Crescent City Courtship (9 page)

Abigail smiled. “Why don’t you live at home? Winona says your family is wealthy and well-connected.”

“I prefer that my mother not be aware of all my comings and goings.”

She could understand that. “You’re fortunate to have choices.”

He looked down at her again, a gleam of curiosity in his eyes. “Do you not have a family who wonders where you are?”

“My mother left before I did.”

“Left where?”

“The mission compound.” There could be no harm in telling him that much.

“Your father is a missionary? I’ve been trying to place your accent. Where is he?”

Abigail knew she’d said enough. “In a sensitive area. It’s best that I not divulge his location.”

John swung the lamp high, throwing light across Abigail’s face. She shielded her eyes.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “You speak like a lady, but comport yourself like…like no other woman I know.”

“Perhaps your circle of acquaintance isn’t as large as you seem to think.” She walked on.

He quickly caught up to her, but maintained a stubborn silence until they reached the hospital entrance. The building loomed, white stucco gleaming in the light of the stars.

“John.” Abigail touched his forearm: hard, corded sinew and muscle, live and real. She needed the grounding of his company.

He kept walking, heading for the rear of the hospital. “What is it, Abigail?”

She trotted after him. “I’m sorry I keep offending you. Truly I know what a favor you’re doing by bringing me here, especially because you probably need to study.” She hesitated. “Can you accept that there are things I can’t tell you without putting myself in danger?”

He wheeled. “There’s a reason you’re so determined to learn how to keep people alive. Who did you kill, Abigail? Was it your husband? This father of yours in the mission compound? Did he beat you? It happens all the time.” He lowered his voice. “Who was it?”

After a stunned moment Abigail got her voice back. “You think I
killed
someone?” A hysterical giggle escaped. “You’re willing to give a murderess an autopsy knife?”

He swung the lamp wildly, slashing light across the drive path. “What am I supposed to think? A handsome, educated young woman like you—living in a tenement, versant with medical terminology—refusing to talk about your family? It doesn’t make one bit of sense!”

Abigail smothered her laughter. “I assure you my father is alive and well. And I’ve never been married.”

“Then what? What are you running from?” John steadied the lamp, his expression troubled, but for once, not particularly threatening.

Abigail bit her lip and stared at the strong, tanned throat rising like a Greek column from the open collar of his shirt. For reasons she couldn’t immediately put her finger on, she was reluctant to lie to him.

“Myself, I suppose,” she murmured. “I didn’t want to be that girl anymore. The one who did what they said, who watched bad things happen.” She met his stormy hazel eyes. “My mother escaped and I knew I could, too. It just took some planning.”

“And this is worth it?” He glanced around, slopping oily light onto the hospital’s mildewed walls. “You’re better off here?”

“As long as…” She folded her lips. “Yes. It’s better. Now let’s go inside. I want to know what you know.”

He stared at her a moment longer, sighed, then turned to rap on the door.

It opened to reveal Miss Charlemagne, bearing a small lamp like a gnome in a children’s picture book. She nodded as if she welcomed visitors into the morgue at midnight on a regular basis. “Come in, children. I’ve made tea if anyone cares for refreshment.”

Shoving away the discomfort of John’s questions, Abigail smiled at the woman as she stepped inside the shadowy anteroom. “Thank you, but we don’t have much time. We won’t keep you, if you have other duties.”

The older woman gave John an uncertain look, as if confirming his authority.

He sighed, visibly restraining impatience. “Dr. Laniere instructed me to make sure we finish well before dawn.”

“Then come with me. I’ve had Crutch move the body onto the table for you.” She turned, skirts swishing, and led the way through an open doorway to the left, through which Abigail could see lights burning.

As they entered the room, the odor of formaldehyde bombarded her senses, watering her eyes and stinging her nose.

“This is most extraordinary,” said the woman, turning up several lamps in wall sconces to illuminate a white-shrouded body lying on a slanted marble table. The sides of the table were raised, portals in the lower corners providing drainage into a couple of metal buckets. “I’ve never heard of an autopsy at night.”

“There’s a lot about this that isn’t normal.” Gesturing for Abigail to stand beside him, John inclined his head to Miss Charlemagne. “We’ll call you when we’re finished.”

Miss Charlemagne glanced at a bell pull suspended from the ceiling and stretching through an aperture in one wall. “Ring for me, then. I’ll be in the kitchen, preparing for morning meals.”

