“I do,” he replies. “Isn’t it grand?”
4
At eleven o’clock, Monty and I are shown into Saint Bartholomew’s Great Hall by a spotty adolescent clerk with too much powder cracking along his hairline. It’s a high-ceilinged, gold-leafed room with two levels of windows framed by dark wooden plaques, the names of donors painted in long, neat rows. Men. All of them men. A portrait of Saint Bartholomew hangs over a marble mantelpiece, his blue robe one of the only spots of color in the dark room.
It would be more impressive if we had not walked through the filthy hospital ward, where haggard nurses shook lice out of gray linens, buckets of waste were carried about by patients forced to work to earn their keep, and a man I assumed was a surgeon screamed at a woman about using the name of the Lord in vain, to get here. The hallways reeked of sickness, intertwined with the sharp, metallic tang from the meat market it adjoins. All this grandeur seems like appalling waste.
But I’m here. My heart hiccups. I am about to speak to a board of hospital governors. I’ve never made it this far before.
There are a few rows of chairs lined up before a tall wooden bench, behind which sit the governors. Them I do find impressive, though aside from their wigs and fine clothes, it’s likely to do with the fact that they are men in a large group, which always ignites a sort of primal fear in me. Flanked as they are by busts of the governors before them and loomed over by all those names along the walls, I feel generations of men who have kept women from their schools staring me down. Men like this never die—they’re chiseled in marble and erected in these halls.
Monty settles himself in one of the chairs and puts his feet up on the one in front of him. The clerk nearly faints. I consider chiding him, but I would rather my first impression with these men not be that of a stern governess correcting her overgrown man-child on his manners. While I, in tartan and wool and work boots, am in no place to be casting judgment upon anyone’s fashion, his trousers have more holes than I noticed on the walk here, one distressingly near a sensitive area. He could have gone to a bit more effort not to look waifish.
I lay my winter things over the chair beside him, fish my notations out from my pocket, and resist the urge to wear out all my anxiety on its corners as I take my place before the board, none of whom look at me. Rather, they’re speaking to one another, or going through the forms in front of them. One of them is discussing what he’s going to eat for his luncheon today. Another laughs at a joke from his fellow about their horse-racing bets.
I feel small enough without being made to wait for them to decide they’re ready to address me, so I speak first. “Good morning, gentlemen.”
Perhaps not the best strategy, but it gets their attention. That, and Monty hisses a hush from the back like we’re in school. I almost turn to glare at him—so much for the promise of not embarrassing me—but the men are starting to look my way. They’re all old, all of them fair skinned and robust. At the center of the table, the gentleman with the largest wig folds his hands and surveys me. “Miss Montague. Good morning.”
I take a breath and it sticks in my throat like cold porridge. “Good morning, gentlemen.” And then I realize I have already said that and nearly turn on my heel and dash from the room in panic.
You are Felicity Montague, I remind myself as I take another porridgy breath. You have sailed with pirates and robbed tombs and held a human heart in your hands and sewn your brother’s face back together after he got it shot off over said human heart. You have read De Humani Corporis Fabrica three times, twice in Latin, and you can name all the bones in the body, and you deserve to be here.
You deserve to be here. I glance down at where it’s written upon the top of my list. You deserve to be here. You deserve to exist. You deserve to take up space in this world of men. My heart begins to even itself out. I take a breath, and it doesn’t stick. I push up my spectacles and look at the board.
And then of course I say “Good morning” one more time.
One of the governors snorts—the same mutton-faced man who was boasting about the chops he was about to eat as soon as they’re finished here—and it sets off a flare inside me. I square my shoulders, raise my chin, and say with as much confidence as I can muster, “I have come today to petition the board on the matter of granting me permission to study medicine at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital.”
I glance down at my notes again, ready to launch into my first argument with only a small reminder of what that argument is, but the wigged chairman who seems to speak for the group interrupts. “I’m sorry. I must have the wrong appointment.” When I look up, he’s flipping through his papers. “I was told that this was to discuss a donation. Higgins!”
“No, sir, that’s right,” I say, nearly knocking Higgins the clerk out cold as I throw up an arm to halt his scurry forward from the back of the room. The chairman looks at me, and I amend, “I mean, it’s not right.”
“Are you Miss Felicity Montague?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you scheduled this appointment to discuss a financial donation you wished to be made from a late relative’s estate?”
“Yes, sir, but that was a pretense in order for the board to see me.”
“So there’s no money?” the chops man whispers to his neighbor.
The chairman folds his hands and leans forward over them, his eyes narrowing. “You felt the need to seek refuge in a pretense?”
“Only because I have made appeals to several different boards at several different hospitals and not been granted permission to make my plea.”
“And what plea would that be?”
I resist the urge to glance down at my paper, just for somewhere to look that isn’t into those hawk-black eyes of a man who has never been denied anything in his life. “I would ask the board’s permission to be granted a chance to study medicine at the hospital, with the intention of obtaining a post and license to practice.”
I had expected laughter from the board. Instead, they’re looking back and forth at one another, as though questioning whether the others are also seeing this terrier of a girl who dares to ask them for the moon, or if she’s simply a figment of their pre-luncheon hunger pangs.
“I can show her out, sir,” Higgins says, and I jump—somehow he’s snuck up to my shoulder without my noticing and is already reaching to take me by the arm.
“Not yet,” the chairman replies. My fist closes involuntarily around my notes, crushing them. That yet raises my hackles, as though my being thrown from this room is merely a matter of time. “Miss Montague,” he says, his tone the auditory equivalent of looking down his nose. Which he is also doing, as he’s seated higher than me. “Why do you think you have previously been denied a chance to petition a hospital board on this matter?”
It’s a snare of a question, one that I know I have to walk into or he’ll lead me in circles until I trip it, and I’d rather not be led anywhere. My chin rises—if I raise my head any higher, they’ll be staring up my nose—and I say, “Because I am a woman.”
“Precisely.” He looks down the bench and says, “So, that’s our recess, gentlemen. We’ll reconvene here at two.”