by Baird Wells
Maybe she was upset that he’d arrived later than they’d arranged. “I had to stop at the apothecary, replace a few supplies,” he apologized. It was true, but it was not what had made him late. The errand had just made him later, on a day when he had woken and remembered that he was alone the moment he’d sat up in bed. He’d teetered half up and half down, until guilt and misery had tipped him back onto the mattress like an overburdened cantilever, half-drunk and sobbing.
Hannah brightened to a lighter shade of gray. “You must be feeling a little rusty after so long in the morgues.”
He nodded, rustling in his case and rattling past a carton of glass syringes and a quantity of bandage that made him wonder why he ever bought more. “I’ve avoided patients in the truest sense. I wish I could go on saying that I don’t want to treat them, but,” he shrugged, glanced at her and then around the room. “I’m happier at this. It’s why I became a doctor in the first place.” Happier than what? Than putting a bullet through the red band of his misery, he decided, and pulled out his stethoscope. “Do you take anything for your headaches?”
“I managed to get Doctor Grant to prescribe some aspirin concoction.” She winced. “It upset my stomach fiercely, though.”
“Toast will help with that. Common wisdom is that the stomach should be empty, so as not to interfere.” He shook his head. “That’s just foolish.”
“Helpful to know. Doctor Harter wouldn’t recommend more for me, anyhow. So it became a moot point.”
He froze at Harter’s name, and then his head pounded until it swam.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, coming out of her chair and gentling his sleeve. “I shouldn’t have mentioned him. It was stupid of me.” Her earlier, distant clip disappeared entirely and she was more herself, but still a mystery.
“With Harter it goes so much deeper than one patient.” He couldn’t make himself speak Emily’s name or enumerate to Hannah – who probably already knew – Harter’s many occasions of negligence. “Anyhow, you shouldn’t concern yourself with it, or feel badly for mentioning it. What happened is a reality, whether it’s talked about or not.” He pushed her shoulder with just the tips of his fingers so that she sat back down. “Any swelling? Face, hands, or feet?”
Hannah stared at him, the blue shards of her eyes cutting into him, and held between them a moment that he had tried to abandon. He took offense, and felt a burn escape his collar and flush his face. How dare she not let the matter rest, when he said it was done? Then he felt raw, naked inside at how she was staring, and dropped his eyes to keep her from burrowing in deeper.
“No,” she said, her voice the first bold note of a victory march that made him bristle because it annoyed him and because, since Meadowcroft, he always felt some strange absolution when she had trespassed inside. And he sensed that the triumph in her voice was at making him feel something, simmering a resentment that she could do it, and would.
“Fatigue, skin rash?” he demanded, recalling that he was the doctor, and in charge at the moment.
“Not a bit.”
“Shortness of breath?” He drew back the chest piece on his stethoscope and snapped its plugs into his ears.
“You’ve danced with me.” She lifted a brow and raised the stakes between them. “What do you think?”
He thought they should stop talking now, and knelt beside her. He rested the diaphragm below her collarbone. “Deep breath.”
Her chest rose in a slow surge, and fell away from his knuckles. He forgot to listen. “Once more, please.”
She obliged, and he slid the chest piece over the pale expanse beside her breastbone and nestled it in the embrace of ruffles at her neckline. It slipped beneath the shameless gloss of black satin, where it half disappeared, and then ran aground at the first early swell of her breast. The skip of her pulse in his ears, an increase from andante to allegro, was a secret between them, and he glanced up to find her eyes on his thumb where it touched her skin.
“Well.” He raised up and stood up with the easy decorum of a mousetrap, strangling his stethoscope. “Everything is sound in that regard.”
She folded her hands. “I’m glad nothing feels out of place.”
He shifted foot to foot, searching for a double-meaning in her thick words, but Hannah only shrugged. “So what do we do?”
He regretted the way she said ‘we’, as though their acquaintance were an honest one. “I’ll examine your diet, your routine. And if you have another headache, I can address it based on the circumstances. But if they persist or get worse, you should probably seek skilled hands, hands more capable than mine.”
