“International,” she repeated, a little dumbly. “Waters?”
“Indeed,” he said. “En route to Venice. Or Seville. Or New York. Your choice, doctress.”
“Oh, Roland,” she said, finally lowering her hand and accepting the thimble and the two rings with it. “I am not a doctor.”
CHAPTER 32
Aweek, Roland realized in short order, had been ambitious.
But, then again, he had always fancied himself an ambitious sort, and so he attempted to meet the constraint with aplomb.
First came the matter of their new student volunteers, namely one Cary Cecil, who showed up to the Clerkenwell Clinic two days after the meeting at Guy’s with all the swagger of a git who intended to make trouble.
Roland had enjoyed this.
“If you do encounter vandals,” he’d said, showing the younger man the perimeter, “I recommend disabling them with quick jabs to one of three anatomical locations. I trust you already know them?”
“Erm,” said the boy. “Jewels?”
Roland grinned at him. “You can try. I recommend the kidney,” he said, his hand flashing out flat and firm to jab the lad underthe ribs, making him woosh out breath and double over. Once bent, Roland suggested, “The kneecap also works,” giving a quick firm kick just below the squishy membrane that held said cap aloft.
He waited for the boy to stand and then gave him an encouraging flash of the teeth. “If that doesn’t work, there are always the eyes, the nose, and my personal favorite”—he reached out with just the pad of his thumb, jabbing lightly just above Cary’s clavicle—“the throat.”
He turned and walked away, whistling in harmony to the hacking behind him.
When the little toff finally caught up, he delighted in informing him that he would be away soon, and any further questions he might have about his new duties should be relayed to his associate, Mr. Beck, at which point Tod’s massive, hulking frame strode into view.
Tod, of course, was none the wiser of his use as a prop in this exercise, having only come to inspect the sturdiness of the new staircase, but it worked a treat anyhow, draining all color from Cary Cecil’s face and effectively amputating all swagger from his demeanor for the remainder of the week.
Next had been the matter of Winston’s schooling.
They had agreed, as a group, that it would be cruel and likely discouraging to throw the lad directly into the deep waters of an ongoing formal classroom with other boys his own age who had been given the benefit of formal instruction since they could hold a quill.
Instead, they had agreed to seek out a private tutor or two to bring the boy up to speed in his core subjects while also allowinghim to continue to work at the clinic as he very clearly wished to do.
The trouble was that they did all of this discussing and deciding before ever speaking to Winston directly or to his mother, which, of course, needed to be done.
Mae and Roland had gone together to their home in St. Giles, where they discovered Winston was one of ten siblings, and his mother was an extremely busy laundress.
“You want to school him?” she said. “You couldn’t even give him the pox!”
But they did convince her in the end, much to Winston’s glee.
He did deflate just a little bit, however, when Mae observed that part of his mother’s workload was mending clothing and suggested that he take up clean stitching with her as part of his duties—a suggestion that might have been the only reason the mother agreed in the first place.
“I already know how to sew,” he had whined.
“Yes,” said Mae, “but you have to become a master.”
“That’s right, little master,” his mother had crowed. “Start with the stockings by the fire. And if you use my good needles, I’ll shave your head.”
Meanwhile, Ezra and Dr. Casper had handled matters withThe Lancet.
When the issue emerged, just two days before they were set to depart for seas unknown, they got to witness Ezra’s abject joy that Wakley had printed the rebuttal with Ezra’s full name in the byline.
“Me!” he cried. “InTheLancet!My editor at theChronicleis going to eat his hat! I have to buy another copy. I have to buy ten!”
“I already bought you one,” Dinah Lazarus had told him with a roll of her eyes. “Idiot.”
