On the corner of his desk rested a small black case, and in it his hypodermic needle. Beside that, the cocaine bottle. In that vial of cobalt blue he might find a little rest. He ran his fingers over the case, a fingertip over the bottle’s lid, feeling the hunger gnawing inside him. He pushed both farther back on the desk where the light didn’t reach and where the little glass bottle didn’t sparkle quite so interestingly. Perhaps later, but there was still so much to do.
Downstairs, the front door closed softly, but not so softly as to escape his hearing. Nudging back the edge of a lace drapery (more of Mrs. Hudson’s handiwork), he peered down to watch a thin figure in top hat and black cloak descend the three stone steps and move with a quickly furtive gait into the damp, fogenshrouded street. The silver head of a walking stick which he tucked under one arm flashed briefly.
A moment later, footsteps sounded on the seventeen steps that led from the first floor, where he and his assistant maintained medical offices, to the upper rooms which they shared in these troubled times. The door’s brass knob turned. The door opened. Dr. Arthur Doyle, tall and slender, dark of hair, not yet thirty, stepped from the brighter hallway into the gloom of their living quarters. He closed the door in a thoughtful manner and leaned back against it. His slim-fingered hand lingered on the knob.
At Edinburgh University Hospital, Doyle had been Bell’s finest student. His mind was keen, and Bell had quickly taken him on as a clerk. Now a doctor fully in his own right, he continued to work loyally at Bell’s side.
“Even in this weak light,” Bell commented as he settled into an overstuffed chair near the window and regarded the younger doctor, “you look quite ashen.”
Taking a handkerchief from a trousers pocket, Doyle wiped his brow, nodding as he sank back into a chair opposite his mentor. He seemed at a loss for words, but Bell waited patiently. “An old friend,” Doyle murmured distractedly. “Also from Edinburgh. I knew him at university. We . . .” he hesitated, biting his lip as he thrust the handkerchief back into his pocket. “We once shared an interest.”
“In writing,” Bell interjected. “I know. How was Mister Stevenson?”
Doyle’s thick eyebrows shot up over his hawkish nose. “How did you . . . ? I promised him I wouldn’t . . . !”
Bell waved a dismissive hand. “You didn’t tell. He gave himself away with that ostentatious cane. He never appears or is photographed without it. And the very lateness of the hour suggested someone famous, or at least well-known, who preferred not to be recognized. There’s also the fact that this person came to you, someone he knew and trusted.” He picked at the nap of the chair’s fabric and flicked away a bit of lint. “Even without the cane I would have recognized your friend, Robert Stevenson.”
A moment of silence hung between them while both men stared toward the window and dark London beyond. Droplets of rain were beginning to splatter on the pane.
“I’m afraid he has it,” Doyle said at last.
Between themselves they had stopped naming the damnable disease. It was only it. He has it. She has it. It’s spread to Bombay. It’s shown up in America. It is a germ. It isn’t a germ. Why can’t we cure it?
Bell closed his eyes briefly, then opened them. “What are his symptoms.”
In the opposite chair, Doyle fidgeted uncomfortably. He sat with his hands on his knees and his head down, looking like a student being chastised by his teacher. “I’d rather not say,” he answered. “It would be an embarrassment to him, and I daresay to you and me. Robert is a man of, well, two natures.”
“Indeed,” Bell replied. Rising from his chair, he crossed the room to a sideboard and poured two small glasses of cognac, one of which he delivered to Doyle. “My dear fellow, that certainly sheds new light on his most recent novel, that absurd Jekyll and Hyde silliness.”
Doyle raised his glass to his lips, but did not yet drink. “I dreamed of writing once, myself,” he murmured. “Detective stories, actually. Tell me, Doctor, do you ever regret leaving Edinburgh and taking up this impossible challenge?”
Bell thought for a moment, then tossed back the contents of his glass. “I was Her Majesty’s personal physician,” he answered. “And London was still in shock from the cholera outbreaks of August and September, 1864. Victoria, herself, requested that I come and look into this new threat.” He set his glass down beside the cognac bottle. “What man could ever resist Victoria?”
