After a brief discussion the ladies couldn't hear, Ned Sylvester got into the Boat with Fowell Buxton and hauled on the oars, face wide in a grimace as he fought the incoming tide. As soon as they pulled away from the sand, the Boat was tossed and spun about like sea scum.
"Still a good ten yards between them and the sailors," muttered Anna.
Sarah rested her hand on her cousin's bony shoulder, delicately, and Anna took hold of it with cold fingers and held tight.
The waves blocked the ladies' view; one moment it looked as if the Boat was almost upon the wrecked mast to which the two sailors clung, the next, as if the whole ocean had rushed between them. Sarah wanted to pray, to ask for these men's lives as a favour, but she knew that was sheer superstition. All she could do was wait on the Spirit.
"Ned's throwing a rope," yelped Anna. "One of the sailors has hold of it ... yes, they're hauling him in!"
The seaman looked like a waterlogged bag of grain as Fowell Buxton pulled him from the sea. The ladies watched the little Boat swing and dip under its new weight. "And the other?" Sarah peered into the salty wind.
"They've thrown him the line," said Anna. "It's no more than two yards away. What's wrong with the man?"
Despair, thought Sarah suddenly. All he had to cling to was this splintered mast. What could persuade him to let go of it? Why should he believe a skinny rope would save him?
"Cousin Fowell's kicking off his boots," Anna reported in a chilled voice.
"What?" Sarah stared, wiped her eyes to clear them.
"He's going in."
"No," said Sarah. "Not at his age. Surely he wouldn't dream—"
But Anna was already halfway down the beach, her wheels grinding through the sand. "No. Cousin, no!"
The men in the Boat gave no sign of hearing her shrieks. Fowell Buxton stood up in the wavering Boat for a moment, then dived over the side. The first wave ate him up.
"No!" Anna shrieked again, though she must have known he couldn't hear her.
Sarah was by her side. "He's a strong swimmer. I'm sure he's got a rope around his waist. The water's not too cold for October..."
Annas teeth were bared to the wind. "It's my fault. I called him a poltroon."
There was nothing to be said. All they could do was watch for Fowell's graying head between the blades of the waves.
He emerged at last where they weren't expecting him, on the other side of the mast. His soaked head was barely recognisable, more like a seal's than a man's. He was struggling to break the seaman's armlock on the wreckage. It looked more like a murder than a rescue. Anna muttered something Sarah couldn't hear. A gigantic gray wave came up and covered everything.
It could have been a matter of years, rather than minutes, later, when the ladies glimpsed Ned Sylvester leaning from the Boat to pull the two men in. Sarah kept counting heads, unable to believe.
The Boat's keel made a musical scraping on the shore. As the fishermen's wives surrounded the seamen to lift them out in blankets, Fowell Buxton staggered up the beach. "Ladies," he said, as if a little drunk, at a ball. Brine poured from his sleeves, and there was a twist of bladder wrack in his hair.
"Cousin Fowell," said Anna, with a hint of amusement.
Sarah wrapped him in her arms, not minding the wet. She started to cry.
"Now now, no need for that, my girl," he said. "Come, Cousin Anna, we've need of your tongue. Surely among all your twenty-odd languages there'll be one these poor foreigners understand."
She rolled her eyes at his exaggeration, but wheeled herself directly towards the huddled group around the seamen. One of the foreigners was being sick on the sand, retching up salt water. Anna addressed herself to the other, who was looking round him in a dazed way. After a few minutes, she called back to her cousins. "Good day," she said, almost laughing. "He says good day, or perhaps that it is a good day; I can't be sure."
Fowell was drying his head on a towel that one of the women had brought him. He cleared his throat with a wet roar now and wrapped a blanket round his shoulders. "Lift them into that barrow," he ordered, "and have them come up to the Hall. There's plenty of room in the barn and I'll send for someone from Cromer to nurse them."
But as the two men were being wheeled up the beach, the more alert one wailed in protest and climbed out of the barrow. Anna caught up with him as he was crawling down the beach; she bent out of her chair to touch his wet head.
