At the same time, Carrie could be found at the infirmary, standing next to the bed of her own mother and assisting the doctor and nurse in making the patient as comfortable as possible, for with burns as severe as those sustained by Mrs. Hale, not much more could be done other than the application of ointments and salves and the imposing of the salutary delirium of laudanum to put the sufferer into a state of anesthetic insensibility.
And where was Molly at this same time? Young Molly, having been released by her friend Carrie with strong words to the effect that she must go home and rest, was now in that very place and doing that very thing.
As it so happened, several other characters in our story found themselves, by either coincidence or design, in a different place stilclass="underline" the Fatted Pig Public House.
Here sate Jane Higgins and the man who sought that very after noon to win her favour, and decisively so: the outwardly charming and prepossessing Mr. Tom Catts, who was funny, and demonstrably endearing, and eager to see their two bumpers of old Madeira refilled until Jane’s head was a-swim in a swirling pool of compliments and blandishments the likes of which she’d never heard in all her three-and-twenty years upon this earth. Close by and watching the two with the studied intensity of a drowsy infant was Jane’s brother, a warm pint of porter clapped between two moist palms. As the room had become mist and haze for the increasingly alcohol-fuddled Jane, it was all that, as well, for Lyle Higgins, although, having grown used to living with his senses dulled and degraded, he had a stronger impression than did his sister of what was up and what was down, and what was up was this and no mistake: his sister Jane was become recipient of the most concerted form of love-making by a man who, unbeknownst to Jane, oozed dishonour and ill purpose from every pore.
And whatever was Higgins to do about it? Catts had been the first man ever to pay Jane more than casual notice. And were not disreputable overtures better than no overtures at all? It was a puzzlement, and he would sit with his porter and puzzle it out even after the two left the pub, directed for someplace he knew not.
Lyle Higgins would sit for upwards of a full minute. And then…
“Begging your pardon, lads,” said Higgins, after decamping from his chair and tottering with tangled steps to the table next to that previously occupied by his sister and her spurious admirer. “Did you happen to overhear any of what was said by the two what was just here?”
“Aye,” said the older and slightly more sober of the two young men. “What is it you’d be wanting to know?”
“Whither he was taking her. That’s the thing.”
“And why, pray, would you be wanting to know such a thing as that? Have you a claim upon the girl?”
“It depends on how you mean the question. She’s my sister.”
“Ah. Now that is a horse of a very different colour,” said the older man. “So I’ll tell ye. There was mention of the emporium. Would you know the place?”
“Indeed I would.”
“Is the man up to no good?”
“I don’t know it for a fact. I only know that I’ve crossed paths with his like afore.”
“Then join us for one last pint as be a send-off to rescue your sister from a fate unknown.”
Higgins bethought himself of the merits of the proposition and concluded that one drink more — strictly for the purpose of lubricating his steps in service to his mission of potential rescue — could do little harm, and perhaps very much good.
Jane Higgins and Tom Catts walked in the High Road with slow, careful steps to mask their having just spent the last two hours drinking intoxicating beverages at a public house (though Jane’s incapacitation was far greater than her companion’s). “You say you have a brother?” asked Catts, as Jane placed her hand upon his arm to steady herself.
“I have a brother, yes.”
“And he lives with you in the back of the family shop?”
Jane nodded.
“Yet you know with certainty he won’t be there at this hour.”
“With certainty I know this.”
“And how is it, Miss Higgins, that you are so confident in this belief?”
Jane stopped in her place. She looked at Catts with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “Because that was him sitting at the table by the old clock — the one drinking alone and slipping into his wonted state of daily hibernation. He’ll not show up until all the chickens have gone to roost, he being the one confused cockerel that sometimes forgets where it even lives.”
Catts laughed hardily. “Miss Higgins, you are perhaps the most delightfully clever young woman I have ever met.”
“And is cleverness my only attribute?”
“Not by any measure, my dear woman. Allow me to enumerate your other fine traits when we are finally alone.”
The two went along thusly. But unbeknownst to Jane, they did not go along unobserved. For Jane was, in fact, being most closely watched by her friend Ruth through the window of a mutton pie shop. Only moments before, Ruth had slipped guiltily inside that establishment after bidding adieu to her friend Pardlow following their after noon tea. Though she had imbibed three cups of the tasty beverage, yet it was a most gastronomically unsatisfying hour and a quarter, for there was naught to be had of a victual nature — not even a fragment of a caraway-seed biscuit or a crumble of an old gooseberry scone. Thus a much-famished Ruth now stood alone in a dark corner of the shop gobbling a crusty meat pie with ravenous shame, and being glad the proprietor was nearly blind and did not identify her, until such point as that familiar gait, that instantaneously recognisable tall and gangly presence abroad, caught her eye.
Ruth betook herself to the window to get a better look, and there-through saw the thing for what it was: her friend Jane being led away by one who appeared to revel in her lurching debility. In that frightful moment Ruth knew there could be nothing propitious to be gleaned from their companioned procession in the lane. On the contrary, Ruth believed Jane to be careening down the path to dire consequence.
The well-being of her friend being more important to Ruth than the last three or four bites of mutton pie, she fled the shop with all due haste and bent her hurried steps to the doctor’s infirmary to enrol Carrie in her mission of rescue (for any confrontation effected by Ruth singly would be misinterpreted by its recipient as officious intrusion in the customary Ruth Thrasher manner).
There was one other familiar to the reader who was at the Fatted Pig. This one sate drinking grog and a great deal of it, which was not a good thing, since the man of reference was one who had pledged himself to absolute temperance: Molly’s father, Michael Osborne. Osborne was drinking to steal himself away from thoughts of Sylvia Hale and from his ineffective attempts to minister to her in the wake of the tragedy of her house catching fire from a toppled candelabra. It was right in his mind that he should do so, for not only did he know the good woman and felt her to be his friend, he also considered himself to be a legitimate member of the healing profession. Yet when he attempted to offer assistance to her through the herbs and other unconventional treatments he had learnt during his years of itinerate practise, he was insolently driven from the premises by the town doctor and made to feel small and unworthy in his adopted line of work.