Mad Miss Mimic by Sarah Henstra

Author:Sarah Henstra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PRH Canada Young Readers

FOURTEEN

As the days passed into weeks, thoughts of the bombings and of opium-trade politics and of poor Hattie’s fate kept whirling round my head. I found that I could not keep my mind on ladies’ lunches and card games. I would open a novel and see only the smoke and dust rising in the opera gallery. I would hear Bertie laugh and think for a moment that it was young Will chased by Tom across the yard. Even when I was with Mr. Thornfax—when we walked in the park, when we dined with Christa and Daniel, when we danced at a ball, when we visited Parliament and he introduced me to some of his new friends there—part of my mind was always preoccupied by fear of the Black Glove. At night I woke again and again with dreams of people falling to their deaths. To ease my nerves I would lie in my bed and imagine the tinkling of a music box, the delicate tapping of crystal birds.

One afternoon in late April, nearly three weeks after Lord Rosbury’s funeral, I screwed up my courage and crossed the plum court. My breath came shorter as I approached Daniel’s surgery, and I hesitated at the door. Partly it was the still-raw memory of poor Hattie lying on the tiles just inside. But I had other memories of doctors’ offices—no less harrowing for being older than the recollection of Hattie’s death. Sterile, comfortless rooms where I waited and tried not to look at the walls with their frightening diagrams of cross-sectioned larynxes, of incisions to the tongue, of metal bracers suspended across the roof of the mouth and soldered to the teeth. One of my most frequent and lasting nightmares stemmed from the memory of standing against such a wall in such an office—as though I were just another illustration!—as Mr. Brinsmead, Surgical and Mechanical Dentist, pressed a wooden utensil into the back of my throat whilst I wept and struggled to say the alphabet around its intrusion. On that occasion Mimic had had enough. Spitting out the instrument I’d shrieked and cursed and hurled at the poor man every vile word Mimic had absorbed a few weeks before when I saw a horse-thief arrested in Holybourne village.

Today I was planning to ask my brother-in-law about the exact nature of Tom Rampling’s misdeeds and why Mr. Thornfax might be taking such an interest in his skills. But it was not the doctor I saw when I stepped into the surgery. It was the girl from the Seven Dials alley, reclining on a pallet under a calico blanket.

“I’m s-sorry,” I stammered. Half expecting Mr. Sears and his stick, I turned to flee.

“Miss Somerville, stay!” she said. A naked arm was thrust at me, and she nearly tumbled from the bed.

I closed the door and stood with my back against it. “Daisy, isn’t it?”

“Yes, mum.”

“What are you d-doing here?”

“Resting, mum. Doctor’s orders.”

“Are you a”—patient stopped my tongue—“is Dr. D-Dewhurst t-treating you?”

Daisy sighed, nodded, and let her head loll back on the pillow as if to demonstrate how in need of treatment she was.

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