Where Love Shines (15 page)

Josh! Josh was in danger?

“Of course, I’ll go with you, Edith.” Then she paused. Her family had not consented to her coming home unescorted, but as Arthur was out of town again, Hinson would send Betsy in Mr. Neville’s carriage for her tonight. “Just a minute.” She turned to Rev. Walker. “When my maid arrives, please tell her where we have gone. She may collect me there.”

As it was growing dark out, the minister insisted on securing a cab to take the women across the river to Lambeth. Fog swirled around the vehicle on the way and encircled the gas-lit lamps in a glowing golden ball, each one disappearing behind them as another appeared in front. Jennifer was glad for the cabby and Mrs. Watson, for certainly she had no idea where she was as they left the lighted streets and entered an alleyway behind a warehouse. Mrs. Watson descended from the cab and paid the driver. Jennifer followed with a basket of medicine over her arm.

The shoeblacks’ home was clean and orderly, if sparsely furnished. The entire top floor was a dormitory filled with rows of iron beds. But here where all beds should still be empty, their inhabitants out polishing the shoes of fine gentlemen entering their clubs or theaters, a third of the beds were filled with curled-up balls of misery.

Even before she turned to the boys, Jennifer strode to the far end of the fetid room. It required considerable tugging and shoving, but at last the shutters came unstuck, and she was able to open the window. Swirls of damp fog rolled in, smelling vaguely of the river but far fresher than the air in the room that had been breathed and rebreathed by twenty boys.

Mrs. Watson began administering doses from brown bottles. She paused to hand one to Jennifer. “Three grains calomel, eight grains rhubarb in a little honey. They will need the doses repeated three times at intervals of four or five hours.” She looked under the nearest bed and then nodded with satisfaction. “This will assist nature in throwing off the contents of the bowels, so make sure they’s a bucket under every bed. Just like we had in the Crimea, eh?”

Jennifer took the bottle and spoon, thinking,
Indeed.
Only in a way this was worse than the Crimea because the sufferers were children and because the official bunglers were closer at hand.

Mrs. Watson continued her lecture, as they had now been joined by the administrator of the home in whose hands they would leave the nursing. “In the morning they can be given my special tea.” Edith Watson pointed to another basket. “That there’s quince seeds, which are of a very mucilaginous nature. Pour boiling water over them and give each boy as much as he’ll drink.” She paused in the midst of administering spoonsful of her rhubarb mixture between fever-cracked lips to shake her head. “Whey would be better—nothing coats the stomach like whey. But in this weather it’d go off too fast, so we must do the best we can with what we have.”

Jennifer’s skirt brushed the scrubbed floor boards, and for a moment the sound recalled the hours she had spent battling this same disease in Scutari. Here also she had a special patient for whom to fight. Josh’s barley-white hair shone against the gray covers of the next bed. Jenny forced a spoonful of the mixture between his teeth, but he was almost too weak to swallow. She thought of the horrors this small creature had endured as a chimney sweep. Had he been rescued from that and given the hope of education and employment only to die of cholera? She hadn’t felt such outrage against the unfairness of the universe since her darkest days in the Barracks Hospital.

“Don’t you have any vinegar-water?” A voice penetrated her consciousness as if from a distance. “I remember how good that felt when I was in a similar state. Or maybe it was just the touch of your hands.”

“Dick!” Jenny turned so quickly at the sound of his voice that she almost spilled Mrs. Watson’s carefully brewed elixir.

“What are you doing here? How did you—” She thrust her half-empty medicine bottle at an assistant from the home and took Dick’s hand. “I can’t believe it. I was just thinking about you.”

“I was thinking about you, too, Jennifer. I went to your home to apologize for our last parting. Hinson was preparing to send Betsy to collect you. I came instead. I trust you won’t object to the substitution? Betsy’s better qualifications for ‘seeing’ you home will count for little in this fog.”

Unbelievably her throat tightened. What was the matter with her? She squeezed his hand. “I don’t mind.”

Mrs. Watson bustled by, wiping her hands on her white apron. “There now—that’s the first dose. Next one in four hours,” she instructed the administrator.

Dick raised his head like a horse to a scent. “I know that voice.”

Jenny introduced them, and the motherly Mrs. Watson hugged Richard thoroughly with delight.

