Crescent City Courtship (12 page)

Abigail’s eyes popped open. She hurried to open the cupboard again. “Look, Essie,” she said with a smile, manipulating the long, flexible snakelike tube of a Siegel’s otoscope. She showed the child the silver bell at one end and the small mouthpiece at the other. “Watch this.” Putting the mouthpiece between her lips, she held the bell against Essie’s neck and blew gently.

Essie giggled. “That tickles!”

Abigail smiled at Winona, who watched with approval. “I’m going to blow just a bit in your ear and see if you can feel it. Can you sit very still?”

Essie stared at her, brown eyes wide. “Yes, ma’am,” she whispered.

“All right. Here we go.” Abigail placed the bell into Essie’s ear canal, peered into it and softly blew through the tube. The child jerked, but managed to stay quiet. Abigail realized, as she had suspected it might, that the membrane of the eardrum had remained rigid. Infection had packed mucus behind the ear, rendering it immobile.

Abigail removed the otoscope. “Does your ear feel stuffy? Like you’ve got cotton in your ears?”

The little girl nodded. “It hurts when I lay down.”

“I’m sure it does.” Abigail wiped off the earpiece with alcohol, then coiled the otoscope tube around her hand and tucked the instrument back into its space in the cupboard. “Have you had a cold?”

“Yes, ma’am. But it’s better…”

“Well, your ear got swollen from the cold and trapped water inside your eardrum. That’s why it feels all stopped up.” She looked at Winona. “I know what the problem is, but there’s not much to do about it. She needs to rest, drink lots of water, eat oranges.”

Winona’s brow wrinkled as she cupped her hands over Essie’s ears. “She lives in a orphanage in the worst part of the city. Her mother died and her father is a stevedore at the docks, a former slave. He couldn’t take care of her…”

For the first time Abigail noted the threadbare state of the little girl’s rough-spun dress and the broken, too-small shoes. She frowned. “Clean water is a problem, then.”

Winona nodded. “And fruit’s out of the question. There’s more’n thirty children in that orphanage.” She pulled Essie close.

“With proper care she’d get well on her own.” Abigail sighed. “All right then. Go to the market and find some witch hazel for the pain. If she can sleep with her head
elevated, that will help. Tell the matron to do her best to keep her quiet until the stuffiness goes away. Within a week or so the fluid should have drained away.”

Winona nodded and looked down at the child, who already seemed better for the attention. She was playing with the ribbons on Winona’s skirt. “I knew you’d help.”

“I haven’t done anything,” Abigail said helplessly. “I wish Dr. Laniere—”

“Hello! Anybody home?” The clinic’s outer door slammed, rattling the windowpanes.

Winona smiled. “Lectures must be done for the day. We’re in here, John,” she called.

Abigail squelched an unexpected leap in her midsection when John stuck his handsome head into the clinic.

“Can a fellow get a chunk of bread and cheese?”

“As a matter of fact, we all can. Come along, Essie, let’s feed the ravening hordes.” Winona boosted her little charge off the table, took her by the hand and curtsyed to John on her way by. Essie dimpled and copied her.

John looked at Abigail. “Who was that?”

She avoided his eyes as she latched the cupboard doors. “A case of acute otitis media with effusion.”

John’s eyebrows rose. “And how do you know this?”

“The eardrum doesn’t move. Don’t worry,” she added, “I didn’t presume to prescribe anything but rest and elevated sleeping couch.”

“I could look at her.”

Abigail put her hands on her hips. “You could. But why upset her again? She’s just stopped crying.”

“And crying would increase the pressure and the pain.” John stared at her for a moment. “All right. Come share a bite of cheese and I’ll tell you about the surgery.”

“Does your boarding house mistress not feed you?” She followed him into the kitchen.