“She likes you,” Abigail observed as John reached into his pocket for a pair of kid gloves.

“It’s mutual.” He handed them to her and produced a second pair for himself. “Put those on.”

She slipped on the gloves, marveling at their tight fit. “Where did you get these?”

“Begged them from my sister’s maid. She’ll never miss them.” He took a deep breath. “Are you ready?”

Abigail nodded, mentally bracing herself. “Is it a man or a woman?”

“Female.” He stripped back the shroud, exposing dark hair and the gray, still face of a young woman.

Abigail swallowed. At least the eyes were closed. The cheeks were puffy, the mouth slack. She fought a feeling of invasion, as if she were the second-in-command of a conquering army. The upper torso came into view. “Stop,” she blurted. Blushing, she looked up at John, but found only sober and respectful interest in his expression as he continued to remove the shroud.

His eyes flicked to her face as he folded it and laid it on a nearby table. “There’s no embarrassment in death, Abigail,” he said with a certain amount of sympathy for her discomfort.

The embarrassment was that hundreds of women died daily in the tenements around the hospital, alone and unwanted by their families, abandoned to the indignities of the surgeon’s knife. She could learn from this one.

She braced herself as John opened his case of implements. Out of their velvet bed they came, one at a time, shining sharp steel. He explained their uses as he laid them on the table.

Skull chisel. Rib cutters, looking like a small pair of pruning shears. Scalpel. Suture needles that reminded her of her job in the sail loft. Toothed forceps. Bone saw.

Abigail watched and listened, wholly absorbed. She was going to make a difference. Armed with knowledge, she
would
make a difference.

“M
ortui vivos docent,”
Abigail murmured, staring down at the red-brown liver in her hands.

“The dead teach the living.” John nodded at the stainless steel scales. “Lay it down there. We’re going to weigh it first.”

Abigail glanced at him as she laid the spongy organ in the scale. “You
can
translate when you try.”

“I can do a lot of things when I try.”

“What does that mean?”

His gaze dropped to her mouth. “Nothing.”

She looked momentarily disconcerted, then shrugged and adjusted the balance weight. “Two and three-quarter pounds. That’s light.”

“Yes.” He studied her a moment, puzzled by her reaction. Had she really not understood the subtext of his comment? “You’ve read Morgangni’s pathology text?”

“Professor Laniere let me borrow it yesterday.”

John grunted. She’d probably read the whole thing in a couple of hours. “You don’t know how privileged you are, having access to that library.” He moved back to the table. “All right. Now put the liver on the table and we’ll dissect
it.” He handed her a scalpel. “Short incisions across each lobe, spaced one inch apart.”

She bit her lip as she obeyed. “Like this?”

“That’s it.” He watched her competent movements. “Stop. What do you see inside the cuts?”

“Lobules. Veins.” She bent to peer at the liver. “The color doesn’t look right.”

“How do you know?”

“The drawings from the textbook…” She hesitated. “The texture is brittle. It’s supposed to be dense.”

“That’s right.” He gently inserted his thumbs into a cut to spread it open. “Do you know what the liver does?”

“It’s a…filter of sorts. Aids in digestion. A toxin would do this kind of damage, wouldn’t it?” Abigail looked up at him, her green eyes intent.

He nodded. “This is similar to cirrhosis—diffuse fibrous content. Typical of patients from the District.”

“Alcohol abuse,” Abigail said sadly. “Or maybe opium.”

John lifted his shoulders. “This woman was a prostitute, a known opium eater.” He nodded at the clock on the wall. “We won’t be able to stay much longer. Quickly, show me the left hepatic duct, the inferior vena cava and the hepatic artery.”

As she did so, she explained the etymology of each word. John listened, absorbed, repeating back what she’d taught him. She was a good teacher, patient and thorough.

They finished with the liver, then removed and examined the reproductive organs. The uterus was scarred, indicative of multiple abortions. Abigail’s eyes went glassy when dissection revealed a tiny embryo imbedded in its lining, but she blinked and correctly named the parts as John touched them.

He returned all the dissected organs carefully to the body’s cavity. “Look in the case for my needle and sutures. We’ll sew her up and be out of here.”

Without speaking, Abigail complied with jerky movements.

John held the body together and watched her neat, evenly spaced stitches. “Very good.”

She looked up at him briefly. “I worked in a sail shop for six months.”

