The Dr Benjamin Bones Omnibus

by Emma Jameson

  “I’m sure it will.” Ben wasn’t concerned with disturbances from beyond the grave. But a cottage just off the high street? That was more worrisome. He wouldn’t miss Foss’s bitterness or the pub’s noise, but having his meals delivered to his room had permitted the isolation he craved. Today he’d done more—spoken more—than he had in several weeks; already, so much social exertion had strained him to the breaking point. Yet tomorrow, he was meant to start keeping house? Cooking for himself? Perhaps even seeing patients, if they were desperate enough to let a fellow invalid advise them?

  “Forgive me, but my legs hurt a great deal,” he lied. Actually, it was his head that throbbed, from pure aggravation. “Can we get on? Lady Juliet mentioned a maid in need….”

  “Yes, of course. Well, Mother, we’re off to the staff wing to sort out poor Dinah at last.” Once again Lady Juliet took the wheelchair by the handles, prompting Ben to clutch his doctor’s bag to his chest, just in case. To his relief, Belsham Manor’s staff resided on the ground level, in that long, unsightly arm that had been stitched onto the house’s hip about fifty years back. So there would be no grand staircase to endure, just one long carpeted hall.

  “I mentioned not wanting to prejudice you,” Lady Juliet said they approached what he assumed to be the women’s dormitory. “But my housekeeper, Mrs. Locke, may have other ideas, so let me give you the facts as I understand them. Our youngest maid, Dinah, has gotten in a few scrapes over the years. She’s only eighteen and comes from—well, not the best people, let’s leave it at that. Dinah’s bright and a good worker some days, flighty and irresponsible others. Over the summer she turned enigmatic, daydreaming and disappearing. I think she had a secret love, which is against the rules, but we’ve always turned a blind eye. At any rate, now Dinah’s taken to her bed. Mrs. Locke says she’s a skiving brat who’s abusing our good nature and should be discharged. I say something may truly be wrong with her. I won’t send her packing until illness is ruled out.”

  Belsham Manor’s staff dormitory was surprisingly agreeable; in fact, its common room was nicer than the one Ben had shared with other young doctors in medical school. Framed watercolors decorated the walls, and it boasted a small fireplace, bookshelf, and reading nook. Bowls of white chrysanthemums, as large and showy as those in Lady Victoria’s parlor, gave the recreation area a homelike touch. Just as Ben started to say so, a slim woman in a black uniform swept in. Catching sight of Ben and Lady Juliet, she seized the nearest bowl and advanced.

  “Jenny cut these flowers and scattered them about without my permission, ma’am. I’ll remove them at once.” White lace trim did nothing to lessen the severity of her uniform’s cut, which emphasized her long neck and narrow shoulders. Her gray hair was swept up flawlessly in two victory rolls, one curled above each temple. Judging by the woman’s scant makeup and ringless fingers, her hair was her lone vanity, at least of the physical variety.

  “I’ve told Jenny to cut what she likes. We have more than enough for every part of the house.” Lady Juliet let the words hang for a moment. “Please leave them, Mrs. Locke.”

  Sighing, the housekeeper turned her attention on Ben. “Ah! You must be the doctor. I do hope you can settle a difference of opinion between Lady Juliet and myself. I find when I am second-guessed on a large concern, I gradually lose authority, even on smallest matters.” Her eyes cut to the flowers: Exhibit A, the look seemed to say. “Belsham Manor is very dear to me. The restoration of order is my utmost priority.”

  There was nothing Ben could say to that but, “Where is the patient?”

  “Follow me.” Mrs. Locke led them into another long chamber with only one window and a double row of iron-framed single beds. In the last one, a figure huddled beneath a patched blanket.

  “Dinah!” Mrs. Locke called loudly, as if addressing a deaf pensioner. “We’ve fetched a doctor to winkle out what ails you. I see in the meantime you helped yourself to Martha’s bed linens.”

  A muffled voice issued from beneath the covers. “I don’t need a doctor. I’ll be back on my feet tomorrow, I swear it. And Martha won’t mind that I borrowed her blanket. I’m cold.”

