“Thewhat?” Roland exclaimed, startled enough out of his panic to feel revulsion. “What is that? Some sort of torch fuel? Like whale fat?”
“Oh, my dear boy,” said Dr. Casper. “I wish. I have a hankering to try the new outdoor staircase, you know, but I can’t climb it by myself. Would you indulge me?”
“Do I have to carry you back down again at the end?” Roland asked, squinting.
Dr. Casper only gave him a wide, gap-toothed smile. “Like a bride on her wedding night.”
It was, Roland had to admit, a decent distraction from the simmering dread of looking at the closed door of the procedure room. It was also a nice thing to do rather than staring at the pile of gray skin flakes under the patient Mae had been scraping at.
He wouldn’t have reflected on that second part at all if he hadn’t heard Winston complaining, “The broom doesn’t work on that muck. It’s too gooey. I’ll pick it up with a rag.”
And Ravi saying, “You really are built for the profession, you know.”
It did make Roland pause, though, setting the old doctor back on his feet at the foot of the outdoor staircase after their tour up and back down again. He was frowning, watching Winston through the window on his knees, picking up curls of dead skin, and turned to the other man with a sad little weight in his heart.
“He’ll never actually be a doctor, will he?” he said. “Not without a fine education and plenty of money to sponsor his training.”
“Likely not,” said Dr. Casper with a shrug. “But he can be like Mae, a healer fully trained, a doctor in all but name. It is not a bad calling, for one who isn’t born to wealth.”
“Like you were?” Roland said, leaning back against the railing of the stairs. “You must have been.”
Dr. Casper hesitated, a look of sorrow flickering over his wrinkled features. “If I could sponsor the boy, I would,” he said seriously.
“That isn’t what I was getting at,” Roland immediately answered. “I was just curious.”
The old man sighed, shaking his head, and turned to creak slowly down to sit on the bottom few steps of the new stairs. “My people weren’t particularly wealthy, nottonSociety or anything like that,” he said. “But they could afford to send me to Harrow. They disowned me, though, when I married Violet. She wasn’t … the word they used wassuitable.What they meant was—”
“White,” Roland finished for him, winning a grimacing nod. “Good riddance, then.”
“Indeed,” said Dr. Casper, rubbing at his swollen knuckles. “Indeed. The money is always nice, though.”
“Maybe Dr. Ravi could sponsor him,” Roland said, considering the scene again through the window. “After a time, once he’s gotten to know him well enough. I expect he has quite a lot of money, given his story.”
“Perhaps,” said Dr. Casper. “But we still barely know the man. He’s given us quite a lot already with just his service, especially with all the trouble going on.”
“Yes, the trouble,” Roland agreed with a sigh. “There’s that, too, isn’t there? You know Lady Aster, Vix, we sent her to school when we were just children. Her brother, the reverend, and myself. We conned our way into getting her onto scholarship rosters and helped her lie her way through the interview process at a girl’s school in Bath-Spa. The really maddening thing is that it seemed so simple and attainable to us as children, and the idea of doing something similar now for a boy like Winston seems utterly impossible.”
“Is that so?” said Dr. Casper, looking impressed. “And just imagine, without what you boys did, she might be running barefoot through the alleys like that little sister of yours, sketching open cadavers for coin.”
Roland laughed outright, shaking his head. “I knew both Sybil and Vix from the babyhood. No two women could have begun more different. Vix would have still been elegant, even if she’d remained nothing more than a flower-seller’s daughter. And Sybil would still be dusted with charcoal and blurting out rude observations with glee, even if she’d been born a duchess.”
“You have to envy that,” said the doctor. “When I was a boy, I thought I could be any of a dozen different men if I stepped the wrong way on the sidewalk one morning or the next. Even our friend Winston in there, if you consider him, had no calling until his mother decided it was time for him to get the chicken pox, just to get him out of her hair for a week or three.”
Roland was smiling, considering it. “I actually was a dozen different men, I think,” he told Dr. Casper. “Maybe I still am.”
“As long as all of those men are hers,” Dr. Casper said, nodding to the window as Mae emerged, giggling and nudging a smiling Vix, “that sounds like a good outcome to me.”
Vix emerged a moment later, her head held high and her nose pointed in the general direction of the moon. “Come along, Roland,” she said to him. “You are to escort me home.”
“Oh, am I?” he shot back. “I have duties here.”
She turned, raising a single dark brow, and withdrew a glinting trinket from her sleeve. “Do it,” she said, “or I shall behead your little ducky.”
He gave her a flat-mouthed look of resignation and tossed an apologetic goodbye to the good doctor, following her to her carriage, which was waiting on a nearby block corner. “Give that to me,” he demanded. “Why do you have it?”
She tittered, tossing it to him as she stepped into the carriage ahead of him and settled back into her seat. “Mae said you would not escort me without it as proof of her blessing,” she informed him. “It seems she was correct.”
He made a noncommittal sound, hoisting himself in across from her and tucking it safely into his waistcoat pocket. “Is that all she gave you?”
