Anatomy: A Love Story(57)

A dozen people arrived at the dungeon laboratory for Hazel’s help the week after she treated Jeanette. It was thirty the week after that. Between Jeanette and Jack, word had spread rapidly, and soon Hazel found herself treating everything from consumption to constipation. For each person who came to the door of her dungeon laboratory seeking treatment, Hazel took complete notes and detailed their age, occupation, symptoms, and the treatment she was recommending.

Fevers she treated with linseed cordial and orange whey, keeping the patient warm with blankets and supplied with plenty of tea. Broken bones were set with wooden planks and strips of fabric. Wounds were stitched closed. When a woman arrived clutching her cheek in pain, Hazel pulled a rotten tooth from her jaw and treated the gum with honey and clove oil.

Hazel found herself consulting her well-worn Dr. Beecham’s Treatise less and less often, becoming more confident in her own abilities and instinct for diagnosis. Most patients Hazel was able to treat in an afternoon and send on their way, but others—like Jeanette’s acquaintance, a young boy named Bobby Danderfly, with the broken leg from the carriage accident—Hazel would assist as she could on her table, and then send the patient to a bed in Hawthornden Castle to convalesce.

When the first patient with Roman fever arrived, Hazel gathered the staff in the library.

“None of you need stay in this house,” Hazel said. “There’s a danger to having the sick here, I know that, especially with the fever.” Hazel had set the man up in the solarium with a straw mat, and she had spent the morning doing her best to keep him comfortable, gently washing away the blood and pus from his burst blisters and wiping an ice water–dampened cloth across his feverish forehead. “The gatehouse is more than big enough for anyone who doesn’t want to live here.” Charles, Iona, and Cook nodded solemnly. Susan the scullery maid scowled in the corner. “And nobody should go in the solarium but me, is that clear?”

“I don’t see why we have to leave,” Susan scoffed. “I didn’t sign up to work in a bloody hospital. I’d like to see what the lady of the house would make of all of this.”

“Well, while my mother is in England, I think you’ll find that I’m the lady of the house, Susan.”

Susan mumbled something under her breath.

“And, Cook, I don’t suppose you’d mind making a pot of oats? Maybe with the currant jelly? To help our patients keep their strength.”

Even as her days became exhausting, filled with tending to patients and mixing poultices and washing sodden rags, Hazel still wasn’t able to sleep properly. She had uneasy dreams, nightmares about the horror of the corpse she and Jack had dug up from its grave and its mutilated face. Other times, the face that hovered before her in the spaceless void behind her closed eyelids was Bernard’s. Either way, Hazel tossed and turned in her blankets until, with an even mixture of disappointment and relief, she saw the first creeping of pastel-colored dawn through her window.

Sometimes Hazel was so exhausted she found herself staring with her eyes open and unblinking while she stood at her worktable in the dungeon, not sleeping but not entirely conscious either.

“Easy there,” Jack said, catching Hazel as she swayed standing up one morning. He was in the dungeon with her, helping Hazel by brewing a fresh batch of wortflower-root tea the way he remembered his mother had done.

“It’s the smell of that,” Hazel murmured with a small smile after Jack had helped her settle into a chair. “That tea smells like loam and dung.”

“Ay, fortunately it only tastes a little bit worse than it smells,” Jack said. “Here, I’ll brew a pot of black for both of us.” Jack stood to leave when they heard a soft knock on the door.

Jack and Hazel looked at each other. Hazel was suddenly entirely awake.

Another soft knock. And then a moan of pain.

Hazel made to rise, but Jack lifted his hand. “I’ll get it.”

Jack unlatched the door and swung it open, and Hazel leaned forward to see who had arrived in the doorway: a young woman clutching her belly, doubled over in pain, her blond hair hanging lank around her face.

“Is this the place?” she said to her feet. “Please, is this the place where someone can help me?”

“Isabella?” Jack said. The girl lifted her head and revealed eyes wet with tears. “Isabella,” he repeated. He took in her pregnant belly.

She moaned.

Hazel walked up behind him. She saw the blood and fluid between the pregnant girl’s legs. “For heaven’s sake, Jack, step aside. There’s a woman giving birth in the doorway.”

Jack blinked rapidly and backed into the dungeon. His mouth hadn’t closed fully since he had first seen Isabella—here—and pregnant.

Hazel assessed the scene quickly. “Dear Lord. I’m afraid there’s no time to get you up to the main house,” she said. “Here, sit down quick. Jack, run up to Hawthornden and fetch Iona. Tell her to bring me a basin of water.”

Jack nodded and with only one more quick glance at Isabella, he ran outside.

“Was that … Jack Currer?” Isabella asked as Hazel gently guided her into the wooden chair.

Hazel was distracted with the mental checklist of everything she would need to do to deliver a baby. “What? Jack Currer. Yes. Do you know him?” Hazel’s eyes widened. “Is he the, uh—?”