Crescent City Courtship (8 page)

Which was just as well. She wanted to observe without having to make conversation. It was a good thing God had seen fit to bless her with keen eyesight. She was so far up in the tiers of seats she was likely to suffer a nosebleed from the height. But no complaining. She was here. She was unmolested. The Toad would never think to look for her here.

Still, she couldn’t help examining the backs of all those
heads below her and to the right. None of them, thank God, had the lumpy, flattened shape she’d trained herself to watch for and run from.

“I’m going out on a limb to assume that the seat isn’t taken. May I?”

Abigail looked up to find John Braddock, hat in hand, at the far end of the aisle. To reach the empty seat beside her, he would have to step over several gentlemen, all of whom were looking at her with various levels of curiosity and disdain.

She sighed. There went her solitary enjoyment of the experience. “I suppose.”

“Pardon me. I beg your pardon,” John repeated as he made his way down the aisle toward her. When he finally reached her, he sprawled in the seat, dropping his hat onto his knee. “Whew. That was a job.” He looked at her. “It took me a few minutes to find you, stuck way up here in this treetop. I usually only sit here when I have a test to study for.”

“I imagine Dr. Laniere was hoping to keep me from attracting too much attention. Which, thanks to you, seems to be a lost cause.” Still, she couldn’t help a surge of pleasure that he had sought her out. She folded her arms. “How were your rounds with the dyspeptic Dr. Girard?”

“As usual, he singled me out for acerbic asides about illiterate rich boys. As if he hasn’t raised three of those himself. But, fortunately, I maintain perspective. The more he growls, the happier he is.” He sent her a wry smile. “And what about you? Did you learn anything today?”

“Yes.” Abigail nodded. “I was taught the proper way to lift a patient from one bed to another, and the science of bedpans.”

A stir at the front of the theater caught Abigail’s atten
tion. A couple of orderlies trundled in a cart with the patient, lying on her back with her hands folded across her stomach. She seemed to be asleep.

As a hush fell across the observing audience, John sat forward. “I watched them put her under anesthesia,” he whispered to Abigail. “She fought the ether like a wild woman.”

“She must have been frightened to death.” Busy with the nurses that morning, Abigail had not been allowed to see the patient as she’d hoped to do. She studied John’s face and was relieved to find sympathy rather than the avid excitement she’d expected. “How would you do it differently?”

He frowned. “I’m not sure. I wonder if there’s a way to prepare the patient—”

“Shh!” someone hissed from the other end of the row.

Abigail jerked her attention back to the operating theater. Dr. Laniere, assisted by a couple of students Abigail remembered from yesterday’s rounds, was adjusting a row of gleaming instruments laid out on a nearby table. An older gentleman in beard and spectacles, whom she assumed to be another surgeon, busied himself with the lights and then stationed himself at the foot of the patient’s bed. Abigail could hear the men murmuring to one another, and she’d have given anything to know what they said.

As if he’d read her mind, Dr. Laniere lifted a hand and addressed the audience. “Gentlemen, we are about to begin the procedure to remove an infected gallbladder, commonly referred to as cholecystostomy. Symptoms that indicate acute sepsis include enlarged gallbladder, persistent pain in the abdomen and a slight jaundice of the skin. Please observe that the patient is completely under the influence of ether-based anesthesia and will neither feel nor remember the incisions.”

Absorbed in the surgeon’s deft movements and clinical explanations, Abigail sat forward, clasping her fingers around her knees. The operation proceeded almost to the letter as Marcus Girard had described it yesterday. There was blood, yes, but far from swooning in disgust, Abigail found herself awed and fascinated that such a drastic action as invasion of the body with a knife could result in healing.

Incision. Removal of infected tissue. Suturing. Scarring. Regeneration.

As she watched, Abigail ran the words through her mind. Spiritual implications nudged her heart, but she pushed them away until later. Right now she needed to learn what she could from the physical experience.

She’d almost forgotten John’s vital presence to her right when he drew in a sharp breath. “She’s hemorrhaging.”

The action on the theater floor suddenly quickened as sponges, clamps and needles flew, and every person in the audience leaned forward. Then, as quickly as it began, it was over. Dr. Laniere gained control, sutured the patient’s internal incision and moved back to let one of his students close.

“You may relax now, Abigail—the danger is past.” John’s amused baritone broke into Abigail’s concentration.

