“He rode out last night,” she said, fisting her quaking hands in her skirts. “I don’t—I don’t know where—”
Mr. Lowell cursed. “Then it must be you, ma’am.”
“What?” She paled.
“I cannot handle this myself, and you are the next thing to a doctor Larrenton has.”
“I’m hardly a doctor,” she said, looking to Mrs. Purl, hoping for help. But Mrs. Purl was nodding with Mr. Lowell.
“You can handle yourself,” Mr. Lowell said.
“You know far more than I—”
“I carry bodies,” Mr. Lowell said sharply. “I clean up the mess.”
“I do the books!”
“A child is dying, Mrs. Lawrence. We must try. We must.”
Her protests all seemed weak, pointless, and she crumpled, covering her face with her hands. She tried to breathe. She tried to think of Mr. Renton, of her steadiness then. But she could only see his death the next morning.
But Abigail. Abigail, she had saved. She had known that Abigail would live, and so the woman had. If it was necessary—if there was no other option—
Jane grabbed her hat from where it had been placed by the door, no doubt retrieved from where it had fallen the night before. Discovered, likely, incongruously, in the kitchen. Jane shuddered but donned it all the same, ignoring the faint whiff of ether that still clung to it. Mrs. Purl supplied her with one of Augustine’s oiled overcoats, and then she was out of Lindridge Hall, following after Mr. Lowell, hoisting herself onto the horse just behind him. The two of them barely fit together, and the horse danced to the side in irritation.
But Jane was outside of Lindridge Hall. A sudden wash of relief flooded her, followed by peace, and she fought the urge to lean forward against Mr. Lowell’s broad back. The horse began picking its way down the muddy road, and she rocked with each step, her nerves subsiding.
She was not a doctor, not a nurse, either, but she would find something that could be done. Abigail was proof of that.
* * *
THE BOY, NO more than ten, was curled by the fire on a hastily made nest of blankets. He had sweated through them already, though, and his cheeks were flushed red. The ceramic basin beside him was filled with an oily, thin vomit, and his mother hurried to clean it out when she saw Mr. Lowell and Jane appear in the doorway.
“Dr. Lawrence is here,” she murmured to her son, touching his sweat-slicked forehead. “You’ll be all right now, you just sit tight.”
Jane’s heart constricted.
Mr. Lowell doffed his hat, worrying at it in his hands. “I’m afraid the doctor is not here, ma’am,” he said, eyes downcast. “The storm must have forced him off the road last night. We don’t know where he is.”
Mr. Lowell had embroidered the story for her as they rode, it seemed. She should have been grateful, but all she felt was a yawning pit of guilt.
“Can’t find him!” the woman cried.
Jane flinched and ducked her head, looking again at the child. “I’ve come to help, instead,” she said. “I have—I have some training.”
Not enough, her logical mind whispered.
She approached the child. His thin shoulders appeared from within his nest of blankets, pink and studded with bumps. She reached out to brush the back of her knuckles against him. The rash felt like sandpaper against her skin, and he was burning up, far too hot. He didn’t so much as flinch at her touch. “We should move him away from the fire,” she said.
The mother shook her head. “He’s shivering.”
“He’s feverish,” Jane said. “He’s too hot.”
“Sweating out a fever is the fastest way I know.”
Jane hadn’t read enough, hadn’t learned enough, to argue. She bit her lip. “How—how has he been eating? Drinking?”
“Naught of either,” the woman said. She was hovering in the doorway, needing to go outside to toss the refuse from the basin, but unwilling to leave her son in the hands of an untested stranger. She was saved from the decision by Mr. Lowell, who took the crock gently from her white-knuckled hands and carried it outside for her.
“Please, tell me everything you know,” Jane said.
“Scarlet fever,” the woman replied. “Scarlet fever, that’s what the doctor said Ben Maerbeck had. Is that what my Orren has?”
Ben Maerbeck. Oh, if only Jane had been back at the surgery, where she could have consulted Augustine’s notes and seen what he had prescribed last. Fighting to hide the tremor in her hands, Jane pulled away from the boy and went to the door. Mr. Lowell had left a satchel there, full of supplies gathered at the surgery before he’d ridden to find her. Had he brought the notes? She crouched down, skirts spilling across the rammed earth floor, pulling the leather bag open. Bottle after bottle, labeled in Augustine’s careful script, rolled over one another. She grabbed each and set them out in a careful line. Papers, she needed papers. And there, at the bottom of the bag, a whole sheaf of them! She grabbed them, poring over Augustine’s less-careful handwriting, the scrawl he used only for himself.