by Paul Boor
It was well into October before the hot breeze off the gulf died and for the first time in months an offshore flow crossed the island. The air felt fresh and cool, the death wagons were put up, the last corpses were covered with quicklime, and throughout the South city fathers declared the yellow fever ended.
Carbolic hung heavy in the laboratory of Francis Keiller. The elderly professor teetered on a lab stool, hunched over his student’s laboratory notes, his eyes raw, his hair awry in the harsh electric light, his bones filling with pain.
“It makes no sense,” he muttered to himself. “It’s impossible.”
The data seemed all wrong, yet this student was his best. He was a bright Texas farm boy, and Keiller trusted the lad’s laboratory work as soundly as that of his own hand. The midnight hour had robbed Keiller of his edge; he shut his eyes and rested his head on his arms . . . for only a moment.
“Uncle. Uncle.” Renée gently shook the old man’s shoulder. “Please come home with me. It’s late.”
Keiller stirred. Wincing, he slipped off the stool, staggered, and nearly fell. “I need to understand this experiment, don’t you see?”
“Tomorrow, Uncle.”
“No, tonight. The experiment seemed so obvious . . .” Keiller steadied himself against the lab bench. “Have ye prepared the solutions, darling?”
A nod from his niece, her smoky eyes bleary with exhaustion.
“You’re the one needin’ rest, ye silly girl. Get yourself home and I’ll begin the reactions.”
Renée shut the laboratory door behind her, leaving her uncle muttering to himself. He lit Bunsen burners under a line of retorts. With the reactions under way, hours of observation lay ahead; there’d be time to reassess the boy’s data while he watched his retorts bubble through the night.
Just days before, Keiller’s student Patrick had failed to transmit yellow fever to a horse, despite using Renée’s most potent sample of particle. The scientists put their heads together and decided Patrick had somehow killed the particle, though the young man swore he’d not altered established procedures, and Keiller’s repeated searches of the student’s notes found no flaw in technique. Patrick was admonished to begin the experiment anew.
“They’re still only boys,” Keiller told himself, laying down the student’s notes. “Ah, youth. A simple error of transcription, no doubt.” Keiller limped to his retorts and adjusted a burner.
What puzzled Professor Keiller most was that the particular horse they’d been injecting, a powerful draft animal, was now resistant to even the most deadly particle. This saddened him, since the horse, from a breed developed in the Clyde Valley of his beloved homeland, was a favorite. Now the horse would have to be destroyed. Keiller would miss the big fellow.
Lost in thought, with a keen eye on his reactions, Professor Keiller flipped the pages of Patrick’s laboratory notebook. Then he saw it—a footnote at the bottom of the page, penned in the careful hand of his finest student.
“Acrylamide? Patrick added ten milligrams of acrylamide? That’s it!” Keiller shouted to his empty laboratory. “The particle of yellow fever must’ve been weakened, denatured a wee bit . . . and that big horse is making a different anti-toxoid, a superior anti-toxoid that makes him resistant to the deadliest strain.” Keiller struggled to his feet and made his way down the line of retorts. “Well, then, I’ll test the idea with a simple precipitation. I’ll begin immediately.” He shut down the burners and went to his personal notes to enter objectives for a new experiment.
Within hours Keiller had an inkling of the answer—the method he hoped would yield the most powerful anti-toxoid they’d yet produced. He walked to the north window and threw it open to morning’s first light and the pale, opalescent bay.
“What a fool I’ve been. Patrick’s simple error has turned the trick. Now, with what Renée learned in Boston . . .”
Dawn broke and the morning bore down. Two hours later than was her usual habit, just as her uncle lifted his final test tube from its rack, Renée dragged through the lab door. Her eyes were red and puffy and a wan smile was pasted on her face.
“A new experiment, Uncle?”
“Yes, yes. Come. I need your help, dear.” Keiller glanced at the clock on the wall. “Where’ve you been? Oh, look at ye, Renée. You’ve not slept a wink, and you’ve been crying again. Listen up, now—young Patrick added acrylamide by mistake, and that draft horse holds the answer. We must be off to the horse barn. We’ll draw the big fella’s blood, and if his serum’s as potent as I suspect, well then . . . Renée, dear. You’re so quiet.”
