“I like to give myself every advantage.” Douglas pulled the curtains closed. “Please allow Miss Grant to help you change. Knock on the door when you are ready, and I’ll come back.”
He went into the waiting room, surprised to see Mrs. Campbell and the minister’s wife sitting there, too, as well as two ladies he did not recognize. The press of well-wishers reminded him of an outdoor surgery in the South Pacific, surrounded by tribesmen all too close to their cannibal roots, watching every nervous move he made. He had been called up to amputate an infected leg of a sailor who had deserted the Royal Navy years earlier. He thought of the chorus of “Ah’s” from that unholy bunch as he pulled the diseased leg away and set it in a bucket. He had turned back to his patient to finish the job, peering around a few minutes later to find the leg gone, and the cannibals looking more than usually satisfied, if such he could divine from their expressions. The memory of that amputation made him smile.
But this was Edgar, and his patient was not a heathen but a lady. His tongue felt paralyzed. He was wholly inadequate to conduct idle chatter, which, he realized, with a sinking feeling, must constitute some necessary portion of a private medical practice. He sat there, ill at ease, aware that no one in his waiting room would appreciate his little South Seas story. Probably no lending library, even Edgar’s, owned a book that would explain idle chatter.
Olive’s knock on the door put him out of his misery. He bounded up, which made Mrs. Campbell chuckle, and began the business at hand, confident of his skills.
Wearing serviceable flannel and a solemn expression,Mrs. Aintree stood in her stockinged feet, her face rosy. “No man except Mr. Aintree has ever seen me in a nightgown,” she informed him primly.
“You’re fetching, my dear,” he said. “I know you wonder why this is necessary, but I assure you that you’ll be easy for me to carry across the street and pop you into your own bed, without having to suffer raising your arms to remove your garments then. Allow me, Mrs. Aintree.”
He took her hand, and with Olive assisting, helped his patient onto the surgery table, which he had earlier padded with Mrs. Aintree’s own blankets. He raised the clever hinged board that the author of Tommy Tavish’s crutches had crafted only last night. He situated Mrs. Aintree, stretched out her arm on the board, and then bound her to it with bandages.
He heard a muffled sob and looked back, startled, to see Olive in tears.
Mrs. Aintree looked too. “Olive Grant, you are made of sterner stuff!” his patient said. “Buck up.”
Pray don’t faint, Olive, he thought. “You were a stalwart when I operated on Tommy Tavish,” he reminded her.
She nodded and chewed her lip. “I am no stalwart,” she said. “Af … after you finished with Tommy I went into the alley behind my tearoom and … oh dear.”
Mrs. Aintree raised up on her elbow. “Douglas Bowden,” she commanded, “give our Miss Grant a little cuddle!”
The advice was excellent and Douglas gathered Olive close. His good humor reasserted itself. “You’re a thousand times more fun to cuddle than a pharmacist’s mate,” he declared, which made her chuckle. She murmured, “I should hope so. Surely you never …”
“Certainly not, Miss Grant!” he said, which made him laugh out loud. He rested his hand on her neck, because she had a fine neck. “Just be a stalwart for ten minutes, and I’ll hold back your hair over the basin myself.”
“Such an offer,” she said, with some vestige of her sharp humor. “You don’t give a person a chance to back out or disagree, do you?”
“No.” He led her to the surgery table. “I never could afford to, then or now. Mrs. Aintree, meet Olive Grant, my excellent assistant. And here you thought she only ran a tearoom. She is going to hold your good hand and we will be done in less than ten minutes. Ten minutes. Keep that in mind.”
Mrs. Aintree nodded. She closed her eyes, which Douglas took as his signal to proceed. He poured a dab of laudanum on a bit of cotton and squeezed a few drops into Mrs. Aintree’s mouth. “It’ll take the edge away, but not much more.”
He watched a moment until her shoulders relaxed, knowing they would tense again when he made the first cut. He moved Olive across the table from him and put her hands on the widow’s stomach. “Just keep her steady.”
Olive turned terrified eyes on him, which meant he had to touch her face and look into those eyes.
“There, now.”
He opened the curtains, turned on the lamps, and began slicing between Mrs. Aintree’s ring finger and little finger, fused because there had been no surgeon anywhere near Edgar to offer sensible advice a year ago. Mrs. Aintree shuddered but Olive held her still. He cut and dabbed, secure in the knowledge that this little bistoury, a favorite of his, had been honed as sharp as he could make it.
“Syncope would be nice about now, Mrs. Aintree,” he murmured, when she moaned.
“What is syncope?” Olive asked through chattering teeth.
Suddenly Mrs. Aintree relaxed. Her shoulders drooped and her head drifted to one side as she fainted. “That,” he said.
He knew he had just a little pain-free time, so he worked faster, separating the two fingers and dabbingaway, pleased with what he saw. He threw in several looping sutures, careful not to bind anything too tight, because there just wasn’t enough skin.
“My hope is that the area will granulate and eventually allow for skin growth,” he explained to Olive as he worked, talking her through what he was doing, simply to distract her from the blood. He had done this before with other pharmacist’s mates, but he had been teaching them. He just wanted Olive to bear up.
He dipped gauze in a sweet-smelling solution he had concocted during a rare bit of calm near Australia one year, and bound Mrs. Aintree’s fingers.
“That smell!” Olive gasped.
He glanced at Olive, her distress made manifest as she sniffed the fragrance he had always enjoyed. She swallowed several times, so he grabbed a basin. She snatched it, turned away, and heaved.
“I like that fragrance.”
