The Echo at Rooke Court

by Harriet Smart

  “We had rumours in Northminster that there was cholera here,” said Carswell, glancing at the others. “What is your mortality?”

  “Not good, sir,” said Bennett in a low voice.

  “And Dr Wharne has left you in charge like this before?” asked Giles.

  “He has his own practice to see to,” said Bennett. “But he has not been here much. He comes in generally for an hour or so in the morning.”

  “And there are no other attending physicians?”

  “Dr Perry comes in once or twice a week for a little while. He is a big man here, bigger than Dr Warne, so he does not do much here, only to oblige Dr Wharne and not to put him out, since Dr Wharne is our authority on the fever.”

  “But you are not entirely confident in him?” said Carswell. “You will have read Malcom on fever, and de Florence?”

  “Yes, sir, I have, but he is a difficult man to have a difference with, and I’m nobody.”

  “You need to have the courage of your convictions,” said Carswell, “backed up by your reason and reading. This is not how it is done at Barts.”

  “I... I... scarcely know. I have not studied this much. That is why I thought I would come here and get some practical knowledge.”

  “Very sound – but you must now have drawn your conclusions that this is not the way to go on,” Carswell gestured at the ward. “How many nurses did you say you have?”

  “Three, though they do not have much experience. But one of the patients has recovered somewhat and has been helping. She is quite able, but I do not like to see her overtax herself, though she insists upon it. In fact, here she is. Esther!” he called out.

  Giles turned and looked at the woman coming towards them. She was as striking as the descriptions he had been given of her, but any bloom of conventional good looks had passed away with illness. She looked emaciated and grey in complexion, but this gave to her form a curious angular grace. She reminded him of an old carved wooden figure of a saint he had once seen in a church – St Mary, or perhaps the Magdalene. There was certainly an aura of penance about her.

  He let her set down her tray before addressing her.

  “Mrs Braithwaite?” he said. “Mrs Joseph Braithwaite of Raythorpe?”

  She stared at him.

  “Who are you, sir?” she said, at last. “What do you want with me?”

  “I am Major Vernon, from the Northminster Constabulary. I would like to talk to you, if it will not tire you too much. You are Mrs Braithwaite?”

  “I must work. There’s so much to be done. Mr Bennett needs me to –”

  “I think you should talk to the gentleman,” said Bennett. “Go back to your bed and lie on it and talk to him there.”

  “I cannot, sir. There is a girl in that room, Lucy, she needs me. She’s in pain – I must do something for her.”

  “Is she being treated as these others?” said Carswell. Bennett nodded. “Then take the covers from her and get her cooled down. And then do as Mr Bennett says and rest.”

  Carswell’s manner had such authority that Mrs Braithwaite bowed her head and left the room.

  Giles followed her and watched as she gently took the covers from the bed and tenderly sponged down the girl’s face and neck, soothing her with quiet words. She glanced warily at Giles as he went and opened the windows, admitting what feeble breeze there was to the small room. The girl seemed to be relieved a little and fell into a fitful sleep. Mrs Braithwaite drew a stool to the bedside and sat down, taking the girl’s hand in hers.

  “She’s a stranger here,” she said at length.

  “Like you,” said Giles, sitting down on the other side of the bed.

  “In her first place. Her mistress brought her here and left her to die, so much she cared,” Mrs Braithwaite said.

  “She will pull through,” Giles said, “with your care. Your daughter is also called Lucy, is she not?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I talked to your husband. I’ve seen her for myself, in fact. A bonny child. How old is she now – six, seven?”

  “Seven,” said Mrs Braithwaite, looking away from him and bending over the girl’s hand.

  “She is missing you,” said Giles.

  “She’ll be better without me,” she said after a moment. “She must learn to do without me.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Please, sir, please, can you not just leave me be? I’ll be gone soon enough and that will be an end of it. I have found a little strength now, but I’m dying. I know I am. Can’t that be enough, that I will be dead to this world and facing judgement from my Maker? Can’t that be enough?”

  “No, I am afraid not,” Giles said. “I need you to tell me why you ran away from your family. They at least deserve an explanation.”

  “I can’t tell you why, I can’t,” she said, shaking her head. “Then they will know what I am and I can’t bear that.”

  “Perhaps that is the price you have to pay, Mrs Braithwaite, for what you have done.”

  “You know?”

  “I have worked out some of it.”

  “Some of it?”

  “Enough to put you up in front of the Justices.”

  She covered her face with her hands at that.

  “Can’t you leave me be?” she said, with a sob. “For the love of God, sir? Let Him punish me. I can bear the fires of Hell, and I will for sure. Can’t that be enough?”

  “It will all come out whether you live or die,” Giles said. “It is better that you give me your account of things. You are allowed to defend yourself, Mrs Braithwaite. After all, the circumstances suggest to me that there is an element of compulsion here, that you were made to act as you did, yes? You have gone against the grain, and in these cases there is often a good reason for it.”

  She gave a fierce shake of the head.

  “No, no, it were nothing like that. Nothing. I did what I did and that’s an end of it.”

  At this moment Carswell came in. He went to Lucy’s bedside and began to examine her.

