The Irish Healer (2 page)

Death.

“Well, Dr. Edmunds?” echoed Mr. Bolton from the spot he’d taken up by the window. The family’s surgeon tapped his fingers against his elbows. “Are you finished with that contraption?”

“It’s a stethoscope, not a contraption.”

“It’s a bit of wood tubing and a bunch of poppycock, is what it is.”

“What color has her sputum been?” James asked Hathaway, ignoring Mr. Bolton’s ridicule.

“When it comes up at all, it’s rusty.”

Blood. No surprise.

James set aside the stethoscope and released the woman’s linen shift, the color of the material not much different than the gray pallor of her flesh. With Hathaway’s steady help, he lowered her onto the stack of thick feather pillows. A relation—aunt? cousin?—sobbed quietly in the corner of the bedchamber. There would be more tears to come.

Separating the cedar stethoscope into its three pieces, James nestled them in their velvet-padded box and closed the lid. He caught Hathaway’s watchful gaze and shook his head.

“
No,”
his young colleague mouthed, face falling.

“Can I get back to my leeches, Dr. Edmunds?” Mr. Bolton asked impatiently. The creatures squirmed in their bottles near his feet. “The only cure for her condition. Draw out the congestion in her lungs.”

“You’ve had them on her since yesterday” The inverted-Y bite marks were still evident on her back. “If they haven’t worked by now . . .” James wouldn’t finish that sentence.

He swept back the woman’s hair, a blonde the honeyed color of demerara sugar, her cheeks flushed from the fever that was burning her alive. He recalled seeing her at some social function long ago, in a teal silk gown with her hair dressed in pearls and feathers, smiling, charming everyone. Even Mariah had commented on her poise and her beauty All of that lost, now.

In her half-conscious state, she muttered incoherently, drawing her relative to the bedside, who soothed, “Hush, my dear.”

The older woman looked around the edge of her lacetrimmed
cap at James. He saw the question form on her face, the one he had been expecting. The eight years he had spent doctoring hadn’t taught him how to respond with cool indifference, like his father had always done. Instead, James only felt disheartened, the loss another chink out of his armor of confidence.

Soon, though, very soon, he would never have to face that question again.

“Doctor?” The relation’s eyes, puffy and red-rimmed, begged him for a hopeful answer.

“I must consult with Dr. Hathaway, ma’am. He is her physician and will speak with you in a few minutes.” James pressed her hand, the only reassurance he could offer, and stood, setting the stethoscope box inside his medical bag. “No more leeches, Mr. Bolton. If you agree, Dr. Hathaway.”

“Whatever you say,” Hathaway concurred.

“What?” The surgeon scoffed, drawing himself up to his not-insignificant height. “What am I doing here if you two are not going to listen to me?”

James snapped the medical bag closed and leveled an even gaze at the man. “I am sure I don’t know, Mr. Bolton.”

Nodding a good-bye, he left the bedchamber before the surgeon could compose a retort. Hathaway strode out behind James and shut the door.

“So the situation is bad,” said Hathaway.

“Let’s walk over there, away from the door.” James inclined his head toward the far end of the hall, steeped in dark and a quiet so profound it was as if the entire house held its breath in anticipation of James’s verdict. “It’s definitely advanced pneumonia. She might only have another day.”

“Dash . . . But I did everything I could think of.” Hathaway
scrubbed his tired hands through his hair. “She has two small children, you know, and she’s only four-and-twenty. My age.”

Cold tension spasmed along James’s neck. Four-and-twenty had been Mariah’s age as well. He pushed the memories back before they could rise, ugly like distorted fungi in a damp, dark corner. The memories of his ultimate failure.

“Edmunds, you all right?” Hathaway asked. “You’ve turned a funny shade.”

“I’m fine.” James waved away the query, letting the cool hush of the hallway still the tumult in his soul. Hard to believe more than three years had passed and the shock—and guilt—could still strangle. “No need to worry about me. Concentrate on your patient. She needs your full attention.”

“I don’t like to admit this, but I’m at a loss what to do next. Nothing, I suppose.”