“But it’s been twenty years!” Doyle thrust himself out of his chair, splashing his drink over his hand and wrist. “Twenty years, and what progress have we made? It continues to spread. The new railways that link our cities carry it from one end of the island to the other. Our soldiers and sailors, our merchants and businessmen, have transported it to all corners of the empire. On the continent it spreads like wildfire, and we are helpless!”
Doyle dashed his glass on the floor. Shards of crystal flashed and sparkled in the gaslight.
Bell watched dispassionately as the carpet soaked up the alcohol. “You’ve wasted a very expensive cognac,” he noted.
Doyle’s rage did not abate. Indeed, it bordered on hysteria. “I just administered paregoric and camphor for a friend’s severe diarrhea, knowing full and damnably well it won’t have any lasting effect!” He shoved his hands deep into his trousers pockets and began to pace. “This morning for another patient, a woman of some status, I made plasters from clover extract for a trio of lesions beneath her left arm. But we both know that will have no real effect, either! Laudanum will manage her pain, but the cancers will continue to grow!”
Ceasing his pacing, Doyle stopped before Bell’s writing desk and slammed his hands down upon it, causing the small blue cocaine bottle to jump. “These frightening cases of trichinosis! Vermifuge has no effect at all! Calomel! Bromine! This new penicillin in which we placed so much hope! Nothing has an effect!”
Doyle spun about to face his mentor. His eyes almost glowed, wide and white in the dimness, and the look on his face was more than mere frustration. It was horror. “I think I’m treating a man for the grippe or loss of appetite. Then he’s back the next week with the worst case of dysentery! Then the week after that with intestinal parasites! And it’s not just one patient—it’s hundreds!” He shook his fist at the walls, making it plain that he was raging at himself, perhaps barely aware that Bell was there at all. “I’m not a doctor, anymore! I’m an assembly line worker!”
Bell walked to his writing desk and set the cocaine bottle back in its place. “Are you quite finished?” he asked in a calm, yet stern voice.
His assistant and former student stared at him. Then, giving out with a deep sigh, he resumed his seat, unmindful of the broken glass around his feet. “Quite,” he answered. He hung his head and rubbed his temples with the finger and thumb of his right hand. Over the years, he’d adopted that habit from Bell. “Perhaps Canterbury and Rome are right and this is God’s Judgment upon us all.”
“I think, my dear Doyle, that you should have drunk that cognac,” Bell stooped to reclaim the wadded pages of his summary from the floor near the bookcase before Doyle should notice them. The tight little ball of paper was an irritating reminder that the estimable Dr. Joseph Bell could also have his little moments of pique and tantrum. “Alcohol provides such a ready excuse when a man speaks nonsense and balderdash.”
Doyle looked up, and his eyes were tired and wet. “Of course it’s nonsense,” he agreed in a somber tone. “Who cares what the Pope or the Archbishop says? We’re men of science, aren’t we? Just as John Snow solved the cholera problem, we’ll solve this.”
There was more than a hint of sarcasm in Doyle’s voice, but Bell let it go. He completely understood his assistant’s frustration. Dr. Snow’s “problem” had been child’s play compared to the mystery at hand. A mere six hundred lives within a two-month period, and once the source of the bacteria was found—a well pump in the Soho district—that epidemic was stopped in its tracks.
Terrible as that epidemic had been,
this African nightmare had claimed far more lives and lasted far, far longer. Nor was Doyle alone in his exhaustion. It was exhausting the empire. Indeed, all of Europe. And still there was no end in sight, no meaningful treatment, no cure.
Yet Bell was not without some theories.
“Tell me,” he said as he headed for the door and seized the brass knob, “did you administer the cup to your friend?”
Doyle turned in his chair to regard Bell over one shoulder as the older doctor opened the door. “Of course,” he answered. “Two small incisions along the rectis abdominus . . .”
Bell moved into the hallway and began the descent down the stairs to the medical offices. Doyle gathered his strength and rose from his chair to hurry after his old teacher, pausing long enough at the sideboard to raise the cognac bottle to his lips and take a deep drink before setting it back in its place.
