by Rose Doyle
The curses she rained on his head weren't silent like my own.
Sarah, saying it was the softest thing she had, put the shawl I'd brought her from Paris under James. For a while after that he seemed less tortured. It didn't last, of course, and he began to gasp and writhe again, jerking as if he would break in two.
'It's destroying him.' Sarah's eyes followed every wrenching movement. 'It's tearing his body apart.'
'The syrup will make him well.' I prayed it would and that I was right about his croup not being the most severe kind. If I was wrong, and if the illness was gone too far, an airway would have to be created to allow him breathe. To do this an opening would have to be made into the trachea from the front of his neck. I couldn't do that for him. Only a trained doctor could.
Jimmy Vance came at last, running like a dervish, and he brought the syrup. 'No doctor,' he was terse handing it over, 'two of them that serve in the camp aren't back from the races yet and the third says he can't leave the barrack hospital before morning.'
'Did you speak to Alexander Ainslie?' I said.
'I sent a soldier with a message to look for him.' Jimmy went on his knees at the nest opening. Inside his son continued to rasp and wheeze, his mother to make endless soft, soothing sounds.
I checked the ipecacuanha syrup before moving Jimmy Vance out of my way and going inside with the bottle. I poured some on to a spoon and while Sarah held James still as she was able I eased what I could into his mouth and down his throat. He resisted the strange taste and feel of it but I kept at it until I'd got enough into him to do what it was supposed to do.
There was nothing could be done then but wait, and watch.
It didn't take long. In less than a minute James was consumed with a coughing so bad that he began to vomit. When he expelled what looked like a piece of muslin I let go the breath I was holding.
'Oh, God. Oh Holy Mother of God, what's that? What's he brought up?' Sarah gathered James to her, held him as he went on coughing, but less horribly, more like the tired exhaustion of someone clearing their throat.
'He'll be all right now,' I said.
'Why will he be all right? What's happened?' She rocked James. There were tears on her cheeks.
'He's got rid of the membrane in his throat,' I said, 'he'll be able to breathe more easily now. He'll sleep after a while.'
James did sleep, thought not as soon as I'd hoped. He cried, weakly, and gave occasional dry coughs as Sarah paced up and down with him outside the nest. But at last, grumbling and sighing like an old man, he slept. Jimmy Vance went back to the camp then, prepared for the worst and a punishment for not being with his regiment in time for the last post.
I burrowed deeper into the nest and slept myself.
When I heard my name being called I groaned, full of sleepy protest. It was dark. It wasn't morning. There was no need to waken or get up. Then through the folds of sleep I remembered James and sat up.
'What is it, Sarah?' I said, 'is he all right?'
She sighed and didn't answer. James slept, peacefully as his mother, in the crook of her arm. The voice calling my name was Beezy Ryan's and she was outside the nest.
I crawled to the opening.
'Visitor to see you,' Beezy said as my head appeared, 'I found him on the road when I was stretching my legs.' Walking off the whiskey more like. Drinking made Beezy restless.
Alexander Ainslie, in full uniform and with his hat on his head, helped me to my feet as I came out of the nest. 'I came to see how the child is. If needs be,' he nodded at the horse he'd tethered to a bush, 1 can ride back for a doctor.' He went on holding my arm, even after I was standing. I was in my petticoat and my arms were bare. My hair was loose to my shoulders. I had no shoes on my feet.
'You've caught me unawares,' I said.
'Your neighbour tells me the child is recovered?' He still held my arm.
'Beezy shares the nest with us, usually, and she's right. James is much better. He'll be himself again in a day or two.' I pulled my arm, sharply, and he let it go. 'It was good of you to come,' I said.
'I brought this,' he said with an apologetic shrug and held up a bottle of brandy. He looked defenceless, something I'd never seen in him before. I took the bottle.
'Thank you,' I smiled, 'I'll use it for purely medicinal reasons.'
'If there's anything else . . .'
