Chapter 30
“We can’t avoid it any longer.”
The fire in the hearth raged valiantly against the icy night as the six occupants turned their eyes to Horace.
He leaned forward in his bedraggled armchair—a strange contrast to the extravagant cut-crystal bowls on the table beside him, gifted by some French royalty.
The angled glass collected the orange flames and threw out glittering shards of light over the group.
“Numbers are rising. Harry, what are you seeing on your district calls?” Horace turned his silvery blue eyes to Harry, who lifted his head from his hands at the sound of his name.
“I saw twenty-two cases yesterday. Would have been twenty-four, but two were dead before I arrived.”
“Neighborhood?” Horace asked.
Harry rolled his eyes up in tired thought, as if reaching for yesterday’s information tasked him to his limit. “Southwark. Thereabouts.”
Daniel swore quietly but fervently. “We’ve had six doctors and students contract it at Bart’s. We’ve lost two already.”
Horace glanced at him briefly. “It’s getting closer.”
“Why haven’t any of us gotten ill?” Julia asked reluctantly, as if frightened to tempt fate.
Horace exhaled. “There’s no way to know, but it means we keep doing what we have been. We take the same tea and broth regimen as our patients. No milk. No cold water. I want everyone to keep coal and incense burning in whatever rooms you occupy and drink a bit of wine daily.”
Harry threw back his head and finished his scotch with a violent grimace. “Or whatever liquor suits you,” he teased.
Mrs. Phipps sighed, unaware of the comical picture made by the zebra posed just above her, looking as if he wanted to nibble at her severely knotted hair. “There’s no more avoiding it. We might as well set up the ward for cholera.”
Daniel paced faster. He’d said the least of anyone. Nora tried not to make eye contact as she glanced at him. She didn’t want to provoke him further.
“It won’t bring money,” Horace pointed out. “Only the most wretched find a hospital better than home.”
“And there’s nothing to learn from them,” Harry added grimly. “We’ve all done dissections on cholera. We all know exactly what happens. We just don’t know why.”
“Or how to stop it,” Nora piped up.
“No money, no scientific benefits,” Horace recited.
“We can save them,” Julia said, her cheeks pinking. “Or some. Isn’t that enough reason?”
“Not for the grocer or the washwoman,” Mrs. Phipps grumbled. “They bill us no matter how many lives we save.”
“Daniel, can you stop that infernal pacing?” Harry interrupted. “You’re going to drive us all mad.”
Daniel jerked to a halt in front of the mantelpiece, glaring at the stuffed falcon. He pulled a crisp piece of stationery from his pocket. “A missive came from Aunt Wilcox just before we gathered in here. We have another problem.”
All heads jerked upward as the storm shook the roof. Daniel rolled his eyes. “I could have done without the theatrics of the thunder. Nevertheless…”
He unfolded the letter and read: “Mr. Muller, the renowned comparative linguist, has had to cancel his scientific lecture to be held on Sunday, November 4, due to family illness. He will no longer be able to travel to London. I have secured the vacated event for Nora to present her experiences with training midwives. She will be presenting to the Marylebone Literary and Scientific Institute at 8 p.m., the fourth.”
“That’s next week,” Mrs. Phipps blurted out.
Nora sucked in a small gasp. The Marylebone literary and scientific club was no small gathering of philanthropic women.
Nor was it a fraternity of doctors or scientists.
It was a collection of the richest, most influential people in London, who took at least a self-serving interest in science, art, and literature. Daniel read on.
“As you are aware, her audience will be exacting, with high expectations of propriety and expertise. There must be absolutely no embarrassment to me or our family.” His voice faded. “There’s more.”
“Oh dear,” Mrs. Phipps pronounced, which did little to ease Nora’s nerves.
“She includes a list of acceptable clothing, accessories, mannerisms…” Daniel’s voice trailed off glumly.
Nora squeezed her hands together. “I was expecting a ladies’ circle in a parlor.
Certainly, a fine parlor, but not the new Marylebone lecture hall.
” Nora hoped for someone to offer bracing encouragement, but Julia’s expression fell somewhere between dread and despair.
Harry looked like he’d just watched her consume a beetle.
“Well, it seems we’ve already stepped into the bog. No trying to keep our feet clean now.” Horace leaned back in his chair with a small groan. “If we’re looking for funding, there’s no better spot than Marylebone.”
“And if we’re looking for enemies, we’ll make the most powerful ones there,” Daniel countered.
“She’ll be addressing MPs and aristocrats.” Again, if Mrs. Phipps could have looked a little less distressed at the prospect, it would have bolstered Nora greatly.
“I’m more than capable of lecturing,” she reminded them.
Julia turned her eyes politely elsewhere, which only worried Nora more.
“We haven’t the best record.” Harry didn’t have to expound. They all knew what happened the last time she’d addressed London society.
