“Are you so tired?” she teased him. “That you can’t manage a half hour’s walk?”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “And if I weren’t here? You’d walk home on your own?”
Anna studied the street for a moment. There was a dead horse in the gutter at the corner of Franklin, the carcass at least a week old. A crowd of boys were busy wrenching out ribs to be used as swords. One of them already had his and used this advantage to poke a playmate in the belly. They fell into the gutter beside the horse, fists flying. Anna would guess them no more than eight.
She said, “I could lie to you.”
One brow went up, which was disagreement enough.
“In the early evening when it’s still light, Broadway is safe enough. I might have walked home alone.”
He took her bag from her and offered his free arm. “You’re lucky you still have your skin,” Jack said.
They walked along quietly for a moment. Anna kept one eye on the brawl, which was attracting little boys from every hidey-hole, all of them battering wildly at one another, crashing into the carcass of the horse and climbing out again.
“Do you want to volunteer to clean up their battle wounds?”
“No,” Anna said. “That would be a mistake. I learned that lesson soon after I qualified. Stay out of arguments.”
He wanted to know more, and Anna didn’t mind telling stories that showed her to disadvantage. At least, not with family and friends. And Jack, she reminded herself, was both.
“A girl of about seventeen, I think. She came into the New Amsterdam with some cracked ribs and a broken nose and two black eyes. I guessed it might have been her father or husband, and I was trying to think how to ask—”
Jack hummed under his breath.
“When her sister came rushing in, looking almost as bad. She had stripes on both cheeks.” Anna held up one hand, the fingers bent into a claw shape. “There was a clump of hair missing from her head above her left ear, too. Do you know the strength it takes to rip out hair like that?”
“I’ve never tried it,” Jack said dryly. “But I’ve seen it done.”
“She was screaming, and spraying blood from a split lip with every movement of her head. The sister on the examination table almost levitated. She just launched herself, or she tried to, but I put my hands on her shoulders to hold her down.”
Jack was listening, but she couldn’t read his expression.
“She might have put a rib through a lung, that’s what was going through my head,” she went on. “And I just acted on that basis. And I said to the sister who had come in, ‘Stop this nonsense, immediately.’ It didn’t have quite the impact I thought it would.”
“Yes?”
Anna shrugged. “They both started screaming at me. The one on the table for speaking to her sister rudely, and the other one for treating her sister roughly. If an orderly hadn’t come in I think they might have joined forces to teach me a lesson.”
She let out a small laugh. “And from that I learned not to put myself in the middle of a fight. I call for the orderlies instead.”
“Sensible,” Jack said. “Do you know what they were fighting about?”
“Money,” said Anna. “It’s almost always money, unless the patient comes in drunk. Then it can be about anything. The color of the sky, the name of the president, the month of the year.”
Broadway was crowded with street vendors and delivery wagons, newsboys and clerks on their way home for the day. An elderly woman with a back so crooked that it forced her to stare at the ground had turned her head sideways to barter for a measure of dried beans. Her voice was cheerful and she was grinning at the man who scowled down at her, because, Anna could see, she was about to get the best of him. It was the end of the day and he wouldn’t want to drag unsold wares home.
“Really, though, it’s always about money,” Anna repeated. “Even when it seems not to be.”
Jack’s eyes were scanning the street, as if he were expecting to be confronted and didn’t know from what direction it would come.
Anna said, “You deal with the worst of humankind, day in and day out. It makes you doubt everybody.”
“I don’t doubt you,” he said. “The first minute I saw you, I knew you for a good person.”
“Because I was treating orphaned children?”
“Because you stood up to that nun. Sister—”
“Ignatia. She made me angry.”
“That was obvious.”
“It was about the children who weren’t vaccinated. Vaccination is free at dispensaries all over the city. She made a decision based on her own fears and superstitions, and put children at danger. There’s no excuse for such ignorance.”
“I got that, too.”
She drew a deep breath and waited for her pulse to stop racing. “So you were attracted to me because I stood up to a nun.”
“I was impressed. Attraction had to do with other things.”