by Mackenzi Lee
“Felicity,” he says again, and when I look up, he’s leaning across the table toward me with his eyes closed and his lips jutting out.
And here it is. The inevitable kiss.
When Callum and I first met, I had been lonely enough to not only accept his employment, but also the companionship that came with it, which gave him the idea that men often get in their heads when a woman pays some kind of attention to them: that it was a sign I want him to smash his mouth—and possibly other body parts—against mine. Which I do not.
But I close my eyes and let him kiss me.
There is more of a lunge into the initial approach than I would prefer, and our teeth knock in a way that makes me wonder if there’s a business in selling Dr. John Hunter’s newly advertised live tooth transplants to women who have been kissed by overly enthusiastic men. It’s nowhere near as unenjoyable as my only previous experience with the act, though just as wet and just as dispassionate a gesture, the oral equivalent of a handshake.
Best to get it over with, I think, so I stay still and let him press his lips to mine, feeling as though I’m being stamped like a ledger. Which is apparently the wrong thing to do, because he stops very abruptly and falls back into his chair, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.”
“No, it’s all right,” I say quickly. And it was. It hadn’t been hostile or forced upon me. Had I turned away, I know he wouldn’t have chased me. Because Callum is a good man. He walks on the outside of the pavement so he takes the splash of the carriage wheels through the snow instead of me. He listens to every story I tell, even when I know I’ve been taking up more than my share of the conversation. He stopped adding almonds to the sweet breads when I told him almonds make my throat itch.
“Felicity,” Callum says, “I’d like to marry you.” Then he drops off his chair and lands with a hard thunk against the floor that makes me concerned for his kneecaps. “Sorry, I got the order wrong.”
I almost drop too—though not in chivalry. I’m feeling far fainter in the face of matrimony than I did at the sight of half a finger in the dishwater. “What?”
“Did you . . .” He swallows so hard I see his throat travel the entire course of his neck. “Did you not know I was going to ask you?”
In truth, I had expected nothing more than a kiss but suddenly feel foolish for thinking that was all he wanted from me. I fumble around for an explanation for my willful ignorance and only come up with “We hardly know each other!”
“We’ve known each other almost a year,” he replies.
“A year is nothing!” I protest. “I’ve had dresses I wore for a year and then woke up one morning and thought, ‘Why am I wearing this insane dress that makes me look like a terrier mated with a lobster?’”
“You never look like a lobster,” he says.
“I do when I wear red,” I say. “And when I blush. And my hair is too red. And I wouldn’t have time to plan a wedding right now because I’m busy. And tired. And I have so much to read. And I’m going to London!”
“You are?” he asks.
You are? I ask myself at the same time I hear myself saying, “Yes. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes, tomorrow.” Another revelation to myself—I have no plans to go to London. It sprang from me, a spontaneous and fictitious excuse crafted entirely from panic. But he’s still on his knee, so I push on with it. “I have to see my brother there; he has . . .” I pause too long for my next word to be anything but a lie, then say, “Syphilis.” It’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Monty.
“Oh. Oh dear.” Callum, to his credit, seems to be making a true effort to understand my nonsensical ramblings.
“Well, no, not syphilis,” I say. “But he’s having terrible spells of . . . boredom . . . and asked me to come and . . . read to him. And I’m going to be petitioning the hospital for admission again in the spring when they bring in new attending physicians, and that will take all my attention.”
“Well, if we married, you wouldn’t have to worry about that.”
“Worry about what?” I ask. “Planning a wedding?”
“No.” He picks himself up off his bended knee and sinks back into his chair with far more slump to his shoulders than before. “About schooling.”
“I want to worry about that,” I reply, the back of my neck prickling. “I’m going to get a license and become a physician.”
“But that will . . .” He stops, teeth pressing so hard into his bottom lip it mottles white.
I fold my arms. “That will what?”
“You’re not serious about that, are you?”
“If I wasn’t serious, I wouldn’t have been able to sew you up just now.”
“I know—”
“You’d still be bleeding out over your washbasin.”
