ONE
The patient is not cooperating. The sutures keep coming out, because she absolutely refuses to take it easy, no matter how hard her nurse works to keep her confined to her bed. It doesn’t help that she’s so young. It also doesn’t help that she’s a cat. A Scottish wildcat to be specific.
A month ago, my boss had to amputate her right hind leg after an accident, and short of permanently sedating her, we can’t seem to keep her from ripping out the sutures. Now I’m holding her, along with her “nurse”—our parlormaid, Alice—and she’s already bitten Gray twice. The kitten, that is, not Alice, though the thirteen-year-old can’t keep from glowering at her employer each time her precious baby yowls.
The patient’s name is Freya, from Alice’s recent obsession with Norse mythology. I’d suggested Houdini, for the cat’s uncanny ability to escape from any bandages we put on her. Of course, no one else got the reference, probably because it’s 1870 and Houdini likely hasn’t been born yet.
My name is Mallory Mitchell. Or that’s my name in Victorian Edinburgh. I was born Mallory Atkinson, in Vancouver … in 1989. How I ended up in the body of a nineteen-year-old housemaid is a long story, but I’ve been here just over a year, in the household of Dr. Duncan Gray, physician turned undertaker and early forensic scientist. I’m no longer a housemaid, thankfully. I’m Gray’s assistant, which is a position much more befitting of a former police detective. Even if my current job is wrestling a very small and very pissed-off wildcat.
“Mallory…” Gray says through gritted teeth. “The patient needs to be restrained.”
“The patient is a five-pound fanged eel masquerading as a kitten. Are you sure you don’t want to sedate her?”
Gray only grunts. The problem is that Freya rips her stitches too often and anesthetic is still relatively new. Gray—rightfully—is concerned about overusing it on such a young patient, and I have to give him credit for that. As with so many “miracle” advancements, chloroform and ether are used a little too zealously in this world, right up to being given out at parties. Because nothing says “a good time” like passing out cold in your host’s living room.
“Can you hold her for a moment, Alice?” I say. “I have an idea.”
She restrains Freya, while cooing and petting her, and promising this will all be over soon. I grab a small strip of bandage. Then, after getting Gray to hold Freya’s head, I blindfold her. She instantly goes still.
I exhale. “Now, Alice, if you can keep her good back leg steady, I’ll look after the front end.”
With the mask on, Freya seems confused. Probably also freaked out, but not the hissing and biting kind of freaked out. I remember a friend who used a blindfold to brush her Persian cat, and the trick seems to work.
Gray swiftly restitches her tiny stump. Then he takes over holding Freya’s rear quarters as Alice bandages the area. Alice has plenty of experience doing that, and her small fingers fly.
When the front doorbell rings, we all glance in that direction. The grandfather clock recently struck nine in the evening, which means our housemaid, Jack, is gone. Gray’s sister Isla is out with McCreadie. Mrs. Wallace will have retired.
“Do you wish me to answer that, sir?” Alice asks Gray, her tone proper now that Freya is tended to, the evil kitten-hurting doctor replaced by her respect-deserving boss.
“I’ll get it,” I say. While it’ll still be light out, I don’t like the idea of Alice answering the door at night.
I leave Alice cuddling Freya and slipping her bits of fish from dinner. When I walk out of the laboratory, Gray is right behind me, because while I might not be willing to let Alice answer the door so late, he’s not willing to let me do it. Also, he’s curious, as always, but it would be unseemly for the man of the house to answer his own door, even if he runs his family business out of the building.
We live in a town house on Robert Street, in the New Town district of Edinburgh, which in this time means the area where people like Gray live. Educated professionals, yes, but also people with money. His father ran a successful undertaking business that put the family solidly in the upper end of the middle class.
After Irvine Gray’s death, the business should have gone to his eldest son. I’ve never even met Lachlan Gray—he’s off in … Asia? America? Who knows these days. Definitely not the stay-at-home type or the look-after-the-family-business type. The best person to run the company would have been Irvine’s oldest, Annis, who is a genius when it comes to business. But there was no way he’d bequeath it to a daughter. So when Lachlan refused, it went to his youngest—even though Gray is the illegitimate son Irvine brought home nearly thirty years ago.
Gray does not love undertaking. He does, however, love Isla and his stepmother, Frances, and so he took over the business to provide for them while he pursued his passion in forensics. His laboratory is here, on the ground floor, the rest of the level given over to the business of undertaking. So we don’t have far to go before reaching the front door.
I pull it open to see a middle-aged manservant on our steps.
“Good evening, miss,” the man says. His face is ruddy and he’s short of breath, sounding as if he ran instead the whole way, despite the coach parked right behind him. “Is Dr. Gray at home?”
“May I tell him who has come to call?” I ask, as if my damned boss isn’t right behind the door, listening and waiting to decide whether he wants to be at home or not.
“I come from Lady Adler,” he says. “She needs Dr. Gray, urgently.”
I hesitate. Gray is a trained doctor with degrees in both medicine and surgery. But he isn’t licensed to practice, so unless this Lady Adler is a very close friend, she’d never call him for that. I’ve never heard the name, which means she’s not a close friend.
