by Lynn Morris
Shiloh shook his head. “Nope. I was just thinking of old Mr. Pettijohn. I miss him. I’d remember if I had met his son that he was so proud of.”
“Mm,” Cheney said noncommittally. Shiloh was not at the hospital very much—Cheney was careful not to involve him in her medical affairs—so it was very possible he had never met Dr. Pettijohn. After all, Dr. Pettijohn did work days only, except for the weekends that he was the on-call physician. Cheney had not come in to the hospital on her weekends off, until today.
Cheney knew that she must spend some time with Shiloh, so she had decided to go ahead with their regular visit to Duvall Court for her fencing lesson and dinner with her parents. But she knew that she must go by the hospital to check up on Cornelius Melbourne. He still was in critical condition, though he rested comfortably, tolerated pain medication very well, and drank water and broth. Cheney had not even told Shiloh about him. The day after the accident had been so busy that she hadn’t had an opportunity. She knew she should tell him about Cornelius Melbourne, but now it seemed to her that the time to speak about him had passed. When she had told Shiloh that morning that she would like to stop by the hospital, she merely said that she wanted to check up on some of the more critical patients.
It was also true that she was worried about Mevrouw de Sille, the patient she had checked in the previous day. Cheney had admitted her in the afternoon with severe catarrh and respiratory distress. Mrs. de Sille had not been in serious enough condition for Cheney to cancel out on dinner at her parents’ and the opera. But still, Cheney felt slightly guilty for leaving early last night.
Shiloh was watching her face and sighed a little as he saw Cheney’s frown and dark introspection. But lightly he asked, “So you’re worried about Mevrouw de Sille?”
Even after all these years, these moments of mind melding still startled Cheney. “What? What did you say?”
“I said, Doc,” he repeated slowly, “you’re worried about Mevrouw de Sille? What’s the matter with her, anyway? I’ve got an idea she’s probably sick with embarrassment over her rotten husband.”
“So you’ve read the gossip page of the World too,” Cheney observed grimly. “So has everyone else in Manhattan, including poor Mrs. de Sille. But it’s not like everyone didn’t already know about Peter de Sille’s awful red-headed chorus girl, prancing around in her pink tights at Niblo’s. I swear, the de Silles are an old respected family, and you’d think that even if he chose to ignore the moral aspect of his behavior, he would at least have better taste. And you’d better not ever think that you’re going back to go see The Black Crook either, Mr. Iron Head.”
“Ow, Doc, you’ve got a grip like a gator when you pinch! I didn’t do anything! I’m not the one with the red-headed woman!” Shiloh protested vigorously.
“I should think not,” she sniffed. “Anyway, here we are, and I don’t have to remind you not to mention any names aloud while we’re in the hospital, but the lady in question—not the one with the pink tights, but the other one—actually asked about you yesterday. I’d like for you to come talk to her for a few minutes. I get the impression that she’s so sensitive about men right now that she can hardly bear to look at one, so I thought it was unusual for her to remember you and ask after you. When we talk to her, just be sure to listen very carefully to the sound of her voice. You know how well you can tell if someone’s going into pneumonia just by listening to them speak.”
They came in through the double emergency entrance doors, which faced the long desk of the nurses’ station. The two nurses, Kitty Kalm and Miss Nilsson, clad in gray uniforms with starched white aprons and modest mobcaps, jumped up when Cheney entered the vestibule of the emergency clinic and dispensary. Cheney and Shiloh just smiled at them, and Cheney waved for them to sit down as she kept talking to Shiloh in a low tone.
In the women’s ward, of the fourteen patients, Shiloh had met two of them on the ward—a former charwoman named Alice Farley and one of Victoria’s housemaids, Rebecca Green. One thing that Cheney had suggested during the planning stages of the wards was that wooden cubicles with curtained doorways should be built for privacy. Cheney felt that when one was ill, lying in an open ward would be uncomfortable, and the board had agreed with her. Even though it took up much space—leaving room around the beds for the doctors and nurses to work—they had still managed to get eleven cubicles, four private rooms, and one luxurious suite in each of the wards.
Both Mrs. Farley’s and Mrs. Green’s curtains were pulled, and Cheney was relieved. Mrs. Farley in particular was a talker, and she would talk to Shiloh—he would stand there and listen politely, never dreaming of interrupting a lady—until kingdom come. Hurriedly she pulled him along down the hall, giving quick nods to the women who looked up and watched them pass by.
