“One moment!” He swept his sleep-crushed notes into his satchel. In the six months he’d been lodging here, Mrs. Calbert had generally respected his privacy. But based on this morning’s unannounced visit, it seemed she was increasingly prone to test it.
“Is everything all right?” she all but shouted.
“Yes, yes, just grabbing my trousers!” He grabbed a blanket off his bed and tossed it over the flotsam of the previous evening’s experiments, still scattered about his dining table. The frogs fell quiet in their algae-stained glass bowl, but the crickets in their wire cages were less circumspect. They chirped ominously beneath their woolen shroud, no doubt berating him for his plans to feed them to the frogs.
The latch rattled on the door, and Daniel belatedly glanced down to make sure he was decently dressed. Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately, given the bedraggled state of his shirt—he was still wearing the same clothing from last night. He’d been dressed in his finest jacket then, but best was apparently relative. A fishmonger, Miss Westmore had called him. The memory made him smile. Had it been more the jacket or the necktie that caused her to sniff in such haughty disapproval?
Though, he supposed it scarcely mattered which bits of clothing Miss Westmore found most offensive when she had also objected to the person in them.
He shrugged away those snarls of memory, turned the key in the lock, and yanked open the door to confront the more pressing issue at hand.
“Mrs. Calbert.” He leaned one shoulder against the door frame, partly to block her view inside and partly because the sun outside his door made him want curl into a ball and beg for mercy. The sunlight bounced off the occasional silver strand in his landlady’s dark hair, making her appear older than her thirty-odd years. Smithfield’s streets had a way of aging a body before its time, as the daily flood of patients at St. Bartholomew’s charity ward could testify. “What an unexpected surprise.”
He waited for her to gather her wits about her and ask him for advice on whatever malady must have brought her to his door at such an early hour. He’d already observed she was plagued by consumptive lungs and limped a bit on cool mornings. The poor woman’s husband had kicked off soon after Daniel arrived, leaving her with little more than a somber wardrobe and the running of this five-room tenement house. It occurred to him, as he waited for Mrs. Calbert to find her courage, that today she was dressed in bright, sunny yellow.
That was certainly new.
“Were you wanting something of me?” he prompted.
Instead of launching into the expected bodily complaint, Mrs. Calbert gave a breathless sigh. “You . . . ah . . . needed to put on your trousers?”
Bloody hell. Why hadn’t he chosen a different excuse for his delay in answering the door? Now the woman would be imagining he slept in the nude. It would be just his ill fortune to be awakened by her knock every morning, hoping to catch a peek. He was fastidious enough to want to choose his own bed partners, and Mrs. Calbert was not at the top of that list.
He ran a hand through his sleep-mussed hair, and that at least brought her eyes back around to his face. “How may I help you this fine morning?”
Her ruddy cheeks plumped up, and she pushed a basket covered with a checkered cloth into his hands. Daniel caught the scent of fresh bread. “You came in quite late last night. Heard you outside my door.” She smiled, revealing a gap where a tooth had gone freshly missing. “I’ve brought you some breakfast, figuring you might be running behind this morning.”
Daniel accepted the basket with a silent groan. She’d waited up for him last night and now was bringing him breakfast? Just what did she expect him to offer in exchange for such a kind but unnecessary gift? He could certainly offer some guidance in the area of improved dental hygiene, but he doubted she would consider his recommendation for tooth powder a worthwhile expense, given the fact she charged her tenants scarcely fourteen shillings for weekly rent.
“Now Mrs. Calbert,” he said, even as his stomach emitted a ferocious growl, “there is no need for such kindness. I am to provide my own meals, according to the house rules you’ve set yourself.”
“Oh, posh. By the hours you keep, I imagine you’re too busy by half to think of your stomach. You need a wife, Dr. Merial, if you don’t mind me saying.” She gestured to the basket. “There’s a bit of jam in there as well, my own recipe. I remember you once said you enjoyed your sweets.” She peered around his shoulder, stretching to catch a peek inside. “I’d be happy to lay it out on your table, and dust off some things, besides.” She sniffed the air. “There’s a peculiar odor, and there seems to be an infestation of some sort. I think a solid cleaning would do you well.”