Renée and her uncle rode the West End trolley to the desolate end of the island where the college maintained their barns. Along the way, Keiller jabbered constantly; Renée kept her face to the trolley’s open window. Finally, Keiller took her by the chin and turned her toward him.
“Renée, I know ye so well. It’s your Northern gent you’re thinking of, innit?”
Renée shook her head free. “No, Uncle.”
“Come now, I see those tears. He’s a fine gent, our ice merchant, but it hurts to see you suffer so. Trust me, I may be a foolish old bachelor, but I know more than ye think. Everything will come out in the end. You’ll find someone else someday. Aye, you deserve that much.”
Renée dabbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m fine, Uncle.” She turned to the window again, to the endless grey beach, the expanse of blue water, the waves of grasses shimmering over the narrow strip of island pastureland.
When her uncle lapsed back into his lecture, Renée felt for the letter tucked inside her smock, close to her bosom. She’d read it a thousand times; once she found a moment alone at the horse barn, she would read it again.
She must write Nicolas Van Horne, answer that horrid letter, and not take his words at face value. After all, she’d done nothing wrong, was guilty of nothing untoward. Why should she stand for such treatment at the hand of this gentleman? How many times had she told herself this? Yet . . . deep down she knew she wouldn’t take up her pen. She’d keep her sullen silence, as she had for months now. It was what he’d asked for, wasn’t it?
But he’d also asked for help, hadn’t he? No matter what else happened in Saratoga, she sensed his eagerness for guidance in that ghastly business of the white slavers. She had plotted with him, told him in her letters every idea she’d had. Now Nick was forced to pursue those dangerous men alone. The risk, the danger, the prospect of facing those awful men—it was all on his shoulders. She didn’t even know if Nick was still alive. Oh, heavens, how she hoped and prayed he was safe in his mountains, even if she couldn’t have him for her own.
Her uncle was still at his lecture. “If our big barnyard fellow makes the anti-toxoid I’m hoping for, we’ll begin trials of dose and treatment regimens soon. You must concentrate, lass. There’s work to be done. Yellow Jack’s held the upper hand all summer.”
“Oh, Uncle, it’s discouraging. We’ve no idea about doses. We’ll need some volunteers. And why is it,” Renée asked, “that each summer the epidemics grow worse?”
“A good question, lass. Damned Yellow Jack’s made it as far north as Philadelphia again. Well, we’ve got the acrylamide step, thanks to Patrick. We’ll find more Clyde Valley horses. They’ll give us plenty of blood for you to purify anti-toxoid, and we’ll be on our way.”
The trolley screeched to a stop. Renée took her uncle’s arm as he scurried painfully down the path to the college’s horse barns.
“And about this Van Horne fellow”—Keiller, grimacing, stopped to make his point—“I admire the man, too, ye know. He’s a fine, inventive sort. But there’s your work, Renée. Your patients and your colleagues need you, too. And there’s Fernando.”
“With his constant chatter.”
“Oh, come now. You know how it is with a new language. He needs practice.”
“Fernando’s been with us over a year, dear Uncle, and he’s still full of silly questions.” She gave this a moment’s tho
ught before continuing. “But you’re right, he does try hard. Lately, I must say, he’s been quite kind.”
Long weeks crept by. At first, Renée’s thoughts were only of Van Horne, but with her uncle, her colleagues and students, and the troubled, swarthy Spaniard Fernando at her side, Renée’s anguish abated. She became less distracted. And her uncle had been right about the anti-toxoid and the big horses. They were on the final path to a cure, their laboratory’s greatest achievement. She’d had success with the Boston purification method. Soon, they’d test the anti-toxoid in living patients, the final trials to decide the doses, to determine a regimen of treatment before spring, before the heat of summer arrived and yellow fever returned to kill again. That would be the final proof of their cure.
With her successes at the horse barn, Renée had assays to perform, horses to inject, and data to analyze with her uncle. Every day was filled with the familiar scents of carbolic and acetone . . . and the pensive young Fernando, talkative Fernando, to whom Renée turned in her excitement, in the heat of discovery.
