“Jack!” Hazel called. “You can come back in.”
Jack reentered, shielding his eyes. Hazel swatted his hands down. “Ay, you cure her? Fix her up?”
“I’m not quite sure, but at least we’ve made a start,” Hazel said. “And, Jack: if you have any other friends or acquaintances who need, well, examination. You know I’m not a physician yet, but I do know the basics, and I have to believe Hawthornden Castle is nicer than a poorhouse hospital.”
“How do you mean?” Jack said.
“Well, we have a dozen empty rooms, at least. With my mother and father gone, and most of their servants with them—there’s plenty of room in the great hall to set up some cots, and mats for those who need rest. We have more than enough food; heaven knows Cook still hasn’t become adjusted to ordering for just me and Iona and Charles.”
“What about people sick with”—Jack lowered his voice—“the fever?”
“Bring them,” Hazel said, hoping her tone conveyed the bravery she wished she possessed. “Anyone who we are afraid might be contagious can go in the solarium.”
Jeanette cocked her head up. “I knows a boy hit by a carriage some weeks back. Leg broke and never healed properly. Seen the bone through the skin myself.”
“Bring him here,” Hazel said. “Hawthornden Castle can become a teaching hospital for one.”
* * *
THERE WAS NO SHORTAGE OF PATIENTS for Hazel to treat, no shortage of poor men and women and children desperate for medical care that wouldn’t require them to descend into the festering stink of the hospital for the poor, where the doctors wore aprons streaked with blood and the destitute slept three to a cot.
A dozen people arrived at the dungeon laboratory for Hazel’s help the week after she treated Jeanette. It was thirty the week after that. Between Jeanette and Jack, word had spread rapidly, and soon Hazel found herself treating everything from consumption to constipation. For each person who came to the door of her dungeon laboratory seeking treatment, Hazel took complete notes and detailed their age, occupation, symptoms, and the treatment she was recommending.
Fevers she treated with linseed cordial and orange whey, keeping the patient warm with blankets and supplied with plenty of tea. Broken bones were set with wooden planks and strips of fabric. Wounds were stitched closed. When a woman arrived clutching her cheek in pain, Hazel pulled a rotten tooth from her jaw and treated the gum with honey and clove oil.
Hazel found herself consulting her well-worn Dr. Beecham’s Treatise less and less often, becoming more confident in her own abilities and instinct for diagnosis. Most patients Hazel was able to treat in an afternoon and send on their way, but others—like Jeanette’s acquaintance, a young boy named Bobby Danderfly, with the broken leg from the carriage accident—Hazel would assist as she could on her table, and then send the patient to a bed in Hawthornden Castle to convalesce.
When the first patient with Roman fever arrived, Hazel gathered the staff in the library.
“None of you need stay in this house,” Hazel said. “There’s a danger to having the sick here, I know that, especially with the fever.” Hazel had set the man up in the solarium with a straw mat, and she had spent the morning doing her best to keep him comfortable, gently washing away the blood and pus from his burst blisters and wiping an ice water–dampened cloth across his feverish forehead. “The gatehouse is more than big enough for anyone who doesn’t want to live here.” Charles, Iona, and Cook nodded solemnly. Susan the scullery maid scowled in the corner. “And nobody should go in the solarium but me, is that clear?”
“I don’t see why we have to leave,” Susan scoffed. “I didn’t sign up to work in a bloody hospital. I’d like to see what the lady of the house would make of all of this.”
“Well, while my mother is in England, I think you’ll find that I’m the lady of the house, Susan.”
Susan mumbled something under her breath.
“And, Cook, I don’t suppose you’d mind making a pot of oats? Maybe with the currant jelly? To help our patients keep their strength.”
Even as her days became exhausting, filled with tending to patients and mixing poultices and washing sodden rags, Hazel still wasn’t able to sleep properly. She had uneasy dreams, nightmares about the horror of the corpse she and Jack had dug up from its grave and its mutilated face. Other times, the face that hovered before her in the spaceless void behind her closed eyelids was Bernard’s. Either way, Hazel tossed and turned in her blankets until, with an even mixture of disappointment and relief, she saw the first creeping of pastel-colored dawn through her window.