Daniel’s hands clenched around the handle of the basket. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, per se. A constable would find no legal fault with his nightly activities. But Mrs. Calbert had a list of house rules the length of Aldersgate Street, and it was hard to refute the sweet, pungent scent of chloroform that hung thick in the air and permeated every porous surface in the room. “Cleaning is the tenant’s own responsibility,” he reasoned, recalling the rules he had been forced to agree to some six months prior.
She sniffed again, this time in greater suspicion. “It isn’t opium, is it? I don’t approve of such things. I try to run a respectable establishment.”
“No, no, nothing like that,” he soothed quickly.
Not opium. But perhaps, given the direction of his experiments, something far more promising. Opiates numbed the mind to insensibility, while chloroform possessed solid anesthetic properties. But while the liquid form of the drug was every bit as dangerous as opium, it was proving safe in small, aerosolized doses, at least in his experiments with frogs. He’d been testing different concentrations and delivery mechanisms since arriving in London this past December, working late at night after his hours at St. Bart’s were finished. His painstaking work had led to the creation of a device with the potential to deliver precise dosages of the drug, based on a patient’s size and state of health.
But Daniel was not convinced his landlady cared enough about the advancement of medical science to overlook the odd menagerie he used in the course of his experiments. He’d be out on his bum if she saw the frogs, of that he was quite sure.
Either that or be invited into her bed, encouraged to help her forget what she had seen.
He cast about for an alternative that would violate neither the house rules nor his landlady’s sensibilities. “’Tis only a bit of turpentine, Mrs. Calbert,” he offered. “For my . . . er . . . paintings.”
She lifted a dark bushy brow. Out of nowhere, he was reminded of Miss Westmore’s fastidiously groomed arches, which had been hefted to far more potent effect the previous evening. He needed to clear his head of the troublesome girl.
And his doorstep of his troublesome landlady.
“A doctor and an artist?” Mrs. Calbert’s eyes swept his face in open appreciation. “How is it you aren’t already married, then, Dr. Merial? A woman appreciates a man of many talents.” She went up on her toes, trying to peer over his shoulder. “My late husband had an eye for a nice painting. Dabbled a bit in oils, he did.”
Daniel moved to block her view. “I am afraid my latest work is covered, at the moment.”
Her eyes narrowed back on him. “Are they not proper sorts of paintings, then?”
“Proper?” he echoed. No, they weren’t proper. They weren’t real.
The ruddiness of Mrs. Calbert’s cheeks deepened. “I don’t approve of that either. A girl’s a girl, and it’s against the rules to bring one in, even if she’s only sitting to model.” But despite her clear censure, one hand crept up to fiddle with a button at her throat. “Although, I suppose I could sit a spell for you. Wouldn’t break the rules that way. And Mr. Calbert once said I ought to be painted in the morning light, as naught but nature intended.”
Daniel smothered a laugh, imagining his landlady sitting in his flat, nude and outraged, swatting at escaped crickets. “I .
. . ah . . . I don’t think you’ll do. ’Tis a likeness of a dead man, the body opened for examination. It is needed to teach the new students.”
“A cadaver?” Her eyes widened, but a hint of macabre fascination infused her words. “Mr. Calbert liked a good funeral, God rest his soul. Mayhap I could take a look?”
Daniel cursed beneath his breath. By the stars, was there no way to dislodge her? He began to inch the door shut. “I’m afraid it’s too much. Chest flayed open, intestines strewn about. Most unpleasant. I wouldn’t want to subject you to such a thing, particularly considering Mr. Calbert’s untimely passing.”
A euphemism, perhaps. To hear the other tenants talk, the man had been gutted in a nearby alley. Yet another side effect of Smithfield’s mean streets.
Mrs. Calbert’s face paled, and he felt like a bounder for it, but short of inviting her in for tea, there was naught for it. “But thank you for your kindness.” The door hovered, nearly flush against the jamb now. “I shall enjoy my breakfast.”
