The Stress of Her Regard (8 page)

Crawford took a filled glass and drank deeply. "What, Hallowe'en? I thought you said
surgical
, not witchcraftical."

Keats laughed uncertainly, the look of anxiety returning to his face. "I become of age then; the thirty-first is my birthday. My—" He paused, for Crawford was staring at several knobby little bluish crystals on a bookshelf.

"What," asked Crawford carefully, "are those?"

A key rattled in the front door lock then, and a tall man opened the door and entered. He didn't look as young as Keats, and his face was leanly humorous.

"Henry!" exclaimed the younger man with obvious relief, "this is Michael . . . Myrrh? . . ."

"Michael, uh, Frankish," Crawford corrected, standing up but not really looking away from the little crystals. Their facets made bright needles of the lamplight, and seemed to increase the fever pressure behind his forehead. "Arthur Appleton . . . told me to look here for a place to stay. I'm a student at St. Elmo's." He shook his head sharply. "Thomas's, that is." He coughed.

Henry Stephens gave him a good-naturedly skeptical smile, but just nodded. "If Arthur vouches for you, that's good enough for me. You can—what, are you off, John?"

"I'm afraid so," said Keats, taking a coat from a rack by the door. "Got to see to Dr. Lucas's poor charges. Good to have met you, Michael," he added on the way out the door.

When the door had closed, Stephens sank into a chair and picked up the wine glass Keats had left. "St. Elmo's, eh?"

Though exhausted, Crawford smiled and changed the subject. "Dr. Lucas's charges?"

Stephens bowed a fraction of an inch. "Young John is a dresser for the most incompetent surgeon at Guy's—Lucas's dressers always have plenty of festering bandages to change."

Crawford waved at the odd crystals. "What are those?"

Stephens may have realized that Crawford's casual manner was a pose, for he looked sharply at him before answering. "Those are bladder stones," he said carefully. "Dr. Lucas is given many such cases."

"I've seen bladder stones," said Crawford. "That's not how they look. They look like . . . spiky limestone. These things look like quartz."

Stephens shrugged. "These are what gets cut out of Lucas's patients. No doubt they're tired of it—any day now I expect the administrators to summon Lucas and tell him, 'Doctor, you're beginning to exhaust our patients!' " Stephens leaned back in his chair and chuckled quietly for several moments. Then he had a sip of wine and went on. "Keats isn't a brilliant student, you know. The boys assigned to Lucas never are. But nevertheless Keats is . . . perhaps more
observant
than the administrators guess."

Crawford knew he was missing something. "Well . . . ," he said, trying to keep his eyes focussing, "why has he
saved
the things?"

Stephens shook his head in humorous but apparently genuine disappointment. "Damn, for a moment I thought you might know, you were looking at them so intently!
I
don't know . . . but I remember one time he was playing with them, holding them up to the light and all, and he said, mostly to himself, 'I should throw these away—I know I can have my real career even without using them.' "

Crawford had another sip of wine and yawned. "So what's his
real
career? Jewellery?"

"Nasty sort of jewellery that'd be, wouldn't it? No." He looked at Crawford with raised eyebrows. "No, he wants to be a poet."

Crawford was nearly asleep, and he knew that when he slept it would be for a good twelve hours, so he asked Stephens which room would be his, and when he was shown it he threw his portmanteau onto the floor. He fetched his drink, and stood for a moment in the hall and swirled the inch of wine in the bottom of the glass.

"So," he asked Stephens, who had helped him carry blankets from the linen closet, "what's poetry got to do with bladder stones?"

"Don't ask
me
," Stephens told him. "
I'm
not on intimate terms with the Muses."

At first he thought the woman in his dream was Julia, for even in the dimness—were the two of them in a cave?—he could see the silver of antimony around her eyes, and Julia had whitened her eyebrows with antimony for the wedding. But when she stood up, naked, and walked across the floor tiles toward him, he saw that this was someone else.

Moonlight climbed a white thigh as she padded past a window or cleft in the cave wall, and he smelled night-blooming jasmine and the sea; then she was in his arms and he was kissing her passionately, not caring that her smooth skin was as cool as the stone tiles under his bare feet, nor that there was suddenly in his nostrils an alien muskiness.