Yet that isn’t the only reason she might know Gray well. When it comes to romantic entanglements, his tastes run to sophisticated widows, and while I haven’t known him to be “entangled” since I arrived, his former lovers do tend to find reasons to renew the acquaintance.
When I look at Gray, though, he seems genuinely puzzled. That should mean this “Lady Adler” isn’t a former lover, but he can be a wee bit oblivious in this regard, honestly confused as to why women might reach out after their affair has ended.
“I fear I have not been with Dr. Gray for long,” I say. “Will he know what this is in regards to?”
“Lady Adler is a longtime patron,” the man says, with some impatience. “If you take him the message, I am certain he will come.”
“Patron…”
“Of his business?” the man snaps. “As an undertaker? I do not know who you are, miss, but I would strongly suggest that if you wish to keep your position, you should not interfere with your employer’s occupation. Particularly when it comes to very influential patrons.”
“Of course. I am so sorry, sir. Dr. Gray has retired for the evening, and I was loath to wake him, but obviously I will do so immediately. Would you like to step inside? We have a waiting room.”
Gray’s look of alarm is very satisfying. Really, if the guy is just going to hide behind the door and make me run interference, he deserves a scare. Of course, the fellow refuses the invitation—he can’t leave the coach on the road—and I assure him I will fetch Dr. Gray immediately.
Then I shut the door and glare. “Please tell me you know who Lady Adler is.”
“Of course,” he says.
My glare deepens to a scowl. “Then why did you act as if you didn’t?”
“I am confused by the summons, not the name.”
“I presume someone has died.”
“Perhaps. But to show up at my door? At night? That is not done.”
He has a point. In this time period, undertakers have nothing to do with the bodies. His laboratory isn’t for embalming. When someone dies, the grieving relatives hire Gray to make all the necessary arrangements for the burial, the service, and so on.
“Does no one ever call you out in the middle of the night?” I ask. “When they’re in shock and all they can think to do is make the necessary arrangements?”
“It has happened, but it is exceptionally rare, and that is not like Lady Adler.”
He has a point. In my world, we might panic at having a dead body in the house and call the first person we can think of to help. If our family has an undertaker they’ve used before, it could be that person. But Victorians are much more accustomed to death.
Here, people die of disease and accident all the time, and you don’t shove the body out the door as quickly as you can. You keep it until the service, and people pay their respects in your home. To an unembalmed corpse. Well, no, not always. Because while bodies aren’t embalmed by undertakers, I actually found it mentioned in a book. A book of household hints with instructions so the women of the house could keep the body of their loved one fresh throughout the visitation period.
Say what you will about the Victorians, but while they may have a reputation for pretty manners, they were not squeamish. Well, not when it comes to death. Sex is a whole other matter, though from what I now understand, they’re only reticent about discussing it. They’re certainly doing it.
“This Lady Adler…” I say. “Could she be summoning you for … anything else?”
His expression is adorable bewilderment. Oh, I know I shouldn’t call it adorable. I doubt anyone else would. Gray doesn’t have that kind of face. It’s perpetually serious. Handsome, but in a severe way, cool and austere.
“Is she … a widow friend of yours?” I prod.
I say it as delicately as I can, but that doesn’t keep him from going red. Victorians.
“Lady Adler is at least sixty,” he sputters.
“Well, I know you don’t have a problem with older women. Is that too old?”
More sputtering. “She is married.”
“Ah, okay. Yes, you don’t do that.”
“I do not,” he says. “My relationship with Lady Adler is purely professional, and even then, I have only met her a handful of times. Her husband was friendly with my father. Isla knows her better, through their charitable work. Lady Adler is a renowned philanthropist.”
“Who is your … patron? What does that mean? That you’re her family undertaker? Like being the family lawyer? I know the death rate is high in this time, but it still doesn’t seem like a regular job.”
“Her father used our services and recommended them to others, and Lady Adler does the same. It’s the recommendations that make her a patron. Her support is immensely valuable, as her family is very well respected and connected.”
“Ah, so she’s responsible for a good chunk of your business—not directly, but by sending clients your way. And I presume those clients recommend you to others.”
“Yes.”
“Is it okay to convey your regrets, then? Tell the driver I cannot rouse you? Or you are not at home?”
Gray’s shoulders slump with a look that is as adorable as the bewilderment. He wants to refuse. He might not like undertaking, but he’s very good at it—the organizational parts, at least. He can make the arrangements efficiently and expediently at a reasonable cost, never cheating the client, which is a huge issue with Victorian undertakers. What he’s not so good at? Dealing with the mourners themselves.
Since I have experience with grieving relatives as a police detective, I’ve started handling that where I can, leaving him to support them in his way—taking all the arrangements off their shoulders. If Lady Adler is summoning him at this hour, though, she doesn’t want to arrange a funeral. She needs comfort.
“I could do it,” I say.
He shakes his head. “That would be an insult to someone of Lady Adler’s stature. I must go. But if you would come with me…”
I smile. “Of course.”
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