“Her bread isn’t nearly as fine as Winona’s.” He gave her a teasing grin. “And she’s not nearly as pretty as you two.” He flung himself onto one of the benches at the table and rubbed his eyes. “It’s been a tedious afternoon. Stuck in an amphitheater with a lot of smelly fellows watching Prof sew some poor fellow’s leg back together. He’d gotten it stuck in a cotton press and nearly mangled it to the bone.”

Winona, slicing bread at the counter, looked over her shoulder. She looked pained. “John. Please.”

“Oh, sorry.” He laughed. “I knew Abigail the Ghoul here would want full details.” He glanced at Abigail, hazel eyes twinkling. “I’ll tell you later.”

Abigail poured a cup of milk for Essie and sat down beside her. “I’d rather have been there. It’s not the same secondhand.” She stroked the child’s thick braids and watched her gulp the milk. “Do you men ever go into the homes of the poor?”

John accepted a basket of bread and cheese from Winona with a smile of thanks. “As often as we can. But usually it’s all we can do to care for the worst cases that come to us.”

Abigail absently took a slice of the fragrant bread. “It seems you’d prevent some of those worst cases coming to be. If you could treat people early, I mean. Maybe even…” She glanced at John, who was munching contentedly, oblivious to Essie staring wide-eyed at his beautiful bottle-green coat. “Maybe you could teach principles of good health in those communities where disease spreads so quickly and easily.”

“I’ve wondered that myself.” John shrugged. “But it’s not practical, Abigail. The doctors’ energies are needed at
the hospital. Besides, the nurses go into the parishes every day, with little accomplished. People live the way they want to live and they’re skeptical about medical advances. You tell ’em sickness is caused by things you can’t see and they look at you like you’re crazy.”

“But when they come to the hospital to see a doctor, don’t they go along with whatever he says? That’s why it’s important for the medical community to be active in public health.” Abigail leaned her elbows on the table. “People mistrust the nurses because they don’t know any better. Education is—”

“I like the thought, Abigail.” John looked uncomfortable. “But the professors are very busy. You’ve seen Prof’s schedule.” His eyes were intent on her face. At least he was taking her seriously.

Winona cleared her throat. “I’m going to take Essie back. It’s my day off, remember. I’ll be spending the night at home.” She paused. “Abigail, would you like to come to church with me in the morning?”

Abigail blinked, jerking her gaze from John’s. She’d nearly forgotten Winona and Essie’s presence in the kitchen. “I suppose I could,” she answered, rather at random. “Mercy! And I promised I’d start supper for Miss Camilla.” She scrambled up from the bench. “Where should I meet you, Winona?”

Winona met her gaze with a knowing twinkle in her dark eyes. “I’ll be at the corner of Philippa and Poydras at ten. If it’s raining, wait under the balcony of the millinery shop.” She backed out of the kitchen, tugging Essie along with her.

Abigail edged around to put the table between herself and John. She wasn’t exactly afraid of him. It was herself she couldn’t trust. She’d almost given in to kissing him yes
terday. “I have to get supper started. Did you need something else?”

He sighed. “I suppose not. I wanted to talk to Prof about the surgery, but it can wait.” He tipped his head. “So you’re going to church in the morning?”

“Is that so odd?” Taking a pot off its hook over the stove, she set it in the sink and began to pump water into it.

He was silent for a moment. “I suppose you don’t need an escort.”

His tone was so odd that she looked over her shoulder. Their gazes held for a moment. Flustered, she shifted the pot and slopped water all down her front. “Oh my.” She looked down at herself. “I imagine you’d be quite out of place in Winona’s church.”

“And you wouldn’t be?” He sounded amused.

“I’m invited.” She didn’t know where to look. “You’d best attend with your family. I’m sure they’d miss you.”

“If I appeared for services at St. Domini’s, my family would assume someone had died.” His familiar sardonic expression appeared as he stood. “Never mind. Clearly my presence would make you and the lovely Winona just as uncomfortable as you seem to be now. I shall remove myself.” He plopped his hat on his head and bowed. “Good day, Miss Neal.”

