Mark tried hard not to grin, but it was still nearly a whole minute before he could put the blade to his face without fear ofdrawing blood.Don’t get your hopes up.Once he began, Ellen broke the silence.
“My parents are attempting to restrict my freedoms. I dislike it, and I want to move here.”
“I'm going to need more details than that.” Mark flicked his gaze in the mirror to meet her eyes.Interesting. She's looking at me when she thinks I won’t notice.Smug, male pride bloomed in his chest.
Ellen groaned. “If I give you details, will you say yes?”
Mark did what anyone would do in a situation where a beautiful woman demanded his help. He told her he had two conditions.
“What are they?” Ellen asked suspiciously.
“Just tell me the story.”
“Is that one of your conditions?”
“No.” Mark swiped a long stroke of cream away and flicked it in foamy water. “Talk.”
Ellen threw her head back and groaned again. When Mark refused to relent, she spoke. “For several years I have been working in the London community to support women preparing to give birth. It's important to me that women receive care while still pregnant, as it shall help outcomes of delivery for both the mother and child. The French call thisprenatal care, and it's a brand new thing over there. British hospitals haven't done much, yet. Besides the New Hospital for Women, but they tend to treat working women and have no more than fifteen beds, and Dr. Garrett-Anderson is blocked at every turn by male doctors who don't like her. And Chelsea Hospital for Women, I suppose, but those doctors are men and serve only thedistressed gentlewoman and deserving poor.”
She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. “I'm rambling. Anyway. I sometimes audit a few classes at the Nightingale Training School on their midwife track, and I've popped by a few surgeries and lectures at the London School of Medicine forWomen over the years. While there, I met my dearest friend, Amelia Hart.”
This was taking so many twists and turns Mark wasn't sure he could keep up. “You roll bandages and attend infant care lectures at medical schools and hospitals?”
Ellen smirked. “I do a bit more than that.”
Mark turned, leaning against the vanity edge, and stared at her. “Continue.”
“When Amelia was in medical school I would volunteer at the women's hospital she rounded at, and I met some absolutely brilliant female doctors. I saw prenatal care was practically nonexistent, mostly because there wasn’t time or energy enough for doctors to venture into the slums and treat working class women.”
“What I saw last week wasn't prenatal care,” Mark cut in, intrigued.
“No.” She sighed. “Amelia opened her own dispensary in St. Giles five years ago, and I help her. She does a little bit of everything, and I help with the babies. I don't usually help with labor, actually. She has plenty of patients who deliver babies without me. I go to deliveries when the baby is coming early.”
Mark was confused. He had seen, felt, her grief at the Chapel a week ago, and couldn't imagine why she would surround herself with other dying babies. “I see why you'd want to support those mothers during their grief,” he said hesitantly. “I imagine it would've made a world of a difference if you'd had someone who'd lost a baby sit with you during that time.”
Ellen's eyes sparkled, and she gestured excitedly. “But that's just it, Mark! They don't always die! At least, they don't always have to die, not with the proper support.”
Mark couldn’t believe this was the same girl he married, the girl who'd told him entering Society was her only life goal. “I don’t understand.”
“Have you ever seen chicks hatch?”
“Chicks?”
“Baby chickens,” she interrupted, smiling widely. “In the zoo, at least in the Paris zoo, they keep the eggs warm in these boxes called incubators, with hot water bottles and gas and hot coils. And these baby chicks, they need the extra warmth, you see, if the mother hen isn’t attentive, and—” She broke off, flushing. “You don’t want to hear all of this.”
“I do!” Mark stared at the passionate woman before him. “I want to hear,” he protested truthfully.
“Well.” Ellen tried to calm herself, even smoothing her skirts, but excitement crept back into her voice the longer she talked. “There’s a doctor in Paris, he was studying puerperal fever at the time, that’s childbed fever, it kills thousands of healthy women every year, by the way, and he stumbled across a zookeeper with these incubators and chicks, and he realized it might help premature babies stay alive also!”
“Does it?” Mark smiled at the idea, too. Her excitement was contagious.
“It does!” Ellen gestured triumphantly. “Dr. Tarnier introduced incubators in his maternity hospital back in ‘81, and it’s making a huge difference. He realized babies don’t just need constant temperature. The weak ones need extra warmth, and they need it damp and clean. The incubators keep in the warm air and keep out germs.”
“That’s unbelievable!” Mark was astounded. “How many are kept alive this way?”
“They don’t have many incubators, unfortunately, so that limits how many they can help. I correspond regularly with Madame Henry, the midwife-in-chief of the Maternity Hospital of Paris, and she hopes they shall soon raise funds to develop an entire ward to feeble and premature infants. Can youimagine?
“She says if you exclude the babies born before six months gestation and babies with severe malformations, they have practically doubled the chances of life for these babies! Some have failed to thrive due to poor feeding, others were born prematurely but still alive at birth, and they care for all of them!”