He pulled the garret window open and stepped in carefully, setting the jar beneath the sill. The child slept on the floor, although not under the window now. He breathed heavily, obviously already congested, lying on his back with the ragged blanket pulled to his chin. But for the sleeping child, the room was empty.
“Damn it to hell,” St. Ives muttered. He must talk to the mother. He couldn’t be popping back in twice a day to feed the child the beef broth. He could think of nothing to do except leave, climb back into the bathyscaphe and reset the coordinates, maybe arrive three hours from now, or maybe yesterday. What a tiresome thing. He would make the child drink the broth now, though, just to get it started up. Trusting to the future was a dangerous thing. A bird in the hand…he told himself.
There was a noise outside the door just then, a woman’s high-pitched laughter followed by a man’s voice muttering something low, then the sound of laughter again. A key scraped in the lock, and St. Ives hurried across toward the window, thinking to get out onto the roof before he was discovered. The door swung open, though, and he stopped abruptly, turning around with a look of official dissatisfaction on his face. He would have to brass it out, pretend to be — what? Merely looking grave might do the trick. Thank heaven he had shaved and cut his hair.
In the open doorway stood the woman who must have been the child’s mother. She was young, and would have been almost pretty but for the hardness of her face and her general air of shabbiness. She was half drunk, too, and she stood there swaying like a sapling in a breeze, looking confusedly at St. Ives. Sobering suddenly, she peered around the room, as if to ascertain that she hadn’t opened the wrong door by mistake. Then, as her countenance changed from confusion to anger, she said, “What are you doing here?”
The man behind her gaped stupidly at St. Ives. He was drunk, too — drunker than she was. A look of skepticism came into his eyes, and he took a step backward.
“Who’s this?” asked St. Ives, nodding at the man. He pitched it just as hard and mean as he could, as if it meant something, and the man turned around abruptly, caromed off the hallway wall, and scuttled for the stairs. There was the sound of pounding feet and a door slamming, then silence.
“There goes half a crown,” she said steadily. “I’m not any kind of bunter, so if you’ve been sent round by the landlord, tell him I pay my rent on time, and that there wouldn’t be half so many bunters if they didn’t gouge your eyes out for the price of a room.”
“Not at all, my good woman,” St. Ives said, surprised at first that she was moderately well-spoken. Then he realized that it wasn’t particularly surprising at all. She had been the wife of a famous, or at least notorious, scientist. The notion saddened him. She had fallen a long way. She was still youthful, and there was something in her face of the onetime country girl who had fallen in love with a man she admired. Now she was a prostitute in a lodging house.
She stood yet in the doorway, waiting for him to explain himself, and St. Ives realized almost shamefully that she held out some little bit of hope — of what? That she wouldn’t have lost her half crown after all? St. Ives, her eyes seemed to say, was the sort of man she would expect to find in the West End, not your common sailor rutting his way through Pennyfields before his ship set sail.
“I’m a doctor, ma’am.”
“Really,” she said, stepping into the room now and closing the door. “You wouldn’t have brought a drain of gin, would you? A doctor, is it? Brandy more like it.” She gave him what was no doubt meant to be a coy look, but it disfigured her face awfully, as if it weren’t built for that sort of theatrics, and it struck him that a great deal had been taken away from her. He could hear the emptiness in her voice and see it in her face. The country girl who had fallen in love with the scientist was very nearly gone from her eyes, and there would come a day when gin and life on the Limehouse streets would sweep it clean away.
“I’m afraid I haven’t any brandy. Or gin, either. I’ve brought this jar of beef broth, though.” He pointed at the jar where it sat beneath the window.
“What is it?” She looked at him doubtfully, as if she couldn’t have heard what she thought she heard.
“Beef broth. It’s an elixir, actually, for the child.” He nodded at the sleeping boy, who had turned over now and had his face against the floor molding. “Your son is very sick.”
Vaguely, she looked in the child’s direction. “Not so sick as all that.”
“Far sicker than you realize. In two weeks he’ll be dead unless we do something for him.”
“Who the devil are you?” she asked, finally closing the door and lighting a lantern on the sideboard. The room was suddenly illuminated with a yellow glow, and a curl of dirty smoke rose toward a black smudge on the ceiling. “Dead?”
“I’m a friend of your husband’s,” he lied, the notion coming to him out of the blue. “I promised him I’d come round now and then to check on the boy. Three times I’ve been here, and each time there was no one to answer my knock, so this time I let myself in by the window. I’m a doctor, ma’am, and I tell you the boy will die.”
At the mention of her husband, the woman slumped into a chair at the table, burying her face in her hands. She remained so for a moment, then steeled herself and looked up at him, some of the old anger rekindled in her eyes. “What is it that you want?” she asked. “Have your say and get out.”
“This elixir,” he said, setting to work on the child, “is our only hope of curing him.” The boy awoke just then, recoiling in surprise when he saw St. Ives huddled over him.
“It’s all right, lamby,” his mother said, kneeling beside him and petting his lank hair. “This man is a doctor and a friend of your father’s.”
At the mention of this, the child cast St. Ives such a glance of loathing and repugnance that St. Ives nearly toppled over backward from the force of it. The complications of human misery were more than he could fathom. “Do you have a cup?” he asked the mother, who fetched down the tumbler from the sideboard — the same tumbler that St. Ives, a week from now, would use to…
What? He reeled momentarily from a vertigo that was the result of sudden mental confusion.
“Careful” the woman said to him, taking the half-filled tumbler away.
“Yes,” he said. “Have him drink it down. All of it.”
“What about the rest of it?” she asked. “A horse couldn’t drink the whole jar.”
“Two of these glasses full a day until the entire lot’s drunk off. It must be done this way if you want the boy to live.”
She looked at him curiously, hesitating for a moment, as if to say that life wasn’t worth so much, perhaps, as St. Ives thought it was. “Right you are,” she said finally, returning the glass to the sideboard. “Go back to sleep now, lamby,” she said to the boy, who pulled the blanket over his head and faced the wall again. She patted her hair, as if waiting now for St. Ives to suggest something further, as if she still held out hope that he might be worth something more to her than the half crown she had lost along with the sailor.
“Well,” he said awkwardly, stepping toward the window. “I’ll just…” He looked down at the jar again. In his haste to leave he had nearly forgotten it. Now he was relieved to see it, if only to have something to say. “This has to be kept cold. My advice is to leave it on the roof, outside the window.”
In truth, the room itself was nearly cold enough to have done the trick. It was a good excuse to swing the window open and step through it, though. Hurrying, he nearly fell out onto the slates. He stood up, brushing at his knees, and leaned in at the window.