“Mind if I … follow along?” asked Crawford, attempting a carefree smile. “I’m supposed to hear about Anatomy from old Ashley, but he’ll just put me to sleep. And I’m sure I’d pick up more real acquaintance with the subject by touring the wards than by sitting through a damn lecture anyway.”
Keats looked uncertain, then grinned. “You were a surgeon’s dresser on shipboard, didn’t you say? Sure, you’ll be used to dealing with much worse than this. Come along.” He held the door open for Crawford. “Matter of fact, I’m taking the exam tomorrow, and then leaving for two months at Margate—you might very well be my successor with Dr. Lucas, so it’s only right that I show you around.”
They reported to the senior surgeon, who didn’t even look up when told that Michael Frankish was to be Lucas’s new dresser; he just gave Crawford an entry certificate and told him to use the boot-scraper before going upstairs to the wards.
It took a little over an hour to tend to all of Dr. Lucas’s patients.
As a student Crawford had not minded tending to the people recovering from surgeries in the cutting wards; the operating theater itself was far worse, a horrifying pandemonium in which burly interns struggled to hold some screaming patient down on the table as the surgeon sweated and cursed and dug with the knife, his shoes scuffing streaks in the bloody sand on the floor as he braced himself for each resisted thrust … and just as nightmarish, if quieter, were the “salivating” wards, where syphilitics drooled helplessly as a result of the mercurial ointment rubbed into their open lesions … but the cutting wards were where a student could see healing actually occurring, quietly, day by day.
Dr. Lucas’s cutting wards were different. After changing the first heavily slick, malodorous bandages, Crawford could see that Stephens had not understated the old surgeon’s skill—Crawford had never seen clumsier incisions, and it was clear that at least as many would die of the bladder-stone operation as benefit from it.
A gray-haired clergyman was on his knees beside one of the last beds they came to, and he looked up when Keats bent over the patient. The old cleric seemed to have been deep in prayer, for it took several seconds for his eyes to focus on the newcomers, and even then all he managed to do was nod and turn away.
“Excuse me, Reverend,” said Keats, “got to change the bandages.”
The clergyman bobbed his head and backed away from the bed, and he thrust his hands inside his cassock—but not before Crawford noticed blood on his fingers. Puzzled, Crawford looked up at his face, and saw the man quickly lick his upper lip—had there been blood there too?
The minister met his gaze for a moment, and the old face tightened with some emotion like hate or envy; one of the bloody hands emerged from the robe for a moment with the ring finger folded inside the fist, and then a spotted finger pointed at Crawford’s own left hand. The old man mimed spitting at Crawford, then turned and scuttled out of the room.
Keats was leaning closer to the figure in the bed, and now he reached over and opened one of the eyes. “This one’s dead,” he said, softly so as not to alarm the patients in beds nearby. “Could you find a nurse? Tell her to fetch a doctor and the porter so we can get this into the charnel house.”
Crawford’s heart was beating fast. “My God, John, that minister had blood on his hands! And he gave me the most horrible look before he ran out of here.” He waved at the corpse in the bed. “Do you think …?”
Keats stared at him, and stared off the way the old man had gone, and then grabbed the blankets and pulled them down to peer at the diaper-like bandage; in that instant Crawford thought Keats looked older than the clergyman had. After a few moments Keats spoke. “He didn’t kill him, no,” he said quietly. “But he was … looting the body. The blood of … certain patients has a … certain value. I’m fairly sure he wasn’t a real minister, and I’ll see to it that he’s kept out in the future—let him go haunt the wards at St. George’s.” He waved at Crawford. “So get the nurse.”
Though both disgusted and intrigued by Keats’s words, Crawford’s mood as he walked down the hall was one of dour amusement at being ordered around a hospital by a twenty-year-old … but his amusement turned to incredulous horror when he started down the stairs.
A nurse was walking stiffly up the stairs, and he had raised his hand to get her attention, but when she looked up he recognized her. It was Josephine Carmody, apparently deep in her mechanical persona.
His hand paused only a moment, then went on up to scratch his scalp as if he had never intended the gesture to be a wave, and he lowered his eyes and moved to pass her. His heart was thudding hollowly, and he felt drunk with panic.
She was too close to him when she drew the pistol from under her blouse, and instead of shoving the muzzle into his ear, she only managed to slam the flesh-warmed barrel against the back of his neck. She took a step back to get a clear shot.
Crawford yelled in alarm and swung his right fist hard up against her gun hand.
Breath whistled through her teeth and the pistol flew out of her grasp, but it clanked against the wall and then tumbled down three steps and Josephine dove after it.
Crawford didn’t think he could get to her before she could come up with it, so he went clattering back up the stairs in a half-crawl. She didn’t shoot, but he could hear her clump-clumping up after him, and somehow her imperturbable clockwork stride was more terrifying than the pistol. He was whimpering as he ran back down the hall to the room in which Keats waited for him.
Keats looked up in surprise when Crawford came lurching back into the windowless ward. “Did you find a—” he began.
“Quick, John,” Crawford interrupted, “how can I get out of here besides by the stairs?"—but the metronomic clumping had reached the floor they were on. “Jesus!” he said shrilly, and ran back out into the hall.
Josephine was standing ten yards away, pointing the pistol straight at him. He sat down and threw an arm across his face, hoping she’d fire quickly and not take time to aim—and then something burst out of the ward doorway to his right.
The gun boomed and flashed, and he wasn’t hit. He lowered his hands——and saw a glittering thing like a rainbow-colored serpent curling its heavy, scaled body in the air between him and Josephine; he was dazedly trying to make out whether it had wings that were beating too fast to see, like a hummingbird, or was hanging from some kind of spiderweb, when it simply disappeared.
The hallway’s stale air shook, and Crawford shivered in a sudden impossibly icy draft.
Josephine was staring wide-eyed at the space where the thing had been, and when she turned and ran back to the stairs it was with an animal grace that was the very opposite of her mechanical pose.
Keats was beside Crawford. “Get in here,” he was saying harshly, “and deny having seen anything.” He dragged Crawford back into the ward, where the patients were querulously demanding to know what was going on and who would carry them to safety if the building was under attack by Frenchmen. Keats told them that a nurse had gone mad and fired a pistol, and to Crawford’s surprise that explanation seemed to calm them.
“Act stupid,” Keats whispered. “They’ll assume you are anyway, to be assigned to Lucas. Tell them this fellow"—he waved at the corpse in the bed—"was this way when we got here.”
Crawford was about to protest that the patient really had been dead when they’d arrived, but before he could speak he looked down at the figure in the bed.
The body was collapsed, like a trolling net with the stiffening hoops taken out of it, and the mouth was now gaping and charred and toothless. When Crawford looked up, Keats was staring at him coldly.