Chapters (36)
“I think so.” Lyddie’s head pounded, but when she opened her eyes she could see nearly as well as she ever could in the dusty, lamp-lit room. She closed her eyes almost at once against the pain.
“How about your stomach? Do you feel sick?” Lyddie shook her head, then stopped. Any movement seemed to make the pain worse.
There was a sound of ripping cloth at Lyddie’s ear. She opened her eyes. “Your apron,” Lyddie said. “Don’t—” Aprons cost money.
Diana seemed not to hear, continuing to tear until her apron was in shreds. She bound the least bloodied pieces around Lyddie’s head and tied them in place with a narrower strip. “Do you think you could stand up?” she asked.
In answer, Lyddie started to get up. Diana and Delia helped her to her feet. “Just stand here for a minute,” Diana said. “Don’t try to move yet.”
The room spun. She reached out toward the beam of the loom to steady herself. Diana put her arm around Lyddie’s shoulders. “Lean on me,” she said. “I’ll take you home.”
“The bell ain’t rung,” Lyddie protested weakly.
“Oh Lyddie, Lyddie,” Diana said, “whatever shall we do with you?” She sighed and pulled Lyddie close. “Delia, help us down the stairs, please. I think I can get her the rest of the way by myself.”
Slowly, slowly they went, stopping every few feet to rest. “We don’t want to open that cut again,” Diana said. “Easy, easy.” Mrs. Bedlow helped Diana take Lyddie up the stairs to the second-floor infirmary, not her own room as she wished. But Lyddie’s head pounded too much for her to insist that they take her up still another flight of stairs.
“I’ll send Tim for Dr. Morris,” she heard Mrs. Bedlow saying. No, no, Lyddie wanted to say. Doctors cost money.
“No,” Diana was saying. “Not Dr. Morris. Dr. Craven. On Fletcher Street.”
She was asleep when the doctor arrived, but she opened her eyes when she heard the murmur of voices above her. “Lyddie,” Diana was saying softly, “Dr. Craven needs to look at the wound.”
They were there, the two of them standing above her, Diana’s familiar face flushed, smiling anxiously down at her, and the doctor’s … He was a handsome, bearded gentleman—young, his dark brown eyes studying her own, his long, thin hands already reaching to loosen Diana’s makeshift bandage. “Now let’s look at that cut of yours,” he said in a tone compounded of concern and assurance—the perfect doctor.
Lyddie gasped.
He drew his hands back. “Are you in pain?” he asked.
Lyddie shook her head. It was not pain that had startled her. It was the doctor himself. She had seen him before—with Diana—last summer on Merrimack Street.