The Death of Jane Lawrence(9)

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.

Dr. Lawrence’s response came quicker this time, his voice firm and growing louder. “There is no way the larger insult to his descending colon was done by his hand. I may not be able to explain what caused it, but such a malformation would have been excruciating enough to drive any man into questionable decisions. I know that is uncomfortable, Mr. Lowell, but you must believe me. He was simply unlucky.”

It was Mr. Lowell’s turn to fall silent. Dr. Lawrence’s words must have wrapped around him in much the same way they had around Jane, the certainty in them bolstering her and dispelling her unease. Superstitions could cut both ways, after all; they could cause people to do irrational things, or to assign irrational meaning where there was none.

“Aye, Doctor,” Mr. Lowell said at last. “Hot or cold, for Mr. Renton?”

“Hot. Build up the fire until he sweats, then bank it.”

Their voices receded, and she sat at last.

He was a good doctor. She had not known it for sure when she proposed to him, had never imagined him the luminary she had seen in the operating theater, but it soothed her soul to know it now.

No; that was a lie. It didn’t soothe her, it sparked something in her that refused to die down or be contained.

If Mr. Renton had lived in any other town, or if Dr. Lawrence had never come to Larrenton, she suspected he would have died. But in Dr. Lawrence’s care, he had survived. She couldn’t forget his screaming, but she also couldn’t forget how deftly Dr. Lawrence’s hands had moved, how his directions had steadied her, how they had worked in concert to set the body to order. She had never before seen the appeal of a physician’s task, but now it made sense to her. They shared the same goals, the same lens through which they viewed the world. She sorted numbers; he sorted humors.

And yet where she analyzed impartial numbers, he cared for the most human of concerns. He was likely with Mrs. Renton even now, and Jane pictured him holding the woman’s hands lightly, telling her all that would need to be done to care for her suddenly incapacitated husband.

Husband.

She had thought of Mr. Renton as a body just now, so easily, and as meat in the heat of the surgery.

What sort of monstrous woman was she? Perhaps she was not as like Dr. Lawrence as she thought, or as she would need to be to remain here. That remove had kept her on her feet through the surgery, had helped save him, but guilt rocked her. He wasn’t a body. He was a man. He was a living, breathing, thinking man.

She heard footsteps again, and the creak of the office door, but didn’t look away from the window where she gazed unseeing onto the street. It was the clink of a saucer and cup that made her, at last, turn.

Dr. Lawrence had placed a cup of tea on the small side table by her elbow.

“When I said there might be blood, I didn’t expect for today to be quite this exciting,” he said, after a minute.

“But it is part of a doctor’s life.” She made herself pick up the cup. The porcelain rattled against the saucer.

“Sometimes. Not all the time. Is that too much?”

Too much? Yes, of course. And the match was hardly settled. All she had to do was say, Yes, it was too much. I have reconsidered. Or perhaps she should echo his words from the night before: It would not be appropriate for me to marry you.

But she found she couldn’t say, either. She didn’t know what to say, but she didn’t want him to stop talking.

“I just need time to think,” she managed at last.

When he had looked upon her in fear the night before, yet still yielded to her demands, what had he felt? She had run roughshod over his logic and desires with her own. She should have accepted the first no, for both of their sakes.

He was still looking at her, though, and when she glanced up, she found his expression had gentled. There was no impatience there, no judgment at her weakness, no relief in finding her unable, perhaps, to meet his requirements.

“And what exactly are you thinking of?” he asked.

You. She turned away, searching for a better answer. She’d never been talented at talking past an issue. “The patient,” she settled on. It was closest to the truth, not really a lie at all. “Who else?”