Mrs. de Sille occupied Room A, next to the last on the end except for the private suite, which spanned the width of the wing. Cheney entered the room, motioning Shiloh to wait, and immediately came back and asked him in.
Mevrouw de Sille had a fever, he immediately saw, and when she greeted him, he could distinguish the odd thick bass note in her voice, a sure sign of thick congestion. “Mr. Irons-Winslow, how kind of you and Dr. Duvall to drop by to see me,” she said weakly, holding out her hand, which he took between both of his own.
He leaned over as close as he could to listen to the timbre of her voice. “The doc wanted to check on you, and when she told me you’d asked after me, I had to come see you to thank you for remembering me—and my name,” Shiloh said lightly. “So far you’re the only person among our acquaintance who doesn’t call me Mr. Duvall.”
“I doubt that very seriously,” she said, closing her eyes. “I’m sure that people recall your name perfectly well…Please forgive me. I’m so tired.”
Gently Shiloh disentangled his hands, laid hers down on the light coverlet, and patted them. “I know you are, Mrs. de Sille, so I’m going to go on while the doc examines you. I’ll come back to visit you soon.”
“Please do,” she whispered. “I don’t get many visitors.”
Shiloh slipped out of the room and looked up and down the hall for the carbolic acid stands. Seeing one about midway up the hall, he hurried to cleanse his hands in the strong yellow antiseptic. Frowning, he noticed that the towels hanging on the stands were soiled and started down to the nurses’ station. But before he’d taken two steps, he remembered that such things were not his responsibility anymore. Doing an about-face, he went back to wait for Cheney outside Mrs. de Sille’s room. It bothered him that Cheney had so vehemently disconnected him from her career. On their honeymoon, she had gone along with him on calls to future shipping clients and had been wonderfully helpful. They had promised to help each other in their careers.
But by the time the hospital had opened, Cheney seemed to have effectively shut him out of this part of her life. Shiloh had been particularly surprised—even a little hurt—that she hadn’t asked him to be on the board of directors. All of the other owners were, and Shiloh had invested his own personal funds in the hospital too. He had fully expected to be named to some part of the hospital’s administration because of his experience both with the Metropolitan Board of Health’s quarantine hospital in the cholera epidemic of 1866 and as director of nursing services at St. Francis in San Francisco.
But Cheney had not told him anything about the hospital as they were setting it up, and since then she had never confided anything about the hospital’s money, patients, or staff. Until today, Shiloh corrected himself. He had known that Cheney must be very worried about Mevrouw de Sille, because until today she had been very good about not going to work on her days and weekends off.
Sturdily Shiloh enjoined himself to quit whining like some annoying kid. He was the luckiest—most blessed, he corrected himself mentally—man in the world to be married to Cheney Duvall. He didn’t have to have his big nose stuck in all of her business every minute of every day.
She came back out with a grave look on
her face. Handing her bag to him, she hurried up the hall to wash her hands. “Now I can hear the rhonchi,” she said worriedly. “She’s gotten much worse just overnight.”
He nodded. “That’s the rattling noises, right? And once I got close to her I could hear the rales, those kinda crackly sounds. Funny how the pneumonia can geometrically increase in severity once it takes hold.”
“Oh dear,” she said in a sonorous alto, “it’s more of that geometry that I don’t understand.”
They returned to the nurses’ station, stifling their laughter in the quiet ward.
“Miss Nilsson, I have some extra instructions for Mrs. de Sille,” Cheney said as the two girls jumped up again. “Where is Dr. Pettijohn?”
Miss Nilsson and Kitty exchanged blank glances. Finally Kitty, who was the assistant to Mrs. Flagg, the head of nursing, answered, “I don’t know, Dr. Duvall. I only came in myself about an hour ago to check up on Mrs. Carteret’s diet. She was so fussy last night that I worried about her all day.”
“That’s right, you’re supposed to be off on Saturdays, Miss Kalm,” Cheney said. “I had forgotten. So neither of you knows where Dr. Pettijohn is? Let’s see, Dr. Gilder is on call when Dr. Pettijohn is, isn’t he?” The interns each took a shift with a certain doctor, and then worked that physician’s on-call weekend with them. Dr. Gilder worked with Dr. Pettijohn, Dr. Stephen Varick worked with Cleve, and Dr. Lawana White worked with Cheney.