“I know that, and that was . . . You did a wonderful job.” He reaches out, like he might pat my hand, but I pull it off the table, for I am not a dog and therefore need no patting. “But we all have silly things that we . . . we want . . . dreams, you know . . . and then one day you . . .” He scoops at the air with a hand, like he’s trying to conjure appropriate phraseology between us rather than be forced to say what he means. “For example, when I was a boy, I wanted to train tigers for the Tower menagerie in London.”
“So train tigers,” I reply flatly.
He laughs, a small, nervous trill. “Well, I don’t want to anymore, because I have the shop, and I have a house here. What I meant is, we all have silly things we lose interest in because we want something real, like a house and a shop and a spouse and children. Not—not today,” he stammers, for I must look petrified, “but someday.”
A different sort of dread begins to distill inside me now, strong and bitter as whiskey. Silly little things. That’s all he thought my grand ambitions ever were. All this time, all these chats over scones, all his intense listening to me explain how, if the head were to be sawed off a corpse, one could trace paths of the twelve nerves connecting to the brain all the way through the body. One of the few who had not told me to give up, even when I had nearly told myself to, when I had written to surgeon after surgeon in the city, begging for teaching and received only rejections. I hadn’t even been granted a single a meeting once they discovered I was a woman. All the while we had been together he’d been wondering when it was that I’d give up on this passing fancy, like it was a fashion trend that would disappear from shop windows by the end of the summer.
“I’m not training tigers,” I say. “It’s medicine. I want to be a doctor.”
“I know.”
“They’re not even comparable! There are doctors all over this city. No one would say it was silly or impossible if I was a man. You couldn’t train tigers because you’re just a baker from Scotland, but I have actual skills.” His face falls before I register what I’ve said, and I try to back step. “Not that you . . . sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
“I know,” he says. “But someday, you’ll want something real. And I’d like to be that something for you.”
He looks very intently at me, and I think he wants me to say something to assure him I take his meaning, and yes, he’s right, I’m just a flighty thing with a passing interest in medicine that can be siphoned off once a ring is placed upon my finger. But all I can think to say is a snappish And maybe someday the stars will fall from the sky. So I offer nothing in return but a frosty stare, the sort of look my brother once told me could put out a cigar.
Callum tucks his chin into his chest, then blows out a long, hard breath that ruffles his fringey hair. “And if you don’t want that too, then I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“Do what?”
“I don’t want you working here whenever you need money and showing up at any hour you please and eating all the buns and taking advantage of me because you know I’ve an affection for you. I either want to marry you, or I don’t want to see you anymore.�
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I can’t argue with any of that, though the fact that my heart sinks far further at the thought of losing this job than of losing Callum speaks volumes about the ill-advised nature of a union between us. I’m sure I could find something else to sustain me in this bleak, punishing city, but it would likely be even more menial and tedious than counting coins in a bakery and would most certainly not include free desserts. I’d ruin my eyes making buttons in a smoggy factory or wear myself ragged as a domestic, be blind and bent and consumptive by twenty-five, and medical school would be soundly put to bed before I’d had a proper shot.
We stare at each other—I’m not sure if he wants me to apologize, or agree, or admit that yes, that’s what I’ve been doing, and yes, I’ve known I was using him badly, and yes, I will agree to his proposal in penance and it will all have been worth it. But I stay quiet.
“We should finish cleaning up,” he says at last, standing up and wiping his hands off on his apron with a wince. “You can eat the cream puff. Even if you can’t say yes right now.”
I wish I could believe that yes was inevitable, the same way he seems to. It would be so much easier to want to say yes, to want a house on the Cowgate and a whole brood of round Doyle children with stubby Montague legs and a solid life with this kind, solid man. A small part of me—the part that traces my finger in the sifted sugar dusted around the edges of the choux and almost calls him back—knows that there are far worse things for a woman to be than a kind man’s wife. It would be so much easier than being a single-minded woman with a chalk drawing on the floor of her boardinghouse bedroom mapping out every vein and nerve and artery and organ she reads about, adding notations about the size and properties of each. It would be so much easier if I did not want to know everything so badly. If I did not want so badly to be reliant upon no soul but myself.
