Chapter 9
Nora meant to sit across from her husband at dinner and attempt some form of rapprochement debating the merits of a report on a cesarean section (not hers, but by a foreign doctor who’d consulted her) in the latest edition of The Lancet.
Unfortunately, the consumption patient on the ward, Meg Prather, had suffered another hemorrhage, coughing up an alarming amount of blood.
John, the orderly who slept in the ward most nights, came with the bad news in the middle of their soup.
It was Daniel’s turn for emergencies, but this one required at least two sets of hands.
Instead of finding amity over the latest journal and roast lamb, she and Daniel passed each other water and bandages as Daniel applied a menthol plaster to the girl’s chest while Nora gave her a small dose of ether to calm the throat muscles.
“We can’t let her choke on the blood while she’s not able to cough,” Daniel said as the girl succumbed to the fumes of the vaporizer.
“I know,” Nora agreed. “But if we let her keep coughing at this rate, she’ll open a fresh hemorrhage.”
They met eyes over her motionless body. The girl was only eighteen, but she looked even younger than that. Nora told herself the girl’s pale face was peaceful and sleeplike, but the stillness reminded her too much of death.
“If she stays in the city, I don’t see her lasting much longer.” Daniel spoke low so other patients wouldn’t overhear.
“They can’t afford to send her anywhere else. Our hospital is a spa compared to their flat.”
Meg’s chest spasmed, and Nora used a rubber tube and bulb to draw more secretions and blood from her throat.
“We need to roll her,” Daniel said, pushing Meg’s left shoulder upright.
Nora flinched as he pounded Meg’s shoulders. Even his attempts to help felt like criticism.
“We could take her out to the garden during the day and let her take a sunbath. It’s not the seaside, but it might do her some good,” Nora suggested as she packed away the ether mask.
But this lingering summer heat only magnified the stench of the Thames and the filthy streets.
Sewage and sour river smells wouldn’t have the same benefit as clean sea air with the tang of salt.
“Maybe she’s not the only one who needs to leave the city.” Daniel dipped his eyes as he listened to Meg’s chest through his wooden stethoscope. His voice carried softly to Nora’s ears, something vulnerable in the words.
“What do you mean?” she asked as she measured the pulse in Meg’s thin wrist.
“Perhaps you and I could get away from patients and papers for a bit. We could visit my family’s house in the country, go riding, walk the woods.”
She saw it for a moment—the picture he painted.
Bluebells in the shady ferns of the forest, rowing across the small lake as trees burst into autumn color around them, and listening contently while Daniel demonstrated his expansive knowledge of flora and fauna.
She’d never learned to ride, but Daniel had offered to teach her.
“With your surgery schedule at Bart’s and the clinic—”
“I know.” He sighed, putting away the stethoscope. “There’s fluid in the lower-right lobe. That must be where the hemorrhage originated.” His face resumed a businesslike expression, the supplication gone from his tired voice.
Nora thought of Harry’s head in Julia’s lap. “You’re right, though.” Her words were quick, lacking her usual confidence. “We should go. Before winter. Perhaps next month when the worst of the heat is over?”
Daniel lifted his head, and she was startled by the relief softening the corners of his eyes. He’d been as troubled by this standoff as she.
“I’ll ask Harry and Horace to cover the clinic. Is she waking?” It had been ten minutes since Meg inhaled the ether, and Daniel was impatient with the anesthesia. He worried over the prolonged sleepers more than Nora did.
“Not waking, but her pulse is normal and strong. The sleep will do her good. You finish your dinner. I’ll stay with her.”
Daniel carried his chair to Nora’s side and set it down with a soft thump. “I’ll wait with you, and we’ll eat together.”
They hadn’t discussed Ruth Franklin, Dr. Adams, or the midwives at all, but Nora didn’t want to. She wished only to sit here with their shoulders pressed together and their fingers interlocked as they waited for their patient to awake.
Besides, this compromise might break if she mentioned Ruth would be visiting here tomorrow. I’ll be more careful this time, Nora told herself. Adams and the rest wouldn’t be here.
***
“I like the notion of learning for myself.” Ruth Franklin’s lips pursed. “But I’m afraid it’s likely to stir up trouble.”
“I’m not worried about that,” Nora lied. “I’m thinking of the good it will do. You were so eager to learn to use forceps. I’m sure your colleagues—”
Ruth shook her head, and Nora exhaled away the mounting pressure in her chest. Some, at any rate. “You don’t think they’d be interested? Even in a class of just women? No doctors?”
