A Corruption of Blood

by Ambrose Parry

  Sarah saw that the woman was crying once more. She retrieved her handkerchief and handed it over, realising as she did so that since her return from her travels she had spent a lot of time comforting the weeping and bereft.

  ‘I don’t even know your name,’ Sarah said.

  The woman sniffed, wiped her nose. ‘My name is not important, and I would prefer if you did not learn it.’

  Sarah decided not to press the issue but was conscious that this one conversation might be all she was likely to get. She would have to extract as much information as she could.

  ‘How was it all arranged?’ she asked.

  ‘Believe it or not, I answered an advertisement in the newspaper,’ the woman said. ‘In the miscellaneous section. “Married couple without family willing to adopt healthy child.” It all seemed legitimate. I was told that they had a house in the country, that they were good Christian folk unable to have a child of their own. A meeting was to be arranged through an intermediary, who would make all the necessary arrangements.

  ‘I met her – the intermediary – several times before agreeing to their terms. Her name was Mrs King. The rendezvous was always at a railway station, encouraging the notion that she lived somewhere other than Edinburgh. She gave the impression of respectability. I was confident my child was going to be looked after, and ultimately sent to a good home. Of course I had been convinced of that,’ she added, as though still trying to justify her actions to herself. ‘How could I have handed over my child otherwise?’

  ‘Was it expensive, this service that she provided?’ Sarah imagined it would have been.

  ‘She took a lot of money up front,’ the woman confirmed. ‘Part of the fee, she said, was for “purposes of discretion”. Effectively blackmail. She knew of course that I had something to hide. She asked for clothing too: as much clothing as I could supply. I gave all I owned and bought some more, as it was the last gift I might give my daughter.

  ‘Then my husband died suddenly, of a stroke. My stroke of good fortune, as I like to think of it. I decided to get my baby back. Lilian could now come and live with me and my new husband-to-be, her father. I tried to find the elusive Mrs King. My fiancé made some enquiries. He has an acquaintance on the town council who helped track her down. Well, her likely address anyway. Of course, I knew immediately that something was very wrong. You saw the place yourself. I have been back several times but there is never anyone there.’

  She sighed deeply. ‘I need to investigate further but how can I do so? Asking questions would reveal that which I must keep secret.’

  Sarah realised then why she had confided so much. She saw in Sarah a means of protecting her anonymity while achieving her own ends.

  As the woman walked back towards George Street, Sarah was struck by the enormity of what she had been drawn into. Tracking down one missing baby had already seemed a daunting task. Now she was charged with finding two.

  TWENTY-THREE

  s his cab emerged from the woodland and he caught sight of Crossford House up ahead, Raven noted the contrast with his previous visit. Gone were the crowds, the music, the smells and the atmosphere of conviviality. The lawns were deserted, the building itself looking lonely and grey, in keeping with the weather. There was an unseasonal chill in the wind as it blew a smirr of rain into the carriage. It seemed incredible that it was only a matter of days since last he was here. This felt like it could be October.

  Another contrast was to be felt in his pocket, as he was having to pay for his own transport on this occasion, his journey being in service of his promise to Eugenie. He had not flattered to deceive McLevy: nothing he had discovered pointed at anything but Gideon’s guilt. Nonetheless, he knew that Eugenie would only be able to accept the difficult truth of it if she knew his efforts had been exhaustive.

  That said, his errand was not solely in service to Eugenie, but in part to his own curiosity. That Gideon should have reached out to Raven in his time of need, despite their mutual antipathy, remained a source of intrigue almost as compelling as the question of Gideon’s guilt.

  On that greater matter there remained only one outstanding question, but it was a canker that continued to worry at him: Gideon’s use of arsenic. Both Eugenie’s father and McLevy suggested that Gideon would have acted without consideration for how he might be caught. Raven had been in enough tavern brawls to understand how rage drove acts of violence with no thought for consequence. He had seen drink and fury possess men, compelling them to attack without assessing the implications of their foe being bigger and stronger or having three nearby companions ready to weigh in. Poisoning, by contrast, was a planned and calculated act, carried out by those who wished to disguise their hand. Many were caught because they had not anticipated how their actions would become visible after the fact, unaware of how much could be revealed when a corpse was examined by the likes of Dr Struthers.