The door shut gently behind him and Abigail fought the urge to call him back. He was gone and she was glad. What had possessed him to ask if she needed an escort? It was almost as if he wanted to come to Winona’s church—but no, that wouldn’t be like him at all. Still, she couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to attend services in the company of a man like John Braddock.

A
damp chill enclosed in a messy fog drifted from the river to blanket the tumbledown buildings and twine around Abigail and Winona’s ankles as they crossed Poydras Street the next morning. Abigail wished she’d brought a wrap. But that would presuppose she
had
one, which she didn’t. Perhaps she could save a bit of what Camilla paid her in next week’s wages and make something serviceable for the mild New Orleans winter—a cloak or even a shawl. The cold weather would come in fits and starts, then be gone by March. But when one needed a wrap, one needed a wrap.

She looked around. Nothing in the District had changed, of course. Same hovels with uncovered windows and broken doors, same pitted road, same reek of garbage in the gutters. Barely a week since she’d moved in with the Laniere family and already her life was so drastically different she hardly recognized herself. She’d gotten used to cleanliness and order, the fresh scents of baking bread, antiseptic and lye. As she walked along beside Winona, hugging herself, dodging mangy dogs and vacant-eyed
beggars, she held her breath against the almost palpable odor of corrosion and fear.

She couldn’t help thinking of the families who had been evicted from the burned tenement, particularly the man whose wife and baby had gone missing. They had never been found.
Oh, Lord, where are you when I come back here? Have you abandoned these people?

She glanced at Winona, whose curly dark hair was twisted in a knot at the back of her head, the ends of a sober brown shawl blowing around her shoulders as she walked. Dressed in a brown-spotted cotton dress, a bit faded with washing but otherwise neat, Winona managed to look fresh and content with her circumstances. Well, and why not? Like Abigail, she had somehow escaped the clutches of the District, to hold a position with a prominent family who treated her with respect and paid her an adequate wage.

Abigail’s thoughts leaped helplessly back to Friday afternoon in the library. After John had walked her home, maintaining an amused silence that set her teeth on edge, he’d bid her adieu in the clinic anteroom and sauntered into the kitchen to talk to Winona. Abigail had rushed up the stairs. Pausing at the landing, she’d listened shamelessly, but John and Winona’s conversation was serious, their voices low and intense. An unexpected discomfort made Abigail hurry on to her room. She was
not
jealous. Positively not.

But why must her thoughts continually circle back to a pair of laughing hazel eyes?

To escape her circling thoughts she touched Winona’s arm. “Have you lived here all your life?”

Winona glanced at her and smiled. “Since I was small. My parents were slaves over in Mississippi. We escaped here after the Union took New Orleans.”

“Oh my.” During the American war between the states, Abigail’s family had been in China, insulated from the conflict that tore apart her place of birth. In the short time since she’d returned, she found herself jarred again and again by the ramifications of the recent struggle.

Winona sighed. “Freedom’s a blessing. But you know the lives of our people—it’s far from easy.” Her gesture took in the buildings jockeying for place along the street, the levee at its end, which held the Mississippi River at bay. “From day to day you never know if education is gonna be extended or withheld, what jobs will be available, whether housing and property will be taken without warning…” She looked down, lifting her skirts as she stepped over a pile of refuse in the bumpy, muddy street.

“Yet you seem to be content.” Abigail couldn’t put her finger on the source, but it was more than happiness. It was a sort of bone-deep assurance she was loved and protected. Abigail longed to possess that sort of peace, but had no idea how to pursue it.

“The Bible says to ‘count it all joy when you encounter various trials and the testing of your faith.’” Winona’s smile was inward. “My family’s always full of joy.”

Abigail hesitated. “I’ve had trials, too, but I don’t know that they make me happy. In fact, I rather resent them.”

Winona’s eyes smiled. “That’s natural, unless you understand the trials are making you stronger, increasing your faith, making you more like the Master.”

