Corpse & Crown

by Alisa Kwitney

  There was a creak as the door opened, and then the sound of hurried footsteps. “How long has she been awake?” Shiercliffe’s voice, a bit breathless from hurrying.

  “Just a few minutes, Matron. She’s a little confused.”

  “That’s to be expected.” Footsteps, then a cool hand on her brow. “Fever’s down—that’s good. How are you feeling, Agatha?”

  “I’m fine,” she said automatically, because she was always fine. From the time she was little, she was the child who did not get sick and require nursing. Her brothers dropped hammers on their fingers or got kicked in the leg by donkeys, but Aggie sailed through childhood all but unscathed. Till now. “What’s wrong with me?”

  There was a rustle of skirts as Shiercliffe moved closer to the bed. “Well, to begin with, you’ve sustained an injury to the back of your head. You were unconscious for nearly three days.”

  Suddenly, Aggie had a flash of memory: Dodger. The shattered bottle. The stabbing pain in her eyes.

  “I’m not going to ask you where you were or what you were doing,” said Shiercliffe, in a tone that implied that she did not want her worst suspicions confirmed. “I only know that Henry Clerval brought you here in a hired carriage. It seems you were injured after the gates had already closed for the night, and someone saw fit to bring you to Mr. Clerval for treatment.” Aggie noted that Shiercliffe did not call Clerval a doctor, although he styled himself one. “To his credit,” Shiercliffe added, “Clerval knew enough to bring you here in the morning. Unfortunately, he did not know enough to treat your eyes properly beforehand.”

  Which meant that Henry Clerval had wasted precious hours when she could have been getting treatment for her eyes. “Matron?” Hearing the quaver in her voice, she firmed it. “Can we take these bandages off now?”

  Shiercliffe hesitated. “Not quite yet. Dr. Grimbald will come by to check on you first.”

  Aggie made herself ask the question. “My eyes. How bad was the damage? Don’t sugarcoat it. I want to know the truth.”

  “Very well, then. The cornea was damaged, by the glass and by carbolic acid. We irrigated the eye and got everything out, but there may be scarring.”

  Aggie sucked in a sharp breath. “I see.” Then, hearing herself, she added, “So to speak.”

  Shiercliffe didn’t laugh. “Was it worth risking your sight and your life for some boy? Don’t bother to deny it—I watched you leave the hospital with him.”

  “It’s not like that. He had a friend who needed medical help.” True enough. But she’d gone also because it was Dodger doing the asking. Shiercliffe was right. Risking sight and life for a boy? Never again. And here she’d thought pregnancy was her most serious concern.

  “And so you left your shift and hared off into the East End?” Shiercliffe’s voice, usually so measured, was shaking with fury. “How many people have you already helped? How many more could you help, if only—”

  Shiercliffe’s outburst was cut short by a brief knock on the door, followed by the brisk sound of confident footsteps. “Well, well, well,” said Grimbald, his voice sounding unexpectedly loud in the room. “I hear our patient is awake at last. Let’s get these bandages off, shall we?” He smelled of some bracing aftershave and moustache wax as he bent over her, and then there was the snip of scissors. “Turn up the light, will you, Matron?”

  “Of course, Doctor.”

  “Now, Miss DeLacey, you might want to keep your eyes closed to give yourself a moment to adjust.”

  Assuming all went well and she could see when the bandages came off. “All right.” She felt Grimbald unfasten the end of the bandage. Time seemed to slow as he began to unwrap the gauze until only one thin layer remained between her and the world.

  “Ready?” Before she could respond, Grimbald pulled the thin fabric away, removing the last bandage.

  She felt a smooth, feminine hand slip over her wrist, slender fingers gripping her hand tightly. Shiercliffe. Grateful for the support, Aggie took a deep breath.

  “Aggie?” Shiercliffe’s voice was unusually gentle. “Go ahead and open your eyes.”

  She opened them. The room was a blur, but she could make out the crude shapes and colors of things—a dark blob of something on the walls, the light streaming through the tall windows, the silver dirigible shape of Justine’s iron lung. She could see Shiercliffe beside her and Grimbald standing over her, even if she couldn’t discern their features.

