For a moment, Blair couldn’t move, but then she ran to the door. The waiting room was a mess: children screaming, mothers trying to quiet them, and one woman groaning with what looked to be labor pains.
Fifteen minutes later, Blair was cutting the umbilical cord of a newborn girl.
“180,” the mother murmured. “Her name is Mary 180 Stevenson.”
Blair didn’t have time to ask any questions before the next patient was brought in.
The next afternoon, a woman brought a little boy to the clinic, an undersized eight-year-old who looked six, a boy who’d already spent two years inside a coal mine. He died in Blair’s arms, his frail little body having been crushed by coal falling from a train car.
Blair called Nina, said, “I’ll do it,” and hung up.
Chapter 30
Blair drove her carriage down the road, away from the Inexpressible Mine and back to
ward Chandler. Nina had lost no time in arranging for her to take the pamphlets to the mine, perhaps because she was afraid Blair would change her mind. So this morning, Blair had called Dr. Weaver, a young man she’d met at the Chandler Infirmary, and asked him to look after the clinic because she’d been called to a mine emergency. The man’d been happy to oblige.
At the Westfield house, Nina’d done her best to hide the pamphlets under a makeshift piece of wood that was to serve as a false bottom in the back compartment of Blair’s new carriage. Throughout Nina’s instructions, Blair was so scared that she could barely speak.
At the mine entrance, the guards had teased her, saying that Dr. Westfield had certainly changed since his last visit, but they let her in. She had to ask some coal-dust-covered children how to find the house of the woman who was to help her, and she found the woman, lying on the bed faking illness, to be as nervous as she was. The woman hid the pamphlets under a floorboard and Blair left the camp as quickly as she could manage.
The guards, sensing she was nervous and, with the normal vanity of men, thought it was their presence that was making her so, teased her more as she left.
She was a mile from the mine before she began to shake, and within twenty minutes, she was shaking so badly her hands couldn’t hold the reins. She pulled off the road to hide among some rocks, stepped down from the buggy, and when her knees gave way, she sat down on the ground and began to cry tears of relief that it was over.
Her shoulders were still shaking when suddenly two strong hands caught her and pulled her upright.
She looked into Leander’s eyes blazing with fury.
“Damn you,” he said, before he crushed her against him.
Blair didn’t ask questions about how he knew what she’d done—she was too grateful that he was there. She clung to him, and even though he was already nearly crushing her ribs, she wanted him to hold her tighter.
“I was so afraid,” she said into his shoulder, standing on tiptoe to bury her face in the soft skin of his neck. “I was so frightened.” Tears poured down her face, ran into her mouth.
Lee just held her close to him and stroked her hair, never saying a word while she cried.
It took a while before her tears stopped and her body quit shaking. When she had the courage to release her death grip on Lee, she pulled away and began searching her pockets for a handkerchief. Lee handed her his, and after she’d blown her nose and mopped up her face, she glanced up at him. What she saw made her step backward.
“Lee, I…,” she began, taking another step back, until she halted against a boulder.
His eyes were on fire. The teasing, smiling, tolerant Lee that she’d always seen was nowhere near this enraged man.
“I don’t want to hear a word,” he managed to choke out. “Not a word. I want you to swear you’ll never do this again.”
“But I—.”
“Swear it!” he said, advancing on her and catching her forearm in his hand.
“Lee, please, you’re hurting me.” She wanted to calm him down, to make him see the need of what she’d done. “How did you know? It was secret.”
“I’m in the mine camps every day,” he said, glaring at her. “I hear what goes on. Damn you, Blair, when I heard you were to deliver those papers, I couldn’t believe it at first.” He nodded toward the wet handkerchief that was crumpled in her hand. “At least, you did realize the danger you were in. Do you know what those men would have done to you? Do you have any idea? You might have begged them to kill you after they got through. And they have the law on their side.”
“I know, Lee,” she said with passion. “They have every legal right to do whatever they want to do. And that’s why someone has to inform the miners of their rights.”
“But not you!” Lee bellowed into her face.
She blinked from the blast and curved her backbone against the rock. “I have access to the mines. I have a carriage. I am the logical one to do it.”