Then they were rolling on the tiles, and it was not skin under his sliding fingertips but scales, and he didn't care about that either . . . but a moment later the dream shifted, and they were in a forest clearing where the moon made spots of pale light that winked like spinning silver coins as the branches overhead waved in a Mediterranean wind . . . she slithered out of his embrace and disappeared in the underbrush, and though he crawled after her, calling, unmindful of the thorny branches, the rustling of her passage grew steadily more distant and was soon gone.

But something seemed to be answering his call—or was he answering a call of its? As in many dreams, identities blurred into one another . . . and then he was looking at a mountain, and though he'd never been there, he knew it was one of the Alps. It seemed miles high, blocking out a whole corner of the sky even though the thin clouds streaking its breast with sunset shadow let him know that it was many miles distant—and, in spite of its broad-shouldered, strong-jawed look, he knew it was female.

Pain in the stump of his missing finger woke him before dawn.

Two mornings later he was scuffing his way up the broad front steps of Guy's Hospital, blinking at the Greek-looking pillars that stretched away overhead from the top of the front door arch to the roof two stories above; but the sunlight seemed too harsh up there among all that smooth stone, and he let his gaze drop back down to the heels of Keats's boots, which were tapping up the steps just ahead of him.

For the last couple of days he had been attending lectures at both Guy's and St. Thomas's, confident that he would be able to get Appleton to acknowledge the signature he had forged on his application papers—if Crawford should decide to make it official and actually become a surgeon again under the name of Michael Frankish.

And he was fairly sure he wouldn't be recognized. For one thing, Dr. Crawford had always worked in hospitals north of the river and, for another, he no longer looked very much like Dr. Crawford—he had recently worked very hard to lose weight so as to look his best at the wedding, and he now found himself losing more, involuntarily; and nobody who had known him a week ago would have described him as hollow-cheeked and sunken-eyed, as he certainly was now.

At the top of the steps Keats paused and frowned back at Crawford. "Are you sure you're not too sick?"

"I'm fine." Crawford fished a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. He was dizzy, and it occurred to him that Newton must have been right when he'd said that light consisted of particles, for today he could feel them hitting him. He wondered if he was going to faint. "What have you got today—Theory and Practice of Medicine?"

"No," Keats said, "this morning I'm helping out in the cutting wards—people recovering from lithotomies."

"Mind if I . . . follow along?" asked Crawford, attempting a carefree smile. "I'm supposed to hear about Anatomy from old Ashley, but he'll just put me to sleep. And I'm sure I'd pick up more real acquaintance with the subject by touring the wards than by sitting through a damn lecture anyway."

Keats looked uncertain, then grinned. "You were a surgeon's dresser on shipboard, didn't you say? Sure, you'll be used to dealing with much worse than this. Come along." He held the door open for Crawford. "Matter of fact, I'm taking the exam tomorrow, and then leaving for two months at Margate—you might very well be my successor with Dr. Lucas, so it's only right that I show you around."

They reported to the senior surgeon, who didn't even look up when told that Michael Frankish was to be Lucas's new dresser; he just gave Crawford an entry certificate and told him to use the boot-scraper before going upstairs to the wards.

It took a little over an hour to tend to all of Dr. Lucas's patients.

As a student Crawford had not minded tending to the people recovering from surgeries in the cutting wards; the operating theater itself was far worse, a horrifying pandemonium in which burly interns struggled to hold some screaming patient down on the table as the surgeon sweated and cursed and dug with the knife, his shoes scuffing streaks in the bloody sand on the floor as he braced himself for each resisted thrust . . . and just as nightmarish, if quieter, were the "salivating" wards, where syphilitics drooled helplessly as a result of the mercurial ointment rubbed into their open lesions . . . but the cutting wards were where a student could see healing actually occurring, quietly, day by day.

Dr. Lucas's cutting wards were different. After changing the first heavily slick, malodorous bandages, Crawford could see that Stephens had not understated the old surgeon's skill—Crawford had never seen clumsier incisions, and it was clear that at least as many would die of the bladder-stone operation as benefit from it.

