Chapter 41
Nora peeled her eyes open slowly, perplexed by the thin light coming through a window on the wrong side of the room. She closed them and tried again, giving her mind a moment to orient.
It didn’t work.
“You’re awake.” The strident, out-of-place voice jarred her.
Nora focused on an unfamiliar peach silk comforter covering her narrow bed before turning toward the sound. “Aunt?”
Her identification was correct. Aunt Wilcox herself was alive and resting in the next bed. But this was no hospital ward.
“Where are we?”
“The nursery. Insulting, I know. Daniel thought he could care for us better in here since there were two beds and a water closet. Your Mrs. Phipps just left to get more towels.”
Nora shifted her body—a mistake. Her muscles whined from cramps and disuse. “What nursery?” Aunt had no children.
“Mine, of course,” Aunt snapped. “You were talking when Daniel and Dr. Croft carried you in. I thought you’d remember.”
“Horace is here? And Mrs. Phipps?” The details were as disjointed as a jigsaw puzzle scattered across the floor. She dug into the recesses of her mind, remembering the sensation of being lifted and the sound of groans. Were they her own?
“They’ve all been here since yesterday. And Sarah.”
“Yesterday?”
The door swung open, and Mrs. Phipps’s lined face emerged from behind a tower of towels. “Nora!” She threw her bundle into a chair and whisked to Nora’s bed, her hand cupping Nora’s chin. “Thank God! You’ve been asleep for more than twenty-four hours. I wanted to wake you, but that man…”
She only used that moniker for Horace, and only at his most irksome. Nora almost laughed, but her sore, groggy head forbid it. “What’s happened?”
“She doesn’t remember,” Aunt said, her voice tainted with annoyance.
“I suppose that’s for the best.” Mrs. Phipps tipped Nora’s face with gentle fingers, assessing.
“You look better,” she conceded, “but Daniel should examine you right away.” Her brow tightened as the corners of her mouth turned down.
“If your mother-in-law hadn’t come to us, we would have never known where you were. What did you—”
“Latta’s solution.” Nora squinted, forcing order in her mind. The ice storm. The quill pens…
Mrs. Phipps halted. “According to Daniel, that’s all you would say when he found you. Do you remember?” Her stern disapproval didn’t match the tender touch of her hands, smoothing Nora’s hair.
“A little,” she half lied. It was as vague as a muddy dream.
Mrs. Phipps anointed Nora’s dry lips with a drop of olive oil, spreading it carefully.
“I’ll go wake Daniel now. He just sat down to eat a sandwich and was asleep in less than three bites.
But that only makes sense, I suppose, considering he’s been awake with you for two nights now without closing his eyes. ”
“Two nights?” Before Nora could finish her question, Mrs. Phipps hurried out, leaving Nora’s confounded gaze nowhere to go but to Aunt Wilcox.
Aunt rolled her eyes. “You apparently put some mixture in my vein that saved me, so Daniel did the same for you. We’ve both had it done several times now.” She gave her bandaged arm a disdainful glance and sighed. “Bruised as a beaten dog.” Her voice dropped. “Daniel says I owe you my life.”
Nora couldn’t keep pace with the steady flow of information and had to wait with closed eyes for her head—or the room—to stop spinning.
“I didn’t know you were ill. I was coming to apologize.
” That much, she remembered clearly. She’d had a headache and nausea on her way over—most likely the beginnings of cholera.
Stupid to mistake it for pregnancy symptoms.
“Perhaps we both should. I—” But Aunt Wilcox got no further. Daniel blundered into the room, stumbling on the rug in his haste.
“Nora?” He caught her up, kissing her forehead and groping for her wrist at the same time. He took her pulse and assessed her color before she could even murmur his name. “You have color in your face again.” He pinched her arm, watching the skin creep back into place. “Better.”
She was glad he didn’t kiss her mouth; it had never tasted so foul. He pulled back the silk bed cover, revealing an unfamiliar flannel shift.
“I’m not sure this is warm enough for you,” he said. “There might be a better one left behind by some maid—”
The word shook her, knocking something else to the forefront of her jagged, jostling thoughts.
“Where’s Miss Pritchard?” There were two beds here, but Daniel could have put in a third. There was space for one next to the window, and if he’d wanted his patients close together…
“You haven’t soiled this bed at all. The towels are clean. Can I help you to the water closet?”
He must have been too caught up to hear her question, and indeed, he didn’t trouble to wait for her answer before lifting her into his arms and pulling her close against his chest.
“You don’t need to…” she began, but it wasn’t the truth. She could barely focus her eyes or speak. Walking anywhere was out of the question.
Mrs. Phipps hovered at his side, putting a nervous hand on Nora’s arm.