  “I find it quite warm in here.” Flashing Ben a theatrical look—watch this—Mrs. Locke strode to the bed, grasped the covers with both hands, and pulled them off Dinah like a magician yanking off a tablecloth. Fully clothed in a maid’s uniform, stockings, shoes, and sweater, the girl sat up with a strangled cry. For a few seconds there was a tug-of-war for the blanket, Mrs. Locke pulling hard, Dinah clinging desperately. Then she saw Lady Juliet and let go.

  “Ma’am! I’m sorry. I got dressed this morning and tried to get up, but I just couldn’t.” Whey-faced with ginger hair and a smattering of freckles, Dinah sounded well enough, but her pale eyes darted from side to side, settling on nothing

  “Got dressed this morning?” Mrs. Locke tutted. “You were still in your nightclothes when I saw you at ten o’clock. And look—you made it out-of-doors from the state of those lace-ups. Tracked mud on your sheets, too. Dinah, perhaps you don’t realize it, but every gainfully employed person can think of more diverting things to do than earn an honest wage. The temptation toward idleness and sloth is universal. Yet most of us subvert such impulses in service of the greater good. You, as I am sure even Lady Juliet sees, are incapable of taming your baser nature. May the good Lord help England if our soldiers prove as undisciplined as our young women.” She turned to Lady Juliet. “Madam.” She pronounced the excessively formal term like an insult. “I really must insist Dinah be discharged. She should leave the premises at once. Furthermore, I have no intention of writing her a character.”

  “Mrs. Locke, please. You’re employed by Lady Victoria, not Queen Victoria.” Lady Juliet approached the maid’s bedside. “Dinah. Whatever we decide, this won’t end with you being thrown into some Dickensian gutter, I promise. You’ve said you’re ill. I’ve brought Dr. Bones. Allow him to—”

  “Don’t need a doctor,” Dinah insisted. Swinging her legs off the bed in an apparent attempt to prove it, she winced, sucking in her breath.

  “I’d like to speak with Dinah,” Ben told Lady Juliet.

  “Please, examine her with my compliments.” Mrs. Locke folded her arms across her chest, smiling tightly. “I look forward to your diagnosis.”

  “I meant I’d like to speak with Dinah alone.” Ben spoke as if he wore his white coat, turning anxious relatives away from the operating theater. It was a tone that said Mere mortals are unwelcome. Coupled with an unblinking stare, his healer’s hauteur vanquished Mrs. Locke’s confidence.

  “Very well,” the housekeeper said. “The verdict will be the same whether I witness it or not. I’ll wait for you in the staff parlor.”

  “We both will. And we’ll close the adjoining door for privacy,” Lady Juliet told Dinah reassuringly. “Remember, Dr. Bones is here to help you. He’s taken an oath, like all physicians, to do you no harm. Whatever the trouble is, tell him the truth.”

  Once the footsteps of Lady Juliet and Mrs. Locke receded down the corridor, Ben placed his bag on the floor and rolled to the girl’s bedside. This close, her face glowed with perspiration. Was she running a fever? Or just overheated after hiding her sweater and muddy shoes beneath that patched blanket?

  “So. Dinah. How long have you felt ill?”

  “Since last night, sir.”

  “Any pain?”

  “No. Well—yes. A little. In my head, sir.”

  “Fever or chills?”

  “No. I mean, yes. I mean… I’m not sure, sir.” As she spoke, she stared at the opposite wall, as if evading Ben’s gaze might make him give up and go away.

  “I see. Well, it’s true what Lady Juliet said, you know. When I became a physician, I took the Hippocratic oath. ‘I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.’ I have to abide by that oath.”

  She said nothing.

  “Dinah, do you want to st
ay on at Belsham Manor?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Have you any family to turn to, should you lose this position?”

  “No sir.”

  “Well, that settles it. I’ll be careful not to report anything to Lady Juliet that will result in you being put out. May I…?” He reached out.

  She flinched. Then, seemingly overriding her instincts by force of will, Dinah allowed Ben to feel her forehead. The girl was a little warmer than being fully clothed beneath a blanket could account for. Not entirely skiving, at least.

  “It seems you have a touch of fever. Now I need to examine you. I’ll turn my back so you can disrobe to your undergarments. The exam will be swift and professional, I promise.”

  “I can’t. I… er… my other clothes are in the wash, sir.”