  “She seems more comfortable in the last few minutes,” Giles observed. “She has a good nurse.”

  Esther Braithwaite had moved swiftly away to the corner of the room, almost as if she were trying to make herself invisible. He wondered whether she was planning to run away, if her strength would permit it, or if her conscience would keep her there, tight-lipped and frustratingly within his sight.

  “Keep her cool and washed down,” said Carswell to Esther when he had finished his examination and given Lucy some more opium. “And come and find me if there is any change.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Esther, moving back to the bedside and still looking suspiciously at Giles.

  “And you and I will talk again later,” Giles said, and she seemed to flinch at it.

  Giles and Carswell went out into the passageway.

  “Did she say anything?” Carswell said.

  “Nothing useful as yet,” said Giles. “How likely is it she might relapse?”

  “I am frankly amazed that we found her alive,” Carswell said, steering him into a side passage and speaking in a low voice. “She must have an astonishing constitution, for the treatment this quack Wharne insists on would kill the healthiest among us, let alone anyone who has enteric fever, or God forbid, Indian cholera! I cannot believe that he has been allowed such free reign. Sweating out the fevers and then bleeding them! It is madness, utter madness!”

  “That was the treatment of my childhood,” Giles observed.

  “Yes, and we have moved beyond that now – at least all informed, sensible men have. But apparently not in Axworth. At any rate I have done what I can, at least in the first instance. There are twenty-five souls in here, though, and one or two of them, well –” He broke off for a moment and pushed his hands through his hair. “I cannot swear to it, never having seen a sufferer first-hand, but from my recent reading, I think they are showing the signs of cholera, and if that is the case... well, to be frank, then we
are in for a deal of trouble.”

  “In what way?”

  “It tends to proliferate, but by what means we do not yet know. That is the difficulty. Some say it is in the air –”

  “Polly and her mia-masma?”

  “Quite. Others feel it is transferred by contact – that of nurse to patient or vice versa. Scrupulous cleanliness and a good healthy situation seem to deter it sometimes, but only sometimes. It is all a question of speculation, and until we know what we are dealing with, anything we do to fight it – well, it is like fighting a ghost! And we have three nurses and a drunken matron, and poor Bennett who is running a temperature himself and should be sent away at once.”

  “Do you think he would go?”

  Carswell shook his head.

  “Where is he?” A man’s voice rang out from the hallway downstairs.

  “He is upstairs, sir,” Bennett replied.

  There was the sound of boots on the stairs and they turned to see a heavy-set gentleman stamping down the passageway towards them.

  “Dr Wharne, I presume,” murmured Major Vernon.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?” said the gentleman.

  “Felix Carswell,” said Carswell. “Are you Dr Wharne?”

  “I am indeed.”

  “I am consulting surgeon to the Northern Criminal Investigation Office,” Carswell went on. “And this is Major Vernon, Chief Superintendent of the same. We came to see a witness who is a patient here, but Mr Bennett needed some assistance and so I acted.”

  “From what I can see you have done a great deal more than that. How dare you, sir, come here and countermand my instructions! What gives you the right to exercise yourself so?”

  “The right of any medical man who sees damage being done to the sick. Your patients are in distress, sir, and many of them are near dying. Bennett showed me the facts – your mortality rate is far higher than it should be. Your treatments are doing no good. In fact they are dangerous.”

  “You are outrageous, sir! That is only your opinion.”

  “Opinion, yes, but supported by the strongest observations of the most up-to-date authorities. And my own clinical experience of fever. Sweating out fevers and bleeding patients is grossly misguided.”

  “In your opinion!” said Wharne again. “And how long have you been in practice, sir, and how long have you had charge of a fever hospital?”

  Carswell was about to reply when Bennett came running up to them.

  “The man downstairs, the suspected cholera case – he has reached a crisis – his skin is turning blue. It must be as you said, Mr Carswell – it must be cholera!”

  ~

  Wharne was not an easy man to convince, even when events had come to such a pass. Felix felt his energy would be better doing something for the sick than trying to make a stubborn old man see that he was a fool, but he could do nothing without Wharne’s capitulation. The nurses were clearly terrified of him, but they were only simple, ignorant creatures, little more than children and entirely unprepared for the work that had been forced on them. So they stood arguing about the best way to proceed over the bed of a man having violent convulsions; whose skin had turned a leaden blue and who seemed so lost to help that Felix felt that do to anything other than make him as calm and as comfortable as the circumstances permitted was a cruelty. But Wharne had his theories and his ideas of a cure.

  “There is no cure,” Felix said. “I have read extensively on this over the last few weeks and the conclusion is quite clear. There can only be relief, not –”

  “Calomel,” said Dr Wharne. “Calomel!”

  “Dear Lord, no!” Felix said. “There was a paper in the Lancet only last month, sent from Bengal, which stated that calomel had nothing but the most disastrous effect when administered. They have discontinued it entirely there.”

  “In a conservative doses it does nothing, I will concede that,” said Dr Wharne. “But when an adequate dose is prescribed –”

  “And how much is adequate, sir, in your opinion?”

  “Thirty grains in hot brandy.”

