Chapter Text
She nearly falls asleep in the carriage.
She hates working night shifts.
It’s the lot of Doctors she knows. But ultimately she is a dayshift person. Her husband has had the day and the night off the fiend and more than likely is in their bed warm and safe and sleeping.
Bastard.
The carriage rocks her from side to side and she forces her eyes open. It had been a horrible shift too. Nights were easier in the sense that people didn’t turn up unless they actually had to but if there was going to be a crisis it was usually at night. Not to mention the drunks.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t grateful. Pittsburgh was not New York and Community Hospital was small enough that it needed doctors and didn’t care what gender they were. Gladys had not ran away from home, put herself through medical school, proved herself against her male classmates over and over and over again to be told that she would never get a job in a hospital to chicken out now. She had come this far, and while the world was changing as she was constantly being told it was not changing enough for her. Woman were in medicine, woman could be doctors, they were close to a turning of the century but she was still only working cases that revolved around children, babies or other things that doctors considered ‘ladylike’. It would make her laugh but to be honest right now she was too tired.
A rap of the knuckles indicated that she was home and she eased out of the carriage feeling like she had sat in it for days and not the half hour it took to get home. Normally she would walk but Jacob would hit the roof if he got wind of that. The only thing that had stopped her husband from coming out after her was that she had promised to get a carriage home and he had arranged for it for her which was both touching and rather amusing all at once.
The house that they lived in was a little brownstone that was on the corner of a very well respected street. It had been Jacobs before she had moved in, in all fairness, their neighbours had been more relieved that the eternal Batchelor Doctor had settled down and more amused that she was a Doctor than offended. Woman physicians did happen, they were rare but they did exist. And this was Pittsburgh. This was not New York. In New York…well…it would have been a scandal and her mother would have been firmly at the helm.
But Gladys did not think of her mother now. It had taken a long time and a lot of anger to get through those emotions but she had come out the other side and was happy for it. She had a house, a career, money in the bank that was hers. And best of all she had a husband and a child who both adored her. A husband who kissed her long and slow when they woke up in the morning, a husband who looked at her and only her and more to the point had wanted her, no the money, not the name Russell, but her…her person and her being and her personality. Who wanted to see her for what she was, who wanted to hold her hand through this and help her be the thoroughly modern woman that she was, passionate and independent and—a lot of other things that she knew would have never fit into the tiny gilded box that was the Duchess of Buckingham and her role in future events.
It had taken a long time to get here.
In truth she had applied before the Duke had come back. It had been on a whim, she’d never thought that they would let her in, she had never expected to be let in. Her name did not command that much kind of power even as Marian told her and Larry over dinner once that there was a school in Pittsburgh that was apparently dedicated to female physicians only, that there was a little housing village attached that was ran by nursing staff and that it was safe for woman to be there, respected even. Of course there were pitfalls. Marian personally had not been impressed that they only offered courses that were considered ladylike—like children and woman’s care for example—but personally Gladys had thought that Pittsburgh was being progressive enough to make up for the whole of New York and while her mother had declared such a thing utterly scandalous her father at the very least had commented that Pittsburgh was not a place known for scandal or progressiveness.
Larry had asked was Pittsburgh not the place where the Unions had nearly exploded and then their father had promptly shot him a look and that had been the end of that.
She had applied on a whim, had the note smuggled in to her—Adelheid was always up for a bit of rebellion when she wanted to be even if she didn’t know what she was helping Gladys rebel against (she always knew who) and it had only been when she had learnt that Billy had moved on that she had realised that she had gotten in, that a nurse was willing to sponsor her as housemistress and that she had a place. The entire thing was just bizarre.
She had not thought to reply until after the Duke had returned. She had gone up to her room after champagne ‘celebrating’ his return and then she had sent Adelheid off for the evening post with a stern promise that if she ever mentioned it to anyone Gladys would see her thrown out and disgraced. Adelheid had said nothing but had done what she had asked out of job security if nothing else and then she’d gotten the note out just as her mother had come barging into the room.
Two days later it was the portrait unveiling. Two days later she sat in front of the Duke of Buckingham and very politely stopped him at the pass and said that while she was flattered (which was a lie) she was not going to marry him and so it was best if he quit while he was ahead and try another rich young woman with a pushy mother.
She hadn’t known what was better, the look on his face or the look on her mothers when she had stormed into the room to see Gladys sat there smirking.
She’d smacked her.
Gladys had not known who was more shocked that she had done it, her mother or her father. Larry had flown in between the two of them with a shout of—you touch my sister again and I will snap your neck—which was sweet and utterly pointless. Larry was at the end of the day to rich to do his own dirty work.
Their mother had burst into tears and shut herself up in her bedroom, their father had asked her only once if she was sure and then he had collapsed on the sofa in relief. Coward.
In another life she wouldn’t have been the one to torch her own life, in another life her father would have stood up to her mother and said no, in another life she wouldn’t have had to see the looks on her friends faces when Larry spontaneously decided to save the day and propose to Marian and everyone knew she had turned him down, one disinvitation to the opera later and she was gone. Snuck out the back door in the middle of the night her mother refusing to see her, her father and brother safe in bed and her reputation ruined. Even now she still didn’t know what they’d said to cover it all up.