“So you’ve never…sold yourself in the District?” He couldn’t contain his curiosity about this odd, brilliant, self-contained young woman. In his wildest imaginings he wouldn’t have conjured a gently bred woman possessing the brass to enter a hospital morgue in the dead of night for the purpose of cutting open and examining a naked dead body.

Tugging on the final stitch, she fashioned a neat knot and clipped the thread. She backed away, her body taut, trembling, her eyes narrowed. “I’m going to tell you this one more time,” she said, voice low and fierce, “and if you ask me again, I will happily demonstrate my finesse with a scalpel. I haven’t to this point been forced to sell my body to survive, although I have lived among women who have. There’s a thriving trade in this city of which you may not be aware—it is a vile form of slavery and it is to these women I wish to minister.” She stepped closer to John then, fisting her gloved hands at her sides. “And
that
wish makes it possible for me to endure your insults to learn what you know.”

Odd she might be, John thought, and decidedly prickly, but she had a very fine pair of eyes and her refusal to buckle under his questions made him smile. He took her hand and gently pried her fingers apart, remov
ing the needle and returning it to its case. “All right, Abigail,” he said mildly. “Objection noted.” He reached up to pull the bell cord. “Crutch will be here shortly, to dispose of the body. We’d best wash our hands.” He gestured toward the basin and ewer sitting on a table across the room. “You first.”

“Thank you.” Abigail stalked around the table and lifted the ewer to splash water into the basin.

Watching her stiff back, John shook his head. “I truly meant no insult. I only wondered.”

She looked over her shoulder. “Is that an apology?”

He considered for a moment. “Yes, I think it was.”

“All right, then. You are forgiven. But the subject is closed.” She moved aside to allow him access to the ewer.

As he washed, he studied Abigail from the corner of his eye. She stood head bowed beside the shroud-covered figure on the table, almost as if she were praying. An intriguing woman, perhaps more attractive than any lady he knew. His mother would be horrified at his assessment.

He smiled.

Abigail trailed behind as John supervised Crutch in the removal of the body.

“Careful, Crutch,” said John, steadying the horse-drawn wagon waiting in an alley behind the hospital. “The poor woman led a hard enough life. Let’s don’t add to her embarrassments by dropping her into the sewer.”

Shooting him a glowering grimace, Crutch slid the awkward, tarp-wrapped bundle onto the wagon bed. “The charity catacombs was full up last time I showed up with a body. Don’t know what they’re gonna do with this ’un.” He raised the tailgate, secured it with a leather strap to the
wagon’s wooden side and wiped his hands on the seat of his filthy pants.

“That’s not your problem.” John slid a coin into the man’s waiting hand and turned to Miss Charlemagne, who was in the doorway, arms folded inside her cloak. “Thank you for your help. We’ll be back for rounds later. Come along, Abigail. I’ll walk you back to the professor’s.”

As she and John rounded the front corner of the hospital, Abigail looked up at him. “Rounds are every day?”

“Yes. And lectures in the afternoons.” He crossed the lawn toward the street, where carts were beginning to rattle toward the market, stirring the early morning quiet.

Abigail squinted at the rising sun, which radiated violet and gray streaks across the tops of the buildings. “You’ll have a long day, then. Thank you for bringing me with you tonight.”

He checked as a dray passed, then ducked across Common, heading for the dark green sward of the park. “Tell me how you came to learn a nearly dead language.” Shortening his long stride, he pulled her hand through the crook of his elbow.

Wondering if he was aware of the courteous gesture, she smiled at him. “My father taught me to read, translate and speak Greek and Latin. He was a schoolmaster as a young man, then became a minister.”

“But you’re—” He looked down at her, perhaps unwilling to state the obvious.

Abigail sighed. “Of course I’m a female. But that doesn’t mean my brain doesn’t work. I had little to otherwise occupy my time—until recently, that is. Not much time to study in the sail loft.”

John stared at her, still clearly perplexed.

She smiled. “I’m grateful my father had no sense of pro
priety regarding the education of females. And that I am an only child. Otherwise he might have concentrated his considerable talents as a teacher on my hypothetical brother.”

John chuckled. “I salute your unconventional sire.” He walked on in silence, then after a moment gave her a sheepish look. “I beg your pardon again for my bumbling and embarrassing questions. I asked out of pure curiosity and had no intention of insulting you. It’s just that—” He paused and she felt the sudden tension in his arm under her hand. “I’m sorry, but I’ve simply never encountered a woman who is both gently raised and entirely without qualms regarding the more grisly aspects of the medical profession. The scientific mind is not usually associated with femininity.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I’m beginning to think you’re right.” He smiled at her. “But if you met my sister you might understand my point of view.”

