The Art of Dying

by Ambrose Parry

  Nora swallowed repeatedly as though the reminiscence was causing her throat to dry again. She took a sip from her cup.

  ‘She got into the bed beside me.’

  ‘You must have been delirious,’ argued Mhairi. ‘No one in their right mind would get into bed beside you.’

  ‘It happened,’ Nora insisted. ‘I felt her hands caress my face and she spoke to me.’

  ‘You were probably full of laudanum, right enough. But it revealed your darkest desires, didn’t it?’

  With that, Mhairi turned away, having had her fun.

  ‘What did she say?’ Sarah asked, ignoring the others.

  ‘That I should sleep, that it would soon be over. Something like that but repeated over and over.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I remember footsteps in the corridor. I think someone else was coming along. She jumped out of the bed good and quick after that. Then I fell asleep.’

  ‘That is most peculiar,’ Sarah said.

  Nora looked urgently at her.

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you? Same as the rest.’ She was becoming agitated. ‘She gave me something to drink, something to make me sleep, and then climbed into bed alongside me and I’m the one said to have lost my reason.’

  ‘I do believe you,’ Sarah assured her. ‘But what I fail to understand is why? Why would anyone do such a thing?’

  Nora spoke in barely a whisper.

  ‘I think she meant to kill me.’

  FIFTY

  aven was still feeling aggrieved by the time he reached Albany Street; being tasked with such a menial errand had done nothing to improve his black mood. However, when Archie himself answered the door, he realised his error. The chloroform was merely a pretext. It was Raven that he wanted to see.

  ‘I’m so grateful you have come,’ he said. ‘There is something I would like to discuss with you.’

  Archie ushered Raven into a small study opposite the parlour. He accepted the bottle of chloroform and placed it on top of his desk, then indicated that his guest should sit. Archie remained standing, albeit restively, in front of the fire. Raven noticed that he was unshaven, coarse bristles speckling his chin. He looked wan, and possibly thinner than the last time he had seen him.

  He didn’t speak for a few moments, long enough for Raven to become concerned that the subject of their discussion was going to be his comforting Sarah when she had learned of Mrs Glassford’s death. His exchange with Quinton had unsettled him. Was it possible that Quinton had spoken to Archie about his disquiet at finding them together in an embrace? Or had his words merely been intended as a warning?

  Obviously, Archie did not represent any kind of physical threat – pistols at dawn were unlikely – but Raven was appalled to think of Archie being wounded by a twisted account of his wife taking solace in another man’s arms.

  ‘I don’t know how to begin,’ Archie said finally.

  Raven swallowed. ‘Take your time,’ he said, though his discomfort was becoming acute.

  ‘There’s the rub. Time is not something I can afford. I think that the end is approaching rather faster than I had anticipated.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘My disease is advancing. I am getting weaker.’ He spoke firmly and with conviction, dispassionately stating the facts of the matter. He did not seem to be inviting contradiction, was not seeking the false reassurance that a contrary opinion would bring.

  ‘I know that everyone feigns optimism for my sake. I know that no one wants to admit that all hope is exhausted, but it is quite evident that all that can be done for me has been done.’

  He paused for a moment, allowing Raven to absorb what had been said.

  ‘I have endured three painful operations which have brought me some relief, but the symptoms always return. There is a firmness at the back of my tongue that extends into my throat, and the nodes in my neck are hard and immobile. There can be little doubt about what that means. I know I am not long for this world, and I have accepted it, but I have one lingering concern. I have no wish to become a burden to Sarah.’

  Archie looked directly at Raven in a way that made him feel distinctly ill at ease. There was another pause.

  ‘We are both medical men,’ Archie continued. ‘We know how it is likely to go for me now. Speaking and eating will become increasingly difficult. The pain will worsen. Death will come slowly. I will succumb as a result of starvation, suffocation, or the tumour will erode into an artery and I will bleed to death. Unquenchable haemorrhage. You know how that will be. What that will look like.’