“Skilled hands?” Hannah slid back in her chair, into a bow of unladylike ease, and snorted. “That sounds like a handbill for female hysteria.”
He blushed, so hard that his face ached, and he packed up his bag to hide it.
She had caught him and chuckled. “Anyway, I’ve been through plenty of doctors, London physicians. I’d prefer to go on seeing you. You have sense in your head.”
“As I said,” he muttered into his bag, not brave enough to face her yet, “I can assist with basic ailments, but if you’re suffering something serious, you’ll need to find competent treatment.”
“I have a competent physician.”
“No, you do not. You have an average country physician who knows his limitations.” What could she not understand? Did she have to drag everything out of him until he was emotionally disemboweled? He recalled their first meeting in Meadowcroft and answered his own question.
She threw out her arms. “Why are you so quick to dismiss your skill? So morose over it?”
He massaged his forehead, and turned to bear her questions. “I lost my wife and child. A year is a long time when waiting for the new fashions or the next quarterly magazine. But to grief, it’s a blink of the eye.”
She frowned until her face scrunched and her lashes met her cheeks, as if her next words took forcing out. “I understand if it makes you uncomfortable to treat me.”
“No. I’m melancholy generally.”
She sat up, taut, and looking ready to lunge. “Then I don’t understand why I should go to another doctor if I’m satisfied with you.”
“Because I can’t help you!” he barked. “Just like I couldn’t help them! I can’t help anybody, not when they truly need it!”
Hannah came out of her chair with an agility that spited her bustled, tufted garments. “You’re not saying these things out of grief. You’re guilty!”
He raised his bag for no reason other than throwing it back into the chair. “I’ve a right to be!”
She laced slender arms over her chest. “You can have a right to anything, but that isn’t the same as a reason.”
“You wouldn’t know.” He hated how petulant it sounded.
She leaned into the space between them, eyes brimming. “How tall was Emily? Was she an early riser? Did she play the piano, or attend services on Sunday?” Her breath hitched into a ragged stutter. “You know the answer to all of those, and I know nothing! And do you know whose fault that is?” Hannah stabbed a finger at her breast. “Say I don’t understand your pain, but don’t dare say I cannot understand your guilt.”
He made his hands into fists and felt full of black things but couldn’t shape any of them into words. “Basic treatment,” he muttered at last. “I’m not capable of more.”
“I disagree.” Her soft expression clouded up into the stubborn mask he knew well by now.
“I’ve already killed two members of your family.” His confession was ragged. “So perhaps you should rethink your course.”
“Oh, James.” Her admonishment was warm and sweet like brandy, with the same effect on his nerves.
He dropped his arms and hung slack, wishing he could lie down on the rug. “I’m a killer, Hannah. You know that.” A murderer by neglect rather than intent, but the result was just as damning.
Smooth knuckles braced his jaw with a slow drag that closed his eye
s. She laughed, a genuine sound that made him question his sanity, and hers. She picked the upended journal from the rug and held it out to his trembling fingers with her steady ones. “I am a murderer, Doctor Grimshaw.” Her smile was thin and irreverent. “I would recognize my own kind.”
He had known two murderers in the breadth of his career. One he would most certainly pin as unabashed over the act, but neither individual would have declared themselves with the ease of a remark on the weather. James didn’t believe that murderers went around identifying as such, but then again, he didn’t know for sure. After a long look at Hannah, present and past, the answer was no clearer. When he didn’t speak, some of the bitter mirth in her eyes banked, and she relaxed. “I would know.”
He didn’t know what to do with her when she went downy soft and touched his flesh with only a look. He gaped at her and took the journal. He stowed it in his bag with a lot of fuss while Hannah crossed the room and put her back to him, a silhouette in front of the window pane.
Confused and sore inside, and sensing that their visit was over, he showed himself out.
