Cowards. The lot of them: measly, self-serving cowards.
He turned the pages of the medical journal faster and faster, sending a pile of letters neatly addressed to Dr Ernest Pinecroft sliding to the floor. No matter how hungrily his eyes scanned the print there was nothing, nothing, nothing. With a cry of frustration he reached the last page and slammed his hand down upon the desk. Another quarter of the year passed, and no one dared publish on phthisis.
He began to pace the small room he had devoted to his work, at the far end of the west wing. Astonishing, how quickly a new house could fall into disarray. Strewn across the floor were the stock ties he had torn from his neck at the end of each day. Books lay splayed open on every available surface and his pipes were tipping their burnt-out ashes into his inkwell. There was a tumbler, somewhere, hidden in this chaos, but since he could not locate it quickly, he took a small nip of brandy straight from the decanter. As he wiped his lips, he noticed for the first time the incongruity between the heavy oak-wood desk he had removed from Bristol by water and the elegant blue-and-white paper decorating the house. A large masculine smear across something female and delicate, like tobacco staining an evening gown. Well, what did it signify? She would never see it.
He threw himself down on his chair, still cradling the decanter. His wife would have known the words to put him in a better mood. She had been there, leaning over his shoulder, whispering in his ear, for more than a score of years. Now she was silent, just like his peers.
It had never been fashionable to devote oneself to the study of phthisis. Foolhardy, his friends would say, for everyone knew the disease was incurable. But Ernest could not accept that damning statement, and it enraged him that others would swallow such dross. What kind of a healer simply threw up his hands and said there was nothing to be done? He swirled the brandy around its decanter, watching the light play upon the liquid. ‘All diseases began as incurable,’ he muttered.
And that was another thing. If consumptives were doomed from birth, unable to be saved, how was it he had incurred such scorn? You could not, in good sense, brand a disease as unbeatable and simultaneously blame a man for not being able to treat it. But that was what had happened to him, all the same.
The light reflected off the glass and caught on the mourning ring adorning his smallest finger. Her hair, plaited with that of the two children. He could scarcely tell one from the other. Letters were engraved beneath the glass: L for Louisa, C for Catherine and F for Francis, but this felt like a falsehood. Catherine had been Kitty from birth and Louisa, his dearest wife, he had always called Mopsy.
That was what she resembled: a mopsy, a pretty child. Always slender and fine boned. So innocent with the roses in her cheeks and the sparkle of her eyes, and yet mischief would suddenly possess her elfin face. He sighed, set the decanter down precariously on the desk. He should have noticed from the start. But he was young then, he had not even completed his studies when the discovery of little Louise necessitated their marriage. He saw only Mopsy’s enchantment, not that she was what others would call the ‘consumptive type’.
Was that it? A certain type of person, selected by the disease with almost religious predestination? There could be no doubt that Kitty and Francis resembled their mother, whereas Louise was the spit of him, a feminine version of him, save for her mother’s blue eyes, which blinked owlishly behind her spectacles. He riffled through the papers and found again the list of prisoners en route from Bodmin gaol. Men ranging from their mid-twenties to sixty years of age, serving hard labour for their crimes. Their existence rather belied the theory. He would be a good deal surprised if these ruffians and vagabonds resembled his dainty wife in any shape or form.
Indulgence, one colleague had said many years before; Ernest forgot his name now. At the time, talk of phthisis had meant as little to him as it did to the other physicians. Whoever the fellow was, he had been convinced that the disease was brought on by pampering – the sufferer was consumed, as it were, by their own consumption. And this was . . . interesting. For Ernest could not deny that he had always given his wife whatever his pocket would stretch to. Then there was Kitty with her rage for gowns and gimcracks, no matter how exposed the new fashions left her skin. And Francis was a baby, the desired heir born so long after the girls; of course he was petted.
Ernest clenched his teeth, swallowed hard. It was an answer, but not the one he wanted: that his love had killed them.
He thought of Mopsy reclining on the soft pillows of her bed. He had fed her dainties, trying to coax her back to health, pulled a swansdown coverlet over her narrow shoulders. He should not have plumped those cushions for her. He should have laid her on a rock.
And that was what the convicts were going to get: a short, sharp shock. Something to force the blood out of its current erroneous patterns and start it flowing naturally again. No one could accuse him of overindulging them. They would live more as nature intended and by God, he would make the treatment work.
Work – yes, work! That was the greatest protection against the blue devils, those low spirits that plagued him. He should not have allowed himself to become distracted by the past. Eagerly, he scooped the letters up from the floor and began to crack their seals. His enquiries to nearby towns and villages had been met with welcome. It seemed there were any number of local grocers and butchers who felt they could help him supply a nourishing but digestible diet to his patients; and many carpenters in need of work ready to construct huts. His plan to erect a dam for safety from the tide was confirmed as feasible. He would have to tell Louise . . .
While he read, Pompey nudged the half-closed door open with his nose and trotted in. The little scamp saw the scattered correspondence on the floor as a game; he began to paw through it. Ernest paid him little heed – the letters were dirty and crumpled anyhow and could endure a few more scuffs.
But after some minutes had passed, the dog’s shuffling noises seemed to change. There was a rasp. Teeth against material. Ernest threw his current letter on the desk and leaned back in his chair.
‘What have you got there then, old chap?’
Pompey wagged his tail proudly, as if he had exposed a great treasure. In fact, it was a cloth-bound volume of folklore Ernest had picked up from a stall in Falmouth.
‘Ah, yes.’
Leaning down, he patted the dog on the head and retrieved the book from his mouth. Two medical cases at once. He never had been one to do things by halves.
The book was undamaged and only slightly damp from Pompey’s attentions. Ernest gave the pages a cursory flick, finding more amusement here than in the medical journal. The rot people came up with! Bucca in the coves, Knockers in the mines. But one could almost understand how the stories had formed, in the days before medical knowledge. He knew there were healing properties in the soft, fresh air that entered the caves – an ignorant person might well attribute such powers to magical creatures. He must not scoff at these ideas. Treating his patient’s theories with derision would only alienate her – he needed this book to understand her way of thinking before he could change it with the force of his own mind.
And perhaps at heart the two maladies he was tackling were not so very different. Some had observed a correlation between the consumptive’s health and their state of mind, after all. Emotional well-being could stay the disease’s ravaging hand . . .
He let his own hands droop, lowering the book onto his lap, and stared at them. Ink-stained, paper-cut. Marked with the many ways in which he had tried to divert his attention away from that mourning ring pinching on his right hand. No, he thought wearily, such a theory could not be sound. For his wife had been light of foot and quick to smile, his son a babbler of the happiest kind. They had been more like the creatures in these foolish fairy stories than people inclined to melancholy.
He threw the volume to the floor, narrowly avoiding Pompey.
No, if it was misery that laid a person vulnerable to phthisis . . . It would have taken him by now. Him and Louise, both.