When Monty, Percy, and I returned to England after what can be generously called a Tour, the idea of a life in Edinburgh as an independent woman was thrilling. The university had a newly minted medical school; the Royal Infirmary allowed student observation; an anatomy theater was being built in College Garden. It was the city where Alexander Platt had arrived after his dishonorable navy discharge with no references and no prospects and had made a name for himself simply by refusing to stop talking about the radical notions that had gotten him booted from the service. Edinburgh had given Alexander Platt a leg up from nothing because it had seen in him a brilliant mind, no matter that it came from a working-class lad with no experience and a stripped title. I was certain that it would do the same for me.
Instead I was here, in a bakeshop with a proposal pastry.
Callum is kind, I tell myself as I stare at the cream puff. Callum is sweet. Callum loves bread and wakes early and cleans up after himself. He doesn’t mind that I don’t wear cosmetics and make very little attempt to dress my hair. He listens to me, and he doesn’t make me feel unsafe.
I could do much worse than a kind man.
The scent of sugar and wood smoke starts to return to the room as Callum smothers the ovens, drowning out the faint hint of blood that still lingers, sharp and metallic as a new sewing needle. I do not want to spend the rest of my life smelling sugar. I don’t want pastry beneath my fingernails and a man content with the hand life has dealt him and my heart a hungry, wild creature savaging me from the inside out.
Fleeing to London had truly been a fiction, but suddenly it begins to unspool in my head. London isn’t a medical hub like Edinburgh, but there are hospitals and plenty of physicians who offer private classes. There’s a guild. None of the hospitals or private offices or even barbaric barber surgeons on the Grassmarket have allowed me to get a toe in their door. But the hospitals in London don’t know my name. I’m smarter now, after a year of rejection—I’ve learned not to walk in with pistols drawn, but rather to keep them hidden in my petticoats with a hand surreptitiously upon the heel. This time, I will approach stealthily. Find a way to make them let me in before I ever have to show my hand.
And what is the point of having a fallen gentleman in the city for a brother if I don’t take advantage of his gentlemanly hospitality?
London
2
Moorfields is a stinking, rotting neighborhood that greets me like a fist to the teeth. The noise is fantastic—sermons of preachers damning the poor from street corners argue with screams from the brothels. Cattle bellow as they’re herded through the road to market. Tinkers call for pots to mend. Vendors sell oysters, nuts, apples, fish, turnips—new wares every few steps, all of them oily and all of them shouted about. I’m ankle-deep in mud all the way from the stagecoach stop, the thick, greasy sort that traps carts and steals shoes. Dead cats and rotten fruit bob up from the quagmire, and the thick haze of smoke and gin makes the air feel gauzy. It’s miraculous that I do not have my pockets picked on the walk and will be equally miraculous if I ever manage to scrape all the mud and offal off the soles of my boots.
My brother, always one for histrionics, has made his fall into poverty as dramatic as possible.
Even as I mount the stairs of his building, I’m not certain what emotion is most strongly associated with the impending reunion with Monty. We parted on good terms—or if not good, at least good-adjacent—but only after a lifetime of sniping at each other like feral foxes. And fencing for soft underbellies is a hard habit to break. We’ve both said enough unkind things to each other that would justify a reluctance on his part to greet me with warmth.
So it is unexpected that my first reaction upon seeing his face when he opens the door is perhaps closest cousin to fondness. This miserable year apart has made me terribly soft.
What he offers back is shock. “Felicity.”
“Surprise!” I say weakly. Then I throw my hands in the air like it’s some sort of celebration and try not to regret coming here at all. “Sorry, I can go.”
“No, don’t . . . Dear Lord, Felicity!” He grabs my arm as I turn, pulling me back to him and then into an embrace, which I don’t know what to do with. I consider trying to pry myself free, but it will likely be over faster if I don’t resist, so I stand, stiff-armed and chewing the inside of my cheek.
