The Music of Razors Read Online Free PDF

Riley I believe you already know.”
    The young woman inclined her head once again, having made no mention of their classes together, or the incident that afternoon.
    “It was Mr. Dysart who finagled Miss Riley a place in your classroom. Quite the talking point, as I’m sure you’re aware.” The woman’s eyes lowered. “Young Finella is something of a revolutionary.”
    “I’ve heard nothing but good things about the strength of Miss Riley’s character, Dorian,” Henry insisted. “And lady doctors are not so queer.”
    “Please, sir,” Miss Riley interjected. “My ears aren’t cloth. Until the social order changes, an oddity I am, and an oddity I remain. It is not a burden to me, but a road.”
    “May it be a short one,” Henry said, his heart invading his lungs. He had never spoken to a woman his own age so straightforwardly. She spoke her mind like a man. That was powerful.
    Dorian applauded. “Bravo,” he said. “Bravo. You would have found a kindred spirit in Casanova, my dear.” Henry felt his face threaten to flush at the association.
    “That right,” she said.
    Dysart snorted and chuckled to himself, Jukes didn’t get it, and Henry felt a kind of strange anxiety closing his pores. Finella glanced at him quickly. Was that a smile in her eyes?
    Powerful.
    “Equality between the sexes began with him, you know,” Dorian continued, unperturbed. “Perhaps the new movement should regard themselves as ‘Casanovans.’ A lovely connotation, don’t you think?”
    “I doubt Margaret Fuller would have been much in love with the notion of naming a women’s movement after a womanizer, Mr. Athelstane. But I take your point.”
    “He believed women were the equal of men and treated them as such,” Dorian rebutted. “As it should be. The chance configuration of our corporeal forms has little bearing upon our capacity for miracles.”
    Jukes’s glass shot into the air, wine slapping over the sides. “Hear! Hear!”
    Dorian raised his own. Dysart was slow to follow. “Hear. Hear.”
    Henry wished to the Devil that Jukes and Dysart and Athelstane would…vanish. How did a man go about speaking to a woman? He had committed the best part of
A Guide to Manners and Dress
to memory, but even so the rough habits of a lifetime took some effort to rein in. Back home their parents would have arranged to spend afternoons together, and then he and Miss Riley could have become acquainted, but here…
    “Henry, allow me.” Dorian filled Henry’s glass from a carafe. “To our newest companion. To Henry.” And they drank. “Now that we are done with our introductions, who might you be, young Henry?”
    Finella cocked an eyebrow. “No introduction from the host, I notice.” Dorian waved her observation away, a pretense of modesty. No one pursued it.
    Henry swilled the wine over his teeth, swallowed it down with satisfaction. “My name is Henry Lockrose,” Henry lied, replacing his glass upon the table. Dorian refilled it. Henry swallowed another mouthful. This seemed to please Dysart. “I want to be a surgeon. Now, what’s this talk of enigmas?”
             
    There had been a man who managed the trick of escaping from their farm a few times a year. He had been a doctor. He would come in on a buggy, dressed neat and sharp and clean as a blade. In a day he would tend to their ills like a miracle worker, leave a few boiled sweets, and be on his way—back to whatever fresh universe he had come from, away from the farm, to someplace where people could be doctors rather than sinners and dirt workers born to live and die in their fear of the Lord.
    It was at a very young age that Henry had decided he would become a doctor. He did not tell his father.
    The publican discreetly reappeared to stoke the fire, bringing with him a tray of small pecan pies and brandy. Dysart slipped the man a few coins and poured a measure of brandy into Jukes’s glass. He then passed the bottle to Henry, seated to his left.