  “And poison the patient?” said Felix, going to his medical bag and fetching out his notebook. “I have all the references here if you would care to study the literature for yourself, sir!”

  Wharne snatched the notebook from his hand and threw it to the floor.

  “This is my hospital, sir,” he said, “and I will determine what is done!”

  Felix glanced despairingly over to Major Vernon. He was at the bedside of a young man and was gently washing his face and shoulders. He carefully finished the task and came over to them.

  “I regret to say that may not entirely be the case, Dr Wharne,” he said. “Now that two medical men have confirmed the presence of cholera, the situation is quite altered. The recently passed statute on infectious diseases places the management of a cholera epidemic into the hands of the Constabulary of the district. It was decided that given the legal powers required to hold in check an epidemic that a senior officer of the Constabulary, superintendent or above, would be better placed to manage such a situation. The outbreak in 1834 in Upper Canada proved the utility of this approach. They reduced the mortality by as much as sixty-five percent – is that not correct, Mr Carswell?”

  Felix realised he was witnessing a bravura display of invention, for he was certain from his reading that there had been no recent legislation on the subject. So he nodded and said, “Actually it was only sixty-two percent.”

  “Over sixty percent, at any rate,” said Major Vernon. He picked up Felix’s notebook and handed it back to him, with a degree of ceremony, almost as if he were conferring a certificate upon him. “And since I am Chief Superintendent of the Northern Office, equivalent in rank to an assistant chief constable, I am obliged to take charge of this unfortunate situation. I offer you my credentials for your inspection,” he said reaching into his waistcoat pocket and taking out his badge. “Sir.”

  Dr Wharne gazed at the badge for some moments and frowned.

  “In that case,” he said, “I suppose I must yield to you, although I must confess I am not up to date on all the legislation. There is too much legislation, in my opinion, too much for any liberty-loving Englishman to feel comfortable with, and this particular piece of legislation is not at all to my taste and I would have argued strongly against such a measure that undermines my own profession and leaves too much control in the hands of whomsoever has climbed the greasy pole. However – whatever you say, Major Vernon, whatever you say. You are clearly a gentleman and I feel your honour will guide you to do what is right. I can only hope your subordinates are so minded.”

  With which he made a stately departure from the room.

  “I think he will go and drink sherry with the matron now,” Bennett murmured, closing the door behind him. “He often does so. I had not read of that legislation either, I must admit, Major Vernon, but it seems like a good measure in the circumstances.”

  “It does not exist,” said Major Vernon. “It was proposed in committee but it never got anywhere. I hope I can rely on your discretion, Mr Bennett, at least in the short term? It seemed necessary given that there are lives at stake.”

  “Yes, of course, sir,” said Bennett. “So I am to take my directions from –?”

  “Mr Carswell,” said Major Vernon. “Do as he says, and with luck we may remedy things a little here.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Unfortunately, the cholera victim, a joiner called John Makepiece, did not survive the night.

  At a little after four in the morning, Giles and Carswell carried him out of the ward and downstairs to a chilly cellar room where a dozen other unfortunates were awaiting removal and burial. It was a terrible sight and there was only just room for Makepiece.

  Wharne had gone home, and Giles wondered how long it would be before they were disturbed and he would be forced to account for his behaviour to the other authorities. He did not know if he would be forgiven for such an
outrageous stratagem, but when he saw the general improvement of the patients under Carswell’s care, he felt justified in it. In the second cholera case, a young woman called Mary Pepper, it was evident that his approach might mean lives saved rather than lost. She was in a dire state, but she had been isolated and watched over carefully and she was showing signs that she might struggle through.

  “We need reinforcements,” said Carswell, surveying the corpses.

  “I will go to the workhouse and see if they can help us,” said Giles.

  “What will you say?”

  “Oh, I will fabricate something else, I dare say,” Giles said, lightly.

  “You are risking a great deal.”

  “We both are, but the end is a good one,” said Giles. “And I shall send a message to Hawksby while I am out. They will be wondering what has become of you. Now, give me your list of requirements. Mr Bennett’s uncle the apothecary ought to be of use to us.”

  In fact, he did no more fabrication. He went and found the nearest station house and made himself known to them. Fortunately the sergeant in charge was a former constable from Northminster called Walker, whom Giles remembered had gone over to the Axworth force because his sweetheart had been in the town.

  “I remember writing your letter of recommendation, Walker,” he said. “And I am glad to see you are doing well.”

  “Thank you, sir, it has all gone well with me, especially when we joined with the county force. But I was sad you were not made Chief Constable.”

  “I did not want it,” said Giles. “I am happier where I am.”

  “It seems all wrong you being only a superintendent, sir, that’s all,” said Walker. “Now, what brings you to Axworth?”

  So Giles explained all that had occurred at the fever hospital and did not omit any detail of how he had overcome Dr Wharne.

  “A desperate remedy,” he said, “and I’m afraid not at all a sound one.”

  “A good thing you did, sir,” said Walker. “No one in the town has any trust of him or that dreadful place. Only the most miserable souls commit themselves there. My mother-in-law will go half way round the town to avoid walking past it. She says the place is cursed, and it seems she is right.”