The Death of Jane Lawrence(72)

“Dr. Lawrence is here,” she murmured to her son, touching his sweat-slicked forehead. “You’ll be all right now, you just sit tight.”

Jane’s heart constricted.

Mr. Lowell doffed his hat, worrying at it in his hands. “I’m afraid the doctor is not here, ma’am,” he said, eyes downcast. “The storm must have forced him off the road last night. We don’t know where he is.”

Mr. Lowell had embroidered the story for her as they rode, it seemed. She should have been grateful, but all she felt was a yawning pit of guilt.

“Can’t find him!” the woman cried.

Jane flinched and ducked her head, looking again at the child. “I’ve come to help, instead,” she said. “I have—I have some training.”

Not enough, her logical mind whispered.

She approached the child. His thin shoulders appeared from within his nest of blankets, pink and studded with bumps. She reached out to brush the back of her knuckles against him. The rash felt like sandpaper against her skin, and he was burning up, far too hot. He didn’t so much as flinch at her touch. “We should move him away from the fire,” she said.

The mother shook her head. “He’s shivering.”

“He’s feverish,” Jane said. “He’s too hot.”

“Sweating out a fever is the fastest way I know.”

Jane hadn’t read enough, hadn’t learned enough, to argue. She bit her lip. “How—how has he been eating? Drinking?”

“Naught of either,” the woman said. She was hovering in the doorway, needing to go outside to toss the refuse from the basin, but unwilling to leave her son in the hands of an untested stranger. She was saved from the decision by Mr. Lowell, who took the crock gently from her white-knuckled hands and carried it outside for her.

“Please, tell me everything you know,” Jane said.

“Scarlet fever,” the woman replied. “Scarlet fever, that’s what the doctor said Ben Maerbeck had. Is that what my Orren has?”

Ben Maerbeck. Oh, if only Jane had been back at the surgery, where she could have consulted Augustine’s notes and seen what he had prescribed last. Fighting to hide the tremor in her hands, Jane pulled away from the boy and went to the door. Mr. Lowell had left a satchel there, full of supplies gathered at the surgery before he’d ridden to find her. Had he brought the notes? She crouched down, skirts spilling across the rammed earth floor, pulling the leather bag open. Bottle after bottle, labeled in Augustine’s careful script, rolled over one another. She grabbed each and set them out in a careful line. Papers, she needed papers. And there, at the bottom of the bag, a whole sheaf of them! She grabbed them, poring over Augustine’s less-careful handwriting, the scrawl he used only for himself.

Her heart gave an unwelcome, agonizing pang. His handwriting.

But behind her, the boy was whimpering. His mother was at his side, and she gathered him up in her arms, rocking him back and forth. Jane must act, not ache.

Jane became aware, then, of eyes on her. Many eyes. She looked up, and from the second room in the small farmhouse peered three small faces—the other children. Orren’s father was likely close at hand, too.

Mr. Lowell returned, pushing past her and giving the bowl back to Orren’s mother, just in time for her to catch the next stream of putrid vomit.

Jane forced her attention back to the notes. They seemed to be just what had littered the top of Augustine’s desk, grabbed in desperation. Maerbeck, Maerbeck, she chanted to herself, wondering how it might be spelled, searching for anything that might match it in the tangle of letters on the crumpled pages. She found nothing, and changed tactics, looking for vomit. Nothing there, either, but then her gaze caught on one of the longer words on the fourth page in the satchel: hyperemesis. It seemed to throb upon the paper, and she frowned, reading the paragraph containing it. She knew that word.

There. Maerbeck. She’d found it.

If Vingh had not used that word …

There was no time to consider it. Sagging in relief, she scanned through the page from top to bottom, thankful for her time untangling Augustine’s personal account ledger, thankful even for her discovery of Elodie, if it meant, now, she stood half a chance of helping.

Jane found the list of symptoms. Fever, vomiting, a red rash on the skin. But Jane had to be sure, because the list of treatments frightened her even to consider. To inflict them on the boy, she had to be certain that this matched what Augustine had seen before. Jane approached mother and son, paper clutched in her hands, and crouched down.

“Orren,” she said softly. “Can you open your mouth for me?”

The boy stared past her, eyes glazed, barely blinking.

“He can’t hear you,” his mother said, then choked back a sob. She reached out and stroked her son’s red cheeks, then gently took his chin in hand, and with her thumb pressed to his lips, pulled his jaw down.

Jane leaned forward, but the light from outside was dim with the storm, and the hearth’s glow flickered. It was hard to see. She shifted, changing the angle, wishing there was gaslight. But this was a farm, and the farms had not yet been run with gas.

She tilted her head slightly and saw at last what she was looking for. The back of the boy’s throat was streaked white and red. “Do you see?” she asked, paper crinkling in her first as she clutched it. “The pattern on the back of his throat, that means scarlet fever.”