That night, Luke returned to the Bay of Quinte Hotel — but only briefly.
As he entered, the innkeeper was coming down the hall. “I’m sorry, sir, but if you intend to stay another night, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you for the fee in advance. There are so many strangers in town, you see.”
“Excuse me,” Luke said. “I understood that the room was paid for.”
“The room was paid for one night for Mr. Lewis and guest,” the man said. “Mr. Lewis has departed and I have received no instructions regarding his guest.”
“Oh.” Luke hadn’t considered this. Or rather, he had hoped that Mr. McFaul’s generosity had included a second night. He should have realized that this wouldn’t be the case. After all, McFaul had assumed that Luke would be travelling on to Montreal when he and his father parted company. His afternoon with the sick and dying had left him exhausted, not only physically but emotionally. The room would be an expensive luxury, but he was too tired to even think about looking for somewhere else.
“Well, I guess I’ll take the room for tonight anyway,” he said, and reached into his pocket for the small satchel that served him as a purse.
The landlord came closer, to take the money, but when he was within a couple of feet of Luke, his nose wrinkled and he came to a stop.
“What’s that on your coat?”
Luke looked down. His sleeve was covered with a sludgy stain. Blood, urine … worse? When he moved his arm to look at it, even he could smell the stink that emanated from it.
“I’m sorry; I was volunteering at the hospital this afternoon. I must have got something on me. If you would be so kind as to fetch me a bucket of water, I’ll sponge it off before I go up to my room.”
“At the hospital?” The landlord’s face paled. “At the general hospital?”
“Well, more in the hospital sheds, really.”
“With all those filthy emigrants?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m sorry, you can’t stay here,” the man said as he began hurriedly backing down the hall.
“Excuse me?” Luke said. “I don’t understand.”
“I won’t have you bringing disease here. I’ve my other guests to think of, you know.”
“But someone needs to help.”
“Someone can do whatever they like. They just can’t stay here and do it. Not even for one night. Not even for one minute. You’ll have to wait outside while I get your bag.”
And before Luke could protest further, the innkeeper turned and marched up the stairs. “Get out. Now,” he flung over his shoulder. “Shoo! You can wait around back.”
Luke knew that there was no point in arguing. He went out the front door and found his way to the back entrance of the hotel. As he waited for the innkeeper to reappear with his satchel, he did wonder if there was any point in looking for another inn. He was likely to receive the same treatment wherever he went, unless he cleaned himself up and then lied about what he had been doing. He debated with himself for a moment about employing this deception, but in the end he decided that it would be unfair. The innkeepers, in fact the whole town, were probably fearful of the contagion spreading. If he were running a business he would feel the same way, he supposed, and as no one had any idea how the disease was transmitted, he had no way to judge how great the risk was.
A few minutes later the innkeeper appeared at the back door and tossed the bag out into the dooryard.
“There you go — take your bag and go somewhere else.”
Luke wandered back in the direction of the hospital. If bad came to worse he supposed he could curl up in a corner of one of the sheds for one night, although he would like to get away from the smell for a while. Still, he had slept in rougher places.
His route took him to the huddle of wooden dwellings that he had passed through earlier that day. He wondered if he might find a corner of one of them to rent, although it was too late to start looking that night and he expected there would be few vacancies. These sorts of cheap lodgings would be a magnet for any emigrant who had a few pennies in his pocket, not to mention the regular working-class inhabitants of Kingston. Still, he could ask the next day.
Only a few ragamuffin children accosted him as he walked. Most had likely bedded down for the night, even though the late evening light of summer had only just started to wane. As he drew nearer to the sheds, he could see that some emigrants had opted to sleep underneath bushes or trees, a patch of grass a more inviting pillow than a few square feet of hard-packed earth. Now and again, a child cried, but without much vigour.
He walked down to the lake so he could sponge the mess off his coat sleeve. Now that the smell had been brought to his attention, he was aware of it every time he moved his arm. The shallow water at the lake’s edge was greasy and green, but even though the water was fishy-smelling, it served to sluice the smear away.
In the end, he was unwilling to face the nightmare of the sheds. Instead, he found an unoccupied corner where two limestone walls of the hospital met to form a sheltered spot. The rock felt warm to the touch — it still retained much of the heat of the day’s sunlight, yet faced away from the ever-present and merciless west wind. He opened his satchel and retrieved the heavy winter coat he had packed in anticipation of Montreal’s frigid winter. It would keep the damp of the earth from seeping into his body during the night, although it might well be stained beyond redemption if he used it in this manner often.
He had only just made himself comfortable and closed his eyes when he sensed someone staring at him. He opened his eyes to find a girl of perhaps nine or ten years — it was difficult to tell the ages of any of these emigrant children as so many were so small — but this one was so slight and pale and insubstantial that she appeared more like a wispy wraith than anything of flesh and bone. Her face shimmered strangely in the fading light and it was only when she moved that Luke saw that her face was covered in a yellowish-white scaly rash that reminded him of the discarded skin of a snake. Her odd visage was framed by thin, fine, almost white hair, and her eyes were so light that they seemed to have no colour at all. She regarded him solemnly for a moment before she spoke.
“You was at the sheds today,” she said.
“I was,” Luke agreed.
“Are you a doctor?”
“No, not yet. I hope to be someday.”
“But you know something about doctoring. You wouldn’t be at the sheds else, would you?”
