Chapter 35 #2
“I’ll check her before you leave,” Nora said, glad Sarah had seen fit to put her in the nearest bedroom.
There was no time to be shuttling to the servant rooms in the attics and back.
Nora slipped inside the silent room to find a woman even older and thinner than Aunt. “Miss Pritchard?” Nora said softly.
The woman rolled her eyes toward Nora, squinting as she focused. Then the lids widened in surprise. “Daniel’s wife?” she whispered, her throat too parched for normal speech.
Nora inhaled. “Yes.” Somewhere in the list of duties for a lady’s maid, between setting out clothes and drawing baths, was the unspoken dictate to carry the same grudges as your lady. Nora saw Agnes’s compliance plainly in her distrusting eyes. “I’m here to help you both.”
“Is my lady—”
“She’s resting at the moment,” Nora reassured her as she took up her wrist to feel her pulse.
The skin was paper dry, but the palpitation under Nora’s fingertips beat steady and persistent.
She could wait a few minutes while Nora attended Aunt.
“If you start feeling worse, call for me,” she instructed.
“I’ll take care of Aunt Wilcox for you.” From the nervous fumbling of Agnes’s hands to her wrinkled brow, Nora knew that promise would do more to calm her than anything else.
“You did an excellent job nursing her while you could. I’ll take over now. ”
The woman nodded, anxiety sloughing visibly from her face.
As Nora stepped out of the room, she left the door open to hear the woman easily.
“You can go now,” Nora told Sarah, attempting to hide her reluctance.
Sending away her only set of helpful hands seemed her worst idea yet, but what could she do without any of her tools or medicines?
She needed Daniel. “Be sure to dress warm.”
Then she returned to her examination of Aunt Wilcox—no easy task without any of her tools, but Horace had taught her to roll heavy paper into a tube when she had no stethoscope, and her fingers would do, for now, in place of a thermometer.
Aunt Wilcox’s pulse throbbed thready and slow, her skin far too cold.
In her haste to send for help, Nora hadn’t paid any mind to the fire, and it had sunk to embers.
She needed hot bricks, but they took time to warm.
Nora shoveled coal from the half-filled scuttle onto the grate and blew until flames licked to life again, then stacked the forgotten bricks around them.
She tried again with the soaked handkerchief, but Aunt Wilcox refused to suck this time. Nora squeezed the drops into her mouth, wetting the parched tongue, but it wasn’t enough to thin her sluggish blood.
As Nora lifted one eyelid, Aunt’s stare was vague and unfocused, her pupil nearly obscuring her blue iris. Far too big. Far too much like the eyes at death, the pupils expanding into black portals as if to let the soul out.
“Aunt.” Nora shook her by the shoulders, trying to elicit some response. Not that it would help. None of the patients in her wards who’d sunk this low had ever recovered.
She pictured Daniel’s stricken face. If he and his aunt never reconciled…
Nora pressed her ear to Aunt’s chest and felt the low vibrations of a weary heart, toiling to move meager amounts of thickened blood.
If she did nothing, this was the end.
She exhaled and dropped her head, ransacking her mind, demanding it give up a solution.
Julia.
The article just hours ago.
Her head snapped up. Mr. Torrance had described patients very close to this. She was still awaiting his reply, hoping for more details and to test the transfusion therapy on some animal first…
Aunt released a weak, broken breath.
Nora scanned the room, willing a syringe to miraculously appear, when her eyes fell on Aunt Wilcox’s writing desk and the cut-glass bottle holding half a dozen long quill pens. No doubt there was a penknife, too, somewhere.
Perhaps she could steal a little more time—at least give Daniel a chance to say goodbye if he hurried.
Nora rushed to the basement to find the kitchen and the cook. Unfortunately, the kitchen was dark, a scribbled note on the counter from the woman who’d run away and left several pots of broth to make up for her defection.
“Dammit,” Nora hissed as she removed the lids to find one pot of hot water.
It didn’t matter that she’d never attempted this before. Sarah should be back in time to help her, and there was nothing else to try except giving up, and that was no option at all. Daniel and the others might not want to risk attempting transfusion, but Aunt Wilcox had nothing more to lose.
Nora threw back the curtains so she could see well enough to rifle through the cupboards, trying to remember details.
Instead of transfusing his patients with milk or blood from a servant, Torrance had injected something he called “Dr. Latta’s solution” into his patients’ veins.
While Nora recalled the ingredients, she couldn’t recall the exact amounts.
And Dr. Thomas Latta himself—well, she’d found no trace of him in journal indexes or medical registers.
The only thing she knew for certain about Latta’s solution was that she’d find the three simple ingredients here.
Without the supplies and medicines in her bag, and with Aunt unable to swallow, this was all she could do—get liquid into Aunt Wilcox to ease her thirst and thin her blood, and hope she didn’t provoke a deadly transfusion reaction.
After picking up a step stool, Nora emptied the cupboards until she found what she needed—a tin of salt and a carton of bicarbonate of soda.
Pocketing both, she scooped some water into a kettle and legged it back upstairs, not trusting Aunt Wilcox’s thready pulse enough to leave her more than a few minutes.
As soon as Daniel arrived… Nora’s brow knit. Why wasn’t Sarah back?
She’ll be here soon, Nora told herself, and turned up the lamp.
She added pinches of salt and bicarbonate to the hot kettle, tasting it, hoping she’d find a good ratio—something close to the subtle saltiness of blood but not injurious to the body—like when shipwrecked sailors tried to slake their thirst with seawater.
Prying the window open several inches, she left the mixture to cool in the arctic air, then threw a harried glance at her patient.
If she sat beside her, dripping broth into her mouth and watched her die, no one would blame her. But if she proceeded with this madness, the results would be her fault.
