That evening, however, when he was alone in his cot, he gave his imagination free rein.
Whenever she visited him, Elizabeth brought Victor some new treat from the dining hall: a lady apple, a currant cake, even a cold Yorkshire pudding that tasted like ambrosia to Victor. He wasn’t sure if his food had been drugged before, but after a few days of not eating the porridge, he seemed noticeably sharper, and his ability to recall words was greatly improved.
“You know, I should take you outside,” she told him the last time she visited. “It can’t be good for you, never seeing the sun.”
Until she mentioned it, he hadn’t realized how much he longed to go outside. He wanted to tell her how much she meant to him—her visits, the way she spoke to him like a human being and a friend, the fact that she was keeping his secret. He opened his mouth, but all the feelings seemed to form a bottleneck in his throat, and he got stuck on the word “I.”
“Relax your throat,” she reminded him. “Breathe.”
Had he thought her merely pretty when they first met? She was beautiful to him now. But the harder he tried to get the words out, the worse it got, and then, in a burst of frustration and something else he couldn’t name, he grabbed her hand and impulsively pressed a kiss to her palm.
Oh, God, what have I done? Why hadn’t he at least kissed the back of her hand, like a gentleman? When he found the courage to look her in the eyes again, she was smiling at him gently, a kindly teacher to stammering schoolboy. Humiliating, yes, but at least she wasn’t offended.
Or was she? She didn’t come the day after, but he didn’t lose hope until the third day. That was when he knew that he’d frightened her away. Damn it. He had to be more careful. He needed her as an ally, not a friend. He would be circumspect, when she returned, and not presume to take any liberties.
Assuming, of course, that she did return.
15
By mid-October, Lizzie discovered why English people went on and on about the rain. The constant downpour stripped the trees of leaves, and there was a distinct chill in the air, but the tall, flower-embossed iron radiator in the corner of the room remained cool to the touch. “Radiators are purely for decoration in England,” Byram had explained in his most sardonic tone. “We believe frigid temperatures build character.”
She tried to take this in stride, the way Byram and Will did, but she wasn’t used to being this cold; at home, her room had its own fireplace. No longer my room, nor even my house, anymore. Someone else is living there now.
The pace of work increased and, as midterm exams approached, Lizzie found she couldn’t spare the time to go to the laboratory during her free periods. At home, her father had always told her she possessed an exceptional intellect, but now she was struggling to keep up with the torrent of new information coming her way. There were daily quizzes in human anatomy and organic chemistry, and the moment she learned something new, she forgot half the previous day’s list. Moulsdale’s comprehensive course on the history of botanical remedies, which had very little practical application, required that she spend hours every night translating medieval sources from the Latin in the dim light of her room. When she looked up from the page, her eyes stung and took ages to refocus. At this rate, she worried she was going to be the first blind female doctor. Will, Byram and other students formed study groups, which lightened their workload a bit, but she was not allowed near their dormitory after dinner, so she had to struggle along on her own. At first, when Lizzie started to feel the tickle in the back of her throat, she refused to believe that she had caught the upper respiratory inflammation that was making the rounds of the school. It was simply a matter of willpower; she could not afford to be sick.
By the third day, she realized she had no choice in the matter. It hurt to swallow, and the room began to spin when she tried to get out of bed. She had the grippe. Aggie, who usually acted as though Lizzie were invisible, paused on her way out of the room to ask if Lizzie needed anything. “No, no, I’ll be fine, just need to rest,” said Lizzie, assuming that her roommate would understand that of course she needed some tea with honey and lemon, and maybe a few lozenges, as well. The girl was studying to be a nurse, after all.
When hours passed and Aggie did not return, Lizzie found herself staring up at the ceiling, surrounded by crumpled, damp handkerchiefs, thinking about Victor. No one had ever kissed her hand before, and even though it seemed silly to think about it, she wondered if her patient was developing a sort of tenderness for her, the way some patients did for their nurses. Perhaps it was for the best that she had to stop seeing him for a while. She did worry about him, though. Had he managed to hold on to his gains in language? Was he able to practice on his own? She hated to think of him losing ground and having to start all over again.
She also worried about losing ground with Professor Makepiece. While she had kept Victor’s progress a secret, she had told the professor about her idea of using the etheric magnetometer with a helmet attachment in order to stimulate the speech centers of the brain, and he had been extremely encouraging. Between studying for exams and getting sick, she had been away from the lab for nearly two weeks now. Might he be experimenting on Victor in her absence? Was he trying out the device on Igor or one of the other Bio-Mechanicals?
Unfortunately, at the moment, midterms were coming and she had other, more pressing concerns. Did the fat man in Wellington ward with the swollen foot have gout, arthritis or some sort of skin disease? Was the young girl in Alexandra ward suffering from cramps because she had ingested old mutton, as she claimed, or was there some other cause she was too embarrassed to admit? Just how much of Lizzie’s histology grade depended on the final exam?
Lying in bed, feverish and stuffed up, she recited the names of the bones of the wrist to herself like a prayer: scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. Will said his brother had taught him the mnemonic for them: Stop Letting Those People Touch the Cadaver’s Hand. She thought of Victor’s strange left arm, and the way he always kept it turned away from her.
