Doctor Death (12 page)

“Madeleine . . . what is wrong?”

His words echoed at once far away and much too close. And it was too late to pretend that I was not affected, even though I tried.

“I just stumbled,” I said, lips clenched. “Nothing happened.”

But I had become visible again. I had revealed myself. Woman. Young. Fragile. Everything I did not want to be.

“You had better go up, Maddie,” said my father.

It was no use arguing. I had to leave the cellar and sit and wait in the hansom cab while they brought a stretcher down and carried the body up and across to the ambulance that served as a hearse while the Commissioner’s own vehicle was being repaired.

By the wrought-iron fence that separated the property from the street a number of curious bystanders had gathered. Two nursemaids, each pushing a pram, stood staring uninhibitedly. An older couple had interrupted their evening walk and were observing the scene with slightly more discretion. On the other side of the street, a broad-shouldered man in tweeds had stopped, even though the dog he was walking was whining impatiently. A newspaper boy halfheartedly announced that the evening edition of the
Varbourg Gazette
could be had for ten centimes, but it was clear that his real interest concerned what was happening on the other side of the fence. That was probably why he noticed me.

“Mademoiselle,” he shouted. “Please.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Is it old Ponti? Has he shot himself?”

Shot himself?

“Why on earth would he do that?” I could not help asking.

“Is it him?”

“No,” I said. “It is not someone from the house.”

The gossip mill was clearly already grinding. How thrilling for Madame Ponti, I thought. But then, she was probably used to it.

Even though it was late, and he was presumably about to keel over with exhaustion, my father insisted on performing yet another examination of Father Abigore’s body that very evening. This time, a constable from the préfecture stood guard outside the morgue, and I was not allowed to assist. To my great regret I was sent home in a hansom cab and thus was not present for the autopsy that the Commissioner gave my father permission to perform.

When he came home, I could see at once on his face that something had happened. The Commissioner had to help him up the stairs, and while I presumed he was again in severe pain, this was not what disturbed him. “Turn up the light, Maddie!”

There was an edge to his voice that made me obey without question.

“Sit there. Put your head back.”

“Here?”

“Yes, so the light falls properly.”

On what? Perhaps I understood that he wanted to examine me before the Commissioner handed him the magnifying glass but not why. He bent over me, and I could smell the distinctive perspiration caused by pain even through an otherwise penetrating smell of carbolic acid.

“Raise the lamp,” he ordered the Commissioner. “No, a little higher.”

With a speculum held clumsily with the fingers protruding from his cast, he dilated my left nostril first and then my right, examining them thoroughly with the magnifying glass. Then he extracted some of the nasal fluid with a pipette. He held the pipette up to the light and studied its contents at length.

“Open your mouth,” he commanded, and carried out a more normal examination of my throat.

“I am fine,” I said when he was done depressing my tongue and observing my tonsils.

He did not answer but at least allowed himself to drop down onto the chaise. I could now see that his healthy hand was also trembling with exhaustion or agitation.

“Papa . . . what is wrong?”

He exchanged a glance with the Commissioner.

“I will have to do it again in the daylight,” he said. “But it does not look as if there are any.”

Suspicion began to dawn. I felt slightly queasy.

“Thank God,” exclaimed the Commissioner, and only now did I notice that his normally unshakable calm was also showing some cracks.

“What has happened?” I asked.

The Commissioner silently handed me my father’s notes from his examination of Father Abigore. They were even more hurried and illegible than usual, but I had, after all, had years of practice in deciphering my father’s handwriting.

His conclusions regarding the cause of death remained the same, of course. Father Abigore had been killed by a powerful blow to the head, presumably with a shovel or a spade. But there was more. Abigore had not been in good health when he died.

Punctiform hemorrhage around the eyes indicates advanced respiratory struggles; this is borne out by the examination of the lungs, which revealed six abscesses the size of a coin, as well as another half dozen in initial stages. In addition, in the throat and nasal cavity were found three dead parasites of a type similar to but not identical with the mite
Pneumonyssus caninum.

I looked up. “Mites?”

“Yes,” said Papa. “The same as on Cecile Montaine.”

“He must have been infected while he sat beside her bier.”

“We must assume as much. And I am fairly confident that I
would have found the same abscess formations in Cecile Montaine’s lungs if a proper autopsy had been permitted.” He ran his hand across his face, and his exhaustion was visible in the gesture. “That means that we are faced with what is probably a parasitically transmitted and potentially deadly lung disease, the type and vector of which we are now only beginning to investigate, after a delay of several weeks.”

I looked across at the Commissioner, who had let himself subside into his favorite armchair.

“Do we know if there have been other deaths?” I asked.

“It is hard to say,” he answered. “Every year, and especially during a winter like this one, many people die due to lung infections, and few are autopsied. There have not been more than usual.”

“Yet,” added my father grimly.

“Tomorrow I will ask the préfecture for a decree that will make autopsies mandatory for every death from lung infections in Varbourg and its environs,” the Commissioner continued. “But it is far from certain that I will get it. The City Council prefers not to frighten the public.”