  Had Gideon perhaps believed that his father’s sudden death would not seem suspicious enough to merit such an examination? Raven doubted it. Something Henry said intrigued him too: that only a small trace of arsenic had been found. He wondered whether this tiny quantity was being read like the letters on the parcel: misinterpreted as the initials of Mary Olsen when there was a different, larger message to be found if you knew where to look.

  There were two other carriages outside the house as his own pulled up. Climbing down onto the gravel, Raven saw a woman in black emerge from the front of Crossford House and make her way towards her waiting conveyance. He recognised her at once as Amelia Bettencourt, Gideon’s sister. She had her son clutched to her chest, dressed in a pink frock, his chin resting upon her shoulder.

  Raven anticipated that she would hurry past with a cursory nod, unlikely to tarry even if she did recognise him, but instead she stopped as he approached. She did not smile – nor did he expect her to under the circumstances – but her demeanour was far from cold.

  ‘Dr Raven, is it not?’

  ‘Mrs Bettencourt, ma’am.’

  ‘I have heard that you and my dear friend Eugenie are to be wed.’

  It was all Raven could do not to roll his eyes. He wondered whether there would be anybody left in Edinburgh who did not already know by the time they made an official announcement. Perhaps that was always the way of such things.

  ‘News travels fast,’ he replied.

  ‘What brings you to Crossford today?’

  This was not an idle question, he knew, and it would not serve him to shrink from it.

  ‘Eugenie has asked me to take an interest, on behalf of Gideon.’

  Raven calculated that Eugenie being Amelia’s friend would get him a more sympathetic hearing than stating he was here entirely at Gideon’s request. As the general consensus was that her brother had murdered her father, he doubted she would look kindly on anyone who might consider himself Gideon’s confederate.

  ‘She finds it difficult to accept that things are as they appear,’ he added, in as neutral a way as he could put it.

  Amelia did not respond, though she seemed deep in thought as she digested this. Her child was peering over her shoulder, his face coming in and out of view as she swivelled back and forth, quietening him.

  ‘This is your son?’

  ‘Matthew,’ she said, her voice faltering just a little as she spoke his name.

  Raven grinned at him. Matthew looked back with an expression of curiosity and confusion, which then resolved briefly into a smile. The provenance was unmistakable even in one so young. He looked very much like Gideon, apart from the happy expression and the air of sweet-natured innocence.

  ‘The family resemblance is most pronounced,’ Raven remarked.

  Amelia nodded sagely. ‘And I am endeavouring to ensure that is all he should inherit.’

  It seemed a strangely unguarded remark, tinged with bitterness and hard resolve. It told Raven that neither of the Douglas siblings bore much affection for their father.

  ‘Forgive me if it is inappropriate, but Eug
enie would wish me to ask. Is it your feeling that . . . things are as they appear? That your brother should have poisoned your father?’

  She adjusted her grip upon her son. Matthew gazed up at her, entranced. There was love in Amelia’s face too, but it was quickly washed away by sadness and regret.

  ‘Every opportunity was granted to my brother, every chance,’ she said. ‘It was not easy to watch him squander things that were never offered to me. Gideon was always as lazy as he was destructive. As a child, I recall spending hours building a house with little wooden bricks. He tried to do the same, but lacked the patience and the skill, and his walls would collapse. His response was to tear down mine so that I could not have it either. Gideon acts in anger and he seeks swift gratification, easy solutions.’

  She gazed across the gardens as though this memory was playing out there in her mind.

  ‘Knowing what he has done is a difficult thing to bear. I wish that it were not so. Such a wish drives me to deny it, as it has driven Eugenie. But there are many things I would wish were different when it comes to my family. That is what brought me here today, in fact. Dymock, my father’s lawyer, is visiting to administrate his affairs. I am intent upon building a life apart from this family.’

