by Baird Wells
Hannah. Where was Hannah? James skimmed the last spot where he’d seen her atop the wall, but she was down in the melee somewhere. He elbowed through the human stink, beer and rancid sweat and shoe black, stabbing out with his stick when anyone refused to move. He had to find Hannah.
Finally, he did, in a small pocket between the wall and a curb, her mouth giving shape to a rapid stream of heated words, arguing with a golem of a constable, tugging against his grip with one arm and pointing past him into the crowd with her other.
“Hannah!” James loped along the edge, voice drowned by the cries of women being struck and restrained, flinching at each punctuating thud of a fist or baton.
Nothing in Hannah’s posture, her demeanor, seemed to change in the miniscule span of time while he rushed her. The policeman must simply have had enough. James stiffened when the hand drew back, and shouted into the chaos when the baton caught Hannah’s temple and she crumpled.
No. “No, no!” Time ceased to flow, instead pooling until it widened and put infinite space between him and Hannah. Every forward step put two ahead of him. The crowd carouseled frantically, and James lost sight of the two or three distinct figures he’d used as a landmark. For a moment, he lost hope of reaching her, too. Bodies parted, and between a man’s legs he glimpsed a triangle of fabric, a flash of Hannah’s skirts.
Someone was helping; a woman materialized over Hannah and pressed a handkerchief to the blood trickling her cheek. James couldn’t comprehend the faces or actions, couldn’t stop to absorb it, not until the stick’s rounded end planted in his chest and skidded him up short under the policeman’s glower. He chafed at the interference until he trembled, rage settling cold in impotent limbs.
James raised his hands in a show of surrender, and two things happened in lightning succession: he recognized that the woman shielding Hannah was Margaret, and stared across the scant open space at Simon Webster’s grim countenance. He had three balls in the air now, worry for Hannah at odds with deceiving Simon and minding the policeman’s wrath. James craned all that he dared, to glimpse Hannah’s wound and the quantity of blood Margaret had daubed from it, a thankfully scant amount so far. Blood, though, wasn’t equivalent to injury, and he chafed again at interference.
He stepped back from the baton and greeted Simon’s mute fury with an indifferent crook of his mouth, precisely the expression he thought would please the man most. “Sir Simon.”
“Miss Maddox,” said Simon, ignoring his greeting. “It must be coincidence that I find you in proximity to Lady Hannah, mixing in the pageantry of the lower classes. There cannot have been purpose to it.”
She might hawk her mistress at dinner or the opera, at Simon’s behest, but under present conditions? Her presence, and Simon’s surprise at it, didn’t sit easily with James. He, too, was curious to hear the circumstances that had produced Margaret.
The almonds of her mouth and eyes compressed at Simon’s verbal backhand, a flicker of rebellion in her stare, and her silence stretched so long against the unruly assembly that James thought he would be deprived of an answer. Finally, Margaret bent lower over Hannah, dabbing in sharp strokes at her wound. “I was passing back from Twinings and heard a commotion.”
Simon’s shoulders dropped a fraction, and James found himself the recipient of a parental frown intended for Margaret, who wouldn’t look up. “Hmph. See what curiosity has bought you?”
Silence. Margaret went on pressing at Hannah’s pale face. James ached to kneel with her, see to Hannah, but held his footing under Simon’s hawkish gaze and the continued presence of the constable’s billy.
“How is it, doctor, that I find you already waiting in the wings to aid Lady Hannah in the midst of this…national embarrassment?” Suspicion; ever gripping suspicion, no matter how tightly he clutched the puppet strings. It riddled Simon beyond reason, until he couldn’t see past it to realize that here was precisely where someone he’d tasked with proving Hannah’s guilt needed to be.