  “I can see,” she said, her eyes stinging with tears. “I’m not blind!”

  “Oh, don’t cry,” said Shiercliffe, dabbing at Aggie’s eyes with a compress. “Silly girl. How can you tell us what you can see if you’re crying?”

  “Perfectly natural response for a girl,” said Grimbald.

  “As if soldiers never shed any tears,” said Shiercliffe.

  “Now, don’t worry if you’re not seeing clearly right away,” said Grimbald. His eyes were dark smears, but she tried to focus on them. “Your vision might be a bit blurry at first, but it should improve over the next few days.”

  She nodded. “Thank you! Thank you so much, Dr. Grimbald.”

  * * *

  It was only as the days turned into weeks and Aggie’s vision remained the same that she began to understand that blindness might not be an absolute. Her right eye was marginally stronger than her left, but even with that eye, she couldn’t recognize a person from across the room. She couldn’t measure out a teaspoon or read a book, and in low light, she couldn’t even spot her hairbrush sitting on the side table right in front of her.

  Lizzie came to visit when she could, but she was preoccupied. She thought she had a good prototype of a Bio-Mechanical eye, but none of the new Bio-Mechanicals was advanced enough to speak in complete sentences or solve a simple wooden puzzle. Moulsdale was beside himself, pointing out that the kaiser was hardly likely to be impressed by a witless Bio-Mechanical, even if it did possess superior vision.

  With less than two months left before the kaiser arrived, Moulsdale was becoming increasingly impatient with the lack of progress. According to Lizzie, he had begun to talk about his duty to the Crown and the need to revisit Victor’s status.

  “I reminded Moulsdale what he had promised me,” Lizzie said on a late night visit to Justine and Aggie’s room. “The bargain was that I don’t reveal what I know about the queen, and he allowed Victor to complete his education.” She paused in the act of braiding Aggie’s hair.

  “What did he say to that?” asked Aggie.

  Lizzie tied off the end of Aggie’s braid with a ribbon. “He said there are promises made in peacetime that do not apply in times of war.”

  “I hope you told him that we aren’t at war with Germany,” said Aggie.

  “I did.” Lizzie pulled some of Aggie’s red hair from the brush’s bristles. “He just looked at me and said wars begin long before someone fires the first shot.”

  “He’s not wrong there,” said Justine.

  “Poppycock!” Lizzie threw the hairbrush against the wall, startling a gasp out of Aggie. “Sorry, Justine,” said Lizzie, walking over to pick up the brush from the floor. “I didn’t mean you. I just don’t see why we can’t test the technology on a person who needs it.”

  Aggie perked up at the prospect. “Like me, you mean?”

  “No, seriously,” said Lizzie. “Why couldn’t we try the new device on you? I’m sure the kaiser would be able to see the military application. We don’t need to turn Victor into a showpiece that gets paraded around.”

  It made perfect sense to Aggie. Why shouldn’t the Bio-Mechanical program be used to benefit ordinary people? For the first time in weeks, she felt a flicker of hope.

  “Moulsdale will never agree to it,” said Justine bluntly, and Aggie felt herself sinking again. “He’s a gambler and a showman, and he wants to pull off a big win. That means a British Bio-Mechanical he can
pit against the kaiser’s model. I don’t see him settling for less.” After a moment, she added, “Besides, I’m sure Aggie won’t need artificial eyes. She just needs a little more time to heal.”

  Yet time kept passing, and Aggie’s eyesight did not improve.

  On rounds, Dr. Grimbald brought the medical students and probationer nurses around to discuss her case and how they were treating it. Corneal scarring could take up to six weeks to improve, he said. Byram, Will and Lizzie always lingered behind for a moment before scurrying to catch up. Aggie knew that Grimbald was telling them things when she was out of earshot. He needn’t have been so discreet. She knew full well what he wasn’t saying—the longer she went without improvement, the slimmer her chances of regaining her eyesight.

