The Irish Healer (22 page)

“I’ve had another patient die from the cholera, James,” said Thaddeus, sawing away at a perfectly fine cut of beef like it was a chewy, overcooked shank of mutton. He stabbed the
freed piece with his fork. “That makes three for me. Much worse than the outbreak in spring.”

“Two of my charity cases have succumbed as well,” James replied. He’d had one recover and live, though he was at a loss to explain why. The timely use of Miss Dunne’s mysterious tonic, the one her mother claimed cured every stomach ill, might have been the reason. He would like to talk to her about the tonic and his patients, but they had avoided each other these past few days. Life in the house had been easier, but not pleasant. He only had himself to blame.

“The disease is moving fast in this heat,” James said, ignoring his own food turning cold on his plate. “I hear they’re scattering lime in the streets in St. Giles.”

“Maybe that will stop the disease from moving farther west. You’d never know there was an outbreak in town, watching these fellows.” Thaddeus waved his fork in the general direction of the chophouse crowd, neither ranks nor vigor visibly diminished by the disease. Waiters in white aprons hurried between tables, arms laden with plates. Associates called to each other across the room, smoked cigars, and hunkered over papers while they ate. At a nearby table, a newspaper headline tallied the latest fatalities. The press had begun to change their tune.

“They all know there’s not much to be done to prevent the spread,” said James, the familiar press of helplessness weighing heavily. “They may as well go on about their lives as normal.”

“It’s the poor Irish and their filthy slums. The miasma lifting off their hovels will strike us all down, I fear.”

A lump hard as a fist jammed in James’s throat. “I’ve heard it proposed it’s coming from the Thames.”

“Little does it matter. The cholera won’t pass until winter sets in. I’m just glad Louisa convinced me to send her to Bath. You should probably send Amelia and Mrs. Woodbridge away too. Just to be safe.” Thaddeus paused to chew his bite of food. “Louisa sends her greetings, by the way.”

“Send her mine in return, when next you write.”

“Nothing further?” Thaddeus asked, still sounding hopeful.

“Nothing further, Castleton.”

“If you insist.” Thaddeus frowned and washed down the beef with a drink of soda water. “Hey, what the . . .”

Thaddeus’s glass halted in midair. James heard the ruckus that had captured his friend’s attention. He craned his neck to see over a man blocking his view.

“Can’t a man eat a meal in peace anymore?” grumbled Thaddeus, shifting in his seat to catch a look. “We have to have waiters scuffling with patrons now?”

Then James heard it, the whisper leaping like fleas scattering before a fumigant of burning sulfur. “Cholera,” it chattered.
Cholera
.

James jumped up, threw his napkin on the table, and pushed his way through to the front. Thaddeus was close on his heels.

“What’s going on?” James asked of the waiter who’d locked arms with the man.

The waiter was a burly fellow and easily subdued the other. “It’s nothing, sir. You can go back to eating. This fellow’s just a mite upset over something he saw out on the street.”

The man, a tradesman by the look of his breeches and heavy dark coat, was sweating. His eyes were wide as a copper penny. “There’s a woman outside on the pavement. She’s perished from the cholera. Right before my eyes, she did!”

“I’m a physician. Show me where she is.”

The waiter relinquished his grasp, and the fellow sprung free. “Out here, doctor.” He shoved back out through the door and pointed down the street a short way. A crowd huddled nearby, hands over noses and mouths, staring aghast. Someone had thought to send for a policeman, for a man in the familiar blue uniform and helmet was running their direction.

Thaddeus joined James as he crouched next to the woman. She was someone’s servant or charwoman, dressed in a simple dark gown, hair graying beneath her mobcap. The items she had been carrying in a basket were scattered on the ground nearby. A skein of twine. A shattered bottle of oily boot blacking.

James felt for a pulse along her neck, the skin already gone blue. “There’s no heartbeat.” The front of her gown was soiled from where she had vomited, the stench sour and pervasive.

Thaddeus finished his own quick assessment as the policeman arrived to drive back the onlookers and send for an ambulance. “I say, it just might be the cholera,” he whispered. “Blessed Lord in heaven, they’re dropping in the streets now.”

