by Tim Pears
Arthur Prideaux took off his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose. His estate manager William Carew had long gone, with a cavalry regiment, and Lord Prideaux was once again managing the estate himself. He peered at the papers on his desk. Perhaps they absorbed him such that it took him some moments to turn his attention from them to his daughter.
‘Jago’, he said, ‘does all kinds of veterinary work, does he not? From lapdogs in Bampton town to bulls on the moorland farms.’
Lottie agreed.
‘You could help him with the small animals,’ Arthur Prideaux said. ‘A girl could do that. Why not?’ He nodded to himself, frowning. ‘You could assist with his evening surgery. We’ll need to find you somewhere to stay, at least during the week.’
Lottie rushed around her father’s desk and embraced him.
‘Thank you, Papa,’ she said. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’
She skipped out of the study and climbed the stairs. On the landing she passed a large portrait of an ancient Prideaux, which one she could not remember, astride his horse.
‘Silly Papa,’ Lottie said to this unknown ancestor. ‘Does he think that horses are small animals?’
2
They rode the buggy in darkness onto the farm, near Withiel Florey. Patrick Jago had not been here before and did not know the occupants. A lad met them and led the way to the stables. There they found a shire mare standing huge and forlorn in her loose box. Around her and outside the box, looking on, were a number of men, grim and exhausted.
‘We never needed a vet before,’ the farmer said, by way of introduction.
Patrick Jago ignored him. He addressed instead a man who stood in his shirtsleeves, with a hand upon the rump of the great horse. ‘Are you the carter?’ he asked.
The man nodded. ‘I can’t figure it,’ he said.
The box smelled of shit and straw, urine and blood. Lottie saw that the litter on the ground around the horse was soaked. She watched the vet examine the mare’s hindquarters. The two tiny forelegs of the foetus were presented.
‘We been pullin and pullin but it don’t come,’ the carter said. ‘’Tis as if it’s caught up with another one, but I don’t believe there’s twins in there.’
‘We’ve not needed a vet before,’ the farmer repeated.
‘How long has she been in labour?’ Patrick Jago asked. No one answered. He looked around but all kept their heads down.
‘We’ve great hopes for this foal,’ the farmer said. ‘The sire’s—’
‘The foal is dead,’ Patrick Jago told him. ‘Let us try to save your mare.’ He turned to the carter. ‘Ten quarts of linseed jelly.’ The carter motioned to his lads and they trotted out of the stable. ‘And strain it through a cloth,’ the vet called after them. He asked Lottie to fetch the enema syringe from the boot of the buggy. When she returned he explained to her that all the mare’s waters had been expelled, there was no more. Her uterine contractions were surely exhausted, the uterus most likely tight as a steel band around the foetus.
While the potion was being prepared, Lottie Prideaux laid out the vet’s parturition instruments upon a bench brought into the box. The finger knife, with its ring to slip over the middle finger. The hand knife, with a cord for the wrist. The short, three-and-a-half-inch hook, with four and a half feet of cord attached. The long hook knife, with its two-and-a-half-foot wooden handle. The crutch, of equal length. They looked like instruments of torture, not aids to birth, yet Lottie knew a foetus could be stillborn and stuck, and have to be dealt with savagely.
When the lad returned, Lottie drew the jelly into the enema syringe while the vet stripped to the waist. He took the syringe and inserted its nozzle into the mare’s vagina, past the forelegs of her dead foal, and pumped the jelly into her womb. He told Lottie, who stood close by him, that the linseed jelly would distend the womb and float the foetus. ‘I hope it will also act as a lubricant,’ he said, ‘in place of the natural water.’
The syringe had to be refilled a number of times. The vet demanded more light. The farmer barked orders and lads scuttled away and returned with hurricane lamps, which they hung from rafters. Patrick Jago requested the long hook. Lottie brought it over to him. He said that the head of the dead foal must be bent back in one way or another. With its nose pointing forward behind the elbow, or with its nose pointing back towards the flank, or with its head turned over onto its back, if she could imagine those fatal configurations. He slowly inserted the long hook. ‘I will try to put it into the eye-socket,’ he said. ‘We need to press the foetus back into the womb and then manipulate the head into its correct position.’
