‘She needs burr holes,’ Freddy said shortly. ‘To reduce the pressure. I said as much and that — he launched into that nonsense. Felix, I cannot do this operation. I am sorry, but I cannot. It has never been my field of endeavour. We must find another surgeon, quickly, who has experience of the brain.’
‘Who would you suggest?’ Felix was still standing in the middle of the room, making no attempt to come to Amy’s side, but they could all feel the tension in him and the control he was maintaining as powerfully as though they were exercising it themselves.
‘Well, there is Grandfather,’ Freddy said. ‘He was a pupil of Charles Bell, you know. He gained much knowledge of brain and nerve afflictions from him. Especially when my grandmother had her illness — the one of which she died. She had suffered a similar injury you see. He has gained much experience in this work over the years —’
‘No!’ Again Fenton’s voice rose above theirs and now he sounded hysterical. ‘That man shall never touch my sister! He will kill her as well as rob her, he will get his own back on me by injuring her, and it shall not be allowed and —’
Felix turned now, his square stocky body making one swift movement.
‘Lucas, be quiet. You have done enough damage already. I do not know what happened here tonight but I have heard enough to make me suspect you are at the heart of it all. Make no more mischief and keep your mouth shut. You hear me?’
‘He’ll kill her, you fool, that Lackland man will kill her — he hates us and me especially and —’
It seemed to Freddy that Felix moved slowly, almost lazily, as he raised his arm and with one smooth movement bunched his hand and brought it round towards Fenton’s face. It was not until he heard the crunch as Felix’s fist made contact with the other man’s jaw, and saw the way his head snapped back and his mouth fell open with shock that he realized just how much power Felix had put behind that blow; and Fenton crumpled and sat down and began to whimper softly, holding both hands to his face and rocking his body a little, like a frightened child.
Felix turned his head and looked at Freddy. ‘Is she fit to be moved?’
‘No. I am sorry, but I think no. It is a matter of— urgency now.’
Felix nodded, his face as inscrutable as ever. ‘Then we had better send a messenger at once to Gower Street, to bring the old man. I will be glad if you will go, Freddy. He will come for you. Tell him —
For the first time his voice cracked and he lookeddown at the silent Amy on her couch. ‘Tell him it is important, please, Freddy. Dreadfully important —’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Abel had been feeling less than well all day. It had been damp heavy weather, with the sun seeming to steam sullenly behind the clouds which filled the May skies, and this, he told himself, was the cause of the way he felt. Certainly the day had been effortful, seeming to drag on his feet as he made his way from ward to ward and from operating theatre to outpatient waiting-rooms. His accompanying students and nurses had seemed aware of his lassitude and been solicitous and helpful and this had infuriated him, making him so irascible that he shouted at students and snarled at nurses and made them sullen and slow. All of which was added to the effortful feeling with which he was filled; and so the afternoon had crept miserably to its end.
Altogether a disagreeable day and now he stretched his legs across the red turkey carpet before the drawing-room fire and glowered at his slippered feet. Across the hearth Maria smiled at him and he scowled back, but it did not matter. She had, with that brief smile, reaffirmed her care for him, told him that whatever happened at Nellie’s, here in Gower Street all was peaceful and happy and always would be, while he with his scowl had told her that he knew of her care and needed it and was grateful for it and loved her too, in his fashion.
In the fashion of these years, that was. He stared down at his feet again, his face set in hard lines. Damn that chit of a girl and her unpleasant brother! Until she had arrived in his house, had stood there with her bonnet hanging about her slender throat by its strings, had smiled at him with those long-lashed eyes of hers, and bounced those coarse curls at him, he had managed not to think of Lilith Lucas for a long time. Not really think of her with any clarity, that is, for there were few days when some whisper of a memory of his first and most violent love did not come creeping tendril-like into his mind. But after seeing that girl the memories had been sharper, more urgent and much more painful. He had been able to see Lilith’s face, to see it clearly with all its vivacity and loveliness as well as all its hidden cruelty and its casual glances full of invitation and laughter, but no love or real feeling.