James rocked back on his heels. “Dreadful business.” He cocked his head and looked at the woman’s face, twisted in agony. She looked familiar, but he couldn’t place her. Why would he know this woman? He was probably mistaken.

He pulled out his handkerchief and draped it over her face, heard the distant clang of the ambulance wagon’s bell as it came to take the woman’s lifeless body away.

“Cor, miss, what a mess in here!” Joe complained, picking his way through the library, past the crates and stacks of books waiting to be packed.

The house was buzzing with activity, every room swarming like ants on a hill. Soon the household would be moving to Finchingfield.

“The packing is taking longer than I expected,” Rachel answered. “Will you be able to help me today?”

“I can ’elp once I’m done dancin’ like a cat on ’ot coals.” He gave an apologetic grimace. “I’m havin’ to clear out the stable, then I ’ave to ’elp Mrs. M down in the kitchen. And Moll thinks I’m ’er messenger boy, sendin’ me up ’ere to tell you she wants a talk.”

Rachel’s throat knotted. She had not only avoided Dr. Edmunds these past few days, but she hadn’t crossed paths with Molly either. She could have predicted her good fortune would not last forever. “Did she say what she needed to talk to me about?”

“’Course not, miss. Moll don’ care to share that sor’ of information with me.”

“Where is she then?” Rachel asked, stripping off her apron.

“Out in the garden.”

Rachel found the girl staring at the green-tinged pool of water surrounding the unused fountain. She glanced at Molly’s middle. The maid’s frock hung loose enough to conceal any increase in girth. She might not be far enough along to obviously show she was with child.

Molly heard the crunch of Rachel’s approaching footsteps and looked over. “You have to help me. I need a potion. To start my monthlies again.”

Abrupt and clear, leaving no doubt as to her condition.

Rachel’s heart pounded hard, her feet begging to flee back to the house. “I cannot help you in that way.”

Even while she denied Molly, ingredients whispered in Rachel’s head.

“I cannot,” she repeated.

Eyes wild, Molly rushed up to her and grabbed hold of her arm. Her fingers pinched. “You have to! I can’t have a baby!”

“Molly, I will not help you get rid of your baby.”

“He was going to marry me, he was! The liar! Says he never promised me anything.” A sob hiccupped out of her, and tears as fat as chandelier prisms rolled on her cheeks. “I bought a tonic from the apothecary. He said it would work. All it did was make me sick and twopence poorer. Men, they’re all liars.”

“Do not try to harm the child. It is wrong.” Dreadfully, horribly sinful. “Besides, most of those tonics will not work, other than to make you severely ill, perhaps fatally ill.”

“Ha! Telling me not to make myself ill.” Molly threw down Rachel’s arm. “As if you care about me. If you cared, you’d help! Well, I know what to do about that. You’re going to help me or I’m going to show Dr. Edmunds the letter. I’ll tell him what I think you’re all about.”

Molly spun away, black skirts belling, and hurried toward the house.

Rachel rushed after her. “Molly, wait! Do not do this! You will ruin both our lives. Stop, please. We can think of something else to do to help you.”

Molly pulled open the rear door, Rachel on her heels. “What, are you afraid now, Miss hoity Dunne? Well, wait until Dr. Edmunds hears everything I know about you! Then you’ll be sorry.”

“What is it you know, Molly?” asked a man’s voice from down the hallway.

Rachel’s heart stopped. Dr. Edmunds was waiting for an answer.

CHAPTER 20

What is it you know, Molly?” James repeated.

Silence permeated the hallway like a mist rising off damp cobblestones.

Molly’s eyes jerked to where Miss Dunne stood rooted to the ground, her face turned an unearthly shade of white. “She’s been lying to you, sir. All this time she’s been working for you, she’s fooled you into believing that she’s of good character. Well, she isn’t, Dr. Edmunds. There was a trial in Ireland, and she was the accused.”

“You must be mistaken, Molly,” he said dismissively. “You have misunderstood the situation, I’m sure.”

Molly’s face flushed an ugly shade of red. “I have not. I’ve a letter that proves what I’m saying.”