"What is it now?" asked Fowell, his nose streaming. He looked at Sarah and raised his eyebrows. She gave a little bewildered shrug.
"Wait," Anna told them. Then, after another exchange of strange guttural phrases, she said over her shoulder, "As far as I can tell—though the dialect is a strange one—they want to save themselves."
"Save themselves?" shouted Fowell. His nose was purple. "Save themselves from what? Why would we have bloody well saved them from drowning if we meant them any harm?"
Anna went into another huddle with the sailors, then straightened up in her chair. "I have it now. How stupid of me. The word must correspond to salvage. It appears they want to stay to see what can be saved. From the water, you know."
Fowell let out his breath in a baffled puff. "Nonsense. What's there to salvage that's worth their catching their death?"
Sarah stared out at the gnawed, splintered remains of the Russian ship. She wondered what detritus the tide might bring in, tonight or tomorrow. A barrel of spirits? An odd shoe? A scattering of wet letters from home? The bodies of their lost shipmates?
But Anna wheeled herself past Fowell up the beach to Sarah. Her face was marked with the wind's radiance. "Let them be. Come along," she said. "We'll fetch them more blankets and flasks of hot wine."
Sarah tucked her numb hands in her armpits, turned, and followed the snaking tracks of the wheels up the sand.
Note
Anna Gurney (1795–1857) and her cousin Sarah Buxton lived in Northrepps Cottage, near Cromer on the Norfolk coast, and their neighbours called them the Cottage Ladies. As well as being a linguist and historian who published the first modern English translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1821, Anna was known for her attempts to rescue drowning sailors.
My main source for "Salvage" was G. N. Garmonsway's invaluable piece of research, "Anna Gurney: Learned Saxonist" (in Essays and Studies, 1955), which draws on unpublished letters and family anecdotes. I also consulted the anonymous On the Means of Assistance in Cases of Shipwreck (1825), which has been attributed to Anna Gurney.
Anna Gurney and Sarah Buxton acted as their relative Fowell Buxton's secretaries in his long campaign to end the slave trade, founded a school, travelled to Rome and Athens, and finally were buried together in the seaside graveyard at Overstrand.
Cured
P.F., aet. 21, dingle, admitted into the London Surgical Home Jan. 7, 1861
"My brother brought me in. He's a peeler—I mean a policeman."
"Do you keep house for him, Miss F.?" The doctor crossed his legs, and his wing chair gave a luxurious creak.
The walls of his office glowed with books. The carpet was thick under her scuffed boots; she wanted to sink down onto it and sleep. The pain kept her always tired, these days. "Yes, well, no. I used to be a cook with a very good family, you see, Doctor Brown."
He smiled at her a little reprovingly. "Mr."
"Oh that's right, you said, pardon me. I mean Mr. Baker Brown, sir." The doctor's face was smooth-shaven: no whiskers, even. He had the pink glow of a best-quality pork sausage, she thought, and almost laughed at the thought. Then she remembered the question. "When my back got so bad, I could hardly stay on with that family, could I? So my young brother, he's always been good to me—our parents have gone to their reward so there's only us now—my brother said he'd take me in till I was well again."
"But you have not been well for a long time now, I believe?" Mr. Baker Brown's eyes were tender, respectful.
"No, sir," she said, letting out her breath and feeling that familiar throb start up
again in the small of her back. "I've been to the free hospitals and they can't do a thing for me. One doctor said I, what was it he said, according to him he said I showed no signs of organic disease, only the normal aches and pains of life." Her voice was getting slightly shrill, so she covered her mouth with her hand.
Mr. Baker Brown tutted faintly.
"So in the end, not that he can afford it very easy, but my brother has some savings put aside, and he said he'd pay for me to come to this special new clinic for female health, seeing as you're said to be the ne plus ultra." Whatever that meant. The borrowed phrase felt foolish in her mouth. "My brother knows nothing of medicine, of course, sir, but he knows what he's heard; one of the sergeants at the station has an uncle that has a wife that came to you with a weakness of the chest last year, sir. He—the uncle, I mean—says he knows nothing about your methods except that they work, and his wife is a changed woman!" She was aware she was talking too much; she couldn't seem to stop. "And in the waiting room"—she jerked her head over her shoulder, and felt the familiar twinge—"I heard one lady tell another that you're the wisest man in Christendom when it comes to women's sufferings."
