From behind him came the sounds of motion. Anson pulled the sheet up the child’s body and turned, ready to order the room cleared immediately. But the two Lansdowne women, their pathetic postures like those of statues melted by their own tears, cooled his wrath. He went to them.
Mary Lansdowne cried openly, her round face slick and red.
“Oh, doctor,” she said. “Thank goodness you’ve come! Edney’s had a spell. I don’t know what it is, but… oh, doctor, I shouldn’t have allowed them up, I knew it was wrong!”
“Calm yourself, now. Bring me a chair.” Anson held Thomas Lansdowne’s wife against his chest as she seemed about to collapse. She was rank with sweat, and her heart thudded against him as if he’d wrapped a bat in a towel. Yet as she pulled her head back, Anson saw that her face also wore a strange repose. The contrast was terrible. If not for the heartbeat throbbing along his lower chest, Anson might have thought her dead.
As he guided the woman into the chair, he realized he didn’t have time for either explanations or apologies. Thomas Lansdowne lay bleeding in the parlour. The best time to operate would be while he remained in shock. Anson looked into the woman’s eyes. She did not look back. He touched her stomach, feeling for the child. When it moved, he did not know if it was a good thing or not.
“I had meant to help,” a recognizable voice spoke at his shoulder. “If I had possibly known of the presence of the evil… doctor, I assure you, I wouldn’t have brought Miss d’Espereaux into such a house.”
The Southerner’s face appeared ravaged; he might have aged twenty years. The blue in his eyes was washed out. A muscle in his cheek twitched repeatedly. He clutched a handkerchief like a limp dove in his hand and spoke with a deference that took Anson by surprise.
“If you would be so kind, doctor, to attend to Miss d’Espereaux, I would consider it a great favour. I fear she has been quite overcome.”
Anson looked down. The young woman remained still, but her eyes opened and closed slowly, her chest moved in an easy rhythm under her finery. She had a remarkable beauty. Her white skin shone with it. The rough character kneeling at her side and fanning her face only made her fragile charms more evident.
“Who is she?” Anson said, moving closer. “What’s she doing here?”
“Miss Elizabeth d’Espereaux,” Richardson said brokenly. “One of the world’s most gifted spiritualists.”
So that was it. Anson had heard of spiritualism, of course, knew how popular it was in certain quarters of society. He had even read attacks against it in medical journals: spiritualism, according to these articles, was a haven for quacks and frauds of the most villainous kind. But this young woman was clearly not acting. Something had terrified her. She had, however, begun to emerge from her fright.
“Lizzie? Can you hear me? Are you all right now?”
The rough character’s sincerity softened his crudely hewn face. He turned, perplexed, to Anson.
“She’s never done that before, doc. Never. Has she hurt herself any? I couldn’t catch her before she fell. The colonel there…” He glowered at Richardson. “He got in my way. But it’s the only time he’s going to touch her, I’ll vouch for that.”
Much to Anson’s surprise, Richardson did not even defend his honour. He merely sighed, his shoulders sagging.
“If I’d known about the evil,” the man said at last, “I’d not have brought her here. But she’d have come anyway. She is so good, you see, that she would risk her life to help a spirit find peace. The fever meant nothing to her.”
The young woman had a slight bump at the back of her head but was otherwise unhurt. As Anson examined her, she kept repeating, “It’s gone now. It was here, but it’s gone.” There was no longer any fear in her voice, however—just a confused kind of wonder. Anson instructed Mary Lansdowne to find suitable places of rest for the two women. Then he took Richardson aside.
“I need your assistance. Some good may yet come out of your return to this house.”
Anson briefly explained the situation that awaited in the parlour. The Southerner took the news without interest; the words hardly seemed to reach him. He was no more substantial than the long shadow he cast. But he nodded gravely once Anson had finished.
From downstairs came a mournful howling. Thomas Lansdowne’s dog, Anson supposed. Somehow the creature’s misery affected him as deeply as the human suffering around him.
“Meet me in the parlour,” he said and hurried off to get his bag.
Ten minutes later, with Thomas Lansdowne shirtless and laid out on the dining room table, Anson carefully examined the wound. It was bad, high up in the shoulder, the humerus fractured. Anson removed what bone fragments he could, all the while desperately trying to convince himself that he could avoid amputation. It had been years since he’d performed one, and he hardly trusted himself even to make the correct diagnosis, let alone to carry out the surgery. Circumstances were decidedly against him.
Thomas Lansdowne’s dog continued to howl outside, as if about to crash through the window at any moment, and the sound, along with the smell of chlorophorm, to which he was no longer so accustomed, had a powerful effect on Anson’s imagination. He kept looking at the long, thin fingers of Ambrose Richardson, pressed, upon instruction, on the subclavian artery, and seeing instead the hand of Dare, as if it had reached out of the mud-clotted darkness to help as it had done so many times before. But Anson knew his current assistant had once been his enemy on those distant battlegrounds and knew, moreover, that this same long-grieving man had endured the loss of his own left arm. The conjunction of images and memories worked against Anson’s concentration as much as the strange mixture of fatigue and exhilaration had focused it in the past. As if guided, he searched rapidly through the gore and shadows… there was something he’d seen in… what was it?… an amputation at the shoulder joint had not proved necessary because enough of the upper humerus remained intact. He asked for the light to be brought closer.
Mary Lansdowne lowered the taper over the wound. Good woman, she had recovered her senses and could now be depended upon. Anson felt encouraged. He let his thoughts remain in the past, in a barnyard open to the elements and crowded with wounded. A senior surgeon, a very experienced man who wasted no energy on saving limbs, had surprisingly saved a young soldier’s arm in just such a case as this, by…
Anson peered at the bloodied gash as if he could see through it. What was it that man had done? He had made an incision… yes… and extracted the splintered head of the humerus. If there was enough upper bone… Anson probed with his fingers. The breathing of his assistants faded into the dog’s howls, then even the howls diminished. Anson picked up his knife.
“Wipe, please,” he said.
Mary Lansdowne quickly mopped the sweat from his brow.
Anson’s hand was firm as he made the incision, firm as he removed the head of the humerus, firm as he sewed the wound shut and positioned the arm upwards, indicating to Mary Lansdowne how a sling would be required to keep the bone as high as possible. Only when Anson stepped away from the table and the lived years rushed together into the strange, living present, and the voices of the wounded were replaced with other voices at the dining room door, did his whole body go so limp that he almost lost his balance. He found a chair and gingerly lowered himself into it. His lower back ached and his hands were weak. He let his eyelids fall.