She looked down to find, to her utter horror, that she’d been clutching his hand. Releasing him, she brushed her palms together as if washing them. “I’m so sorry—”

“Never mind, I understand,” he said with a surprising absence of teasing. “Prof is a dynamic surgeon, but I admire him most because he makes it look so easy.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “Some of the surgeons with a deal less skill are much more apt to play
up the theatrics of a situation. Flourishes, raised voices, all that nonsense. Prof teaches us to take care of business with thoroughness and precision.”

Abigail nodded, distracted by the lingering sensation of John’s large, fine-boned hand wrapped around hers. Helplessly she remembered the feeling of his broad shoulder under her hand as she’d stood in the hospital parlor, listening to him breathe. Strong, vital, male. Oh my, she was undone. “Will Mrs. Catchot recover now?” she said rather at random.

“Undoubtedly.” John rose as the gentlemen around them began to stir, discussing the operation they’d collectively witnessed. He offered Abigail a friendly hand to assist her to her feet.

She stared at it for half a second, then jumped up on her own. “Oh, dear, it’s nearly noon. I promised Camilla I’d come back to help—please excuse me, Mr. Braddock.”

He stared at her, nonplussed, but moved to the end of the row and waited for her to hurry past. “Would you like to join me and the fellows for—”

“No, thank you, I really have to go.” Dipping a curtsy, she fled down the theater steps, dodging doctors and laymen lingering in conversation.

Only when she was safely on her way back to Rue Gironde on foot did she realize what a ninny she’d been, allowing her ridiculous, unwanted interest in John Braddock to keep her from learning what she could.

Taking a breath and releasing it, she slowed her steps. She looked up at the sky, where weak sunlight filtered through a bank of soft gray clouds. Control had brought her this far. Persistence and willingness to face her fears. She’d finally maneuvered her way to safety and a possible means
of attaining her desire to become a doctor. If she could only stay the course, who knew what she might accomplish?

Besides, she wasn’t afraid of John Braddock. What nonsense.

T
he midweek French market was a jumbled discord of music, laughter and multiple languages, a gumbo of color, odor and movement. Inured to the crowd and noise, John effectively blocked out everything but his single-minded quest for the perfect orange. He was crouching to poke through a pile of fruit in a vendor’s basket when a hand touched his shoulder.

He looked up to find Abigail Neal standing over him.

“Behold, the vassal on his knees.” Eyebrows quirked in amusement, she swept a dramatic hand through the air.

“Abigail!” He lunged to his feet. “I thought you were going back to the Lanieres’.”

“I did.” She gestured vaguely in the direction of Rue Gironde, setting the empty canvas bag in her hand flapping. “Camilla sent me to buy a chicken for the evening meal and I saw you over here.” She plucked the orange out of his hand. “I thought you medical people never stopped to eat.”

“Citrus helps ward off colds and influenza.”

“Indeed.” She examined the orange as if she’d never seen one before. Perhaps she hadn’t.

John chose another one and called to a dark-skinned woman seated on a three-legged stool at the booth’s entrance. “I’ll take both of these. How much?”

The woman, dressed in a multilayered gown and head rag, answered in the Acadian French mumble of the Quarter; John drew a penny from his pocket and tossed it to her. He looked at Abigail and jerked a thumb in the direction of a jambalaya vendor’s stall. “Come on, I’ll buy the rest of your dinner.”

She hesitated, looking over her shoulder at a poultry farmer’s noisy stall.

He handed her one of the oranges. “Camilla won’t expect you back right away. I daresay she won’t even know you’re gone.” He didn’t know why he was insisting when she’d made it clear she didn’t want his company. But then he’d never been able to resist a challenge. Smiling with gentle mockery, he backed toward the stall from which the aroma of crawfish, onions, peppers and tomatoes drifted like a siren song. “Come on, Abigail. You know you’re hungry.”

She looked down at the sack dangling from her wrist. “I suppose I could stay Chanticleer’s execution for another hour.” Tossing the orange over her shoulder and catching it behind her back, she picked up her skirts. “All right, then.”

He glanced at her as they approached the jambalaya booth. “You’ve read Chaucer?”

She shrugged. “Where I grew up, there wasn’t much to do but read.”

“Considering your vocabulary, that doesn’t surprise me. But
Canterbury Tales
is a fairly bawdy choice.”

She slid him a sidelong look. “Make up your mind, John. Either I’m a lady or I’m not.”

