Vingh sighed. “He’s going to get himself killed, attending virulent cases. He’s too good with his blade to be wasting his life out here.” He paused, then inclined his head. “No offense, ma’am.”
“None taken,” she said, despite her bristling. “I’ve seen his skill firsthand.”
“Have you?” He sounded surprised.
“The second day I knew him, I assisted with an emergency surgery.” The scent of blood filled her nose as if she still wore her soiled gown. With it came the memory of their charged, quick touches, and the full-force bloom of her intoxication with him. A mess. It was all a mess, right from the first.
Vingh leaned in. “Really? What sort?”
“Ah—abdominal. A man came in with a malformation of the bowel.” She tripped over the words, though she remembered them issuing smoothly from Augustine’s lips.
“You’re trained, then? Where at? Almonth? Edonbridge?”
“No,” she said, smile tightening. “No, I was merely there. He needed another set of hands.”
Vingh regarded her curiously. Jane looked among the highly educated faces of surgeons and physicians crowding around her, and realized that she was not what they had expected to find.
“I see,” Vingh said, pulling her back. He offered her a patient smile. “Well, what I wouldn’t give to have seen that! Augustine is a wonder with a knife. Some concentrated practice, instead of this generalist nonsense, would quickly bring him to my level. Maybe higher.”
She could almost feel Renton’s blood under her nails again, and this man only cared about skill. “The patient died the next day.”
Vingh shrugged. “It happens,” he said, without embarrassment or empathy. “Abdominal surgery carries risks.”
“Yes, I suppose it does.” But his nonchalance sat ill with her. A man like him—she could see his dismissal. By comparison, Augustine seemed almost too good. Too generous of spirit. He had never quizzed her on her education. Should that have been its own clue?
“You said that was the second day you met?” Vingh asked, gaze fixed on her as if she were a curiosity, vivisected. Her skin crawled. “With no nursing training at all?”
“No. I’m actually an accountant. I keep Dr. Lawrence’s books.”
That got a laugh out of him. “An accountant! He did find an interesting wife. Did he hire you first, or…？”
“In a manner of speaking,” Jane said, then inwardly relaxed as Hunt brought over two glasses of brandy, one of which she pressed into Jane’s hand. Jane took a quick but determined sip.
“Are you boring Mrs. Lawrence out of her mind, Andrew?”
Vingh shrugged. “I was just getting around to making my case for Mrs. Lawrence to draw her husband back to Camhurst. If you had been a nurse, Mrs. Lawrence, I would have described to you the wonders of the Royal. They’re always in need of skilled nurses. I wonder if they’d be in want of an accountant.”
A self-taught accountant, she did not add. After all, grammar schools hardly trained tradeswomen.
Instead, she tried to picture Camhurst, tried to picture Augustine in a grand operating theater, sought after, with the easy arrogance of his classmates. If only he had been that man instead, a man without time for spirits, a man whose secrets might have been more prosaic. Though perhaps that man would not have wanted her.
“I can’t imagine him going so far afield,” Jane said, taking refuge in bitterness.
“A pity. We have missed him, these last two years.”
Two years. Two years ago, a patient had died in this house. Jane paused halfway to another swallow of brandy. It seemed the eyes of all gathered had turned on them in that moment, as if sensing the sudden quiet that had come over her thoughts.
“He’s been a hard man to track down since then,” Hunt confided, sitting on the arm of the nearest chair, crossing her legs and leaning one elbow on her knee. “He was under consideration for a lead surgical post, and then he was gone. Off to the southern counties, treating chronic injuries left over where the gassing was worst. It was all very sudden.”
Just the government posting. That was all. She was still jumping at shadows.
“I still can’t believe he accepted the job,” Vingh sighed. “Giving up his future … and for what? Of course, it was a hard thing, Elodie’s death.”
Jane went very still.
Elodie.
Vingh continued, heedless. “But surely he—”
“Did you know her?” Jane blurted, before they could devolve to sniping about achievements and the lack thereof.