Chapter 29
“Nora.” Julia’s breathless voice conveyed a tight, controlled urgency.
Nora glanced up from the burnt arm she was bandaging, coating the injury with cold, soft flour that eased the pain as the young boy gritted his teeth.
He’d been injured by a blast of steam from a burst factory pipe, and his father was watching her narrowly, still disappointed there was no male doctor available to help his son.
“Yes?” Nora asked cautiously, praying that this interruption was no domestic emergency involving cooks or laundry. If the boy’s irate father was presented with one more reminder that she was a woman…
“Mrs. Franklin is here with a child.” Julia’s eyes darted to the doorway, a clear message to hurry. Ruth had never brought a patient in. One of her newborns? Fragile and on the cusp of life? Nora brushed the flour from her hands.
“Mrs. Trimble can finish bandaging your son.” Nora sped through instructions, giving the last ones from the hallway, hurrying to the clinic entrance, racing through possible scenarios. Aspirated meconium? Cord strangulation?
Wheelbarrow.
Nora stopped short at the wooden gardener’s cart in the middle of the reception room. Ruth twisted her hands, eyes red as she pulled back a ragged blanket revealing a filthy young girl curled into a ball of misery.
“What?” This was no newborn, but a school-age child, limp with blue skin.
Ruth’s voice trembled as she spoke. “I delivered a stillborn child today. Found this girl—a sister—on the floor in this state. Cholera.”
“You brought her in a wheelbarrow?” Nora bent down, taking a frail wrist in her hands. Even her practiced fingers struggled to find a pulse.
“No cab would take her in her state. I had to plead for this rickety thing.”
“How far did you come?”
Just as Ruth tried to answer, the incensed father thundered down the hallway, carrying his crying son.
“Mr. Brown, stop,” Nora pleaded.
“I’ll take him to Bart’s. No one told me this place was run by women.” He nearly collided with Mrs. Phipps on his way out the door.
“Who was that?” she demanded, scowling after him before her eyes riveted to the wheelbarrow. “And what’s this?”
Julia emerged from the hallway, shaking. “I’m sorry,” she said through trembling lips. “I was bandaging him just as you said. The father asked where the male doctors were, and I said they were doing rounds at St. Bart’s. He just yanked up the boy and left without a word.”
“Never mind that now.” Nora turned her eyes back to the softly panting girl. If she examined her quickly and sent her home, she’d not be breaking the agreement to keep cholera out of the hospital. “Julia, I need clean linens and something for this girl to wear.”
Mrs. Phipps tossed her bonnet onto the desk. “I keep a small collection of clothes—for emergencies. I’ll find her a shift.”
For half a second, Nora wondered if Mrs. Phipps had always done so—even when Horace had appeared carrying a feeble eight-year-old almost twenty years ago.
Ruth twisted her skirt in a tight fist. “I probably shouldn’t have brought her, but—”
“I wouldn’t have left her, either. But I’m not sure it will help.
” Nora lifted the child carefully, trying to keep the filthiest parts away from her blouse.
The girl didn’t weigh nearly what she expected.
“Heavens, does she have hollow bones?” The motion expelled a small flood of clear water from the girl’s mouth.
Nora shifted so most of it splashed to the floor.
It was the symptom of cholera she most dreaded—when the fluids no longer required a heave to make their way out, but simply flowed like a high river breaching an embankment.
Ruth did a mincing step to avoid the sudden puddle. “Her name is Amelia Dawson. Her parents begged me to—”
“I can’t keep her in hospital. If people hear there’s cholera here, they won’t come.
” Back in the examination room, Nora swept aside the spills of soft flour and the unused bandages from treating the burnt boy and settled Amelia onto the table.
The small body—she could hardly admit there was a girl still inside—sprawled out without resistance or recognition.
A web of blue veins discolored her wraithlike arm, and a warning tinge of lavender suffused her lips. “She’s ice cold,” Nora said.
There were warming stoves in the patient ward that kept the room toasty against the coldest days. And clean linens. And screens to shield infectious patients.
“Go to the kitchen and get a hot kettle. Cook always keeps at least one ready,” Nora said.
Mrs. Phipps returned with full arms. “I brought a blanket from the oven, but we need to bathe her.”