He moved awkwardly in his chair and felt the heaviness that had been in his chest all day thicken and press outwards, making his left shoulder ache, and he tried to take a deep breath and muttered irritably as a pain shot through him.
Maria looked up, apparently as tranquil as she always was, but with watchful eyes. ‘Are you well, my dear? Perhaps you should go to bed and I will bring you some hot —’
‘Maria, you are behaving like a governess again! I do not want any of your pap and well you know it —’
‘Well, old habits die hard. I was a governess long enough, after all. If you do not wish to take anything, well enough. But you look tired, my dear, and I think are less well than you will admit. And even Abel Lackland is a man, like others, and in need of care sometimes.’ She bent her head again over her sewing and he looked at her smooth dark hair and thought confusedly, ‘Good soul — best of all of them. Good soul —’ And then moved awkwardly again, angrily wondering what megrim had entered into him tonight for, just for one fraction of a second, a brief memory of Dorothea, his first wife, had come swimming into his mind, and he had not thought about her for years. He must be reaching his dotage to slide into such ancient memories so fast. He was much too young for that — he knew men ten years older than he, at eighty-seven, who were not so mawkish.
Seventy-seven. It was odd to be seventy-seven, he thought, and looked into the fire. It seemed so short a time since he had been brought to this house, a scrawny hungry scrap of a creature, thick with dirt and stinking of the gutters, to stand here in this very room before this very fireplace and be stared at by the assembled company of well-dressed men and women, and that horse-faced hateful Charlotte and her timid stupid daughter, Dorothea —
Again he stirred and looked across at Maria. ‘Am I wrong?’ he asked her sharply. ‘You would not say, one way or the other, on this issue. Am I wrong?’
She looked up at him and after a moment set her work down on her lap.
‘The Will, you mean? I wondered when you would agree to speak of it. Are you wrong? I cannot say, Abel. I do not know why you decided as you did, you see. If you can explain that to me, then perhaps I can help.’
He stared back at her, and frowned. Even after twenty-seven years as his wife there were things about him she did not know, could never know. How could he ever tell her, with her smooth dark head and her serene round face and capable hands, of Lilith who had danced and laughed and made him love her so agonizingly and then derided him and hurt him so? How could he ever explain to her how sick he had been made at the money she had and the way she had obtained it? How could she ever help him deal with the pain of that?
‘It does not matter, after all,’ he said after a moment and returned his attention to the fire. And she looked at him with her eyes quite clear of any expression and then nodded her head and returned to her sewing; and if she was hurt or offended by his brusqueness she did not show it, any more than she ever showed any of her feelings.
The silence sank into them again, interrupted by the faint crackle of the fire and the distant sound of clopping hooves from the dark street below; so that when the cab came rattling to a halt outside their door and someone ran up the steps in great haste they were both very aware of the fact and lifted their heads to listen. And then, the door-bell pealed, and a few moments later Freddy appeared at the drawing-room door.
‘My dear boy
,’ Maria said equably. ‘I collect this is not a social call, but it is good to see you none the less.’
‘Thank you, Grandmamma Maria.’ Freddy was clearly very abstracted and his eyes were fixed on Abel. ‘Grandpapa, I would not disturb you for the world, as well you know. I have refused to call you many times when you were needed. But this is important.’
‘Well?’ The old man looked up at him and would have smiled had it been in his nature to display such warmth, for he had a great affection for this square red-headed man who was so unlike him to look at, yet so very much a man of his own stamp.
‘A fractured skull. There is clearly pressure building up, so there must be continued bleeding. The neck is rigid and there is spasm of the right arm and hand. The eyes show the signs, also, with a fixed unresponsive pupil.’
Abel was getting to his feet, slowly, for every movement seemed hampered by the heaviness of his chest. ‘Where is the fracture?’
‘The surface injury is at the occuput. However, I suspect some movement of blood to the left hemisphere —’
‘Aye. The right hand you say. Yes. Well, we had best get there at once. Is the cab waiting? Good. Don’t wait up Maria. I daresay I shall sleep at the hospital when all is done —’
‘Not at the hospital, Grandpapa.’
