The surgery had belonged to Patrick Jago’s father, who was awarded his diploma from the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in the early sixties and then surprised his contemporaries by retreating at his wife’s request to set up practice in her small home town in Devon, close to the Somerset border, below the moor. Patrick was their only child, and followed his father’s calling. When his father died, from the infectious disease of glanders, picked up from a horse, Patrick took over the practice. His mother still lived in her home beside the surgery, and Lottie now lodged with her while Patrick and his wife lived across town.
What had once been a two-stall stable up against the house, Patrick Jago’s father had converted into a surgery. In the gloomy loft above the stable and adjoining coach house were dusty glass cases in which were mounted obstetrical monstrosities the old man had collected. Lottie climbed the steps and wiped the dust off the glass. She studied calves with two heads and three eyes. Lambs with supernumerary limbs sprouting from their backbones.
New stables and kennels had been built in the garden. At the back of the surgery was a dispensary or pharmacy. Patrick Jago had inherited his father’s factotum, Edgar Riddell, who stood for hours every day at a granite mortar, grinding vegetable roots and barks to powder, for incorporation into tonics and cough mixtures, with a heavy marble pestle.
Today Lottie was not with Jago on his rounds, and there were no visitors to the surgery, so she assisted Edgar compounding ginger and aloes with black treacle into physic or horse balls. They pounded hard lumps of carbonite of ammonia, mixing the powder with gentian and fenugreek, aniseed and ginger, and pushed the mixture into four-ounce parcels wrapped in brown paper and sealed with wax.
They prepared pint-and-a-half bottles of cattle drench containing many ingredients infused over a gas-ring in a large cauldron, filling the dispensary with herbal odours. Edgar Riddell made black draughts for the relief of colic and permitted Lottie to cut their corks level with the neck of the bottle and to seal them by dipping each one, upside down, into a saucepan containing an inch of boiling pitch.
Edgar did not talk much. At the end of his working day he shooed Lottie out of the dispensary so that he could tidy up on his own. His last task was to polish the mahogany benches, blackened by age, with a beeswax and turpentine concoction he had prepared himself.
While Edgar cleaned his territory, Lottie stepped into the surgery. She told Jago sitting at his desk that she found the preparation of these powders and electuaries strangely enthralling.
The vet laughed. ‘It’s terribly out of date,’ he said. ‘All these ingredients, painstakingly prepared. Wholesale firms can sell us stock medicines ready for dispensing. But how can I let Edgar go? And the thing is, they trust him, you see, Lottie. When a farmer or horse-owner calls to settle his bill, he invariably looks around the dispensary and is tempted by those shelves of drenches to take a dozen or two away with him, to replenish the harness-room first-aid cupboard.’
Lottie asked the vet to tell her of his studies to become a surgeon, at the Royal Veterinary College in Camden Town in London.
‘We lived in diggings,’ he said. ‘We were mostly the sons of veterinary surgeons or registered practitioners. One, of a quack. The others of yeomen farmers. None of us great scholars, it must be admitted. I was the only one I knew who’d been to any kind of public school. An extremely minor one, I should add.’
He told her how in their second year they were admitted to the dissecting room, a dank and evil-smelling place. A supply of aged ponies was kept in readiness in the college stables. Two or three at a time were shot, and prepared by an injection into their arteries of red wax, and into their veins one of blue.
‘The carcases were laid out on trestle tables. Each of us was allotted a portion. As our dissections proceeded, quantities of flesh were discarded upon the concrete floor around us. After a day or two this meat rotted and stank. You could see the pieces undulating under the influence of blowfly larvae. I had the advantage over some, as the son of a vet, of being somewhat inured to the sight of corpses and the smell of putridity, but most of my fellows would no sooner enter the dissecting room than have to rush out and be wonderfully sick. Until they learned not to have breakfast on dissecting days.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sure by the time you go, Lottie, it will be very different.’
‘Me?’ she asked, astonished. ‘Surely I cannot hope to maintain this lad’s disguise forever. Neither do I wish to.’
‘No,’ Patrick said. ‘I mean that a woman will be admitted to the College one day. Why should the first one not be you?’