“Ether,” she breathed, not quite believing it as she withdrew one of the bottles and held it up, looking back at the remaining stock in the box. “Twice as much as we lost.”
“Oh, good turn!” Ravi exclaimed, rushing forward to peek inside. “Digitalis! And Quinine!” he announced, pulling out more vials. “Mae, this is a miracle.”
She licked her lips, which suddenly felt quite dry, pushing aside the ingredients within. At the very bottom there was a small box that, once again, had her name on it. She withdrew that with hands that did not quite shake but buzzed strangely, as though she were in a dream.
It was heavy.
“Maybe that’s just pure liquid gold,” Dinah speculated, crossing her arms. “I do love a good apology bribe. One time my papa bought me a jeweled headband after I got in trouble for something my sister Esther did.”
Mae glanced up at her with a smirk as her fingers dug into the corners of the box, working it open.
Inside was not gold, but silver.
She withdrew a glinting, beautifully made mortar and pestle from the cushioned inside and turned it against the light, her heart giving a little flutter in her chest.
Roland came to stand over her shoulder, peering down at it. “‘Hippocratis Juramentum,’” he read from the spiraling letters around the bowl of the mortar. “‘Primum non nocere.’ The devil does that mean?”
Mae blinked several times, looking up at him through a bleary wash of warmth in her eyes, shaking her head because she could not bring the words to her throat.
“It means the law of Hippocrates,” Ravi provided.
Dr. Bethel nodded, looking thoughtful. “First, do no harm.”
“Ohhh,” said Winston, nodding sagely. “He’s cross that we put a needle in him.”
It startled everyone so much that it broke the tension in the room, a little ripple of laughter settling over them.
“I suppose, my boy,” said Dr. Bethel, “that what Hippocrates meant was that you shouldn’t doabjectharm. Sometimes the cure requires a little pain. Breaking eggs to make omelets and so on.”
“What’s an omelet?” said Winston, which made Dr. Bethel gasp.
Mae glanced up at her grandfather over the muddle of others and found him watching her with a wry steadiness, his hands braced on his knees. She set the gifts aside, letting Winston inspect the engraved mortar, and made her way to him, voices behind her simmering into an incomprehensible static.
“Amends, I presume,” she said, once she was close enough to speak, giving him a little open-handed shrug.
“Perhaps,” he agreed, his gaze flicking from her to the excited admiration of the gifts in the background. “Or a golden shackle, as many institutions are wont to have.”
“Silver, actually,” she said, winning a quirk of his lips. “A shackle is better than a lash, isn’t it?”
“A shackle reminds its wearer that the lash is waiting,” he corrected, raising his bushy white eyebrows, “but necessary evils are part of the game. You humbled that inspector, whether you intended to or not. It wasn’t the plan we’d made, but now it’s the one we’re going to have to work with.”
“The investigation documents we got from Abraham Murphy were fully destroyed, I expect?” she said, leaning against the beam near the door and crossing her arms with a sigh.
Her grandfather nodded. “But we’d all already read them, hadn’t we? And Mr. and Mrs. Murphy are perfectly capable of penning things down again upon request, I imagine, even if there’s an associated fee.”
She frowned, glancing back over her shoulder. “Grandy, you might think me soft in the head, but something about this gift feels … sincere to me? When I opened that mortar, I felt touched by it, not threatened.”
“Did you?” he said, sounding more curious than disagreeing. “Then perhaps that’s all it is: a gift, an apology. But, even so, it is also direct acknowledgement by the institutional body that is something other than a rebuke, and that’s of note. The clinic is no longer a tent in answer to a crisis, or a dream of a single wooden room. It is, as of today, part of London’s medical organism, Mae. You are.”
She huffed, giving him an ironic little smile. “I’ll never be a doctor, Grandy. You know that.”
He huffed right back. “Don’t start with that. And that wasn’t what I said, anyhow. Will you help me stand? I want to go look at that fellow with the ague. I’ve never seen a case before.”
“Malaria,” she corrected, leaning down to get him onto his feet. “It seems odd that we’ve given it a pet name, doesn’t it?”
“That’s what happens when something is mostly hypothetical,” he said with a shrug. “Though even its proper name is a bit precious.Mal-aria? Bad air? We’re scientists, not poets.”
“Fair enough,” she said with a titter. “I had a patient once who, after being diagnosed with dropsy, named her cat for it. And I can’t blame her. It does sound like a cat, doesn’t it? Dropsy.”