Patrick Jago fished around with the hook. He could not see into the darkness of the womb. Lottie watched his face. Though his eyes were open it was clear that he saw nothing of the stable but rather what was in his mind’s eye as he attempted to interpret or decipher what he discovered with the hook. He continued for a long time, adjusting and readjusting the handle. Occasionally he took a deep breath, as if to signify his hope that he had a catch, and began to tug the hook slowly out, only to sigh with disappointment as it slid too easily free.
The great shire mare stood calm all this time, suffering the pain and the indignities that had been wrought upon her and continued to be. Did she know that her foal was lost, that its heart beat no more inside her? That these human beings were intent upon saving her life? Lottie did not believe so. No one spoke to her, or stroked her. Not on this farm. She wished to do so herself but did not. She glanced around and saw that one or two more people had gathered, including a woman of the same age as the farmer. They looked to her with their stern faces in the yellow light like macabre spectators at some morbid entertainment. As if they could not help themselves, though they wished to save their prize mare, from taking pleasure in watching her suffer.
Patrick Jago withdrew the long hook and gave it to his assistant and asked her for a length of cord. Although so little had been achieved so far, the vet’s bare chest was already marked by spots of the linseed jelly and blood and other matter. He looped the cord around one of the dead foal’s pastern joints and twisted it tight and told the carter to hold it taut.
‘Pull it when I tell you to, not before,’ he said. He asked Lottie to fetch the long embryotomy knife. This he introduced carefully into the mare as he had the hook, and pushed it in half as far.
‘We need to get on to the shoulder,’ he said. He manipulated the knife, telling Lottie that he was now cutting the skin, and dividing it down the limb. He then withdrew the knife and asked her to use her fingers to detach the skin from the shank-bone, and pull it loose.
Lottie removed her jacket and rolled up her sleeves, and felt along the limb for where the skin had been cut.
‘Ain’t the lad gonna take off his shirt?’ the farmer’s wife called out. Perhaps this was meant as a joke to lighten the morose proceedings, but none laughed. Patrick Jago ignored her. He asked the carter to tug gently but steadily on the cord. Lottie found the loose skin and separated a little of it from the limb. She tied a piece of thin cord to the flap of skin and extracted her hands from the mare and pulled the cord. At first it would not give but when she applied all her strength she could feel the skin tearing off the flesh beneath.
The vet reintroduced the long knife and cut the muscles between the shoulder and the body. The carter kept pulling on the cord fixed around the dead foal’s pastern until, with a grotesque watery sound of snapping bone or gristle, and rent flesh, the foreleg came away.
Jago wasted not a moment to celebrate this revolting success but exchanged the long knife for the hook as before and tried once more to secure the head and turn it around to a normal presentation. He was not able to but this time did not spend so long, but set to repeating his operation to remove the other foreleg of the foetus. Again Lottie pulled loose the skin. Again the vet cut the pectoral muscles and the carter tugged with all his force, and the foreleg was yanked and ripped off the body of the dead foal so abrup
tly that it came slithering out of the vagina of the mare and the carter staggered backwards across the wet straw of the loose box with the severed limb, like a man astounded by what he’d been given, struggling to retain his balance.
Lottie looked up and saw that a girl now stood at the head of the mare. She had not seen her enter the stable. The girl stroked the horse’s neck. She was looking at Lottie, and when their eyes met did not look away but kept staring directly at her.
The vet now inserted the long crutch and pushed against the foetus. Robbed of its support, it slid easily back into the bottom of the womb. Once again Patrick Jago did not waste time but with both the long hook and the short hook, with four or five feet of cord attached and a wooden handle at the other end, he got the head round and was able with the carter’s assistance to pull the mutilated body of the dead foal out from the mare, a messy bundle of flesh and jelly and blood. As she felt her offspring’s delivery, the exhausted mare appeared to stumble, her knees buckling at the relief or the disappointment, Lottie could not tell which. Recumbent, on her side, the big horse breathed softly, her flanks trembling.
