A Flaw in the Blood (5 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

A
SSAULTED? IN YOUR CHAMBERS
?”

He had run Georgiana to earth at last, after a fruitless interval at her home in Russell Square, spent pacing before the drawing room fire and fingering the calling cards he found there. None of the servants could tell him where she had gone; in rising anxiety, he resorted to the cab stand.

The fifth man in the queue admitted he'd driven Miss Armistead to Covent Garden that morning. Twenty minutes later, he deposited Fitzgerald before a tenement dwelling in the rookery known as St. Giles.

It being winter and early in the day, the females of the district were within doors; but Fitzgerald had known them to stand in front of their dwellings, naked to the waist, with a bottle of gin in their hands. Most of them were Irish. What could Georgie possibly find to occupy her in this wretched place?

He entered a narrow hall stinking of urine and cooked pork. There was no light, and he cursed as a cat twined itself sinuously between his legs. A blasted staircase led upwards, past a group of children disposed on the treads, playing at skittles with bleached bones. They told him where to find the lady.

A cramped set of rooms, notable for a smoking coal fire and four young faces that turned to him expectantly as he hesitated in the doorway. A boy he judged to be no more than ten was toasting a hunk of bread on a poker thrust near the coals; the others huddled at his knees. The straw pallets on which they had slept lay tousled by the fire.

“Is Sep conscious?” Georgie asked now as she closed the door behind him. “Patrick? Have you summoned a doctor?”

“He was insensible when I left—a severe concussion of the brain, so the sawbones says. I asked that I be sent word, when he wakes. But I've not been home since—”

She took his hand, squeezed it briefly. “You believe the attack not unconnected to our adventure of last night?”

“How could it be else?” he burst out, pacing across the dirty floor. “—Though as God is my witness, Georgie, I've no idea why. It must be papers they wanted—and Sep got in their way. Our chambers were turned topsy-turvy. I'd no time to learn which documents were taken—though I'd wager a guess—”

“You need a drink,” Georgie interrupted quietly. “You're all to pieces.”

He broke off, his eyes following the progress of a filthy child, possibly a girl, who stole up to Georgie's skirts and hid her face in the French twilled silk. Georgie swayed slightly, and touched the child's head; he noticed then how dreadful her pallor was, how the exhaustion of last night, and her own accident, had never left her. She still wore a bandage about her head, disguising the ugly bruise at her temple.

“Did you sleep at all?” he demanded.

“Perhaps an hour.”

“You shouldn't be here. You should be tucked up on a sopha with a novel and a pot of tea.”

“I have a patient within.”

“A patient!”

“The poor have as much need of doctors as the rich, Patrick,” she flashed.

“I'm the last man to argue that, Georgie—but need the doctor be
you
?”

“I'm fortunate to win the custom! The rich prefer their doctors male—these women have no choice but to accept my services. In return they give me experience—and so we each barter what we can.”

He glanced around the slovenly room. “Snow would hate to see you here, lass.”

“It was Uncle John who introduced me to the neighbourhood,” she retorted. “Do you think his cholera researches were conducted in Mayfair? He was often in far worse places than this—Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Although these women die of syphilis far more than cholera, of course.”

Syphilis.
Her casual use of the word rocked him. To another man—a true English gentleman, reared with all the prejudices and ignorance of his willful class—Georgiana's worldliness must ruin her. Fitzgerald suspected she betrayed it less to the circles she usually frequented; but to him she always spoke her mind. They argued constantly and Fitzgerald invariably lost.

“Why have you come, Patrick?”

“I want you to leave London. Immediately.”

“Whatever for?”

“You're in danger.”

“Nonsense!”

“Georgie, my chambers have been ransacked, my partner nearly killed, and my carriage overturned—for what do you wait, a pistol to the head?”

“I have
nothing
to do with your affairs!” she cried. “Even if we accept that these events are linked—and that they are animated by some power at Windsor—no one there could possibly know that I rode in your carriage last night!”

“Your friend von Stühlen does.”

“Von Stühlen is
not
my friend, Patrick,” she said sharply.

“I found his card on the mantel at Russell Square. Did he call this morning to inquire after your health?” He grasped her wrist, his persistent jealousy flaring. “
Tell me
how you come to be acquainted with that man—and why he hated to see you at Torning's inn.”

She stared at him as though he'd run mad. “I don't have time for this! There is a girl on the brink of
death
in that room, and it is my duty—my
calling,
Patrick—to do what I can to save her.” She shook off his hold.