“Stay with me a bit longer,” Nora urged, and turned to rifle through the desk. Her fingers shook in protest.
Eight pens. Some would split, but cut and trimmed, Nora figured she could assemble a tube of at least twenty inches.
With the pulse so suppressed, the hydrostatic pressure should be enough to force her makeshift mixture into Aunt Wilcox’s veins.
Though how she would manage, with only her own two hands…
She glanced at the window but saw only snow, swirling through the square and collecting on the sill of the open window.
“I’m sorry, Horace,” she told the almost empty room; Aunt Wilcox barely counted as another life in this state. “I can’t treat this quietly.”
She inspected the pens, choosing the strongest, and sharpened it to a fine point.
Then she trimmed off the remaining feather, leaving a pointed tube about five inches long.
The second quill split, but her third attempt yielded another tube, which she slid into the blunt end of the first. The next quill was too narrow, so she cast it aside, and the fourth split.
“You can slice open a trachea and tie off arteries,” Nora reminded herself as she shivered in the current of frozen air from the window. “Pull yourself together.” She wasn’t clumsy. Maybe the pens were too dry. She could have soaked them first.
No time! Just do it, she scolded, and tried again with the last quill, this time successfully.
Tube ready, she inspected the penknife, testing the point with her thumb. Despairingly dull, but it would have to do.
The mixture was lukewarm now. She slammed the window shut and set the kettle on the bedside table, pulling close beside Aunt Wilcox, her hip pressed to the bed.
She had a knife, a makeshift tube made of joined feather shafts, and warm water that, to her tongue, seemed about as salty as blood.
Aunt had been using a spouted cup. Nora blessed Adams, assuming he’d left it with Sarah to help coax liquid into Aunt.
She poured out the cold dregs of beef tea, rinsed the cup, and filled it with the warm mixture before snatching the shallow dish, still stained, that had been used to collect Aunt Wilcox’s blood.
Nora picked up a wizened arm, the skin disconcertingly cool to the touch, and propped it across the shallow basin.
Her feeble hopes sank as she compared the shrunken vessels to the width of the first doctored pen.
Cursing under her breath, she returned to the desk, snatched up the narrow quill she’d discarded, and whittled it to a fine point.
“Please work,” she whispered. And though she had to squint, bite her tongue, and curse, she managed to fold a minuscule pleat into the wider pen, forcing it into the narrower one.
“Don’t you dare break,” she ordered, then realized the command applied to herself just as well as her makeshift assembly. She surveyed the table. Everything ready, but she tasted the mixture one more time. She was guessing with the solution’s concentration, but this would have to do.
Taking a breath, she positioned the penknife with her right hand and angled her quill tube with the left until her fingers stopped trembling.
“All right.” Swiftly, she punctured the median cubital vein where it crossed the hollow of Aunt Wilcox’s elbow, then slid in the tube, letting blood seep into it. It oozed slowly, thick and dark.
When the blood reached the end of the tube, Nora pinched it shut, angling it upward gently, her right hand keeping the point secure in the vein.
Quickly now. Blood would seep through the joints of the tube if she didn’t hurry.
Freeing her right hand, praying the tube would stay in the vein and keeping her left impossibly still, she reached for the spouted cup.
Not daring to breathe, she released the pinched end and began slowly easing the mixture into the tube.
The majority of it spilled down the sides, flowing into the basin and across the bedspread, but enough entered the tube to force the blood inside back.
Into the vein, though? Nora watched the basin.
Pink swirled into the liquid, and her heart stopped until the color faded.
The blood had slid back into Aunt Wilcox’s body, chased by the solution, which was now trickling into her. If the point had dislodged, the liquid in the basin would be bloodred.
It’s working.
Arms burning from the strain of holding Aunt Wilcox’s arm completely still while grappling with the spouted cup, she manipulated the liquid into the misshapen tube.
Torrance had administered a quart of mixture at a time, but Nora still didn’t trust the unorthodox procedure.
She didn’t know what she feared most—the solution missing the vein, or flooding inside it.
Also, it seemed she’d overestimated her strength.
Her shoulders seized, trembling from the strain of keeping both arms aloft.
All of it intensified her headache until it throbbed in the back of her skull.
But she didn’t dare pour any faster, fearing what might happen when the solution reached Aunt’s heart.
She had no way to know how many spoonfuls she had pushed into her blood.
This wasn’t like the controlled press of a syringe.
A tremble started in Nora’s back. She couldn’t hold this position much longer.
Pour out another cup’s worth, Nora told herself, biting the inside of her cheek.
A quarter…half… If she had to guess, she’d postulate she’d delivered three ounces into the vein.
She made it to three-quarters, then dropped the cup, pulled the tube from the vein, and pressed a handkerchief to the wound with burning, aching hands.
Heart pounding, she sagged to her knees, leaning against the side of the bed.
She just had to keep pressure on the wound, keep every drop of hard-fought fluid inside.
Clumsy with exhaustion, she tied the arm loosely with the handkerchief.
With luck, Aunt Wilcox would stay alive until she had a real syringe, another batch of mixture, and Daniel to help her.
With two more hands and proper equipment…
Nora tried to push to her feet, then realized what she’d ignored while pouring the infusion and binding the wound—black clouds blurring the edge of her vision and ringing ears growing louder every second.
Smelling salts. There were some in a silver holder on Aunt Wilcox’s table.
Nora fumbled as sparks burst through the darkness veiling her eyes.
Seconds ago her arms had burned with pain, but now she couldn’t feel them.
Breathing in rapid pants, Nora heard something fall to the floor and realized there was no help for it; she was on her way down, too, and nothing could stop her from slumping in a heap.
You choose the absolute worst times to faint, she berated herself.