“Well.” Richard caught his breath. “Are you ladies ready to leave?”

They were. As the carriage clattered over the uneven streets, Jenny stole glances at the man beside her. His prominent nose was silhouetted against the pale light of the carriage window. She turned a bit farther until she could see the shadowed shape of his high cheekbones, square chin, and firm mouth. Perhaps this was the first time she had really regarded him thus—not as a patient, not as a friend’s brother, not as a compassionate cause, but as a man of strong feeling and strong determination. Strong enough to survive the horrors of the battle of Balaclava and the Scutari hospital and fight his way back from the despair of blindness and loss to… She stopped. To what? She had been so anxious to thrust him forward without being sure of her own direction. Had he seen the pitfalls more clearly than she?

He had apologized at the shoeblacks’ home, and she hadn’t answered him. What would she say when they were alone in the carriage?

In a few minutes they left Edith Watson at the mission, Jenny promising to return in the morning to help her with the nursing.

Then the carriage door closed again, leaving them in their small, swaying, fog-wrapped cocoon.

“Richard.”

“Jennifer.”

They spoke at the same time and then turned to each other, laughing.

“Jenny.”

“Dick.”

They did it again. And laughed again.

“You first,” he said.

“I only wanted to say I’m sorry. You were right.” Her words sounded inadequate in the velvet darkness.

“Jenny.” His hand moved uncertainly on the seat. As of old habit, she took it in hers and felt him hold tightly. “Jenny, through all those months of horror, you were my only light. I heard Florence Nightingale referred to as the Lady of the Lamp, but you were
my
lamp, a small flame in all the darkness. Then I came home to continuing days of endless darkness, and I had no lamp—until you reinvaded my life.”

Jenny gave a small chuckle. “Only I wasn’t a lamp. I was more like a raging bonfire. I see that now.”

In the dim light she could just see his smile. “Where you wanted to charge ahead, I wanted to think. I had seen disaster enough from charging ahead without thinking.”

“Yes.” Jenny could think of nothing else to say.

“Jenny, ever since that first night in the hospital, I’ve longed to see you. May I?”

Slowly she took off her bonnet and leaned forward, directing his hands to her face. His touch was so light on her hair. He stroked it with just two fingers of each hand, following the natural swirls from her center part down to the curls over each ear and up again to the simple bun in the back. “It’s brown,” she said. “Darker than a walnut and lighter…” She sought for just the right metaphor. “Lighter than the garden soil after a rain.”

He moved on to the hairline that dipped to a little heart-shaped peak over her high forehead, then the heavy eyebrows arching over her wide-set eyes. “Eyebrows dark—almost black, eyes brown,” she narrated. His fingertips found the little hollows in her cheeks and then moved on to her wide mouth. He must have felt her tense because he pulled away.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that,” she said. “But I’ve always hated having such a large mouth.”

He shook his head. “You’re beautiful. Thank you.”

Wordlessly they pulled apart. The experience had been far more intimate than he had intended. It left him shaken. In the past weeks he had been coming to terms with the darkness. He had made up his mind that in time he would get used to the physical groping. He had to, and one could do whatever one had to do.

But the spiritual groping—the sense of groping for his life had been driving him crazy. Until the afternoon he had spent in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s company. Since then Kirkham had read countless white papers and the longer blue books to him. The visions brought to life by the earl were beginning to take shape as ideas and goals.

He did not need this new complication that Miss Jennifer Neville presented. If he were sighted and unscarred, he might determine to give the insufferable Mr. Arthur Nigel Merriott a run for his money. But as matters stood, the notion was ridiculous.

The carriage stopped before Number 7 Portland Place. The silence grew uncomfortable. Richard could not walk Jenny to the door without a word. He cleared his throat and spoke as if giving report to one of his aunt’s committee meetings. “I want you to know that partly at the urging of your Mr. Merriott, who has been calling regularly at Aunt Charlotte’s, I have undertaken to pursue the matter of reform at Greyston Pottery. It is not mine, of course, nor will it ever be, but I shall exert what small moral influence I have on my family. I have written to both George and Father urging them to look into the matter of schooling and work hours for the children we employ and the housing conditions of our workers.”

