A Star Shall Fall

A light snow began falling as Galen disembarked from his chair outside Dr. Andrews’s house. He welcomed the sight; it had been a gray, dreary Christmas, and a bit of sugar frosting might make London more attractive—at least until the coal smoke turned it to black crusts.

He paid the chair-men and hurried across to the door, shivering. The footman took a dreadfully long time to answer, and bowed deeply as he let Galen in. “My apologies, Mr. St. Clair. Dr. Andrews is in his laboratory at present. If you would be so kind as to wait in the parlor, he will be with you shortly.”

Galen agreed, and was led upstairs to the back parlor. While he waited, he chafed his cold hands in front of the fire and surveyed the room. It had the kind of vague ordinariness that characterised the homes of many bachelors; Andrews put out sufficient effort to furnish his parlour with chairs, tables, and so on, but with no wife to make it fashionable, the result was utterly forgettable.

“Ah, Mr. St. Clair.” Dr. Andrews entered behind him, still buttoning his waistcoat. “I was unaware of the hour, or I would have been more ready to receive you.”

“Quite all right. Your footman said you were in your laboratory…” Galen’s voice trailed off as he noticed a smear on the back of Andrews’s hand.

The doctor saw it and hastily fetched out a handkerchief with which to scrub it away. “Yes, in my basement. I have a room down there where I conduct dissections. My apologies; I don’t usually come upstairs with blood on my hands. Shall I have the maid brew coffee for us?”

He rang a bell, and gestured Galen to a chair. “I never touch spirits myself, and only occasionally take wine,” the older gentleman confided, “but coffee has become my great vice.”

Faced with that admission, Galen didn’t try to hide his own guilty smile. “Mine as well. Its effects are most wonderful: it clears the mind, steadies the hand, aids digestion—”

“It’s fortified my own health wondrously,” Andrews said. “Indeed, just last week I advised a certain lady to adminster regular doses to her sickly child, to fend off infections.”

“Very wise,” Galen said. “But I was under the impression you don’t practice medicine any longer?”

Andrews made an indeterminate gesture that could have been meant to convey anything at all. “By and large, no. But I make exceptions for a few trusted families.”

No doubt the most influential and respectable ones. Galen quite understood. “Your time is mostly taken up with your studies?”

“And illness,” Andrews said bluntly, as the maid entered with the coffee tray. Judging by the speed of her return, the doctor had not been lying about his fondness for the drink; it must have been nearly prepared already when Galen arrived. She laid the tray on a pillar-and-claw table to one side, then curtsied out of the room again when Andrews waved her off. He poured the coffee himself. “You will have guessed, I am sure, that I suffer from consumption.”

“My heartfelt sympathies,” Galen said. “I had an aunt taken by the same disease, and two of her children.”

Andrews passed him a coffee bowl. “With so many diseases in the world, I sometimes wonder that any of us reach maturity. But it produces this happy coincidence in my life, that my time is occupied by two facets of the same issue.”

“You study your own illness?”

“What else should I do, with the time I have left? Particularly if I wish to increase the amount of that time.”

“Then that is why you remain in London,” Galen said, understanding. Most consumptives who could afford it went to more healthful climates, where the air was warmer and drier, and might prolong their lives. The damp, chilly rains of London were not good for such men.

But Andrews looked puzzled. “What has London to do with it?”

Now uncertain, Galen said, “The Royal Society. I presumed there were men among its number who shared your interest, and that you wished to remain here to work more closely with them, without the delay of letters.”

The doctor was drinking coffee as he responded; Galen could not tell whether a routine coughing fit struck him just then, or whether the answer caused Andrews to choke on some of his drink. Galen hovered at the edge of his chair, not certain what he should do, as the gentleman hastily put down his bowl and snatched out a handkerchief.

“I would to God that were true,” Andrews said. “Come, Mr. St. Clair, you’ve seen what our meetings are like. Nice, orderly business, suitable for gentlemen, and occasionally someone from the Continent, or elsewhere in Britain, performs a bit of experimentation that actually does ‘improve our natural knowledge,’ as the name would have it. But the weekly activity is often tedious and trivial in the extreme.”

Galen took refuge in the contemplation of his coffee. “I would not say so, Dr. Andrews.”