Chapter 21
“Thanks for coming with me. I know you’ve put in a long day already.”
Harry’s voice—low, mumbled, half-buried under the clamor of the busy street—breached Daniel’s cluttered thoughts. It was true. He’d had a taxing day, but not as many in a row as Harry.
“What do you think it is?”
Harry frowned, his ginger whiskers catching the bleak sunlight. “Strange presentation. Strong man, only twenty-four, delirious and fevered. No rashes.”
“What’s he doing?” Daniel nearly trod into a foul brown puddle on the pavement. But then, everything looked foul and brown. Even the autumn leaves were painted with paltry dark hues and muddled colors. At least the rain had ceased momentarily.
“Hallucinating and frantic. We can’t get him to lie still for anything.”
Daniel frowned, puffing through his mouth as they passed a courtyard with leaning privies.
Ten feet above him, a silent child in a rag of a gown peered at him from a window, face pressed mournfully against the dirty, barred glass.
Daniel studied the little prisoner until Harry’s words called him back.
“He’s entirely out of his mind. It started a couple hours ago.
I came home to get you because I was too tired to think through it alone.
” Daniel abandoned his other thoughts—fuzzy images of Nora sleeping with her back to him and Adams grinning at him in the hallways of Bart’s as if they shared a secret.
Harry never admitted defeat or asked for help unless… No, Daniel couldn’t remember an instance. “After we see him, you should get a cab home and have supper with Julia. I can finish your calls.”
Harry didn’t respond for a long beat, his eyes shuffling through the huddles of people sharing the pavement. “Julia left yesterday to visit her parents.”
The words came out stiff, starched and ironed with some emotion Daniel couldn’t place. Perhaps Harry was wading through marriage troubles himself and could commiserate. “Did you two have a row?”
“Nothing like that.” Harry transferred his bulging doctor’s bag to his other hand and dodged a sour-faced woman to step up to a black door coated in greasy finger streaks.
He knocked once and entered, for the door, like most in this collection of rookeries, was left unlocked.
The daylight, however thin and stifling as it had been on the narrow street, died as if enclosed in a coffin the moment they stepped inside.
Tenement air. Dull, soupy, teeming with the accumulated smells of sweat, cooking, rubbish.
Harry navigated the shadowy hall into a back room, where a young woman huddled with a whining child on her lap, shadows in a cell of disorder and darkness.
Daniel’s first instinct was to treat the pair and tend to whatever had made their faces so haggard and hopeless, but the true patient swayed behind them, a thin, unshaven man kneeling on the bed, jabbing a wooden spoon erratically in the air.
“What’s he on about now?” Harry asked.
The woman answered in a voice flatter than paper. “He’s crimping pipes. Thinks he’s at the factory. Apparently, I’m another worker, one he doesn’t get on with. He’s threatened to crack my head several times.”
Harry sighed. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Healey. I’ve brought my friend to help, as promised. This is Dr. Gibson. Your husband still hasn’t slept?”
She shook her head. “Between him and her…” She looked at the child, features twisting in anguish.
“Sam,” Harry called as he approached the bed. The man didn’t respond to his name. “Sam, it’s Dr. Trimble. You shouldn’t be up.”
Sam flourished the spoon, and his lip twitched up like an angry cur’s. “I didn’t take a break. You’ll not be docking my pay, Robbins!”
“Thinks you’re the foreman, Mr. Robbins.” Mrs. Healey winced as Sam swung his arm at Harry, but Harry caught the spoon easily, arresting it in a muscled fist.
“Don’t you take me in!” Sam screamed, and lunged forward, coming at Harry with yellow teeth.
“Daniel!” Harry called. “A little help!” But he was already in motion, grappling the crazed man’s shoulders. Together, using every hand and elbow they had between them, they wrestled Sam Healey to the filthy mattress. Daniel’s elbow pressed into something damp, the smell of excrement stifling.
Mrs. Healey set the crying child on the floor and tried to come to their aid.
Harry waved her off. “We’ve got him. We won’t hurt him.”
“What started this?” Daniel asked over the commotion, bracing his feet against the floor as Sam tried to wriggle free.
Her words shook. “Lost his job and didn’t eat or go to the pub for two days, trying to save it for me. He only took water and nothing else.” Her face crumbled, falling into the disorder of terror and regret.
“Delirium tremens,” Harry huffed as he pressed his knee into Sam’s back.
“Are you sure?” Daniel asked.
Harry rolled his eyes. “You’ve not spent much time in Glasgow, I take it.” He grunted out the sarcastic words as Sam writhed beneath his grip. “Two days of no liquor. And now an attack of shaking, puking, and hallucinations. It’s delirium tremens. Got to be. He needs a weak draft.”