Margaret was just coming down when he reached the landing, and he thought how pretty she was with her traditional auburn-haired looks when she didn’t think anyone was watching. As she noticed him, her face closed in its familiar pinch.
“Doctor Grimshaw,” she murmured, when he was rounding the bannister.
“Miss Maddox.”
She folded boney fingers and rested them just so at her waist. “Things are done differently in the country, but in town fifteen minutes is usual for a call; thirty at most. Anything more is unseemly.”
He was a little boy being chastised for staying out past supper without realizing how long he’d been at play. “Thank you. I don’t foresee my examinations of Lady Hannah being so lengthy in the future. Hers is a strange case and will have to be chipped at by bits.”
Margaret came down the last step separating them, cocked her head, and dressed him with a provocative glance, violating the propriety she had just held up to him. “I hope you can get to the truth of the matter.”
Margaret put emphasis on the word truth, but whether it was to draw his attention to it or hide her discomfort with it, he couldn’t guess. “Miss Maddox.”
“Doctor Grimshaw.”
She held and let him go down first, and the whole way he questioned the wisdom of putting his back to her.
On the street, cold air braced him, and cleared away the heated confusion that Hannah always stirred up inside. He realized, crossing to the other side of Brook Street with a disregard that made two passing drivers swear, what upset him most about Hannah. It wasn’t her stubbornness or her mention of Emily, or his crippling apprehension of the whole living world. It was her rightness, and that he felt she cheated to get it by trespassing inside of him.
.
CHAPTER NINE
“Have you been to the theater this month, Lady Hannah?”
“No, Lady Alice.” Hannah claimed a glass that waited, ready to interfere, and washed down any remaining conversation on a dry mouthful of wine.
She sat in Lady Alice Beckford’s coffin of a dining room, shrouded by lace curtains and table drapes that had died a slow half-century death with no decorative relief in sight from newer, more fashionable fabrics. Hannah knew she was invited as an unpleasant sort of life-raft for the Beckfords, who floundered for an old name, an old title, or at least old money, drowning in a sea of new faces and industry. Like Simon, they brought a few specimens of middle-class rebellion to the table, because one must know one’s enemy and prove superiority over him in at least eight courses.
“You will attend court at Christmastime, I imagine,” pressed her hostess. “The Lennoxes are always invited to court, of course.” Lady Alice’s nervous laughter reached an opera pitch, then died a sudden death in her throat.
Hannah placed her glass back on the table without haste. “Mm.”
She was not seated as guest of honor, despite outranking nearly everyone at the table save her host and hostess. Lord Phillip and Lady Alice had found a vagabond French duke to fill the seat to remind her of her fortune at being included at all, a fortune which was really just awkward luck. At least, luck was how Lord and Lady Beckford saw it, benevolent and progressively tolerant towards scuffed Lady Lennox-Webster.
To Hannah, their invitations were smoke in her eyes, an irritating necessity of keeping their discomfort kindled. She imagined their hushed conversation at the breakfast table and in the parlor, each day since her invitation had gone out. Lady Alice must have spent her days with face and limbs in tight angles until the post arrived, and when no refusal had come, Hannah imagined Alice’s exchanged glances with Lord Phillip, stoic and resigned.
The Beckfords were right to chew their lips and wring their hands. Her revenge was no cloak-and-dagger affair, no waiting to serve it cold. Her brand was simple and immediately gratifying, and it was had by nothing more than showing up someplace. The Beckford name had been stamped on some of the more hurtful gossip when Gregory died, a fact that Hannah had been slow to realize, but had never forgotten.
“The duc here will attend, I imagine,” offered Lord Phillip, struggling to bear his end of their verbal combat. Eager to redirect the conversation to someone less reticent, he nodded at their foreign attraction with an over-bright smile.
“Oui. And you will all be there, yes?” offered De Beringar in hopeful, halting English.
“If we’re able,” fibbed Lady Alice.
“It isn’t done like that,” corrected Hannah. “It isn’t a Lady’s Auxiliary fundraiser; not everyone can wander in. You only get an invitation if the queen likes you.”