James tucked his walking stick beneath his arm and didn’t remove his hat. He leaned in and put his lips to Simon’s ears with a familiarity that caused the other man to flinch. “How that has occurred, sir, is by your design, on the night of your dinner party.” For the benefit of Margaret and the constable he snapped back and spoke loudly. “I was told that Lady Hannah would be present at this…assembly. Concerning information, you must agree, given our prior conversations.”
“Not concerning,” ground out Simon. “Only shamefully typical.”
“The usualness in itself is concerning. For a woman to parade herself so, put herself in intentional peril on such absurd arguments?” James snorted, and turned to take a long look around them, stealing another glimpse at Hannah and wishing anything would hurry Simon along. “Hysteria barely touches it.” He hated the words, their necessity.
While he’d been speaking, the hound’s whiskers of Simon’s moustache had begun to twitch, calculating. James appreciated too late that, in trying to minimize his presence and Hannah’s at the rally, he’d given Simon more ammunition against her. Her behavior had always been a target for Simon, but not her sanity.
“Hold her,” Simon demanded of the constable, without deigning to look at him. “Keep her until you hear otherwise from me.” To James he finished, “I have a friend with whom I’d like to discuss her…outbursts.”
James would bet that he did; every sort of friend in every place.
Simon righted his hat, snapping it down so that he was a nose and pressed pair of lips. “Doctor Grimshaw, you’ll keep yourself available. I may have need of your testimony, soon.”
He’d be more fearful of the new strategy, if not for those last eight words. He wouldn’t damn Hannah thoughtlessly again, certainly not to any of Simon’s cohorts.
James fixed his eyes on Margaret, still cradling Hannah under the policeman’s hovering baton, and kept silent, promising nothing. There were no words to spare for anyone else, no concern that could be spared from Hannah. He stayed just so, fixed in the chaos to a count of ten before he dared a glance after Simon and found him passing out of sight at Parliament Square’s long curve.
He withdrew his bankbook and palmed it. “She’s injured,” he said to the policeman, who shrugged and tugged his chinstrap as a caution that he had plenty of fight left.
“Look,” commiserated James, making a show of studying the fracas behind him. “These women? You’ll have a headache all night if you lock her up at the precinct; they won’t give you peace, shouting their demands. And besides,” he cocked his head at Hannah’s prone figure, “she’s a Lennox. Even if you and your brothers escape this rabble…” he clucked and shrugged at a dawning wariness on the man’s face. “Her parents may not care a fig about her, but they hold the family name dear. You don’t need that blemish inked in your file.” He slipped the hundred pound note from its slot like an offhand remark, wondering if his heart was drumming him to the gaol right behind Hannah. He swallowed and held the note down against the officer’s knuckles. It was more money than the man would see in a year, acknowledged by a widening of his eyes, and James thought he might have won. “I know that Sir Simon told you to deal with her, but I am his physician. I can treat her wounds and hold her, and all the while spare you lads the inconvenience.”
The officer tipped his head to see past James and, it seemed, getting a good look at the poor lot of his companions, heaving and hauling flailing shouting women with little success, snatched the note into his scabbed fist. “Your name, if Sir Simon is to ask it.”
“Harter!” volunteered Margaret, forgotten until now at their feet. “He is known to me. Doctor Timothy Harter.”
“That right?”
James choked, not from his fearful hesitation to lie, but at Margaret’s comfort with it when it was of curious benefit to Hannah. Putting aside that little mystery, he nodded and forced a smile for the constable, lost in Margaret’s unintelligible gaze, and managed to stick out his hand. It was refused.
> “Harter, then. Take her off, and if she’s found loose again tonight or tomorrow, breakin’ up the peace, you’ll have a visit, eh?”
James took his time studying the man’s balled fist, concealing its tiny fortune. “We understand each other perfectly.”
Margaret stood and brushed out her emerald skirts, moving back from Hannah almost in unison with their captor. “Simon can’t get her committed,” she whispered with a haughty elevation to her pointed chin. “He’s tried.”
Was that disappointment in her hushed words? “And if he succeeds this time?”
