Doctor Death

Thank you for downloading this Atria Books eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Atria Books and Simon & Schuster.

C
LICK
H
ERE
T
O
S
IGN
U
P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

To my sister Eva—with love and with admiration for the work she does and the strength it takes to do it

I

February 23–March 20, 1894

I
t is snowing. The snow falls on the young girl’s face, on her cheeks, mouth, and nose, and on her eyes. She does not blink it away. She lies very still in her nest of snow, slightly curled up, with a fur coat covering her like a quilt.

Around her the city is living its nightlife, the hansom cabs clatter by in the cobblestone slush on the boulevard, just a few steps away. But here in the passageway where she lies, there is no life.

Her brother is the one who finds her. He has been to the theater with some friends, and then to a dance hall, and he is happy and lighthearted when he returns home, happy and a little bit tipsy. That is why he does not understand what he is seeing, not at first.

“Hello?” he says when he notices that someone or something is lying at the entrance to his family’s home. Then he recognizes
the coat, which is unusual: astrakhan with a collar of ocelot. “Cici?” he asks, because that is the girl’s pet name. “Cici, why are you lying there?”

Only then does he discover why she does not blink and makes no move to get up.

“It is unusual,” said the Commissioner to my father. “It is difficult to believe that it is a natural death, considering the circumstances, but there are no external signs of violence.”

The young girl lay on a stretcher in the hospital’s chapel. They had removed the fur coat, which was now hanging across the lid of the waiting coffin. Papa had turned the gas lamps all the way up in order to see as clearly as possible. The hospital had recently had its first electric lights installed, but the chapel had not yet seen such progress. Light for the living was more important than light for the dead, it was thought, and that was probably true. But it made my father’s work even more difficult.

Beneath the cloak, Cecile Montaine was wearing only a light white chemise and white pantalets. Both were filthy and had been worn for a while. Her narrow feet were naked and bloodless, but there was no sign of frostbite. Someone had closed her half-open eyes, but you could still see why she was considered a beauty, with long black eyelashes, sweetly curved lips, a narrow nose, symmetrical features. Her hair was pitch-black like her eyelashes and wet with melted snow.

“Dear Lord,” said the third person present in the chapel. “Oh, dear Lord.” The hand holding the prayer book shook a bit, and it was clear that Father Abigore, the Montaine family priest, was in shock.

“Could the cold have killed her?” asked the Commissioner.

“It’s possible. But right outside her own door?”

“No, that is not logical. Unless she died somewhere else and was later placed where her brother found her?”

“I think she died where she was found,” said my father. “The clinical signs suggest as much.”

They both stole a glance at the priest and refrained from discussing lividity while he was listening.

“Sickness? Poison?” asked the Commissioner.

“It is difficult to say when the family will not agree to an autopsy.” My father bent over the girl and carefully examined the halfway open mouth and the nostrils. Then he straightened up. “Did she suffer from consumption?”

The Commissioner looked over at the priest, passing on the question. Father Abigore stood staring at the dead girl and did not realize at first that he was being addressed.

“Father?”

“What?” With a start, the priest focused on them. “Consumption? No, certainly not. When she left her school a few weeks ago, she was as sound and healthy as one could possibly expect of a young lady of seventeen.”

“And why did she leave school?” asked the Commissioner.

“I must confess that we thought it was because of an unfortunate attachment she had made to a young man who disappeared at the same time. But now . . . Perhaps we have done her an injustice.” His gaze was once again drawn to the young dead girl, as if he were unable to look anywhere else. “Consumptive? Why would you think that?”

“There is dried blood in the nasal and oral cavities,” said my father. Suddenly, he leaned forward with a wordless exclamation.

“What is it?” asked the priest nervously.

But my father had no time to answer. He grabbed a pipette from his bag and quickly bent over the young girl’s face again.

“What are you doing?” asked the priest indignantly and took a step closer. “You promised, nothing unseemly. Nothing undignified for the dead!”

“It is not undignified,” my father cut him off. “But absolutely necessary. Move, you are blocking the light!”

My father later said that it was perhaps just as well that the family had insisted on having a priest present for the examination, because it was a miracle of God that he saw them in the poor light, and even more incredible that he managed to capture two in the glass tube of the pipette.

“What? What?” asked the Commissioner. “What have you found?”

My father shook his head. “I don’t know. I have never seen anything like this before. But they look like some type of mites.”

