Chapter 40
He should have brought Horace. It would have taken longer to get here, but now he had three patients—four, when he counted his own child—sinking fast and a kitchen two stories away.
He needed to focus like never before. As Daniel raced through the frozen house, every heavy exhalation was an entreaty for his wife.
He’d never seen the kitchen or basement rooms, and he navigated them crudely, opening doors to storerooms and offices, before he found the pantry.
He cursed when he reached the stove, cool to the touch, the fire long spent.
Boiling a pan of water would take far too long.
He lit the coals anyway with trembling hands and raided the wine cellar.
He could start with that. He loaded a basket with bottles, coal, towels, and linen, and ran back upstairs.
Halfway through the front hall, he struck an ornate side table in the darkness and sent it sprawling and splintering.
He’d never cared less for any object. He ignored the sharp throb in his shin and continued his blind sprint.
His heart demanded he return at once to Nora, but intellect ordered him to tend the older women first. Nora had been able to speak coherently, which meant she wasn’t in the final stages. Yet.
Dropping his armful onto the bedroom carpet, he hurried to Aunt Wilcox’s side. Ashen skin, sunken cheeks. Daniel thumbed up her eyelids to check her pupils. They responded sluggishly to the light.
“Aunt, it’s Daniel. I’m here.” He pulled his tube from his bag and fitted it into her mouth, replacing the wet handkerchief.
After a brief tussle with a corkscrew, he opened the wine and attached a funnel to the tube, his toes pressing impatiently against the soles of his shoes.
Everything with cholera took painstaking time.
He inhaled as he forced his hands to mete out a trickle of wine. His aunt managed to swallow, a bitter pucker to her lips.
Must be a bad vintage.
He waited until he was certain she’d had at least four ounces and the wine began to dribble out the corner of her mouth before he removed the tube.
He took up the lantern and followed its wavering glow into the hallway, his glance ricocheting between Nora’s doorway and Pritchard’s.
But reason had fallen through the anxious chasm in his brain.
He needed to see Nora. He promised himself only a reassuring glance, but the skin of her cheeks was dry, crepe-like, as gray as the wings of a dead moth.
He coaxed several ounces of wine into her mouth and raised his voice until she finally fluttered her eyelids open, pain and exhaustion in the vacant recesses.
“You can go back to sleep. I’ll keep giving you liquids,” he promised.
Her eyes closed instantly, but her mouth cracked open. “Latta’s,” she whispered.
He kissed her forehead with frantic force. “Yes, Latta’s,” he agreed, though he had no idea who Latta was. He only knew she needed to rest and not worry.
***
Now for Miss Pritchard, the woman who’d always been his aunt’s shadow.
Silent, brooding, forever peering at Daniel with disapproval whenever he didn’t give his aunt due deference—which, at this crucial moment, he worried had been far too often.
He creaked open her door to find an all-encompassing blackness.
The lamp had burned out. A cloying stillness clung to the heavy air.
Daniel raised his own lamp, throwing shadows across the monstrous bedstead.
Not a rustle or whimper like those he’d grown accustomed to hearing from so many suffering patients.
“Miss Pritchard?” he asked slowly, inching forward. It took two more steps before he could discern her small shape in the twisted covers.
He moved the lamp toward her head and closed his eyes. No need to take her pulse. Her dried flesh was frozen in a mask of death, gray and pitiful. Miss Pritchard’s prim mouth now gaped open as if begging for a last drop of water, her once-stern cheeks collapsed and creased in surrender.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. He could never tell Aunt or Nora that Miss Pritchard had suffered silently and alone.
Neither would forgive herself, even though they’d each been battling the same demon disease.
Daniel gently closed her mouth, the leathery skin strange to the touch—just like all the cholera cadavers he’d handled.
He didn’t need this jarring evidence to know Nora, his child, and his aunt teetered at the precipice.
He shook his head and latched the heavy door behind him.
Only three patients now.
He’d not lose another.
***
Daniel wrestled his watch out of his pocket, from beneath a handkerchief, a thermometer, and hard candy.
Half past 10:00 p.m. It had taken him an hour and a half to travel less than two miles.
He counted the hours. Nora had been fine at 2:00 p.m., so she’d been sick less than eight hours.
But that was more than enough time for cholera to kill.
The water in the kitchen should be seething by now. He’d need it to get through the long night. Horace wasn’t coming, not in this weather. Maybe not even tomorrow. And Harry wouldn’t think to—not with Daniel and Nora already treating the case. No one else knew Nora was ill.
Daniel reasoned through the possibilities as he filled two kettles and brought them upstairs.
He’d divide himself—thirty minutes with Nora and then fifteen with his aunt.
He couldn’t change their bedding on such a schedule—Aunt would have to burn all three mattresses when this was over—so he’d focus only on keeping their fluids up.
When he returned with the tea, he stripped Nora down to her shift so she could rest easier, and propped her up. She could still sip so long as he held the heavy cup. She drained five ounces of steaming, bitter brew in minutes.
Daniel sighed with relief. “That’s good,” he praised her. “Can you take any more?”
She gave an exhausted shake of her head, squeezing her face in misery. “The cramps,” she panted.
“I know,” he lied, and pressed her face to his chest. She resisted enough that he leaned back and realized she was still trying to speak, the words labored and slow.
“I need Latta’s solution. And Aunt, too. Just a bit of salt and bicarbonate in the water. The same saltiness as blood.” She paused to catch her breath. “Transfuse it into my vein, not muscle.”
