Crawford took a filled glass and drank deeply. “What, Hallowe’en? I thought you said surgical, not witchcraftical.”
Keats laughed uncertainly, the look of anxiety returning to his face. “I become of age then; the thirty-first is my birthday. My—” He paused, for Crawford was staring at several knobby little bluish crystals on a bookshelf.
“What,” asked Crawford carefully, “are those?”
A key rattled in the front door lock then, and a tall man opened the door and entered. He didn’t look as young as Keats, and his face was leanly humorous.
“Henry!” exclaimed the younger man with obvious relief. “This is Michael … Myrrh? …”
“Michael, uh, Frankish,” Crawford corrected, standing up but not really looking away from the little crystals. Their facets made bright needles of the lamplight, and seemed to increase the fever pressure behind his forehead. “Arthur Appleton … told me to look here for a place to stay. I’m a student at St. Elmo’s.” He shook his head sharply. “Thomas’s, that is.” He coughed.
Henry Stephens gave him a good-naturedly skeptical smile, but just nodded. “If Arthur vouches for you, that’s good enough for me. You can—what, are you off, John?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Keats, taking a coat from a rack by the door. “Got to see to Dr. Lucas’s poor charges. Good to have met you, Michael,” he added on the way out the door.
When the door had closed, Stephens sank into a chair and picked up the wine glass Keats had left. “St. Elmo’s, eh?”
Though exhausted, Crawford smiled and changed the subject. “Dr. Lucas’s charges?”
Stephens bowed a fraction of an inch. “Young John is a dresser for the most incompetent surgeon at Guy’s—Lucas’s dressers always have plenty of festering bandages to change.”
Crawford waved at the odd crystals. “What are those?”
Stephens may have realized that Crawford’s casual manner was a pose, for he looked sharply at him before answering. “Those are bladder stones,” he said carefully. “Dr. Lucas is given many such cases.”
“I’ve seen bladder stones,” said Crawford. “That’s not how they look. They look like … spiky limestone. These things look like quartz.”
Stephens shrugged. “These are what gets cut out of Lucas’s patients. No doubt they’re tired of it—any day now I expect the administrators to summon Lucas and tell him, ‘Doctor, you’re beginning to exhaust our patients!'” Stephens leaned back in his chair and chuckled quietly for several moments. Then he had a sip of wine and went on. “Keats isn’t a brilliant student, you know. The boys assigned to Lucas never are. But nevertheless Keats is … perhaps more observant than the administrators guess.”
Crawford knew he was missing something. “Well …” he said, trying to keep his eyes focussing, “why has he saved the things?”
Stephens shook his head in humorous but apparently genuine disappointment. “Damn, for a moment I thought you might know, you were looking at them so intently! I don’t know … but I remember one time he was playing with them, holding them up to the light and all, and he said, mostly to himself, ‘I should throw these away—I know I can have my real career even without using them.'”
Crawford had another sip of wine and yawned. “So what’s his real career? Jewellery?”
“Nasty sort of jewellery that’d be, wouldn’t it? No.” He looked at Crawford with raised eyebrows. “No, he wants to be a poet.”
Crawford was nearly asleep, and he knew that when he slept it would be for a good twelve hours, so he asked Stephens which room would be his, and when he was shown it he threw his portmanteau onto the floor. He fetched his drink, and stood for a moment in the hall and swirled the inch of wine in the bottom of the glass.
“So,” he asked Stephens, who had helped him carry blankets from the linen closet, “what’s poetry got to do with bladder stones?”
“Don’t ask me,” Stephens told him. “I’m not on intimate terms with the Muses.”
At first he thought the woman in his dream was Julia, for even in the dimness—were the two of them in a cave?—he could see the silver of antimony around her eyes, and Julia had whitened her eyebrows with antimony for the wedding. But when she stood up, naked, and walked across the floor tiles toward him, he saw that this was someone else.
Moonlight climbed a white thigh as she padded past a window or cleft in the cave wall, and he smelled night-blooming jasmine and the sea; then she was in his arms and he was kissing her passionately, not caring that her smooth skin was as cool as the stone tiles under his bare feet, nor that there was suddenly in his nostrils an alien muskiness.
Then they were rolling on the tiles, and it was not skin under his sliding fingertips but scales, and he didn’t care about that either … but a moment later the dream shifted, and they were in a forest clearing where the moon made spots of pale light that winked like spinning silver coins as the branches overhead waved in a Mediterranean wind … she slithered out of his embrace and disappeared in the underbrush, and though he crawled after her, calling, unmindful of the thorny branches, the rustling of her passage grew steadily more distant and was soon gone.
But something seemed to be answering his call—or was he answering a call of its? As in many dreams, identities blurred into one another … and then he was looking at a mountain, and though he’d never been there, he knew it was one of the Alps. It seemed miles high, blocking out a whole corner of the sky even though the thin clouds streaking its breast with sunset shadow let him know that it was many miles distant—and, in spite of its broad-shouldered, strong-jawed look, he knew it was female.
Pain in the stump of his missing finger woke him before dawn.
Two mornings later he was scuffing his way up the broad front steps of Guy’s Hospital, blinking at the Greek-looking pillars that stretched away overhead from the top of the front door arch to the roof two stories above; but the sunlight seemed too harsh up there among all that smooth stone, and he let his gaze drop back down to the heels of Keats’s boots, which were tapping up the steps just ahead of him.
For the last couple of days he had been attending lectures at both Guy’s and St. Thomas’s, confident that he would be able to get Appleton to acknowledge the signature he had forged on his application papers—if Crawford should decide to make it official and actually become a surgeon again under the name of Michael Frankish.
And he was fairly sure he wouldn’t be recognized. For one thing, Dr. Crawford had always worked in hospitals north of the river and, for another, he no longer looked very much like Dr. Crawford—he had recently worked very hard to lose weight so as to look his best at the wedding, and he now found himself losing more, involuntarily; and nobody who had known him a week ago would have described him as hollow-cheeked and sunken-eyed, as he certainly was now.
At the top of the steps Keats paused and frowned back at Crawford. “Are you sure you’re not too sick?”
“I’m fine.” Crawford fished a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. He was dizzy, and it occurred to him that Newton must have been right when he’d said that light consisted of particles, for today he could feel them hitting him. He wondered if he was going to faint. “What have you got today—Theory and Practice of Medicine?”
“No,” Keats said, “this morning I’m helping out in the cutting wards—people recovering from lithotomies.”