“You did well,” he said, turning on the faucet with an elbow and rinsing blood from his hands in the sputter of water. “Come here, clean yourself up. I should have told you to don a gown, but I suppose I didn’t think you’d—well. Many wouldn’t have been able to stay standing the whole time. It’s a grisly business, as I warned you.”
Jane glanced back at the table. The patient looked whole and slumbering, as if Dr. Lawrence’s surgery had been some form of magic.
“That was incredible,” she said, then looked at him, at the lines of his face, his steady hands. “I didn’t know such surgery was possible.”
“It isn’t, in most cases. I was taught by the greatest instructors in Great Breltain.” He said it without pride or boasting.
“What happened to him? That thing you removed, what was it?”
“The large bowel, malformed from … something. I will send for a specialist.”
“But he’ll live? Now that it’s removed, now that you’ve…” She trailed off, left without the right words or understanding, but she nodded back to the man’s abdomen, the covered hole.
“The sponge will catch the output of the digestive tract, and as long as the site is kept clean and he is lucky, the tissue will callous and he may live many more years. But this is no amputation, where we understand everything that we do, and our patients survive more often than they do not. I hope he will live.” His gaze dropped, his hands tightening on the edge of the sink.
Jane approached him and resisted the strong, surprising urge she had to lay a hand upon his shoulder. “We have done good work here,” she echoed back to him instead.
He glanced up at her with a small, thankful smile.
Her heart sprang into an erratic, unfamiliar rhythm.
They were alone in the room. Mr. Lowell had left, unnoticed, some time before. She tried to focus on the stink of blood and bowel, the astringency of the antiseptic, the faint whiff of ether on the air. Anything besides him, because his smile felt intimate and intoxicating in the wake of that horror.
“How are you feeling? If you feel at all faint, I’ll get you to a chair.” He searched her face, no doubt seeing her confusion, reading it as weakness. Waiting for her to say she’d changed her mind about being a doctor’s wife.
“I feel…” Inappropriate. It was inappropriate to fixate on him like this, now. But there were other emotions below that. She felt elated, as though she were soaring, but also bone-tired and worn out, and she knew, somewhere below it all, she was still horrified. Her skin still burned where it was coated in blood.
“You feel alive,” the doctor supplied. “And it’s sometimes a very overwhelming feeling. You should wash up, then sit for a while in my office. I’ll send Mr. Lowell out for a change of clothing as soon as the patient is settled in the recovery room.”
She looked down at herself, at the blood soaking through her gown in dark, spreading stains. Her nails were caked black, the lines of her palms filled with drying gore. She shook her head, then joined him at the faucet, mechanically rubbing the blood away in the ice-cold water.
“Here,” he said, taking one of her hands. His fingers were lightly calloused, and he worked quickly, methodically, getting soap up under her nails and leaving her skin more or less what it had been when she arrived. Her breath caught in her chest, and she wanted, desperately, confusingly, for him to cradle her hands in his, to stroke his thumb along her knuckles.
But he didn’t. He simply took her other hand and repeated the work, then shut the tap off and handed her a clean towel. And then he left her, shedding his apron and tossing it onto a pile of stinking laundry, ready for Mr. Lowell to pick up as soon as his other tasks were done.
CHAPTER FOUR
JANE LOOKED AFTER him, unmoving. His office seemed miles away, her world contracted to the four walls of the operating theater and the rasping breath of the patient. His chest rose and fell, the rhythm gently off-kilter. Slowly, she walked around the table.
She froze when the tangled length of bowel came into view.
She’d half expected it to be gone, swept away into a bucket of bloody rags and torn clothing to be discarded, but it sat, the blood on it congealing but otherwise just the same as when Dr. Lawrence had removed it. It had not deflated in any way, and even now it gave no sign of death. She leaned forward, frowning, refusing to blink. If she didn’t blink, she was certain she would see it pulse with the same slow beating of his heart.
“Miss Shoringfield,” Mr. Lowell said from the doorway.
She tore her gaze away. “Yes?”
“I’m about to move Mr. Renton here to the recovery room,” he said.
“Can I help?”
“No, no. But before I move him, do you need anything? Tea? Brandy?”
“Oh, no,” she said, clasping her trembling hands together and lacing her fingers to still the shaking. “I, ah, I’ll just move to the office, then. Oh—our maid, Ekaterina, she might be by soon. You can send her for my clothing. I expect you’re more needed here than running errands.”
“It’s no trouble, but I’ll look for her. Maybe take an apron to sit on, though,” he said, and with a nod of his head, stepped past her and over to the table. She colored, took one of the aprons she should have donned earlier, and hurried out, down the hall and into the office. Dr. Lawrence was nowhere to be seen, though she could hear his voice, far off, too far to make out the words. Closing the door behind her, she looked around.
Could she really live here? Work here? Could she handle another Mr. Renton, whether she was in the bloody theater with him, or across the hall, listening to his screams and speaking with his relatives?
And the way she had felt when Dr. Lawrence had taken her hand—thinking of it now left her adrift. Confused.
She laid the apron out on the chair by the window, but stopped just short of sitting when she heard footsteps. Sound traveled in the surgery, including voices, even those hushed so that she had to strain to hear them.
It was Mr. Lowell and Dr. Lawrence.
“She said she found him in a circle of chalk and salt,” Mr. Lowell said. “Should we call the magistrate?”
Chalk and salt? All thoughts of touches and blood were pushed away. She took a few steps toward the door, the better to hear. Surely chalk and salt weren’t sufficient signs of a crime to send for the local judiciary.
But Dr. Lawrence did not immediately respond, and Jane’s certainty wavered. It rocked entirely when he said, so quietly she could barely hear him, “Superstitions do not cause medical malformations, Mr. Lowell. But they do cause madness, occasionally. Accidental poisonings, certainly.”
“And mutilations?” Mr. Lowell pressed. “Could it be some kind of—ritual?”
Jane frowned. Great Breltain had cast off its church over a decade ago, though of course not everybody had stopped believing. Some of Mr. Cunningham’s clients even clung to practices older than religion, small offerings left to ensure a better harvest, love potions, and the like. But ritual mutilations? She had never heard of such a thing.
No. No, it had to be the fruit of madness only. If anybody were to know the reality of such dangers, it would be the magistrate.
“He cut his own stomach open, sir,” Mr. Lowell pressed.