After the challenges of her last lecture, Nora was convinced a separate class was the answer, and better than what she’d originally envisaged.
Ruth and the other midwives wouldn’t be sneered at for their lack of Latin, and their years of practical experience wouldn’t be dismissed.
Men like Adams would be more receptive to their ideas if they were filtered through her.
Or even Daniel. Grating as that was, Nora was used to adjusting to practical realities. The result was what mattered.
But judging from Ruth’s uneasy frown, it might not be possible to coax other midwives to come back. “Mrs. Bailey says it’ll anger the doctors. When she needs to call one, she sends for Frederick Brown, and he apprenticed to Dr. Adams. She doesn’t want to tread on any toes.”
Nora chewed the inside of her lip. Maybe that was her problem; she never meant to, but she’d flattened a few feet already. “How would Dr. Brown—or Adams, for that matter—ever know? I’m not inviting them to your class. It would be exclusively for women, all experienced midwives.”
“You know I’ll learn whatever you’re willing to teach me. But…” Ruth sighed. “I’ll ask the others. They might be keener if the class were held at night. They could come without being seen.”
“Of course.” She’d done her share of hiding, but it rankled that these women felt they must, too.
Most were at least a decade older than her, and Ruth had begun apprenticing to her mother when she was twelve.
“If the fees are a problem…” Nora had decided to keep them low, only a quarter of Horace’s one-pound fee.
Even the reduced amount would be helpful. But it wasn’t her motivation.
With trained women beside her, she wouldn’t be alone. An aberration. She longed for the day she’d turn her head and see an encouraging smile from a female colleague.
“It’s not the fees,” Ruth assured her.
Nora sighed in relief. She hoped to at least reimburse Horace for the expensive supplies she’d ordered.
In her enthusiasm to defend the use of midwives through formal training, she’d already written to Italy, asking Magdalena to arrange the purchase of teaching models like those she’d trained with in Bologna.
The local craftsmen were experts at anatomical replicas, largely because of tighter restrictions on cadaver dissections.
These were necessary aids, especially if she wanted to run parallel lectures for men and women, and over time, they’d save her plenty of hours in the dissection laboratory, but the expense was considerable. Even Horace had blanched a little.
The cost was even more staggering if she was teaching only a class of one.
But given enough time and students, she could make a name for herself and her hospital.
“Nora?”
She turned. It was Harry, sticking his head through the laboratory doorway. He had his hat and overcoat on, so either coming or going.
“You’ve a fancy visitor on her way down. Julia offered to entertain her in the drawing room, but the visitor insisted she wasn’t going to stand on ceremony. Or something to that effect.”
Nora glanced behind her, but the bones she’d been wiring together were safely concealed beneath a sheet. If any bodies had arrived in the night, they’d been stowed safely in the ice room.
“Who is it?” Nora asked.
“She said to tell you Ben Bee’s mother is here. Bye the nou.” He touched his hat, grinned, and vanished, hurrying out the side door.
Nora rubbed her forehead. She couldn’t remember Ben Bee. And the surname didn’t sound “drawing room.”
“Do you want me to go?” Ruth asked, but Nora had no time to do more than shake her head. She had plenty of persuasive arguments left and intended to use them.
“Dr. Gibson, how good to see you.”
Nora started at the sight of the lady in the doorframe. She was beautifully attired, her bonnet a masterwork of asymmetric japonais motifs, with a parasol slung over her arm.
“Lady Woodbine?” Nora hadn’t seen her aristocratic patient in several weeks—not since determining that she was conclusively recovered from her surgery, the cesarean section that had brought Nora so much attention and acclaim.
“I thought you were in the country.”
“Came to visit my cousin. Little Benby is still at home, but you’ll be glad to hear your namesake is thriving.”
Ah. Lady Woodbine’s slightly different inflections explained the mysterious name.
The child Nora had delivered safely via cesarean, Charles Benedict Beady Rawlston, owed the Beady in his name to her, though naturally Nora had traded her last name for Daniel’s after her marriage.
She’d not expected Beady to figure in his everyday moniker, however, and flushed at the unexpected tribute.
“Of course I am. That’s wonderful news. You look very fit yourself, if I may say so.”
Lady Woodbine smiled. “Thanks to you. Motherhood agrees with me.”