Eventually she fell into a strange fever dream. She was looking at a ballroom filled with swirling, jewel-colored silk gowns, and then she was one of the dancers, whirling from partner to partner, moving from Perry to Will to Byram, who did not limp in the dream. She wanted to stay with Byram, but he spun her away, and then she turned and crashed into cold metal arms that closed around her waist and would not let her go. Startled, she found herself staring up at a helmeted medieval knight, but his visor was down and she could not tell if there was a man inside or not. It took all her strength to reach up to raise the visor, but as it came up, the movement of her own body jolted her awake.
The next morning, she felt a little better and when Aggie again asked if she needed anything, she replied with a curt, “No, thank you,” and forced herself out of bed. When she made it to the dining room, however, she discovered that there was no hot food for breakfast. The constant rain had caused a delay in the coal delivery, and everyone had to make do with cold leftovers.
Her day did not improve. In Gross Anatomy class, some wag had scrawled Anatomy Killed Me on the blackboard and signed it Mortimer Graves III with an arrow pointing to the human skeleton. Grimbald erased the board without comment, then announced that their first cadaver dissection would take place the next day. Arrangements would be made for those who were not eligible to participate. Will gave Lizzie a sympathetic look as she sat beside him flushed with anger, but Byram calmly continued taking notes.
“This is completely unfair,” she whispered. “I just got back, and now I’m going to miss another class.”
Byram shook his head and wrote her a note in the margins of his notebook: Forget about it. Ever since his confrontation with Grimbald over wearing the correct uniform for running, he had been subdued. Whatever Grimbald has said to him, it seemed to have had the desired effect. If she wanted to fight back against
Grimbald’s rule, she was going to have to do it on her own.
* * *
By the end of the day, she still hadn’t thought of a solution. Lizzie brushed her hair out with sharp, angry strokes, then hit a snarl that sent the brush flying across the room. She was picking it up when Aggie opened the door. Her roommate paused at the doorway, then walked over to the table they shared.
“Where’s my brush gone?”
“I don’t know.” Lizzie picked up her brush from the floor and dusted it off on her skirt. A few of the boar’s hair bristles were broken.
Aggie sat down and removed her nurse’s cap. “Yes, you do. You’re holding it.”
“This is my brush.”
Aggie, who had been looking in the small mirror, turned around to face Lizzie. “No, your brush is on your side of the table, where I put it every single day after you use it. You can tell it’s your brush because it’s filled with brown hair, which you never bother to comb out of the bristles.”
Lizzie looked down at the brush in her hands. There were a few brown strands in it now, but it was very clean. And now that she looked at it more carefully, it was a slightly longer shape than her brush. She fought back the urge to apologize. Her roommate seemed to have made up her mind to be aggrieved with her on that first night, and nothing Lizzie said made any difference.
“I am sorry,” Lizzie said with exaggerated politeness, handing Aggie the brush. “I must have taken this by mistake. I suppose I don’t spend as much time thinking about my hair as you do.”
Aggie muttered something under her breath and began plucking Lizzie’s brown hairs out of the bristles as though they were vermin.
“Let me do that. I know how tired you must be of cleaning things—after all, that’s most of what you do in nursing school, isn’t it? Scrub, scrub, scrub the surgical surfaces and the patients’ beds and keep everything absolutely spic and span?”
“You have no idea...but since you’re bringing up the subject of cleanliness...” Aggie looked up, her eyes meeting Lizzie’s in the mirror. “Do you think you could manage to clean up all the soiled handkerchiefs lying around your bed? We nurses believe that such behavior is unhygienic and can spread disease.”
Lizzie snatched up the offending articles and stuffed them into an empty pillowcase. All right, fine, she wasn’t quite as neat as Aggie, but she had been sick for the better part of three days. Still, it wouldn’t help matters to say that out loud. “Anything else bothering you?” She made her voice treacly sweet.
“Actually, yes.” Aggie unpinned her hair. “While you were sick, you kept leaving your books out where I’d trip over them in the evening. I didn’t say anything then, but since you’re better now, do you think you’d mind putting them under your bed?”
“Not at all.” Lizzie collected the textbooks, thinking that it wouldn’t hurt Aggie to open a book every once in a while. “Please. Don’t stop there. Let it all out.”
“As a matter of fact, there is one more little detail.” Aggie stood up and picked up a pair of Lizzie’s drawers, which were hanging on the back of her bed next to her chemise. “Is there a reason why your knickers are always on parade?”
Lizzie snatched her drawers back and threw them on her bed. “Because I wash them. I don’t know how many pairs of drawers you own, but I don’t have enough to last me to laundry day.” She had noticed that Aggie never hung out her underthings, but had assumed that English girls had different standards of hygiene.
“This is so typical. You really don’t have a clue what’s going on in front of your eyes, do you? We all wash our knickers, dearie. There’s a clothesline in the nurse’s bathroom.”