“Ruth’s getting water. I have sponges in here.” Nora took the warm blanket and put it over the girl, willing it to seep some heat back into the frozen limbs. She looked up at Mrs. Phipps’s worried face, somehow older than it had been at the breakfast table. “I can’t keep her here. We all agreed—”
Mrs. Phipps pursed her lips. “Does she have a decent home to go back to once you treat her?”
“Her mother just delivered a stillborn and is failing herself. The father can’t take care of both of them,” Ruth answered grimly as she set down the kettle.
“You did the right thing,” Mrs. Phipps clipped, always brisker when deeply troubled. “We’ll care for her. Quietly,” she added when Nora opened her mouth to protest. There was currently a sign on the clinic door announcing Cholera Patients Seen in Homes Only.
“We must be adaptable,” Mrs. Phipps said reflexively—one of Horace’s maxims. “She’s a child.”
The four women worked together, removing the stained nightshirt and wiping down the cold, soiled skin. At one point, the girl gave a sigh that sounded so much like a last breath that Nora panicked and searched for a heartbeat. It still slogged on—lethargic and reluctant.
Nora fitted a tube into the girl’s mouth, tucking it between her teeth and cheek where the saliva glands were located, and used a funnel to drip a slow stream of tea. Jasmine leaves stimulated blood flow, and Nora’s most immediate fear was the small heart stopping.
“A cholera cot would be best,” Mrs. Phipps said, speaking of a cot with a hole cut away and a bucket placed underneath so the patient didn’t need to be moved and cleaned constantly.
Nora gave her head a small shake. She and Daniel had only just reconciled. If he came home to her cutting up cots and treating a cholera patient in their own home—
But then again, once he saw Amelia…
They’d done everything they could in the exam room. The girl hadn’t focused her eyes once. Nora doubted she knew where she was. If she survived, this day would be folded away into the mysterious vaults of her mind, never to be reopened. Nora chewed the inside of her lip and looked to Mrs. Phipps.
The older woman steeled herself. “We’ll put up the screens and set her far away from the others.” Her eyes dipped to Nora’s middle, and her voice dropped. “But perhaps you shouldn’t tend her anymore.”
Nora stepped forward to tuck the girl’s dangling arm on top of her frail chest. Without warning, the weak purple fingers closed around Nora’s, the grip fragile and pleading.
Mrs. Phipps knew the answer as soon as Nora lifted her eyes. “This way,” Mrs. Phipps said, leading Ruth out the room. “We’ll put her on a cot by the stove.”
Julia caught Nora’s sleeve as she started to follow. “We can let her stay, but Mrs. Franklin said Amelia’s mother delivered a dead baby today.” Julia’s voice lagged as her eyes melted into pools of blue worry. “It sounds like cholera kills unborn children.”
“I—I doubt—” Nora stammered.
“You should keep your distance.”
With timid hands, Nora smoothed her skirt over her stomach. It was swelling. Though not visible to anyone else, she’d loosened the drawstring on her drawers by several inches. The small person was making its presence known.
“But, Nora,” Julia added in a conciliatory tone before she sucked in her breath.
“You can still teach Ruth what to do. You could teach the midwives how to nurse all the sick patients instead of only laboring mothers. If you taught them basics like suturing and treatments, they could do work when you can’t. ”
Nora stood still, staring at the striped wallpaper.
Had the idea just sprung into existence in Julia’s mind?
It was surprisingly brilliant. “Horace always says cholera is like an invasion, marching over cities and devouring everything.” Nora’s words escaped slowly, knitting into solid thoughts as she spun them off her tongue.
Every doctor in London was whittling away with the demands of a sick, teeming city.
But the midwives were women with time and talent to spare.
Nora had thought only of training them in labor and delivery, but they could do far more.
They could help stem the flow of disease and suffering.
Women well acquainted with the most afflicted neighborhoods and their tenants.
“If it’s true—if cholera is an armed invasion”—Nora’s eyes widened—“then we need soldiers.”
“The midwives?” Julia asked hopefully, giving a small bounce on her feet.
Nora smiled. She could kiss the brilliant girl in front of her. “The midwives.”
