“A promenade?” Iona said with a wicked glint in her eye.
“Very witty.”
“Will you be all right without a chaperone? Even with your mother gone, I worry—you know, appearances and all that.”
“Iona, I have been going to Edinburgh unchaperoned for weeks now.”
“Oh,” she said. “I forget when you’re dressed like George.”
“Now, the two of you be off before it gets any later. I’ll tell Cook to leave you dinner in case you stay late.”
Charles’s grin could have lit all the lamps in Hawthornden at once. The two of them rose and awkwardly maneuvered themselves out the door, each trying to politely defer to the other, until Charles bowed and Iona went ahead and then tripped on her laces. “Steady, now!” he said, gingerly touching her elbow.
Hazel finished tidying the mess she had made of her amateur laboratory in half an hour, collecting and smoothing the papers she hadn’t thrown from the balcony and pressing them between the covers of books to get the creases out. The emotions of her confrontation with Straine seemed so much smaller now, more distant, as if they had shrunk to a size where she could deposit them neatly into a hatbox and then forget about them at the back of a closet.
She heard humming coming from the kitchen, and smelled something from down in the kitchen. Cook was making fish pie, one of Hazel’s favorites, and no one ever seemed able to do it justice like Cook. Hazel rounded the corner into the kitchen to find Cook patting a heaping mound of mashed potatoes into a giant dish. A pot of cream sauce simmered gently on the fire.
Cook beamed when she saw Hazel. “Hand looks worlds and universes better,” she said proudly, holding up her palm where Hazel had sewn her cut closed. “Not a bit of bile—tell you the truth, I was a bit worried about that but didn’t want to bother you, with you so busy these days. Your illness and all that.” Cook’s smile revealed the gap between her teeth, and Hazel couldn’t help but smile back.
“No pus is just fine,” Hazel said. “Here, let me see.” The cut, which had been furious, was now just a thin line of pink, embroidered with Hazel’s needlework. “I think I can remove these sutures now.”
“I was very careful with them, not letting them strain or stretch.”
“That’s wonderful. It’s healed beautifully.” Hazel removed a pin from her hair and, holding Cook’s hand up against the light of the fire, slowly pulled at each stitch. Cook winced and averted her eyes, but Hazel’s fingers were nimble, and the work was done before Cook had a chance even to cry out. “There,” Hazel said. “I don’t even imagine it’ll leave a scar. A small one, if it does.”
“I’d hardly be a cook without scars on my hand, miss.”
“Well, I hope you’ll be content with one less. I did come down to tell you to save Charles and Iona plates. They might be out late this afternoon. I told them they could go down to the Princes Street Gardens together.”
Cook clapped her hands. “Oh, good for them, now!”
Susan, the kitchen maid, let a stack of dishes clatter into the sink. “’S about time!” she huffed. “I’ve been telling that boy to do something. He looks moony at her all day, it’s a wonder he’s able to get anything done.”
The warmth of the kitchen—of Cook, of the fire, the smell of fish pie—filled Hazel and pushed out all the bad feelings of the morning and previous day. Her hands had felt sure and adept with the needle and with the pin, removing the careful stitches. She had liked the feeling of competence, of seeing Cook’s injury, knowing how to address it, and then being able to do so. Maybe she had been foolish for thinking there was a path forward to work as a surgeon in the public sphere, but perhaps she had been equally foolish for pretending it was pointless not to learn all she could in the meantime. When she married Bernard, she would leave Hawthornden, and her makeshift laboratory and her father’s books. She would be going to Almont House with only her trousseau and her mind. With her mother and Percy in Bath and her father abroad, this might be the final time in her life she had the opportunity to attend lectures without being discovered. Maybe there was an answer.
“Would you mind keeping a plate warm for me as well?” Hazel asked. “I have an errand to run in Edinburgh, and I might be back late.”
15
THE SIGN WENT UP ON THE giant oaken front door of Le Grand Leon on a frosty November morning, nailed in by Mr. Arthur, who made sure the notice was straight before sighing and going back inside.