'There's nothing, thank you. James will be fine now.'
'How are you?'
'Tired, but that's easily remedied.' How I was, really, was acutely aware of my petticoat, of my bare arms and chest and general state of deshabille. 'I'd best get back to my bed.' I held the bottle against my chest. There was no way of covering the bared rest of me. 'Thank you again for coming, Alexander.'
'I'm sorry I didn't know earlier about the child.' He stepped back, stiffly. He looked at the nest, at the opening I'd come through. 'How can you sleep in there?'
His tone, and his face, were full of an uncomprehending wonder. He'd never come close enough to truly understand how the village was before; now he was right inside it and all the questions he'd asked me were being answered at once. I laughed, but softly so as not to waken Sarah and James.
'You'd be surprised where a person can sleep when they're tired,' I said, 'and when they're—'
'You don't have to sleep here, Allie.' His tone was modulated again, nonchalant in the way it usually was. 'You know that I can arrange a room for you in the country home of friends. It's a good-sized house. You'd be left alone. You could call on your companions here as often as you wished.'
'I was also going to say, Alex, that a person can sleep well when she's among friends. You mean well but I'd prefer to stay with Sarah and James until things are settled with Jimmy Vance. You know that.' I stopped. 'I'm comfortable enough here, for the moment. I'm using my time well.'
Both of these points were true. But I was worried too, and growing more so by the day. The winter was approaching and the weather showing signs of changing. Sarah and Jimmy Vance would have to settle on a marriage date very quickly. Beezy was restless and muttering more and more about America. The comforts of a country house, and daily visits to the village, would have suited me well, but only if Sarah and James could come with me and that was not what I was being offered.
In any event, Alexander Ainslie's idea of 'good-sized' meant the house was most likely a mansion. His friends would patronise me and he himself, though he'd been monk-like in his correctness so far, would expect more than polite conversations from me in such a situation.
'I'd like you to think about it, nevertheless.' He gazed over the furze bush roofs, 'and perhaps tell me tomorrow if you've changed your mind.'
'I won't do that, Alex,' I said, 'and I'll say good night now. Thank you again for coming.'
He reached out and lifted a length of my hair. For one, very gentle, minute he held it between his fingers. He let it fall back on to my shoulders then, and smiled. 'Until tomorrow,' he said.
I watched and listened until he'd ridden out of sight.
He was a good man and I felt reasonably safe with him. He was also full of pride and would never force himself on a woman who didn't want him. He was a creature of the light to Ned Mulvey's monster of the dark.
I wasn't altogether surprised at him coming to the village, even though he'd never expressed a wish to do so and I'd seen no point exposing him to jibes and coarse humour. Or in exposing the wrens to his scrutiny. But things had begun to change between us a week before and his visit seemed a natural enough extension.
'I would marry you if it weren't that I would be destroyed socially,' he'd said to me on an afternoon about six days before.
I laughed. 'I'm flattered. But there are others reasons why you'll never marry me, Captain Ainslie. In the first place your fiancee in England would not have it.' I paused, put my head to one side and considered him carefully. 'In the second place, I would not marry you.'
'Not even if I told you that I believe myself to be in love w
ith you?'
'Love!' I was scornful. 'I have only to look around the wren village to see the effects of love.'
'What you see in the village are the effects of lust and loneliness and romantic delusion.'
'And your feelings are, of course, much superior?'
'Obviously,' he said, 'or I would succumb to them.'
We were in the sitting room of the hut which was his quarters. I'd walked there from the village, alone and without telling Sarah or Beezy or any others of the wrens where I was going. Even to have told Sarah where I was going would have opened a flood of questions I didn't have answers to.
I knew that I'd been observed coming into the camp though, and that those who'd seen me go into Alexander's hut suspected I was behaving as all wrens were believed to behave.
'Perhaps you would like to be my mistress instead?' He seemed half serious.
'Since I don't want to be a wife why would I want to be a mistress?'