“Transfuse it?” Daniel startled. He’d assumed she meant a mixture to drink. “Into a vein?” Was she delirious? “You know how badly transfusion experiments have gone, putting anything into a vein.”
Nora sank into the pillow, at the end of her strength. “It worked,” she managed to whisper. “I gave it to Aunt.” Just when he thought she’d gone back to sleep her lips parted. “Aunt? Pritchard? Are they—”
Daniel swallowed. “Doing better.”
Not entirely a lie. He believed wherever Miss Pritchard was now, it had to be better than the pains of her deathbed.
Nora’s lips relaxed into the ghost of a smile. “It worked.”
Daniel’s heart twisted. “Did you give the solution to both of them?” He’d repeat nothing with a 50 percent mortality rate.
Nora tried to focus her yellowed eyes. “Just Aunt.”
Daniel exhaled. Only if necessary.
He slanted his watch to catch the firelight. After eleven. Time to check Aunt and dose her with tea. “Sleep for a few minutes. I’ll be right back,” he promised. But she’d slipped under the waves of sleep before he finished speaking.
***
Daniel returned as quickly as he could, within his allotted fifteen minutes, but he could tell at a glance Nora had declined considerably. Her color had blued in the small span of time, and her heartbeat was so fast and feeble he struggled to measure the beats.
His throat seized, but his hands moved with speed and certainty, plying her with liquids.
Barely any made it past her throat. He’d have to spend at least half an hour coaxing moisture back into her mouth just to help her to swallow, and by then…
Daniel withdrew the glass-and-metal syringe from his bag and studied it at length.
While he often used it to measure medicines, draw out swelling from afflicted organs or joints, and irrigate wounds, he’d only administered fluids with it orally.
He’d certainly never imagined using it to propel foreign liquids into a patient’s bloodstream, especially his wife’s.
And then there were the logistics—he’d need to cut into a vein to introduce the bronze tip of the syringe.
Daniel rubbed his eyes, trying to picture the procedure.
If he hadn’t studied the horizontal slice across his aunt’s arm, he wouldn’t believe Nora had done anything so foolhardy.
It was entirely possible Aunt had survived out of luck or coincidence, but he couldn’t trust either, not in Nora’s case.
He filled a teacup with water and slowly tipped in some salt, unable to measure because of the pounding of his heart. He’d seen a transfusion experiment in Paris once and witnessed the patient’s immediate reaction. She’d nearly died of it.
He’d try to replicate Nora’s recipe, but that didn’t compel him to put it in her body.
He could—no, there was no chance she’d be able to drink it.
Everything he’d given her earlier had gone straight through her, the bed soaked and nearly odorless.
Her bowels were stripped bare. If he didn’t act now, there wouldn’t be another chance.
“Let it work,” he prayed. With reluctant hands and disjointed thoughts, Daniel filled the barrel of the syringe. He turned up the wick and positioned the lamp to throw all its glow onto Nora’s wasted arm. So thin. It looked normal just this morning.
Quietly. That was what Horace always said.
To treat things with the least intervention possible.
He’d likely strike the syringe from Daniel’s unsteady grip.
And yet his hands kept moving, ignoring Horace’s imagined prohibition, winding a strip of linen around Nora’s arm and pulling it tight.
He watched, waiting an age for a vein to emerge.
He flicked the hollow of her elbow, trying to provoke it to the surface.
Nothing. He’d have to go in and find it, then.
He rubbed his eyes until gold sparks scattered his vision. No more delays. Time for decision.
“Please,” he murmured as he pressed the scalpel to her cold flesh.
A bead of blood bloomed slowly, dark and reluctant.
He deepened the cut, searching for the lighter blood of the vein, and she flinched but didn’t wake.
Blood started to flow, and he tamped down the opening until he could fit the tip of the syringe inside the open vein.
He pulled the plunger up to be certain he was in the vein, watching red blood swirl with the salty mixture, still tempted at the last moment to divert the fluid under the discolored skin.
“Please be right,” he pleaded with Nora.
With trembling fingers, he depressed the plunger while holding pressure on the tip to decrease the bleeding.
He got through half the syringe and jerked it out, breathing heavily as he bandaged the wound, already regretting his impulsiveness.
Sweat moistened his hands as he searched intently for any signs of distress.
He counted the seconds, her pulse, her breaths, until her eyelids flickered.
She shifted.
So soon?
“Nora?” He leaned in, touching her dry, cold skin.
She panted softly and looked at her arm. “You did it?” Relief tinted her strained words.
“Only two ounces,” he admitted. But she was speaking again. Something she hadn’t done for two hours. His head hummed with unformed questions.
Nora gave a small nod and closed her eyes. “More. Aunt. Pritch…” Her dry tongue crackled in her mouth, and she gave up attempting speech.
“I will,” he promised. “How much?”
“Six,” she whispered.
Six ounces? Too much. He’d kill her. But when he took her pulse, he found it slowed to one hundred beats per minute. Still far too high, but at least countable. He couldn’t deny the marked change. How could such a small amount…
Fumbling with doubt, Daniel filled the entire syringe—four ounces of solution this time.
The cut edges of the vein stuck together, the thick blood clotting faster than usual.
Trying to ignore Nora’s sharp intake of breath, he reopened the wound, exploring until the blood began to run again.
“Please tell me you know what you’re doing,” he begged as he inserted the tip once more and reluctantly released the clear fluid into her faltering body.
Nora shivered as the liquid traveled into her arm.
After several long minutes, she shuddered and then sighed, the muscles of her face loosening.
“Nora!” He jumped forward, fearing she’d taken her last breath.
“Better,” she mouthed. And then: “Give me something to drink.”