“They won’t give him a shilling of her estate without a hearing, and that takes evidence. Which he hasn’t quite got. And neither have you,” she finished in a millpond tone that gave no hints and sunk him deeper in confusion.
“That’s very frank, and accusatory,” he said, poking, trying to provoke anything that would afford a glimpse beneath Margaret’s surface. Hannah groaned, and Margaret backed up another step, beyond the reach of his meager probing. He applauded her; what she lacked in compassion she made up for in spades with self-preservation.
“I know why Simon keeps you about, and you know why he keeps me. Frankness is our common language.” She started to bend down, and he thought she would aid him with a groaning Hannah. A pause, and Margaret straightened and put her back to him in a practiced dismissal, a green line of cold efficiency moving between the agitated, straggling throngs until she was one small shape among hundreds. He wished he didn’t care what had changed her mind.
He abandoned Margaret’s retreat, dropping onto the street’s wet grit beside a restless Hannah. One constable had let them be, but dregs of the crowd still circled, barking and stoked to make trouble, and a few empty-handed policemen trailed the walk, peering for any lingering protesters. They needed to move off, just a block or into an ally, but he hesitated putting even that strain on Hannah.
He claimed Margaret’s handkerchief from the road and shook it out. Something struck the stones, bounced twice, and came to a stop at Hannah’s crooked elbow. It was a pin, a violet blossom in purple enamel, its three petals bearing the green initials of the Women’s League. He recognized it from Hannah’s collar, the day he’d found her on her way to the Fitzes. When its post pricked his finger, he assumed it was the same, and then saw hers still fixed to her lapel. He studied the pin, the handkerchief, and Margaret’s empty path, puzzling over how they fit together.
When a constable on the opposite side of Abingdon raised onto his polished black toes and craned in their direction, James tossed aside the mystery. He weighed the danger of moving Hannah and threaded an arm beneath her back. “Come,” he whispered to her raspy protests. “Come along, I’ll keep you safe.”
“I’m up!” she gasped, wrestling in his grip. “I’m up, I’m all right!” She snapped upright, propelled by invisible springs before he could caution her. She weaved, retched predictably, and fell against his chest, panting.
James shook his head and tried heaving her up once more. “No, you’re not. Let me help you. And go slowly, but with haste,” he added, watching the constable step down into the street.
“What does that…” Hannah scoffed, limp and trembling at his side. “You’re not making a bit of sense,” she groaned.
“None of this makes sense,” he muttered, limping her to the first bench they passed along Parliament Square, jamming his stick at a waxed moustache who made no effort to clear the seat. The moment James relaxed the crook of his arm, Hannah fell to the bench’s cold iron, tipped back her head with eyes closed, and was silent. He examined her face, the jagged tear across her temple, the scratches lining her chin, and a purple blush revealing itself over her left cheek. A hundred words sprang to his lips. “You’re going to need that sutured,” was all he could manage.
“Just take my head off,” she breathed. “That would be preferable.”
The grip in his chest fell somewhere below his diaphragm, allowing a laugh to escape. “But impossible. Can you manage to the curb?”
She nodded. “If the alternative is you carrying me.”
“You don’t seem particularly upset,” he snapped, angry on her behalf.
Hannah cracked an eye. “This isn’t new, or novel. I think it was tame, compared to what we can expect in the future.”
“Here,” James dodged, throwing up his arm for a passing cab and not wanting to contemplate worse. “Let’s see to your head, and then I want you resting. Strict rest, today and tomorrow.”
“Rest,” she mocked, not doing much to aid him in getting her up. “Doctors always prescribe rest.”
“Even the good ones, at times,” he agreed, stuffing her into the hansom’s small box and waving off their driver’s offer of help. “Sometimes rest is, in fact, what you need.”
“Never anything that truly feels good,” she moaned, slouching into one corner.
