I want to stay—I want to keep fighting them. I want to be allowed to finish the points upon my list. I want to tell them how I stole medical treaties from the bookshop in Chester because the seller wouldn’t let me buy them, how I cut the pages out so carefully and reconstructed them into the binding of Eliza Haywood’s amatory fiction to hide what I was actually reading after my mother found a copy of Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals in my bedroom and thrown it in the fire without a word to me. How sometimes the only reason I feel like I belong to myself and not the world is because I understand the way blood moves through my body.
I also want to cry, or shout that I hope all their genitals sprout wings and fly away, or perhaps travel back in time to the start of the meeting and go about this whole thing differently. I want to shut up the small, nasty voice in my head whispering that maybe they’re right and maybe I am unsuited for this and maybe I am hysterical, because even though I don’t think I am, it’s hard to be raised in a world where you’re taught to always believe what men say without doubting yourself at every step.
Before Higgins can at last get a good grip on my arm, I push past him, not waiting for Monty or looking backward at the governors or the Great Hall. I’ve never wanted to be away from somewhere so badly in all my life.
Outside, the winter air is a welcome slap across my burning face. I plow through the hospital courtyard, past the line at the dispensary and the nurses emptying sludgy buckets into the gutter, until I’m through the gates and out on the street. The cold has pried the tears from my eyes, though it’s easier to blame them on the winter than humiliation. I stop on the pavement so suddenly that I force a sedan to redirect its course. A dog on the lead of a vagrant growls at me.
I pull my sleeves up over my hands and press them against my face, my nails digging hard into my forehead. A gust of wind carries a sprinkling of snow off the hospital wall and deposits it on the back of my neck. It feels greasy and clogged with soot, but I let it melt in a slow trickle down my spine, imagining each vertebra as it passes, counting bones with every breath.
Running footsteps slap the stones behind me. I drop my hands from my face as Monty comes barreling out of the gates, stopping short when he realizes I haven’t made it any farther than that. My cloak and muff, abandoned back in the Great Hall, are slung over his arm. He extends them to me, and when I don’t move to take them, he makes an awkward toss of the cloak around my shoulders. He starts to wedge the muff in between my elbows, rethinks it when he realizes how close this puts him to accidentally grabbing my breast, and instead lets his hands fall, the muff hanging limp at his side.
We look at each other. The city boils around us. I want to strike flint and set it aflame. Burn everything from the sky down and start the world over.
“Well,” Monty says at last, then again, “Well. That didn’t quite go as planned.”
“It went exactly as I planned,” I say, my voice a snap like a rib cracking.
“Really? That was your ideal scenario?”
“I said what I wanted to.” I snatch my muff from him and shove my hands into it. “Every point I made is irrefutable. Their exclusionary policies rest entirely on the fragility of their own masculinity, but it doesn’t matter because they’re men and I’m a woman so it’s not even going to be a fight and it was never going to be a fight. It was always going to be them walking all over me, and I was stupid to think it could ever be anything more than that, and don’t you dare try to hug me.”
His arms, which had been rising, freeze midair, and he lets them hover there, like he’s carrying something large and round and invisible. “I wasn’t going to.”
I swipe the back of my hand over my eyes, knocking my spectacles askew. I want so badly to be away from here, but I’ve got nowhere to run to. Not back to their flat, too small for me to have a good, private cry. Even the fact that it’s their flat reminds me how much more together my brother’s life is than mine. Not back to Edinburgh, into the arms of a man who smells like bread and aniseed and says he likes me for my spirit but wants it broken just enough that he can take me out in public. Not back to my parents’ house, where I grew up unacknowledged by anyone unless it was to voice some disapproval for the way I dressed and spoke and brought books with me to parties. For all my efforts, I haven’t even a bed of my own to throw myself upon and sob.
“Miss Montague,” someone says behind me, and I turn too quickly, for a tear rips itself loose from my eye and sets a course down my cheek.
One of the governors is standing behind me—the man with the ill-fitting wig who gave me an eyebrow wiggle at the mention of Dr. Platt. His cloak is thrown over his arm and he’s breathing fast, a bit of a wheeze to his lungs that sounds like a lingering winter cold.
I can feel that tear sitting against the corner of my mouth, and I’m not certain if wiping it away will make its presence more or less noticeable, so I leave it there. “Good day, sir.”
He scrubs his hands together, an uncertain gesture that seems to be both an attempt to generate warmth and also just something to do. “That was quite a scene,” he says, and my heart sinks.
“You don’t have to put it like that, mate,” Monty interrupts. He’s reaching out for me again, like he intends to put a protective and brotherly arm around my shoulders. I glare at him, and he turns it into brushing some invisible dust off my arm.
“My apologies.” The governor extends a hand to me. “Dr. William Cheselden.”
“Oh.” In spite of how sour I’m feeling toward all men in medicine, I go a bit light-headed at hearing the name. “I’ve read your paper on lithotomy.”
“Have you?” He looks surprised, as though my entire presentation in the Great Hall was a fabrication. “What did you think of it?”
“I think your method is undeniably better for removing bladder stones,” I reply, then add, “but I wonder why you wouldn’t devote more energy to the study of how to reduce their occurrence altogether rather than removing them once they’ve already caused pain.”
He stares at me, his mouth slightly open and his head canting to the side. I’m ready to turn and walk away, nursing the satisfaction that I was able to tell off at least one of the Saint Bart’s governors. But then he smiles. “You subscribe to Alexander Platt’s school of preventative medicine?”
“Emphatically,” I reply. “Though I’ve had very little chance to apply anything practically.”
“Of course.” He slaps his gloves against his palm, then says, “I wanted to offer my apologies for the ungentlemanly way you were treated just now. Some men seem to think that if a lady behaves in a way that they consider unbecoming of her sex, they are justified in speaking in a way that is unbecoming of theirs. So first, my apologies.”
I nod, not sure what more I can say other than “Thank you.”
“Second, I wish to offer you a few suggestions.”
“Suggestions?” I repeat.
“If your heart is set upon studying medicine, you might seek an apprenticeship with an herbalist or a midwife.”
“I’m not interested in either of those subjects.”
“But they are”—he drags out his thought with a hum through pursed lips, then finishes—“adjacent to medicine.”