A Corruption of Blood

by Ambrose Parry

  Lizzie, the housemaid, appeared at his side to take his coat and hat. She tutted loudly as she passed the garment onto Christina, the new girl standing at her side. Christina had not been with the household long, but was as diligent as she was uncomplaining, in contrast to her frequently simmering and occasionally terrifying colleague. Not that Christina was a cheery soul. The girl seemed burdened by a constant pall of melancholic gloom, which was unlikely to be lifted by working alongside Lizzie.

  Lizzie pointed at the mud on his coat, acquired when Raven had knelt down to examine the parcel on the quayside.

  ‘You’ll have to take a brush to that,’ she told Christina. ‘Dr Raven has a tendency to pick up a great deal of dirt when out on his rounds. I’ve had to take that coat out the back with the carpet-beater before now.’ She gave Raven a stern look, daring him to contradict her.

  ‘What would I do without you, Lizzie?’ Raven replied. He had learned from experience that arguing with her seldom did much good.

  She snorted and turned round, colliding with the luggage cluttering the hallway.

  ‘Don’t know why he bothers unpacking those bags,’ she said. ‘The professor is off again at the end of the week.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘London.’

  Raven found it hard to keep up. Staying abreast of the professor’s activities was an impossible task. Simpson had at one point employed an amanuensis to order his affairs, but that had not ended well.

  ‘London,’ Christina repeated. ‘I’d love to go.’

  Lizzie snorted again. ‘The only chance of you and me getting much beyond the outskirts of Edinburgh,’ she said, ‘is if we’re transported.’

  As far as Lizzie was concerned that might well be true, Raven thought. He looked again at the new girl, who was now studying her shoes, possibly regretting that she had opened her mouth at all. She was young to have her modest hopes extinguished, yet how likely was it that her life would amount to much more than this?

  Raven had just begun to flick through the pile of correspondence on the hall table when Hugh Morris stuck his head out of his consulting room. Dr Morris was also a recent addition to the staff at Queen Street. He was a decent sort, but a quiet, industrious type, always working, reading, writing papers, performing experiments in his room. He was not much for revelry or conversation. To Raven’s mind, occasional light-hearted distraction was essential when one was forced to contend with the diseased and the dying on a daily basis.

  ‘Difficult case?’ Morris asked, by way of acknowledging how long Raven had been gone.

  ‘Cases plural, as it turned out. Twins in the first instance, both delivered safe and healthy, but the next infant was not so fortunate. Found floating in the water at Leith.’

  Dr Morris’s eyes bulged briefly. ‘And the mother?’

  ‘Currently being sought by McLevy.’

  ‘How thoroughly unpleasant. I wish I could offer respite, but . . .’

  Raven nodded. There were still groups of patients clotted together at the door to the waiting room, a low hubbub of muted conversation from within.

  Raven went into his consulting room and called for his first case of the day, which turned out to be an older lady full of gripes about the condition of the roads and the conduct of young people.

  ‘They do not show the proper respect for their elders any more,’ she grumbled, settling her ample posterior down on the examination couch like it was the assertion of a claim. ‘I had to wait an age for someone to give me a chair in the waiting room.’

  Raven listened to her grievances as attentively as he could, before manoeuvring the conversation back to medical matters. He knew that sometimes the best medicine was a listening ear, that loneliness and isolation could contribute to a patient’s complaint, but this was not something at which he considered himself to be proficient. He could hear Simpson’s voice in his head as he struggled to concentrate: An unsympathising physician is a physician bereft of one of the most potent agencies of treatment and of cure. He knows not, and practises not, the whole extent of his art, when he recklessly neglects and eschews the marvellous influence of mind over body.

  Simpson’s mantra had been repeated so frequently Raven could recall it without effort. He agreed with the principle but found its application a little more problematic.

  He finally managed to coax from the woman the reason for her visit, asked the relevant questions, and made his examination of the crusted, scaly lesion that extended in patches from forearm to shoulder. He wrote out a prescription before applying a dressing and then a bandage to the worst affected area, congratulating himself on his patience and fortitude.

  He handed her the prescription with a smile. It was not returned, the woman evidently not as impressed with his performance as he was himself.

  ‘When is Sarah coming back?’ she asked flatly. ‘I generally prefer to be looked after by her. A lady is naturally more comfortable being treated by another woman.’

  ‘Perhaps Sarah should obtain a medical degree then,’ Raven replied.

  The lady looked askance at Raven’s handiwork, which he had to admit was not nearly as neat as Sarah’s would have been.

  ‘Yes, perhaps she should.’

  As he watched her amble to the door, Raven knew that his patient was not the only one who was missing Sarah. It had been a month since she had gone, and the house did not feel the same without her.

  Or was it simply that he did not feel the same without her? Aye, he would have to own that too.

  There had been a time when he intended to make Sarah his wife, but he had not been sufficiently resolute until it was too late. In that respect, he had proven himself to be unworthy. He had let slip his chance through cowardice, concerned that marrying a housemaid would be injurious to his prospects. It took the pain of losing her to understand what she really meant to him: first when she married someone else, then when she had come so close to death.