  After six weeks had passed without a change, Lizzie made Aggie a pair of spectacles. The lenses were much thicker than Lizzie’s own glasses, but Aggie didn’t care. If they helped her see more clearly, she didn’t care what she looked like.

  “Well?” Lizzie perched on the edge of her bed as Aggie looked around the laboratory through the new lenses. “How are they? How does everything look?”

  Wordlessly, Aggie removed the glasses and shook her head. There wasn’t going to be any miraculous cure for her, it seemed. Funny old world. Before her accident, she had thought the worst fate imaginable was failing out of school and winding up pregnant and married to some local boy. Now she wondered if she was even going to be able to live on her own.

  She tried to console herself that she was not blind, if blindness meant living in total darkness. Her world wasn’t devoid of light and color.

  It just felt that way.

  15

  Dodger waited out the gray end of February and settled into the long, blustery month of March, hoping in vain to catch a glimpse of Aggie. He stationed himself near her lodging house in the morning until he learned to recognize the pigeons roosting there. When that strategy failed, he arranged to pass by the gates of the Royal Victoria at eight, so he could bump into her among the crowd of departing patients.

  That plan went pear-shaped, as well.

  Dodger couldn’t make sense of it. Nancy was up and about again, though not as strong as she had been, and her injuries had been life-threatening. Surely Aggie should have recovered by now...and yet the image of her, unconscious on the ground, haunted him. He had brought her to the doctor within the hour, then paid to have her transported to the hospital. Perhaps she was perfectly healthy but had a different schedule.

  Or else she might be avoiding him.

  In mid-March, the flower girls that strolled around Covent Garden stopped selling cloth flowers from their baskets and started selling primroses and daffodils from the countryside, and Dodger faced up to the facts. If he wanted to find out how Aggie was faring, he would have to seek her out at the hospital. At least then he’d know for sure if she’d been giving him the brush-off. Part of him hoped that was the case, that she was right as rain, even if the price for that bit of good news meant some ache for him.

  He briefly considered the pros and cons of breaking and entering the Royal Victoria after dark, then quickly concluded that his best bet would be to stroll through the front gates in broad daylight. After all, he was a pickpocket, not a burglar. He might not have the tools for picking locks and muffling the sound of breaking glass, but he knew how to blend in and set people at ease.

  Stationing himself at the back of the receiving room, he slipped a young woman a thruppence to pitch a fit, then waited till she began shrieking and thrashing on the floor to walk unnoticed past the front desk. When he happened upon a blank-faced orderly pushing a laundry cart, he pulled a marble from his pocket and tossed it under the wheels. As the orderly wrestled to get the cart back under control, Dodger snagged a white coat off the top of the pile. By the time he’d rounded the corner, he had removed his top hat and donned the white coat and the attitude to go with it. He passed another white-jacketed doctor and gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Saw you in action earlier,” Dodger told the man. “Really nice work.”

  “Oh! Thank you,” said the man, confused but pleased, and completely oblivious to the fact that Dodger had just swiped his stethoscope. Walking down another corridor, Dodger deliberately moved into the path of a probationer nurse, apologized profusely in his best posh accent, then asked them where to find Agatha DeLacey.

  “Oh, are you a specialist?” The nurse had a slight Jamaican accent. “I do hope you can help her, Doctor. She’s in Waterloo Ward.”

  So Aggie hadn’t fully recovered yet. How badly had she hit her head that night? Could she have caught a lung infection? Tamping down his fears, he summoned his most ingratiating smile. “I’m new here, lovely,” he admitted to the girl. “Don’t suppose you could point me in the right direction?”

  She did even better—she walked him to the right door. “Tell Aggie I’ll try to visit her later,” she told him, and then hurried off.

  Clearing his throat, he knocked on the open door and said, “Miss DeLacey?”

  “Come in.” The voice was so soft that he wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t imagined it, but he stepped in anyway. His first thought was that he was in the wrong room. First of all, there was a strange metal contraption with a bellows attached at one end and the fragile head of a young girl sticking out of the other. He also noticed a tray with some disturbingly medical things—rubber tubing, a funnel, and something that looked like a dull scissors. On second glance, he also saw a regular hospital bed, a small table and one chair, and a bookcase that contained The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

  Surely this couldn’t be Aggie’s room.

