Chapter 8: A Doctor's Confession
The whiskey in his glass was the same indifferent amber as every other night, but tonight it tasted of linen closets and lavender. Jack slumped on the wooden stool, the rough-hewn edge digging into his thigh, and stared at the liquid as if it held answers. The cellar’s usual symphony—the low murmur of deals, the tap-tap of coin counting, the clink of glass—was just noise.
“You’re wearing a hole in the floor with those eyes, boy. And you’re wasting good Scotch.”
Beatrice Farrier leaned against the velvet-draped counter, a silhouette of generous curves and watchful stillness. The flickering gas lamps turned her henna-red hair to molten copper. She refilled his glass without asking.“She came to the hospital today,” Jack said, his voice flat. “With her grandfather.Lord Ashworth.”
Beatrice’s pouring hand didn’t waver. “A social call, then.How charming.”
“She cornered me. Pulled me into a linen closet.” He took a large swallow, the liquor burning a path down his throat.“She knows, Bee. Or she thinks she knows. She looks at me and she doesn’t see a doctor or a thief.She sees… me. And she’s not running.”
“Of course she’s not running. She’s bored.” Beatrice took a slow sip from her own glass, her eyes sharp over the rim.“You’re a novel diversion. A ruffian with clean hands and a complicated past. It’s romantic, in a dreadfully naive sort of way.”
“It’s not like that.” He shook his head, frustrated.“She’s sharper than that. She stood there in the dark and I told her… I told her I’ve killed men. I tried to scare her. I nearly kissed her again to do it.”
“And?”
“And she said if I wanted to convince her I was a monster, I’d have to try harder.” He let out a brittle laugh.“She saw right through me. Just walked out.”
Beatrice set her glass down with a deliberate click. She moved around the counter and stood before him, her presence suddenly filling the space, vast and uncompromising.“Listen to me, Jack. That girl is a parlor fire. Warm, bright, and if you get too close, your whole world burns down.She is a peer’s daughter. You are a workhouse rat who mends cutpurses and lies to judges.You get tangled with her, you’ll hang. And I will be the one left to scrape your corpse off the gallows with a coal shovel.”
Her words were not angry, but cold and precise, each one a stone dropped into the pit of his stomach. He opened his mouth to argue, to say that Emily was different, that he could be different.
The trapdoor at the top of the stone steps crashed open.
The sound was a violent rip in the cellar’s fabric.All conversation ceased.A man stumbled down, his boots slipping on the worn steps. He clutched his shoulder, his fingers dark and slick. The coppery tang of fresh blood cut through the smells of whiskey and damp.
“Jack,” the man gasped, his face a mask of panicked pain.Instinct overthrew turmoil. Jack was on his feet, the stool clattering backward. The physician in him snapped into place, a cool, assessing calm descending over the heat of his thoughts.He crossed the room in three strides, catching the man as he sagged.
“Easy, Silas. Let me see.”
Beatrice was already moving, snatching the worn leather medical kit from beneath the counter.“Back room,” she ordered, her voice all business. “Now.”
They half-dragged, half-carried the wounded man through a low archway into a smaller, quieter chamber lit by a single shuttered lamp. Jack laid him on a scarred wooden table, the surface stained with old remedies and older blood.
“Pressure, Bee,” Jack said, his fingers already probing the sodden wool of Silas’s coat. Beatrice pressed a clean wad of linen hard against the wound, her expression grim. Jack cut the fabric away with a small knife from his pocket, revealing the angry, puckered hole just below the clavicle. A bullet, still in there.Blood pulsed in a slow, ominous well.Silas hissed through his teeth. “Bleeding Revenue man… cornered us at the wharf… got off a lucky shot…”
“Your luck is terrible,” Jack muttered, his mind already sorting through the steps: clean, probe, extract, stitch.He washed his hands in a basin of water Beatrice provided, the ritual focusing him. The world narrowed to the wound, the tools, the task. Emily’s face, the feel of her breath in the closet, the challenge in her blue eyes—it all receded to a distant murmur.
“This will hurt,” he warned, selecting a long, slender pair of forceps from the kit. He met Silas’s gaze. “Bite on this.” He handed him a leather strap.Beatrice held the lamp closer, her shadow dancing on the wall. Jack took a deep breath, the sterile scent of carbolic cutting through the cellar’s musk. He inserted the forceps, his touch deliberate and steady.Silas groaned around the strap, his body tensing. The metallic scrape of instrument against lead was a faint, grotesque sound. Jack’s brow furrowed in concentration, his world reduced to the feedback through his fingers.Then, a click.He gripped it. With a careful, firm pull, he extracted the misshapen lead ball and dropped it into a tin bowl with a dull clink.Beatrice let out a held breath. “Always the dramatic exit, isn’t it?”
Jack didn’t smile. He was already packing the wound with a carbolic-soaked gauze, his hands moving with practiced efficiency. As he began to stitch the flesh closed, neat, precise sutures that were a strange testament to his dual life, he felt Beatrice’s eyes on him.
“This,” she said quietly, gesturing to his bloody hands, to the pale man on the table, to the bullet in the bowl. “This is your reality, Jack.Blood and lead and secrets in a cellar. Not linen closets with earl’s granddaughters.”
He tied off the last suture and cut the thread.He knew she was right. The metallic scent of blood was thick in his nose, a stark counterpoint to the memory of lavender.Silas was breathing easier, his color returning. Jack cleaned his hands again, the water turning pink.He looked at Beatrice, her face etched in the lamplight.
“I know,” he said, his voice hollow.
But as he said it, he felt the ghost of Emily’s defiance, a spark that refused to be smothered by the damp, bloody truth of the room. It clung to him, stubborn as a stain, even as he wiped the blood from his fingers.