The Essex Serpent(38)
‘I have always wanted to learn to sail,’ said Cora, smiling and taking Stella’s small hands. ‘Will you put me in touch with the Gainsforths, and vouch for my good character? Goodness, Stella, your hands are hot: take off your coat, and tell me how you are.’
Francis, listening from his newly favoured position under the dining table, approved thoroughly: the move to Colchester had given him new kingdoms to conquer, and he was ready for more. He’d exhausted the town’s small store of treasure (the gull’s egg he’d blown and preserved, the silver fork which Taylor had let him take from the High Street ruin), and shared his mother’s certainty that something was waiting on the Blackwater marsh. In the months since his father’s death he had become (he felt) more or less an adult himself: neither Cora nor Martha attempted any more to cosset or coddle him, and certainly he never asked for it. His tendency to arrive unbidden in the night or early morning, watchful at the door or window, was long gone – he didn’t know why he’d done it, only that it was no longer necessary. Instead he grew self-contained and contentedly silent, and bore their Aldwinter visits with good grace. The rector’s sons treated him with an amiable contempt that suited him perfectly: on the two occasions they’d met the boys had ranged across the common and exchanged perhaps a dozen words in several hours. ‘Aldwinter,’ he said, trying it out for size: ‘Aldwinter.’ He liked the three syllables; he liked the declining cadence. His mother glanced down at him and said, with relief, ‘Would you like that, Frankie? There, then: it’s settled.’
2
In his rooms on the Pentonville Road, sleeping off bad wine, Dr Luke Garret was woken by a tumult beneath his window. A running boy had brought a message, and stood obstinate on the doorstep awaiting a response. Opening the folded sheet of paper, Garrett read:
Suggest attend wards immediately. Patient presents with stab incision left-hand side above fourth rib (police notified). Wound measuring one and one eighth of an inch, penetrating through intercostal muscle to the heart. Primary examination suggests cardiac muscle undamaged; incision to pericardial sac (?). Patient male, twenties, conscious and breathing. Possible candidate for surgical intervention if attended within the hour. Anticipate your arrival and will prepare accordingly – Maureen Fry.
He gave such a bellow of joy that the waiting boy, startled, abandoned all hope for a tip and slipped back into the crowd. Alone among the hospital staff (saving always Spencer), Sister Maureen Fry was Garrett’s champion and confidante. Thwarted in her own desire to take up knife and needle, she saw in Garrett’s disruptive fierce ambition a proxy for her own. Her long service and formidable intellect, combined with an implacable serenity wielded as a weapon against the arrogance of men, caused her to seem as essential to the hospital’s structure as any of its supporting walls. Garrett had grown used to her near-silent attendance in the operating rooms, and suspected (though was never so certain as to be able to thank her) that to have her as ally had permitted him to attempt several operations which might otherwise have been considered too grave a risk. And none came so burdened with risk as this: no surgeon had ever made a successful attempt to close a wound to the heart. The impossibility of doing so had become attended by romance and legend, as if it were a task set by a goddess no-one could ever hope to placate. Less than a year before, one of the most promising surgeons in an Edinburgh hospital, believing he could remove a bullet from a wounded soldier’s heart, had lost his patient on the table, and in his shame and grief gone quietly home and shot himself. (He’d aimed, of course, for the heart; but with a shaking hand misjudged the aim and died of an infection.)
None of this occurred to Luke Garrett, there on the sunlit doorstep with the sheet of paper held to his chest. ‘God bless you!’ he roared at the baffled passers-by, meaning both patient and nurse, and whoever had so conveniently wielded the knife. He put on his coat – he patted his pockets – his money was gone on drink, and there was none remaining for a cab. Laughing, he ran full-tilt the mile to the hospital gate, shedding with each step the last of the night’s dreariness, and on arrival found himself expected. His entrance to the ward was blocked by a senior surgeon with a beard the colour and shape of a garden spade, who more or less braced himself in the doorframe. Beside him, looking anxious as he so often did, Spencer stood with his hands raised in a placating gesture, now and then gesturing to the note he held, which Luke saw clearly to have also come from Sister Fry. Behind them both a door was opened and pulled quickly shut, though not before Luke glimpsed a pair of long, narrow feet extended beneath a white sheet.
‘Dr Garrett,’ said the older surgeon, tugging at his beard: ‘I know what you are thinking, and you cannot do this – you cannot.’
‘Can’t I?’ This was said so mildly that Spencer drew back in alarm. There was, he knew, no mildness anywhere in Luke. ‘What’s his name?’
‘I mean that you both cannot, and you must not. His family is with him: let him reach the end in peace. I knew someone would send for you!’ He wrung his hands. ‘I will not let you bring disgrace on this hospital – his mother is with him, has not stopped talking since she came in.’
Garrett took a step further, and smelt a kind of onion ripeness coming from the surgeon, and above it the consoling reek of iodine.
‘Tell me his name, Rollings.’