“Yes, ma’am,” Miss Nilsson answered. “He was helping Timothy get the storage closets supplied and the emergency clinic set up. We’re expecting some patients tonight.”
Saturday nights were generally busy for all hospitals, for workingmen were usually off on Sundays, so they spent most Saturday nights at the taverns and brothels. Generally between two o’clock and five o’clock in the morning the fights broke out, the drinkers got alcohol poisoned, and the women got violently assaulted. Also sick people tended to have crises between those hours.
Cheney nodded. “All right, I won’t bother him. You can do it anyway, Miss Nilsson, but I would prefer that you have Dr. Pettijohn check on Mrs. de Sille every two hours after the treatment.” Busily Cheney wrote on Mrs. de Sille’s case file, another innovation that she had imported from St. Francis. Handing it back to the nurse, she asked, “Do you understand?”
Miss Nilsson took it and read it, then narrowed her eyes. “I know about mustard plasters, Dr. Duvall. But syrup of ipecac? You want to induce vomiting?”
“No. Please take special note of the dosage,” Cheney said. “Only two minims mixed with a fluid ounce of tincture of anise. In very small doses ipecac will break up the mucous and induce coughing. Mrs. de Sille has pneumonia,” she finished, sighing, “in both her lungs. So try the prescriptive now—” she checked the clock on the desk—“at five o’clock. If one dosage doesn’t break up that congestion, try doubling it at nine o’clock. I’ve written the prescriptive down very carefully, Miss Nilsson. Can you mix it, or would you prefer to have Dr. Gilder do it?”
“Oh, I can do it, ma’am,” she answered, “as long as you don’t mind a nurse making it.”
Cheney smiled. “You will probably do a better job than Dr. Varick or Dr. Gilder. Most doctors don’t much care for apothecary work. But please, Nurse Nilsson, do ask Dr. Pettijohn to keep a close eye on Mrs. de Sille. Understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Miss Nilsson and Kitty answered in unison.
“Miss Kalm, you’re not staying for the entire night shift, are you?” Cheney asked. “Is something wrong with Mrs. Carteret?” Cassandra Carteret was Dev’s patient, but of course all three of the staff doctors kept current on each patient. Mrs. Carteret had specifically requested Kitty as her personal nurse, and the doctors had allowed it because Kitty never neglected her duties as assistant to head of nursing, even though she spent a lot of time with Mrs. Carteret.
“Oh, no ma’am, she’s fine,” Kitty reassured her. “I just thought that this is the first weekend we’ve had snow, and it being the full moon and all, that I might better stay for a while tonight. I’ve a feeling that our emergency clinic might see quite a bit of traffic.”
“I had forgotten it’s a full moon,” Cheney said, rolling her eyes. “And some of the streets are icy. It’s good of you, Nurse Kalm, and do put in a request for additional pay. Anything else?”
“Dr. Buchanan was here earlier, Dr. Duvall, and left this note for you,” Nurse Nilsson said, handing her a folded piece of Dev’s cream- colored parchment notepaper with the dignified block letterhead.
Sent a breast cancer from Bellevue to St. Luke’s morgue. One of my patients who underwent surgery last year and suddenly died. I have a day and evening full of appointments and obligations, but I’m going to try to do the dissection tonight. Hope to be at St. Luke’s about ten o’clock. Will you join me? D.B.
Thoughtfully Cheney folded the note and said in a very low voice to Shiloh, “Dev’s got an important dissection to do here tonight on a former patient who died. You know Rebecca Green? Well, she has breast cancer, and Dev has decided to operate and try to excise the tumors. This patient to be autopsied is evidently a similar case. Would you mind if I—that is, Dev asked me—”
Shiloh took her hand and squeezed it gently. “Of course I don’t mind if you pitch in, Doc. You need to stay now, or what?”
She dropped her eyes. “Actually, there are a few more things I’d like to do as long as I’m here. But I won’t be long. We can go on to Duvall Court and have supper with Mother and Father tonight, as we planned, and then have a nice moonlight ride home. I can come back tonight by myself.”