Lord Phillip cleared his throat. Lady Alice fussed with her collar. De Beringar nodded happily, in time with clanking silver and crystal, an orchestra of nervous fiddling.
These were the characters who peopled her world, a same-faced cast of men and women who made up the chorus at dinners and balls. They had played the part of audience at her wedding, of rigid advisor and critic during her first year of marriage. They had erected the scaffold for her years after when their lead actor died tragically, had formed the mob that tried hanging her. At least her society tonight was more varied than usual, populated by more than Simon’s collection of tweed-jacketed vassals who came to nod and be impressed.
Lord Phillip commanded the horizon of his ancient dining table, which might have been any sort of wood and was undoubtedly expensive. It was a secret because the cloth was never taken way, not even when the meal was finished, owing to Lady Alice’s vanity about its Brussels lace topper. In that regard she was a thoroughly modern woman, as afraid of change as of a Manhattan new-world aristocrat in her dining room, evidenced by her wary glances at Mister Hilton who carried just such a concerning pedigree.
Phillip’s soft jowls curtained his long face and twitched in time with each furrow of his brow, each consideration of his table’s adequacy now that Hannah had stirred up his anxiety. His fingers tapped an uncertain cadence on its edge like a pianist, hands comical miniatures identical to his wife’s, which rested in her lap, still and unconcerned.
Nothing much discomposed Lady Alice, at least nothing domestic; certainly no worry over whether others had found satisfaction in the arrangement of her table. And it was her table. Lord Phillip might sit at its head, but no one who’d known the pair five minutes would believe the man a master beyond his study door. Rumor was, the silent and slightly dull Phillip had not even wished to marry; not Alice or anybody else. But her will had ground down his resistance with a glacier’s force and put a healthy caution into Phillip’s mind to oppose Alice as little as possible from their wedding day on.
They seemed old, both in looks and ideas, and Hannah mused that it must be that same glacial pressure grinding at their features; a bloomless if not unhappy marriage which stretched so that their lives, ahead and behind, felt much longer. But they were not old, only in their late forties. To Hannah’s thin d
elight, that meant a younger and by degrees more fashionable set was to be found at their dinners and parties than the ones held by Simon.
Sir William Fox took up Phillip’s left, twenty-five and ruddy-faced, the only blemish on his character a premature bald spot hereditary in the Foxes, which ladies declared ‘unfortunate’.
“I was up at Halcombe,” he admitted to her when the croquettes were passed. “You have a fortune in fine horseflesh stabled there.”
“I do. Which sire caught your fancy?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
“Cobhill, actually. I placed my stud fee with Cobhill,” he sniffed, daring her to cross the renowned breeder as though they weren’t her competition.
“Shame,” she frowned to her plate, back-handing an insult of her own in his direction. “I hate to see you paying the same price for inferior bloodlines. More, actually.”
And so ended Sir William.
Across from him was seated Miss Marianne Sloan, heiress of the Sloan & Trumble banking fortune. Hannah had tried to make allowances for the girl’s being only twenty and too rich and pretty for her own good, but there was a snobbery which spoke of inherited prejudices, and a dullness which no amount of growing up would resolve. She’d also had the audacity to snub Hannah more than once but never the brass to cut her. Hannah detested the girl’s lack of deference on the one hand and despised her lack of nerve on the other. Mostly, she basked in the girl’s silence.
Hannah’s view ahead was filled by the bold silhouette of Mister Hilton, a New York railroad magnate. He was handsome and dark, and all his money was painfully new but in sufficient quantity that, coupled with his mother’s cousin’s something’s pedigree, his commonness was overlooked. He talked enough for everyone else at the table, but he was clever and interesting, and Hannah was glad for his interference.
“Stud farm?” he declared at an octave too enthusiastic for English ears at the dinner table, rustling bodies down the table’s length like a minor earthquake. “Sounds lucrative and exciting.”