“Perhaps no one has yet made the effort to enlighten and educate her.”

“Undoubtedly true. But my mother would be horrified at the idea of teaching Lisette anything beyond the ability to snag a socially acceptable husband. In fact—” John’s lips tightened. “I had to fight for my own education beyond the basics. My father wishes for me to continue in the family business.” He drew Abigail to a stop and looked up at the imposing brick facade of the building to their left.

Abigail looked up. They had walked down this block earlier, of course, in the dark. The sign above the front door was painted in enormous block letters: “Crescent City Shipping—Offices—Warehouses located on Commerce at Joseph.” On either side of the sign was a large crescent
moon—a symbol that had haunted her dreams since she’d left China nearly a year ago.

She stared for a moment, incapable of speech. “Your father is—this is your family’s enterprise?”

Apparently he didn’t notice the strain in her voice. “Yes.” He started walking again. “I suppose, like you, I have rather mixed feelings about my father. His business acumen has enabled me to afford my medical college fees and books. But it has been a source of considerable contention between us that I refuse to follow him into the transportation industry.” His voice took on a bitter edge. “China this, China that. One would think that nothing of value happens on this side of the world. You should count yourself fortunate that your own father was more interested in the classical languages than the exotic ones.”

Abigail swallowed, suppressing the impulse to give John Braddock a shove and run as fast and hard as she could. “Indeed,” she murmured. “I am very fortunate.”

“Appleton, please tell my mother I’ve answered her summons.” Handing his hat over to the Braddock family butler, John looked around. He hadn’t been home in several weeks. Fleur, the housekeeper, had placed fresh chrysanthemums in the tall crystal vase on the mahogany side table; their spicy aroma filled the entryway.

“If you want me to put it in them terms, Mister Johnny, it ain’t gonna be a pleasant visit,” Appleton said cheerfully, dusting the hat off by whacking it against his thigh.

John shook his head, grinning a little. “I’ll trust you to interpret.” Although perhaps not the personification of the well-trained servant, Mick Appleton had served as first mate on John’s father’s maiden voyage thirty years ago.
Upon his retirement from the sea when John was only nine years old, Appleton had landed in a position of household authority second only to Eliza Braddock. For all intents and purposes part of the family, he was in the nature of a favorite uncle to John.

Whistling, Appleton limped up the stairs while John wandered into the Chinese parlor situated just off the entryway. It was overwhelmingly red and black, the ebony furniture upholstered in crimson velvet with thick brass studs; tapestries woven of exotic silken designs hung between and on either side of the two wide French windows, clashing with a complex striped wallpaper pattern. John closed his eyes. Lack of sleep had engendered the beginnings of a migraine and his mother’s hideous decor did nothing to help.

Still he couldn’t regret last night’s rendezvous in the morgue. Abigail Neal was easy to look at, if one overlooked the statuesque build and frequently sardonic expression. At least she didn’t make fun of his struggle with Latin as the other fellows did. And she was teachable and appreciative of a fellow’s talents.

He was standing at the window, smiling at the memory of Abigail’s inventive imagination when he heard a rustle of skirts in the doorway. He turned. “Mother—it’s good to see you.”

Never one to release her self-control, Eliza Dreher Braddock extended both hands and offered John a smooth cheek to kiss. “John, my dear. It’s been too long since we saw you.”

“Seventeen days, I believe you mentioned in your note.” He waited for her to seat herself upon a red slipper chair before he sprawled in the wing chair opposite. Her light
brown hair was dressed as usual in a complicated mass of loops and curls, and her high-necked pink gown complemented her still-slim figure and unlined fair skin. “You’re looking beautiful as usual. Where’s Lisette?”

With a pleased smile, his mother accepted his compliment as her due and relaxed against the arm of the chair. “She is driving around the Commons with Dorothée Molyneux. They enjoy one another’s company so, one would think they are already sisters.”

“In this nasty weather?” John ignored the blatant insinuation in the word “already.”

His mother gathered her shawl closer. “Yes, indeed, it is messy, but these young girls…Always after attracting the attention of the town beaus. Dorothée will be wed before the year is out, I am sure, and Lisette will be inconsolable to lose her best friend.”