Corridors of the Night (27 page)

‘So you took her place, mostly at nights?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you working for Mr Hamilton Rand?’

‘No. I was on general nursing duties, and I answered to Dr Magnus Rand.’

The interest in the gallery was beginning to wane. Rathbone was aware of people fidgeting, occasionally changing position. Juster should move on.

As if he had heard Rathbone’s thoughts, Juster changed the subject. ‘Were you on night duty when you discovered the ward for children, Mrs Monk?’

The attention was total again. No one stirred.

‘Yes. I saw a child, a girl who appeared to be about six years old, alone in the corridor in the middle of the night.’ Hester’s voice wavered a little with her own emotion. ‘She was white-faced and terrified. She told me her brother was dying.’

Now, one could have heard a pin drop.

Colbert moved as if to interrupt, and at least a dozen people glared at him.

Hester continued without being prompted. ‘I went with her. She led me down a passage I had not seen before and into a ward where there were six beds, all occupied by children looking to be between three years old and ten or eleven.’

‘And was one of them her brother?’

Again Colbert took a deep breath, and then changed his mind.

‘Two of them said they were,’ Hester answered. ‘The older, Charlie, was very ill indeed. The younger, Mike, was frightened but not seriously ill. He was about three or four. I remained all night and together we managed to keep Charlie alive. By morning he was returned to consciousness, and seemed to be recovering.’

‘What was the matter with him?’ Juster asked innocently, glancing at Colbert, and then back again at Hester.

Rathbone relaxed a fraction, stopping his fingernails from digging into his palms. Colbert was waiting for the slip, the assumption, the statement of a skill Hester did not have.

‘I didn’t know,’ Hester replied. ‘He seemed to be suffering from lack of fluids . . .’

This time Colbert could not resist. He rose to his feet.

‘My lord, Mr Juster has perhaps forgotten that he has not given us any background of Mrs Monk’s medical training for such a diagnosis. Nor has he asked her why on earth she did not call the doctor!’

One or two jurors looked puzzled, turning from Colbert to the judge, and back again.

Juster smiled. He looked to Hester. ‘How do you know this, Mrs Monk? And why did you not call the doctor, if Charlie was as ill as you say?’

‘It was the middle of the night,’ she replied. Her voice was perfectly level, but thick with emotion. ‘Dr Rand does not sleep on the premises. And it is a nursing job to know if someone has lost too much fluid and not replaced it. However, the nurse on duty was absent. There are several ways to know if someone is dehydrated.’

She held out her arm and gently pinched the flesh of it between the finger and thumb of her other hand. ‘When it is firm, you are all right. When the skin comes away, as Charlie’s did, then there is not sufficient fluid. One can feel dizzy, headachy, a little sick, and very tired. The inside of the mouth becomes very dry, even painful. You pass water very little. It is easy to let this happen, especially if you have lost a lot of fluid as with vomiting, or having diarrhoea. I simply encouraged Charlie to drink as much as possible. Later we made beef tea, so there would be some nourishment in it for him.’

Out of the corner of his eye Rathbone could see one or two women towards the front of the gallery nodding their heads.

Colbert had fired his first volley, and conspicuously missed the mark.

‘Thank you, Mrs Monk,’ Juster said, barely hiding his smile. ‘I think perhaps many of us here are not certain what is a doctor’s job and what is a nurse’s. It seems clear now that you used your experience in nursing the very ill to save this boy’s life.’

Colbert rose to his feet. ‘My lord, my learned friend is testifying. I understand his eagerness, but he knows better. At least I believe he does!’

‘I apologise,’ Juster said quickly, before the judge could intervene. He turned again to Hester. ‘When Charlie seemed better in the morning, did you then report the situation to Dr Rand?’

‘The matter was taken out of my hands,’ she replied. ‘Dr Rand heard that I had been in that ward and he asked me to help with the treatment of one of his patients who had white blood disease.’

Colbert looked sharply at Juster.

Juster smiled. ‘How did you know that that was his illness, Mrs Monk?’

‘I don’t,’ she replied. ‘I know that was what he said, and I had no reason to doubt him.’

There was a slight titter of amusement around the room.

