“Lingering over breakfast, are we?”
Karigan glanced at her plate as though the leftover crumbs of her meal proved her guilt.
“Miss Goodgrave! Have you lost your tongue?”
“Um, no.”
“Well, it is time to get moving.”
“Get moving?” Karigan asked, bewildered. “Get moving to where?”
“Why, to your bed chamber. Mender Samuels is due here any moment.”
“Mender Samuels?”
“Honestly. Doesn’t your uncle tell you anything?”
“No,” Karigan said, with feeling.
Mirriam actually chuckled, unexpectedly easing the strain between the two that had been present ever since Karigan had stood up to Mirriam about Cloudy the cat and other matters. “Well,” the housekeeper conceded, “the professor can be rather forgetful. Come, child.”
Karigan rose and, grabbing the bonewood, followed Mirriam out of the dining room. “What does Mender Samuels want with me? I’m not sick.”
Mirriam glanced at her in surprise. “No, I daresay you are not. In fact, I’d even say you are . . . robust. It is unseemly in a refined young woman of your status. I can only guess it comes of your being reared in the countryside.”
Karigan tried to digest the housekeeper’s skewed logic. Should she try to be more sickly in order to fit in? Would being “robust” somehow reveal her true identity? “Then why is Mender Samuels coming to see me?”
“Miss Goodgrave,” Mirriam said as they began to mount the stairs to the second floor, “you did not expect to be wearing that cast on your wrist to the end of your days, did you?”
TIME
Karigan gazed at Mender Samuels with trepidation and tightened her grip on the bonewood.
“Put that down, silly girl,” he admonished her as he polished what looked like the blade of a bone saw.
“You are not coming near me with that,” she informed him.
He paid her no heed and simply checked his blade gleaming in the sunlight that filtered through her window.
Mirriam heaved an exasperated sigh. “He isn’t going to saw your arm off, Miss Goodgrave, just the cast.”
Karigan raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“Put your stick down and come sit at the table so I may do my work,” the mender said.
She reluctantly set the bonewood aside, figuring it was just as well the mender did not know how lethal her “stick” could be. She sat at the little table as he directed and placed her forearm on top, pulling up her sleeve to reveal the cast.
The mender looked at it in dismay, wrinkling his nose. “Have you been dragging your arm through a pig sty, Miss Goodgrave?”
Mirriam loosed another great sigh. Karigan knew she had been Mirriam’s very trying responsibility, and perhaps she found some vindication in the mender’s recognition of her ward’s incorrigibility.
Karigan watched closely as the mender sawed through her cast, plaster dust collecting beneath her forearm on the table. When he removed the cast in sections, her relief that he hadn’t even nicked her skin, was replaced by repugnance at the odor that rose up reminding her of dead fish. She saw, for the first time in several weeks, the pale thin thing that had once been her forearm. A current of cool air rippled across flesh that hadn’t felt a breeze for a month or more, and she sighed then, to have it finally free and in the open.
And now she could satisfy her urge to scratch, which she did furiously, raising flakes of dead skin and plaster dust.
Mender Samuels slapped the back of her hand. “None of that,” he said. “I have a jar of cream to relieve the itch.”
He took her forearm into his hands, prodded it, and bent the wrist, while Mirriam at his side observed through her monocle. He then asked Karigan to bend it on her own, and rotate her hand, and wiggle her fingers. Her wrist felt dull and weak, but it worked. Mender Samuels grunted with satisfaction and turned to Mirriam.
“See that Miss Goodgrave does not do too much at first, that she uses it gently. It is still fragile. Gradually she may increase its use.”
“Yes, Master Samuels.”
Karigan held her tongue despite the fact that the mender did not address her directly.
“By the way, why is she using that cane?” he demanded. “I’ve heard no complaints of her leg injury worsening.”
Mirriam raised an eyebrow at Karigan. “Has your injury been bothering you, Miss Goodgrave?”
Karigan didn’t know what to say, fearing to be caught in a lie and not wanting the bonewood to be taken away from her.
“Let me see your leg,” the mender said.
Karigan’s heart sank, but she hitched up the hem of her dress and rolled down her stocking so he could see the well-healed injury.
“Hmm,” he said. “This looks good. I see no reason for the walking cane.”
To Karigan’s surprise, Mirriam came to her defense. “Her uncle gave it to her. I expect she’s attached to it.”
Karigan nodded eagerly. “It was a gift.”
The mender stopped his probing. “There is no medical purpose for it, but if her guardian approves?” He shrugged and told Mirriam he’d be back in a week to check on Miss Goodgrave’s wrist. Then he collected his satchel filled with tools and devices and departed, Mirriam escorting him out.
Karigan wasted no time in bathing her wrist and slathering it with the cream he had left behind, then she gazed at her forearm, acknowledging it would take some work and time to bring it back to its former condition. But she smiled and whirled across her floor in a little dance of pleasure at having it free of the unlamented cast that lay in pieces on her table.