“Do you really believe that?” Knowing the answer, Abigail hurried on. “My father wanted to preach the gospel to the heathen, so he took me and my mother into some awful places. Strange places where we were looked upon as outsiders. Always outsiders.” She’d never told another
person about it and didn’t feel any better to air it. If anything, her chest burned with deeper bitterness.

Winona flicked a thoughtful look at Abigail. “I also knew about being an outsider.”

Shame washed over Abigail. Maybe she
had
been a tall, gawky, light-haired stranger in an Asian nation full of tiny black-haired people, but at least she had never been enslaved. “I’m sorry—”

“No, no.” Winona laid a gentle hand on Abigail’s arm. “I only meant I understand. But, Abigail, any of us who follow Christ gonna be outsiders in this world. Because the world wants to go its own way. And the world can’t understand what only spiritual eyes can see—that we’re loved by God in an all encompassing way. And He wants to love others through us with the overflow of that love, so they’ll be more likely to see Him.”

Abigail walked a few more paces, hardly aware of the overcast sky, the fog blanketing tin-roofed shanties with half-rotten porches on either side of the road. A window seemed to have opened inside her—a window through which light poured on the paucity of her faith. How could a woman who had grown up in a missionary compound have managed to escape the glowing truth in the words of a former slave?

“Will I find it?” She fumbled over the words. “That love…in your church today?”

“For certain. But now’s a good time, too. God listens to your heart all the time.”

Perhaps He
had
been listening all along—all the way from China, through the poverty of the District and into the relative comfort of life in Professor Laniere’s clinic. Maybe if she continued to seek Him He would lead her into her heart’s desire.

A chance to study medicine, a chance to practice her gift of healing.

Maybe God would heal
her.

By the time John, Weichmann and Marcus exited the High Hat saloon, the morning fog had burned off, leaving a bright winter day in its wake. As they crossed the street toward yet another drinking establishment, John exchanged disgusted glances with Weichmann. High noon on a Sunday morning and already Marcus was three sheets to the wind.

John himself couldn’t bring himself to drink his beer, which had sat at his elbow while they played cards and listened to the singing drift from the churches in the Quarter and the Treme neighborhood nearby. He wasn’t sure why he’d agreed to come. Funny how his taste for alcohol had dried up since that conversation with Prof. And without the haze of liquor clouding his mind, he found little enjoyment in Marcus’s ribald jokes nor the suggestive conversation of the easy women who frequented the bars. Instead he and Weichmann wound up discussing Friday’s surgery.

Now the three of them marched along the side of the street, John and Weichmann bracing Marcus on either side to keep him from lurching into the gutter.

“The yeller-haired one wanted me to come home wi’ ’er, I swear.” Marcus hiccupped.

John steadied him. “And you’d’ve come home with the pox, so it’s a good thing you ran out of money.”

“Well, but what’re we goin’a do the rest of the day?” Marcus gave John a belligerent look. “Jus’ because it’s Sunday, nuffin’ goin’ on our side of town. Boringest day of the week.”

Weichmann leaned around Marcus to speak to John. “Hey, that looks like your Amazon.”

John followed Weichmann’s gaze to a tall figure in a dark blue dress disappearing around the side of a blacksmith shop on the next corner. “She’s not my Amazon,” he said automatically but dropped Marcus’s arm and hurried after Abigail. He rounded the corner just in time to see her enter the front door of a barnlike two-story building on the other side of the blacksmith.

He stopped, frowning. What was she doing in a colored orphanage?

“Braddock, what’s got into you?” demanded Marcus from behind him.

John turned to Weichmann, who was supporting the weight of Marcus’s shoulder against his arm. “She went in the orphanage. Want to come along?”

Weichmann moved away and looked around with a grin when Marcus sat abruptly in a mud puddle. “Good thing you’re so close to the ground, old man.” He caught up to John in two long strides, paying no attention to Marcus’s yelps of indignation. “What do you suppose she’s up to?”

“No idea. But I’m going to find out.”