  Raven could well imagine. As an obstetrician he was no stranger to sudden and dramatic blood loss but the prospect of exsanguination from the mouth, blood filling the throat, perhaps drowning in the stuff, added a uniquely horrific dimension.

  ‘I would not have Sarah witness such a thing.’

  ‘No. Of course not,’ Raven said.

  ‘I want to be able to talk, to eat, to kiss my wife, to laugh and to enjoy the time I have left as much as I can. But when that is no longer possible … I see no point in prolonging the inevitable.’

  An image of Archie kissing Sarah was suddenly all that Raven could see, and he cursed himself for his shallow selfishness. A dying man was taking him into his confidence, and yet he could not fully banish his own desires.

  ‘That is why I hope I can count on your assistance.’

  ‘Assistance? With what?’

  Their eyes locked, the intensity of Archie’s gaze conveying the gravity of his request.

  ‘I do not wish to wait helplessly for the end.’

  Raven’s mouth dried. He tried to grasp what Archie meant, his mind struggling to acknowledge what was being said. Was he asking Raven to ease his passing, smooth his pathway to the grave, or was he suggesting something more deliberate, something anticipatory? Was this man, his rival for Sarah’s affections, asking Raven to kill him? Coming so soon after his intervention with the dying Alec, it was as though the gods were toying with him. His facetious thought about a duel at dawn returned to mock him, then to make matters worse, propelled him back to Berlin.

  He saw the pistol aimed at his head, loaded quicker than he could have anticipated. He saw the spray of blood hit the wall as he opened the gunman’s throat. He had cheated death then by taking a life, using a surgeon’s blade designed for acts of mercy. Was there some perverse price to be paid for evading his destiny in that alleyway? Was he now fated to end lives rather than to save them?

  I do not wish to wait helplessly for the end.

  Sleep now, Alec.

  ‘I understand you might wish to think about it,’ Archie said, interrupting Raven’s tormenting thoughts. ‘How best it might be achieved.’

  Archie glanced towards the bottle of chloroform. Or at least Raven thought that he did. He was beginning to feel dizzy, an unpleasant vertigo settling upon him, as though he had been inhaling the stuff himself.

  Archie swallowed.

  ‘That is not all. I have a further request.’

  Raven reasoned that nothing he might ask for now could possibly trump what had been asked for already, but was wary of making assumptions.

  ‘After I am gone, I will need someone to look after Sarah. I have seen to it that she will be provided for financially, but there are things she will need other than money. She is a strong woman, a remarkable woman, but I am under no illusions about how difficult life will be for her. She will need a man’s protection.’

  Raven thought that Sarah may well disagree with this statement.

  ‘What about the child?’ he asked, thinking it best that everything be brought out into the open.

  ‘She told you?’

  ‘No. My deduction.’

  Archie smiled. ‘Of course. It is after all your area of expertise and you have been spending a considerable amount of time with my wife.’

  Raven wondered if there was a barb within this remark but decided against seeking clarification.

 
‘If you know that, then you will understand why I am so concerned. To leave her to bring up a child alone: it pains me to think about it, almost as much as it pains me to think about all that I will miss. Will you help her?’

  ‘To raise your child?’ Raven asked. The words came out before he could censor himself.

  ‘To assist her, advise her. To ensure she is not left alone.’

  He looked at Raven unflinchingly, as though he had an unassailable right to make these demands of a man he barely knew.

  ‘I got to have her just a little while. I am grateful, so very grateful for that much. But I am sure I will miss the best of Sarah. She will achieve remarkable things if she has the help of her friends.

  ‘I would not ask any of this if I did not know how much you cared for her already. And though I have not known you long, I have the confidence that you are a good man because of how much she cares for you.’

  Raven bowed his head. He did not feel worthy of Sarah’s care or Archie’s confidence.

  ‘You are wrong about me, Archie. I am not a good man. If I was, we would not be having this conversation.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that if I was a good man and not the coward that I am, Sarah would be my wife, not yours.’