“What's wrong with her, then?”

“Ignorance and desperation.” Georgie threw the words over her shoulder, already leaving him. “Lizzie is but fourteen—on the Game, like her mother—found herself in the family way, and consulted an abortionist. Whatever the butcher did has infected her blood. Her mother, half wild with fear, sent round a note to Russell Square at midnight. I blame myself that I did not find it until this morning.”

At midnight, Georgie was rolling toward Hampstead Heath in the hands of the Queen's coachman. Fitzgerald's fault, again.

“What will you do?”

“I shall have to remove the uterus.”

“Surgery! In this place?”

She stopped short in the doorway. “I can hardly transport her to the College. As you're here, you might boil water on that hob and scrub the table. We shall have to operate by the fire—and send the little ones out into the hall while we do it.”

He wanted to tell her that no common prostitute, however young and desperate, was worth the sacrifice of her safety. He wanted to tell her that the girl would die, no matter what she did.

“Georgie—”

“Not another word, until I am at leisure to hear you. Mr. Fitzgerald requires some water, Davey,” she ordered the boy. “Be so good as to fetch it for him.”

CHAPTER NINE

W
HATEVER BRUTAL WORDS HE MIGHT
have thrown at Georgie were stopped in his mouth when he saw the girl.

She was not a pretty thing, being too thin and already gapping in her teeth. Her faded blond hair was a mass of tangles, her face grey and drenched with sweat. But there was in her slight frame and fragile wrists, in the delicacy of her fingers as they plucked at the rags that covered her, all the possibility of a different life—one of expression and feeling, a world glimpsed but never grasped. The sight of her shamed Fitzgerald. As he bent to lift her in his arms, to carry her to that scrubbed old table where Georgie would slice into her flesh, he thought of all the other men, breaking the twig of her body in half. How many? For how many years?

Her mother, who was called Button Nance, swore beneath her breath in a continuous stream of vituperation half-realised, half-heard, a diatribe against the world and God and doctors of every description, against men in general and men who paid and men who didn't, men who demanded little girls instead of women like herself who could stand the nonsense; against little girls, too, and Lizzie in particular—more fool her for not bearing the brat and then pitching it in the Thames—and finally, against Fitzgerald for causing her daughter to cry out in pain as he lifted her. Nancy drank deep from a pitcher of gin, and though it was only noon by the time they laid Lizzie before the fire, her mother was dead drunk.

He had never seen Georgiana administer the chloroform that John Snow made famous.

It was a ticklish business, and in the hands of Snow's imitators, occasionally a fatal one. Impossible to predict how a weakened frame might react to the drug-induced night—whether the constitution, already brought low by illness or accident, might not be extinguished altogether. There were stories indignantly circulated of patients dead at the extraction of a tooth, because chloroform was used; of labouring women whose ease of delivery was swiftly followed by the grave. But John Snow, to Fitzgerald's knowledge, had never lost a patient. And the possibility of enduring surgery without pain had made his discovery wildly popular, so that for the first time patients went under the knife without terror. Chloroform had revolutionized the practice of medicine in the past decade; all of Europe was ready to take its risk.

“Patients die because their doctors, terrified of waking them with the knife, continue to drug them long after they are unconscious,” Georgiana said placidly as she placed a drop of chloroform on a square of linen and held it to Lizzie's nose. “Then the heart rate is depressed and the lungs collapse. Sheer stupidity on the surgeon's part—but so many of them are untrained, and besieged with requests for anaesthesia. It's no wonder they kill with kindness.”

The girl reached out and grasped Georgie's hand. “Don't cut me,” she pleaded. “The last one cut me and I've not been right since—men don't like a girl what's cut.”

“Hush,” Georgiana said, smoothing the rough hair. “You shall feel a world of difference soon.”

The steady application of drops to handkerchief continued; Lizzie's eyelids fluttered, her breath fell slowly into the oblivion of sleep.

*    *    *

The surgery required almost an hour. Fitzgerald stayed at Georgiana's side and did as he was instructed, though he'd never been one to love the smell of blood. In Lizzie's case the rich animal scent was overpowered by the stronger one of decay: Her body stank as he remembered the wounds of soldiers stinking, with the foetid pus of inflammation. Georgiana's face was grave as she opened the girl and removed the perforated uterus, which lay like the liver of a butchered cow on the scrubbed table.