  As she recovered from her episode of ill-health, he had cast his plans. He would ask her initially to join him in setting up his own practice; then in time, once the appropriate decorum of widowhood had been observed, he would ask her to become something more. But on the very day he was preparing to broach the issue, she returned from visiting her husband’s grave and told him she wished to follow in the footsteps of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to obtain a medical degree.

  That was when a true epiphany struck him. Her circumstances were profoundly changed. She was a widow now, with her late husband’s resources at her disposal. She was embarking upon a voyage of discovery, both physical and metaphorical, trying to find her place in a world that had suddenly become much larger.

  Raven realised he could not make his offer: not because he feared she would reject it, but because he feared she would accept it. He could offer her a good life, far better than she might have dreamed only a few years ago, and she might well settle for that, but she deserved better. Sarah wished to be something more than a woman was usually permitted to be, and if he truly cared for her, he could not be the man who stood in her way.

  The nobility of this often felt like small consolation as he watched her make her plans, and the hardest part was that he could not tell her any of it. But quite unexpectedly, by the time she was packing her cases, it had become easier: paradoxically because things had become more complicated.

  He still cared for Sarah a great deal, but his feelings for her now had to be accommodated alongside his feelings for someone else.

  THREE

  London, three weeks earlier

  arah could see nothing but a cerulean blue sky and the type of pristine, bleached white clouds rarely encountered north of the Tweed. Not typical of London either, she would wager, given what she had witnessed thus far. Smoke and dust seemed to hang in the air, great plumes of it obscuring any view of the firmament above. Perhaps that explained why their hosts had painted the ceiling of their dining room with a view that could not be obtained by simply stepping outside. A r
eminder of what the sky was supposed to look like.

  The décor was at least providing some distraction from the monologuing gentleman to her left, who seemed intent on describing, in its entirety, his collection of microscopic slides. He seemed wholly oblivious to the fact that Sarah had been staring at the ceiling for a full five minutes.

  ‘. . . the lung of a frog. A piece of shark skin. The wing of a horse fly . . .’

  Sarah regretted that their meal had ended some time ago, or she might have feigned a choking episode as a means of bringing this interminable, one-sided conversation to an end. She looked across the table at Mina, who had evidently been more fortunate in the seating arrangements. She had been placed beside a handsome young man with an intelligent face and a full head of hair which moved about as he did, a great strand of it breaking free from the rest and sweeping across his left eye as he came to the end of an amusing anecdote that Sarah could not hear. Mina laughed discreetly behind her hand as the other men in the vicinity guffawed loudly.

  ‘. . . a piece of goat’s horn. The scales of a freshwater trout . . .’ the slide man droned on.

  Perhaps she could attempt a faint. Or stab herself in the eye with her cake fork.

  Lady Montague, fortunately, came to her rescue.

  ‘Let us all move through to the drawing room,’ she announced. ‘We shall have a musical interlude. My nephew Geoffrey will play a piece by Mendelssohn on the piano.’

  They had left Edinburgh three days before, stopping in London en route to Paris. Sarah had been excited to see the great metropolis that she had heard so much about but had quickly tired of the place. It was too crowded, the atmosphere oppressive. Everything, even the most palatial residences, seemed begrimed with filth.

  Their great expedition had been instigated by Sarah, but it was Mina – Mrs Simpson’s sister – who decided the route they would take, the invitations they would accept and the sights they would see on the way. Mina’s brother Robert, being the accompanying man in their party, was nominally in charge, but he generally followed Mina’s lead and did what was asked of him without complaint. Barring his attendance at a few business meetings, there was no specific agenda he wished to pursue, and he presented no impediment to Mina’s grand plans.

  Consequently, Sarah had little say in how they spent their time and had been strictly instructed not to go off by herself. Even at her most frustrated she would not have done such a thing, intimidated by the scale of the place and worried that she would become hopelessly lost. She had enjoyed their visit to Westminster Abbey, never having seen anything on such a scale before. St Giles in Edinburgh could not compare. They had viewed the new Houses of Parliament and witnessed the great morass of the Thames crowded with boats.

  She had a list in her mind of the places she would have preferred to visit but she did not wish to seem petulant or ungrateful. She would have loved to walk the wards of one of the great hospitals – St Bartholomew’s, St Thomas’s – or wander around the displays of morbid anatomy at the Hunterian Museum. The British Museum would have served at a pinch, and Sarah had suggested it, but Mina declined. The weather was much too fine to be indoors, she said.

  Sarah was impatient to get back on the road to their next and ultimate destination, but Mina was enjoying sightseeing and socialising too much for that. Being the sister-in-law of James Young Simpson, Professor of Midwifery and discoverer of chloroform, guaranteed a steady supply of invitations to luncheons, dinners and parties.

  Sarah felt out of place at all of them. Her modest wardrobe was insufficient for such a variety of gatherings and she was obliged to wear the same dresses in short rotation. Initially she worried that people would notice and then she decided that she did not care. As a consolation for the endless round of social engagements that she was compelled to attend, she thought she might at least meet persons of a scientific bent with whom she could converse on matters that were of interest to her. Instead she found that she was forced to endure the same inane discussions about clothing – the latest fashions from Paris (rather scandalous, apparently) – and the relative merits of serving dinner à la russe compared to the more traditional à la française. It was becoming increasingly difficult to fathom when the French were to be emulated or shunned; approved of or disparaged.