“You can help me wash her up after,” Daniel said to the housekeeper, who nodded, appeased.
Cholera left one with very little dignity.
As soon as they finished, Daniel returned her to the nursery. Mrs. Phipps helped Nora rinse her mouth with rose water until the fishy tang of old vomit and dry tongue washed away. “We’ll leave your hair until tomorrow, when you’re well enough for a bath.”
Nora touched her head with a frown. “My hair?”
“Never mind.” Mrs. Phipps waved her off.
It must be horrid. Even worse with Aunt Wilcox observing only feet away. The woman must have sensed Nora’s distress.
“Well, we can’t walk into our own graves and reemerge still looking presentable,” she pointed out.
Instead of laughing at her quip, Daniel dropped his eyes, grief shrouding his worn face.
“It was that bad?” Nora whispered.
No one met her gaze. “For a bit,” Daniel informed her shoulder, unable to raise his eyes any higher.
“I’ll wake Horace and let him know she’s past the worst,” Mrs. Phipps said in the brisk tone she used to redirect wayward conversations.
“Please don’t.” Nora took a labored breath. She understood exhaustion. “Let him sleep. He’ll see me when he wakes.” She looked at Daniel with apologetic eyes. “I’m tired, too.”
“Of course you are.” He leaned forward, this time his kiss lingering on her forehead, leaving a circle of warmth pressed into her cold flesh. “But you should have broth first. You can doze until I come back with it.”
She sank deeper into her pillow after they left, relieved to be free of questions and words. She needed to piece together the tattered fragments of the last days.
“What day is it?”
“Sunday,” Aunt Wilcox answered more gently. “The twenty-third. You didn’t miss Yuletide.”
She’d arrived Friday afternoon. Her brow contracted with bleak memories of the first night: struggling to nurse Aunt and Miss Pritchard, finally collapsing on the floor when the cramps and evacuations overtook her.
“Is Miss Pritchard—”
“Daniel got here just in time,” Aunt interrupted. “You were far gone.”
Nora recalled the ice-coated world into which she’d sent her mother-in-law to fetch him. “Sarah saved us.”
“I suppose there’s praise enough to go ’round.” Aunt sniffed. “Daniel’s a fine doctor.” She paused, her jaw clenched. “But you seem to know a few things even he did not.” It was a difficult concession. Aunt’s lips barely allowed the words passage.
Torrance’s treatment. The infusions of Latta’s solution.
“I was lucky,” Nora admitted. “Experiments fail all the time. But the article sounded plausible when I read it.”
Aunt grimaced, visibly galled to be part of any medical experiment deemed only plausible.
“Be that as it may, I’ve had time to think while you slept.
Daniel says your midwives are running the hospital in your absence.
” Aunt trailed her neat hands over her bedding. “I may have been hasty in my opinions.”
Nora hesitated, but if she was ever going to speak her mind, surely there was no better time than now. “They won’t be allowed to help much longer. Not if the colleges ban them.”
Aunt waited so long to reply that Nora feared the conversation was spent. Then: “Agnes didn’t live.”
The words slammed into Nora’s aching head. “Miss Pritchard?”
Aunt nodded slowly, turning away and fixing her gaze on the ash-stubbled coals in the hearth. “Agnes was my nursery maid, barely older than I was. She came with me when I married Colin. I only called her Pritchard when others were with us. She was always Agnes to me.”
Guilt seared up Nora’s chest like heartburn. She’d never given Pritchard the transfusion, thinking the uncomplaining woman was doing well enough to avoid the risk. And then, when Agnes must have been worsening, she’d been too ill to reach her.
“We decorated this nursery together. Agnes had a knack for it. But the children never came. And six years after we married, Colin drowned.”
Nora froze. The formidable woman she’d feared for months was a grieving widow, convalescing in a gaily decorated graveyard of shattered dreams. She’d known the same heartache as Julia.
“I didn’t know,” Nora whispered.
“That was long ago,” Aunt replied gruffly, inhaling a fresh breath of courage. “But I’m quite broken up about Agnes.” Aunt’s cheeks burned red with determination as she fought back the emotion behind her stiff words.
“I wish I could have helped her,” Nora admitted. “I should have done—”
“You were dying yourself. Like a good number of doctors have. But you were right. If the midwives were trained to nurse, and one had been with Agnes…”
A careful attendant could have made the difference. But…“Dr. Adams won’t allow it if he has his way. He’s gathered hundreds of signatures. He’s already petitioned MPs.”
“Leave Dr. Adams to me.” Aunt spoke with the force of a lineman hammering steel spikes. “That man left me to die. I believe he owes me a favor.”
***