This Golden Land (4 page)

     Then he looked at the rounded abdomen where his child once slumbered but was now entombed. He lifted a tear-stained face to Willoughby. "How did it happen?"

     "Everything was going as I expected, the blood-letting was easing her distress when suddenly she expired."

     "But she was fine this afternoon when I rode to fetch you. Just a little queasiness."

     "I blame myself, Your Lordship. When I saw the bowl of toxic fluid, I should have thrown it out at once. But, of course, my main concern was with seeing to Her Ladyship—"

     Falconbridge blinked. "Toxic fluid?"

     Willoughby pointed to the bowl on the writing desk and Falconbridge immediately realized he had been detecting a strong odor in the air. It was coming from the bowl. "What is it?" he asked, rising from the bed.

     "The good Lord only knows," Willoughby said, throwing up his hands. "The Quaker had set it out for reasons that are beyond me. It is not normal medical practice, I assure you. But I do chastise myself for not throwing it out. I fear the air has been poisoned and in fact you and I would do well to leave this room at once, Your Lordship."

     Falconbridge stared into the pungent-smelling fluid, feeling its fumes assault his nostrils and swim up into his head to engulf his brain. Margaret was dead. The baby dead. He felt the room tilt and sway, heard the wind howling beyond the windows. "What am I going to do?" he sobbed, and covered his face with his hands.

     Willoughby laid a fatherly hand on the baron's shoulder and said, "I will take care of things for you, Your Lordship. I suggest, however, that we detain the Quaker and his daughter and send for the constable. A crime has been committed here tonight."

     Luke Keen came into the kitchen. "Sorry, sir, but His Lordship has asked that you be detained. Come this way, please." The estate manager led the Conroys to a small library off the main hall, where no fire burned in
the grate, and only one candle had been lit so that the room was cold and gloomy. "If you'll wait here," he said, not meeting them in the eye, and then he left, closing the door behind himself.

     "What do you suppose—" Hannah began, when Willoughby came striding in, looking somber and officious.

     "How is Margaret Falconbridge?" John Conroy asked. He had removed his wide-brimmed Quaker's hat and stood taller than the older doctor.

     "
Lady
Margaret," Willoughby said archly, "has died."

     "Oh no," Hannah whispered, standing at her father's side. "And the child?"

     "It perished as well."

     "Thee could not save them?" Conroy said.

     Willoughby drew himself up as tall as he could, and jutted out his whiskered chin. "And how was I to do that when you poisoned them both?"

     Conroy's eyebrows arched. "What does thee mean?"

     "You poisoned her with that concoction in the bowl."

     "Dr. Willoughby," Hannah interjected. "Iodine cannot cause illness. It
prevents
illness."

     Willoughby skewered her with a look. A lifelong bachelor, the Oxford-trained English gentleman was contemptuous of women, as he was of Irishmen, foreigners, and Quakers. "I did not say you made Her Ladyship ill," he said archly. "I said you
poisoned
her. You filled the air with toxins."

     John Conroy said quietly, "I did not."

     "Will you swear to that?" Willoughby asked, knowing that the Quaker would do no such thing.

     "Friend, my way of speaking is plain speech which is truthful speech. Therefore I have no reason for making a sworn statement. Instead I offer an affirmation that my witness is true."

     "The high court in London will want more than that, sir. You must place your hand on the Holy Bible."

     "That I cannot do. But I affirm before God that I did not poison Margaret Falconbridge."

     "We'll see about that. His Lordship has sent for the constable. In the morning, your case will be presented to the magistrate. There will be a formal
inquest, and I shall recommend charges of medical malpractice, professional malfeasance and criminal negligence be brought against you."

     Willoughby turned to leave when his eye fell upon Conroy's black medical bag. Without asking, he undid the clasp, looked inside, and lifted out a bottle containing purple liquid. He read the label:
Experimental Formula #23.
"You experimented on the baroness! You might have at least saved it for one of your farm wives, sir!"

     "I was not experimenting," Conroy said. "I merely call it my experimental formula. There is a difference. I have used it in my treatment of other patients. I assure thee, Friend, no harm came to Margaret Falconbridge through my use of the iodine."

     "And I will thank you, sir, to stop calling Her Ladyship by her Christian name!"

     "I know of no other to call her," Conroy said quietly.

     "She is
Her Ladyship
to you, sir. You will show some respect to your betters."

     "Can he do that, Father?" Hannah asked after Willoughby had left. "Can he accuse us of those things?"

     "A man can be accused of anything, Hannah," John Conroy said as he sank into an upholstered chair and turned melancholy eyes to the rain washing the windows. Shadows crept along the cold carpet, shifting, changing shape—ghostly phantoms, he thought, mustering for an attack. His eyes swept the shelves of books that had a look of neglect, and he thought of the forgotten knowledge they contained, the undisturbed passions, suspended lives and ecstasies lost to memory.

     "Don't worry, Father," Hannah said as she looked around for a blanket. "You have friends, and there are your patients. They will speak up on your behalf." But even as she said it, Hannah thought of how rich and powerful Lord Falconbridge was. A High Court judge would sooner heed him and wealthy men than farmers and village shopkeepers.

     "I shall ask Mrs. Keen to bring some tea." Hannah went to the bell pull by the dark fireplace, gave it three firm tugs. When she came back to her father's side, she searched for anything that might keep him warm, but found nothing. Musty furniture stood in ancient shadow, giving the room an eerie,
abandoned feel. Hannah took the one burning candle and lit a candelabra of six, bringing it closer to her father. The additional light did little to add warmth to the sepulchral atmosphere.

