Corridors of the Night (8 page)

‘Yes, Dr Rand, of course,’ she said quietly, as she would have to a child, someone else’s child whom she did not much like.

She found Bryson Radnor lying motionless with his eyes closed. She stood beside him and wondered if he were praying. Would it be for help? Or to make some peace with his Maker, and deal with life’s regrets; all the things not said, not done?

He became aware of her and opened his eyes. The instant she saw them, the idea that he had been praying vanished.

‘Come to comfort me?’ he said sarcastically. ‘Tell me God loves me, or some such tripe?’

‘I have no idea what God thinks of you,’ she snapped back at him. The words were out before she gave them consideration.

To her surprise he smiled. ‘Of course you haven’t. But I’m surprised you have the nerve to say so. What are you supposed to do for me? You must have a purpose. God knows, you’re not here as an ornament.’

‘I imagine you buy ornaments,’ she replied. ‘If you want them. If they break, you replace them. I am here to help you behave appropriately, so the treatment has a chance to work.’

‘I have never in my life had any woman tell me how to behave!’ he said witheringly, his eyes sharp in spite of his distress.

‘So I assumed,’ Hester answered coolly. ‘Certainly no one made much of a job of it.’

He grunted. ‘Were you really in the Crimea?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why? God-awful place. Totally pointless war.’

‘I didn’t go to fight,’ she told him. ‘I went to nurse the wounded.’

‘Very noble.’ The sarcastic edge was back in his voice again. ‘Found yourself a husband, did you?’ He was watching her closely, his eyes searching for emotion in her face, perhaps for the vulnerability he could probe. Was that resentment of life, because he could feel it slipping out of his hands?

She wanted to tell him that she could see his fear, even understand it. But that was not what she was here for. She should have been able to pity him, but so far he had made her dislike him too much for that. He was frightened, so he was trying to transfer the pain out of himself and into her.

‘No,’ she answered the original question. ‘My father died, and that drove out all other concerns. I can imagine very easily how your daughter feels now.’

A look came across his face that was too complex for her to read. There was intense emotion in it, but a mixture of pleasure and pain, a slow relish of something sweet, and a loathing as well.

Then it vanished.

‘I don’t need your sympathy, woman,’ he sneered at her. ‘Just do your job, whatever that is.’

‘Just as well,’ she said before she thought. ‘Because you don’t have it. And my job is to distract you now, and to keep you from ripping the needle out when Dr Rand puts it in your arm. If you do pull it out, you will lose what little precious blood you have.’

He stared at her. ‘Got a tongue like a butcher’s knife, haven’t you?’

She smiled at him as if she liked him, and saw the confusion in his eyes.

‘Like a surgeon’s scalpel,’ she corrected him. ‘Far more precise and sharper. If I have the need.’

Magnus came in and grasped hold of the contraption, wheeling it over the slightly uneven boards of the floor. He stopped it very close to the side of the bed. Hester glanced at the bottle hanging from it, with the soft rubber tubes trailing like tentacles. The light did not pass through the bottle. It was full of something.

‘Please be still, Mr Radnor,’ Magnus said politely. ‘If you fear you might pull away, I can have you strapped down. But the pain will be slight. I cannot answer for a degree of discomfort.’

‘I can hold still,’ Radnor said through clenched teeth. ‘Stop treating me like a child, man. Do what you have to.’

Magnus did not argue with him. He turned to the contraption, and checked all the connections once again, in case the journey across the floor had jarred anything loose. Satisfied, he took a small cloth that smelled strongly of surgical spirit, and wiped the skin on the inside of Radnor’s arm. Then without warning he jabbed the needle into the vein and held it hard.

Radnor gasped and his face turned even whiter than before.

Hester was not surprised. There was something about the shining point of a heavy needle sinking into one’s own flesh that would make anyone shudder, however much they steeled themselves against it. It was far darker than the delicate stitching of the skin a surgeon would do to a wound.

Magnus glanced at Radnor, just to assure himself that he was steady enough, and then he began to adjust the dials and pressures on the contraption.