The door clicked shut. Daniel stood still, holding his breath. Finally, through the thin-walled door, he heard the sounds of his landlady shuffling away, and his lungs loosened. He turned to the table and placed the basket down. Pulling the blankets away, he warily eyed the device that was causing all his problems.
“Damn it all,” he muttered. Six months, he’d been here, working on his experiments without interruption, and now Mrs. Calbert was growing suspicious?
Or was it only that she was growing lonely?
His landlady was proving a danger he had not anticipated. There was no doubt he was close to a breakthrough. He was tempted to stay here this morning and keep working. But he had a noon lecture to give the first year students, and while his instructor’s salary from St. Bart’s was meager, it was still his most predictable means of income at the present, next to Lady Austerley’s payments.
He picked up the chloroform regulator, running his fingers across the surface of the tin body and linen-wrapped tubing, reassuring himself that there were no cracks that might permit the vapor to escape and impact the results. Last night’s results had been highly promising—on frogs, at least. If things continued to go well, he felt certain it would result in a groundbreaking paper, one he could possibly even publish in London’s leading medical journal, the Lancet.
But he anticipated several more weeks of work before he was ready, and the completion of his experiments depended on a healthy population of amphibians. It had taken him weeks to grow the fragile creatures to an age that would suit the purposes of the experiment, and at times he felt as though he lived and breathed according to the whims of their delicate constitution.
If he was forced to pack up and move now, he risked losing the lot of them and having to start over.
His fingers hovered over the mask, which was shaped to fit over the nose and mouth of a patient. He fished a hand in his coat pocket, seeking to clean it with the handkerchief he always kept here. His fingers closed unexpectedly over the edge of a card. Drawing it out, he saw Lady Cardwell’s name and direction on it.
A flooding memory returned—the sound of Miss Westmore’s voice, and the feel of her skin, quivering against his hand. The way her brows had formed an unexpected wrinkle between her eyes as she’d concentrated on his words, and the way her lips had rounded in protest when he’d prescribed a month’s rest.
Bloody, bloody hell. He couldn’t stay here this morning and work on the regulator. He had an appointment to keep, and he refused to contemplate the small rush of eagerness he felt at the thought. There was naught for it but to gulp down his breakfast of bread and jam and catch the omnibus toward Mayfair.
That, and pray Mrs. Calbert didn’t return to pick the lock.
Chapter 7
Normally, Clare quite enjoyed a nice family breakfast.
Before Geoffrey left for Eton, the entire family had often taken the meal together, Mother included. More recently, with her parents’ inexplicable estrangement so keenly felt, breakfast had become a jealously protected sliver of time, that hour before Mother woke up and set the household scrambling, the only part of the day where she could sit with her father in an unguarded fashion and not worry about whether one parent felt slighted or the other annoyed.
Of course, there was nothing normal about the way this family breakfast was shaping up. For a start, it was far too bright. Sunlight streamed through the lace curtains, an ominous harbinger of one of those uncommon London Saturdays so sunny and clear it practically begged one to plan outdoor pursuits. The swelling in her foot was more severe this morning, and the pain reminded her that she would not—under any circumstances—be permitted to enjoy such a day.
Then there was the additional oddity of having Geoffrey present at the breakfast table again. He appeared not the slightest bit chagrined over the fact that he ought to be nose-to-the-books at Eton. Grimly, Clare considered whether he might have been expelled from school on account of his table manners. Instead he was here, uncouth and uneducated, shoving sausages into his mouth and slurping his tea like a costermonger.
But far worse than the minor irritation of the morning was the bone-weary knowledge of her mother’s indiscretion last night. Clare looked across the table at her father and swallowed the lump that rose in her throat at the sight of his thinning blond hair¸ just visible across the top of his morning paper. No matter the difficulties between her parents, she imagined her father would still be hurt by the knowledge of such a betrayal.
She was determined to keep the truth from him, if possible.