***
Between the hackney and his umbrella, Daniel managed to stay mostly dry above his ankles, but he’d spent so much effort getting Horace safely through the swimming streets that he’d not placed his own feet carefully enough.
Now the two men were reduced to using the clinic entrance to avoid Mrs. Phipps’s wrath.
Whatever vile substance covered their shoes, they didn’t dare track it into her parlor.
“You’re back.” Julia froze as they opened the door. She balanced a pillow in one hand, a small pile of clothing in the other.
Horace gestured to the mud on his trousers. “Don’t come too close. We haven’t washed yet.”
“Cholera patients?” she asked, a strange tightness to her face.
“All day,” Horace replied. “We’ll change into new clothes in the ice room.”
Daniel hardly relished even chillier temperatures, but it was certainly the last place they needed to worry about infecting anyone. And unless Nora had had a terrible day, there were no bodies stored there at the moment.
“Would you bring a bucket of hot water and soap?” he asked.
Julia’s nervous eyes darted down the hall. “Of course.”
As he and Horace shivered through a fast scrub and change, a timid knock sounded on the door. “Yes?” Daniel asked, speeding up his numb fingers as he buttoned his shirt.
“It’s Nora. I need to show you both something.”
Horace met Daniel’s gaze, his eyebrows lowered. “That doesn’t sound promising.”
“Just a moment,” Daniel called through the thick door. Horace hadn’t even gotten his arms into his sleeves. But Horace was right—something tense and hesitant hung in her voice.
When they opened the door, she stood across the hall, hands knotted.
“Is something wrong?” Daniel prodded.
Instead of answering, she motioned them to the hospital ward. “Ruth brought in a patient today. She and Julia and Mrs. Phipps are tending to her. You need to see for yourselves.”
Daniel’s muscles tensed, coiled for whatever sight might meet him behind the screens Nora had positioned. Something dire enough that it required the attention of four women.
“This is Amelia.” Nora nudged away the screen to reveal an undersize child that hardly made a bump in the thick blankets covering her. The girl slept on despite the visitors, her large eyelids bulging slightly from her skeletal face.
“Cholera,” Horace said flatly.
Daniel glanced quickly between the silent observers and the girl.
“Yes,” Nora confirmed, nervously chewing her lip.
“I knew you didn’t want the cholera here,” Ruth admitted. “Her home was little better than the streets. I couldn’t leave her there.”
“Of course not,” Julia said, giving Daniel a warning glare. “We’ve agreed to care for her, and Nora will keep her distance.”
Horace gave a grim chuckle. “It seems every epidemic brings some dying girl in with the tide.”
“Don’t be absurd. She’s going home after we treat her. She has a family.” Mrs. Phipps squared her shoulders, ready for a battle.
“So you all expect her to stay?” Horace scanned the women who sported various expressions of guilt and fierceness.
“There’s no choice, is there?” Ruth spread her hands.
“There certainly is,” Daniel finally injected. “I could take her to the cholera ward at Bart’s.”
Four voices rose in tangled arguments, impossible to unwind into separate words.
Daniel raised his hand to stop them. “Didn’t we all agree—”
“We agreed not to start a cholera ward,” Nora pointed out, her voice so low everyone halted to hear her. “And we won’t. But I think we should treat Amelia. If it’s going to kill her, it will be quickly. And if she survives, we’ll return her home as soon as she’s strong enough.”
“The outlook is grim,” Horace interjected. “There’s very little chance—”
“What about the article I came across—from that surgeon, Mr. Torrance, transfusing the vein with solution?” Nora was stretching wildly and they all knew it.
“Haven’t read it. Not sure I need to.” Horace lowered his eyebrows in disdain. “I think you know well enough how it goes when we start throwing random substances into the bloodstream. We can’t let desperation make us fools.”
Daniel looked at the girl’s waxy face, her thin hair sprawled across the pillow like straw on a field of snow. He’d already lost the girl who reminded him of Julia. This one reminded him of Nora.
“I’ll not treat her, I promise,” Nora added.
Horace’s lips played with several expressions, one of them clearly surrender. “I fear we’re outnumbered.”
If Horace wouldn’t help him put up a fight, he’d look like a monster, ordering a dying child away. Nor did he have the stomach for it. “I am now.” Daniel sighed. “But we’ll only take this one.”