The conundrum had entered his mind more than once
since her abrupt departure from the operating theater. Sometimes it seemed she understood the rules of society and other times she appeared to delight in flouting them. He stared for a moment without answering, then turned to the aged mulatto stirring a pot of something fragrant over an open cookfire. “Two bowls of jambalaya, if you please.”

A few minutes later they were seated side-by-side on a low brick wall opposite the market, watching the foot traffic pass by as they ate. Abigail had already finished her orange, dropping the fragrant rind onto the ground for the seagulls, and was engaged in scooping jambalaya into her mouth with an oyster shell provided by the vendor. A cluster of dark-skinned women swayed past, one of them winking over her shoulder at John.

Abigail glanced at him. “Do you ever wonder where all these people come from? Where they live and what sorts of occupations they have?”

“I’m fairly certain what those particular women do,” John said drily.

“You thought the same about me, but you were absolutely, unequivocally wrong.”

“Unequivocally?” He’d have to admit he’d never met a prostitute with quite the vocabulary Abigail flaunted. “I stand corrected. Perhaps you could redirect my ignorance as to how you and Tess
did
manage to support yourselves in that squalid little room I found you in.”

“We worked in the sail loft on Julia Street. I waxed twine and Tess hand-stitched grommets.”

He gave her a skeptical look. “Where did you learn to do that?”

“Tess taught me. She was working there—she’s quite a seamstress, you know—and put in a good word for me. The
work isn’t difficult to learn, just tiring and a bit hard on the hands.” She rubbed her fingers together and he could hear the swishing of callus against callus. “Some days I thought my back would break from sitting in one place for ten or twelve hours straight.”

John frowned. “That’s inhumane.”

Abigail looked down at the oyster shell in her empty bowl. “It kept us out of the brothels.” Brushing off further questions with a wave of her hand, she smiled at him. “Thank you for my dinner. I was actually looking for you because I wanted to ask you something.”

Wary, he searched her face. Her sharp cheekbones had filled out over the last few days, turning her from a gaunt Amazon into quite a striking young woman. Her hair glowed with healthy streaks of umber and gold and, loosened a bit from its severe brown bun, revealed a distinct wave. The green eyes, bright and rested, regarded him with frightening intelligence.

“You may ask,” he said, “but I make no promises.”

“I would expect no less from you, Mr. Braddock” she said tartly. “Yesterday I heard Professor Laniere reading a piece from a medical journal to Camilla. The subject was autopsy. The author seemed to think the practice a bit of, shall we say, overkill.” Her lips twitched.

John chuckled. “The medical profession is divided over the issue, but Prof advocates autopsy as a method of preventing disease. The more one knows about what causes death, the better the chances of heading it off the next go-round.”

“I gathered that.” Abigail tipped her head. “Which is why I want you to teach me what you know about it.”

John stared at her. “You can’t be serious.”

“Why not?” She set her bowl down on the wall. “I know the professor makes you fellows cut up and examine every charity case that comes through the hospital morgue. Surely you’re capable of demonstrating the rudiments.”

“Of course I’m
capable.
” John scowled at her. “But you’d not be allowed into the morgue. And—and even if you were, where would we get the body to examine? And why do you
want
to do this?” The idea of a woman willing to watch a human body cut from stem to stern, the organs lifted out, weighed and measured, prodded and poked…

Preposterous.

Abigail leaned forward. “The body is a mystery I’ve longed for some time to unlock. Tess, for example. I’d no idea how to help her baby get out safely because I didn’t know the arrangement of the parts inside.”

“I know the arrangement of parts, but that didn’t help me,” John pointed out. “Besides, I can draw that for you with pencil and paper. Any good anatomy textbook will show—”

“I’ve seen the textbooks. I want to examine the organs’ texture and color, compare the sizes of male and female, see the physical arrangement inside the body. And I want to see anomalies. John, you of all people must understand this…this craving I have to know.” Her eyes burned into his.

John had never met a woman like this one. His mother and sister swooned at the sight of blood—or at least pretended to. Camilla Laniere, somewhat more down-to-earth, never shied away from her husband’s work or her children’s needs. But John had never heard her express a desire to observe an autopsy, much less participate in one.

“I’ll ask the professor,” he said reluctantly. Prof would put the hammer down on the idea.

“I already asked him. He said he didn’t have time to spare from his family and his students—”

“Then there you have it.” John shrugged. “It’s out of the question—”

“—but he said if one of his students wanted extra practice and was willing to go in after hours, he’d approve the release of the body.”

John set down his bowl with a clatter. “I can’t believe that!”

“It’s true. Ask him.”