Would Dr. Merial keep her family’s confidence? She’d almost destroyed the possibility last night when she unwittingly implied Dr. Bashings would be a better choice for her continued care. Thank goodness she hadn’t offended Dr. Merial to the point he’d refused her mother’s request. But she hadn’t specifically asked him about confidentiality, either. She liked to imagine that perhaps his physician’s oath would be enough to ensure this secret was kept, but fear had kept her awake and tossing in her sheets.
Clare picked up her cup of coffee—a vice Mother would have objected to had she the gall to rise before noon—and studied the headlines that hid their father from view. “It looks as though the Chartists have suffered another set-down,” she offered by way of making conversation. The headlines she could see certainly shouted their opinion on the matter. So did many in the ton, who objected to those commoner upstarts who had the audacity to gather in public rooms and demand a say in their country’s disposal. Her fingers itched to have their own chance to peruse the printed pages.
“Hmm,” came her father’s noncommittal response.
Clare thought of saying more, but hesitated. She always read the London Times from front to back when her father finally put it down and tucked himself away to his club. Not to prepare herself for the shallow drawing room conversations so common during the Season. No, those events required nothing more taxing than elbowing her way through delicate discussions without actually expressing anything so gauche as an opinion. She read the Times because she enjoyed it, and because private pleasures were otherwise rare during the height of the Season.
But having opinions on political matters was one thing. Expressing them was clearly another.
A flash of movement caught her eye. She intuited its source, even before she turned her head. “Geoffrey,” she warned.
Her brother froze, his twitching fingers just inches from Lucy’s hair, which had been tied back this morning in a masculine queue at the nape of her neck, an old strip of leather holding it in place. They owned an entire department store’s worth of ribbons and any number of hair combs, but Lucy insisted on these eccentric touches, as if she could ward off the march of time and her looming Season by playing the heathen instead.
“Yes?” Geoffrey asked, his blue eyes the very picture of the devil.
“It is customary to finish one’s breakfast before moving on to other distractions, is it not? And aren’t you a little old to be pul
ling hair?”
“You sound just like Mother.” Geoffrey grinned. “And I’m not the one who isn’t eating this morning.” He pointed at Lucy with an accusing finger. “If you want to play mother hen, shouldn’t you be squawking at her, too?”
Clare bit back a retort. She hated being compared to their mother. But Geoffrey was right about one thing. The conundrum of her hair aside, Lucy’s latest obsessive rebellion was on full display this morning. A plate of wilted watercress had been served up by the kitchen staff, apparently intended as an accompaniment to the unbuttered toast Lucy lived on now that she was refusing to eat meat.
“The smell of your sausage is turning my stomach,” Lucy declared, matching her brother’s volume. “It is barbaric to eat the flesh of animals.”
Privately, Clare considered that this most recent eccentricity might have been better timed to ensure her sister remained a respectable—and marriageable—height. A little malnutrition, properly timed to best effect, could only help matters.
But no, Lucy had to decide on this moral course of action only after she’d obtained the rough proportions of an Amazon.
“How can you object to eating animals, but not to wearing strips of them in your hair?” Geoffrey countered.
A rustling of paper froze them all in their seats. Father frowned over the top edge of the paper and adjusted the wire rims of his spectacles. “Geoffrey, stop pulling your sister’s hair. You should have matured past such nonsense. Clare, stop pestering your brother. He’s too old to need a nursemaid.” His gaze fell on the disgusting lump of watercress, shimmering in the middle of the table. “And Lucy, eat your . . . er . . . grass.”
The paper lifted again.
They all exchanged bemused glances, although no one looked surprised that Father had been aware of their brewing row from behind his newsprint facade. Even in the midst of their worst family squabbles, their father remained calm and unflappable.
“You know, I think the Chartists have the right of it,” Geoffrey proclaimed, proving he had actually been listening during his assault on the sausages. “It seems unfair to limit their ability to even meet to discuss their options, or plan a peaceful protest. They caused no real trouble in April, during the march from Kennington.”
Diary of an Accidental Wallflower Page 6
