Berry squeezed his hand. In her eyes there were fresh tears, but Matthew saw she had bowed before the inevitable. “I will only be happy when you step off a ship onto the New York dock, and I will look forward to that day,” she said, with a resigned sigh. Her face softened again, as much as possible upon digesting news that tasted as bad as had the antidote. “Well,” she said at last, “if I can’t talk you out of this … come back to my house and I’ll make tea.”

On his return to his own abode an hour or so later, with the thousands of stars shining above in the night and a more gentle but still cold breeze blowing in from the sea, Matthew saw lantern light through the windows of the hospital. The doctor was still at work in his new and solitary home. Matthew felt he’d never fully thanked Firebaugh for what he’d done, so he strode past his cottage and rapped upon the hospital’s door.

The doctor opened it. He was wearing his newly-acquired pair of spectacles. “Matthew!” he said. “Please come in!”

“I won’t take much of your time,” Matthew replied as he crossed the threshold. “I just wished to speak with you for a minute or two.”

“I was working. Good to take a rest, I think. Come back.” He motioned Matthew through an area where there were several beds—vacant at the moment, since Belyard had discharged a man who had suffered stomach cramps just this afternoon—and through another door into the laboratory itself. Past a writing table where sat a lantern, an inkwell and penstand and the red bound book itself was another larger table holding an array of glass tubes, many bottles of liquids, little blackened burners, two brass microscopes, glass vials containing various powders and what appeared to be botanical substances in a long rack, and a number of candleholders with tin reflectors and attached optical lenses. An assortment of various-sized and different-hued pottery jars stood on shelves around the room. Further back there was a large bellows attached to a fireplace that also held a variety of jugs and jars on hooks fixed to the bricks. A man-tall chest sported perhaps a dozen slim drawers with ivory pulls. At the back of the laboratory was a door that Matthew assumed connected to the greenhouse. It was quite the display, and Matthew knew there was much here that he probably couldn’t see.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” the doctor asked, as proudly as any father might speak it.

“She?”

“Oh yes.” Firebaugh put his thumbs into the lapels of his brown jacket in an attitude of pride. “She. As beautiful as any woman I’ve ever laid eyes upon.”

“You must be an inexpensive escort,” Matthew remarked.