  “Come now.” Aware that females from rural areas could sometimes be excessively modest, Ben maneuvered his chair to the wooden chest by the bed’s footboard. “I happen to know a housekeeper as, shall we say, rigorous as Mrs. Locke would never gather up every stitch of clothing to wash all at once. Risking an indecent staff isn’t in her nature. Surely you have—” He stopped. Except for a bible and the Book of Common Prayer, Dinah’s chest was empty. No spare uniform, stockings, nightgowns, undergarments. Not even a handkerchief.

  Dinah kept her eyes on the opposite wall. Slowly, twin spots of pink blossomed on her milk-white cheeks.

  As Ben considered what tack to try next, a familiar scent teased his nostrils. It reminded him of—what? Home?

  No, but someplace like home, someplace he’d almost forgotten during those long, dismal days at the Sheared Sheep. Leaning closer to the open chest, he took a deep breath but got nothing but mothball residue.

  “Right. Let me think,” he muttered. It was one of his more annoying habits, speaking aloud when a puzzle gnawed at his brain. “Only one door out of the dormitory, and that leads to the sitting room. From there you’d have to pass through the kitchen—always busy—and then the dining room and parlor. Even if you felt strong enough to walk that far, someone would have seen you. So....” He rolled to the nearest window. The black and white tiles beneath it were spotless. “Not this one. Must be the other one.”

  “Sir, I only got dressed because I want to work, I swear it,” Dinah quavered. “Please tell Mrs. Locke I’m feverish. She’ll listen to you.”

  Ben was already at the window opposite Dinah’s bed. As he expected, a smear of mud marred one tile. Not the brown mud of Birdswing’s rutted roads, which he’d bounced over all the way to Belsham Manor. Rich black soil from a well-composted garden, matching the dirt on the soles of her shoes.

  Ben tried to open the window from his wheelchair, but the sash was positioned too high. “Nothing for it.” Gripping the sill with both hands, he hauled himself to his feet. After the day’s jostling, his left knee surprised him, not with a thunderbolt of pain, but only moderate throbbing. From his right, just a mild ache as he balanced his weight on that foot. Sticking his head out the window, the first thing he saw was a cultivated strip of earth. A thorny rose bush, still covered in late blooms, with a pile of fallen leaves at its base. Though far from a gardener, Ben was observant by nature—a tendency honed to razor-precision by his medical training. It was too early for winter precautions. Besides, none of the other rose bushes along the wall had fresh mounds of leaves beneath their lower branches.

  He remained standing for what felt like a very long time, weighing the possibilities in his mind. Then he eased back into his wheelchair, closed the window, and returned to Dinah’s bedside. The pink spots had faded, leaving her face white again—too white. Mrs. Locke and even Lady Juliet had probably put down such pallor to fear, but he should have known better. Just as he should have recognized the faint, coppery scent of blood the moment his nose detected it.

  “Dinah, did you cut yourself?” The question was absurd, but he had to start somewhere.

  “No sir.”

  “One corner of your sheet’s untucked. Did you vomit? Try to change the sheets yourself rather than ask for help?”

  “Y-yes sir.”

  “Shift to one side—no, don’t try to stand, just shift. Let me help you.” As the girl slid over reluctantly, biting her lower lip, Ben made as if he intended to tuck the unmade corner beneath the mattress. Instead, he pulled it back, revealing a wide pink stain beneath the sheet. The mattress had been flipped, leaving the bloodiest side face down. But Dinah had bled so much, the odor of blood wafted up from below, and even the mattress’s underside had been discolored.

  Making a soft sound, Dinah covered her face.

  “Please remember. I’m a physician. Nothing under the sun is new to me.” That wasn’t true, not yet, but Ben spoke to his patients as if it were. They needed to believe at least one person didn’t judge them. Besides, although circumstances could be startling, even shocking, human misery was all too similar, no matter the cause. “When did you give birth?”

  “T-two days ago.”

  “Obviously you managed to conceal the pregnancy from your employers. How?”

  “Ate as little as possible. Wore a corset. Moaned about getting fat. It wasn’t hard.” Wiping her eyes, Dinah gave a determined sniff, as if silently vowing not to weep. “No one here cares about me, or even sees me. Not really.”

  “If that were true, Mrs. Locke would have been permitted to discharge you, and I’d be having my tea at the Sheared Sheep. Dinah.” Despite his urgency, he worked hard to radiate calm. “What did you do with the baby?”