“What are you doing here?” He pushes me back to arm’s length for a better look. “And you’re so tall! When did you get so tall?”
I have never aspired to impressive stature, based primarily on Monty’s example—we are both of a solid, hard-to-knock-over stock that sacrifices height for shoulder width—but I’ve had to let the hem of my skirt out since summer, and in my heeled shoes and him in stocking feet, I could put my nose to his forehead. Pettiness must die a very slow death indeed because, in spite of that momentary pinch of fondness, I’m delighted to be officially taller.
His hug prevented me from getting a good look at him until he stepped backward to assess my height, and I examine him in return. He’s gotten thinner—that’s the first thing I notice. Thin in a way that can no longer be described as willowy, but rather the sort that comes from not having enough to eat. He’s paler as well, though that’s less alarming—the last time we saw each other we’d just finished a stretch in the Cyclades islands so we were both of us brown as nuts. The short, bleak days that populate London in the winter have made it impossible not to notice the scars on his face, far more livid than I expected. They run raised and red, like a splatter of paint across his forehead and in patches down to his neck, made more visible because he’s cut his hair short, though it somehow still has that effortless tousle to it, like someone’s sculpted it to look rumpled just so.
“Here, come inside.” Monty ushers me into the flat, floorboards protesting more loudly than I feel they should while still maintaining structural stability. I haul myself and my knapsack over the threshold.
The flat is crowded as a party. There’s a washbasin balanced atop a set of trunks stacked on each other that seem to be functioning as both storage and a dining table, bumping knees with a sooty stove that looks like it’s pushing down th
e floor. I consider taking off my boots but decide I’d rather not risk trodding these boards sock-footed for fear of a splinter impaling me.
Monty steps into the middle of what can be generously termed the front room, though there’s only a thin partition to designate its edges. “I know it’s shit,” he says before I have to come up with a compliment that is actually a lie. “But it’s our shit. So long as we pay the rent. Which we have. Mostly. Only one close call so far. And we have a stove, which is grand. And there are significantly fewer cockroaches than there were in the summer. More mice now, but fewer cockroaches.” He does a little victorious gesture with his hands clasped above his head. “Here, Percy’s in bed. Come say your hallos. I think he’s still awake.”
“Why’s Percy abed?” I follow Monty around the partition as Percy raises his head from where he’s burrowed into their mattress. He hasn’t become as dramatically waifish as Monty, though his dark skin hides any pallor. That, and Percy has been a stretched-out creature since youth, every suit a bit too short in the sleeves and his limbs thin with lean muscles jutting out like tangerines wrapped in burlap.
It occurs to me suddenly why the pair of them may be lounging in the middle of the day, and I freeze, blushing before I have confirmation of my suspicions. “Oh no. Am I interrupting something marital and romantic?”
“Felicity, please, it’s six in the evening,” Monty says with great indignance, then adds, “We’ve been fornicating all day.”
I resist using up my first eye roll of the visit this early. “Really, Percy, why are you in bed?”
“Because it has not been a very good week.” Monty sinks down at Percy’s side and nestles into his shoulder, his deaf side away from me.
Percy gives me a weak smile, his head listing against Monty’s. “Just a fit yesterday,” he says, and Monty wrinkles his nose at the word.
“Oh.” It comes out more relieved than I meant it to—I’m far more comfortable discussing epilepsy than fornication. Percy is an epileptic, temporarily incapacitated at periodic intervals by convulsions that physicians since Hippocrates have been attempting—and largely failing—to both understand and treat. After several years of his guardian aunt and uncle bringing a parade of so-called experts in to cup and bleed and dose him in attempt to lessen the severity, they finally decided upon permanent imprisonment in the sort of barbaric asylum that people with untreatable ills are confined to. It would have happened, too, had he not absconded with my brother—so dedicated were they to keeping his illness a secret for fear of the social embarrassment that neither Monty nor I knew of it until we were abroad.
