This is not Elodie. This is not Elodie. This was a patient, teetering on the edge of death. A dying woman who needed help.
Jane donned an apron, rinsed her hands, and came to Augustine’s side. “What can I do?”
“Retractors,” Augustine said, and Jane shuddered with grim, hysterical humor. Retractors. Just like Mr. Renton. The retractors were discarded on the operating table itself, already bloody, and she slipped them into the wound Augustine had made in the woman’s belly. The flesh was distended.
She was pregnant.
Augustine set his scalpel aside and slid his hands inside the incision, pushing and pulling. He muttered a curse, and Jane looked up at him, startled. There were dark circles below his eyes, and his skin was sallow. His forehead was still beaded with sweat.
He was not well. The dawn had not brought relief, not enough.
His hands trembled as he took a pre-threaded needle and began stitching something deep inside the wound, quickly but precisely. Skill and training won out over exhaustion, at least for the moment, and Jane made herself focus on keeping the surgical site clear for him. She used the flushing bulb when he demanded and shifted the angle of the retractor to open up more room to one side of her abdomen.
This was all too much like Mr. Renton. She could see him again, hear his moaning. But no; if this was not Elodie, this was also not him.
“Jane, look away,” Augustine said, softly.
“I—”
“Look away, please.”
She did so reluctantly. Augustine whispered what might have been a prayer. She felt the retractor shift as his hand went beneath it. Something wet squelched and thudded, and Jane’s stomach flipped.
Perhaps he was right to have her look away.
“Why isn’t she screaming?” Jane asked.
“Ether, exhaustion, blood loss,” Augustine responded. By the vibrations in the retractors, he was stitching again. Another flush demanded; another curse. He closed the skin, set the body to rights, inch by painful inch.
At last, he pulled away from the patient, exhaling a long, shuddering breath. He reached up to mop his brow, leaving a slash of blood across his face. His whole front was soaked in it. He looked monstrous and tired as he staggered over to the sink. Jane remained behind to wash the woman’s belly.
Her chest rose and fell in shallow rhythm. Jane cleaned up the woman’s legs and hips, then found a cloth to drape over her bare skin. From there, she focused on her stomach, cleaning gently around the sutures.
She circled around to the woman’s other side, then covered her mouth to contain the shriek that came from her lips without warning.
There, in a ceramic dish, lay the unmoving remains of a small, half-formed infant, alongside a mass of bloody flesh the color and texture of raw liver. The world seemed suddenly very far away, and she staggered to the wall, bracing herself against it and vomiting.
The tap turned off behind her. “She arrived several months pregnant and hemorrhaging extensively,” Augustine said. “Her husband reported that she’d been bleeding on and off for her whole pregnancy, but without pain. When they went for a ride together this morning, the bleeding began again and wouldn’t slow. I suspected a miscarriage, but when I attempted to induce labor, she only bled more and reported extreme pain. Palpation revealed that her pregnancy was taking place outside of the womb.”
“Outside?” Jane whispered.
“The fetus had damaged her womb beyond repair. The placenta had grown into the outside of the uterine wall, and had been torn from it during the ride. The tearing and subsequent bleeding meant that the only course of action was to remove everything. I had hoped maybe to save the child, but—” He shook his head, and she thought again of the still form in the pan.
Bile rose in her throat again, but she pushed it down and turned back to the patient, and to Augustine. She met his gaze across the woman’s body, then went to the operating table. She ignored the dish at her feet, and gently mopped the woman’s stomach.
“She will probably die,” Augustine said, more softly this time.
Jane shook her head, fighting down the urge to clap her hands over her ears. “Don’t say such things. She can still hear you.”
“Ether clouds the mind. She won’t remember. Jane—”
“If any part of her believes she will die, especially in such a clouded state, it may become reality,” Jane snapped.
Augustine stared back at her, confusion surfacing through his numb exhaustion. It took her a moment to realize she had echoed the basic concept of magic that Dr. Nizamiev had tried to explain to her. Before, it had been only impossible, insane thinking. Here, now, it made sense.