     As Hannah moved about this room that was not hers, taking over as if she were the lady of the manor, drawing heavy drapes against the rain, tugging the bell pull once more, examining the coal bucket and seeing if there were tinder for a fire, John Conroy marveled at his daughter's new self-assurance. Thirteen months ago she had left Bayfield a shy, quiet girl of eighteen, but she had returned a confident nineteen-year-old woman eager to tell stories of patients, fellow students, and professors. "It's a waste of time to educate a girl," friends and villagers had warned Dr. Conroy. "It makes them uppity with notions of reaching beyond their station. No man will want to marry her." John Conroy had turned a deaf ear. And look how he had been rewarded! A year's course in midwifery had gifted his daughter with a lifetime of wisdom and skills, or so it felt to a very proud father who had looked forward to sharing his medical practice with his daughter.

     Until now . . .

     
"Medical malpractice, professional malfeasance and criminal negligence."

     Words sharper than knives and deadlier than bullets. John Conroy felt his heart quiver beneath the assault. A body can take any punishment, he thought, but the soul is a vulnerable thing. He whispered, "Hannah, bring me my bag."

     She was suddenly at his side, searching his face, gently touching his wrist to feel his pulse. When she had left for London, her father had still been in good health. But when she had returned, Hannah had been shocked by the change. That was when she had learned the extremes to which he had gone in his obsession to find a prevention for childbed fever. On the evening of her return from London, with her luggage still crowding the parlor, her father had called from his small laboratory: "Hannah! Hannah, come quickly!" Lifting the hems of her skirts, she had hurried through the house to find her father bent over his microscope. "Take a look, Hannah. Tell me what thee sees."

     Because the room was small and crammed with a workbench, stools, a desk and boxes of records and supplies, Hannah had had to move carefully
so that her wide crinoline skirt did not knock anything over. She bent to the eyepiece. "I see microbiotes, Father."

     "Are they moving?"

     "Yes."

     He had removed the slide and replaced it with another. "Now look."

     She peered again through the eyepiece. "These are not moving."

     "The first is from a patient, Frank Miller at Bott's farm. He has a gangrenous wound. I collected pus from it and smeared some on my hands. I then washed my hands in the latest formulation."

     "Father! You have been experimenting on
yourself
?"

     "Watch, Hannah. Verify it for me."

     Using the remaining supply of matter harvested from Miller's wound, Dr. Conroy had smeared it on his hands and then scraped off a sample and placed it on a slide under the microscope. Hannah peered in and saw the sub-visible creatures squirming there. Conroy then washed his hands in a bowl filled with a strong-smelling solution, rinsed his hands in a bowl of clear water, filled a tiny pipette with the rinse water, dropped it on a slide and positioned it under the lens. "Now what does thee see?"

     Hannah looked. "They are not moving, Father."

     John Conroy murmured, "Praise His name." Then, with more animation: "Hannah, I believe I have found the formula at last. The cure that I have been searching for. I will go to London and present my findings to the learned men there."

     "But, Father, last time . . ." That day, two years ago, was burned painfully into Hannah's memory. She and her father had gone to London where he was to speak before the College of Physicians. Prior to his speech, they had taken a tour of Guy's Hospital where Hannah had seen doctors in frock coats smeared with blood and pus. These, she learned, were badges of a doctor's popularity. The filthier his coat meant the more patients he attended to. Hannah's father was of the radical and unpopular belief that such fluids, even when dry, possessed contagions that could be spread from patient to patient. Which was why Conroy advocated that a physician wash his hands before touching a patient, and even change into clean clothes on a daily basis.

     "No one knows what causes fevers," the gentle-spoken Quaker had said that day as he addressed the respected gathering of Britain's elite physicians. "No one knows why the human body burns where infection is present. But I believe . . ."

     He had gone on to describe to his learned audience his belief that sickness was the result of unseen beings invading the bloodstream. John Conroy had even invented a word for them: "microbiotes," from the Greek
mikro
, meaning very small, and
bios
, meaning life. Conroy believed that microbiotes secreted a poison that made a person sick.

     But his audience was not won over. One gentleman had shouted from the back of the auditorium, "It has been demonstrated time and again, sir, that fevers are the result of too much blood in the body, and that only by blood-letting can a fever be reduced."

     Conroy had countered with: "I have personally examined, under microscope, blood drops from healthy people and from those with fever. In the blood of the sick person I have seen white cells in greater preponderance than in the blood of a well person."

     "You mean greater
preposterousness
, do you not?" called a man from the front row, and everyone laughed. "White cells! Microbiotes! Are you sure you are not a novelist, sir, dishing up a fiction?"

     Hannah had been in the visitors' gallery watching as her father became the target of insults, mocking laughter and stamping feet until he was finally forced to step down, albeit it with solemn dignity.

     "Daughter, my bag," he said now. "I am not feeling well."

     Hannah brought his medical bag to him, and then she went to the door and opened it upon a deserted corridor. Closed doors beneath Tudor arches and two silent suits of armor were all she saw. Why had no one answered her ring? "Hello? May we please have a fire in here? It is terribly cold." She listened. Muffled voices—male, upset, authoritative—came from upstairs. Had the constable already arrived? Hannah could not believe how she and her father were being treated. He had come out in the rain for Lady Margaret.

     She returned to his side and brought the candelabra closer. Judging by his sudden pallor and the way he grimaced, she knew it was the pericarditis. Exposing himself to infection had caused a chronic inflammation of the
membrane around the heart. She opened his bag searched for the familiar vial. "Father, I cannot see your medicine."

     His head dropped back against the back of the chair. "I must have left it at home . . ." Closing his eyes, he listened to the rain beyond the windows, and felt the chill of the small library penetrate his coat and shirt to meet the pain that was building behind his breast bone. He felt as if he were in a vise, and he knew that, without the medicine, he would most likely not survive this attack. So he sent his thoughts to God, praying for guidance, for forgiveness and for peace.