Jack found Hazel sobbing by the red oak tree, the body still on the cart. Without a word, Jack started to dig a grave.
“I have to study him, Jack,” Hazel said when she saw what he was doing. She could barely get the words out for her weeping. “I need every corpse I can.”
“Not this one, love,” Jack replied quietly. “You knew him. You cared for him. You can bury him, and mourn him. He doesn’t have to be parts. Not yet.”
Hazel didn’t answer. She breathed deeply until the crying stopped, blinked her tears away, and walked back up to the main castle. By the time Jack finished burying the man and made it back to Hawthornden, Hazel was clear-eyed, already treating patients again in the solarium.
There was no medical writing about any sort of treatment, let alone a cure, for the Roman fever, and so Hazel began with small, harmless remedies. She gave her patients tea with lemon juice and honey. In the afternoon, she insisted they drink powdered cardamom seeds and milk, the way the book advised her to treat consumption. Their bandages were changed three times a day, the fabric almost always sticky with crusted scabs. If they could stand the smell, she offered them the wortflower-root tea that Jack brewed. If he had drunk it in childhood and he never got the Roman fever, maybe there was something about it that could help.
Strangely enough, it seemed to work, at least on some of the patients. An hour after she served wortflower-root tea to four Roman fever patients, one of them knocked gently on the glass and asked Hazel to bring over a deck of cards so they could play whist. The next day, she powdered the wortflower root and applied it to their boils.
Their scarring didn’t heal, but the improvement from the powdered root was undeniable: flesh that had been angry and red with streaks of chartreuse became pink and smooth. The first Roman fever patient who arrived at Hawthornden, a fisherman named Robert Bortlock with white whiskers and a nose shaped like a turnip, had even begun to ask for seconds at breakfast.
The scabs from the Roman fever, which were healing over on the patients’ backs, reminded Hazel of the drawings of smallpox she had seen in her books.
She knew the story of Edward Jenner and the smallpox vaccination, of course—how the English physician had noticed that the local milkmaids seemed to be the only ones not succumbing to smallpox, and how he hypothesized that their exposure to cowpox had somehow taught their bodies to fend off its deadlier human cousin. Lord Almont had once even hosted Jenner at one of his salons, and though Hazel had been too young then to absorb what he was saying, she recalled his wispy gray hair and the white handkerchief wound tightly around his thick neck and tied in an elegant square bow below his chin.
But inoculation had existed before then, for decades. Scientists understood it conceptually, that you could train a body to fight a deadly disease by introducing a weakened version of it, and before Jenner and his cows, people were using the healing smallpox scabs, ground into a fine powder needled beneath the skin.
Why had nobody tried it with the Roman fever? It was an illness on a much smaller scale than smallpox, certainly, but surely if the same technique worked, physicians in Edinburgh could save thousands of lives. Was it possible that there were so few healing cases of the Roman fever that inoculation didn’t even seem like a possibility? Hazel imagined there should at least have been something in the literature, an essay in the Scottish Journal of Medicine or a study published in London. But she found nothing. She decided to write to Dr. Beecham at the Anatomists’ Society and ask his opinion.
Dr. William Beecham III
The Royal Anatomists’ Society
Edinburgh
Dear Dr. Beecham,
I pray this letter finds you well, and I assure you that I continue to study hard for the Physician’s Examination. As part of my education, I have begun rudimentary examinations of several fellow Scotsmen and -women suffering from a variety of medical ailments, including, I am sorry to say, the Roman fever. I hope you’ll forgive my impudence, but I wanted to ask your opinion on the matter. Has any experimentation been done with regard to inoculation against the Roman fever? On the advice of a local boy and his memories of a childhood folk remedy, I treated patients with a tea made of wortflower root, and upon seeing positive results, I added a poultice of powdered wortflower root to the dressing when I bandaged their boils. The effect has been encouraging. So encouraging, in fact, that I wondered if the healing scabs could be used in an inoculation. I know that your schedule must be prohibitive, but if you do find the time, please write back.
Yours most sincerely,