  ‘What were you afraid of? What stood in your way?’

  ‘I feared for my position, my status were I to marry a housemaid. It seemed important at the time.’

  The folly of it all seemed so stark now that he had admitted it.

  ‘You deserved her more, Archie, and you deserve far longer with her. You were the better man. The stronger man.’

  Archie’s expression softened and he put a hand on Raven’s shoulder.

  ‘Perhaps there are truths that you can only tell a dying man.’

  ‘I apologise if I was indiscreet,’ Raven said, his sense of foolishness deepening.

  ‘You miss my meaning. The consolation of my plight is the clarity it affords, to see what is truly important and to help others see it. We make different decisions when we know life is short. And yet life is always short, for all of us.’

  Raven felt dazed as Archie accompanied him to the door. He could not fathom how things had become so complicated so quickly. He had only been back in Edinburgh a matter of weeks.

  ‘Think about what I have said,’ were Archie’s parting words.

  Raven considered them unnecessary. It was unlikely he would be able to think about anything else.

  FIFTY-ONE

  t was beginning to get dark as Sarah walked towards Princes Street, the failing light hastening her stride. She had spent longer than she intended at the Infirmary. It was her policy never to be out alone after nightfall, and though she would likely be home before the lamplighter appeared on Albany Street, she did not want Archie to worry.

  Fear was prominent in her mind, though. She was wary of what might lurk in each close and alley that she passed, imagined horrors that grew all the more frightening as the sun set. She thought of Nora’s fear too, that look of terror revisited as she recounted her story.

  Mhairi had attributed it all to delirium, possibly an effect of the medicine Nora had been given. However, delirium by its very nature was transient, and the phantoms it summoned were as quickly dismissed. Sarah knew from her own experience that though demons could sometimes assail her in the dead of night, the fear she felt was dispelled by morning, its source instantly forgotten. The traumatic nature of the event Nora had described was evident in her retelling of it. That she still felt such fear all this time later suggested that it was born of something tangible.

  But equally, Sarah could understand Mhairi’s scorn. She knew that the night nurses could be a law unto themselves. Raven had said as much on numerous occasions – poorly paid drudges who helped themselves to the laudanum on occasion and rested their weary bones in empty beds. But what would make anyone get in beside one of the patients? Thinking about some of the poor souls she had encountered in Dr Simpson’s waiting room, Sarah couldn’t imagine ever being tempted to do such a thing.

  With frustration she realised that, despite this new information, she was still stuck with Raven’s seemingly intractable questions. The symptoms Nora had experienced did not match the ones described in any of Raven’s cases, but that was a mere detail in comparison with the equally obstinate issue of motive. Was Mary Dempster deliberately killing people? And if so, why?

  As she approached the High Street, she saw that her route across to the North Bridge was obstructed by an overturned dray. The wagon had shed its load of beer barrels and was attracting a sizeable crowd. As she skirted round the back of the Tron Kirk, she sifted once again through the reasons people usually had for killing one another – greed, lust, envy, anger, vengeance, power – but none of them seemed to apply. Unless they applied in some obscure way that she could not see. How did killing her patients, and latterly those who employed her, profit or satisfy Mary Dempster?

  This is not like some scheming wife poisoning her rich husband so that she might live off the inheritance, Raven had said.

  As Sarah marched up the High Street, she passed the Scotsman newspaper office and the sight triggered another memory, something that Archie had said on the very day Raven had returned to Queen Street. He was reading an article about four members of the same family who had died within two weeks of each other.

  I wonder who’s to inherit … I’d be checking their pockets for arsenic.

  Archie had said it in jest but might have spoken more truth than he realised.

  FIFTY-TWO

  t is sometimes a source of anger and sometimes of amusement that for much of my adult life I have been surrounded by doctors who considered themselves above me. They had no notion of how far I was always above them.