A gray-haired clergyman was on his knees beside one of the last beds they came to, and he looked up when Keats bent over the patient. The old cleric seemed to have been deep in prayer, for it took several seconds for his eyes to focus on the newcomers, and even then all he managed to do was nod and turn away.

"Excuse me, Reverend," said Keats, "got to change the bandages."

The clergyman bobbed his head and backed away from the bed, and he thrust his hands inside his cassock—but not before Crawford noticed blood on his fingers. Puzzled, Crawford looked up at his face, and saw the man quickly lick his upper lip—had there been blood there too?

The minister met his gaze for a moment, and the old face tightened with some emotion like hate or envy; one of the bloody hands emerged from the robe for a moment with the ring finger folded inside the fist, and then a spotted finger pointed at Crawford's own left hand. The old man mimed spitting at Crawford, then turned and scuttled out of the room.

Keats was leaning closer to the figure in the bed, and now he reached over and opened one of the eyes. "This one's dead," he said, softly so as not to alarm the patients in beds nearby. "Could you find a nurse? Tell her to fetch a doctor and the porter so we can get this into the charnel house."

Crawford's heart was beating fast. "My God, John, that minister had blood on his hands! And he gave me the most horrible look before he ran out of here." He waved at the corpse in the bed. "Do you think . . . ?"

Keats stared at him, and stared off the way the old man had gone, and then grabbed the blankets and pulled them down to peer at the diaper-like bandage; in that instant Crawford thought Keats looked older than the clergyman had. After a few moments Keats spoke. "He didn't kill him, no," he said quietly. "But he was . . . looting the body. The blood of . . . certain patients has a . . . certain value. I'm fairly sure he wasn't a real minister, and I'll see to it that he's kept out in the future—let him go haunt the wards at St. George's." He waved at Crawford. "So get the nurse."

Though both disgusted and intrigued by Keats's words, Crawford's mood as he walked down the hall was one of dour amusement at being ordered around a hospital by a twenty-year-old . . . but his amusement turned to incredulous horror when he started down the stairs.

A nurse was walking stiffly up the stairs, and he had raised his hand to get her attention, but when she looked up he recognized her. It was Josephine Carmody, apparently deep in her mechanical persona.

His hand paused only a moment, then went on up to scratch his scalp as if he had never intended the gesture to be a wave, and he lowered his eyes and moved to pass her. His heart was thudding hollowly, and he felt drunk with panic.

She was too close to him when she drew the pistol from under her blouse, and instead of shoving the muzzle into his ear, she only managed to slam the flesh-warmed barrel against the back of his neck. She took a step back to get a clear shot.

Crawford yelled in alarm and swung his right fist hard up against her gun hand.

Breath whistled through her teeth and the pistol flew out of her grasp, but it clanked against the wall and then tumbled down three steps and Josephine dove after it.

Crawford didn't think he could get to her before she could come up with it, so he went clattering back up the stairs in a half crawl. She didn't shoot, but he could hear her clump-clumping up after him, and somehow her imperturbable clockwork stride was more terrifying than the pistol. He was whimpering as he ran back down the hall to the room in which Keats waited for him.

Keats looked up in surprise when Crawford came lurching back into the windowless ward. "Did you find a-," he began.

"Quick, John," Crawford interrupted, "how can I get out of here besides by the stairs?"—but the metronomic clumping had reached the floor they were on. "Jesus!" he said shrilly, and ran back out into the hall.

Josephine was standing ten yards away, pointing the pistol straight at him. He sat down and threw an arm across his face, hoping she'd fire quickly and not take time to aim—and then something burst out of the ward doorway to his right.

The gun boomed and flashed, and he wasn't hit. He lowered his hands—

—and saw a glittering thing like a rainbow-colored serpent curling its heavy, scaled body in the air between him and Josephine; he was dazedly trying to make out whether it had wings that were beating too fast to see, like a hummingbird, or was hanging from some kind of spiderweb, when it simply disappeared.

The hallway's stale air shook, and Crawford shivered in a sudden impossibly icy draft.

Josephine was staring wide-eyed at the space where the thing had been, and when she turned and ran back to the stairs it was with an animal grace that was the very opposite of her mechanical pose.