Another knock echoed off the front door.
“Have you been busy all day, Doc?” Brogan asked.
“Yes, but not with patients. It’s been an odd day.”
“Well, offer my apologies to Gemma, but I’ll slip out the back door while you’re seeing to whoever’s at the front. It’s a fair jaunt back to Piccadilly.”
Barnabus walked from the library to the front door. He didn’t usually have so many visitors on the nights his surgery was closed.
A man stood on the front stoop, his hat in his hands, looking a bit upended. He was dressed nicely if not elegantly. He might have worked as a clerk or a merchant. Nothing was obviously the matter with him.
“May I help you?” Barnabus asked.
The man’s gaze narrowed, not ominously but in confusion. Something about his expression made him look familiar.
“I’m feeling a touch poorly,” he said. “Was hoping you could take a minute and let me know if it’s anything I ought to be worried about.”
Barnabus motioned him inside and directed him to the sitting room where he saw his patients. As the man passed him, Barnabus spotted a folded issue of theLondon Timestucked under his arm. That one clue pieced together the rest of the mystery. This was the man who’d watched him on the street earlier that day, the man who’d sat with a paper on his lap.
“I’m Dr. Barnabus Milligan,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“George Snelling.”
“Mr. Snelling, what is it that ails you?”
“I—There is . . . I . . .”
There was no mistaking he was trying to think of something. Most patients could tell him quickly, if in vague terms, what they were experiencing. Those who were afflicted with something potentially embarrassing would generally start by identifying it as such. This hesitation was neither of those things. And through it all the man kept watching him, studying him.
“My throat,” Mr. Snelling finally said. “I fear it might be the beginnings of a putrefaction.”
Barnabus decided to humor Mr. Snelling. The man had watched him very closely on the street only to show up, mere hours later, pretending to be ill. Barnabus knew full well that coincidences could happen, but he always took care to connect any dots that needed connecting.
He made a quick examination of the man and, as expected, found nothing wrong with him.
“I’d advise a bit of lukewarm tea before bed tonight,” he said, keeping his suspicions to himself. “Choose soft foods for a couple of days, and the irritation in your throat should ease. This shouldn’t become anything alarming.”
He waited to see if the man would push his act any further. He didn’t. He popped his hat on his head and slipped a few coins into Barnabus’s hand in payment for the examination, then left as oddly and quickly as he had arrived.
Barnabus had occasionally interacted with people who were awkward by nature. Mr. Snelling was not one such person. The man had come looking for him; Barnabus was certain of it. What he didn’t know was why. And he didn’t like that. Not at all.
Mind still spinning over the confusing and worrying visit, he wandered back into the library. Brogan had slipped out, as he’d said he would, and Gemma hadn’t come back from the kitchen.
The room was quiet, as was the house. It so often was.
And when Gemma decided to leave Finsbury, it would be quiet again. He’d been lonely these last three years, and for many years before that, but loneliness was not reason enough to tie her to a life with him when he knew perfectly well he wasn’t what she wanted.
“I’ve lived all my life in houses where I weren’t loved,” she’d said three years earlier, standing in the entryway with her carpetbag in her hand and determination in her eyes. “I’d hoped this house would be different, Baz.”
“You’re safe here, and you’re wanted. That’s an improvement.”
His logic hadn’t softened her expression. “I asked you this last night, and I’m terrified to ask it again, but I need to. Do you love me, Barnabus Milligan?”
They’d covered this ground quite extensively. “I care for you a great deal.”
She shook her head. “That ain’t what I’m asking.”
Frustration had bubbled. “We entered into this agreement without that expectation. To demand it of me now is unfair.”