“You can drink like a sailor and spoil yourself with macaroons until you vomit, for all I care.” James wrestled up beside her, banging his walking stick until it fit somehow in the remaining space. “Smoke cigars. Read bawdy novels.” He met her hazy glare. “But do so lying down.”
* * *
Hannah reclined into the embrace of her favorite maroon chaise, positioned by James in front of her favorite window because Mrs. Delford had insisted she should have all her favorite things, clucking and muttering over what Hannah assured her housekeeper was a minor injury. She handed off her hat to a pale and fussing Bethany, and James pounced, pinching at her hair pins.
“Leave it,” she said of her hair, slapping hands that wouldn’t be budged. “It’ll be a tangled mess if I lie here as long as you’ve instructed.”
“You will,” he managed over a pin held between his teeth. “And I’m just rearranging it so I can see.”
She wished he would stop. Her head throbbed with the echo of the constable’s baton, and a draining away of her outrage and her fighting instinct seemed to multiply the effect. James's ministrations were making it worse, but then he drew one last pin and buried his fingers at her crown, and Hannah withdrew all objection. There was strength in his long fingers, and an awareness of it in the way he raked and piled her hair with controlled restraint. Unthinking, she tipped her head and silently willed a roughness from him, arched for it against a searing white light behind her left eye, but James finished his task and pulled away.
“You’re clever enough to know this is going to hurt,” he said, claiming the small crystal of brandy left behind by Mrs. Delford.
Hannah took it, daring to slip her ring finger over his, a brush more intimate in that moment than their naked bodies. “You had better find me something stronger,” she warned softly.
His brows jumped, but he wasted no time producing a slim leather-wrapped flask from his breast pocket and topping up her glass. Despite his assured movements, there was a tremble to his hands. “I need you sensible,” he cautioned, but she was already tossing back the concoction and hissing out its burn.
She blinked owlishly at him. “Does that include sleeping through your prodding?”
“I’m a quick pair of hands,” he said, nipping off a length of silk.
Liquor flared behind her breastbone and ran molten through her veins, spreading a false courage. “You are unusually taciturn this afternoon,” she chided.
“And you are suitably flippant!” he poked back, threading his needle with such precision that she was briefly impressed into silence. “This afternoon was affecting. In many ways.”
“As it ought to be,” she agreed. “That’s what happens when we don’t tend the wash and knead the biscuits as we should.”
“I can’t have a chuckle over it,” he said, scooting by small jumps until his chest rested at her shoulder. “I can’t make light of watching you brutalized.”
“This afternoon was a microcosm of a woman’s lot. Who can help but laugh at the absurdity of what took place? Treat her as a queen, so long as her castle remains the kitchen.”
“Deep breath,” he murmured, and his needle pierced the swollen flesh beside her eye. It burned into the raw edges, a pointed sting that spread like fire across her forehead and deep in her temple. “Mph!” Hannah wrung her hands and shifted away on his next pass.
“Two more; perhaps three,” he promised gently, lips near enough to her face to feel heat in the space between them.
“I can’t bear three more.” She laced her fingers, strangling them at the knuckles to keep from pushing him away.
Another stitch. He looped his thread with the graceful arc of a conductor. “Weren’t you frightened?” he asked into the tight silence.
“No one wishes to be publicly abused; it hurts and humiliates.” She flinched at the needle’s next gritty trespass. “But there are plenty of women suffering worse without a voice, and those who can speak, should.” She swallowed, coming out a little from her defenses. “But yes, I was frightened.”
“So was I.”
It was his admission that snapped her around, as much as his ragged drawing out of each word. She stared at her reflection in his eyes, and waited for him to decipher what she saw there.
James coughed and cleared his throat, holding up his needle. “All finished.”
“Oh!” She raised startled fingers to her stitches without thinking. He caught her wrist and drew her hand away. “Oh, I didn’t realize…it seemed to take ages and then…” She shrugged, swallowing her lack of eloquence, but not the obvious. “And then it was over.”