“You do?” The gentleman’s tone curled upward with a cynical lift.
Rachel lifted her chin. “I do.”
“Hm.” He cocked a disbelieving eyebrow and shook his head. “What next.”
The man tapped the brim of his hat and hastened off, his attitude a foretaste of the reception Rachel expected she would receive in London.
The boys taunted him as they tossed the bundled rags they were using as a ball over his head. They brushed past Rachel, boisterous, laughing. Seemingly untroubled that the sliver of earth they had called home probably all their lives was inching out of reach.
Rachel faced the dwindling shoreline. Then I should be untroubled like they are. For what good does it do me to mourn what I have lost?
Rachel looked down at the bag she clutched and felt hope for the first time in weeks. Months, actually Slowly she unwound the ribbon and tucked it in her pocket. Turning the bag upside down, she released the dried leaves, flecks of slategreen caught by the wind. She dropped the bag after them.
“I have your strength, Mother. I do not need herbal remedies when your love bolsters my spine.” Rachel watched the speck of cream fabric until it was dragged underwater by the churn of the float-boards. “I shall do very well in London, and someday we shall be reunited. I promise you that.”
Because to do anything less was to fail, and she never wanted to fail again.
CHAPTER 2
London, three days later
Well, Edmunds?” asked Hathaway, leaning across the bed to prop up his patient, too weak, too faint to sit up on her own.
Resting his ear against the circular ivory ear plate, James Edmunds moved the stethoscope down the woman’s hunched back. Her breathing was shallow, rapid, and he could hear the thickness in her lungs. No sound in the low portion of the left lung at all, the tissue hepatized into a useless mass. Or much of the right lung, for that matter. She wheezed as she struggled to drag in air and expelled a shuddering cough. Acute pneumonia.
Death.
“Well, Dr. Edmunds?” echoed Mr. Bolton from the spot he’d taken up by the window. The family’s surgeon tapped his fingers against his elbows. “Are you finished with that contraption?”
“It’s a stethoscope, not a contraption.”
“It’s a bit of wood tubing and a bunch of poppycock, is what it is.”
“What color has her sputum been?” James asked Hathaway, ignoring Mr. Bolton’s ridicule.
“When it comes up at all, it’s rusty.”
Blood. No surprise.
James set aside the stethoscope and released the woman’s linen shift, the color of the material not much different than the gray pallor of her flesh. With Hathaway’s steady help, he lowered her onto the stack of thick feather pillows. A relation—aunt? cousin?—sobbed quietly in the corner of the bedchamber. There would be more tears to come.
Separating the cedar stethoscope into its three pieces, James nestled them in their velvet-padded box and closed the lid. He caught Hathaway’s watchful gaze and shook his head.
“No,” his young colleague mouthed, face falling.
“Can I get back to my leeches, Dr. Edmunds?” Mr. Bolton asked impatiently. The creatures squirmed in their bottles near his feet. “The only cure for her condition. Draw out the congestion in her lungs.”
“You’ve had them on her since yesterday” The inverted-Y bite marks were still evident on her back. “If they haven’t worked by now . . .” James wouldn’t finish that sentence.
He swept back the woman’s hair, a blonde the honeyed color of demerara sugar, her cheeks flushed from the fever that was burning her alive. He recalled seeing her at some social function long ago, in a teal silk gown with her hair dressed in pearls and feathers, smiling, charming everyone. Even Mariah had commented on her poise and her beauty All of that lost, now.
In her half-conscious state, she muttered incoherently, drawing her relative to the bedside, who soothed, “Hush, my dear.”
The older woman looked around the edge of her lacetrimmed cap at James. He saw the question form on her face, the one he had been expecting. The eight years he had spent doctoring hadn’t taught him how to respond with cool indifference, like his father had always done. Instead, James only felt disheartened, the loss another chink out of his armor of confidence.
Soon, though, very soon, he would never have to face that question again.
“Doctor?” The relation’s eyes, puffy and red-rimmed, begged him for a hopeful answer.
“I must consult with Dr. Hathaway, ma’am. He is her physician and will speak with you in