The Healing Season

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Epilogue

Questions for Discussion

Author’s Note

Chapter One

London, 1817

The sight that greeted Ian Russell as he stood in the doorway of the dark, malodorous room gave him that sense of helplessness he hated. It was in stark contrast to those times when he was setting a bone or stitching up a wound, knowing he was actively assisting a person in his recovery.

This situation was the kind where he knew his pitifully small store of skills would be of little use.

Here, only God’s grace could save the pathetically young woman lying on the iron bed in front of him, her life ebbing from her like the tide in the Thames, leaving exposed the muddy rocks and embankments on each side.

Blood soaked the covers all around the lower half of the bed. Ian crossed the small room in a few strides and set down his square, black case at the foot of the bed.

The women were always young: fourteen, fifteen, twenty, sometimes even thirty—if they lived that long. Women in their prime, their lives snuffed out by the life growing within them. This one didn’t appear to be more than seventeen or eighteen.

As he began drawing back the bedclothes, he looked at the only other occupant of the dim room—a young woman sitting beside the bed.

“Will…will she be all right?” she asked fearfully. He spared her another glance and found himself caught by her breathtaking loveliness. Large, long-lashed eyes appealed to him for reassurance. Strands of light-colored hair framed delicately etched features as if an artist’s finest brush had been used to trace the slim nose, the fragile curve of her cheek, the pert bow of her lips.

He blinked, realizing he’d been staring. “I don’t know,” he answered honestly before clearing his mind of everything but saving the life of the pale girl lying on the sodden bed.

“Can you tell me what happened?” he asked, attempting to determine whether it was a miscarriage by nature, or a young woman’s attempt to abort an unwanted life.

As he lifted the girl’s skirts and measured the extent of dilation, he listened to the other woman’s low, hesitant account.

“She had…tried to drink something…several things, I think…but nothing worked. I think she grew desperate and tried to get rid of it herself.” She raised her hand and showed him the knitting needle. “I found this beside her.”

It didn’t bode well. Blood poisoning could already have set in. If the girl contracted a severe case of fever, she’d be dead in a few days. He prayed she hadn’t punctured anything but the membranes.

Sending a plea heavenward, Ian set to work to stop the bleeding.

“Can you remove her stays?” he asked the young woman sitting by the bed. Would she be able to handle what was in store, or was she too squeamish?

The young woman stood and gingerly approached him. As she hesitated, he repressed an impatient sigh. Pretty and useless. Probably a lightskirt, he decided, like the one lying unconscious. His heart raged with the familiar frustration at how easily a young woman’s virtue was lost in this part of London.

But he had no one else to assist him. It was two in the morning, and he’d been summoned from his bed, with no idea what he would find when he arrived at his destination.

The edges of the young woman’s sleeves were stained with blood as if she’d already tried to help her friend. At his bidding now, she leaned over the bed and began to lift the girl’s dress higher. Her hands were shaking so much they fumbled on the lacings of the corset.

“Here, let me,” he said, barely concealing his annoyance. He took one of the scalpels from his case and slit the corset up its length.

It was a wonder the girl hadn’t already miscarried, the way she was bound so tightly. She was further along than he’d supposed.

He addressed his reluctant assistant. “It’s important that we stop the bleeding. In order to do that, I’m going to have to remove the unborn child. Do you think you’ll be up to this? You’re not going to faint on me?”

The woman stared at him, her pupils wide black pools within silvery irises. She bit her lip. “I’ll…I’ll try not to.”

“You’ve got to do better than that.” He tried for the note of encouragement he used with students around the dissecting table for the first time, but his mind was more concerned with the young girl bleeding to death. They had a long night ahead of them.

Dawn was lighting the interior of the room when Ian straightened to massage the kinks out of his lower back.

He glanced at his young assistant. Her pretty frock was ruined, the front and sleeves spattered with blood.

She hadn’t fainted, he’d give her that, although many times he thought she’d be sick. She’d clasped her hand over her mouth more than once. Now she wiped the perspiration from her forehead with her sleeve, pushing back the damp golden strands of hair that had fallen from their knot.

“The bleeding has abated and her pulse, though weak, is regular. We’ve done all we can for now.” He turned away from the bed to the basin of water to wash his hands.

After dumping it out the window and pouring some fresh water to wash off his instruments, he asked, “Can you see if there are any fresh linens for the bed?”

She started, then glanced around the dingy surroundings. “I don’t know if she would have anything.”

“Perhaps the woman who let me in earlier. Can you ask her?”

She pressed her lips together. “I doubt she would be so obliging.”

“I suggest you find out. Bribe her if you have to. Your friend can’t lie in that bloody mess.” He nodded curtly toward the soiled linens.

The young woman straightened her back and gave him a look that told him the words had stung. It was the first hint of anything other than fear he’d seen in her all night. He’d rarely had such a jittery nurse. He was surprised a woman her age—at least twenty, he’d judge—hadn’t been around a delivery room before.

She left the room without a word.

Ian forgot her as he dumped cranioclast, regular forceps, crochet and hooks into the basin. The water immediately clouded red.

He had little hope the girl on the bed would survive. If the loss of blood didn’t kill her, childbed fever likely would.

The other woman returned as he was drying the instruments.