The wife nodded. “I can’t keep him clean, but he’s passing…well, it’s scarcely more than water now.”
Daniel traded glances with Harry, but Harry spoke first.
“His color. Look.”
There was no window, and the paltry lamplight made it difficult to distinguish colors, but Harry was right. Sam’s skin bore a strange gray tint.
“When’s the last time he ate or drank?” Daniel asked.
“I gave him stew an hour ago, but it all came up and out again.” As she spoke, the struggling man whimpered and wentlimp at last. Harry released him, smoothing down his crumpled jacket. “Keep still, now. We don’t want any trouble.” Though his voice was calm, Daniel recognized fear in the man’s eyes as he bent close, searching inside his open bag.
“Think it’s a double diagnosis?” Harry whispered.
Delirium tremens and cholera at the same time? Daniel exhaled in a sharp burst, desperate to believe this was all caused by hunger and a lack of alcohol. But he couldn’t tell, and they needed to know for certain. “Show me his chamber pot.”
As Harry made to move toward the wife, Sam Healey turned his head, face twisting into submission in a grotesque smile. “Are you taking bets? Half a crown on Voltaire.” He reached up and pushed the wooden spoon against Harry’s coat.
“Dear Lord, he’s at the races now,” Mrs. Healey moaned. “He’s not usually like this,” she promised. “He drinks away his wages, but he’s never deranged.”
Daniel studied the man, imagining his face calm instead of wearing this mask of mania.
“We can’t allow him to get agitated again,” Harry muttered. “After two nights of no sleep, his heart might give out.”
“If he won’t sleep on his own, we’ll have to make him.” Daniel looked at Harry’s bag. “You carry chloroform, don’t you?”
Harry nodded. “Just a bottle. I don’t drag the whole vaporizer about. Even if I did, we’d have a hell of a time getting the mask on him.”
Lying on the bed, Sam began cheering on his hallucinatory horse race.
“Get on, Voltaire. Two more lengths. Come on, boy! Whip’em!” His hand swung madly, urging on the phantom rider, but then he curled in with a cry, clutching his stomach.
Cholera cramps were said to be excruciating.
Daniel swept his fingers through the depths of Harry’s medical bag, identifying bottles by feel: paregoric, with its flared, broad outline; quinine, with its flat metal stopper; and then—yes—he located the chloroform, with its sloping shoulders and tapered neck. He pulled it out and handed it to Harry.
“No!” Sam grunted in dismay, holding his stomach and groaning as if he’d ruptured his appendix. “He lost. I’m out ’alf a crown. We’ll starve, all of us!” On the floor beside him, not to be outdone, the child competed with a passionate scream, and the ceiling above thundered with someone stomping for quiet.
“Poor fool,” Harry muttered. “He can’t even win in his delusions.”
“I’m mixing the chloroform with port wine. That will get alcohol and the anesthesia into him at the same time.” Daniel had to lean close to Harry’s ears to be heard.
But before he’d completed the mixture, Healey stopped wailing, turning rigid, his face frozen.
“What the hell?” Harry darted forward, searching for breath and a pulse, jostling Daniel’s arm and spilling a trail of wine. “He’s starting to seize.”
Daniel thrust the spoon of medicine at him. “Give it now.”
Harry tipped the spoon into Sam’s mouth, then recoiled as Sam gasped and gagged, spewing the mixture into the rank air.
“Too late,” Daniel muttered. “Help me roll him.”
The coughing increased in violence as they pointed Sam’ssputtering head to the floor. Harry pounded his back. The child hunched her head in fright and cried fit to undo a saint. As soon as Healey’s trachea was free of the offending liquid, tight gasps burst from Sam’s lips and transformed to guttural whispers. “I’m a dead man.”
“Should we restrain him?” Daniel asked, pulling straps from his bag.
“Dead man,” Sam groaned, keeping up his tearful tirade.
“Take your little one into the hall,” Harry commanded Mrs. Healey, waiting while she hauled her resisting daughter through the doorway.