'A mistress has freedom. She's not shackled to a husband and conventions in the way a wife is—'
'I've been offered the role of mistress before,' I cut him short, 'and it appealed to me no more then than it does now.'
'Pity,' he unfolded himself from his chair, 'because it's all I can offer you.'
'I don't know why you feel the need to offer me anything,' I said.
'Because I don't want to lose you.'
'You don't possess me so you can't lose me.'
'But we're friends, are we not?'
'We have a friendship, yes. But it's one which you're half ashamed of . . .' I shrugged, 'and you don't respect my aspirations for my life.'
'You're hard on me, Allie.' He rubbed the scar to the side of his eye, which was what he always did when he became agitated. It was the only indication he ever gave of inner turmoil.
'Just honest,' I said. 'I don't disregard your life plans, your ambition to be finished with the army and rearing cattle on your family lands.'
'My life's plan is a conventional one,' he said, 'and easy to accept. Yours, to be a lady doctor, begs both admiration and scepticism.'
'In what sort of measures?'
'Equal, I would think.' He came to where I was standing by the desk, a copy of the work of Charles Darwin in my hand. He quickly and lightly brushed his lips across my forehead. 'On the other hand,' he walked back to the table and lifted his hat, 'you're quite likely to do anything you decide to do.'
'Thank you for that,' I said.
For a minute, as we looked at each other across the room, the gulf between us was sad and deep and neither of us knew how to bridge it.
It was Alexander who ended it by saying, 'I'll walk with you to the road to the wren village.'
On the way through the camp I brought up the subject of Charles Darwin. I didn't want to part with an awkwardness between us and it was always easy to get him talking about topics of the day.
'He supports his ideas with huge evidence,' I said about his conclusions that man had evolved from lower animals. We'd read On the Origin of Species in the convent in Paris — mainly because we were told not to by the nuns. It made sense to me, for the most part.
'I think Darwin is right,' he said. 'But I also believe that man will eventually destroy himself and everything else which lives on this planet.'
'How can you possibly believe that?' I laughed and wished I hadn't. He was looking very serious.
'Because man is so immensely certain of his superiority,' he said.
'Indeed he is,' I said, 'but woman is not and so there is hope still for the world.'
'You may be right.' He smiled and the tension between us lifted.
I'd made sure not to be alone with him, or to encourage intimate conversation, since then.
James was crotchety and pale next day. But he wasn't sick.
'You're better than any doctor,' Sarah said to me, 'I want you to know that I believe that, no matter what happens.'
'I'm coming to believe it myself.' I grinned at her and reached for James. She gave him to me reluctantly and I held him for a minute only before giving him back to her. 'A few years in medical school and I'll be as good as the best of them,' I said. I didn't ask her what it was she expected to happen. If I had, and if she'd told me, it would have prepared me. But it wouldn't have changed anything.
I was sitting in that afternoon's sun, reading, when I head the sounds of a horsecar pulling up on the road. The shorter days meant the sun cooled earlier and earlier. James was beside me in the small crib his father had brought for him; soon it would be too cold and too dark for either of us to sit outside. Sarah had gone for a short walk with his father.
I looked up from my book and saw Daniel Casey standing in the road as the horsecar drove away.
I saw the village as he must have: peaceful at that time of day, a primitive situation in which a community of women tried hard to preserve decency. Some wrens were washing clothes and others adding furze to the roofs of their nests. A group stood talking, children ran about. Everyone, of course, wore only petticoats and most, like myself, had draped a second petticoat or underskirt over their shoulders against the chill.
I hoped that Daniel saw the village for what it was and not as I'd seen it myself, the first day. What I'd seen, and so had Sarah, was a series of low, furze-covered hovels into which those who lived had to crawl, animal-like. I hoped he wouldn't see the wrens simply as half-naked women with matted hair, the children as out-of-control wantons.