  ‘You are here to claim your share of the inheritance,’ Raven stated.

  She wore an odd smile: amused and yet resolute.

  ‘Not exactly,’ she said, then bade him good day.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  he rapid clump of feet outside the door alerted Sarah to the emergency before she was informed as to its nature. Dr Simpson stuck his head round the door, interrupting her tidying of Raven’s consulting room.

  ‘Where is Will?’

  ‘He has gone out. I’m not sure where.’

  ‘Come away then, Sarah. Someone is in need.’

  Sarah wiped her hands on her apron, took it off and hung it on a hook beside the door. She looked around the room quickly for anything that she might require, threw a few things into a bag and followed Dr Simpson out to the street. They stood for a few minutes waiting for the carriage to arrive.

  ‘A case of prolonged labour,’ Dr Simpson said. ‘Dr Paterson requests our assistance.’

  She loved him for implying that she was an essential part of this. Sarah was fairly sure that Dr Paterson, whoever he was, was not expecting any help from her.

  The carriage arrived and they climbed in, Angus the coachman giving her a smile and a nod.

  ‘This is the patient’s second confinement,’ Dr Simpson continued. ‘At her first, two different medical gentlemen failed in their attempts to effect delivery by the forceps.’

  He did not say how the delivery was achieved on that occasion; a destructive operation, perhaps, using the implements that lay at the bottom of Dr Simpson’s medical bag. She hoped that there would be no call to dredge them up today.

  Sarah adjusted her position on the seat. Dr Simpson had already extracted a sheaf of papers from somewhere and was making notes in the margins with a stubby pencil. He insisted on making use of the broken and disjointed pieces of time that littered his days, maintaining that they were too precious to fritter away. ‘Save up any odd moment and put it to use,’ he would say, encouraging others to follow his lead.

  Sarah sighed. She had not meant to. It just escaped, as though she had been holding her breath for some time. Dr Simpson looked up from his work.

  ‘Are you alright, Sarah?’

  ‘I am quite well.’ A polite rejoinder. She did not feel well at all.

  Dr Simpson stared at her for a moment. Sarah found that she could not meet his eye. She looked out of the window, noticed that they were heading south.

  ‘It’s just that it strikes me you have not seemed yourself of late. Not since your return from Europe, in fact. And it is conspicuous that you have not spoken at all about your meeting with Dr Blackwell.’

  Sarah wondered if this was the real reason she had been brought along. Had she anticipated as much she might have refused, found a reason why she could not come. She willed herself not to cry.

  ‘Am I right in assuming that it did not go as you might have hoped?’

  She managed a tight-lipped nod.

  Dr Simpson patted her gently on the knee. ‘Whenever you wish to speak about it, I am here to listen.’

  She was grateful for his solicitousness, but she doubted such a time would ever come.

  The carriage continued through the town to Bruntsfield Place, far removed from the miasmic atmosphere of the more densely populated parts of the city. Sarah lowered the carriage window and took some deep breaths, trying to compose herself. The air here was clearer, the houses bigger, with gardens and trees and flowering shrubs, a world away from the cramped and dilapidated warren of the Old Town. But Sarah did not want to be here.

  The work that she had previously enjoyed, which had given her so much satisfaction, was as nothing to her now. There seemed little point in her being part of it. She felt adrift, afloat outside of herself, as if she could not quite connect with what was going on around her.

  She took another deep breath, determined to regain some control of herself. She had a job to do. Dr Simpson had asked for her help and it was incumbent upon her to perform her duties to the best of her abilities. She owed him that, at the very least. She owed Christina too, having promised to help find her child. Perhaps by focusing on the tasks at hand, on the more immediate things that she had to deal with, she would learn to cope with the greater calamity that had befallen her.

  The loss of hope, the loss of her ambition. A little flame that had puttered out.

