“I’m a doctor, not a grave digger.”
“You’re not much of a doctor, either.”
John flinched at this brutal truth. “Is there a…graveyard nearby?”
The girl shook her head. “We’re nearly underwater here. The charity burial grounds is on the north side of the city.”
Tess began to cry, clutching the child closer.
John didn’t know what to do with this slide into helplessness. Despite her derisive words, Abigail looked at him as if she expected him to do something heroic. Clearly he had a maudlin trollop, a corpse and an angry Amazon to deal with before he could go home and go to bed. And he’d been up since before dawn.
With a sigh he walked toward a rusty sink in the corner of the room and activated the pump. He stuck his head under the anemic stream of murky water, rubbed hard, and came up dripping. His coat was ruined, but that was the least of his worries at the moment. Slicking his hair back with both hands, he turned. “Abigail, wash the baby and wrap her in a blanket. We’ll take Tess to Dr. Laniere. Then I’ll send someone from the hospital to take care of the burial.”
Abigail nodded, a rather contemptuous jerk of her severely coifed brown head, but moved to obey.
John knelt beside his patient. “Where are your clean clothes?” He touched her shoulder again, aware of the awkwardness of the gesture.
Her anxious dark eyes followed Abigail’s ministrations to the child. She shook her head. “I don’t have any.”
John sat back on his heels and looked around. Other than the cookstove, a shaky three-legged table shoved next to the far wall and the two straw-filled cots, there wasn’t a stick of furniture in the room.
His sister, Lisette, had two armoires stuffed with more dresses than she could wear in a year. Her shoes lined a dressing room shelf that ran the entire length of her bedroom.
The abject poverty of these women filled him with guilt. Releasing a breath, he gathered Tess up in his arms, ignoring the blood on her skirt that soaked through his sleeve and the shabby shoes tied to her feet by bits of rope. He concentrated on rising without disturbing her sutures.
The girl let out a gasp of pain and clutched his neck.
“It’s all right, you’re all right,” he muttered.
“Be careful!” Abigail turned, clutching the blanket-wrapped bundle close. “Should I go look for help?”
The last of John’s patience fled. “Just open the door,” he said through his teeth.
Those light eyes narrowed. She gave John a mocking curtsy as he passed with Tess in his arms. “Your lordship.”
He was grateful to find the cart still tied in front of the building. Equipages had been known to disappear during calls in this part of the city, especially after dark. Thank God he had decided at the last minute to bring it. Riding would have been faster, but one never knew when a patient would have to be hauled to hospital.
Hitching her skirt nearly to mid-calf, Abigail climbed into the back of the cart with a lithe motion that gave John an unobstructed view of trim ankles and a pair of down-at-the-heels black-buttoned boots. She sank cross-legged onto the clean straw and opened her arms. “Here, lay her head in my lap.”
Swallowing a time-wasting retort, John complied. Later he would impress upon her who was in charge.
Abigail stroked Tess’s damp reddish hair off her forehead, a tender gesture at odds with her brisk, no-nonsense manner. She looked up at John, brows raised. “Let’s go.”
Scowling at her presumption, John climbed onto the narrow bench at the front of the cart and flapped the reins. With a snort the mule jerked into motion. As the cart bumped over the uneven bricks of Tchapitoulas Street, John could hear an occasional groan from his patient, accompanied by hisses of sympathy from Abigail.
“Can’t you be more careful?” she shouted over the clop of the mule’s hooves and the rattle of the cart.
He stopped, letting another wagon and several pedestrians pass, and stared at her over his shoulder. “Would you care to drive, Miss—?”
“Neal.” Darkness had nearly overtaken the waterfront, but John detected a hint of amusement in her tone. “My papa often asked my mother the same thing when I was a little girl.” All traces of levity vanished as she sighed. “Forgive me. I know we have to hurry.”
“Yes. We do.” Surprised by the apology and puzzled by an occasional odd, sing-song lilt in the girl’s cultured voice, John stared a moment longer, then turned and clicked his tongue at the mule. He would question Abigail later—after the baby was buried.
A grueling ten minutes later, the cart turned a corner onto St. Joseph Street, leaving behind the waterfront’s crowded rail depots, dilapidated shanties, cotton presses and towering warehouses. Inside the business district, two-and three-story brick buildings hovered on either side of the narrow street like overprotective mammies. Streams of green-slimed water, the result of a recent rain, rushed in the open gutters beside the undulating sidewalks. Businessmen intent on getting home after the day’s work hurried along, ignoring the stench of decayed vegetation, sewage and shellfish that permeated everything.
John frowned, unable to overlook the city squalor. He had tried to convince his father that a platform of sanitation reform would solidify his mayoral campaign. The senior Braddock preferred more socially palatable topics of debate. If all went well, John’s father would be elected in November.
If all did not go well, the pressure would be on John to quit medical school, go into the family shipping business and try for political office himself. Phillip Braddock often opined that power was a tool for good; he meant to grab as much as possible, even if it had to come through his son.
Because John had no intention of becoming anyone’s puppet, he was concentrating on getting his medical diploma and staying out of the old man’s way. As much as John admired him, his father had a great deal in common with the new steam-powered road rollers.
As he guided the cart onto Rue Baronne, he wondered what his father would have to say about these two passengers. Probably shake his leonine head and expound at length on the wages of sin.
He glanced over his shoulder again. Abigail had rested her elbow on the side of the cart and propped her head against her hand. She seemed, incredibly, to be asleep, with Tess dozing in her lap.
What set of circumstances had brought the two of them to such a pass? He saw women like them often, when he and his friends did rounds in the waterfront, but he’d never before had such a personal confrontation with a patient. Or a patient’s caregiver.
“You just passed the hospital,” Abigail said suddenly.
“I thought you were asleep.” Annoyed to have been caught daydreaming, John flipped the reins to make the mule pick up his pace. “We’re not stopping at the hospital. Dr. Laniere has a clinic and a few beds at his home. Tess will be better cared for there.”
“I see.” Abigail was quiet for the remainder of the trip.
The professor’s residence on Rue Gironde was a lovely three-story