The orphanage yard was a weedy, soupy mess that ruined his boots before he got to the door. The odor of rotting vegetation was indescribable, even to a man who had exhumed and preserved bodies for dissection. He tugged his handkerchief from his pocket to cover his nose and knocked on the door.

It was yanked open by a young girl dressed in the same rough brown fabric as the child Winona had had in the clinic yesterday. This one was older, perhaps twelve, her
wiry hair braided neatly and coiled around her head. She looked up at John with huge near-black eyes.

Because she appeared to be dumbstruck, John lowered the handkerchief and smiled at her. “Good afternoon. I’m looking for Miss Neal.”

“She’s back in the baby room,” the girl whispered and stood back for John to enter. “With Miss Winona and Mammy.”

He looked around to make sure Weichmann followed and found an expression of extreme discomfort on his friend’s thin features. “Buck up, Weichmann.” John stepped into the dark interior of the orphanage. “We’ve seen worse.”

“I doubt we’ve smelled worse,” muttered Weichmann. But he followed John inside, closing the front door behind him.

John stopped, appalled. He’d seen some bad places, including tenements like the one in which Abigail and Tess had lived. But that had been a palace compared to this: scrubbed wooden floor with gaps so wide he could see the mud beneath, oiled paper windows, crumbling brick walls covered here and there with sailcloth. There was not a stick of furniture in the place except for a few crates upon which fifteen or twenty children of various sizes, genders, and shades of brown sat playing with bits of wood and metal, apparently scavenged from the docks.

John could hear babies crying through a closed door at the back of the room. He looked around at Weichmann, who stood near the front door, arms folded, lower lip between his teeth.

Weichmann shrugged and came off the door. “I didn’t know this was here, did you?”

“No. Come on, Weichmann.” Something had shifted in
John, something irrevocable as a broken levee. While the girl who had let them in squatted to tend to a weeping toddler, John strode through the children, who looked up at him with wide, curious eyes. He lifted the latch of the interior door and it swung open with a loud creak of rusty hinges. “Abigail?”

She was sitting in a straight-backed chair facing the door with a colored infant in her arms. Winona sat on a crate nearby, holding two more in her lap, and a black woman leaned over a rickety crib in which four or five babies were tumbled together like a litter of puppies.

Abigail looked up at him, lips parted and eyes wide. “What are you doing here?”

“Following you.” He stepped aside to admit Weichmann. “We saw you round the corner—”

“I told you not to—”

“We didn’t come for church.”

Winona laughed. “You boys out hunting up trouble on Sunday morning?”

“Who has to hunt?” John glanced at the babies gnawing on their fists in her lap. “Are they sick?”

Abigail jiggled the wailing infant. “We just got here. Did you speak to Essie on the way by?”

“Who? Oh, the little girl from yesterday. Is this where she came from?”

Winona nodded. “I suppose you should meet the matron, Mammy Jonas. Mammy, this is John Braddock, one of the students from the medical college.”

Mammy, a thin, sharp-faced Creole woman, lifted one of the babies out of the crib and looked John up and down. “You the one took our cow and left her tied to the flagpole at the courthouse?”

That had been Marcus, and John had tried to talk him out of it, but explanation would be pointless. “No, ma’am,” he said, mustering all the humility at his disposal.

“Humph.” Mammy dismissed him with a regal turn of her head. “Young men ought to have better things to do.”

John nodded absently as he walked to the crib. “Where’d these babies come from?”

“You’ve had advanced anatomy and you have to ask that?”

John shot Abigail a look. “You know what I mean.” He leaned over to lay the back of his fingers against the cheek of one sleeping infant. “There are so many of them.”

“They mamas left ’em to go wet nurse rich white mamas’ babies.” Mammy’s voice shook. “They make good money and leave a bit in the church poor box—which we get some of.”

John stared at Abigail in horror. Wet nursing was a common enough practice, but he’d never considered the implications for these abandoned babies. If anything, he’d assumed the nursing mothers had lost their infants to death. “Is this true?”