“Not just vomiting,” the wife interrupted timidly. “He’s been running from the other end since last night.”
Daniel’s grip loosened slightly. “Diarrhea?”
Healey flailed. “Don’t let him move,” Harry snapped.
The wife nodded. “I can’t keep him clean, but he’s passing…well, it’s scarcely more than water now.”
Daniel traded glances with Harry, but Harry spoke first.
“His color. Look.”
There was no window, and the paltry lamplight made it difficult to distinguish colors, but Harry was right. Sam’s skin bore a strange gray tint.
“When’s the last time he ate or drank?” Daniel asked.
“I gave him stew an hour ago, but it all came up and out again.” As she spoke, the struggling man whimpered and went limp at last. Harry released him, smoothing down his crumpled jacket.
“Keep still, now. We don’t want any trouble.
” Though his voice was calm, Daniel recognized fear in the man’s eyes as he bent close, searching inside his open bag.
“Think it’s a double diagnosis?” Harry whispered.
Delirium tremens and cholera at the same time? Daniel exhaled in a sharp burst, desperate to believe this was all caused by hunger and a lack of alcohol. But he couldn’t tell, and they needed to know for certain. “Show me his chamber pot.”
As Harry made to move toward the wife, Sam Healey turned his head, face twisting into submission in a grotesque smile. “Are you taking bets? Half a crown on Voltaire.” He reached up and pushed the wooden spoon against Harry’s coat.
“Dear Lord, he’s at the races now,” Mrs. Healey moaned. “He’s not usually like this,” she promised. “He drinks away his wages, but he’s never deranged.”
Daniel studied the man, imagining his face calm instead of wearing this mask of mania.
“We can’t allow him to get agitated again,” Harry muttered. “After two nights of no sleep, his heart might give out.”
“If he won’t sleep on his own, we’ll have to make him.” Daniel looked at Harry’s bag. “You carry chloroform, don’t you?”
Harry nodded. “Just a bottle. I don’t drag the whole vaporizer about. Even if I did, we’d have a hell of a time getting the mask on him.”
Lying on the bed, Sam began cheering on his hallucinatory horse race.
“Get on, Voltaire. Two more lengths. Come on, boy! Whip ’em!” His hand swung madly, urging on the phantom rider, but then he curled in with a cry, clutching his stomach.
Cholera cramps were said to be excruciating.
Daniel swept his fingers through the depths of Harry’s medical bag, identifying bottles by feel: paregoric, with its flared, broad outline; quinine, with its flat metal stopper; and then—yes—he located the chloroform, with its sloping shoulders and tapered neck.
He pulled it out and handed it to Harry.
“No!” Sam grunted in dismay, holding his stomach and groaning as if he’d ruptured his appendix.
“He lost. I’m out ’alf a crown. We’ll starve, all of us!
” On the floor beside him, not to be outdone, the child competed with a passionate scream, and the ceiling above thundered with someone stomping for quiet.
“Poor fool,” Harry muttered. “He can’t even win in his delusions.”
“I’m mixing the chloroform with port wine. That will get alcohol and the anesthesia into him at the same time.” Daniel had to lean close to Harry’s ears to be heard.
But before he’d completed the mixture, Healey stopped wailing, turning rigid, his face frozen.
“What the hell?” Harry darted forward, searching for breath and a pulse, jostling Daniel’s arm and spilling a trail of wine. “He’s starting to seize.”
Daniel thrust the spoon of medicine at him. “Give it now.”
Harry tipped the spoon into Sam’s mouth, then recoiled as Sam gasped and gagged, spewing the mixture into the rank air.
“Too late,” Daniel muttered. “Help me roll him.”
The coughing increased in violence as they pointed Sam’s sputtering head to the floor.
Harry pounded his back. The child hunched her head in fright and cried fit to undo a saint.
As soon as Healey’s trachea was free of the offending liquid, tight gasps burst from Sam’s lips and transformed to guttural whispers. “I’m a dead man.”
“Should we restrain him?” Daniel asked, pulling straps from his bag.
“Dead man,” Sam groaned, keeping up his tearful tirade.
“Take your little one into the hall,” Harry commanded Mrs. Healey, waiting while she hauled her resisting daughter through the doorway.
“We’ve got to calm him,” Daniel said as he fumbled with the restraints.
“If you tie him down, he’ll only fight more.” Harry gripped the man’s shoulders. “Sam.” No response from the fixed eyes and large pupils. “Sam.” He modulated his voice, making it level and low. “Mr. Robbins sent me.”
Sam jerked, searching for the voice. Harry leaned closer, putting a hand on his sweating, shivering cheek. Daniel reached up for a wrist, finding the thundering pulse. Too fast to count.