Стефани Баррон - A Flaw in the Blood

He broke off, his eyes following the progress of a filthy child, possibly a girl, who stole up to Georgie’s skirts and hid her face in the French twilled silk. Georgie swayed slightly, and touched the child’s head; he noticed then how dreadful her pallor was, how the exhaustion of last night, and her own accident, had never left her. She still wore a bandage about her head, disguising the ugly bruise at her temple.

“Did you sleep at all?” he demanded.

“Perhaps an hour.”

“You shouldn’t be here. You should be tucked up on a sopha with a novel and a pot of tea.”

“I have a patient within.”

“A patient!”

“The poor have as much need of doctors as the rich, Patrick,” she flashed.

“I’m the last man to argue that, Georgie—but need the doctor be you ?”

“I’m fortunate to win the custom! The rich prefer their doctors male—these women have no choice but to accept my services. In return they give me experience—and so we each barter what we can.”

He glanced around the slovenly room. “Snow would hate to see you here, lass.”

“It was Uncle John who introduced me to the neighbourhood,” she retorted. “Do you think his cholera researches were conducted in Mayfair? He was often in far worse places than this—Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Although these women die of syphilis far more than cholera, of course.”

Syphilis. Her casual use of the word rocked him. To another man—a true English gentleman, reared with all the prejudices and ignorance of his willful class—Georgiana’s worldliness must ruin her. Fitzgerald suspected she betrayed it less to the circles she usually frequented; but to him she always spoke her mind. They argued constantly and Fitzgerald invariably lost.

“Why have you come, Patrick?”

“I want you to leave London. Immediately.”

“Whatever for?”

“You’re in danger.”

“Nonsense!”

“Georgie, my chambers have been ransacked, my partner nearly killed, and my carriage overturned—for what do you wait, a pistol to the head?”

“I have nothing to do with your affairs!” she cried. “Even if we accept that these events are linked—and that they are animated by some power at Windsor—no one there could possibly know that I rode in your carriage last night!”

“Your friend von Stühlen does.”

“Von Stühlen is not my friend, Patrick,” she said sharply.

“I found his card on the mantel at Russell Square. Did he call this morning to inquire after your health?” He grasped her wrist, his persistent jealousy flaring. “ Tell me how you come to be acquainted with that man—and why he hated to see you at Torning’s inn.”

She stared at him as though he’d run mad. “I don’t have time for this! There is a girl on the brink of death in that room, and it is my duty—my calling, Patrick—to do what I can to save her.” She shook off his hold.

“What’s wrong with her, then?”

“Ignorance and desperation.” Georgie threw the words over her shoulder, already leaving him. “Lizzie is but fourteen—on the Game, like her mother—found herself in the family way, and consulted an abortionist. Whatever the butcher did has infected her blood. Her mother, half wild with fear, sent round a note to Russell Square at midnight. I blame myself that I did not find it until this morning.”

At midnight, Georgie was rolling toward Hampstead Heath in the hands of the Queen’s coachman. Fitzgerald’s fault, again.

“What will you do?”

“I shall have to remove the uterus.”

“Surgery! In this place?”

She stopped short in the doorway. “I can hardly transport her to the College. As you’re here, you might boil water on that hob and scrub the table. We shall have to operate by the fire—and send the little ones out into the hall while we do it.”

He wanted to tell her that no common prostitute, however young and desperate, was worth the sacrifice of her safety. He wanted to tell her that the girl would die, no matter what she did.

“Georgie—”

“Not another word, until I am at leisure to hear you. Mr. Fitzgerald requires some water, Davey,” she ordered the boy. “Be so good as to fetch it for him.”

Whatever brutal words he might have thrown at Georgie were stopped in his mouth when he saw the girl.

She was not a pretty thing, being too thin and already gapping in her teeth. Her faded blond hair was a mass of tangles, her face grey and drenched with sweat. But there was in her slight frame and fragile wrists, in the delicacy of her fingers as they plucked at the rags that covered her, all the possibility of a different life—one of expression and feeling, a world glimpsed but never grasped. The sight of her shamed Fitzgerald. As he bent to lift her in his arms, to carry her to that scrubbed old table where Georgie would slice into her flesh, he thought of all the other men, breaking the twig of her body in half. How many? For how many years?

Her mother, who was called Button Nance, swore beneath her breath in a continuous stream of vituperation half-realised, half-heard, a diatribe against the world and God and doctors of every description, against men in general and men who paid and men who didn’t, men who demanded little girls instead of women like herself who could stand the nonsense; against little girls, too, and Lizzie in particular—more fool her for not bearing the brat and then pitching it in the Thames—and finally, against Fitzgerald for causing her daughter to cry out in pain as he lifted her. Nancy drank deep from a pitcher of gin, and though it was only noon by the time they laid Lizzie before the fire, her mother was dead drunk.

He had never seen Georgiana administer the chloroform that John Snow made famous.

It was a ticklish business, and in the hands of Snow’s imitators, occasionally a fatal one. Impossible to predict how a weakened frame might react to the drug-induced night—whether the constitution, already brought low by illness or accident, might not be extinguished altogether. There were stories indignantly circulated of patients dead at the extraction of a tooth, because chloroform was used; of labouring women whose ease of delivery was swiftly followed by the grave. But John Snow, to Fitzgerald’s knowledge, had never lost a patient. And the possibility of enduring surgery without pain had made his discovery wildly popular, so that for the first time patients went under the knife without terror. Chloroform had revolutionized the practice of medicine in the past decade; all of Europe was ready to take its risk.

“Patients die because their doctors, terrified of waking them with the knife, continue to drug them long after they are unconscious,” Georgiana said placidly as she placed a drop of chloroform on a square of linen and held it to Lizzie’s nose. “Then the heart rate is depressed and the lungs collapse. Sheer stupidity on the surgeon’s part—but so many of them are untrained, and besieged with requests for anaesthesia. It’s no wonder they kill with kindness.”

The girl reached out and grasped Georgie’s hand. “Don’t cut me,” she pleaded. “The last one cut me and I’ve not been right since—men don’t like a girl what’s cut.”

“Hush,” Georgiana said, smoothing the rough hair. “You shall feel a world of difference soon.”

The steady application of drops to handkerchief continued; Lizzie’s eyelids fluttered, her breath fell slowly into the oblivion of sleep.

The surgery required almost an hour. Fitzgerald stayed at Georgiana’s side and did as he was instructed, though he’d never been one to love the smell of blood. In Lizzie’s case the rich animal scent was overpowered by the stronger one of decay: Her body stank as he remembered the wounds of soldiers stinking, with the foetid pus of inflammation. Georgiana’s face was grave as she opened the girl and removed the perforated uterus, which lay like the liver of a butchered cow on the scrubbed table.