Chapter Text
Eight months was a very long time to be good.
Jack Dawkins had considered himself to be “good” before. Well before Fagin reentered his life at least. He hadn’t stolen anything for fourteen years between joining the Navy and Fagin’s reappearance. But he’d been gambling and drinking and whoring. While these were not arrestable sins, they were fun and risky and, notably, not inside a bloody hospital.
The governor and Lady Fox had given him an extraordinary deal, he knew that. One more year of service to the hospital and his penal debt would be paid. His record would be expunged and he would be a free man for the first time in his adult life. Furthermore, he didn’t have to stop his work as a surgeon. In fact, Lady Fox had made it quite clear that his skill in that arena was a key reason for this miraculous deal.
All he had to do was abide by three simple rules:
- Don’t go anywhere
- Don’t make any money
- Don’t be alone with Belle
Any infraction, no matter how small, would add six months to his sentence.
It was a bit more nuanced than that, he had to admit. He could leave the hospital with a “trusted member of society,” which had grown from the original list of Sneed, Lady Fox, and the governor to include Hetty during house calls and the Professor on occasional pre-approved outings. The money rule similarly made a lot of sense if the primary goal was to keep him from fleeing the country as it prevented him from buying himself a pint, let alone squirreling away money for an escape attempt. Though it wasn’t really a problem, he had no intention of leaving Australia.
The first two rules instead had the effect of making him into a hermit. He couldn’t go out, and even if he did, he couldn't do anything. So he sat in his dingy upstairs rooms eating the same food as the patients and trying not to feel sorry for himself. Fagin visited regularly, often with his own, dubiously procured food and Sneed had become remarkably friendly after Jack had asked him to publish the aortic aneurysm surgery under his own name (followed closely by Belle’s initials).
But the third rule. That was the hardest one. It had been easier while Belle was still in the hospital. He visited her under the guise of medical care, though he didn’t think they fooled anyone. With a nurse or two in the room, he could check her bandages and listen to her complaints as the boredom of convalescence quickly set in. If it was Hetty chaperoning them, he could even risk chaste kisses to her knuckles and forehead.
But then she went home to finish her recovery and the truth of Lady Fox’s intentions became clear. Belle was strictly forbidden from visiting the hospital. At first it was due to her recovery. They both understood that. At first Belle could not sit up on her own, let alone travel the two miles to the hospital, and Jack couldn’t visit her without one of the pre-approved chaperones walking him out of the hospital.
Then Jack visited with Hetty for a house call and was rejected at the door. Dr. Sneed could attend to Belle, Lady Fox said. Dr. Dawkins’ attentions were better spent in the surgical theater than trekking out to the Governor’s mansion. It was a blow that he should have seen coming. But he hadn’t. And it ached worse than any beating he’d ever received from Fagin or Bill Sykes or aboard any of the navy vessels.
Belle rushed her recovery, because of course she did.
Less than three weeks after surgery, Belle was walking around her home and demanding to visit the hospital. This went about as well as could be expected, which was not very. Eventually, as Belle approached the point where she looked as if she would try to walk the two miles to the hospital, Lady Fox agreed to a small concession.
Belle could read to the patients on the wards. So long as she didn’t strain or overly tire herself. Lady Fox failed to specify what Belle could read to the patients, so Jack spent a week grinning like a loon while Belle sat in the middle of his ward and gave the assorted patients a very good primer in basic anatomy. Belle also was not content to simply read, so she propped the book on one patient’s knees while she sat in a wheelchair and rolled bandages, nodding occasionally at Mr. Dunny to turn the pages. Mr. Dunny, for his part, seemed delighted to be involved and counted himself lucky to have had chemical burns down his leg since it meant that he got to spend a week on his arse in hospital turning book pages for a very pretty young lady.
Unfortunately, Lady Fox paid a surprise visit, mostly to assure herself that Dr. Dawkins was not breaking his end of the bargain, only to find the two of them very much not alone, but also not doing anything even remotely propper. Changes were made.
Belle refused her mother’s request to read poetry to the patients, so her visits were limited to twice a week, but lengthened to half days rather than just an hour or two. As Belle’s strength grew, she began donning a nurse’s apron once more and tending to the patients on Jack’s ward. They had to be very careful not to be caught alone together, especially in the surgical theater or the morgue. But they were able to brush their hands together over bandages and while making beds longer than was strictly necessary for the task.
Jack started living for Tuesday and Thursday afternoons when the tedium of his routine was injected with liquid brown eyes and clever ideas.
Belle began truly chafing at the restraints three months after her surgery. She felt as good as she ever had. Better, perhaps. And, as she whispered to Jack as they made up a bed in the far corner of the wing, her blood had come right on schedule, so there was no threat of her mother packing her off to India for nine months. Jack, who had stupidly not considered that in the heat and terror of their night together, found himself terrified of the agony he could have subjected her to without even knowing. Not that he said that, of course. He just froze, causing Belle to look at him quizzically.