  The carriage pulled up at a great porticoed door. There was a crunch of gravel underfoot, the smell of something sweet in the air. Jasmine or honeysuckle. The door was answered by a liveried footman, and a housemaid in a starched white apron took their coats. They were shown up carpeted stairs, Sarah aware of a strong smell of beeswax polish. She thought about what she would be required to do, rehearsing her actions in an attempt to quieten her mind and avoid costly mistakes. She was worried that the skills she did possess would somehow desert her.

  They entered a bedroom of immoderate size that could have comfortably housed several families. It was crowded with furniture and there seemed to be a continuous flow of maids bearing basins of clean water and fresh towels. Childbirth was, however, a great leveller, mother nature no respecter of pocketbooks. The afflicted woman looked much as any who had been in labour for a prolonged period: sweat-soaked and exhausted. Sarah immediately felt sorry for her. Fancy sheets and numerous attendants could do little to improve matters when the infant was stuck tight and no amount of maternal effort would shift it. Skilled assistance and obstetric instruments would be required.

  Forceps, thought Sarah. Let it be the forceps. Not the cranioclast or the perforator.

  Dr Simpson consulted with Dr Paterson, who looked about as worn out as his patient, the dark circles under his eyes suggestive of a long night without rest. As the men discussed the problem, Sarah readied the chloroform. She carefully decanted a dose from the larger bottle into a smaller receptacle fitted with a dropper, then folded a piece of lint into a cone.

  Dr Simpson made his examination, the woman groaning and then crying out as he tried to ascertain what was amiss. The professor began to explain his findings to Sarah, which seemed to cause Dr Paterson no end of confusion. He looked about the room repeatedly, as though in search of the person Dr Simpson was addressing.

  ‘The head is low down in the pelvis,’ Dr Simpson said, ‘but it is in the right occipito-posterior position and the forehead instead of the vertex is presenting. One orbit is easily felt behind the symphysis pubis.’

  Sarah nodded. Dr Paterson’s eyeballs seemed ready to pop out of his head. He looked from one to the other but remained silent. What could he say? He had requested the professor’s assistance and was therefore not in a strong position to then question his methods.

  If Dr Simpson was aware of the effect his b
ehaviour was having on his colleague he showed no sign of it, too intent upon what he was doing to concern himself with what Dr Paterson might be thinking. He then compounded matters further by asking Sarah to listen in for the foetal heart.

  ‘It’s there,’ she said after a few moments of searching. ‘Not as rapid as it should be.’

  ‘Unsurprising,’ Dr Simpson stated. ‘I think the infant has been lodged in this position for some time.’

  Dr Paterson looked as though he was about to interject but Dr Simpson cut him off.

  ‘Grab the forceps from my bag, would you please?’

  Dr Paterson retrieved the forceps as instructed, fumbling a little with the fastening on the top of the bag. Sarah began to administer the chloroform, watching with a small sense of triumph as the distressed woman subsided gently into sleep. Her groaning, which had accompanied all their efforts thus far, ceased completely.

  Dr Simpson applied the forceps without difficulty, aided by the relaxation of the maternal muscles from the anaesthetic.

  ‘I am turning the head a quarter of a circle into the occipito-anterior position,’ he said.

  He then proceeded to extract the child who, on account of its prolonged entrapment, required vigorous rubbing of its chest to provoke its first cry.

  Dr Paterson finally found his voice. ‘Extraordinary,’ he said. ‘Quite extraordinary.’

  Sarah wished she could believe he was talking about the baby, but his flabbergasted gaze was fixed upon her.

  As the coach pulled away to commence the journey home, Dr Simpson finished writing something then slid his notebook into his pocket. He looked at Sarah and smiled.

  ‘Do not be dismayed by apparent difficulties on the road to professional distinction,’ he said, as though reciting a prepared speech. ‘Let them not enervate but rather stimulate you onwards. That is what I tell my students. Only the timorous and irresolute will be intimidated and daunted by them. And you, Sarah, are neither.’

  Sarah returned his smile. She felt more relaxed, less tense than she had been. She realised that she had a few skills that she could rightly be proud of.