Chapter 1
Trouble Breeds Trouble


Are you keeping mice in your bag again?" Constantine asked, turning in his saddle to peer at his daughter. "You couldn't choose a filthier pet."
   "I haven't kept mice since I was a little girl," Clover said, folding her haversack closed and pulling her hat down to hide her eyes. If her father knew what she did have in her bag, he would wish it were a whole litter of mice.
   "I can hear you fiddling with something back there. When you turn fourteen, I'll be giving you your own medical bag, but not if you plan to keep buttered bread and rodents in it."
   Clover held her tongue. In addition to remembering the portions that turned poison to medicine, never flinching from the horrors of pus or spilling organs, and keeping his tools clean and orderly, her father also wanted Clover herself to be tidy: useful and trouble free, like a porcelain spoon. She was too tired to argue anyway. For the past two days they'd been assisting a breech birth down on the Sawtooth Prairie, and fatigue had made Clover goose brained.
 
   She knew she looked ragged even though her dark curls were bound into tight braids. Being a doctor's daughter was messy work, and Clover hated to have her hair yanked by deranged patients. She'd been tending to the sick in the foothills of the Centurion Mountains with her father for as long as she could remember. She helped him grind powders and hold patients down during surgery. She even stitched up the easy wounds herself, dipping the silk in brandy before making the tight, clean loops that kept a body together.
   Now Clover shifted in her saddle, close to giggling or cursing. Or both. She watched her father, the model of propriety. Constantine Elkin had high cheekbones and a black beard that tapered to a handsome ink brush point. In recent years, Clover had seen the gray hair creep into his temples. His clothes were threadbare, but even now, after twenty-six hours of keeping a mother and baby alive in a sod house, his vest was still buttoned up--he was always a gentleman. He even chewed pine needles so his patients wouldn't smell the smoked trout he survived on.
   They started up the red-clay slopes toward home. The forest thickened, and a squirrel squawked at them from the branches above. To Clover, there was nothing sillier than an angry squirrel, a fat governor of its own tree. She giggled, which only made the squirrel bark louder. Its tail waved like a battle flag. Clover wiggled her nose and showed her own teeth as she barked back, "Chuff, chuff!"
   Clover's stomach grumbled. She hadn't had time to eat the raisin buns Widow Henshaw had made for her, and now they were as stale as oak galls. She pinched off a crust and cast it at the base of the tree, because even grumpy squirrels deserved something sweet now and then.
 
   Her father shot her a look. He was suspicious. What would he do if he discovered the secret in her haversack? Nothing upset him as much as an oddity.
   Clover noticed the bundle of gray fur swinging from her father's saddlebag and was suddenly as hungry as she was tired.
   "Are you telling me that after two days of tending and a healthy baby against all odds, those settlers paid us with prairie rabbits?" Clover asked.
   "You would prefer to be paid with snails? They're poor, kroshka," Constantine answered. "The poorest."
   Clover usually liked it when he called her kroshka--it meant little bread crumb--but those rabbits galled her.
   "Aren't we poor? Everyone pays us with turnips or jugs of sour cider. There's not even any fat on those rabbits. Look at your pants. I've mended them so many times the seat looks like a quilt."
   Constantine sighed and shook his head.
   "This is why the ties on my bonnet frayed and I switched to men's hats," Clover continued.
   He looked back at her under a cocked eyebrow. "I thought you preferred dressing like a boy." There was a tender smile half-hidden under his mustache.
   "I wear trousers so I can sit on a saddle properly, since I spend half my life on this horse. I wear men's gloves because they were made to get dirty and don't stretch or wear out." Clover knew she was beginning to sound like an angry squirrel herself, but after the cramped vigil in the damp birthing room it felt good to holler. "I'm not about to blister my backside sitting sidesaddle just because the world was made for men!"
   "As you wish," he said.
 
   It was just like her father to make her feel like she had chosen this life.
   "A Prague-trained surgeon could have real paying customers if only we lived a little closer to New Manchester," she argued. "Or Brackenweed. Or any city. We could have fresh milk every day and new clothes. In New Manchester, we could buy turpentine instead of having to boil pine resin ourselves. That stuff never washes out! And you ask me why I don't wear dresses."
   Her father was silent, allowing her outburst but refusing to participate. If Clover had wanted a response, she shouldn't have mentioned New Manchester. Nothing shut her father up as quickly as talk of the past. He had buried his history like a dead body.
   Clover had been a toddler when they left New Manchester and didn't remember a thing about it. "Cities are swollen with woe," Constantine was fond of saying. Because of his Russian accent it sounded like svollen vit voe. The true name of that woe was Miniver Elkin. Clover knew only three things about her dead mother: that she had been a collector of oddities; that she was involved with a society of scholars who studied the singular objects; and that she had died in a tragic accident that her father would not explain.
   Constantine's broken heart was the reason Clover had never walked the busy streets of New Manchester, never visited her mother's grave. Everyone said that Constantine Elkin was a generous doctor. But Clover knew how much he kept for himself. His high, learned forehead was a cabinet he had locked his secrets inside.
   Now Clover had her own secret, something thrilling. Keeping an eye on the back of her father's head, she opened her haversack and reached in.

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Excerpted from Oddity by Eli Brown
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.