Ah. A man cutting himself open for no reason except, perhaps, pain—the much simpler explanation.
“I expect,” Dr. Nizamiev said, voice cool and dry, “that I am needed inside. Not explaining myself to … a nurse?” The woman looked Jane up and down again, measuring. She couldn’t be much older than Dr. Lawrence, but in her sharp appraisal, she seemed ageless. Unyielding.
“Not exactly,” Jane said, straightening her shoulders. “I am an accountant, training to assist Dr. Lawrence.”
“I see,” Dr. Nizamiev said, and her tone was empty, empty of amusement or confusion or derision. She opened the door to the surgery and stepped inside, and Jane trailed after.
The door swung shut behind them, and a moment later, Dr. Lawrence appeared in the operating theater doorway. Jane felt a wayward surge of excitement, then stilled as she took in his expression: he was wearing his surgeon’s focus.
“Come, come quickly,” he said, voice harsh. Jane’s stomach dropped. “It is Mr. Renton. Avdotya, you can wait in the office, it’s just—”
“I will come as well,” Dr. Nizamiev said, and though no surgeon, she strode into the operating theater with a confidence Jane could not conjure in herself. Mr. Renton. What could have happened? Why was he back for more of the knife?
Was there another impossible tangle?
She followed and donned a gown with trembling hands.
Their patient lay on the operating table. He was quiet, but not from ether, and though he was strapped down, there was no need for it, for he did not move at all. Dr. Lawrence had laid bare his belly and removed the sponge covering the gaping hole of his bowel. His skin was red and taut around it.
“Hands,” he said, and Jane obediently scrubbed herself clean, then joined him at the operating table.
“What has happened?”
Dr. Lawrence looked up at her, grim-faced. “His pulse has grown very weak. I have attempted purgatives and bleeding, but there has been no improvement. He may have a hemorrhage in his gut, either that we missed or that I caused.” He delivered the facts in a rush, controlled but too rapid for confidence. “I will need to open him up. Retractors, if I may impose upon you again, Miss Shoringfield?”
Jane found them laid out on a nearby counter. She was back at his side in seconds. He worked the stitches open, and a slow-moving gout of filth oozed forth, clotted into masses and stinking of death. It was impossible for Jane to make out any other details, but Dr. Lawrence swore, then demanded, “The bulb, the flushing bulb. Jane, take it, fill it with water, just water.”
Her hands refused to still as she grabbed up the equipment, as she turned on the tap, as she manipulated the fine glass-and-rubber instrument. Where was the confidence that he could create in her? Dying on the table, curdling in her heart. Slipping away, too fast.
She handed the equipment to Dr. Lawrence.
Black filth ran from Mr. Renton’s abdomen as Dr. Lawrence worked the bulb. She looked for any hint of red or healthy pink beneath the skin and found none. He plunged his hands into the wound and methodically slid his fingers along sick-slick organs, feeling where he could not see.
“If we can clean the rot, if I can find the perforation—”
Mr. Renton’s chest rose and fell, shallowly, slowly. The doctor pushed his hands deeper.
His chest moved slower still, shallower still.
Dr. Lawrence swore.
Mr. Renton’s chest moved not at all.
It was a small change, from shallow breaths to nothing, and yet without that last vital scrap, Mr. Renton was transfigured. Dr. Lawrence kept working a few desperate moments longer, and then he pulled his hands out entirely. They were black.
“He is gone,” the doctor said.
Jane looked between the corpse and Dr. Lawrence, simultaneously numb and on the verge of tears, and then retreated to the sink, turning on the spigot and washing her spotless hands as if they were coated in blood.
When she was finished, she turned around to find Dr. Lawrence unmoved.
“This is my fault,” he said.
Behind him, Dr. Nizamiev arched a brow but said nothing. She was watching Dr. Lawrence with predatory focus. For what, Jane couldn’t say. If Dr. Nizamiev had been a surgeon, Jane might have seen competition, or judgment, but no. No, it was something unidentifiable that nevertheless left Jane uneasy.
“I moved too quickly during the initial surgery,” Dr. Lawrence continued. “I flushed the wound at the start, but not at the end. The wound was befouled. I could have caught this.”
“Dr. Lawrence,” Jane murmured.