The Healing Season. Ruth Axtell Morren

him. As she hesitated, he repressed an impatient sigh. Pretty and useless. Probably a lightskirt, he decided, like the one lying unconscious. His heart raged with the familiar frustration at how easily a young woman’s virtue was lost in this part of London.

      But he had no one else to assist him. It was two in the morning, and he’d been summoned from his bed, with no idea what he would find when he arrived at his destination.

      The edges of the young woman’s sleeves were stained with blood as if she’d already tried to help her friend. At his bidding now, she leaned over the bed and began to lift the girl’s dress higher. Her hands were shaking so much they fumbled on the lacings of the corset.

      “Here, let me,” he said, barely concealing his annoyance. He took one of the scalpels from his case and slit the corset up its length.

      It was a wonder the girl hadn’t already miscarried, the way she was bound so tightly. She was further along than he’d supposed.

      He addressed his reluctant assistant. “It’s important that we stop the bleeding. In order to do that, I’m going to have to remove the unborn child. Do you think you’ll be up to this? You’re not going to faint on me?”

      The woman stared at him, her pupils wide black pools within silvery irises. She bit her lip. “I’ll…I’ll try not to.”

      “You’ve got to do better than that.” He tried for the note of encouragement he used with students around the dissecting table for the first time, but his mind was more concerned with the young girl bleeding to death. They had a long night ahead of them.

      Dawn was lighting the interior of the room when Ian straightened to massage the kinks out of his lower back.

      He glanced at his young assistant. Her pretty frock was ruined, the front and sleeves spattered with blood.

      She hadn’t fainted, he’d give her that, although many times he thought she’d be sick. She’d clasped her hand over her mouth more than once. Now she wiped the perspiration from her forehead with her sleeve, pushing back the damp golden strands of hair that had fallen from their knot.

      “The bleeding has abated and her pulse, though weak, is regular. We’ve done all we can for now.” He turned away from the bed to the basin of water to wash his hands.

      After dumping it out the window and pouring some fresh water to wash off his instruments, he asked, “Can you see if there are any fresh linens for the bed?”

      She started, then glanced around the dingy surroundings. “I don’t know if she would have anything.”

      “Perhaps the woman who let me in earlier. Can you ask her?”

      She pressed her lips together. “I doubt she would be so obliging.”

      “I suggest you find out. Bribe her if you have to. Your friend can’t lie in that bloody mess.” He nodded curtly toward the soiled linens.

      The young woman straightened her back and gave him a look that told him the words had stung. It was the first hint of anything other than fear he’d seen in her all night. He’d rarely had such a jittery nurse. He was surprised a woman her age—at least twenty, he’d judge—hadn’t been around a delivery room before.

      She left the room without a word.

      Ian forgot her as he dumped cranioclast, regular forceps, crochet and hooks into the basin. The water immediately clouded red.

      He had little hope the girl on the bed would survive. If the loss of blood didn’t kill her, childbed fever likely would.

      The other woman returned as he was drying the instruments.

      “You had some success,” he said, noting the folded linens she carried in her arms.

      “Not with the landlady.” She laid the gray sheets down on the vacated chair and eyed the bed. “The neighbor upstairs whose boy went to fetch you last night gave me what little she could spare.”

      As she continued standing there, he approached the bed. “Here, I’ll show you how.” He began to strip the soiled sheets from under the patient, again amazed at the woman’s ignorance in changing a bed for an invalid. “If you can procure some fresh ticking for this bed later today, it would help.”

      She nodded, taking hold of the sheet on the other side of the bed. After they had done the best they could with the limited supplies available, Ian took up the bucket with the remains of the night’s work.

      “I’m going to see about a burial.”

      Once again the young woman looked queasy. She averted her eyes from the bucket and nodded.

      Ian found the lad who’d brought him the night before and had him fetch a shovel.

      Out in the small, refuse-filled yard, he dug a hole deep enough to keep stray animals from uncovering it, dumped the remains into it, and filled it with the dirt.

      Dear God, he began, then stopped, not quite knowing what more to say. A poor half-formed child, destined for a miserable existence if it had come to term. And yet, he felt the familiar sense of defeat over every lost life, life that hadn’t yet had a chance to live.

      Thank You for sparing the mother, he finally continued. I pray You’ll watch over her in the coming days that she might heal. Bless this infant. Welcome him into Your kingdom.

      He gave a final pat with the back of the shovel to the unmarked grave and returned it to the boy. “Thank you.”

      “Sorry for getting you up in the middle of the night. Mum and I ’eard the screams. ’Twas awful. Sounded like she was dying.” He sniffed. “Mum’d ’eard as ’ow you don’t charge people wot ’aven’t got ’ny blunt.”

      He nodded. “You did the right thing.”

      Ian trudged back upstairs. He reentered the room and gathered his things to depart. Ignoring the other woman, he bent over his patient and felt her forehead. If fever didn’t develop over the next twenty-four hours, she had a fighting chance.

      Lord, grant her Thy healing, if it be Thy will. Show her Thy mercy and grace.

      He straightened and turned to the young woman who had been sitting by the bedside. Once again he was struck with her beauty. Ethereal and fragile…how deceiving looks could be.

      In another few years she’d probably be poxed and coming around to St. Thomas’s to be treated, like so many of the women he saw.

      “I’ll be by later in the morning to check on her,” he told the young woman. “There isn’t much you can do for her now, except keep her warm and give her some water to sip if she wakes.” He handed her a small parcel from his satchel. “This is ergot. If you stir a little in water, it will help stop the bleeding.”

      She took it gingerly. He tried to give some words of encouragement, but didn’t want to get her hopes too high. “Try to get some rest yourself,” he said simply.

      She made no reply, so he gave a last look toward the girl on the bed. What she needed was divine intervention, and he was too exhausted to pray.

      Ian departed the room as silently as he’d come.

      Eleanor woke to the sound of low voices. Her maid knew better than to disturb her before noon.

      Her eyelids protested as she forced them open. Two men stood by the bed. Frightened, she sat up, finding herself in a chair. She didn’t remember falling asleep here. Why wasn’t she in her bed?

      Betsy! Recollection came back in a heap of nightmarish images. Her friend had been bleeding to death when Eleanor had found her.

      Aching muscles in her neck and back shrieked in outrage as she looked toward the bed. The tall, young doctor who’d arrived in the wee hours of the night was standing at Betsy’s bedside now, another man beside him.

      He’d come back as he’d promised.

      Had