“A knitting needle, I think,” she murmured as she carefully sewed her incisions closed with catgut. “The abortionist's oldest trick. The man should be hanged.”

Fitzgerald stepped to the room's sole window and opened it a crack, greedily breathing in the cold air. Freezing rain still fell steadily, mingling with the coal smoke and pale northern light of December; it was as though all of London had drawn a cloak of mourning about its shoulders. His hands were shaking again and he craved a drink: He took great draughts of polluted air instead. The stench of the rooms—sweat and stale alcohol and semen—had conjured a march of demons through his brain.

Unwashed female bodies, torn shifts, a tangle of arms on a single mattress, hair spread like matted fur across the worn boards of the floor—a public house in Cork City. The sweet rot of bodily fluids and spilled ale.
His mother.

His gorge rose; he closed his eyes. The vision was so powerful that for an instant it eradicated the present and he could feel the earth crumble beneath his knees, as he knelt at the edge of her grave.

He'd been thirteen, the eldest of five, when she died. Fitzgerald was
her
name, none of them claiming a father to speak of. Cork City was one of Ireland's finer seaports, and Ma enjoyed the custom of sailors from all over the world—though it never brought her riches. What she made, she spent on drink and her children's bellies, in that order. When she died, the three girls were sent to an orphanage and the two boys cast out into the world. The innkeeper—whom the Fitzgeralds called Uncle Jack, though he was no relation of theirs—offered to keep young Liam, an open-hearted, grinning lad obsessed with the workings of the brewery. Patrick was good for nothing, being shy and bookish. Uncle Jack bluntly called him a penniless bastard not grand enough for making a priest, and suggested he join a mendicant order. Instead, Patrick stole the pub's earnings one moonlit night and walked to Cobh, where the great ships left for the English coast.

He had lived in London for thirty-three years; he'd turned a trick of pure luck and made a life from absolutely nothing—but that grim spectre of the past, the want and the stink and the desperate cruelty of living, could still bring him to his knees.

The curtain of sleet thickened and lowered. He studied the narrow courtyard below—the buildings leaning on one another's shoulders like drunkards, the stray mongrel carrying a rat between its teeth—and felt his breath catch in his throat. A man had appeared around the crumbling edge of the tenement opposite; a complete stranger in Fitzgerald's eyes, but too well-dressed to belong to the rookery. Barrel-chested, heavy-limbed, with luxuriant muttonchop whiskers, he carried a heavy club known as a cosh. As Fitzgerald watched, he stopped in the centre of the courtyard, his eyes roving among the derelict entries. Was this one of Nancy's regulars?

A regular would know where she lived.

Three other men materialised at the first's back, obviously in support, and stood silently waiting. Then, in the space of a heartbeat, two more approached from a narrow passage at the courtyard's far end.

Six men.
Converging.

Fitzgerald could hear Georgie murmuring to her patient, who was waking now with wracking sobs. She would ask him to carry the girl back to her pallet, soon.

He opened the door to the hall. “Davey.”

The boy was minding the younger children on the stairs.

“Is there a back door out of the building?”

“Yessir.”

Fitzgerald tossed him a shilling. “Run down and see whether it's all clear. Don't talk to anybody—there's a good lad.”

The child vanished with stealth and swiftness, the coin clenched between his teeth; Fitzgerald turned back inside, and lifted Lizzie in his arms.

“I might send to Covent Garden for some fresh linen,” Georgiana worried, as he set the girl down on her straw, “but all the shops are closed. I shall simply have to bring some things tomorrow from Russell Square—”

“You won't be in Russell Square tomorrow.”

“Nonsense,” she retorted crisply. “This child must be examined daily. Would you consign her to her mother's care? She might as well be left for dead.”

Fitzgerald glanced at Lizzie; she'd lost consciousness from the pain. “There's a party of killers in the courtyard below. If they've found you here, Georgie, they've already been to Russell Square.”

Her face was suddenly, sharply, white.

“What?”

He grasped her shoulder, pulled her from the inner room to the window. “
Look
. There. On the paving. A man with a cosh. Probably still stained with Sep's blood.”

She shook her head wildly. “I see nobody!”

Fitzgerald cursed. Heavy boots resounded through the lower entry; the men were already inside.

“Get your cloak and satchel. Quickly!”

She asked him nothing this time, though he could read the disbelief in her face. He seized her hand and pulled her after him, through the hallway.