“What do you have to say for yourself, Miss Dunne?” He waited for her to deny Molly’s ridiculous assertion, waited for her to throw back the accusation. Waited for denial that did not come.

“Molly is telling the truth,” she answered, her soft lilting voice steady. Unbelievably calm.

“You were accused of a crime?” It wasn’t possible. “What could you have done? Something desperate, like taking a loaf of bread to feed hungry family members, perhaps,” he said, grasping for a palatable explanation, one he might comprehend. “Tell me it was something like that.”

“I cannot, Dr. Edmunds.” Her gaze was unwavering. “I was accused of murder.”

His blood ran cold through his veins. Funny, when he was young he had always believed that expression to be just a saying, but indeed it was truth. “Impossible.”

“I assure you, it is not.”

Molly started laughing, a feral sound emanating from low in her throat. “Murder! What a rotten hypocrite you are, saying you won’t help me.”

What an odd comment
, James thought, his eyes never leaving Rachel’s beautiful face. He stared at her as though she were a stranger, an unfamiliar woman he might pass in the street and wonder about.
Who is she? What is her past?
He thought he had known, at least enough. He’d just learned he had not known her at all.

“I did not murder Mary,” Rachel said to Molly, so smoothly it sounded as though she were saying nothing more startling than she did not wish to have jam with her toast. His physician’s mind analyzed; he’d had patients so shaken by their injuries they acted with utter calm, as if the wound were happening to another person. He witnessed the same response here. “I was accused, but not convicted. The jury acquitted me.”

“But you obviously did something that made the officials think you might have been a murderer! Constables don’t go accusing folk for no good reason!” Molly shrieked.

“Quiet down, Molly,” he ordered. Mrs. Mainprice would hear; the men from the moving agency scraping furniture across the floor even now would hear; his neighbors would hear. Miss Dunne had barely flinched.

“She died while in my care,” she answered Molly’s hysterics. “While I was asleep. I do not even know what happened, why . . . But I did not murder Mary Ferguson. That I swear.”

“Mr. Ferguson doesn’t think you’re innocent, does he?” Molly spat, her gaze venomous. “That’s what it says in the letter.”

“Molly, enough!” James said. “I’ll deal with Miss Dunne. This is none of your concern. Please leave us.”

“Make sure, sir, you don’t listen to the evil she’ll likely spread to defend herself,” she said, eyes narrowing. “Miss Dunne is a wretched liar. Next she’ll be saying all sorts of things about Peg and me, to make her own self look good. Don’t believe them.”

“I asked you to leave, Molly, in case you didn’t hear me.”

Molly blanched and scurried down the stairs, toward the kitchen.

Miss Dunne’s gaze was fixed on a spot halfway up the wall. Spine erect, shoulders squared, she awaited his sentence like a prisoner in the dock.

Dash it all, why did you do this to me, Miss Dunne? I wanted to remember you as perfect in every way . . . I wanted to hold on to you until the last possible second
.

He walked nearer until they stood face-to-face. He attempted to gather his thoughts, but they kept slipping away from him, like he was trying to cup grains of wheat in his hands only to have them trickle through his fingers.
He had to believe she was innocent of any crime, this woman he had come to respect so highly. This woman he had desired to embrace, to kiss. But it was clear now that she had kept secrets from him. Clearer still that his only option was to send her away.

A vast abyss, arid and wide as some distant desert chasm, opened in his chest.

When he spoke, his mouth was dry. “You should have told me what happened to you in Ireland, Miss Dunne. Now because Molly knows what you’ve concealed and the rest of the house will learn, too, I have no choice but to dismiss you from my employ.”

“I am sorry for not telling you. Believe me, I truly am.” Her eyes begged him to understand. “But the treatment I received in Carlow from people who had known me all my life led me to believe I had to keep quiet. They shunned me, Dr. Edmunds, went out of their way to avoid me on the streets, like I was a leper. They shunned my family as well. My mother’s work as a modiste dried up like . . . like a puddle of water on a hot day, as if it had never existed. My brother, my little sisters, treated with contempt and cruelty though they were innocent . . .” Her voice cracked. “I concluded I would have no chance at honest employment anywhere if my past were known.”