Chapter Twelve #3
‘If he lives . . . if he lives, Theo,’ – Ralph shook his head in wonderment – ‘then all has led to this point. Do you see? All the times I have tried and failed, since—’ He stopped. ‘All my endeavours towards perfecting a technique for remedial intracranial surgery . . .’
‘And his family? They . . . must be delighted at this outcome, since they agreed to the operation?’
Ralph said nothing for a while, staring so that she shrank from his scrutiny.
‘They are delighted,’ he said at last. ‘But I did not need their consent.’
‘You did not?’
‘No. Mr Miller gave it himself, when he was first brought in. I explained what might happen and he was eager for the surgery to go ahead, if it became necessary.’
‘I see.’ Theo swallowed. ‘Was Missy your first?’
She hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but the tonic wine had loosened her tongue and set off tiny fireworks in her head.
Ralph stared again, his face unreadable.
‘Was she . . . was hers the first operation of that kind you had performed?’ Theo pressed.
‘Do you mean to imply that I botched her operation?’
‘Not at all!’
Theo thought that perhaps she had meant exactly that. Her heart pattered.
‘I only wondered . . . how long you have waited for a successful outcome. With such a terribly difficult thing.’
Ralph considered her. ‘You’re still very pale, Theo. I will call for a cab to take you home. I’m afraid I can’t come with you just yet.’
‘I understand. But I’m quite happy to walk.’
‘No,’ he instructed. ‘Wait for the cab.’
In the small hours of the night, Theo crept out of bed. Ralph had been up for almost thirty-six hours by the time he came home, and though he’d been almost feverishly talkative at first he was now sleeping like the dead.
She went downstairs to her writing desk, lit a single candle and began a letter to Albert Mackie, the doctor she’d first met in Hallewell, whose wife, Rosalind, had been dying.
Please forgive me, Dr Mackie. This will not be a letter of the ordinary sort, but I am in need of the opinion of a medical man on a particular matter, and although we are acquainted only a little, I believe that if you find my questions impertinent, or offensive, you will tell me so and let that be an end to it.
I can only hope that my faith in your discretion, whilst instinctual, is well founded.
Her fingers went to her throat but found nothing there.
She didn’t wear Rosalind’s butterfly pendant very often any more.
She’d grown wary of injuring Ralph; conscious of the oppressive spell of awkwardness that would follow.
It had taken weeks for his good mood to fully return after the skating gala, and his long, accusatory silences were like a yoke around her neck.
But the gold butterfly was still her favourite.
It was a talisman of sorts; a link to another time.
Through it she might retrace her steps, and perhaps find a different way forward.
A way to go back, and make repairs. A way, if one existed, to undo the fact of her marriage to a man she increasingly felt she didn’t know at all.
Subject Melissa Cartwright, female, pauper, aged 14 years, M.E.
She thought back to the day she’d gone to ask for a lock of Missy’s hair as a keepsake.
The way Ralph had put her off, offering to go to the undertaker himself.
Forgive me, Theo. It just wasn’t possible.
Had the problem been, in truth, that Missy’s hair had already been stripped away and discarded by then?
Angry tears burned her eyes. She felt betrayed.
Worse, she felt that Missy had been betrayed.
When she’d finished the letter she took it to Audrey, woke her with an apology, and asked her to post it discreetly.
‘I must ask something else of you, Audrey. For the next while, if the master is at home, please try to be the one to receive the post. Keep back anything addressed to me that you do not recognise, and give it to me privately. I’m very sorry to make such a request.’
Audrey’s eyes were huge in the dark. ‘Don’t be sorry, miss. I’ll do as you ask.’
In his fever, Toby saw Kit in the bed beside him. He struggled to focus his eyes, because he couldn’t shake the feeling that his brother probably shouldn’t be there. But after a while he gave up trying to understand it, and was simply relieved.
‘Where have you been?’ he said.
Kit didn’t reply. He was asleep – Toby recognised the regular snuffle of his breathing.
He thought it was probably time he himself got up, and got some reading done.
He could have a go at tackling Euclid. The Durham matriculation exam loomed ahead of him.
When was it? Tomorrow? The following day?
Had he missed it altogether – had he slept through it?
In a panic he struggled to rise, but his body was entirely uncooperative.
‘Shh,’ he heard his mother say. Or thought he did. The sound appeared to have no source.
