Chapter One
London, October 1887
Ellen Glenfall held her breath as she splashed antiseptic over her hands, then washed them in the wooden bucket of water on the counter.
Dr. Amelia Hart laughed, her pink cheeks turning rosy. “You should see your face.”
“The smell burns my nostrils.” Ellen stepped away and dried her hands on a nearby towel.
Amelia smiled and shook her head, her long, deep brown curls bouncing in the Gibson girl bun atop her head. “Carbolic acid’s not that bad. You get used to it after a while.”
Ellen snorted. “Or perhaps you’ve singed off all the receptors in your nose and that’s why you can’t smell anymore.” She smoothed the loose hair coming free of her bun. “What is the time?”
Her friend, whose hands were still covered in streaks of blood, glanced down at the gold pocket watch pinned to her jacket. “No idea.” Amelia moved around the examining table and took her place at the bucket of water, soap, and antiseptic.
“It’s half four,” an elderly voice called from the front room.
Ellen started. “Goodness! I had no idea it was so late.”
“Time flies when you’re holding premature babies and checking lochia flow.” Amelia, true to her word, didn’t flinch as the stringent smell of the antiseptic wafted up from her slender, long-fingered hands.
Ellen wrinkled her nose. “Lochia.”
“Postpartum vaginal bleeding, for those of us who didn’t attend medical school.”
Ellen rolled her eyes at her friend’s tone. “Can you imagine me at medical school?”
“Why not?” Amelia dried her now-clean hands on the towel. “I did it. And Mrs. Daugherty might not be a medical doctor, but she was a brilliant midwife in her day.”
“What do you mean,in my day?” The elderly voice echoed, strong and indignant, from the front room.
Amelia and Ellen grinned at the interruption.
“Even if your husband won’t allow you to attend medical school, you could still become a Nightingale nurse or midwife. I could use one of those.”
Ellen looked around the ramshackle room, put together mostly through donations and her quarterly allowance. “You could use a nurse you don’t pay, you mean.”I’m not going to think about Mark.She hadn’t seen him in nearly eight years; it wasn’t that hard to banish him from her mind. And no, Mark hadn’t forbidden her from medical school. He’d have to return from the Navy to even notice her existence.
The exam room was small, filled with odds-and-ends furniture, and had a cracked photograph of Queen Victoria on the wall. “So you can lie back and think of England,” Amelia always joked to the women when it came time for internal exams.
Most of the room was taken up by the examining table, with one wall filled with the counter, a bucket of water, and a few shelves overflowing with medical texts and illustrations. Another corner of the room had Amelia’s roll top desk, papers always threatening to fall off or fly away, and in the last corner sat acabinet where Ellen kept all her notes, correspondence, and medical supplies.
The front room of the doctor’s office, run by Mrs. Daugherty, also doubled as the apothecary.
Amelia sighed, bringing Ellen back to the present. “I’ve almost turned a profit this year. Hopefully, next year I can pay the wages for a licensed nurse.” She’d said that for three years in a row.
“You need patients who can pay more than a sixpence for care,” Ellen said.
“Patients who can afford my care won’t take it from a lady doctor,” the tall, absurdly slender doctor returned. It was an old argument. “Besides, these people need it the most. You know it.”
Ellen did know it. Not half an hour earlier, she’d held and weighed a small, jaundiced baby from Seven Dials while Amelia had performed a postpartum exam on the exhausted mother.
“I don’t like how yellow that baby was, Amelia.” Ellen tried to put patients from her mind after they’d left the office, but it was hard. Especially with those premature babies.
Amelia shook her head. “I don’t like how heavy Lizzie’s bleeding was for being four weeks past delivery.”
Lizzie Peele and her infant son were Ellen’s last patients for the day. Ellen tried not to attend births, as it brought back far too many bad memories, but she’d been there for Lizzie’s most recent baby, little John. He’d been born a month early, one of Ellen’s specialties.
“I told her to set baby John out in the sun to help keep the jaundice away, but…” she trailed off. Amelia knew the problem without Ellen voicing it. The Peeles lived in the Seven Dials slums, off the St. Giles rookery where Amelia’s dispensary was. With its rabbit warren-like passages, and tall, tottering buildings, sunlight was hard to come by. And Lizzie was already back to working full-time, taking in laundry for a shilling here and there. She had very little time to make sure her newborn got the sunlight he needed.