Epidemic. That was the word that neither man was saying out loud. It hung in the air like a shadow. It was a cholera epidemic that had taken my mother’s life, and my father took such events extremely personally.

Prevent the spread, I thought. Identify, isolate, treat; somewhere out there was the source. I suddenly remembered the three fresh droplets of blood in the snow at Cecile’s burial and understood that Father Abigore had been sick even then. The mites had wandered from her to him while he sat by her dead body and prayed for her soul.

But how had she acquired them?

II

March 20–25, 1894

I
found it hard to keep my eyes off the wolf.

It was so bizarre. The creature was sprawled on a hearthrug in front of the fireplace in the abbess’s office with its head resting on its front paws, its eyes half closed. Yet there was no way it could be mistaken for a large dog.

“Does he bother you?” asked Mother Filippa. “We can sit in the front office instead.”

“No, no,” I said quickly. “I was just . . . surprised.”

She smiled. She was younger than I had expected, perhaps about forty-five, with smooth sun-freckled skin and olive-green eyes. The habit of the Bernardine sisters hung loose on a figure that I still somehow perceived as athletic. Perhaps it was the way she moved.

“He is old now, and I do not have the heart to put him with the others,” she said, glancing at the wolf with a look that I could only interpret as loving. “The new pack leader will not tolerate his presence.”

The Bernardine sisters kept wolves. I knew that, of course. The story of the Gray Miracle of 1524 was known to every child in Varbourg. It was said that as long as the wolves remained with the Bernardine sisters, no foreign tyrant could reign in Varonne. As a border province, we needed all the help we could get. We were like a shuttlecock constantly batted from one side of the net to the other, in a game played by nations much greater than our little state. Only a couple of decades ago, in 1870, Varonne could have been swept up into the German empire the way Alsace-Lorraine was, and that would have been the end of spoken and written French in schools and public life. As it was, we were still an independent province under the more or less protective wings of the Third Republic, and there were people who believed that this was due to the wolves, rather than to diplomats and politicians. All the same, I had not expected to find one of them lying comfortably in front of the fireplace.

I cleared my throat and tried to concentrate on my errand.

“As you can see from the Commissioner’s letter, it is of the greatest importance that we find the source of the infection and determine its extent. I know that there are some very competent nurses among the sisters here. Perhaps one or more of them could help examine all the students and teachers who were in contact with Cecile Montaine.”

“It was considerate of the Commissioner to send a woman,” said Mother Filippa. “Some of the sisters prefer to remain in the cloistered part of our community. But—excuse me for saying so—you seem a bit young.”

“Yes. But I am used to assisting my father, and besides, I am
one of the four people in the world who can identify the mite with any certainty—if we find it.”

She still looked at me with a challenging skepticism in her olive green gaze. Just then the wolf got up from its place by the fire. It stretched and yawned, allowing me to see a set of teeth that although yellowed and marked by its advanced age, still featured canine fangs that were about four centimeters long. The yawn became a small disarming sneeze, and it rubbed its nose with one paw. Then it came over to the desk where we were sitting, I on one side, the abbess on the other. It nudged her with its snout, a single powerful push, and she let her fingers slip through the thick gray-white fur of its neck for a moment. Then the wolf continued around the desk and approached me.

Its eyes were almost white. The pupils were like shiny black buttons in the middle of irises pale as miniature moons, and it stared at me without blinking, without lowering its gaze. I was distantly aware that I had stopped breathing, just as most of my thought processes had ceased.

It studied me in this way for an endless moment, and it was entirely impossible for me to look away. When the wolf finally blinked and lowered its head, its nose briefly touched my hand. It was not a peremptory poke like the one it had given Mother Filippa, just a fleeting and damp touch. A greeting, a marking of invisible lines. Yawning once more, it lumbered back to its hearthrug and lay down.

“I think he likes you,” said Mother Filippa. “Very well. The Commissioner would presumably not have sent you unless he felt you were up to the task.”

I was left with a clear impression that the wolf’s judgment was more important than that of the Commissioner.

In 1524 the convent had been remote and secluded, surrounded by deep forests. This probably played a part when Black Pierre and his mercenaries had found themselves so harassed by the local wolf packs that they gave up their attempts to seize the convent and the citizens of Varonne who had sought refuge there. These days, the outskirts of Varbourg could be glimpsed between the hills; farming and human habitation had replaced much of the original wilderness, and apple orchards and wide sprouting fields smelling of spring and rain surrounded the convent walls. The forest was still there, a low dark shadow on the edge of the open landscape, but only as a distant reminder of another, less protected time. The convent was no longer a fortress, crouched behind moats and buttresses, but was now reminiscent of a cross between a country estate and a village. The convent chapel and the cloister itself were still sequestered from the world by walls and iron gates, but the school and the old hospital, the cider barn, the stables, the orphanage, and the almshouse lay along tidy lanes bordered by budding chestnut trees, with some fifty cottages spread a little more haphazardly in the shadow of the solid institutional buildings. All in all, just over a thousand people lived here, and I sincerely hoped that it would not be necessary to examine everyone. It depended entirely on what we found among those who had been in close contact with Cecile.