Chapter Fifty-Two #2
to clench, and his hand to close hard over mine.
While an assistant held Nabby’s left arm up and pressed her shoulder to the chair, I only saw a flash of metal as the surgeon
quickly thrust the sharp fork into the flesh of my daughter’s breast. Perhaps it was the swiftness with which he stabbed her,
but she didn’t cry out.
It was only when he lifted the speared breast on this fork to saw it off that Nabby grimaced—her legs straining in her desire
to escape the knife. As blood began to flow, my mind was unwillingly thrown back to when she was a little girl, offering her
arm to the doctor to cut for inoculation. I remembered the way she bit her lip, the way she tugged at her lace cuff, and the
way she’d so bravely winced at the pain.
It is like inoculation, I repeated to myself. It will save her life.
But there was so much more blood as they severed her flesh, amputating the breast. So much blood that it tinged the air with
iron.
Pain constricted in my own breast as I prayed, God, let me take this from Nabby. I would take it onto myself gladly!
Yet, all the while, Nabby was silent.
Though her teeth began to chatter through lips now tinged with blue.
It felt an eternity before the breast—tumor and all—was finally severed and thrown into a waiting basin with a horrifying wet slap.
In truth, it had been speedily done, and I swallowed a gasp of relief, knowing they now only needed to close the wound and
dress it. But as the gore-spattered doctor investigated the flesh, he said, “The tumor has extended into the lymph nodes.
I have to keep cutting.”
No, no, no.
The mother in me wished to fly at this surgeon and wrestle his instruments away. Only John’s hand gripping mine kept me still. How I wished they had bound me to the chair instead of my child.
As the surgeon razored away her flesh, I quaked. For glistening ruby in the light, blood now flowed in such quantity it looked
as if someone had tipped a barrel of claret wine. It soaked the surgeon and Nabby both. It soaked the chair and the sheets
on the floor beneath them.
I couldn’t stand this macabre scene anymore, but neither could I swoon or avert my eyes. For Nabby’s gaze met mine and held
it.
“Brave girl,” I whispered, willing my strength into her. “That’s my brave girl.”
At last, the surgeon reached for the hot iron to cauterize the wound. He pressed it down on my child with a hiss and spit,
sending smoke into the air that smelled like charred flesh.
Not once, not twice, but four times did that iron brand her. And as Nabby groaned and twisted her head in agony, I twisted my own head, burying my face
in John’s shoulder.
When I could finally look again, I saw Nabby sagging with pain and exhaustion, her hair now hanging in sweat-soaked ringlets.
She had never screamed—not once. The heroine had endured it all with such fortitude that the doctors all proclaimed her the
most stoic patient they had ever encountered. Not one cry—not even one word—had escaped my silent Nabby.
Nor did it now that all was over.
“It is all gone,” the surgeon said, wiping his bloody hands with one of my dish towels. “The morbid substance is totally eradicated
and nothing left but flesh perfectly sound. A complete success.”
My knees now finally surrendered, and John and Sally had to hold me steady at the elbows lest I sink to the floor.
Meanwhile, an assistant freed Nabby from the chair upon which she’d been tortured.
It was left to Sally to tend to her now, stripping from Nabby the ruined dress, sponging her clean, helping her into fresh
bedclothes, and taking charge of the laudanum doses that might allow her some rest.
The first night was the worst.
Though Nabby endured it with little complaint, the pain was too obviously brutal. Her daughter, Caroline, sat with her, making
certain to adjust pillows or fetch water or relieve her in any way possible.
And this comforted me. The love of family would get my daughter through this—a sentiment I felt more keenly when, a few days
later, Colonel Smith arrived on a Sunday morning, and the family reunion was nearly complete.
“She didn’t wait,” he said, blinking. He had, I think, half expected her to change her mind by the time he arrived. That the
ordeal was already finished left him enormously relieved.
“She’s up and walking a little,” I told him. “Just from her chamber to mine and back. She’s able to sit up most of the day.
The wound has closed. Her arm, kept in a sling, she’s forbidden to use. And though she is weak, I believe seeing you will
revive her spirits.”
That it did, for Colonel Smith was still handsome and dashing in his way. And he was gentle with my Nabby. If she worried
he might think her mutilated, he put her mind at ease by repeating how beautiful she was. And she smiled a lovely smile before
drifting back to sleep.
I was grateful for that. I’d long mourned that Nabby’s once-brilliant marriage prospects had landed her with a man of neither
good fortune nor good sense. But he did love her faithfully, and he was kind. Not every woman was so fortunate in marriage as that.