Daniel leaned an elbow against the zebra’s sharp fur. “Not to mention, secrecy becomes even more important. If the attendees found out you’re with child, it would be a scandal. And with my aunt—perhaps a homicide. She’d surely kill me.”
Nora didn’t appreciate the dramatic use of words.
“How would they know?” she demanded with more bite than necessary.
The detail of her pregnancy seemed utterly unrelated.
“I don’t have any visible signs.” She cast a furious stare at Horace, quelling whatever he had started to say about the shape of her nose. “None that normal people would see.”
“Eventually, my family will need to know. They might be curious when we appear with a fat infant in a pram.” Daniel’s eyebrows raised half in surrender, half in warning.
“And when Aunt does the math, she’ll know we did all this campaigning for the midwives and training while you were pregnant.
And there’s nothing more dangerous than my aunt when she’s affronted.
Then what happens to your support and funding? ”
“Can’t you placate her—” Nora began.
Harry laughed mirthlessly. “He cannot. That woman visited us in Paris when we were in medical school. I’ve been in navy battles less terrifying.”
Nora sighed. “Then do I refuse?”
Daniel sputtered. “Absolutely not. She arranged this as a favor. I only mean we need to be strategic about how we share news of the pregnancy. Perhaps swear we didn’t know.”
Nora rolled her eyes. “We’re both doctors.”
“We’ll think of some excuse.”
Horace made a few excited gestures from his chair. “I once arrived at a home for abdominal pain and delivered a full-term infant to a very surprised mother. She’d already had three children and had no clue she was expecting.”
“What about her monthlies?” Harry asked.
“She’d not had them since she started nursing her first child. She thought she had an acute attack of the bowels.”
“But her abdomen? How did she not notice a massive belly?” Harry countered.
“Hardly distended at all,” Horace announced enthusiastically. “Mind you, I can’t be sure the child was full term, but it was nearly six pounds and it lived.”
“May we return to the matter at hand? Marylebone, if you recall,” Julia chided.
Harry and Horace both looked back to the annoyed group as if they’d forgotten the rest were there.
Daniel cleared his throat. “And we need to decide what we’re doing in the ward. We’ve tried to do the right thing by keeping Amelia. It’s right for her, at least. I’m still worried about Meg Prather and her consumption. She cannot survive a bout of cholera on top of it. Nor can our other patients.”
Horace cleared his throat, his eyebrows tangled in contemplation. “We have the facilities to handle twenty patients, but not the hands. Not for cholera patients. We need help.”
“And the midwives need work,” Nora answered.
“No one wants to hire them after they found the Surrey girl guilty of manslaughter this week. But Julia had an idea…” Nora looked to her friend, who nudged her on with a nod.
“We could offer the midwives a salary to help nurse the cholera patients. They need the work, and it is a ripe opportunity to give them training.”
“Who would pay money for a nurse?” Mrs. Phipps demanded. “Every household has a medicine cabinet stocked with essentials, and it takes no training to wipe a forehead. I did it with you.”
“Not true,” Nora disagreed. “You had Horace to tell you what I should drink and when and how to keep me clean and warm. But we all know there aren’t enough doctors and medical students for London on a good year. Harry can’t see half the people on his list most days.”
Harry inhaled in wordless consensus, and Nora continued with a nod. “But if we train the midwives in nursing, they would be more useful to the doctors and perhaps earn their respect.”
Daniel hung his shaking head like a man about to deliver dismal news.
“They’ll be useful so long as cholera is overrunning us,” he agreed, not looking at any of them.
“And if we have the resources, we can pay them to make up for Adams’s campaign against them.
But the doctors will only be angrier. They don’t share their territory. ”
“It’s an absurd stance,” Horace growled. “If they stopped being such fools—”
“How can we change their minds?” Harry asked as if he already knew it was a lost cause. “And also, what did the woman—that patient of yours, Horace—think the quickening movements were?”
“Apparently, she never recalled feeling them!” Horace fumbled the pipe he’d been filling, and the tobacco tumbled across his lap and hideous chair. “She dismissed them as stomach complaints.”
“Maria auitami,” Mrs. Phipps groaned under her breath. Nora wasn’t the only one who’d learned Italian in the two years on the Continent.
Nora stood and rolled her stiff shoulders as she tried to gather her thoughts.
The walls shivered with the wind, and the light from the lamps shook the shadows in a strange dance.
“We need nurses. We need money. And the money we need is at Marylebone.” Nora pressed her unsteady palms together to hide her doubts.
“I have to give the lecture and win them over.”
Daniel’s eyebrows flexed. “You understand the strings attached?”
Nora straightened her shoulders. “We have no choice. Tell Aunt I won’t embarrass her.”
She quietly prayed it was the truth.