‘Eh? Not the hospital? Where then?’
There was a short pause, and then Freddy said deliberately, ‘The Royalty Theatre in Dean Street. The patient is in her dressing-room there. She is Amy Lucas.’
Abel stood at the door of the dressing-room with his hands thrust deeply into his coat pockets and stared at them all, and they stared back. They saw a tall spare man with a face as hard and brown as a rock and cut into deep crevasses from nose to mouth; and he saw a tatterdemalion group of actors, clustering round a couch upon which lay a girl in a white dress, her dark hair curling on the pillow and her face white and expressionless above her hardly moving breasts as she took shallow jerky little breaths.
Again time seemed to slip sideways and backwards, and he was a boy again, a frightened apothecary’s apprentice seeing a girl on a couch in a green-room, writhing in pain and crying; but this one was still, and now he remembered other dressing-rooms and other green-rooms, and he pushed the thought away and moved forwards, very deliberately. When he moved so the heaviness in his chest seemed to be less, and no one noticed that he was awkward in his movements. Deep in his surgeon’s mind he knew he was far from well; that he ought to be a patient in another doctor’s care — Freddy’s for choice — rather than working over someone else at this time of night.
Someone else. He was beside her now and looking down and the face on the pillow was so young and vulnerable and so very delicate that for a moment he wanted to reach out and touch the softness of the cheeks. But he only turned his head and said harshly, ‘Freddy!’
‘Yes, sir,’ Freddy said, and came to stand beside him, jerking his head at one of the actors as he did so. He at once brought a table close to the head of the couch and stood there waiting.
‘This is Charles Wyndham, sir,’ Freddy said softly. ‘A physician as well as an actor. He too will help us. He will handle any anaesthetic that is required.’
‘Hmmph.’ Abel was examining the girl now, his hands with their square spatulate fingers moving slowly across her skull. ‘None to commence. We shall need her responses to assess our progress.’
‘You will operate without any painkiller, sir?’ Wyndham said, and looked over his shoulder a little fearfully. But Fenton was gone, of course, and he breathed again. As long as the others could keep that fool out of the way until Amy was all right, things might work out well enough. But if she were to cry out in any sort of pain, was there not a risk that Fenton would break away from the two tired actors looking after him, and push Rourke, guarding the door of the dressing-room, out of the way, and come storming in? It was a daunting thought. ‘No painkiller, sir?’ he said again.
Abel merely scowled, but Freddy said softly, ‘You need not worry, Charles. I too was alarmed when I first saw a skull opened without benefit of chloroform or ether but the patient in this state feels no pain, and will not until the pressure is released. And as soon as there is any response, we can let you give chloroform. So be ready. Don’t worry — I’ll guide you. Where is Felix? Did he not wait?’
Wyndham shook his head. He was watching Abel, who was with great deliberation taking instruments from his bag and arranging them on the cloth-covered table at the head of the couch. ‘He said there was nothing he could do here, and trusted to you and your grandfather to take best care of her. He said she would need special nursing after, and went to arrange for that.’ He shook his head then, a little puzzled. ‘He’s a cool man that one. I thought he was to wed Miss Lucas?’
‘He is,’ Freddy said shortly, as he too began to help arrange the instruments and dressings on the table. ‘His care is of the wise kind. He works. He does not stand and weep. Felix is a good man, and never think otherwise.’
‘If you have nothing better to do than talk, then do it elsewhere,’ Abel said harshly. ‘Where is a razor? I did not bring one — have any of you one about you?’
The little group of actors in the corner shivered and broke up and the big woman who shared the dressing-room with Amy pulled out a drawer from her dressing-table and after some rummaging brought out a wide-bladed razor.
‘If you’re goin’ to cut ‘er up wi’ that, I’m goin’, she said loudly and her gin-thickened voice filled the room with truculence. ‘I said as ’ow I’d ’elp but there’s some things as mortal eyes shouldn’t ’ave to look upon, let alone suffer, whatever you surgeons may say. If she’s marked to die, well, let ’er die. All this cutting about — don’t ’old with it, I don’t —’
‘Get out,’ Abel said, without raising his voice at all, but it was icy enough to hit home, for the big woman reddened and opened her mouth to speak, but as she caught the sharpness of his glare she closed it again and shrugged her shoulders and went lumpishly to the door.