“I think we have it. We do!”
“The reaction is good, yes?”
“Darling Fernando, would you hand me that large test tube, por favor?”
“Sí, my love. For you . . . anything.”
61
Under the Skin
The syringe’s metal casing was cool in his hand. He would take care to draw the tarry brown liquid to the mark . . . the second mark . . . no, the third.
“‘A most excellent instrument,’” he said, quoting the slogan printed on his hypodermic’s worn case. “‘The superb workmanship of Messrs. Codman & Shurtleff of Boston.’” He’d taken to mumbling like this, reciting over and over under his breath. Advertisements in the newspaper. Placards posted along the roadside.
“Most excellent, indeed.”
He injected. Precisely three marks’ worth, a goodly dose, deep enough beneath the skin to touch, and pierce, a decent vein. He’d been using the veins, and a mix even stronger than Boatmann’s usual. He’d upped the dose, too, and bought a shiny new needle for Codman & Shurtleff’s syringe. A day never passed without morphine.
The leather couch creaked with Nicolas’s meager weight as he leaned back, stunned, trying to clear the muddle of brooding thoughts that plagued his days and nights.
It was right, what he’d done to Renée, but it brought a high price. Visions of the woman scientist haunted him. Renée in her laboratory. Renée running ahead on the beach. Renée at the clubhouse at Saratoga. And her letters.
She’d sent many he’d never answered, was almost afraid to read again. In them, he remembered, Renée had analyzed his discovery of the slave trade, attacked it like a laboratory problem, listed her hypothetical courses of action, named those in Buffalo, Albany—even Chicago—who might help. Constables. City aldermen. University professors. “Don’t go it alone,” she’d written. “Use your connections, find good people, people in power who’ll know how to put a stop to this atrocity.” She’d even deciphered the damnable brand that was their trademark, though his thinking was so murky, he couldn’t recall the details of what she’d said. Since Nicolas had stopped her with his last, desperate letter, nothing made sense any longer. His life seemed to stall like a seized, broken engine. He felt frozen in place. Defeated.
Nicolas Van Horne could no longer claim success at life. He’d once had a spirit, an integrity that so filled him, it seemed it would burst and pour out. His business of ice and his village position held such promise . . . until the Galveston delivery revealed an evil thing in his ice.
Young boys, orphans, were suffering and being murdered willy-nilly, their lives as grim as those of the African slaves who’d labored in the cotton fields, the cane fields, their masters’ chambers. Boys like Knox suffered the horrors of the factories, the slaughterhouses, the mines. Young girls faced a life of subjugation. But Nicolas was impotent against the forces that buffeted him. He saw the sum total of his life before him, and a weak sum it made.
“Nicolas! Nicolas!” He was shaken from his dark musings. “It’s time for the new medicines,” came the call from overhead.
Van Horne climbed to Ruth’s bedroom.
After his return from Saratoga, after his final letter to Renée, Nicolas saw for the first time the truth of his wife’s deterioration. He took the ailing Ruth to Albany by train for an opinion from the same medical man to whom, years earlier, he’d supplied the first bodies for dissection. But this fellow, now a professor of anatomy at the medical college, directed Nicolas to yet another medical professor, Ashbel Smythe, an expert in “female matters.” Smythe had recently joined the medical faculty from Europe. Nicolas saw immediately that here was a man like Galveston’s Francis Keiller, a man trained in modern science.
In Smythe’s office, Nicolas and Ruth found themselves surrounded by cabinets stacked with jars of exotic leaves, powders, and seeds. Twisted fragments of dried bark and tubers lay like misshapen bones on the shelves. Smythe, with his red rubber listening tubes slung over his shoulder, directed Ruth to disrobe and wrap herself in a sheet. He guided her behind a screen to an examining table, where Nicolas heard him prodding and probing. After what seemed like hours, Smythe dashed from behind the screen with a microscope slide in his hand, mumbling, “You may dress, madame.”
At a side table, Smythe splashed a purple fluid on the slide and, still standing, observed it under his microscope. Nodding knowingly, he settled behind his desk and scratched in a notebook until Ruth took her chair, then he shut the notebook, leaned back in his chair, and addressed himself to the ceiling without meeting the two pairs of eyes fixed on him.