  Sarah moved away from her dining companion with relief and walked around the expansive table towards Mina, who seemed disinclined to leave. As Sarah approached, Mina held out an empty wine glass which Sarah accepted without comment and then headed towards the decanters lined up on a sideboard to fill it.

  What am I doing? she thought as she poured the wine. Sarah was unsure who she was more annoyed with: Mina for treating her like a servant, or herself for behaving like one. Mina, she realised, was experiencing great difficulty in recognising Sarah’s altered status. She had been a housemaid once, but marriage and then widowhood had changed that. She was now a woman of independent means, however modest.

  As Sarah followed the rest of the guests out of the room, she lost sight of Mina in the crowd. There was a slow procession between the rooms, the most eminent guests leading, those of a more moderate standing bringing up the rear. The drawing room was as large and ornately decorated as the dining room, hung with huge paintings of severe-looking men in military attire and a large tapestry depicting an ancient battle.

  The playing of the piano was delayed as the sheet music had been misplaced. Lady Montague swept around the room to offer effusive apologies to her assembled guests, clutching at the jet beads which adorned her neck and then adjusting a lace headdress that had somehow been knocked askew.

  ‘You’d think she had poisoned someone rather than mislaid a concerto,’ said a voice at Sarah’s shoulder. She turned to see the man with the resplendent hair who had so entertained Mina throughout dinner.

  ‘Mr Cadge,’ he said, ‘at your service.’ He smiled and made a bow. A lock of hair fell across his face and he tucked it behind his ear as he straightened up again. ‘I am given to understand that you work with the great Dr Simpson.’

  ‘I do,’ Sarah said, returning his smile.

  ‘And what is it that you do?’

  ‘I’m an assistant. Of sorts.’

  Mr Cadge frowned.

  ‘I help with the patients and administer chloroform on occasion,’ she clarified.

  ‘You have an interest in anaesthesia?’

  ‘I am interested in medicine.’

  ‘Then our Miss Gillies would approve of you.’

  ‘Miss Gillies?’

  ‘She is an artist.’ He looked around the room. ‘She is here somewhere. Ah, yes. There she is. Deep in conversation and gesticulating wildly as though having a fit of some kind.’

  He indicated a woman on the far side of the room, dressed extravagantly in brightly coloured silk, an explosion of colour in an otherwise drab corner.

  ‘She thinks that women should find themselves a useful occupation away from hearth and home. Work is good for the soul, apparently.’

  That rather depends on the work, Sarah thought. Scrubbing floors was not perhaps the kind of toil the good lady had in mind.

  ‘She was very much taken with Dr Blackwell who was here last summer,’ Mr Cadge went on. ‘You will have heard of her, I suppose.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The first woman to acquire a medical degree. Quite an achievement.’

  ‘We are hoping to meet her in Paris,’ Sarah said, although the truth of the matter was that it was only Sarah who wished to meet her, the very reason she had embarked upon this trip in the first place. Mina had declared herself impressed with Dr Blackwell’s success but unlike Sarah had no desire to emulate it.

  ‘Is that where she went. I had assumed she had gone back to America,’ Mr Cadge said, taking a sip of his brandy. ‘I consider myself to be something of a pioneer in the field of anaesthesia,’ he continued, his interest in Dr Blackwell seemingly exhausted. In Sarah’s limited experience, men vastly preferred to talk about themselves a
nd shifted discussion in that direction at the earliest opportunity. ‘I was present when Liston performed the first operation under ether. I was his house surgeon at the time. Do you know this story?’ he asked.

  ‘Not the details,’ she said. At least this was a story she wished to hear.

  ‘A butler from Harley Street needed his leg off and was somewhat reluctant to undergo the procedure. Could not be persuaded even when told that Liston could complete an amputation in about thirty seconds. He jumped at the chance to have ether. Funny thing was – and few people know this – before Liston arrived in theatre that day, it was thought prudent to try out the ether on one of the hospital porters, a big man who agreed to participate in this experiment for a fee. Took a few breaths of the stuff and then leapt off the table, rampaged round the room, cursing at the top of his lungs. Took four of us to restrain him until he recovered his senses. If Liston had witnessed that he would probably have abandoned the whole thing and lost his place in history.’

  ‘Does Mr Liston use chloroform now?’

  ‘He does not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Died shortly after it was discovered. Hit in the chest with a yacht boom. Led to a thoracic aneurysm which subsequently ruptured.’ Mr Cadge mimicked an explosion with his free hand.

  ‘Tragic.’

  ‘Messy.’

  Sarah was confused by this and briefly considered asking for more details, but further enquiry was forestalled when they were approached by another guest, an elderly gentleman wearing thick spectacles, his rheumy blue eyes magnified by the lenses. He seemed to be a little unsteady on his feet and failed to introduce himself. This lapse was perhaps explained by his excessive consumption of Lady Montague’s claret, some of which had spilled onto his shirt.