The Irish Healer (29 page)

“You should be.” Rachel gripped the locket’s chain, pressing the metal into her palm. “You have neglected her. Do you ever see her? In the weeks I have been here, she has never visited until now. When there was desperate need.”

“Amelia has not been neglected. Sophia loves the girl like a mother would and has taken very good care of her. Believe me.”

“But how could you . . .”
My storybook hero, the man whose embrace brought me peace and calm. The man I thought I loved
. “You were so tender with that apple girl when she was injured by the carriage, so sympathetic after Molly’s death. How does a man with that sort of compassion ignore his own child? Bear to be apart from her? Your very flesh and blood. My father would never, even in the worst of times, have sent a child of his away.”

“Then he was a better man than I am,” he replied, flatly, as if his words were truth that merely needed a signature and a seal to become law. “When my wife passed on, permitting Sophia to take Amelia seemed the best and most sensible course. Sophia’s husband was still alive then and they had no children of their own. Besides, sisters often step in to replace a lost mother. Even in Ireland, I’m sure.”

“In Ireland, only fathers who do not care or are good-for-nothing let those sisters raise their children away from their house.” He made his actions sound utterly logical; Rachel refused to be swayed.

“Then maybe I am good-for-nothing, because I wasn’t fit to be Amelia’s father. Not at that moment, maybe ever.” His fist clenched and unclenched. “Right before my father died, though, he made a request that Amelia be brought to Finchingfield House and raised there. Sophia will be living with us, to help me, so you should be happy to learn we’ll all be together and my daughter will no longer be neglected.”

Rachel dragged in a breath, which shuddered through her chest and failed to calm the whirling of her emotions. She had fallen in love with him, a man she had completely misjudged. How much of who he seemed to be was actually a lie?

“You claimed I understood you, and I confess I thought I did. A little.” She was proud that her voice shook only a trifle. “But I see I was wrong. You are so full of contradictions, you’re impossible to understand. You act as though you are happy to become a gentleman farmer, when anyone with eyes in their heads can see you have no more than a passing interest in it. You want me to believe you are finally going to play the role of good father, when it took the request of a dying man to force you to reunite with Amelia. And then only belatedly.”

His face had gone very pale, but Rachel pressed on. “Worst of all, you tried to get me to believe you cared for me, when I wonder that you know how to truly care for anyone.” Rachel’s fingernails dug into her skin. “I wanted to believe in you, but how can I after this?”

The locket swung as she thrust it toward him. He stared at it,
a blood vessel visibly throbbing in his temple. Rachel held her breath and waited for him to profess how much he did care and that she could still believe in him. Waited for him to prove he wasn’t a lie.

“Anything else, Miss Dunne?”

“No, Dr. Edmunds.” The locket slithered from Rachel’s grasp and fell unheeded to the desk. “There is nothing else.”

The locket and its chain lay coiled on James’s desk like a serpent ready to strike. He had stared at it for the past hour, not particularly eager to touch it and be stung by the rush of memories the piece of jewelry held.

With a groan, he finally stretched out his hand and lifted the locket. Springing the latch, James stared at the miniature of himself contained within. The painting came from happier days, right before he and Mariah had gotten engaged, when he had been more certain of himself, certain he was on the verge of a promising future. The sort of man who would never have denied his child and then hidden her existence like a blemish. The man he used to be, as Thaddeus had claimed ages ago. Before loss and failure had stripped him of his confidence.

James dropped the locket onto the desk and stood. The office blinds opened with a squeak of protest, their unused hinges stiff from lack of use. Beyond, the tangle of leggy green weeds he’d been expecting to see had been tamed. Joe’s handiwork. Had it been years or only days ago that he had instructed the lad to clear the garden? James peered through the slats, the sun slanting low over the top of the
house to light the shaggy-headed trees. The garden lacked its former glory, though vestiges hung on its bones like the fading loveliness of an aging beauty’s face. He was certain if he stared long enough he could summon the image of Mariah moving among the roses. She would not be there, if he succeeded, any more than heat shimmering off scorching pavement was truly water.

“
Do you love me, James?”

He had respected Mariah, cared for her, certainly. But love? In those early days, he had loved his practice far more than he had cared for anything or anyone else. Mariah had been pragmatic enough to turn her affection to tending her flowers. The relationship might have looked successful to their acquaintances, but at its core lay unfilled need and emptiness. She hadn’t been the answer to his heart’s needs, and he surely hadn’t been hers. In the end, he had failed Mariah just as surely as he had failed his father. As he continued to fail Amelia.

James pressed his hands against the slats, shutting the blinds against the scene beyond the window, rested his forehead against the wood. The three years since Mariah’s passing had only brought him one revelation—that the emptiness still marked his soul, like the imprint of a footstep in the sand.

And he was still waiting for something, or someone, to wash it away.

Rachel stared up at the School for Needy Boys and Girls. The building looked abandoned, the windows closed and
shuttered, an air of neglect clinging to its bricks. Not even a wisp of smoke billowed from the chimneys. Had the school been shut down because of the fear of the cholera?