“Richard, that’s wonderful! Oh, I can’t wait to tell Arthur. He will be so pleased!”

He felt the reference to Arthur more deeply than he would admit. “I had hoped
you
would also be pleased.”

“Of course I am.”

“As soon as Mother is well enough to travel, we will be returning to Newcastle. She has already stayed in London far longer than she intended. Now that the cholera season is upon us, she is most anxious to be off. A new doctor is coming tomorrow. Perhaps he can do something for her.”

Since Jennifer had nothing more to say, he took her to the door in silence. Her voice had sounded genuinely delighted, so why did he feel deflated?

The next morning Richard was just finishing his platter of kedgeree and creamed kidneys on toast to the sound of rain beating against the window when Livvy flew into the room. “Oh, Dick, I’m longing to be back in Newcastle. I’m sick of being cooped up in London. Just think how golden the trees will be there, and we can go out into the country and ride for miles over the fields.” She stopped suddenly. “Oh, Dick, I’m sorry. I forgot. How dreadful for you. I—”

“No. Please don’t apologize.” He held up his hand. “I quite agree it will be excellent to be away from London. Has the new doctor come yet?”

“Dr. Pannier? He’s in with Mama now.” Livvy sighed. “I don’t suppose he can do anything the others haven’t, though. We must convince her to go home anyway. I’m sure the air there would do her more good than any new doctor.”

Dick pushed his plate back. “You may be right. I think I’ll just have a word with him and see what he thinks about her condition for traveling.”

Dick refused Kirkham’s offer to go with him. He knew his way around the house very well, as long as no one left a footstool or basket out of place.

When Richard entered his mother’s room, the doctor was just concluding his instructions to Violet, Caroline Greyston’s tall, thin maid. “…that’s dried dandelion root, your best ginger, and Columba root—all well bruised and boiled together in three pints of water—do you have that, my girl? A glassful every four hours. Do not be slack about it.” He turned back to Caroline on the couch. “That should do very well for the liver complaint. Now as to the palpitations, I shall speak to you very directly. Such conditions are most often caused by luxurious living, indolence, and tight-lacing. This you must conquer with the application of sturdy resolution.”

In the dim light of the invalid’s room, Dick could see the exaggerated gestures that so suited the doctor’s august bearing. Dick had an impression of soft, white skin and macassared hair beneath a high, balding forehead. But it was the voice that brought Dick to a full halt just inside his mother’s room. As the deep, gravelly tones droned on, giving self-important orders, Dick became more certain. This was the voice that had sounded familiar to him at Tattersall’s. And, he now knew, it was the voice of a doctor in the Barracks Hospital. So the speaker was a perfectly respectable professional man who also engaged in a respectable sport. Why should the voice irritate him so?

Dick stood in front of the door, requiring that the doctor stop mid-sweep in an otherwise imposing exit. “Ah, Doctor—” Dick paused pointedly.

“Pannier. William Pannier, surgeon.”

“Yes. I believe we met in Scutari. You were at the Barracks Hospital?”

Pannier cringed. “I was.” Then he looked severely at Richard.

Dick had the strongest sensation of wanting to pull back.

The doctor leaned closer, however, peering at Richard. Then he drew himself up. “Bread and water poultices on those scars, young man. Applied thickly twice a day.” And he continued his exit as if followed by a train of courtiers.

Dick crossed the room. “Mother, how are—”

“Whatever can you be thinking of, Caroline? I will not have that man in my house, much less attending my niece,” Lady Eccleson demanded as she entered the room.

“Why do you say that, Charlotte? I confess I was not much pleased with his advice, but that is not unusual.”

“I am surprised at you, Caroline, especially as Pannier is a Staffordshire man. I should think you would have heard of him in Newcastle.”

“Alas, there is never any news in Newcastle. One must come to London to hear of one’s hometown.”

“Humph. From my memory of Greyston Pitchers, there was little to do there but gossip. If it has changed materially since I left, I should be amazed.”

“Aunt Charlotte, if you know something of Dr. Pannier that would disqualify him from attending Mama, pray tell us.” Livvy, who had been standing by the door for several moments, crossed the room and kissed her mother. Then she tossed her blonde curls. “And whatever you know, tell us. It sounds like delicious scandal.”