“I know a little,” Luke admitted. “Are you feeling sick?”
The girl’s eyes widened in alarm, and Luke realized that he had said the wrong thing. None of these children would ever admit to being unwell, he realized, for fear that they would be whisked off to disappear like so many of their family members. In their world, weakness brought only calamity.
“You don’t look sick,” he said quickly. “Is there something else amiss?”
“A lady’s cut her thumb and now it’s festering. She asked at the hospital, but they chased her away.”
“I could look at it, if you like.”
The girl nodded and waited until Luke packed up his makeshift bed before leading him back to the rundown neighbourhood he had just passed through. The path snaked through a warren of tiny, unpainted hovels that appeared in imminent danger of falling in on themselves.
The girl stopped in front of a figure who Luke at first mistook for another child. On closer examination, he realized that it was a woman, but he could scarcely hazard a guess at her age. She was tiny to begin with, but hunger or disease or misery had wizened her to almost nothing. Her face was a mass of wrinkles, punctuated by a sharp, beaky nose. She had what appeared to be a herd of ragged children at her feet, although as Luke approached they rose and resolved themselves into six small bodies, the smallest perhaps three or four, the oldest a little younger than the girl who had brought him here. As to their genders, it was impossible to tell.
“This here’s nearly a doctor,” the girl announced. “He can look at your thumb.”
The woman mutely held out a bony hand, loose skin flapping as she moved her arm. There was a gash just beneath the thumbnail, not deep, but the flesh was open from the cuticle to the knuckle, greenish ooze collecting in the cut.
“This is infected,” he said. “It’s not serious right now, but it needs to be cleaned up. Have you any salt?” He had often found that cleaning out a wound with warm, salty water worked wonders on those occasions when a cow or a pig had been ripped by a wire or stone, and he had no reason to believe that this method wouldn’t work equally well for a thumb.
The woman shook her head. “I have nothing but what they give me at the shed.”
“Well, let’s clean it out as best we can tonight, and I’ll beg some salt for you tomorrow.” At least there was a supply of warm water nearby. There was a small fire still burning in the yard, with a tin pot of water beside it. He tested the temperature and judged that it was warm enough for his purposes.
He looked around the tiny encampment, but he could see nothing that he could use as a swab. He pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket, dunked it into the water, then wrung it out over the woman’s outstretched hand. He would have preferred to have her soak the thumb for a few minutes before he began cleaning it, but he guessed that the pot was used for cooking, or to hold their drinking water, and he hesitated to foul it with a septic cut.
The children clustered around him, rocking back on their haunches as they watched. The smallest one thrust a filthy thumb into its mouth.
“I’m Luke Lewis by the way,” he said as he worked.
“It’s a fine thing to meet such a distinguished gentleman as yourself, nearly Dr. Luke,” the woman said. She didn’t volunteer her own name in return.
Luke poured some warm water into the palm of his hand, trying to dip his handkerchief in it and clean out the wound at the same time, but he couldn’t keep the water from leaking out onto the ground. The ghostly girl suddenly appeared at his side with a battered and dented tin bowl to use as a makeshift basin. He hadn’t even noticed her leave the yard. As she handed him the bowl, her sleeve fell back, exposing a thin wrist. Like her face, it was covered in a whitish scale. He thanked her and, after immersing the thumb, began coaxing the crusted matter away from the edges of the cut.
“That’s as clean as I can get it now,” he said, after working away at it for a time. “I’ll find some salt tomorrow, and we can go at it again. Try to keep your thumb as clean as you can in the meantime, and I’ll look at it again in the morning. Will I find you here?”
The woman peered at him suspiciously, as if confirming her future whereabouts would be a perilous and foolhardy thing to do.
“I’ll come looking for you,” he said finally.
He was about to head back to his makeshift corner when the girl tugged on his arm. “There’s another lady wants to talk to you,” she said, and she led him to where two women were waiting by the hospital sheds.
They were both young, and although their clothing hung in rags around them and there were hollows under their cheekbones, they had obviously made attempts to keep clean and had taken some pains with their hair. They brightened when they saw Luke, sitting up a little straighter, and one of them smiled a little. The other held a wailing bundle.
“Deirdre won’t stop crying,” the woman said. “Do you think it’s the fever?”
Luke swept back the rags that covered the child’s face. A year and a half old, he judged, maybe two, small and thin, but not starving. And then he noticed the rosy red patches on the infant’s cheeks. He had seen this before, with his brother Will’s children.
He smiled at the woman. “It’s not the fever. I think she’s just teething and having a miserable time of it.” He hesitated and then decided to sacrifice his second handkerchief. He ducked into the nearby shed. No one was there to ask permission from, so he went over to one of the oak casks that were stacked up in the corner and poured a little brandy onto the cloth. He took it outside to the woman. “Let her suck on this. It will help relieve the pain and send her off to sleep. She should be fine in a day or two.”
She offered the infant a corner of the handkerchief. The child latched on and sucked vigorously, with only sporadic intervals of hiccupping wails until finally it settled down for a good long pull.
“Bless you, sir,” the woman said. “I’m sure she’ll be fine now.”
“But perhaps you should come back tomorrow and check on her,” the second one said.
“Yes, that would be a grand idea,” the first woman agreed. “You’ll do that, won’t you?”
Luke assured them that he would, and, satisfied with his first foray into the world of doctoring, he returned to his makeshift bed.