Chapter 34
Daniel cornered her in the water closet, brushing her teeth.
“Horace told me to find you,” he explained, sidling past the door. “And I heard some of the shouting from the ward. What happened?”
Nora spat into the washbasin and pressed a wet towel to her face.
No way to avoid telling him the new problem she’d created.
“I had no idea Aunt was here. Apparently, the maid came down the main stairs while I went up the back with Horace.” She paused just to spare him the truth a second longer.
“Aunt overheard me mentioning my pregnancy.”
She recounted the argument as stoically as she could, watching her husband’s jaw tighten. When she finished, he passed a tired hand over his eyes.
“How is your stomach?” he asked quietly.
She swallowed, touched by the tender tone. But even if he sided with her now, what about next week? Ten years from now? Would he still think defending her was worth alienating his family?
“I don’t know,” Nora admitted. “My brain is spinning too fast to take note of anything else.”
“I’m sorry. She’s… My aunt has a quick temper, but she’ll soften in time. By the time our child is born—”
Nora looked up at him.
He shrugged. “I’ll talk to her. She’ll recover.”
“I don’t know if she will, Daniel.”
“None of us are at our best just now. Especially since the lecture.”
“She said she came to tell me about Miss Vaughn,” Nora said, wincing at the thought of the young woman’s burns.
“She’s improving,” Daniel asked. “Adams said he saw her three days ago.”
“And?”
“Still in a great deal of pain. Sleeping mostly, from the laudanum, but her skin is starting to granulate.” As she turned away from the basin, he took her hand. “None of the scars will show. Her clothes will cover them.”
Nora bit her lip. Was she supposed to consider that a mercy? Julia’s scars, both inside and out, gave her untold distress, no matter how cleverly she concealed them.
“It shouldn’t have happened,” she said quietly. Mr. Brandon, if he survived the months with his leg in traction, would have to learn to walk all over again. No easy task for a man aged seventy-seven.
“No,” Daniel agreed, pulling her close and sliding his arms around her.
She drew back, though not because she didn’t want the embrace. “Are you angry?”
His mouth twitched. “I am, some. But that doesn’t seem particularly helpful just now.”
“At me or at her?” Nora placed each word carefully, as if building a house of cards.
He loosened his hold, studying her with concern. “It’s not really a case of—”
“Daniel.” She wanted an honest response, not sidestepping.
“Neither.” He blew out a resigned breath. “At life in general, I suppose. Every time we try to do some good, it burns down in front of us. And now you’re…” Daniel blinked twice, his eyes glossing. At once, Nora understood why.
“Now you’re worried I’m sick,” she whispered.
Daniel swallowed, then gave a barely visible nod.
“I’m not,” she promised.
“You can’t be sure.” He tipped out the words like coins he couldn’t spare.
“If I was, you shouldn’t be this close.”
He shook his head, pulling her nearer, resting his chin on her forehead. Nora’s eyes stung.
“You know perfectly well how smells bother me since the pregnancy.”
“Yes.” The word was unsteady. “Will you rest awhile?”
It didn’t hurt, on a day like today, to be persuadable. “Yes.”
He nodded, satisfied. “I don’t know what we’re in for,” he murmured. “I keep thinking things can’t get any worse, but the way Horace speaks about the last cholera epidemic… He doesn’t think we’ve even neared the peak of this one.”
She shook her head. “You could have been a barrister, you know. Never dealt with any of this.”
“No, I couldn’t.” His hands tightened again. “And you couldn’t, either.” He might not celebrate her compulsion for medicine right now, but he understood it.
Maybe he was right and Aunt Wilcox would relent, once sufficient time had passed and their wards weren’t full of cholera.
But this rupture might just as easily have arisen from something else.
She and Aunt Wilcox were like two reactive liquids that should never be combined unless you wanted an explosion.
Whether it was this year or next, Daniel would have to choose.
Somehow, she’d have to make this up to him.
***
So many of their carefully tended patients died that whenever one recovered, everyone looked on in numb surprise, bewildered by the slow transformation from husk back to health.
The relentless and unpredictable losses took a toll on all of them, but Daniel was especially irritable, with the date of Aunt Wilcox’s Christmas party fast approaching.
They were not invited, and Nora knew the sting of it had burrowed into his chest.
Aunt’s party was one of his favorite traditions. One of his best childhood memories was the year he was finally deemed old enough to attend. He’d only missed one, when the weather was too wretched to permit him to travel from Paris, where he was studying.
It was easy for Nora to imagine, as Daniel’s eyes grew shadowed and dejected, that she alone didn’t outweigh the things he had lost.
Aunt Wilcox had never even allowed her to present a defense, and as one day succeeded another, Nora’s arguments swelled and rankled inside her.
Not that they’d do her any good. Aunt Wilcox would never listen, and that certainty rankled even more, as niggling and impossible to ignore as a chipped tooth.
