8 September

What a miserable two days these have been, waiting and wringing our hands together for not only Mrs. Thomas to regain her health, but for Evie to come back with what we could only hope was a more competent doctor than Dorset could offer. As of now, Evie is returned to us, and her task fulfilled, but the changes over the Thomas household are severe and sufficient enough to require my telling of them in these rare moments of isolation.

The hour was late and very dark. Still coming in a relentless downpour, the rain refused to give in all through the day and night. Lily and Peter held each other and cried for hours in the arms of their mother, while Jack had the sense to control his emotions and help bring food to his mother and siblings. I will say, he did himself and his father a great honour in his conduct, and at such a tender age as nine. Still, he acted every bit a man as those my own age could not have hoped to be.

I myself flitted from staring outside of the windows in the shop at the front of the house to wringing my hands together in front of the fireplace. In one of his acts of chivalry that night, Jack solemnly offered me a chair, to which I graciously accepted. Once his heroic deed was done, he collected his little siblings, gently prised them from their mother, and put them to bed, not coming back down once they had ceased their crying enough to sleep. I would later find him slumped over at their bedside, lightly drooling over a book of fairy tales he had read them into a slumber with. It appears the will of the reader is far from immune from the power of a drowsy word in the rain. Mr. Thomas had collected his wife after the sleeping of his children and bundled her well into their room, leaving me all to myself for the next few hours. Any other circumstances would have made this a most perfect oppourtunity for writing, reminiscing (as I was wont to do when I actually wanted to write), or daydreaming and reflecting, but the current circumstance was quite unallowing for thinking about anything other than Evie.

Nestled into my seat, wrapped in my dress as best as I could be, I worried nearly as hard as I had ever worried in my life. My father being gone at sea for months at a time should have prepared me better, but an emotional heart never loses its ability to fret about every little thing!

I rose from my seat and paced around. It had been two days, and there was neither a stop to the rain, nor news from anyone further in town. A splash of lightning lit up the shop, sending shadowy echoes across the room into the pale hands of the firelight. There were a hundred ways one could get lost in the miserable weather. Teacups rattled from their hiding places in the cabinets. One wrong step could have anyone stranded with no hope for help. "Damn thee!" I hissed, stomping back to the fire. "Shut yourself off for a moment, wouldn't you?" Obstinate in prolonging my misery, my brain and its accompanying thoughts ignored me. Image after image of Evie, drenched and alone, or half-dead in the rocks, or washed up along the base of the cliffs where she had been washed away overnight, plagued me with no end.

Only tea could assuage my pain. I hovered by the kettle, holding my hands over the heat as best as I could without burning myself. Gradually, the smell of oranges and strange ingredients filled my nose, so much more soothing than the burn of coffee I was used to. A cup was filled with sugar, and then the now-gently whistling kettle was emptied into the pile of white granules. I took a sip, wondering when the comforting warmth would fill my soul and comfort me that my friend was still alive, and coming home to help her mother.

A very long few hours passed in this isolation. The fireplace went out before long, and the telling whoosh of the ashes covering whatever was left of the logs left me in an almost total darkness, save for the flickering of the elements.

It was unendingly uncomfortable. As appreciating as I am of my independence, excessive solitude bears heavily on my psyche. In times when I was holed up in our salt-scented house, where the factories and the rivers swirl together in one smoke-filled mess, at hours when everyone was either sleeping or gone off to work for the day, this very same sensation of being the only human left in all of the world possessed me. I, the sole inheritor of the steamships and the mechanical whirring of life in the city, was alone. Would I let the world fall into decay? There was no hope for me, one rather small person, with hardly any directional sense to her name, and even less by way of hands-on knowledge. Every attempt to teach me the ways of things hammered and nailed and welded together were total wastes of every party involved's time. Of course I would lead the world into ruin in such a state! How long would it be, before the factories rusted over as their only warden wept in the prison of her bedroom? My room was never a prison, but in those peculiar hours where one can never tell what has happened to the rest of the world, it felt the strongest prison in all the world.

That night had awoken the sparks of apocalyptic agony from the depths of my bosom. Pressed against the shop windows after another hour of this miserable waiting, half-convinced I was all that would ever be safe from the flooding that surely must have covered the very face of the Asias and the Africas and all the rest of the world, I felt strongly that if Evie did not burst in through those front doors that very moment, I would perish for the belief that God had begun and ended the end of times without reminding me to complete some crucial step to participate.

Perhaps my sense of the dramatic in a literary sort of way had given me some intuition into the mood or the timing, because not a second after I had sprung forth these thoughts into my head, the front door rattled fiercely and swung open, welcoming in not only a sodden Evelyn Thomas, but what had to have been buckets of water thrown inside by a rude and troublesome creature. Only after I had finished my cries of joy and the dampening of my own clothes in embracing her did I notice someone tall and cloaked in shadows behind her shoulders.

