Nora glanced up from the burnt arm she was bandaging, coating the injury with cold, soft flour that eased the pain as the young boy gritted his teeth. He’d been injured by a blast of steam from a burst factory pipe, and his father was watching her narrowly, still disappointed there was no male doctor available to help his son.
“Yes?” Nora asked cautiously, praying that this interruption was no domestic emergency involving cooks or laundry. If the boy’s irate father was presented with one more reminder that she was a woman…
“Mrs. Franklin is here with a child.” Julia’s eyes darted to the doorway, a clear message to hurry. Ruth had never brought a patient in. One of her newborns? Fragile and on the cusp of life? Nora brushed the flour from her hands.
“Mrs. Trimble can finish bandaging your son.” Nora sped through instructions, giving the last ones from the hallway, hurrying to the clinic entrance, racing through possible scenarios. Aspirated meconium? Cord strangulation?
Wheelbarrow.
Nora stopped short at the wooden gardener’s cart in themiddle of the reception room. Ruth twisted her hands, eyes red as she pulled back a ragged blanket revealing a filthy young girl curled into a ball of misery.
“What?” This was no newborn, but a school-age child, limp with blue skin.
Ruth’s voice trembled as she spoke. “I delivered a stillborn child today. Found this girl—a sister—on the floor in this state. Cholera.”
“You brought her in a wheelbarrow?” Nora bent down, taking a frail wrist in her hands. Even her practiced fingers struggled to find a pulse.
“No cab would take her in her state. I had to plead for this rickety thing.”
“How far did you come?”
Just as Ruth tried to answer, the incensed father thundered down the hallway, carrying his crying son.
“Mr. Brown, stop,” Nora pleaded.
“I’ll take him to Bart’s. No one told me this place was run by women.” He nearly collided with Mrs. Phipps on his way out the door.
“Who was that?” she demanded, scowling after him before her eyes riveted to the wheelbarrow. “And what’s this?”
Julia emerged from the hallway, shaking. “I’m sorry,” she said through trembling lips. “I was bandaging him just as you said. The father asked where the male doctors were, and I said they were doing rounds at St. Bart’s. He just yanked up the boy and left without a word.”
“Never mind that now.” Nora turned her eyes back to thesoftly panting girl. If she examined her quickly and sent her home, she’d not be breaking the agreement to keep cholera out of the hospital. “Julia, I need clean linens and something for this girl to wear.”
Mrs. Phipps tossed her bonnet onto the desk. “I keep a small collection of clothes—for emergencies. I’ll find her a shift.”
For half a second, Nora wondered if Mrs. Phipps had always done so—even when Horace had appeared carrying a feeble eight-year-old almost twenty years ago.
Ruth twisted her skirt in a tight fist. “I probably shouldn’t have brought her, but—”
“I wouldn’t have left her, either. But I’m not sure it will help.” Nora lifted the child carefully, trying to keep the filthiest parts away from her blouse. The girl didn’t weigh nearly what she expected. “Heavens, does she have hollow bones?” The motion expelled a small flood of clear water from the girl’s mouth. Nora shifted so most of it splashed to the floor. It was the symptom of cholera she most dreaded—when the fluids no longer required a heave to make their way out, but simply flowed like a high river breaching an embankment.
Ruth did a mincing step to avoid the sudden puddle. “Her name is Amelia Dawson. Her parents begged me to—”
“I can’t keep her in hospital. If people hear there’s cholera here, they won’t come.” Back in the examination room, Nora swept aside the spills of soft flour and the unused bandages from treating the burnt boy and settled Amelia onto the table. The small body—she could hardly admit there was a girl still inside—sprawled out without resistance or recognition.
A web of blue veins discolored her wraithlike arm, and a warning tinge of lavender suffused her lips. “She’s ice cold,” Nora said.
There were warming stoves in the patient ward that kept the room toasty against the coldest days. And clean linens. And screens to shield infectious patients.
“Go to the kitchen and get a hot kettle. Cook always keeps at least one ready,” Nora said.
Mrs. Phipps returned with full arms. “I brought a blanket from the oven, but we need to bathe her.”
“Ruth’s getting water. I have sponges in here.” Nora took the warm blanket and put it over the girl, willing it to seep some heat back into the frozen limbs. She looked up at Mrs. Phipps’s worried face, somehow older than it had been at the breakfast table. “I can’t keep her here. We all agreed—”
Mrs. Phipps pursed her lips. “Does she have a decent home to go back to once you treat her?”
“Her mother just delivered a stillborn and is failing herself. The father can’t take care of both of them,” Ruth answered grimly as she set down the kettle.