“All you can do is provide some comfort. A scruple of niter for the fever, keep her cool and quiet, laudanum for the pain.” He glanced over at the door. “And get Bolton out of there. She can’t handle any more blood loss.”

Hathaway nodded briskly. “I just wish I had your fortitude, Edmunds. I’ve never lost a patient before, you know? I don’t know what to do.”

James felt his gut clench. He had precious little advice to offer.
Show a bold front, lad
. His father’s favorite words. “Pray.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Not really” James started down the carpeted stairs, his coattails slapping against his medical bag in his haste to depart. “Do you have an attendant to sit with her? That might provide you some relief and let you clear your thoughts.”

“I’ve been so busy lately, I haven’t had the time to hire one.”

James glanced over his shoulder at his colleague. He remembered when he’d been like Hathaway—young, fresh, throwing life aside to plunge into medicine headlong and heedless. After eight years, though, that eagerness was already burned out of him. “I would stay to help you, but I’ve a woman coming from Ireland any minute now, and I have to get back home and see her settled.”

“You’ve decided to hire a replacement attendant?” They rounded the landing, Hathaway hurrying to keep up. “I thought you were quitting your practice and leaving London, heading at last for your little farm in Essex.”

“I am looking for someone to fill in for Miss Guimond for the next month, but this Irish woman isn’t a nurse. I’ve hired her for what is only a temporary situation. A favor for a family friend.” James descended the final steps. “It doesn’t mean I have changed my mind about giving up medicine.”

Hathaway uttered a sound halfway between a laugh and a grunt. “Which I still cannot believe.”

At times, neither could James.

They reached the entry hall, and Hathaway shook James’s hand. “Thanks for helping me here and good luck to you. You’re a good man and will be hard to replace.”

A good man. Am I?
“You think too highly of me, Hathaway.”

James bade the other man farewell, and Hathaway headed back upstairs to deliver his bad news. The maid, waiting by the open front door, held out James’s hat and gloves along with his discreetly bundled fee. A young child hid behind her skirts; James could see a tiny hand clutching the edge of the maid’s apron.

“Here you are, sir,” she said to James. She twisted to pat the child on the head. “Come now, little miss. Stop hiding behind my skirts there. The doctor here’s been to see your mum. She’ll be up and about soon enough.”

The child shuffled out from hiding. She smiled shyly, a lass three or four years of age, her eyes, her hair . . . James’s chest constricted. The child was so like Amelia—nearly the same size, the same golden curls, blue eyes. In a day or so, the girl would be motherless too. Just like his daughter.

An impulse opened James’s mouth to say hello, but he couldn’t get the word to come out. Not when he could hardly breathe. Pulse tripping, he nodded to the girl and made a hasty escape.

A good man.

Dearest Lord. Help me believe it’s still true
.

“Here we are, dearie.” Mrs. O’Rourke brandished a hand in the air above the steamer’s railing, the
thunk
of the gangway upon the stone pier nearly drowning out her words. “Londontown.”

Rachel stared at the masses of people churning on the wharf like chickens fighting over a fresh throw of feed. “Oh my heavens.”

“Truer words were never spoken,” concurred Mrs. O’Rourke.

They had steamed up the Thames for several hours, the city approaching like an advancing storm cloud. Buildings pressed against the riverbanks in such quantity they blocked out the view of the alleyways beyond, so thick Rachel could imagine their steamer was chugging through
a tunnel of brick and stone. A tunnel jammed with drifting barges and scuttling wherries and blackened colliers, thick as fallen branches choking a weir.

And now this.

St. Katherine’s Docks were the greatest collection of buildings and masted ships Rachel had ever seen in her life. Ever dreamed she would see. She’d tried to count the boats, tucked so tightly against each other it seemed a man could jump from one deck to the next without fear of getting wet, and lost track after two hundred and forty. At the water’s edge, yellow brick warehouses six stories high surrounded the basin, bristling with pulleys at open windows, bales and barrels and wine casks stacked to the vaulted ceilings. Men and boys clambered everywhere, thousands of them. They scrabbled for space between loaded carts and wagons, crates of chickens waiting to be loaded onto the next boat out, sacks of flour and coffee. Deafening shouts bested the rattle of boat chains and the squeals of pigs being toted off ships, the clang of ships’ bells and a band on a foreign steamer heartily blowing unfamiliar tunes. All of it a noisy sea of flesh and commerce writhing beneath a hazy, reeking, smoke-heavy sky.

