Una watched them go, hoping Edwin would look back. He did not. A strange, panicky feeling grew inside her. Like she’d swallowed a live eel, and it was still thrashing around in her belly.
Clearly Edwin had mistaken her chance encounter with Conor as an illicit rendezvous. Normally Una didn’t care two figs what other people thought of her behavior. But, in spite of herself, she cared deeply what Edwin thought. Yes, she’d rebuffed his courtship. And, yes, she trusted he wouldn’t report her to Superintendent Perkins. But even so, she didn’t want him to think anything was going on with her and Conor. Didn’t want him to think this was one of the secrets she’d alluded to last night.
The wisest course of action was to forget about Edwin and get back to the nurses’ home. With any luck, she’d arrive right as the morning’s demonstration was ending and could slip in alongside the other trainees on their way to the hospital. No one, save Dru, would know she’d been absent. But instead of heading toward the gate, she wended her way across the lawn toward the ambulance bay.
She flattened herself against the wall alongside the entrance and listened. Conor’s voice sounded above the snorts and whinnies echoing from the horse stalls, his brogue all but absent. Edwin replied with uncharacteristic curtness. Their conversation was all business—which supplies were aboard, where they were stored, how the surgeon on-call was notified when a message came over the receiver.
Una waited until their discussion ended and Conor’s heavy footfalls drifted toward the stalls before creeping inside. The long line of black ambulances stood at the ready, the first already hitched to a horse. The animal’s eyes were half-closed, and one of its hind legs lifted as if dozing. Its tail swished as Una approached, but otherwise it didn’t stir.
Edwin stood at the back of the wagon, examining the contents of the medical bag the ambulance surgeons carried. Una watched him a moment
from alongside the horse, uncertain what to say. The smart half of her knew she should turn around. She’d already said too much last night.
But the stubborn half of her won out. He had no right to sashay around the hospital grounds, barging in on people’s private conversations and perverting their intentions. The horse swished his tail again and lazily raised his eyelid as if to say, Well, get on with it. She glared in response—though, of course, the horse was right—and straightened her shoulders. A backward glance at the stables to be sure Conor was still occupied, and she pressed her feet onward.
Edwin looked up as she approached, then back down at the medical bag. “Something I can help you with, Nurse Kelly, or were you looking for Mr. McCasanova?”
“It’s Mr. McCready, and no, I was not. I came to see you.”
He continued to rifle through the bag, picking out objects and examining them as if he’d never seen gauze or tweezers before. “Well, here I am.”
“I just . . . before when . . . it wasn’t what it looked like. I’d fallen into a bush, and Mr. McCready was checking to see that I was all right.”
“And how does one just fall into a bush?”
Una hesitated. She couldn’t very well tell him she’d been snooping around the Insane Pavilion because the attendant not only had a penchant for strong spirits but maybe murder too. Edwin, seemingly reading her silence as guilt, snorted and shook his head.
“Edwin, I—” The gong above the telegraph receiver boomed, drowning out her voice. “I—” She tried to speak above it, but the sound filled the bay. The drowsing horse raised its head, ears perked and eyes fully open as Conor leaped onto the driver’s seat.
“Ready, Doc?” he hollered without looking back.
Edwin jammed the medical bag closed and climbed into the ambulance. The final gong sounded. Una tried to speak again, but he cut her off. “I have work to do, Nurse Kelly, and you should be on the ward.”
Una’s hands tingled as if her heart were pumping fire. She clambered into the wagon just as it started to move. “You don’t get to tell me what to do.”
“I’m a physician. You’re a nurse. Not even a nurse. A trainee. Damned if I don’t get to tell you what to do.”
The ambulance listed, knocking Edwin to his knees. After years of sneaking onto the streetcar, Una had better sense and had grabbed onto one of the overhead hand straps.
“Hold on!” Conor yelled from the driver’s seat. “We’re about to really get going once we clear the gate!”
Edwin scrambled onto the bench, looking a bit pale. He paid no mind to his lopsided hat and dusty trousers but clutched the seat like it was a life raft.
Wood paneling enclosed the front half of the ambulance, but the flaps covering the large rear windows were furled, giving Una a plain view of the passing hospital. If she leaped out now, she’d likely manage to land on her feet. But once the wagon picked up speed, exiting would be trickier. Of course, she could always wait for a soft pile of trash or manure, covering her head and rolling as she landed. Una was well practiced at this. When you filched a man’s pocketbook, you didn’t always have time to wait for the streetcar to stop. But Mrs. Buchanan would throw a conniption fit if Una returned to the home with her nursing uniform covered in horseshit and mud.
And her stubborn half wasn’t finished. She freed one hand from the strap and pointed at the hospital. “You can order me about in there. But out here, the only boss of me is me.” She glanced down at the hard dirt drive, gauging the wagon’s speed. It wouldn’t be a graceful landing, but she should manage to stay upright. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I also have work to do.”
She turned away from him and was about to jump when the ambulance rocked again, weaving between the stonemasons at work on the gatehouse. As it turned on to Twenty-Sixth Street, Una lost her grip on the hand strap. She stumbled sideways, reaching for hold of something, anything, to keep from tumbling out. The street flashed by in a blur. The top half of her was already out the window when something snagged on her skirt.
A hand. Edwin’s. He held her there, half in half out, until he could manage to loop an arm around her waist and pull her inside. They collapsed side by side on the bench.
“My God, Una, are you mad?” His hat sat further askew, and his necktie had come undone.
“I thought I had time to jump.” “Jump! From a moving wagon?”
Una hadn’t realized her hands were trembling until Edwin took them in his own. A dirty dress would have been the least of her problems had she fallen face-first at this speed. “I hadn’t expected such a sudden turn.”
Edwin shook his head, but to her relief, he was smiling. “You are mad.”
He started to pull his hands away, but Una held on. Her blood no longer felt as if it were on fire. Instead, a different type of heat stirred inside her. “Nothing is going on between Con—Mr. McCready and me. I promise. I was . . . I was sneaking around the Insane Pavilion. He startled me, and I really did fall into a bush.” She turned her head so he could see her opposite cheek. “See, I have a scratch to prove it.”
He freed one of his hands from hers and traced the scratch with the pad of his thumb just as Conor had done. Instead of pulling away, Una leaned into his touch.
The ambulance rolled over a pothole, and Edwin pulled away to clutch the seat again.
“You’re not afraid of carriage riding, are you?” Una asked.
“‘Afraid’ is far too strong a word,” he said, even as his knuckles blanched from so tight a grip on the bench. “I simply prefer being the one in control of the reins.”
“Mr. McCready has assured me he’s the best driver in the city.” “I’m sure he has.”
“Like it or not, Edwin, Mr. McCready and I are good acquaintances. We attend the same church service, and he’s been kind enough to walk me home a time or two. That’s all.”
“There’s something about the man . . . I don’t trust him.”
She brushed back a strand of hair that had fallen across his forehead and righted his hat. “You don’t have to. You only have to trust me.”
A pang of guilt followed her words. How could she ask him to trust her when everything she’d told him was a lie? But before she could take the words back, his lips were on hers. This kiss was deeper than their first, insistent and unabashed. Una gave up trying to resist him and matched his intensity. Everything else fell away—the sway of the wagon, the rattle of the medicine bottles in the box beneath their seat, the cool stir of air around them—and with it, her old life, everything she’d been and would one day have to return to. Not even the risk of being seen or the cry for air from her lungs could rend the moment.
When at last they pulled apart, Una’s lips were tingling and her heart sputtering.
“Promise me you won’t try jumping out of a moving wagon again,” he said.
Una smiled and kissed him, so she wouldn’t have to lie.