“Why didn’t you ask one of the other chaps? Weichmann or Girard would jump at the chance to show off.”

“Because I want the best. If I can’t have Dr. Laniere, I want you.”

John resisted her blatant flattery. “You don’t know what you’re asking. Have you ever seen an adult cadaver?”

She nodded. “I assure you I can tolerate more than you think. Look, I’ll make it worth your while. I was going to propose a trade.”

“A trade?” Startled, he laughed, taking in her shabby dress and broken shoes. “What could you possibly have that I would want?”

For a moment she regarded him with cold fury. “I was going to offer to tutor you in Latin and Greek—which I happen to be very good at.”

Somehow he knew she wasn’t making false claims. “What makes you think I need help with Latin and Greek?”

She reached into his jacket and plucked out his dictionary. Her thumb fanned the pages. “I saw you sneaking glances yesterday as we made rounds. And this morning in the surgery theater. You’re afraid Girard will outgun you.”

“Girard? You’re mad. He can barely speak English.”

“Then it’s Weichmann. You’re terrified of losing first place in the class.” Her eyes dared him to deny it.

Pressing his lips together, he stared across the street, where the new Courtyard Hotel was undergoing construction, the masons calling to one another, singing over the slap of brick and mortar, scrape of trowel. Abigail had somehow hit on his Achilles’ heel. Although he was acknowledged to be brilliant in maths and sciences, reading had never come easily, and Latin declensions gave him migraines.

But as she said, if he could somehow turn his problem around, his place would be secured. The professor had given him another chance to prove himself. Supervising an autopsy, even for the benefit of a woman, was a privilege.

“All right. I’ll do it.” He frowned at Abigail to squelch her obvious triumph. “But you’ll do exactly as I say and don’t tell any of the other fellows about it.”

“But you said—”

“I don’t want them to get any ideas. Are we agreed on the terms?”

She looked at him silently, then nodded, a brief jerk of her head. “Agreed. Can we begin tonight?”

“If there’s a body available.”

Her smile was grim. “In this city, right here by the waterfront, there’s always a body available. Where and when shall I meet you?”

“You’ve no business walking anywhere alone after dark. I’ll come for you at eleven.” He thought for a moment. “I’ll have to let Miss Charlemagne in on it, get the key from her. She won’t tell anyone.”

Abigail’s smile broadened to a grin.
“Mors gaudet succurrere vitae.”

“You might start your tuition by translating that.”

“Death rejoices to help those who live.”

Abigail waited for John that evening in the clinic entryway. Winona had just gone to bed, leaving a small oil lamp on the table to spread orangey shadows into the kitchen.

The young housekeeper had stood in the doorway of her room, shaking her head over Abigail’s insane desire to cut open dead bodies in the middle of the night. “It’s all well and good for Mr. John and the other students hacking people apart, but you’re a lady.” When Abigail just shrugged, Winona snorted and disappeared, taking her disapproval with her.

Abigail slid back the small window panel in the door and peered out into the dense darkness. She wiped her sweaty palms down the sides of her skirt. She wasn’t ready for this as she’d pretended. An adventure that had seemed like a good idea in the bright noonday sun of the French Quarter now loomed with nightmarish grimness.

She took a hard look at herself. Leaning against the door, she looked down at her hands. The nails had been trimmed to the quick, the cuticles and fingertips cracked from exposure to lye cleansers. Not the hands of a lady. But what had the title ever given her or any other woman she’d known? Protection? She pictured her mother, imprisoned in a Chinese missionary compound, unprepared for any work except maintaining her white skin and corresponding with herself in a journal.

There had to be more. Abigail would
make
more, gladly forfeiting her right to be called anything except a useful human being.

At a soft rap on the door at her back, she turned and released the latch. John Braddock stood there, shifting
from one foot to the other. Dressed simply in white cotton shirt, loose breeches and boots, he held a lamp in one hand and the handle of a large wooden case in the other.

He moved back to allow her to pass. “Are you ready? I had trouble getting out of the house, so we’re a bit late.”

“I’m ready.” She stepped into the carriageway and kept pace with him until they reached the street. The residential area was quiet at this time of night; only the sound of water dripping from leaves after a late-afternoon rain shower accompanied their footsteps. The scent of frangipani from someone’s garden drifted on a sultry breeze. They’d walked two blocks before she broke the silence. “Why would you have trouble leaving the house?”

He glanced at her, lips curved. “My landlady’s a bit of a dragon.”