‘Don’t wake Kit,’ he said.
The next time he surfaced, he forced his eyes to open.
The room jerked stickily around him. It was curious.
More curious still to find Theo sitting in the chair by the bed, with her Tennyson open on her knees.
He knew it at once – the brown cloth cover fraying at the corners, the well-thumbed pages.
She, too, looked just as he remembered her.
He had something terribly important to tell her, but drew a complete blank as to what.
But she was absorbed in her reading, and didn’t seem in a hurry to leave.
So, it was all right, he decided; he’d rest a bit, and it would come to him.
Watching her, he felt calm. The kiss of the light on her face, her eyes on the page with that faraway focus he knew so well.
Exactly as she’d looked when she’d studied the symbol of Uroboros on Midsummer’s Day.
What was it he’d needed to say?
He woke again because he was ravenous. Weak white light from the window stabbed at his eyes, but when he tried to lift an arm to shade them it appeared to be fixed to the bed. He couldn’t work out where he was. There was movement nearby.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘What’s . . .’ His lips were so dry they felt stiff. ‘Thirsty.’
‘Here.’
The rim of a cup touched his mouth, and a hand behind his head tilted it forwards.
‘Don’t try to get up. You’ve been very ill – you’ve had a fever. Pneumonia. But you’re all right now; you’re going to be all right. Lie back. You mustn’t try to do anything yet.’
Toby heard her voice vaguely; sleep was already dragging him back under.
It was another two days before he was strong enough to sit up in bed. He coughed a great deal, and very painfully; every muscle in his body ached like an abscessed tooth. He was horrified to hear that he’d been insensible a full fortnight.
A doctor by the name of Sanderson came to see him.
A woman doctor, perhaps forty, with an unflinching gaze and a streak of grey through her sooty hair, who charged less than half what a man would have done.
She was brisk and contained, and Toby tried not to react to her as though she were a talking horse.
‘How do you feel?’ she asked, having listened to his lungs.
‘“Weak as the puny rillets of the hill”, as Paulus Syllogus would have it,’ Toby croaked.
She raised an eyebrow. ‘It sounds as though you’re back in charge of your mental faculties, at least.’
‘Almost, other than a perpetual urge to sleep. I had all sorts of odd visions. I saw people that I . . . couldn’t have seen.’
‘Yes, well, your hyperpyrexia lasted over a week.’ Dr Sanderson noted his incomprehension. ‘Your temperature reached a hundred and four degrees at one point, Mr Meriwether. I’m not surprised it did peculiar things to your brain.’
‘How bad was I?’
With her fingers on his wrist and her watch in her other hand, Dr Sanderson smiled faintly.
‘Bad enough to boast of it to your friends. And to give your parents quite a scare.’
She was quiet for a moment, then put his hand back on the blankets and packed her things away.
‘Do you have many patients, yet?’ Toby asked.
Dr Sanderson tipped up her chin. ‘You are number four. In three months.’ She left a pause. ‘Number three only called me out to prove to a house guest that I was, indeed, a woman.’
‘I hope you billed him anyway.’
‘Too right I did.’
‘People will get used to it. They’re as stubborn as mules around here, but once news of your fee gets about . . .’
‘We shall see. I may well be selling snake oil to support myself before then.’
‘We will recommend you.’
‘Thank you.’ Her clipped tone told Toby that she hated to need any such favours. ‘Rest is all you need now, Mr Meriwether. Eat as well as you are able to, but don’t try to do too much. Your lungs will be weak for quite some time. If you overdo it, you risk a relapse.’
‘Thank you, Doctor.’
She nodded in reply, and left.
David had sent a telegram to The London Daily News to explain Toby’s absence.
A short acknowledgement had come in reply, with no promise to hold his position or anything like that.
Toby fretted about getting back, but the simple fact was that he couldn’t.
The first time he went downstairs, he nearly didn’t make it back up again.
The effort left him gasping. He wrote to the editor to apologise, promising to return as soon as he possibly could.
‘They would not give your job away, surely?’ David said.
‘They would, if some other suitable person came along. Ambition is like an illness, in that place.’
‘Well. Then let’s hope no such person comes along – you heard what the doctor said. You mustn’t do too much.’
Toby sighed anxiously. ‘Is there any brandy? Or a glass of wine?’
His father gave him a steady look. ‘No.’