No Comfort for the Lost Read Online Free PDF

ma’am.”
    Celia yawned into her fist. She had been called away last night to help a young Mexican woman through childbirth. The infant, a lovely black-haired boy, was stillborn. How his mother had wept. When Celia had finally returned home and collapsed into bed, she had lain awake and thought about Li Sha, whose baby had been likewise cheated of life. Thought about the cruel brevity of man’s existence.
    She wrapped her crimson shawl with its paisley border more tightly around her shoulders, the cashmere whispering against her neck. She closed her eyes and breathed in. The shawl had been her mother’s, and if she tried very hard, Celia could imagine she smelled her mother’s jasmine perfume caught up in the warp and weft. A small morsel of comfort.
    Perhaps her aunt in Hertfordshire was correct, and nursing was no proper occupation for a lady. Her aunt had never forgiven Celia when she’d reasoned that the quickest way to join Harry in the Crimea was to pretend she was older than her true years and volunteer as a nurse. When she’d learned just how different mending a bird’s broken wing was from tending shrapnel-riddled bodies, she’d almost turned back from her chosen path. But she hadn’t. She had persevered, seen success, and come to love what she did.
    She could not, however, restore a stillborn baby to life or save Li Sha.
    “Your tea, ma’am,” announced Addie, striding into the room with a tray, bringing Celia back to the here and now.
    “Is Barbara awake?” she asked.
    “Aye.” Addie moved aside Celia’s ledgers and set the tray atop her desk. She poured out a cupful of steaming tea. “She was sitting on the porch for a while, catching a chill, but she’s in the parlor now. Staring out the window, poor bairn.”
    After burning her tongue on a quick sip, Celia rose and wandered across the foyer that separated the two front parlors—one now Celia’s examination room, the other used as their sitting room.
    Barbara had turned one of the upholstered chairs to face the window and fixed her gaze on the street beyond the glass, her damaged foot resting on a low stool. There wasn’t much of a view across the stretch of dirt road except for the top story and roof of the house across the way, its ground floor below street level.
    “How are you feeling this morning, Barbara?” Celia asked from the doorway.
    Barbara had taken the confirmation of Li Sha’s death very hard. When Celia had returned from her patient last night, she’d heard her cousin sobbing in her bedchamber. She should have realized that Barbara had grown attached to Li Sha, though she’d rarely shown affection for the girl. Her cousin must have longed for a friend who could comprehend the isolation she endured, halfway between her mother’s Chinese world and her father’s white one, where people whispered behind their hands and didn’t fully accept her.
    “How can she be dead?” Barbara’s head drooped. “I keep thinking and thinking, but when Owen came by earlier, he said it’s just something that happens to people like him and Li Sha, people nobody wants.”
    “That isn’t true,” Celia protested. “Li Sha was wanted. And Owen Cassidy is wanted, too, by those who matter.” Having been abandoned by his parents, Owen scraped by, living on the streets and doing odd jobs, just one boy among the many lost souls in this city. “But I can understand his feelings.”
    Or were they more than feelings? Owen was Irish like many of the men in the anti-coolie groups. What might he know about Li Sha’s death? She would ask him the next time he came by.
    “It’s just awful,” said Barbara, toying with the folded lace-edged handkerchief in her lap, running her fingertip across the looping
B
embroidered in vermilion silk.
    “Are you afraid that the rioters who attacked those Chinese laborers a few weeks ago might have killed Li Sha?” asked Celia. “Because I am thinking that may be the case.”
    Barbara glanced over, a tiny