  “When the pains started that morning, I begged off work by trading with another maid. I was meant to be gone for an hour. I was gone all day. That got Mrs. Locke’s nose out of joint, and after going through it alone inside Mr. Cranford’s old granary, I couldn’t come up with a story. All I wanted to do was sleep. But I couldn’t, not when I kept thinking—”

  “Dinah.” He squeezed her hand. “What did you do with the baby? Is it still inside the granary?”

  “Lord, no! He’d freeze to death. I wrapped him up in rags pinched from the kitchen and crept down an alley—the one between Miller’s Sundries and St. Mark’s,” she said, voice shaking. “People kept passing by. I hurt, I hurt so much, and I was so thirsty. I couldn’t wait no longer, so I left him by the delivery door at Miller’s. I hated doing it,” she cried as if Ben had reproached her. “Every time I closed my eyes, I pictured him blue and still. Dead with a dumb slut for a mother. But in the morning it was all over the village—a foundling baby. A living baby,” she sniffed, shaking her head as if searching for words to express her gratitude. “Carried by Mr. Miller’s clerk to the church and taken into the vicarage for now.”

  “So it was bloodstained clothes you buried under that rose bush.” Ben’s shoulders sagged in relief. “When did you hemorrhage?”

  “What?”

  “Bleed, when did you start to bleed?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Are you going to tell Mrs. Locke? She’ll put me out, and you swore an oath....”

  “Did any of the plac—tissue come along with the blood?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must know. It’s important.”

  “But will you tell her?” The girl’s eyes were wild, the only color in her moonlike face. “If you’re going to tell her, it doesn’t matter!”

  “It does.” Ben kept a firm grip on her hand as she tried to pull away. “If you don’t receive proper care, your life may be in danger. You could die. I’m not trying to frighten you, Dinah,” he added as she began trembling all over. “I’m going to help you. Now tell me everything, and I promise you’ll come to no harm.”

  * * *

  “And so,” Ben concluded, employing the tone he used when giving orders to nurses, “Dinah will need to be conveyed to St. Barnabas’s hospital for a procedure. It’s called a D&C, or dilation and curettage, which means—”

  “Dr. Bones, Lady Juliet and I are both married women,” Mrs. Locke said severely. The three of them were conf
erring in the staff sitting room, which had been locked against interruptions. Lady Juliet had taken a chair near the cold fireplace, watching Ben’s face as he spoke. Mrs. Locke had remained standing, arms folded across her nonexistent bosom, eyes fixed on a point just above Ben’s left ear. “You needn’t explain such terms to us as if we were innocent young girls. Indeed, one suspects this house contains no such creatures.”

  “Yes. Well. At any rate, Dinah will likely be kept overnight for observation, then allowed to return home. I see no reason why she can’t resume light duties in a day or so.”

  “No reason?” Mrs. Locke let out a bark of incredulous laughter. “She will never return to Belsham Manor. Indeed, she’ll never show her face in Birdswing again, not after this becomes known.”

  “Where would you have her go, Mrs. Locke?” Lady Juliet asked. “She has no family to speak of, and no skills beyond what we’ve taught her. How do you propose she keep from starving?”

  “She has one skill, it seems, that we certainly did not teach her. Perhaps she can ply that trade like so many women before her.” Mrs. Locke’s smile faded as Lady Juliet rose, her broad, sunburned face becoming masklike. “Oh, very well, perhaps that was harsh. But there’s no need to turn Dinah’s situation, which she brought entirely upon herself, into a paperback melodrama. We’re a country at war. She has a strong back, and the government needs women to work the farms and bring in the harvest while the men are away. She can become a Land Girl.”

  “Brought entirely upon herself?” Lady Juliet’s question had a dangerous ring to it. “What of the man? Did he play no role?”

  “Whatever role he played, he’ll soon be in France, if he isn’t already. And his culpability is not our affair,” Mrs. Locke said. “Men are men, as I am sure even Dr. Bones would readily agree. The woman who fails to see that is no better than a child playing with matches. But enough of this hand-wringing! We knew Dinah was lazy. We suspected she was a liar. Now we see she is immoral, and ladies of our good character cannot allow her to poison this house. I couldn’t possibly stand by and permit such a thing.”