A Sudden, Fearful Death

"We have cholera, typhoid, and smallpox here," Berenice pointed out. "There was a serious outbreak of cholera near here only five years ago, which argues my point. One should keep the windows closed, in the sickroom especial-ly."

They began to walk along the corridor.

"How long did you live in the Indies?" Callandra asked. "Where was it, Jamaica?"

"Oh, fifteen years," Berenice answered. "Yes, Jamaica most of the time. My family had plantations there. A very agreeable life." She shrugged her elegant shoulders. "But tedious when one longs for society and the excitement of London. It is the same people week after week. After a time one feels one has met everyone of any significance and heard everything they have to say."

They had reached a turn in the corridor and Berenice seemed to intend going into a ward to the left. Callandra wished to find Kristian Beck and thought it most likely that at this time of day he would be in his own rooms, where he studied, saw patients, and kept his books and papers, and that lay to the right.

"It must have been a wrench for you to leave, all the same," she said without real interest. "England would be very different, and you would miss your family."

Berenice smiled. "There was not so much to leave by the time I came away. Plantations are no longer the profitable places they used to be. I can remember going to the slave market in Kingston when I was a child, but of course slaving is illegal now and has been for years." She brushed her hand over her huge skirts, knocking off a piece of loose thread that cling to the cloth.

With that she laughed a little dryly and walked away along the corridor, leaving Callandra to go the other way toward Kristian Beck's rooms. Suddenly she was nervous, her hands hot, her tongue clumsy. This was ridiculous. She was a middle-aged widow, of no glamour at all, going to call upon a busy doctor, nothing more, nothing of any other meaning.

She knocked on the door abruptly.

"Come in." His voice was startlingly deep and touched by an almost imperceptible trace of accent she could not place. It was mid-European, but from which country she did not know, and had not asked him.

She turned the handle and pushed the door open.

He was standing at the table in front of the window, papers spread out in front of him, and he looked around to see who it was who had come in. He was not a tall man but there was a sense of power in him, both physical and emotional. His face was dominated by dark eyes that were of a beautiful shape and a mouth both sensual and humorous. His expression of preoccupation vanished when he saw her and was replaced immediately with one of pleasure.

"Lady Callandra. How good to see you again. I hope your visit does not mean that there is something wrong?"

"Nothing new." She closed the door behind her. Before she came she had formulated a good excuse for being here, but now the words escaped her. "I have been trying to prevail upon Sir Herbert to have the nurses cover the slop pails," she said rather too quickly. "But I don't think he sees much purpose to it. He was on his way to the operating theater, and I had the feeling his mind was on his patient."

"So you are going to persuade me instead?" His smile was sudden and wide. "I have never yet found above two or three nurses in the hospital who can remember an order for more than a day at a time, never mind carrying it out. The poor souls are harried from every quarter, hungry half the time and drunk the other half." His smile vanished again. "They do their best according to their lights, for the most part."

His eyes lit with enthusiasm and he leaned against the table, engaging her attention. "You know, I have been reading the most interesting paper. This doctor, sailing from the Indies home to England, contracted a fever and treated himself by going out on deck at night, stripped of his clothes, and taking a cold shower with buckets of seawater. Can you believe that?' He was watching her, searching the expression in her eyes. "It relieved his symptoms marvelously and he slept well and was restored by morning. Then in the evening his fever returned and he treated it the same way, and was again restored. Each time the attack was slighter, and by the time the ship docked he was fully himself."

She was astounded, but his eagerness carried her along.

"Can you imagine Mrs. Flaherty if you tried drenching your patients with buckets of cold water?" She tried not to laugh but her voice was shaking, not so much with amusement as with nervousness. "I cannot even persuade her to open the windows in the sunlight let alone at night!"