‘’Oo’d want to stay, as was a normal ’uman Christian? Poor little soul — she’ll need prayin’ for with you at ’er poor ’ead,’ and she was gone, with the other actors following her, throwing scared glances over their shoulders.
And then there were just the four of them. Charles and Freddy, standing watchful and waiting at each side, and in the middle the silent figure of Amy. And looking down at her, very still and quiet, Abel Lackland.
‘This is the girl who is seeking to take me to court?’ he said suddenly and Freddy shook his head.
‘No, sir, not she,’ he said quietly. ‘Her brother. He is a very different matter entirely. This girl is not like him. A little — well, flighty perhaps. And somewhat given to performing all the time, so that one can never be sure when she is being strictly honest. But then —’ he smiled a trifle crookedly. ‘My own dear Phoebe has been known, when very young, to be much the same. But like my Phoebe this girl is good and loving at heart, however captious she may seem at times. And Felix loves her dearly and is to wed her. But then, you know that.’
Abel nodded, never taking his eyes from Amy’s face. ‘Yes, I know. It is no affair of mine. Felix is Martha’s concern and no blood of mine, after all. Not that I do not find the boy well enough — well enough -—’
He looked up again and there seemed to be a faint air of appeal about him and Freddy looked back at him, puzzled. He had never seen his grandfather anything but his own implacable self before tonight. And now he seemed to be somehow softer, more concerned about others and their feelings than he had ever been —
Almost as he thought it, Abel seemed to change. He pushed the heel of his hand briefly against his chest and arched his back and said harshly, ‘Well, to work. I have not all night to waste here. Whoever the girl is and whoever is to wed her she needs treatment and she needs it very soon if she is to live. So — the razor.’
‘I shall shave her, sir,’ Freddy said and did so, as Charles held her head ge
ntly with a hand on each side of her face, and Freddy, with great care not to remove more than was strictly necessary, shaved away the coarse dark curls, moving smoothly and very delicately, until at last the extent of the injury could be seen.
It was big — an area of some two inches across — and the soft white skin was bruised and swollen. In the centre there seemed to be a depressed area, and gingerly, Abel touched it.
‘Hmph. A splinter of bone there needs to come out, I suspect. Well, let’s evacuate what clots we can and then we shall see better what’s to do —’
The room sank into a silence as Abel started work. Charles stood ready at one side with a green chloroform bottle in one hand and a piece of soft gauze in the other, ready to administer his soothing anaesthetic at the first sign of need, and Freddy stood on Abel’s other side, his cuffs pushed back up his arms, and with a small carbolic spray in his hand.
As Abel worked, he made swift darting movements which never impeded the older man’s actions in any way, but which kept the area clean for him, removing the blood which oozed out steadily as the incision Abel was making was enlarged, and wiping a film of red pungent carbolic acid on all the parts the instruments touched.
The knife moved smoothly and easily, making a gently curving red line in the white skin, which opened and spread like a wave lazily breaking on a beach, and the little bleeding points sprang up in the depths of the incision, waiting for Freddy’s darting touch with a swab of gauze to remove the blood so that they could start their steady ooze again.
As Abel worked on the curved cut became the edge of a flap, and widened and lengthened until he could fold it back upon itself and they could all see the bone beneath, pearly white and glistening, as softly pretty as the inside of a shell. Except for the centre of the revealed part, where the bone was displaced, curving down into a shallow well of damage.
‘That is how an eggshell looks when it has been tapped with a spoon,’ Charles said suddenly, and his voice cut across the quietness like a whipcrack, and Abel grunted and said, ‘No doubt such poetical similes have a place in a physician’s dictionary, sir — especially that of a physician who is also an actor. They have, however, no place at all in my language. That is a depressed fracture. No more and no less — Freddy, the spatula.’
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