The glass above the needle this time was dark brown. Hester could not tell from looking at it what it might be. She watched Magnus’s face, his intense concentration, and then she turned back to Radnor. He was lying motionless, but there was a beading of perspiration on his forehead. She decided not to disturb him by wiping it away. To him it would seem like fussing.

The seconds ticked by.

Magnus looked at the contraption, then at Radnor. He fiddled with the rubber tubing to make sure it was still working.

Hester put her hand gently on Radnor’s forehead.

He opened his eyes and glared at her. She saw the fear in him and felt a moment’s pity. She could tell him that his temperature was holding steady, but no doubt he knew that. There was nothing feverish about him. She did not do so because she did not want to provoke him to respond. Instead she told Magnus.

‘Quite steady, Dr Rand,’ she said quietly. She moved her cool finger down to Radnor’s wrist. The pulse was light, but no faster or more uneven than before.

More minutes slipped by.

Magnus told Hester to take Radnor’s temperature properly, with the thermometer. She did so, and his pulse with a stop watch.

‘His temperature is up a degree,’ she told him. ‘Pulse is the same as before, but a little stronger.’

‘Good. Good, so far,’ Rand said with relief. ‘We will continue.’ He did not ask Radnor. This was medicine, an experiment. All that mattered was the result. Radnor as an individual meant nothing.

Carefully, with Hester’s help, Magnus unhooked the dark brown bottle and then attached another, seemingly identical. It was only then that Hester saw the rime of blood on it, and knew beyond doubt what it was that Magnus and Hamilton were doing. It was human blood that they had taken from the children, and were putting drop by drop, into Bryson Radnor. They were replacing his sick, white blood, empty of life, with that of Charlie, Maggie, and whoever else they had in that ward full of children.

It was terrifying, barbaric – and brilliant, if it worked! She had enough knowledge of medical history to know that it had been tried before. As far back as the 1600s doctors had tried to give healthy blood to save sick people. On rare occasions it had worked, for a while. Usually it killed the recipient, most unpleasantly, as if the new blood, which had kept someone else alive, were poison to the one who received it. Nobody knew why.

One great difficulty was that blood clotted – if it did not, then any cut would cause the victim to bleed to death – but you could not put clotted blood into another person. How had Hamilton overcome that? What had he added to the blood he had taken so that it ran liquid and easily through those brown rubber tubes? How much of it was exactly right to keep the blood liquid, and yet so that it still clotted when it had mixed with the recipient’s own blood?

Did Bryson Radnor know what was happening to him?

She looked at him closely as Magnus tied up the second bottle and began its slow, steady drip into the glass vial and the needle at the end of it. Did Radnor even wonder whose blood it was? Maybe he thought it was from some animal. Or a convict destined to die anyway.

She took his temperature and pulse again. The temperature was still normal. His pulse was markedly stronger. The skin of his face had lost some of its grey look.

As she was staring at him he opened his eyes. They were a strange, golden brown colour, brighter than before.

It’s working!
His pale lips formed the words. They were silent, but she could hear the ring of victory in them as if he had shouted loud enough to fill the bare hospital room with the sound.

By late in the afternoon Radnor was lying back against his pillows drinking beef tea and requesting more food than he had eaten in the entire previous week. His colour had returned, his temperature was close to normal, his pulse steady.

Magnus was pleased, but he did what he could to contain his elation.

‘We’ve had such success before,’ he said warily, when he and Hester were alone in his office. He took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. ‘Sometimes we succeed for a few days, even a few weeks. Then when they are ill again, we treat them again . . . and they die.’ He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. ‘Horribly.’

‘And you don’t know why?’ she said with a sudden chill taking away her moment of victory. That was what it was about – not making it work just the once. She thought of Wilton, and Sherryl’s description of how he had died, and thrust it out of her mind.

She saw in her mind’s eye soldiers lying on battlefields, limbs torn off, riddled with bullets. With current medical knowledge they could be saved, but only for a while. Even with the best care in field hospitals, they died of shock and loss of blood.