‘And did you consent?’ Juster resumed.

‘Of course.’

‘Why?’

She looked slightly taken aback by the question. ‘I would never refuse to treat a patient, whatever the illness. And it is not contagious, so there was no question of quarantine.’

‘Exactly so,’ Juster agreed. ‘In what way did you assist in this treatment? Can you tell the court something about the patient?’

Hester described Bryson Radnor briefly, concentrating on his state of health and his symptoms, mentioning that his daughter, Adrienne accompanied him.

‘She was of great assistance,’ she continued. ‘She had been caring for him for over a year in his illness and could describe the course of it clearly for Dr Rand. She also assisted in nursing him, which was helpful to the hospital.’

‘What was the treatment you gave him, Mrs Monk?’

‘Transfusion of human blood,’ she said quietly.

There was a gasp around the room. Someone in the gallery stifled a cry. Two of the jurors leaned forward as if they were uncertain if they had heard correctly.

Lord Justice Patterson frowned. ‘Did you say transfusion of human blood, Mrs Monk?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Hester answered levelly. ‘It has been tried many times before, going back two hundred years or more. It has never been done with any permanent success. Often the failure is immediate. The patient suffers distress, nausea, faintness, eventually death.’

‘And Mr Radnor?’ Patterson asked.

‘He rallied,’ Hester replied. ‘Sometimes it was for several hours, sometimes longer. Then he would grow faint again and need the treatment to be repeated.’

Patterson stared at Juster. ‘Have you any other witness to this remarkable story, Mr Juster?’

‘Yes, my lord. If you will allow me to continue?’

Patterson nodded and sat back in his great carved seat.

Juster continued to question Hester and draw from her piece by piece a vivid description of the blood transfusion machine. She began with how blood was drawn from Charlie and Maggie, but it was added to so that it would not clot and coagulate.

‘What was added?’ he asked.

‘I think it ill advised to tell you,’ she answered, ‘in case anyone might attempt such a thing themselves. It is highly skilled.’

‘I see,’ he nodded agreement. ‘Can you tell the court how it was administered?’

She described Radnor’s treatment, his recovery, and then relapse. Juster questioned her about her abduction from the hospital and finally how she was rescued by Monk and his men.

No one interrupted her. The court was so quiet that the faintest of movement was audible: the rustle of fabric on wood, the creak of a chair as someone moved their weight.

‘And did you attempt to escape during this time?’ Juster said at last.

‘No. I could not leave the children behind,’ she answered.

‘And your patient?’

She hesitated.

‘Mrs Monk?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘He had one bad crisis, and I don’t think Miss Radnor could have dealt with it.’

‘Did you think of escaping?’ Juster insisted. Rathbone had warned him that Colbert would press the issue. He could not afford to ignore it.

‘Yes, I thought of it,’ Hester said very softly. ‘But the children were growing weaker. He took too much blood from them. They are very small, very thin . . .’ Her voice wavered.

Colbert looked up sharply and started to rise.

Juster turned towards him. ‘Your witness, Mr Colbert.’

Rathbone immediately thought that Juster had let Colbert take over too soon. There were other things he could have asked Hester, let the jury see her courage and dedication more clearly.

It was too late. Colbert rose to his feet, walked out into the body of the court to stand below the witness box and stared up at Hester.

Rathbone lost his certainty. It was too long since he had been in the courtroom. His judgement was blunted. He was too personally involved.

‘You have been very specific, Mrs Monk,’ Colbert said with a slight smile. ‘We are grateful to you. Most of us here are laymen when it comes to medical details such as you describe. Help us, please. Do I understand you correctly that Dr Rand was taking an amount of blood from two of these children and then placing it, through a very fine needle and a machine that he had created, into the veins of his sick patient? And after this treatment, the patient showed considerable recovery? Is that a fair description of what you assisted him to do?’

‘It is incomplete,’ Hester replied, her voice perfectly level. ‘But it is not inaccurate as far as it goes.’

‘What did I miss?’ Colbert looked puzzled.

‘Mr Radnor did not have insufficient blood,’ she explained. ‘His blood was diseased. Dr Rand had tried once some time ago to perform this transfusion with other patients, and other donors. Apparently these three children, the youngest as well, had blood that worked on all upon whom he used it. No one seems to know why that is. But the children are young, very small and increasingly weak.’