“Huh-uh,” Shiloh said firmly. “We can go to Duvall Court, but we stay there until you’re ready to come back here. I’ll come with you and wait until you’re ready to come home. And don’t argue. I won’t bother you and Buchanan and your moldy old corpses. I’ll just hang around at Roe’s till you get all your business done. And if you need a while now, I think I’ll just go on over and beat up James and John.”
“All right,” Cheney agreed. “But you’d better save some of your strength, Mr. Iron Head, because I predict that by the time we finally head for home tonight, you’re going to be carrying Balaam.”
****
For at least the dozenth time Shiloh checked his watch. “Midnight thirty-two, that’s just great,” he grumbled to himself. “Gonna be here all night or what?” Bored, he breathed on the gold watch, polished it with his shirt sleeve, wound it two ticks, and popped it open to listen to the squeaky little tune again. When Johnny comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah…
He sat in Roe’s stables, alone except for eleven horses, including Balaam and Eugènie. With a half sigh, half exasperated breath, he shoved the watch back into the pocket of his faded denims. Licking his finger, he popped it onto the coffeepot and heard the satisfactory sizzle. Good and hot. Guess I’ll have another cup…don’t need to stoke up the fire.
Once again he kicked back in the chair that Mr. Jack had been sitting in earlier that day, propped his booted feet on an upturned feed bucket, and sipped his scalding coffee. The Roes were good to keep the coffee on all night when the hospital was busy.
Sure is jumping tonight, he reflected moodily. And here I sit like a big…big what? Like a big—doll! A Duvall doll, that’s me, Mr. Dummy- Doll Duvall! No wonder everyone calls me Mr. Duvall!
He and Cheney had arrived back at the hospital at nine-thirty. Cheney had insisted on coming a half hour before Dev was expected because she wanted to make sure the laboratory had everything ready for the dissection. “And I’m not going to go in there and bother Dr. Pettijohn by popping in and out of the clinic,” she told Shiloh decisively. “As much as I want to meddle, I’m just not going to do it. I think I make him nervous or something.”
“You? Make another young male subordinate doctor nervous? Nah, Doc, how could that be?” Shiloh intoned, and she pinched him.
She had left him at Roe’s, and Shiloh had noted that she went in by the Sixth Avenue e
ntrance that had steps leading down directly into the cellar.
Both James and John were on duty in the stables, having been alerted by Dr. Pettijohn that tonight would likely be busy. And he had been right.
An entire family of Italians in their cart had skidded on an icy street into—of all things—an iceman’s cart, resulting in everyone getting slightly injured, including the two horses. The iceman’s cart was all a-splinters, John had told Shiloh with relish, but the Italian family’s cart was still intact when it was righted. Mr. Renaldi, the patriarch, piled the nine injured members of his family back into the cart, threw Mr. Bartoli, the iceman, in with them, hitched Mr. Bartoli’s horse to the back of their cart, and drove like a fiend to St. Luke’s. At the late hour James had almost gone to fetch his grandfather in their cottage next door, but Shiloh had objected, offering to tend to Balaam and Eugènie himself. He even helped them put iodine on the two injured horses’ cuts and wrapped one big weary gelding’s bruised off hind with a pressure bandage.
They had finished with that when another man came in with a child. The man simply tossed his horses’ reins to Shiloh and ran furiously to the hospital with the pale, unconscious little girl in his arms.
Then Duncan Gilder, the student doctor on call, had come out to tell James and John that the ambulance had been called out and ask them if they would drive him to Chickering Hall. Shiloh had to grit his teeth not to interfere, for he knew that if Dr. Pettijohn, the doctor in charge this weekend, was sending his student doctor, that must leave just him and two attendants for the entire hospital—unless Cheney and Dev had come up out of the depths of the morgue and were helping out. Shiloh muttered to the two young men, “Go on. I’ll stay here until you get back.”
So here he was, bored stiff and feeling very frustrated that he had been shut out of this part of Cheney’s life. Frowning fiercely, his eyes staring off miles away, he reflected, Wait a minute. That’s not fair to the doc. I’m the one who wanted to play at being the shipping magnate and sail around on my clipper…expensive toy even for a grown man. Still, it’s making Winslow Brothers a pretty profit. It’s just that I never expected it to be so easy.