“Could I . . . ?”
He opens his eyes. I suddenly feel very small and meek, a child begging to crawl into bed with her mother when she’s woken at night by frightful dreams. But I don’t even have to ask. He tosses back the quilt and slides over to make room for me.
I kick my boots across the floor and strip off my coat, but leave my jumper on, then lie down beside him, pulling the quilt over us both. I roll over onto my back and let the silence settle over us like a fine layer of dust before I say, my face to the ceiling and not entirely certain Percy’s still awake, “I’ve missed you. Both of you.”
I can hear the soft smile in his voice when he replies, “I won’t tell Monty.”
3
The appointment at Saint Bart’s is confirmed for a week after I arrive in London—somehow the address in Moorfields didn’t tip them off to the fact that I haven’t any spare coinage to be tossing at their establishment. I have a half-hour slot, just before they recess for lunch, so they’ll all be hungry and irritable and disinclined to rule in my favor.
I sleep as well as a girl can hope to the night before a meeting that could change the course of her life. Which is to say, I do not sleep at all, but rather lie awake for hours, mentally reviewing the process of lancing boils, like they might quiz me on that one very specific thing I just happened to study, and trying not to let my thoughts spin into hypotheticals of where I would live if they did admit me, or how I’d pay the fifty pounds tuition, or what I would do if my tutors did not subscribe to an anatomist philosophy. When I do fall asleep, it’s into dreams of missing my meeting time, or my feet turning to stones as I race toward the assigned room, or the board asking me why I should be allowed to study medicine and I cannot come up with a single coherent reason.
Why are you here, Miss Montague? they ask, and I can’t reply because my throat is clamped shut and my head is empty. Why should you be admitted here when you’re just a girl, when you’re just a child, when this is all just a silly passing fancy?
The third time I wake from this particular dream, I get up. Monty isn’t home yet, and Percy is dead asleep beside me with his head all the way under the blanket, so I risk lighting a candle from the smoldering ashes of the stove. I retrieve my book of Platt’s treaties from my knapsack and rip out the final blank page. Then, with a pencil from Percy’s music stand, I sit cross-legged on the floor at the foot of the bed and begin to make a list.
Reasons I Should Be Allowed to Study Medicine at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital
First, women comprise half the population of this city and the country and have unique afflictions of their sex that male physicians are incapable of understanding or treating effectively.
Second, the perspective of a woman on the subject of medicine is an untapped resource in a field dedicated to progress.
Third, women have been practicing medicine for hundreds of years and have only been excluded in this country in recent history.
Fourth, I can read and write Latin, French, and some German, in addition to English. I am schooled in mathematics and have read widely on subjects related to medicine. My favorite writer is Dr. Alexander Platt, and if you were to present me now with pen and paper, I could draw you a map of the bronchial tree from memory. Also I recently mended a gentleman’s amputated finger with no prior schooling on the subject, and he is expected to recover entirely.
Fifth, I want nothing else in the world so much as to know things about the workings of the human body and to improve upon our knowledge and study of them.
I frown at the last one. It’s a bit overly sentimental and will do nothing to make a case for the stout heart of a woman. It is also not entirely true—I do not want to know things. I want to understand things. I want to answer every question ever posed me. I want to leave no room for anyone to doubt me. Every time I blink or breathe or twitch or stretch, every time I feel pain or awake or alive, I want to know why. I want to understand everything I can about myself in a world that often makes no sense, even if the only things to be known for certain are on a chemical level. I want there to be right answers, and I want to know them, and myself because I know them.
I don’t know who I am without this. That’s the truest thing I could say. Half my heart is this hunger. My being is constructed by an aching to know the answers to every mystery of the frail ligaments that connected us to life and death. That wanting feels a part of me. It has seeped into my skin like mercury injected into a vein to trace its shape through the body. One drop colored my whole being. It is the only way I can see myself.
This, I remind myself, is a fresh start. A new city. Another place to try again and prove that I deserve a spot in this world.
I write that at the top—not for the board, but a reminder to myself. You deserve to be here.
There’s a crash and a curse on the other side of the partition. I startle so fantastically that I accidentally poke the tip of the pencil all the way through the paper, skewering the final e in here. “Monty,” I hiss, peering out from behind the partition with my candle raised. I make out the shape of my brother, bent double massaging his kneecap, which, judging by the clatter, he slammed into the stove.
“This flat’s a bloody death trap,” he says, words fizzing through his clenched teeth. “What are you doing? It’s four in the morning.”
“I’m . . .” I look down at the paper mashed between my hands. “Thinking.”
“Can you think in bed with the light out so that I can sleep?”
“Yes, sorry.” I crease the paper and shove it into the pocket of my skirt hung upon the partition.
Monty watches me, one hand still rubbing his knee. “What were you writing?”
“Nothing of consequence.” The list suddenly feels silly and small, the sermon of an idealistic missionary who has yet to accept that no one cares about her gospel. “Just some notes for my appointment.”
“Are you nervous?”
“Of course not,” I reply. “Just wanted to be prepared.” I blow out the candle and return to bed before he can ask further. I can hear him rooting around the flat for several minutes longer, dressing for bed. He pauses on the other side of the screen, and I hear the crunch of unfolded paper. There’s a silence, then another rustle as it’s returned to its place.
I don’t get up, and he doesn’t say anything to me as he gropes his way to bed through the darkness and curls up on Percy’s other side. He’s snoring in minutes, but I lie awake for hours longer, counting the beats of my heart and repeating to myself over and over You deserve to be here.
When I wake again, the morning light flitting in through the cracks in the wall is the warm gold of a soft-boiled egg. At my side, Percy is curled up with his knees pulled to his chest and Monty’s head—still swathed in that ridiculous slab of a hat—resting on his chest. It’s the same way we sometimes slept on our Tour, the nights we all three shoved ourselves into lumpy beds in dodgy inns or laid out beneath the white poplars in farmer’s fields blushing with lavender.
I try to make my rising quiet, though the floorboards render that impossible. The whole flat seems to be conspiring against me, for I immediately run into the screen, and it nearly collapses. It’s a testament to how exhausted they both must be, for Monty continues to drool into Percy’s nightshirt, and Percy doesn’t stir.