  The girl in the metal device was scrutinizing him as carefully as he had observed her room. “How may I help you, Doctor?”

  “Ah—hello, young lady.” Dodger gave the girl his best smile, trying to ignore the rampant weirdness of the metal dirigible. “Dr. Dworkin here to see the DeLacey girl. You must be...ah...” He snapped his fingers, as if trying to dredge the name up from memory.

  “Justine Makepiece,” said the girl. “Aggie’s just gone out for a moment. She’ll be right back—Dr. Dworkin.”

  So Aggie wasn’t bedridden. That was something. He let out a long breath of relief, then coughed to disguise his reaction. “You’re a peach, Justine.” He placed his top hat down on a pretty inlaid dresser, allowing his fingers to linger over a silver brush and mirror. The brush had a dent in it but would still fetch a pretty penny.

  “You’re quite young to be a specialist, aren’t you?”

  How to respond? “It can be a bit of an obstacle,” he replied, allowing a hint of annoyance into his voice. “Some patients and staff refuse to believe I’m qualified till I produce a whole stack of paperwork.” He gave a little sigh for the needless prejudice of people, then picked up a small framed portrait of a black cat with what appeared to be electrodes at its neck. “How unusual. Your pet?”

  “Back in Yorkshire. She wouldn’t have liked London. Where are you from, by the way? I can’t quite place your accent...”

  “That’s because I’ve trained in so many different places. Edinburgh, Brussels...” He put the cat portrait down. “Amsterdam.”

  “So what I’m hearing is a Scottish-Belgian accent mixed with Dutch?” Justine sounded thoughtful. “Who knew that could sound so much like Cockney?”

  Just then, Aggie appeared in the doorway, sparing him from having to embellish his lies any further. “Aggie!” She was wearing a white blouse and dark skirt instead of her nurse’s pinafore and cap, which made her seem even more approachable. He was about to take her hands in his when he recalled that Justine was watching him. “Miss DeLacey. I’m Dr. Dworkin, a specialist from Brighton.”

  “Dr. Dworkin?” Aggie squinted at him as though trying to place how she knew him. Clever boots, she was pretending not to recognize him.

  “You’re just
in time,” said Justine, sounding cheerful. “Your friend here was about to invent a colorful story about his education in Amsterdam.”

  “Guess that’s my cover blown,” he said, giving Justine a wink as he strode to Aggie. “How have you been? You look wonderful.”

  “Thank you.” Averting her gaze, Aggie walked carefully over to a chair and sat herself down. “How is Nancy?”

  “Thriving, thanks to you.” He looked around the room, wishing there were another chair. He didn’t want to sit on the edge of Aggie’s bed—it seemed too presumptuous—but there was something awkward about standing in front of her like a supplicant.

  “I’m glad to hear your friend is recovering,” said Aggie. “Wait—who took care of Nancy’s wound? You didn’t just do it yourself, did you?”

  Now Dodger was the one averting his gaze. “There’s a doctor works not too far from the pawnshop. New bloke, just opened a surgery.” He forced himself to look up. “Sorry—I probably should have gone to him in the first place, instead of bothering you. He’s the one who helped you, after you got hurt.”

  Aggie’s mouth firmed into a hard line. “I suppose. If you count calling me a carriage as help.”

  “Aw, now, he can’t be that bad. He trained with the head of your school.”

  Aggie shook her head. “Henry bloody Clerval is a total incompetent! You’d have been better off tending Nancy yourself.”

  With a pang of guilt, Dodger recalled his own gut feeling that there was something off about Clerval. Yet the man had seemed so confident in his abilities. “Well,” he said, “Clerval might not be as talented as some, but he seemed to know what he was about. I’m sure he helped a bit, at any rate.”

  Aggie said nothing, but it was clear she did not agree.

  Taking a step toward her, Dodger said, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that night. I could kill Twist for what he did.”