Between rounds, Nora tried to immerse herself in articles, but the words ran away from her and forced her to corral the same paragraphs over and over.
A dull ache in her head sanded down her thoughts until they had no handholds.
Finally, she sighed and set her journal aside, irritated by the persistent queasiness brought on by the pregnancy.
“You know, I think there’s something to that transfusion idea you mentioned,” Julia said from the sofa, making Nora start. The room was so quiet, her bitterness so strongly brewed, that she’d forgotten she wasn’t alone.
“Pardon?” Nora straightened in her chair.
“The article you mentioned about transfusions. I took it to Harry, and he explained the terms that were obscure to me.”
“Dr. W. Pepper’s article? The transfusions of milk?” Nora’s brow creased.
Julia shook her head. “No. The other doctor who used that solution. Lady’s—”
“Latta’s,” Nora corrected.
“Yes, that’s right. It sounded much more promising than the milk one.”
Nora frowned. It had sounded promising, but as Daniel had pointed out, Torrance, the Rugby-based surgeon advocating transfusion therapy in a single, brief article, was referencing cases from the first epidemic, years and years ago.
Nora had written to Mr. Torrance, care of the journal’s editors, requesting further details but had received no response.
“It did sound interesting,” Nora admitted. “But there have been plenty of deaths after putting foreign substances into a patient’s veins.”
“Yes, I know. But that surgeon…Torrance?”
Nora nodded.
“Says six of his seven cases recovered. It sounds almost miraculous…”
Nora grinned at her friend, calmly conversing as she drew her silk thread into a neat French knot. “Julia?”
She stopped talking, lifting her eyebrows.
“Are you becoming a doctor?”
Julia’s cheeks bloomed pink as she bit down on her bottom lip.
“It’s the fault of living in this house.
I have no other conversations to overhear.
” Her eyes fell, and Nora swallowed the lump in her throat, wishing Julia could have the half-dozen or so children she longed for.
Nora knew her friend would far rather hear the prattle of little ones than referee disagreements between surgeons.
“I admit, I like siding with you when the discussion gets heated.” Julia’s fingers played with the needle. Then she looked up, lips twitching with a faint smile. “The profession is awfully catching.”
Nora grinned. “I certainly contracted a lifelong case from Horace.”
“I’m enjoying the nursing more than I thought,” Julia admitted.
“If I could have my own children…” She cut off, pain apparent in her face.
“I like that Harry and I have work to do together. I like being able to help and understand the arguments at the dinner table. I enjoy compounding salves and tinctures with you and Horace.” Her voice strengthened and grew more pointed.
“I certainly have no desire to venture into the surgical theater. You can keep the blood to yourselves.”
Nora studied Julia’s confident smile. She was a different woman from the girl Nora first met when she returned home. Nora swiped at her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “You know what a watering pot I’ve been lately. I just—” She swallowed. “I’m glad you’re here. You keep us all sane.”
Julia scrunched her nose. “I would never go that far.”
“I should get back to work,” Nora said, tickled by the unexpected exchange with her friend. She’d never realized before Harry married, but this house had always needed at least one more female.
Nora returned to the ward, where Daniel was struggling with the drinking tubes, more tired than ever.
When one of the recovering women hummed “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” between spoonfuls of broth, he flinched, making Nora’s eyes burn.
He shouldn’t be cast off from his family right before Christmas; it was needlessly cruel for a man expecting his first child.
And keeping him from seeing his sisters…
In the past two weeks, the only word he’d received from the Gibsons was a furious missive from his father, dripping with feelings of betrayal.
She knew he wanted to drive out and see them, but he couldn’t disappear for days in the middle of this outbreak.
“Please go upstairs and get something to eat. Maybe lie down,” Nora pressed, and Daniel complied so easily and silently that her worries only multiplied as she watched him drag his feet up the narrow staircase.
Nora closed her eyes, willing away the nausea and aching head that plagued her. There was no time for pregnancy symptoms amid so many other pressing needs. After a deep breath, she placed her stethoscope on the patient’s chest and listened carefully. Miss Bagnell’s pulse was improving.
All the patients had been fed and now were sleeping or resting, buckets in hand for the vomit. A catalog of bleak emotions—fear and hopelessness, fatigue and pain—was displayed across their quiet faces.
Silent suffering, commendable here on the wards, was impossible to summon herself.
Nora couldn’t watch Daniel wither any longer.
She had to do something. She checked the clock on the wall—half past two.
The proper hour for making social calls.
She could attempt a trip across town if she took a hackney. It was too cold outside to walk.
Aunt wouldn’t welcome her, but if she came with an offering… She could be meek and tractable. For Daniel’s sake.
It wouldn’t hurt to try. This was supposed to be a season of goodwill. If she failed, she’d at least know she’d done everything she could.
Still frowning, Nora went for her coat, wishing courage was as easy to don as the cloak and muffler that armored her against the December chill.