At the bottom of the stairs were a pair of doors on either side of a carpeted vestibule. One door opened into the rooms set aside for Bell’s use, but Bell pushed open the other door and entered Doyle’s consulting rooms. The gas lamp inside still burned with a bright flame.
With narrowed gaze, he scrutinized the room. Doyle’s bloody apron lay across the examining table where he’d discarded it after Stevenson’s departure. On a tray beside the table lay the scalpel with which he’d made the aforementioned incisions, and next to that, several glass vials which, when heated and applied to the merest incision, formed a vacuum and drew forth blood. It was, Bell often reflected, only a small improvement over common leeching, a practice still followed in some parts of the empire. As for the application of evacuated cups to draw forth blood thought to be diseased, the treatment was so common that most patients not only expected it, but insisted upon it.
Bell considered the practice vaguely medieval and of unproven value. Nevertheless, like all physicians of the day, he understood the theory behind cupping and frequently employed the treatment.
As Doyle came in behind him, Bell went to the tray. He picked up the scalpel and turned it toward the light. A fine, precision tool, of course—Doyle would have no less. A red smear of blood still colored the razor edge. Setting the scalpel aside, he next picked up the vial that his former student had used. Blood still colored the inside of the glass, and the rim as well.
He turned to a table against the wall near the head of the examining table. Here sat the mortar and pestle in which his student had mixed the clover extract poultices. Beside that was a small pan containing a quantity of the crimson liqueur from Stevenson’s flesh, and possibly that from other patients of the day as well, such was the amount of blood.
Turning again, he scanned the open cabinets and the well-stocked shelves and bottles within: opium and laudanum for pain; tincture of mercury for syphilis; bromine and digitalis; morphine; penicillin; quinine for appetite and digestion; calumel, mercury chloride, and other purgatives; various expectorants, liniments, and camphors; carbolic acid for disinfectant.
In another cabinet next to the first, more vials and glass cups for bloodletting; sets of scalpels, clamps, spools of silk thread and catgut for surgeries; powders for plasters. On the centermost shelf, as if occupying a place of honor, and plainly visible through the glass of the closed cabinet door sat a microscope—Leeuwenhoek’s marvel, and Doyle’s prized possession.
Despite the presence of the microscope, it all seemed horribly primitive to Bell. He recalled how not all that long ago Londoners had hung sprigs of elderberry in their windows to ward off cholera. Useless superstition. In the face of this new pestilence, he wondered if the conglomeration on these shelves was any better.
He picked up the blood-smeared scalpel again and turned it before the light, noting its balance and its weight, turning it between his fingers this way and that. He ran a fingertip along the side of the blade, accidentally nicking the skin. Only the tiniest drop of blood welled near his cuticle, and he sucked it without a thought as he set the scalpel down again.
So many times before he’d thought that the answer, or at least part of the answer, that he sought must lie in a surgery just like this one. He considered Dr. Samuel Overton again and his cluster of patients, among the first to succumb to the mysterious contagion. He knew their names, the intimate details of their lives. He had suspicions—but he had no clear answers, not yet, and that rankled him.
And time was desperately short, for there was news he had not yet dared to share with Doyle, nor with anyone. A small cobalt bottle in the open cabinet caught a gleam of light from the gas lamp. It drew his attention. He thought of another cobalt bottle on his writing desk and experienced a craving like he never had before.
“Doctor Bell?” Doyle spoke formally from the doorway. “Sir Charles Warren is here from the Metropolitan Police.”
Bell had been so deep in thought that he had not even heard the doorbell, nor taken note of the voices in the vestibule. But for Mrs. Hudson, he thought sometimes that he would lose his head. No, that wasn’t right. He squeezed his eyes shut briefly. Mrs. Hudson was dead, another victim of the African curse. He fought to push away her memory and focus his thoughts on the present. Straightening his jacket, he turned toward Doyle.
“Damn,” he groused, “if Scotland Yard is here, that means there’s been another murder.”
Doyle turned toward the staircase and started up to their shared apartment. “I’ll get our hats and overcoats,” he said.
