As he and Horace shivered through a fast scrub and change, a timid knock sounded on the door. “Yes?” Daniel asked, speeding up his numb fingers as he buttoned his shirt.
“It’s Nora. I need to show you both something.”
Horace met Daniel’s gaze, his eyebrows lowered. “That doesn’t sound promising.”
“Just a moment,” Daniel called through the thick door. Horace hadn’t even gotten his arms into his sleeves. But Horace was right—something tense and hesitant hung in her voice.
When they opened the door, she stood across the hall, hands knotted.
“Is something wrong?” Daniel prodded.
Instead of answering, she motioned them to the hospital ward. “Ruth brought in a patient today. She and Julia and Mrs. Phipps are tending to her. You need to see for yourselves.”
Daniel’s muscles tensed, coiled for whatever sight might meet him behind the screens Nora had positioned. Something dire enough that it required the attention of four women.
“This is Amelia.” Nora nudged away the screen to reveal an undersize child that hardly made a bump in the thick blankets covering her. The girl slept on despite the visitors, her large eyelids bulging slightly from her skeletal face.
“Cholera,” Horace said flatly.
Daniel glanced quickly between the silent observers and the girl.
“Yes,” Nora confirmed, nervously chewing her lip.
“I knew you didn’t want the cholera here,” Ruth admitted. “Her home was little better than the streets. I couldn’t leave her there.”
“Of course not,” Julia said, giving Daniel a warning glare. “We’ve agreed to care for her, and Nora will keep her distance.”
Horace gave a grim chuckle. “It seems every epidemic brings some dying girl in with the tide.”
“Don’t be absurd. She’s going home after we treat her. She has a family.” Mrs. Phipps squared her shoulders, ready for a battle.
“So you all expect her to stay?” Horace scanned the women who sported various expressions of guilt and fierceness.
“There’s no choice, is there?” Ruth spread her hands.
“There certainly is,” Daniel finally injected. “I could take her to the cholera ward at Bart’s.”
Four voices rose in tangled arguments, impossible to unwind into separate words.
Daniel raised his hand to stop them. “Didn’t we all agree—”
“We agreed not to start a cholera ward,” Nora pointed out, her voice so low everyone halted to hear her. “And we won’t. But I think we should treat Amelia. If it’s going to kill her, it will be quickly. And if she survives, we’ll return her home as soon as she’s strong enough.”
“The outlook is grim,” Horace interjected. “There’s very little chance—”
“What about the article I came across—from that surgeon, Mr. Torrance, transfusing the vein with solution?” Nora was stretching wildly and they all knew it.
“Haven’t read it. Not sure I need to.” Horace lowered hiseyebrows in disdain. “I think you know well enough how it goes when we start throwing random substances into the bloodstream. We can’t let desperation make us fools.”
Daniel looked at the girl’s waxy face, her thin hair sprawled across the pillow like straw on a field of snow. He’d already lost the girl who reminded him of Julia. This one reminded him of Nora.
“I’ll not treat her, I promise,” Nora added.
Horace’s lips played with several expressions, one of them clearly surrender. “I fear we’re outnumbered.”
If Horace wouldn’t help him put up a fight, he’d look like a monster, ordering a dying child away. Nor did he have the stomach for it. “I am now.” Daniel sighed. “But we’ll only take this one.”
Chapter 30