  Doctors flatter themselves when they talk of holding the power of life and death over a patient. By their rationale, any child at the table holds the power of life and death if she so much as lifts the knife from her plate. The knife, the scalpel, and indeed the medicine, is merely an instrument. Power lies not in the object itself, nor even in the hand that holds it. Power resides in the will to use it: not in the knowledge that one has the means of taking a life, but the knowledge that one has the fortitude to do so.

  Nobody truly holds the power of life and death if they have only exercised it in the service of the former.

  I must stress that I bore Mr Robertson, the dock-labourer, no ill-will. Indeed, I bore no ill-will to many of the patients who died at my hand: in certain instances, I wished only to provide for them an easeful death, sparing them an agonising end or what I could see would be a squalid future. Others were casualties of my experimentation, a means to an end. In many instances I had no feelings towards them one way or the other, much as I felt towards the dog I poisoned with arsenic. It was merely the means by which I sought to hurt Mrs Dempster.

  I most certainly felt ill-will towards her, an enmity that did not diminish in accordance with my seeing less of her.

  I recall how, in a moment of forgetting myself, I spoke to a patient from Glasgow in my own voice, rather than the one she had beaten into me. I was initially alarmed to realise that I had done so in front of a doctor, and expected some form of rebuke, but none was forthcoming. It became clear that nobody was judging me for it. It had simply been another exercise in Mrs Dempster bending me to her will.

  As I had once vowed, I began to speak as I pleased when I was at work. This in turn led to me sometimes forgetting myself before Mrs Dempster, but her ire only increased my determination not to let her eradicate the person I perceived myself to be. And nor did I let her actions go unanswered.

  I saw to it thereafter that when she beat me, one of her animals died. I was patient in my retribution, lest she too quickly understand the correlation between the two events.

  Why did I not simply kill Mrs Dempster, you may well ask, and the answer lies partly in what I have just told you. Back then I had the means but not the fortitude. Drugg
ing some pathetic specimen in the hospital was a different prospect to poisoning a robustly healthy woman in her own home, particularly one who loomed so large in my perception. However, I was growing stronger all the time.

  I was paid a little more by this time but chose to continue living at the house in Canonmills. I had seen the kinds of low places my fellow nurses inhabited, as well as the little they could afford to eat, and decided that living with the Dempsters was preferable. It must also be acknowledged that I had unfinished business in that house.

  Martha was still living there too, though finally, to Mrs Dempster’s delight, there was a healthy and indeed handsome prospect of that changing. Mrs Dempster would always talk about her real daughter as though she was quite the beauty, but betrayed her true perception in the surprise she showed in having secured for her a match. It goes without saying that she had made no such efforts on my behalf.

  I knew what fair looked like in a girl, having seen it in my real sister, Ellie. It had always been clear that she would be a beauty, and at the Institute it was already becoming apparent that she would use this to find favour. I had not seen Ellie in years. She was ‘adopted’ too, though Mrs Dempster took delight in dropping hints that she had caused trouble for her new family and was likely to be put out as a result.

  Martha was as plain as me, if not plainer, and certainly a good deal plumper. Nor was she as clever as me, but nonetheless, all of Mrs Dempster’s efforts and aspirations were coming to fruition. Her daughter was engaged to be married to a gentleman by the name of Colin Flett, who worked for the General Steam Navigation Company in Leith.

  He had been invited to the house for dinner some months before because he was a client of Mr Dempster at the bank. That was when he started to take an interest in Martha, an interest she heartily reciprocated (though not as heartily as her mother).

  I thought him handsome. I liked the sound of his voice, the stories he told. His accent was unusual. I suspected it had been altered by living in all manner of different places. He was from Orkney originally, and told us his family had always had an association with the sea. Through his job with the shipping company he had travelled many times to London, to Dublin, to Amsterdam and even to New York. He was a man shaped by travel and by many and varied experiences. Calm and knowledgeable, gentle and wise: the opposite of my father in so many ways. He was ten years older than Martha, a man who had seen his fill of the world and was now ready to take a wife and start a family. Marriage was proposed, and Mrs Dempster was beside herself with joy. One could say all her ships were coming in.