"Evie, I cannot tell you how very worried -Oh, you must be a right mess, soaked through -Let me settle the fire once more, and here, you must have something warm to drink!"

"Winnifred," she declared, in a voice no clearer than a rasp. I froze at once, caught between the kitchen and the dining room where the fireplace sat. What a darkened voice! To hear it worried me greatly, and I strove to ignore it.

"Well now, sit down! Here, have the rest of my tea while I make you some." Could it have been fear that I sensed, as I stammered my way through trivial pleasantries?

"Winn. Please."

I turned to face her, heart thumping like the pistons of a train racing through the heart of a city. Her eyes were dark and empty. I did not recognise them - was the rain's cold responsible? Had she heard some dire diagnosis for her mother's condition? Worse still, had there been no doctor available? My fears were all worthless, and remarkably off base.

"This is Dr. Radcliffe." I blinked before noticing the shadow had arms and legs and a hat, which it pulled from a head of trim, proper hair.

"Oh!"

"I am pleased to make your acquaintance," the figure said, stepping forward into the middling light to reveal a well-over six-foot tall man with very hard black eyes and a smile that made my stomach do strange, sickening flips. These were hardly the motions my body inexplicably went through when watching Evie through the window of my own kitchens as she toiled over my garden, but rather, the swirlings of some unknown anxiety whose origin I could not place. I despised it intensely, but inclined my head and looked up at the hard-sought doctor who would, with any luck, cure the miserable ailings of Mrs. Thomas, uncomfortable presence or not.

"And I yours, Doctor."

This doctor looked around the kitchens and peered through into the silhouetted shop. With an oddly strained smile, lips closed over his awkward teeth, he appeared to be taking in the rather run-down shape of the Thomas home which was, while not the richest nor the biggest house, and suffered from the lack of any sort of maid or governess, was still a welcoming and healthy destination, especially for anyone coming in from the violence of the weather outdoors. Walking past me, his arm brushing my shoulder as he drifted by, he turned about the dining room, hands clasped behind his back. Gloves like thick leather covered them, but I felt strongly and distinctly that each finger was soaked to the knuckle in blood and bile, producing such an exaggerated shudder that Evie saw with utmost sympathy. While not outwardly as disgusted as I, now that the doctor's back was turned, she scowled so fiercely that I knew the moment we were behind the privacy of her bedroom doors, she was going to divulge what troubled her so. 

"Where may I leave my things? I will require a sufficient amount of room to conduct my analysis of the Lady's condition, and the body is a notoriously messy creature when overrun with illness."

This question did not bode well with Evie, who blanched at the latter half of this request before sternly leading the doctor along the hall out of the dining room and into the guest's quarters of the house (which I had avoided only by the distinct lack of warmth the entire area possessed at the time I stayed overnight). 

As she led him out of sight, I watched with a sigh and a general stooping of the shoulders. How unfortunate, that this sought-after man should be more concerned with his state of living than immediately investigating the health of the woman he'd been summoned for. Perhaps it was the more sensible thing, to ensure his workspace was guaranteed, but I still felt quite poorly towards this Dr. Radcliffe for this most strange of first impressions, and was ready myself to at last retire as the rest of the family had done. Drinking the last of my now-cold tea, I collected my various writing tools, sadly untouched for the night, blew out the final wisps of smoke that trailed from the fireplace, and made my way into Evie's room, far too nervous to settle down and sleep as I had originally intended. After nearly half of an hour of waiting and pacing and chewing my thumbs in impatience, Evie at last staggered into the room, wherein she collapsed in a sopping pile of her own dampness. 

"Where in the name of the Queen did you find such a man?" I asked once she had peeled her clothes away and motioned for me to pull her nightclothes from the dresser. She laughed at my expression and clawed at her hair, undoing the braided bun and letting the black coils tumble freely over her face and partially hiding her pale eyes from sight. 

"He was recommended by the doctor a few roads down."

"And why," I demanded, as I stood over Evie and held her clothes out to her," was he not a sufficient solution to your mother's aches?" 

"I cannot say, Winn," she replied softly, closing her eyes as she dressed. She remained quiet for the rest of the night, which while not unusual for her contemplative nature, still concerned me greatly. What had she and this leering doctor with such lifeless eyes discussed on their journey into town? I could not shake the sensation that be it by carriage, train, or on foot, they had indeed discussed something and the contents of that conversation weighed heavily on Evie. I would have posed the question to her, but as I looked up from my makeshift bed on the ground to ask, I found that she had slipped into a frowning slumber amidst the bundles of blankets and fluffed pillows. It was with a heavy heart that I put out the lights and tucked myself into my cocoon of fabric, feeling occasionally throughout the night the whisper of her hair on my cheeks.

It was a very long time before I found it in myself to fall asleep.

Winn