And not a blade of grass or patch of heather to relieve the oppression.

“It is not like home, is it?” asked Rachel, her heart hammering.
London will completely consume me
. But wasn’t that what she wanted it to do? Let it hide her from her past?

“Nothing is like home.” Mrs. O’Rourke sniffled, wiping a coarse woolen sleeve beneath her nose. “
Arra
, you’ll make me cry, you will. And here I’ve held it back all this while.”

“I am sorry. I did not mean to upset you.” Rachel tucked
her carpetbag with its cracking leather handles against her hip and took her companion’s arm. “Shall we go?”

Mrs. O’Rourke nodded. “’Tis nothing else for it.”

Stiff-legged from three days spent in the cramped confines of steerage, they pushed their way into the throng tramping down the gangway and onto the teeming wharf. A dockworker knocked against Rachel and continued up the plank to become part of the stream of people moving on and off the steamer. If they didn’t move speedily, they would either be run over or shoved into the oil-slicked water like so much garbage.

Mrs. O’Rourke found her bearings and Rachel followed the other woman in single file, their destination a set of rooms for departing and arriving passengers.

“Ho!” Mrs. O’Rourke cried out before they reached the dubious security of the grimy-windowed space carved out of a corner building. “Look then! Me sister sent her eldest to meet me, and there he is now, to be sure.”

She made to move off toward a young man waving frantically over the heads of a hundred others.

Rachel grabbed Mrs. O’Rourke’s elbow. “Are you not going to wait with me?”

“See all the guards? There be nothing to be affrighted of.”

“I own I think there is.”

“You’ll be fine, Rachel. ’Tis a fearsome city, it is, but God watches over the least of His sparrows, does He not?” She patted Rachel on the cheek with dry fingertips. “
Rath Dé ort
, lass. You’ve had a stroke of bad luck, you have, but the good Lord will see you through.”

“Right now, Mrs. O’Rourke, I simply wish He would help me find my employer’s carriage.”

“Ask for Dr. Edmunds in the passengers’ office. And know I’ll be prayin’ for you.” Mrs. O’Rourke hoisted her bag and melted into the crowd, her rust-red cloak soon swallowed up by all the bodies.

Snatching up her carpetbag, Rachel elbowed a path toward the passenger area and the waiting lines of wagons and carriages. She wished she still believed she could say a prayer that might calm her fears. Rachel pulled in a breath, sucking in the stench of sweating bodies and rotting fish, rather than courage.
I will be strong, Mother
.

For what else had she left?

“Now then, are you in need of lodgin’, miss?”

The man’s voice at her side startled her. “What?”

Dressed in a worn frock coat, the original shade of which was long lost to the jumble of fantastically colored bits of cloth sewn on elbows and cuffs and pockets, the man was squat, smelly, and leaning far too close. “I asked if you are needin’ a lodgin’. Off the steamer from Ireland, are you?” he asked, his soft Irish lilt tugging at her already homesick heart as much as the sight of his
caubeen
tilted sideways on his head.

“Yes, but someone is meeting me here.”

“You’re certain, now? ’Tis a good lodgin’ house, so it is. For the lasses, no more than six to a room.” He gripped her sleeve. “And there’s none of the fever or the cholera in me house. Not like the other places.”

Cholera? “I am most certain I do not require lodging. Please, now, let go of my arm.”

“Might be no other offers, you know. Lodgin’ hard to come by.”

“Let go. Now.” She jerked her arm free of his grasp.

“Think you’re too good, do you?” He muttered a curse and turned to another woman standing nearby. She must have come off the boat, too, though Rachel didn’t recognize her. She looked barely past eighteen, yet she had two children with her, one clinging to her threadbare shift, the other cradled in her arms.