“What do you think it is?”
Harry frowned, his ginger whiskers catching the bleak sunlight. “Strange presentation. Strong man, only twenty-four, delirious and fevered. No rashes.”
“What’s he doing?” Daniel nearly trod into a foul brown puddle on the pavement. But then, everything looked foul and brown. Even the autumn leaves were painted with paltry dark hues and muddled colors. At least the rain had ceased momentarily.
“Hallucinating and frantic. We can’t get him to lie still for anything.”
Daniel frowned, puffing through his mouth as they passed a courtyard with leaning privies. Ten feet above him, a silent child in a rag of a gown peered at him from a window, face pressed mournfully against the dirty, barred glass. Daniel studied the little prisoner until Harry’s words called him back.
“He’s entirely out of his mind. It started a couple hoursago. I came home to get you because I was too tired to think through it alone.” Daniel abandoned his other thoughts—fuzzy images of Nora sleeping with her back to him and Adams grinning at him in the hallways of Bart’s as if they shared a secret.
Harry never admitted defeat or asked for help unless… No, Daniel couldn’t remember an instance. “After we see him, you should get a cab home and have supper with Julia. I can finish your calls.”
Harry didn’t respond for a long beat, his eyes shuffling through the huddles of people sharing the pavement. “Julia left yesterday to visit her parents.”
The words came out stiff, starched and ironed with some emotion Daniel couldn’t place. Perhaps Harry was wading through marriage troubles himself and could commiserate. “Did you two have a row?”
“Nothing like that.” Harry transferred his bulging doctor’s bag to his other hand and dodged a sour-faced woman to step up to a black door coated in greasy finger streaks. He knocked once and entered, for the door, like most in this collection of rookeries, was left unlocked. The daylight, however thin and stifling as it had been on the narrow street, died as if enclosed in a coffin the moment they stepped inside. Tenement air. Dull, soupy, teeming with the accumulated smells of sweat, cooking, rubbish.
Harry navigated the shadowy hall into a back room, where a young woman huddled with a whining child on her lap, shadows in a cell of disorder and darkness. Daniel’s first instinct was to treat the pair and tend to whatever had made their faces so haggard and hopeless, but the true patient swayed behind them,a thin, unshaven man kneeling on the bed, jabbing a wooden spoon erratically in the air.
“What’s he on about now?” Harry asked.
The woman answered in a voice flatter than paper. “He’s crimping pipes. Thinks he’s at the factory. Apparently, I’m another worker, one he doesn’t get on with. He’s threatened to crack my head several times.”
Harry sighed. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Healey. I’ve brought my friend to help, as promised. This is Dr. Gibson. Your husband still hasn’t slept?”
She shook her head. “Between him and her…” She looked at the child, features twisting in anguish.
“Sam,” Harry called as he approached the bed. The man didn’t respond to his name. “Sam, it’s Dr. Trimble. You shouldn’t be up.”
Sam flourished the spoon, and his lip twitched up like an angry cur’s. “I didn’t take a break. You’ll not be docking my pay, Robbins!”
“Thinks you’re the foreman, Mr. Robbins.” Mrs. Healey winced as Sam swung his arm at Harry, but Harry caught the spoon easily, arresting it in a muscled fist.
“Don’t you take me in!” Sam screamed, and lunged forward, coming at Harry with yellow teeth.
“Daniel!” Harry called. “A little help!” But he was already in motion, grappling the crazed man’s shoulders. Together, using every hand and elbow they had between them, they wrestled Sam Healey to the filthy mattress. Daniel’s elbow pressed into something damp, the smell of excrement stifling.
Mrs. Healey set the crying child on the floor and tried to come to their aid.
Harry waved her off. “We’ve got him. We won’t hurt him.”
“What started this?” Daniel asked over the commotion, bracing his feet against the floor as Sam tried to wriggle free.
Her words shook. “Lost his job and didn’t eat or go to the pub for two days, trying to save it for me. He only took water and nothing else.” Her face crumbled, falling into the disorder of terror and regret.
“Delirium tremens,” Harry huffed as he pressed his knee into Sam’s back.
“Are you sure?” Daniel asked.
Harry rolled his eyes. “You’ve not spent much time in Glasgow, I take it.” He grunted out the sarcastic words as Sam writhed beneath his grip. “Two days of no liquor. And now an attack of shaking, puking, and hallucinations. It’s delirium tremens. Got to be. He needs a weak draft.”
“Not just vomiting,” the wife interrupted timidly. “He’s been running from the other end since last night.”
Daniel’s grip loosened slightly. “Diarrhea?”
Healey flailed. “Don’t let him move,” Harry snapped.