As the carter’s lads took away the foetus of the foal, Patrick Jago told Lottie that if they had called him earlier he might have saved it. His bare torso was now covered in bloody gore and filth. He told the carter to water the mare immediately, and to mix a simple powder of four drachms of nitrate of potash and two of carbonate of iron in her mash each night for one week.
‘And either move her to a different box or stall or change this straw immediately,’ he said. The girl knelt beside the mare, still stroking her neck, still staring at Lottie.
The farmer’s mood was changed. He seemed to have forgotten the prize foal and was grateful to have his mare alive. He insisted that the vet and his assistant come to the farmhouse to clean up and enjoy the breakfast they deserved.
They returned the instruments and ropes to the cart, stumbling through the darkness. Patrick Jago told Lottie that he was glad to see someone had thought to take it upon himself to stable their cob, and no doubt give it some hay. Lottie thought of the girl with the wide eyes.
Though it was warm in the farmhouse kitchen Lottie kept her jacket on, covering as it did her blood-spattered white shirt. The farmer’s wife served them porridge with cream and honey. Lottie was sure that after what she had witnessed she would have no appetite at all, and would sit mute and unfed while the vet and the farmer ate and talked, but to her surprise her hunger was great. She had little idea what time it was. The farmer’s wife put plates with three eggs each and four rashers of bacon before them, and cut slices of bread from which steam rose. Lottie spread a slice with yellow butter.
The farmer proclaimed that he had never called a veterinary surgeon before, he thought he might have said so already but wished to repeat it. ‘I’ll never have that quack horse doctor again,’ he said. ‘With his blocks and his pulleys. Near as dammit killed my best mare. But you saved her, Mister Jago. With your young lad there. You saved her with all your fine tools.’
They drank sweet creamy coffee, then Patrick Jago said they must be on their way. When they stepped outside Lottie was surprised to find the sky pale grey and the barns and hayricks discernible in the pre-dawn light.
As they drove the cob slowly back to the surgery in Bampton, Lottie asked if there were further abnormal positions a foetus could be aligned in beyond those Mr Jago had outlined. He said there were. Many. She must study the plates in Thompson’s book.
‘There are times one is forced to do what we have just done, or similar butchery, to a live foetus, and kill it in order to save the mare. There are other times when a foal or calf is of more value than its mother, and we must perform a Caesarean section to save the offspring, and run the risk of losing the mother.’
The vet handed the reins to Lottie and while she drove, he filled his pipe and lit it. ‘When I say risk, I should add that of the half-dozen Caesareans I have performed on mares, I have lost the mother every time.’ Patrick Jago sucked on his pipe. ‘It can be a savage business, Lottie. Reproduction is the most extraordinary miracle in the whole of nature, yet it can go wrong in so many ways. A paradox of obstetrics I imagine one will never fully comprehend.’
3
The surgery had belonged to Patrick Jago’s father, who was awarded his diploma from the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in the early sixties and then surprised his contemporaries by retreating at his wife’s request to set up practice in her small home town in Devon, close to the Somerset border, below the moor. Patrick was their only child, and followed his father’s calling. When his father died, from the infectious disease of glanders, picked up from a horse, Patrick took over the practice. His mother still lived in her home beside the surgery, and Lottie now lodged with her while Patrick and his wife lived across town.
What had once been a two-stall stable up against the house, Patrick Jago’s father had converted into a surgery. In the gloomy loft above the stable and adjoining coach house were dusty glass cases in which were mounted obstetrical monstrosities the old man had collected. Lottie climbed the steps and wiped the dust off the glass. She studied calves with two heads and three eyes. Lambs with supernumerary limbs sprouting from their backbones.
New stables and kennels had been built in the garden. At the back of the surgery was a dispensary or pharmacy. Patrick Jago had inherited his father’s factotum, Edgar Riddell, who stood for hours every day at a granite mortar, grinding vegetable roots and barks to powder, for incorporation into tonics and cough mixtures, with a heavy marble pestle.