Rachel hugged her arms to her waist to keep from shivering with panic.
Good luck comes in tricklets; ill luck comes in rolling torrents
.

“Oh, Papa, I could do without thinking of one of your sayings every time life hands me another misery,” she whispered. Although this misery could turn out far worse than discovering Dr. Edmunds was not the man she had wanted him to be.

Rachel squared her shoulders, marched up the steps, and pulled the bell. Many moments passed, long enough to draw the attention of a passing shop boy.

“Got the cholera there, miss. Don’ think anyone’s gonna answer,” he called out to her.

“Thank you, but I might wait a few minutes longer to discover whether or not that is true.”

“Suit yerself.”

Once he’d gone on, Rachel dragged the bell pull more insistently and, with relief, heard noise beyond the door. It opened a crack and the sharp odor of quick lime wafted through, so strong it smelled as though they had doused the building in it. An attempt to conquer the dirt that caused diseases like the cholera.

A young woman with a pox-scarred face peered around the door. She was not the unnamed girl with the hole in her shoe who had answered the bell the last time Rachel had visited. “What do you want?” she asked.

“Where is the girl who usually answers the door?”

“She’s not here.”

The young woman started to shut the door. Rachel shoved her boot between it and the frame to stop her. “Is she ill? Does she have the cholera?”

“I dunno. She’s been told to stay away like the rest of the students. Why do you care? What do you want?” she repeated, squinting suspiciously at Rachel.

“I need to speak with Mrs. Chapman. I interviewed for a position as a teacher and we had another appointment scheduled. I must talk to her today about the situation.”

“Ain’t no one here going to talk to you about nothing today, miss. The headmistress is gone with the others. Leaving just me and Megs to clean this filthy place.” She kicked at Rachel’s foot. “Now let me shut the door. No one better spy me talkin’ to you. People been comin’ and threatenin’ to burn us out, saying we’re harborin’ the cholera and infecting the neighborhood. If they figure out I’m here, they’ll drag me away to hospital and I know I’ll get sick and die there. So just go away.”

“Can you at least provide me with Mrs. Chapman’s address so I may contact her?”

“She lives with her brother on Clifford Street, but you won’t find her there. She’s skipped town. Lucky her.”

“Here. Wait.” Rachel poked through her reticule and found the piece of paper Claire had included in her last note. It contained the address of a lodging house Claire had recommended to Rachel, and where she would very soon be living. “Tell Mrs. Chapman, when she returns, that she may contact me at this address. I shall be staying at the lodging house beginning day after tomorrow Tell her I am still very interested in the position and will not fail her. I must have this work. I need the money.”

The other woman looked unimpressed. “You and a thousand others,” she said, though she took the paper and stuffed it into an apron pocket. “Now, go away!”

Rachel removed her foot and the woman slammed the door in her face.

The sound of hopeless finality.

“Oh, it’s terrible,” sniffled Mrs. Mainprice into her handkerchief. “Such a pitiful gathering. Poor Molly.”

“It is far better than she might have expected, given her situation,” said Rachel.

“Rightly so, miss. A place in a nice graveyard with a tiny headstone and all. But so far away from Hampshire and her family . . .”

Rachel scanned the assembly, the sun—shining so brightly in defiance of the sorrow—dappling their faces, shifting blocks of light across their shoulders and bowed heads, white against dark. Only a small crowd gathered around Molly’s gravesite, the number a testament to the narrowness of her world. Joe, subdued and grim, shifted on the balls of his feet, his cap crushed in his fingers. Mrs. Mainprice gripped her Bible close to her chest and held out a clean handkerchief for Rachel to use. Molly’s friend, a tattered cipher in a borrowed once-black frock, huddled near the wrought-iron fence, staying clear of the household staff. The sexton and his boy, standing not too far from her, leaned on their shovels while they waited for the brief ritual to end. Peg had remained in Finchingfield, and Mrs. Woodbridge had stayed at the house with Amelia.
Though Rachel suspected the woman would not attend a servant’s funeral even if she had no good reason to be absent.

Rachel’s eyes settled on Dr. Edmunds. He stood apart from the rest, the planes of his face set into immovable angles, attention fixed on a spot above the minister’s head, somewhere in a direction beyond the churchyard, out into the streets of London. His wife might be buried in this yard somewhere. Perhaps that was why he stopped his gaze from slipping too low.

“Miss Dunne.” Mrs. Mainprice nudged, her crying under control. “Do you need another handkerchief? I’ve a spare.”

“No. This one is still adequate,” Rachel answered, pressing it, crumpled and damp, to her eyes. Where were the tears coming from? She’d thought she had used them all up last night, soaking her pillowcase with a torrent of salty self-pity.

Dr. Edmunds’s eyes shifted at the sound of Rachel’s voice, but they didn’t meet hers. It was just as well he didn’t look at her, when he was the greatest part of why she had wasted all those tears.