“There is?” How was it possible she hadn’t noticed it? This was just like being nine years old again, the odd, motherless girl, the only one whose hair wasn’t braided or even brushed, the only one who didn’t know better than to chew with her mouth open. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
Aggie bent over to unlace her right shoe. “No one told me, either. I just paid attention to what other people were doing. In good weather you can pull the clothesline out into the little courtyard behind. That way, we don’t stink up our rooms with the smell of mildew.” She pulled the shoe off and wriggled her black-stockinged toes. “And we don’t need to spray scent all over to disguise it.”
Oh, Lord. Lizzie had noticed the faint odor of mildew in the room, but hadn’t known what to do about it. The air here was always so damp. Then it occurred to Lizzie that she was in that bathroom every day and she had never seen a clothesline, or a bunch of nurse’s underthings hanging out to dry. “Wait a moment. If there’s a clothesline, why haven’t I ever seen it?”
“It’s around the back, behind the loo and the tub. Which you would know if you didn’t act as though you was Lady Muck trapped amongst the peasants.” Aggie arranged her shoes under her bed.
So that’s what they call me when I’m not around. “I don’t think of myself as Lady Muck. I’m American, remember? We got rid of all the lords and ladies.”
“In that case, do you think you could make your bed in the mornings?” She gestured at Lizzie’s bed, which, as far as Lizzie could see, was made up: Blankets pulled up, at least.
“What are you talking about?” She’d pulled at the covers over the bed. “It’s made.”
“Are you serious? Look at the corners. And the sheet fold is completely lopsided. I can only imagine what Shiercliffe would say if one of us made up a patient’s bed like this.”
Lizzie stared at her roommate. The drawers, all right, that had been embarrassing. But this, this was petty. “Some of us,” she said slowly, “have better things to do than perfect our hospital corners.”
Aggie’s mouth compressed into a hard line. “I’m not talking nursing-school standards, ducks. My eight-year-old sister could do better. No, I take that back—my six-year-old brother could do better.”
Hands on her hips, Lizzie smiled at her roommate. “Then I am sure he will make an excellent nurse.”
Aggie looked ferocious. “D’you think that’s all that’s required? Bed making?”
“You do seem to spend an awful lot of time on it. But of course, I know there’s more to nursing.”
“You ’ave no bloomin’ idea, luv—” Lizzie had noticed that her roommate’s accent thickened whenever the other girl was tired or upset. Right now, however, Lizzie didn’t give a fig what Aggie was feeling.
“Emptying bedpans, giving sponge baths and making sure you don’t mix up the food trays.”
There was a moment of taut silence, and Lizzie braced, half expecting Aggie to slap her or pull her hair. It had been years since her last schoolyard fight, but her body remembered. But Aggie just shook her head.
“I thought, you being a woman and all, that you might be a bit less thick than the other medical students. Truth is, you’re worse.”
“That’s not true! I’m at least as good as any of the men.”
“Which means you’re not as good as any of the nurses. I’ve watched you doing rounds. Do you ever take the time to learn the patient’s name? Do you stop a moment to hold someone’s hand? When you ask them how they’re feeling, do you listen to the answer?”
“I...” No, she realized. I don’t do any of that.
“No, of course not, because that won’t get you a good grade or impress your professors. And your professors are all men, and they think all that personal touch is just a load of malarkey. But stop and think a moment. Someone asks you, ‘Where’s the pain?’ Maybe you’re embarrassed to say where it is, so you say your belly instead of your breasts, and the doctor operates on the wrong bits. Or maybe you know where the pain is, it’s in your leg, but the doctor never stops to hear the whole story about how a horse rolled over on you and broke your leg in two places. Because what does it matter how your leg got broke? Only the leg hurts so bad you don’t savvy you’ve got a w
orse pain in your belly, where the horse rolled over on you and ruptured something vital, and that’s what’s going to kill you.”
Lizzie stared at her roommate.
“Or maybe the doctor’s so busy with his books and his charts that he orders the meds and doesn’t bother to check the patient after, and now it’s the nurse who sees the patient’s turning blue, so she double-checks the order and realizes that someone put a period in the wrong place and so the poor thing’s been given ten times the right dose.”
“What happened to the patient?”
Aggie laughed. “Which time, darlin’?”
“It happens a lot?”
She shrugged. “Doctors are only human, and humans make mistakes. Sometimes it’s trial and error, anyhow, but it’s the nurses who are in the best position to observe the small changes, so we’ve got the best chance of catching something before it’s too late.” Aggie went over to her drawer and took out her little flask. “I came ’ere because doctors was always complaining about midwives not having proper training. And fair enough, I’ve learned a few things. But there are things I know that the doctors don’t. Not that they’d ever admit it.” She looked Lizzie over. “Ah, what’s the point of even talking to you?” She raised the flask to her lips.
Lizzie sat down on the edge of her bed, her legs shaking. She wasn’t used to arguing. She and her father had never argued. “I didn’t know you worked as a midwife.” Then she remembered that she had known, because Aggie had told her when they had first met.
Aggie didn’t correct her. “Me mum was the midwife. I just assisted.” She took another swig of the flask, then looked at Lizzie. “Want a nightcap?” Her voice had a mocking lilt. Without waiting for a reply, she replaced the cap. “Oh, no, of course not. A medical student is above such things.”