“You’re a surgeon, Jack,” she scolded as she fluffed a pillow harder than strictly necessary. “Don’t tell me you can’t handle blood that comes out of its own volition rather than through a wound.”
“Of course I can. That’s not what I meant,” he answered.
Belle didn’t look convinced, but didn’t press him further as Hetty rushed in with news of a shattered femur.
Belle began assisting in surgeries again too, though nothing like the impromptu and impossible surgeries of before. These were tried and true surgeries that were dangerous, like any surgery, but not utterly novel. Jack found himself showing off, worried that these surgeries would bore her, would leave her uninterested and longing for her plush mansion.
But she stayed, relishing every surgery, asking questions afterward and questioning certain techniques once the patients were safely stitched up and settled in their beds. She still itched to be the one holding the scalpel, of course she did. But there was little they could do about it with constant audiences and chaperones ensuring that they never got too close. Never did anything the least bit scandalous. Not just with each other, but with medicine as well.
Eight months and two days after Belle’s surgery, the new issue of The Lancet arrived, containing the shocking account of a successful surgical mending of an aortic aneurysm performed by Rainsford R. Sneed and B. E. Fox.
Sneed beckoned them into the Professor’s office the night the package was delivered with a bottle of real champagne and The Lancet open to the appropriate page. Sneed and Belle, read the article aloud in turns while they all sipped champagne and got progressively more pleased with themselves. They beckoned Hetty in for propriety’s sake and so that Belle could honestly tell her mother that she had not been alone in a room with two men. (Lady Fox had already made it clear that dead and/or unconscious bodies did not count in these circumstances.)
Between the four of them, they drank the entire bottle of champagne and a half bottle of whiskey they found under the Professor’s desk. Hetty’s face had gone flushed and Sneed kept recounting how difficult it had been to make Dawkins’ crude drawings presentable. Jack just kept smiling and couldn’t tear his eyes away from Belle who kept trailing her fingers over her own initials.
“How does it feel?” he asked Belle as Hetty fell into a fit of uncharacteristic giggles on the other side of the room.
Belle didn’t answer right away. Just kept tracing the words with her fingertip.
“It’s incredible. I just wish–” she cut herself off.
Jack felt more like the Artful Dodger than he had in months when he tangled their fingers together and brushed them against his lips.
“Just wish what?” he pressed.
“I wish it were our names,” she whispered. “Together.”
Jack wished his breath wouldn’t catch when she said things like that.
“It’s more important to get the knowledge out there than for me to get the credit,” he said.
He thought that was reasonable, but she scowled at him.
“You deserve the credit,” she argued.
“So do you,” he countered.
She narrowed her eyes playfully at him and went back to tracing the words in The Lancet with her free hand. She left the other one in Jack’s possession and he thought it might be the greatest treasure he’d ever pinched. His fingers strayed down to her pulse point, as they always did these days. The soft, steady thump of her heartbeat calmed his nerves like nothing else could. He knew that she didn’t always like it. It reminded her too much of everything they almost lost, but she never begrudged him the reassurance.
“Alright you two,” Sneed said, leaning heavily against the desk. “Hettie and I have got to get Lady Belle back while we’re all still conscious.”
Jack nodded and pressed one final kiss to the back of her hand. She smiled at him and closed the book to hold it protectively against her chest.
“We did it,” she said to the room.
“We did,” Sneed repeated confidently.
Jack didn’t reply; he was still working on convincing his fingers to untangle themselves with hers.
“I’ll be back on Tuesday,” Belle said quietly.
Jack nodded and forced his fingers free.
“Tuesday,” he repeated.
Belle’s hands squeezed around The Lancet rather than his arms. Not for the first time, Jack wondered if Hetty and Sneed would feel compelled to inform Lady Fox if they kissed right in front of them.
“Goodnight, Lady Belle,” he said instead.
“Goodnight, Dr. Dawkins,” she said back.
Then she went out into the dark street toward a waiting carriage. And he went up to his cluttered room alone and tried to get some sleep.
Things are going well, he thought. It’s not worth six extra months to sneak out.
Because it wasn’t worth it. Jack was sure he could sneak out. He was sure he could get to the Cat and Bagpipes or Fagin’s strange little rented house without trouble. He was sure that he could make it all the way to Belle’s bedroom unseen. But the risk was too high that someone else would be lurking. That someone else would try to blackmail him with the information, or simply turn it over to Lady Fox so she could increase his sentence. And he’d been so damn good.
It wasn’t worth the temporary pleasure of drink or company or affection when it could cost him another six months of loneliness. When all he had to do was be good for another four months. He could manage that. He could.
Afterall, nothing else had changed. Belle was still so far above his touch that he didn’t really have a chance. What he had with her was already so much more than he ever could have expected. Because the basic facts of their positions hadn’t changed. Couldn’t change.
Little did Jack know who was at that moment sailing toward Port Victory with change at their heels.