“This growth of Mrs. Van Horne’s . . . ,” Ashbel Smythe said slowly. “Yes, we’ll call it that, shall we? A growth, an abnormal growth of cells—millions of them—well, they’ve gotten totally out of hand and traveled far from the female organs.”
“It’s bad?” Nicolas asked.
“They’ve taken her over. Filled her abdomen.”
“Is it . . . fatal?”
There was a brief silence, an exchange of glances between the men. “I’m afraid so,” Smythe said with a nod toward Ruth, who pulled from her bosom a small handkerchief with delicate lacework at its edges and dabbed at the corners of her eyes.
“But the battle isn’t over, Mr. Van Horne. Not yet.” Smythe leaned toward Ruth and addressed her in earnest. “I assure you, madame, we can gain time against it. You see, I studied for some years in the East, in Shanghai, where they’ve employed therapeutic herbs for centuries. Through the judicious use of certain combinations of exotic plants, the viability of tumorous growths such as Mrs. Van Horne’s may be retarded, though never completely reversed.”
Ruth brightened at Smythe’s words. The doctor stood and wandered along his row of cabinets, sorting through items on the shelves until he held a gnarly, mahogany-colored root.
“This one works well on tumors of the ovary, the blight suffered by the missus,” he said, slipping the root into his jacket pocket. “And this . . . this powder is for the swelling.” Smythe extended the bottle to Nicolas to examine, then hesitated, bottle still in hand, staring at the line of unhealed sores at Van Horne’s cuff line. “I see you are a user of morphine, sir,” he said. “Yes. Morphine it is—that cunning fiend.”
“A bit, yes, Doctor. For relaxation, you understand.”
Smythe leaned over to take Nicolas’s pulse. He lifted Nicolas’s eyelid with his thumb and peered down. Nicolas thought of the tangled, bloody web he’d seen in the mirror that morning.
“Have you heard of nervous waste syndrome, Mr. Van Horne?”
“I’ll not suffer from that, I trust.”
“Your rapid heart tells me otherwise, sir. I strongly recommend you taper your use, slowly, very slowly, until you may comfortably put it aside altogether. For now, use only pure morphine. Do not adulterate it with cocaine or other stimulants. This tapering of dose may take a month or more, and will require a powerful will.”
“I rather dislike that tapering idea. I’d rather just up and quit one day.”
“Trust me, Mr. Van Horne. You must taper. If you were to stop abruptly, it would be utter hell. Indeed, it might well prove fatal.”
“But—”
“You must do as I say, sir, or you’ll be of little use to your wife. In my opinion, morphine’s medicinal qualities have been extended far beyond the drug’s purpose. Morphine should serve only for relief of the most excruciating pain.” Smythe’s eyes shifted from husband to wife and back to Nicolas. “And what pain have you, sir, compared to what your spouse may have in store? For now, I advise only small doses of laudanum for Mrs. Van Horne. There will come a time when she’ll require the maximum, I’m afraid.”
Smythe went to writing on a large pad on his desk. “I’ve made out my diagnosis, sir. If properly followed, the therapeutic regime I’ve prescribed should help. If a fever should occur, place her comfortably in bed and apply a warm mustard pediluvium . . .”
In the weeks that followed Nicolas was heartened to see Ruth regain a modicum of health on Ashbel Smythe’s prescribed regimen of root extract. He followed Smythe’s recommendation of only small draughts of laudanum, saving that for her pain to come. At noon each day Ruth took his arm and they stepped out of the house to walk along the Town Lake path. They sat on a lakeside rock—sometimes for hours—two skeletal specters against the pale river, reminiscing.
For his part, Nicolas found it impossible to follow Smythe’s advice. He altered his mix to pure morphine, as suggested, but failed to reduce his use.
In fact, he injected more and more.
62
The Hunt for Knox
Word came to Adam from the garnet mines. He hurried to the Van Horne place, where he found Nicolas and Abigail in the kitchen. Nicolas was working the pump, gulping water from a tin cup.
