“I don’t know. I’ve tried three of the neighbors, and the houses were shuttered. No one is staying in London this winter…” Sarah’s voice rose with each word, climbing octaves toward the high notes of hysteria.
Nora swallowed. “All right. Don’t fret. I’ll write the note and tell Daniel exactly what’s happened. You only need to find a messenger.”
In harried strokes, she summarized Aunt’s condition—advanced—and listed necessary supplies, closing with,Come quickly. He would know what that meant.
“The hospital at 43 Great Queen Street,” she said, pointing to the address she’d printed in thick black letters. “If you can’t find a message boy, ask a carriage driver or a passing stranger.” Anyone with legs would do. “Offer a pound and tell them to hurry. Offer ten if you must.”
“What about Agnes?” Sarah glanced at the closed door behind her. “She needs someone to tend to her, too.”
“I’ll check her before you leave,” Nora said, glad Sarah had seen fit to put her in the nearest bedroom. There was no time to be shuttling to the servant rooms in the attics and back. Nora slipped inside the silent room to find a woman even older and thinner than Aunt. “Miss Pritchard?” Nora said softly.
The woman rolled her eyes toward Nora, squinting as she focused. Then the lids widened in surprise. “Daniel’s wife?” she whispered, her throat too parched for normal speech.
Nora inhaled. “Yes.” Somewhere in the list of duties for a lady’s maid, between setting out clothes and drawing baths, was the unspoken dictate to carry the same grudges as your lady. Nora saw Agnes’s compliance plainly in her distrusting eyes. “I’m here to help you both.”
“Is my lady—”
“She’s resting at the moment,” Nora reassured her as she took up her wrist to feel her pulse. The skin was paper dry, but the palpitation under Nora’s fingertips beat steady and persistent. She could wait a few minutes while Nora attended Aunt. “If you start feeling worse, call for me,” she instructed. “I’ll take care of Aunt Wilcox for you.” From the nervous fumbling of Agnes’s hands to her wrinkled brow, Nora knew that promise would do more to calm her than anything else. “You did an excellent job nursing her while you could. I’ll take over now.”
The woman nodded, anxiety sloughing visibly from her face. As Nora stepped out of the room, she left the door open to hear the woman easily. “You can go now,” Nora told Sarah, attempting to hide her reluctance. Sending away her only set of helpful hands seemed her worst idea yet, but what could she do without any of her tools or medicines? She needed Daniel. “Be sure to dress warm.”
Then she returned to her examination of Aunt Wilcox—no easy task without any of her tools, but Horace had taught her to roll heavy paper into a tube when she had no stethoscope, and her fingers would do, for now, in place of a thermometer.
Aunt Wilcox’s pulse throbbed thready and slow, her skin far too cold. In her haste to send for help, Nora hadn’t paid anymind to the fire, and it had sunk to embers. She needed hot bricks, but they took time to warm. Nora shoveled coal from the half-filled scuttle onto the grate and blew until flames licked to life again, then stacked the forgotten bricks around them.
She tried again with the soaked handkerchief, but Aunt Wilcox refused to suck this time. Nora squeezed the drops into her mouth, wetting the parched tongue, but it wasn’t enough to thin her sluggish blood.
As Nora lifted one eyelid, Aunt’s stare was vague and unfocused, her pupil nearly obscuring her blue iris. Far too big. Far too much like the eyes at death, the pupils expanding into black portals as if to let the soul out.
“Aunt.” Nora shook her by the shoulders, trying to elicit some response. Not that it would help. None of the patients in her wards who’d sunk this low had ever recovered.
She pictured Daniel’s stricken face. If he and his aunt never reconciled…
Nora pressed her ear to Aunt’s chest and felt the low vibrations of a weary heart, toiling to move meager amounts of thickened blood.
If she did nothing, this was the end.
She exhaled and dropped her head, ransacking her mind, demanding it give up a solution.
Julia.
The article just hours ago.
Her head snapped up. Mr. Torrance had described patients very close to this. She was still awaiting his reply, hoping for more details and to test the transfusion therapy on some animal first…
Aunt released a weak, broken breath.
Nora scanned the room, willing a syringe to miraculously appear, when her eyes fell on Aunt Wilcox’s writing desk and the cut-glass bottle holding half a dozen long quill pens. No doubt there was a penknife, too, somewhere.
Perhaps she could steal a little more time—at least give Daniel a chance to say goodbye if he hurried.
Nora rushed to the basement to find the kitchen and the cook. Unfortunately, the kitchen was dark, a scribbled note on the counter from the woman who’d run away and left several pots of broth to make up for her defection.
“Dammit,” Nora hissed as she removed the lids to find one pot of hot water.
It didn’t matter that she’d never attempted this before. Sarah should be back in time to help her, and there was nothing else to try except giving up, and that was no option at all. Daniel and the others might not want to risk attempting transfusion, but Aunt Wilcox had nothing more to lose.
Nora threw back the curtains so she could see well enough to rifle through the cupboards, trying to remember details. Instead of transfusing his patients with milk or blood from a servant, Torrance had injected something he called “Dr. Latta’s solution” into his patients’ veins. While Nora recalled the ingredients, she couldn’t recall the exact amounts. And Dr. Thomas Latta himself—well, she’d found no trace of him in journal indexes or medical registers. The only thing she knew for certain about Latta’s solution was that she’d find the three simple ingredients here.