‘You mentioned that,’ Colbert was still polite. ‘But it did work, did it not? Mr Radnor was alive and apparently gaining strength when Mr Monk and his men broke in and forcibly stopped the treatment. They arrested Mr Rand and Miss Radnor, and brought all of you forcibly back to the city? Yes or no will do, Mrs Monk.’

Rathbone stiffened. Whatever way she answered he would trip her up. If she said ‘yes’ then she was admitting that Monk had effectively damaged Radnor’s chances of recovery. If she said ‘no’ she would be suggesting that she knew more than Rand did about his disease and recovery.

‘I don’t know,’ Hester said with the shadow of a smile. ‘I could tell you his pulse rate, temperature, whether he was eating or not, and sleeping. What that meant with regard to his recovery, and whether it was temporary or permanent, I do not know.’

Colbert masked a slight irritation, but Rathbone saw it.

‘Do you always refer to a doctor, Mrs Monk? Surely in your heroic experience in the battlefield you had to take major decisions yourself when a man was critically injured? My research into your career tells me that at times you performed surgery right there on the grass. You even amputated limbs from dying men, and saved their lives!’ He invested his tone with intense awe, drawing the emotions of the court with him. ‘You were less circumspect then, far less timid.’

Hester was pale. ‘Seconds of delay can allow a man to bleed to death when he has lost a limb, Mr Colbert,’ she said a little harshly. ‘There may be no doctor there to ask. And by the time you find one it would be too late. With Mr Radnor I did all I could to preserve his life. He was suffering from a disease that is usually fatal, but not in a matter of minutes. I had plenty of time to ask Mr Rand’s counsel and then act according to his instructions.’

‘And yet you do not know if he was recovering or not?’ Colbert said with disbelief.

‘The treatment was experimental,’ she explained again carefully. ‘The essence of that is that no one knows whether it will work or not.’

‘Your answers are very considered, Mrs Monk, very well thought out. You sound as if you are picking and choosing your words to protect yourself from accusations of complicity in this . . . experiment. Did you believe it would fail?’

Rathbone looked across at Juster and saw the anxiety flicker for an instant in his face. Had the jury seen that? Was it the same fear that he felt gnawing inside himself? Hester was sometimes painfully honest. Where would her first loyalty lie now? Towards justice, safety for the children she had come to know and protect? Even to love. It could be anger at what had been done to them, but he doubted it would be as simple as revenge. Might her loyalty be to medicine itself, to all the future lives that could be saved if Rand succeeded, or even if someone else picked up the knowledge so far and went forward with it?

How would her conscience drive her to answer? She must not hesitate too long, or it would look contrived. Colbert would press on that. More importantly, the jury would see her indecision as lies.

Rathbone looked at Juster again. Perhaps he should object, say that Colbert was asking her to give the very speculation he had claimed she was medically untrained to offer. It would be legally correct, but it would also quite clearly be an evasion. The question had been asked. It must be answered, or the jury would provide their own answer. Colbert was a great deal less mild than he looked.

‘Mrs Monk?’ Colbert said with a lift of curiosity in his voice.

Hester smiled. ‘As you have said, sir, I am not medically qualified to give such an opinion. But since you have opened the door by asking me, I can say that I was deeply impressed by Mr Rand’s means of keeping freshly taken blood from coagulating, which would make it unusable to give to another person. His equipment was well designed and seemed to work efficiently . . .’

‘Mrs Monk—’ he interrupted, frowning his annoyance.

She ignored him as if she had not heard, and continued, ‘. . . to carry out the function of giving the blood to the patient. Occasionally Mr Radnor’s reaction was not good, but with nursing he recovered. I think it is impossible to say if in time he would have recovered from his illness, or if he would have continued to need blood regularly. Nor did Mr Rand ever learn why the blood of these children always worked, and with other people sometimes it did, but more often it did not. That is a series of experiments one cannot make. More often than not they failed and the patient died, not always could one say from exactly what cause – whether the transfusion killed them, or merely failed to save them.’