In the vestibule, Sir Charles Warren glanced through the office doorway at Bell, but called up after Doyle. “Better bring your revolver, too, if you have one,” he advised as he pushed back the brown derby on his head. “Hell’s very own ghosts are roaming the streets tonight. There’s rioting in the East End and other parts of the city, and we’re getting reports of looting in Carnaby. Nobody’s safe, and particularly not where we’re going.”
Bell frowned at Sir Charles Warren. He didn’t much like the commissioner of police. Not many people did. He was a bumbler and an incompetent, and dressed the part. His worn tweed suit was rumpled and considerably out of fashion, and his starched collar was dirty. The cuffs of his trousers were also wet, and the soles of his boots stained with mud. A graying mustache framed his mouth and drooped to either side of his chin. In all respects, he looked a sadly comical figure, but for the large-caliber American pistol he wore strapped in a holster to his right hip.
“It’s unholy late,” Bell grumbled at Sir Charles. He noted the sorry state of the commissioner’s trousers again. “Is it still raining?”
“Later for some than others,” Sir Charles shot back. “And of course it’s still raining. This is London!”
Doyle hurried down the stairs. He wore an Inverness overcoat and handed a nearly identical garment to his former teacher. As Bell slipped it on, he felt a weight in the coat’s right pocket. He wasn’t at all surprised to reach his hand inside and find his pistol. He assumed Doyle had likewise armed himself. Clapping his hat upon his head and shouldering past Sir Charles, he opened the door to the street and descended the three stone steps. A hansom cab waited at the curb.
“Where are we going this time?” he demanded without glancing back at Sir Charles.
The surly commissioner pulled his derby lower upon his head as he nudged past Bell and flung open the hansom cab’s black door. “Well, sir, you could go straight to hell if it were up to me, but it’s come down from Her Majesty that you’re to be brought in on these events. Seems some folks have a higher opinion of your abilities than I do.”
Laying a light hand on Bell’s elbow, Doyle helped him into the cab after the commissioner, then climbed in himself. “Perhaps they merely have a lower opinion of yours,” he said as he settled back for the ride.
Sir Charles glared at him, then rapped on the roof of the cab. “Dutfield’s Yard on Berner Street,” he ordered the driver. “And make a damned hurry of it. This is police business!”
The hansom cab lurched into motion. At the sound of a whiplash, the horse sped forward. Sir Charles
grabbed for the handle on the inside of the door to avoid being thrown into Bell’s lap. Doyle’s head bounced back against the cab’s construction. All three men exchanged glares, then arranged themselves in their seats. No one spoke. The grim occasion for their meeting didn’t lend itself to chitchat.
As they left London proper and entered the East End, Bell leaned closer to his window and lifted the edge of the rain curtain, his attention drawn by voices in the street. A pair of men on the curb dropped their conversation to watch with sullen eyes as the hansom cab passed by. It was well after midnight, but the men weren’t alone on the streets.
The East End was a place of outcasts, a vast and dirty slum teeming with the poor and downtrodden, with immigrant masses, and with the sick. Economically and socially, it was a world apart from the rest of London and from the rest of Britain. Here, pigs and sheep and cattle were driven down the open streets to the stinking slaughterhouses. Excrement and rubbish and sewage filled the ditches that lined the dismal streets. Between the slaughterhouses and the filth, the most obnoxious miasma that not even the hardest rain could wash away hung perpetually over the district. The rows and rows of rotten, reeking tenements stood in the most deplorable conditions, often with more than one family occupying the meager rooms. The lodging houses were no better.
Looking out upon it, Dr. Joseph Bell felt sick to his stomach, and not from the stench. Such a place was a breeding ground for disease and all manner of contagion.
A raucous shouting suddenly surrounded them, and the hansom cab lurched to a halt. The horse gave a loud whinny and crashed its hooves down upon the muddy cobbles. The driver let out a string of curses.
Sir Charles whipped out his immense revolver and pushed open the cab’s door. Bell and Doyle both reached into their pockets, although neither drew a gun. Clinging to the side of the cab, the commissioner rose to stand upon the running board. “Get back! Get back, I tell you!” He brandished his weapon. “This is police business! Police business, I say! You! Unhand that bridle, or I’ll shoot your damned eye right out of your head!”
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