She spent the next several hours being volleyed person to person, telling the story over and over again, recounting moments in copious detail at request. There was a particular hunger for the slumping defeat of the younger Mr. Cecil, which she was, of course, happy to provide.
To her surprise, it wasn’t only her clinic family in attendance, nor simply the extended arms of the church and the gambling dens and so on.
Her parents came. Her grandmother too. Even her brother had closed up his precious gold shop to come and await her at the clinic and hear the news. Her brother had always been skeptical of her chosen profession, and yet here he was, just as proud as the rest of them.
She watched them all as they interacted with Roland, watched closely, curious about how they might interact in the years to come.
She glanced at her Granny Violet, leaning fondly against her husband, and a flutter of hope opened in her chest, wide and yearning.
“You are pining,” came Vix Aster’s voice, sharp and sudden, at her back, making her startle. She whipped around, directly into that grinning visage. “It is all right. We all pine now and then.”
“Did you give him the thimble?” Mae asked, unwilling to be bashful in front of Vix just now. “He hasn’t mentioned it.”
“Hasn’t he?” Vix asked, her grin curling up further. “How curious. Perhaps you’ll see it again very soon. Ah, look, Ambrose is here with the food.”
“The … food?” Mae repeated, turning in bafflement as a line of caterers marched into the clinic doors, carrying trays of things for the gathered well-wishers and patients alike.
It was, she thought, the most unusual party that London would see this Season, and thetonwould never even know of it.
Roland approached her, carrying two glasses of bubbling liquid in one hand and a plate of assorted bites in the other, his grin wide. “Winston has just discovered pate,” he informed her. “We’re going to have to lock him upstairs.”
“He likes it?” Mae replied, laughing. “I was repulsed by the stuff until I was twenty. Let’s give him the caviar next.”
“Ravi had the same thought,” he said, pointing to the pair, Ravi with a thin wafer piled high with black roe kneeling in front of a skeptical-looking Winston. “A shilling says he hates it.”
“Game,” said Mae, and they waited.
Winston chewed with a strained expression on his face, his eyes crinkled shut, and coughed after, sticking his tongue out.
“Ha,” said Roland.
“Hold,” Mae said, touching his arm and nodding toward the scene.
Winston was frowning, smacking his lips. He tugged on Ravi’s sleeve and asked for the other half of the cracker, which he summarily crammed into his mouth, though his face crumpled all over again upon doing so.
“A draw,” Roland said. “We’ll call it a draw.”
“Fine,” Mae agreed, her shoulders shaking with laughter.
“We could leave, you know,” he said to her, brushing his fingers over her shoulder. “No one would notice.”
“Where would we go?” she asked, smirking up at him. “Venice? Seville? New York?”
“My flat,” he said. “For now.”
She took the plate from his hands and set it on the nearest basin stand. “Game.”
Everyone noticed,of course.
And Mae knew that they would.
But she played the sneaking lover anyhow, pacing her exit against Roland’s and meeting him around the side of the building in a giggling flurry as they clasped hands and ran off into the evening light.
She suspected, bordering certainty, that they had an audience behind them, fondly watching them go.
And strangely, she did not mind it at all.
They circled the blocks at a trotting pace, their fingers linking, stopping to capture pecking kisses at the corners. He unlocked one door and then the other, tugging her along behind him with a grin on his face and heat rushing in the blood under his skin.