Today Lottie was not with Jago on his rounds, and there were no visitors to the surgery, so she assisted Edgar compounding ginger and aloes with black treacle into physic or horse balls. They pounded hard lumps of carbonite of ammonia, mixing the powder with gentian and fenugreek, aniseed and ginger, and pushed the mixture into four-ounce parcels wrapped in brown paper and sealed with wax.
They prepared pint-and-a-half bottles of cattle drench containing many ingredients infused over a gas-ring in a large cauldron, filling the dispensary with herbal odours. Edgar Riddell made black draughts for the relief of colic and permitted Lottie to cut their corks level with the neck of the bottle and to seal them by dipping each one, upside down, into a saucepan containing an inch of boiling pitch.
Edgar did not talk much. At the end of his working day he shooed Lottie out of the dispensary so that he could tidy up on his own. His last task was to polish the mahogany benches, blackened by age, with a beeswax and turpentine concoction he had prepared himself.
While Edgar cleaned his territory, Lottie stepped into the surgery. She told Jago sitting at his desk that she found the preparation of these powders and electuaries strangely enthralling.
The vet laughed. ‘It’s terribly out of date,’ he said. ‘All these ingredients, painstakingly prepared. Wholesale firms can sell us stock medicines ready for dispensing. But how can I let Edgar go? And the thing is, they trust him, you see, Lottie. When a farmer or horse-owner calls to settle his bill, he invariably looks around the dispensary and is tempted by those shelves of drenches to take a dozen or two away with him, to replenish the harness-room first-aid cupboard.’
Lottie asked the vet to tell her of his studies to become a surgeon, at the Royal Veterinary College in Camden Town in London.
‘We lived in diggings,’ he said. ‘We were mostly the sons of veterinary surgeons or registered practitioners. One, of a quack. The others of yeomen farmers. None of us great scholars, it must be admitted. I was the only one I knew who’d been to any kind of public school. An extremely minor one, I should add.’
He told her how in their second year they were admitted to the dissecting room, a dank and evil-smelling place. A supply of aged ponies was kept in readiness in the college stables. Two or three at a time were shot, and prepared by an injection into their arteries of red wax, and into their veins one of blue.
‘The carcases were laid out on trestle tables. Each of
us was allotted a portion. As our dissections proceeded, quantities of flesh were discarded upon the concrete floor around us. After a day or two this meat rotted and stank. You could see the pieces undulating under the influence of blowfly larvae. I had the advantage over some, as the son of a vet, of being somewhat inured to the sight of corpses and the smell of putridity, but most of my fellows would no sooner enter the dissecting room than have to rush out and be wonderfully sick. Until they learned not to have breakfast on dissecting days.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sure by the time you go, Lottie, it will be very different.’
‘Me?’ she asked, astonished. ‘Surely I cannot hope to maintain this lad’s disguise forever. Neither do I wish to.’
‘No,’ Patrick said. ‘I mean that a woman will be admitted to the College one day. Why should the first one not be you?’
4
Lottie rode home three days before Christmas. She stabled the horse she’d inherited from Jago’s old assistant, and spoke with Herb Shattock. A lad carried her saddlebags to the house. Lottie walked to the back of the house and entered by the kitchen. The cook fussed over her and would not let her go until the girl had tried her new sponge.
‘You can’t wait for lunch, my lovely,’ she said. ‘Not after a long ride like that.’
That was where Alice found her. As they embraced, Alice caught sight of the recipe on the kitchen table. She told Cook that it was not right to use so many eggs in the Christmas pudding, when in London and no doubt other towns and cities eggs were in short supply and people had to do without. She said there was a more suitable recipe in yesterday’s newspaper and she would find it. She smiled at Lottie and walked out of the kitchen.
Cook did not understand. ‘The hens is still layin,’ she told Lottie. ‘If a lot a the men is gone, there must be more eggs for the rest of us, like it or not.’