I stayed where I was as he came towards me. I couldn't have walked to meet him to save my life. It was unlikely I could even have stood steadily. I knew at once that Sarah had sent for him, that she hadn't trusted me to make James well. I didn't blame her; I wasn't a mother, as she'd pointed out. I wasn't even a qualified doctor.
But I was hurt, nevertheless.
Daniel looked much the same but was somehow more of a man than when I'd last seen him. He carried himself with more assurance and looked older. Working in the dispensary would do those things to you; dealing with poverty and sickness was aging and left no time for self-consciousness. He was wearing a tweed suit with a dark waistcoat and his hair, which had always been short, was longer and unruly over his forehead. He carried his doctor's bag.
'I'll have a look at the child, Allie.' His manners hadn't improved. He said not a word of greeting before putting down his bag and crouching beside the crib.
'Of course.' I lifted the covering. 'You'll find he's recovering well.'
He picked James up and gestured that I should spread the covering on the grass. He laid James there and began to examine him, listening to his chest and back with a stethoscope and
testing his temperature and looking at his throat. James protested, loudly and healthily.
When he'd finished I put the child back in the crib and rocked it with my foot. 'Sarah sent for you?' I said.
'She telegraphed me. You've looked after him well. He's a fine baby.'
He put his instruments back into his bag; he still hadn't looked at me directly. I thought this was because of my state of undress but saw that it was more than this when he turned and stared at me and said, 'You're well yourself)'
He was awkward and embarrassed and it was all he could do to get the words out. He'd always been like that, I saw now, only I'd been too preoccupied with myself to notice. Or care.
'I'm very well.' I smiled to put him at his ease. 'The simple, country life suits me.'
'You' ve been here since leaving Dublin?' He looked around him.
'It's not so bad as it seems,' I said gently. A gust of sudden, sharp wind lifted the cover from James's cot. 'It's less smelly than Dublin and the sun has shone almost every day.' I secured the cover around James.
'The sunshine's coming to an end.' He looked skywards. I didn't follow his gaze to the clouds I knew were gathering there. 'The winter's coming in.' He paused. 'Come back with me to Dublin, Allie. This is no place for you.'
'I'll make us some tea,' I said, 'by the time it's ready S
arah will be back to share it with us. She'll be getting married soon.'
'What will you do then?' He knew me well.
'I'll go back to Dublin.'
It didn't seem the time to add that I would be moving on from there. America, since my first, vague thoughts about going to that continent, was becoming more and more a definite plan in my head. There were medical schools there, with women students; I hadn't forgotten how discouraging Daniel had been of my plans to study medicine.
I filled a pot with water and put it on the fire. We talked about the dispensary and Dr Connolly and about Daniel's mother, who'd been ill but was better. Daniel had spent a month in Galway, looking after her and his younger sisters. He would always be caring for someone, it seemed to me.
'You were good to come to see James,' I said.
'I came to see you too. Her telegraph said you were here.'
'How long will you stay?'
'Until you come back with me to Dublin. I've taken a room in Kildare town.'
'Then you could be waiting a while. It's not at all certain when Sarah will be married. What about your work at the dispensary?'
'I've made arrangements.' He paused. 'Have you no gown to put on, Allie? It's getting cold.'
I flushed. The more I became aware of my hot cheeks and neck the more they burned. I lifted my dress from the furze and slipped it on over my petticoat.
'Am I more respectable now?' I said.
'I hope you're warmer,' he said.
I moved James in his crib into the nest and got the cups and made the tea. Sarah and Jimmy Vance returned just as it was ready and we sat drinking, the four of us, and talking, pleasantly but of nothing much. After a while Beezy appeared from Nance Reilly's nest. She sobered very quickly when she saw Daniel; he looked just as shocked to see her.
'Your face has healed well,' he said.
'It was a good doctor treated me.' Beezy watched him closely as she spoke.
'The word is that you've gone to America,' Daniel smiled, 'they say you're making your fortune there, running a big house in New York City.'