Baker Brown smiled with wry modesty. "To speak frankly, Miss F., I see myself—being both a doctor and a gentleman—as a protector of womankind."
"Like the knights in the old tales?" she asked, fascinated.
A little nod. "It appears that destiny has called me to rescue the softer sex from the general ignorance of their friends and advisors. I am a pioneer, so to speak, in a wholly new branch of the healing sciences, but I must do myself the justice to admit that my efforts have already met with a considerable amount of success."
"So my brother heard," she murmured, her eyes tracing the gold-backed spines that filled the nearest bookcase.
"Well," said Mr. Baker Brown decisively, "together we must ensure that his generosity is well repaid."
"Together?" Miss F. spoke a little hoarsely.
"Indeed." He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, all at once, with his hands joined. She heard the slippery leather of his chair squeak. "For the truth of the matter is that I can only cure a patient who truly wishes to get well."
Her breath was released like a flame. "Oh I do, I do indeed, sir."
He gave her his hand. "I could tell that about you, Miss F., the moment you were shown into this office."
She got to her feet slowly, her lips pursed against the sudden pain.
There will he wasting of the face and muscles generally;
the skin sometimes dry and harsh, at other times cold and
clammy. The pupil will be sometimes firmly contracted,
but generally much dilated. There will be quivering of the
eyelids, and an inability to look one straight in the face.
The examining room was painted in dazzling white. The nurse had taken her behind a screen and changed her street costume for a loose white nightgown. Now she lay on a padded leather table and stared into the bright eye of the lamp.
When the doctor came in his manner was brisker and more animated. He carried a notebook and a fountain pen. "Where exactly is the pain at this moment, Miss F.?"
"I don't know that I can rightly say, sir. About at the middle of my back, perhaps? It's not so very bad when I'm lying flat like this, you see, just a stiffness and a heaviness, really, but dreadful when I walk or try to lift anything."
"And also when you rise from a chair, I have observed."
"That's right," she said, suddenly grateful to the point of tears. "That's when it pierces right through me, like a sword. At least, that's what I imagine, though I've never gone into battle." She gave a nervous little laugh.
"Mercifully not, Miss F. Brave as woman may be in the age of Victoria, she is still exempt from that particular patriotic duty!"
As he said that he took her by the wrist. Miss F. looked at the wall. She couldn't remember this ever happening to her before, except with a friend of her brother's, at a party, once, who'd taken her hand when everyone was admiring the tableau of Britannia's Subjects Pay Her Tribute. Mr. Baker Brown was left-handed, she noticed, but not at all awkward. He pressed her wrist a little harder, and stared down at the fob he held in his other hand. She felt thrilled, comforted.
"Your pulse is regular," he murmured, "but a little quick for my liking."
"I've always been sturdy, till two years back," she assured him. "I can tell you exactly when the damage was done: I was sugaring caraway seeds for Christmas, on the mistress's orders, and the boy was nowhere to be found, so I had to lift the heavy kettle of syrup off the fire myself, and I felt something rip in my back. I said it to her the minute she came in, the lady I worked for I mean, but she said it was nonsense as backs can't rip."
Mr. Baker Brown was jotting something in his notebook. "Until I've examined you fully, I cannot make any firm pronouncements," he murmured, "but I can tell you now, Miss F.,"—his warm eyes suddenly rose to meet hers—"that it is generally impossible for the non-medical to penetrate into the root of their condition."
"Oh."
"The incident you describe may have revealed your disease, rather than caused it."
"I see," she said again, and blinked up at him. "I was sure that was it, the sugar syrup, I mean, sir. My brother said I didn't ought to work for a lady who'd treat me that way."
"Your brother's natural concern for you"—and here the doctor flashed her another of his smiles—"leads him to fancy that he can form an opinion on medical matters. Are you ever constipated, Miss F.?"