That had been nearly eight years ago. The Duke had married Carrie Astor, had one boy and another child on the way. Larry had a son. Her mother and father had apparently reconciled. She read about it in the papers and upon occasion wrote to her brother. She never said where she was, she never said what she was doing, she wrote to tell him she was alive and nothing more. It just seemed…easier…not that she didn’t trust her brother. It was her parents that she didn’t trust. She could not hide away from the fact that she still even now lived in fear that they could come in and take it all away from her, that they could ship her off to England to marry a man she doesn’t like. That she could lose it all, lose this…lose Jacob, lose Emma, this house, this career.
She had met Jacob Whittaker when she had first gotten her job out of school. She had been a midwife by trade and had gone with her patient to the emergency room for what was called a c-section. Jacob had been the one to do it and despite all the odds mother and baby had survived. She had squared her jaw and refused to leave her patients side much to his chagrin but then she had helped when the baby had struggled to breathe. As she had been washing the blood of her hands he had asked her to coffee almost as if he was regretting it, he was older than her, and as he had told her a decade was a long time to be older than someone else. Gladys with a confidence that came with snatching a human soul back from the jaws of death had simply told him she liked them old and he had laughed and offered her dinner.
And that had been that. She had married him less than a year later, had fallen madly, wildly in love with him, had wanted him with everything that she had and then a year into their marriage she’d told him sat on their bed after a mass casualty shooting that had required all hands on deck no matter what the gender, that she was pregnant with his child.
Emma had been born nine months later.
Gladys had never told Jacob just how scared she was that she was going to turn into her mother, that instantaneous she had looked at her daughter and was scared that all of a sudden she would want her to marry someone she didn’t love. Her feelings towards her mother have cooled somewhat since her own acceptance of motherhood. She knows now for example that her mother did love her, when you carry a child around for nine months within you, when you feed it, when you feel it kick, when you dream of what they look like, it changes you. Gladys knows now her mother loved her. It helps…it helps really it does. Makes her look at her mother’s actions through her own lenses.
It does drive home how bad things had gotten between them though. Somewhere down the line they allowed both of them maybe, their relationship to be like that, to end like that, to be…that…where Gladys had honestly not cared if her mother died hating her, where she had thought that she would die hating her…
She’s lucky, so lucky…that she has a husband who understands this, who lets her get all of this out, who lets her curl up in their bed and who holds her so tenderly as if he knows that she is precious beyond words. And when Jacob has a bad night, when there are cases and people involved, that make his life hell she knows he feels the same, she knows that they have a partnership like her parents, for better or worse her mother and father were a partnership right up until the Duke of Buckingham came into their lives and inadvertently came into their marriage. She doesn’t know what happens there. Larry swears they are still together but from what he writes she almost gets the sense that he is almost as estranged from them as she is.
A knock from the driver interrupts the thoughts and it reminds her that she is home. She drags herself awake and then clambers down out of the carriage and watches him take his leave. The sun is just coming up. Jacob wrangled the morning off so he could sleep then he is working this afternoon. She thinks when she has slept she might see if Emma wants to go and feed the ducks. Her silly, beautiful baby girl loves the ducks so very much.
She slips into the house, a small modest brownstone that came with her husband with neighbours that were polite and non judgemental and she drops her keys to the table. She has no servants, one of the things that this life has given her is a practical sense. The first thing she had to learn how to do was dress herself. She’s learnt to wash her own clothes and mend them. She’s her own ladies maid. There are times when that is liberating and there are times when that really, really makes her miss Adelheid.
They have a housekeeper who will be along shortly no doubt to start breakfast but she sighs as she looks over the mail and—
“Morning” comes a sleepy voice behind her and she smiles as hands slide around her waist and wrap around her. She leans back into the strong sensual body of her husband all tightly corded muscles and hard flesh. She closes her eyes at the smell of him and feels his stubble rasp at her chin and neck and she feels her muscles uncoil.
“Morning” she says closing her eyes. “You didn’t have to wake up”
“S’alright, don’t sleep well without you anyhow…I’m gonna have to speak to Edgecomb I don’t like you working nights without me”
“I am hardly at any more risk working nights than I am during the day”
“Still don’t like it” he mumbles and she grins turning and kissing him. She still melts like sugar in a sauce pot. Jacob with his dark hair flecked with grey, beard much the same and strong jawline and dark eyes that tracked her with single intent underneath the crow lines. She had never been looked at like that before. As if she was the sole purpose of another persons reason for being.
“How was Emma?”
“Emma” her husband said grinning. “She has decided she wants to go and work with brains when she is older. I fear we may have lost her to the glamour of surgery”
“Give her time” Gladys said easily.
“Tough shift?”
“The usual…did we get mail?”
“Nothing that can’t be spoken about in the morning” he said gently though she noted that there was an twist to his smile then, an odd flicker of something over his eyes that she had never seen before. She wanted to comment on it, drag it out before it could fester but the truth was she was too tired.
“Bed” Jacob said pulling her towards the stairs.
“Thank God…Emma really wants to be a surgeon now?”
“Don’t worry” Jacob said as they got up to their bedroom and the sweet release of her side of the bed was waiting for her. “Tomorrow you can tell her all about the stories of Gladys Whittaker, female doctor, midwife extraordinaire and by lunchtime I guarantee she will be back thinking you’re the greatest”
Gladys smirked.
The greatest.
Yes.
She couldn’t remember feeling that way personally, about her mother or herself.
But then her dress and corset were off and her teeth were clean and her hair loose and the sweet release of sleep awaited her and to be honest she couldn’t think anymore.
She was gone before her head hit the pillow and the last thing she heard was her husbands sigh of bone deep, quiet contentment.