“Mites?”

“Yes.” He held the pipette toward the Commissioner. “Do you see it? One is still moving.”

The priest swallowed abruptly and held the hand with the prayer book in front of his mouth.

“But I thought you said she had not been dead for very long,” said the Commissioner.

“Nor has she,” said my father slowly, once again holding the glass up toward the light of the gas lamp in order to more clearly observe the pale minute creatures he had caught. “These are not carrion parasites. I think they lived in her while
she
lived and are leaving her now that she is dead.”

Of course, I cannot know that this is precisely what occurred. I was not there. My father was reluctant to let me assist when he examined the dead. He said it could only hurt my reputation and
my future—by which he meant my chances of marriage. For the most part, my father was a man of progress, absorbed by the newest ideas and the latest technology. But he was incomprehensibly old-fashioned on this particular point.

“It is bad enough that
I
engage in such activities,” he had said when I tried to convince him. “But if it becomes common knowledge that I let my daughter assist . . . No, Maddie, it is out of the question. Out of the question!”

“I thought one was not supposed to let the limited horizons of others stand in the way of progress,” I said. That was his standard argument when people called him Doctor Death, or accused him of desecrating the dead. Some of his living patients, especially the more well-to-do, had left him because they did not like the fact that his hands had also touched the dead. But every time the Commissioner sent for him, he went.

“The dead can no longer speak for themselves,” he was in the habit of saying. “Someone needs to help them tell their story.”

But this “someone” was not supposed to be me.

“This discussion is over,” he said. And so I just had to wait at home with as much equanimity as I could muster until he and the Commissioner returned from Saint Bernardine in the early hours of the morning.

We lived on Carmelite Street, behind the old monastery and conveniently close to the Hospital of Saint Bernardine, where my father often worked. Ours was not a large house, in fact it was the narrowest on the whole street, but the second floor let out into the small rooftop garden my mother had created many years ago above what had then been the kitchen. Because it was so elevated, it received plenty of sun in the summer in spite of the
taller buildings surrounding us. Right now all the bushes wore tall, powdered wigs of snow, and the small basin in the middle was frozen so solid that I feared all the goldfish might be dead. My toes were well on their way to joining them; I wriggled them inside my button boots to bring some life to them again, but I did not go inside. If I did, the two men in the salon would cease talking about Cecile Montaine, and I would not get to hear any more of the clinical details that I have just described.

Perhaps I now appear as cold as the snow that covered her body, but do not misunderstand me. I had all the compassion in the world for her family, and when I thought about how prematurely and inexplicably she had departed this life, tears sprang to my eyes. She was three years younger than me, and the realization that often seizes the living when they encounter death—
that might have been me
—felt more urgent than usual.

But feelings had no place here. In spite of my father’s resistance, it was my plan to one day follow in his footsteps, and that meant I had to learn what I could
where
I could—including here in the rooftop garden with the door to the salon open just a crack.

“I will have to examine the mites tomorrow, in daylight,” said Papa. “It is hopeless to attempt to determine what species they are now. It is not even certain that they have anything to do with the cause of death, but they did come from her nostrils, and my best guess is that she died from respiratory failure.”

“She stopped breathing, you mean?” growled the Commissioner. “Is that not how we all die?”

“Most of us are lucky enough to die before we stop breathing, Monsieur le Commissaire, not the other way around. As you know perfectly well.”

The Commissioner sighed and stretched his strong, robust legs.

“The family would like to have the funeral over with. And I
would like to have a cause of death before they are allowed to bury her.”

“Tomorrow. Perhaps. If only I was allowed to look at her lungs . . .”

“Unfortunately that is out of the question, my dear friend. Her father will not permit it. And I cannot lawfully twist his arm, especially considering that everything until now suggests a natural, if peculiar, death.”

“But that is reactionary and illogical!” my father exclaimed. “Think how much more we could learn, how many illnesses we could cure, and how many lives we could save, if only all corpses were professionally autopsied and examined. Or at least all
interesting
corpses.”

The Commissioner set down his cognac glass and got up.

“That may be. But how would you feel if it was your own sweet Madeleine lying there?”

My father waved his hand dismissively. “It is not.”

“But if it were?”

My father had risen as well. He was half a head taller than the Commissioner, but rangy and thin in the worn overcoat that he had not yet discarded.