"Yes, at times, I suppose," she said, startled.
"Does it hurt to defecate, at those times?"
"I ... I suppose so." As Baker Brown began to press lightly on her stomach, she turned her face to the wall again.
"Any pain, now?"
"No, sir."
He touched her face, and she flinched. "Skin moist and warm," he commented under his breath, as he wrote it down, and she smiled a little, though she couldn't have said why.
Then he leaned down and Miss F. thought for a moment that he had lost his mind, that he meant to kiss her. She went stiff from head to toe. "Breath inoffensive," the doctor murmured, straightening up, "and now if you would be so good as to let me see your tongue."
She put it out, but only a little; she couldn't stick out her tongue at a gentleman. He felt the tip of it, put his index finger in her mouth and pressed down, fingered her gums all over. Her eyes swam; she blinked hard. No one had ever touched her that way before, inside her mouth. She kept her tongue very still, and memorised the smooth cool surface of the doctor's finger.
His eyes seemed to narrow a little now, as her brother's did sometimes when he spoke of gathering clues, tracking down a thief. "Do you suffer from giddiness. Miss F.?"
"Occasionally, on first getting up, in the mornings," she said.
"Headache?"
"If the day is hot. When I was a cook I did; my cap was too tight."
"Do you perspire freely?"
"Sometimes," she admitted, looking away. That was a nasty question.
"And your menstrual periods, are they irregular?"
She felt the blush flood up from her collarbones. "I don't know," she faltered. "Maybe. Sometimes."
"Do you suffer from them at more or less the same point in each month?"
"More or less."
"Is the flow excessive?"
Excessive, she repeated in her head. What was the definition of excess? "Sometimes."
"Do they last as many as four days?"
"Five or six, usually," she confessed.
Mr. Baker Brown shook his head as if that was a bad sign. Then he went to the end of the table. He put his warm hands on her ankles and pressed them apart.
She clamped her knees together.
"I beg your pardon, Miss F., and I respect your delicacy, but this is necessary for me to complete my examination."
She squeezed her eyes shut and let him part her legs. She started counting from
one to a hundred, but she only got to eleven. She wondered why he was standing there peering down at her, and what he was looking for. She thought perhaps it was almost over, and then he touched her somewhere. It was not a part she had a name for, or not one that could be said aloud. She writhed a little. She told herself she need not be embarrassed; this was no ordinary man but a doctor, no ordinary doctor but the famous Mr. Baker Brown who understood women as no other man in the world did. She thought of stuffing rabbits with forcemeat and rosemary. She lay there; she shook as if with cold. His hands moved like a pickpocket's, gliding, seeking.
Finally he shut her legs, wiped his hands, and helped her to ease herself up into a sitting position. Her back ached. She smoothed the nightgown over her knees, observing the creases.
"Miss F., do you ever suffer from maniacal fits?" he asked thoughtfully, letting go of her arm.
"No, sir," she said, startled.
"Have you any other symptoms you care to mention to me?" He fixed her with an intense look now, though she couldn't tell why.
She gave him what she hoped was a brave smile and straightened a little, where she sat on the edge of the leather table. "No, Mr. Baker Brown. Really, my back is all that troubles me," she said, laying her hand quite high up, on the left. "The pain generally begins just here—"
"Have you any, ah, pernicious habits?" It was the first time he had hesitated in asking a question.
"No, God forbid," she said. "Except for a sup of fortified wine. At Christmas," she added hastily.
A flash of what looked like irritation crossed Mr. Baker Brown's pink forehead. "What I meant to ask, Miss E, is whether you have ever in your life touched yourself? In an improper way, I mean?"
She stared at him.
"In a way that only a physician should touch you, or a husband, if you had a husband?"
Her cheeks were scorching. "I don't ... I don't know what you mean, Doctor. I mean, sir."
"Never mind," he said lightly, and glanced at his notes again. She had the feeling he was not pleased with her answer. "Would you say that you feel languid, debilitated? Not so lively as when you were younger?"
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: Stories Page 10