And not only soldiers, other people, in street accidents, industrial disasters, women dying in childbirth from bleeding no one could control.

But the blood had to come from somebody. Somebody like Charlie, Maggie, even little Mike. One pint of blood from a child that age – undersized anyway, malnourished, alone and frightened – could be enough to weaken him so the first infection he caught killed him.

There was no way out.

But that also meant no way forward!

All the men who had died here from war injuries – could blood have saved any of them? Hester couldn’t know. It was all too late now. For Wilton, anyway. What about the next one? All the men in this hospital, other hospitals, all the future?

Did this potentially life-saving treatment always come at this sort of price?

HESTER WAS fully occupied with her duties caring for Bryson Radnor. He was very sick indeed, and although his daughter, Adrienne, was as much help as she could be, there were still certain things that Hester needed to do, as much for observation as skill in the execution of them.

She found him a disagreeable man, but quite often the very ill were frightened and in pain. Many resented being dependent upon other people for even the most simple things, some of which it was instinctive to keep private.

‘For goodness’ sake stop fussing, woman!’ he snapped at her late on the second day. Adrienne was out of the room.

Hester was making the bed so it would be more comfortable for him. She was keeping her temper with difficulty.

‘If you prefer the sheets wrinkled, Mr Radnor, all you have to do is say so,’ she told him.

He gave what was intended to be a wave of dismissal, but he was too weak to make it effective.

‘Where’s Adrienne?’ he demanded.

‘Asleep,’ Hester answered. ‘She was with you all night. Everyone needs to rest at some time.’

He turned his head and stared at her, moving his eyes slowly down from her face to her body. He did not bother to be discreet about it. She found it unpleasant, almost prurient, as if he were trying to reduce her to the physical necessities as much as he felt she was to him in his dependence.

She wanted to snap at him, tell him how childish and offensive he was, but she knew better than to allow any patient to provoke her like that. And it would give him the satisfaction of knowing he was dictating the relationship between them. Instead she forced herself to smile at him, gently, almost sweetly, as if she were nanny to a rather objectionable child.

He looked away. That was a battle she had won, but she knew there would be more.

She finished tidying the bed and the rest of the room, opened the window to let in the warm fresh air, and went out into the corridor.

She all but bumped into Adrienne, who looked exhausted. Her plain, dark dress was crumpled; her hair was pinned up too hastily and was pulled tight in places. But it was her face that most affected Hester. Her skin was pale and looked like that of a much older woman. There was no bloom to it; she looked almost bruised around her eyes.

‘How is he?’ she asked immediately, her voice sharp with fear.

Hester put out her hand and laid it on Adrienne’s arm, holding her, feeling the strength with which she pulled away.

‘He’s resting,’ she answered firmly. ‘And he has taken some beef tea with a little tonic in it. Dr Rand is hoping to begin the treatment soon.’

Adrienne was still pulling away, as if she would not believe anything until she saw it for herself.

Hester kept hold of her.

‘You must take more care of yourself,’ she said gently. ‘Once treatment begins, we will need your help. You need to be well, in order to look after him.’

Adrienne stared at her. She was exhausted, frightened and desperately in need of belief that the long battle could be won.

‘Come and have a cup of tea,’ Hester asked. ‘I need to tell you certain things about caring for him that you need to know.’

Adrienne hesitated.

‘You have done an excellent job so far.’ Hester could see the doubt in the other woman’s eyes, the hunger to check for herself that Radnor was indeed all right. As soon as she was in the room he would ask her to do one small task after another, all of them unnecessary, and she would obey. Hester had already seen how he needed to feel the power of ordering her around, and she never refused him anything. Whether it was love, fear of losing him, or guilt that he had imbued her with over the years, she could not tell. And it made no difference. He was drawing the strength out of her, and what Hester had told her about how she would be needed later on was perfectly true, even if that was not the reason she said so now.

‘I’ve tried.’ Adrienne smiled very slightly, searching Hester’s face to see if she were telling the truth, or just trying to be kind.