After Dev left on his mysterious mission, Cheney was obliged to work so quickly and make so many difficult decisions that she had very little time to consider the implications of what had happened in the cubicle with Officer Jamison and Alfie the Pocket and of what Dev had said. By the time she had arranged for restocking the hospital’s supplies and drugs from the office and had adjusted the interns’ scheduled duties to account for Dev’s absence, it was already midnight. She was at the nurses’ station starting some emergency patient files when Dr. Cleve Batson came striding through the emergency doors. His face was pale and seemed thinner than when Cheney had seen him a week ago, but he didn’t look deathly ill.
“Hello. Before you say anything, I am pronouncing myself cured of the plague,” he declared as he reached the desk and bent over it to speak very emphatically. “I have slept the clock around, and now I am up, the wraith, haunting the halls of the hospital, looking for my severed head. No, no, I forgot. I’m looking for work. Need a hand, ma’am?”
Cheney laughed. “Are you really all right, Cleve?”
“Yes, ma’am! I know I look like week-old porridge, but I feel better than I look. And listen—ahhhhhh—no rales, no stridor, no frogs. Okay?”
Cheney smiled at him. He was so boyish, so endearing, that it was very difficult to deny him anything. “No coughing, no sneezing,” she ordered with mock severity. “You’ll be confined to quarters again if you disobey.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then I am very glad to see you, Doctor, and I hope you are indeed cured, because you are going to have to work.”
Cheney updated him on the rather odd situation concerning the supplies and Dev’s sudden insistence that he go find Dr. Pettijohn. Cleve asked no questions; he merely went to work. By one o’clock Cheney realized that things had calmed down enough, and that Cleve indeed was well enough, that she could let him work the rest of the late shift.
She went for a short walk around the hospital grounds. The snow had stopped falling, and though it was very cold, the night was so still and quiet that Cheney found it restful and refreshing. Of course she was burning with curiosity about Dr. Pettijohn, the laudanum, and Dev’s abrupt departure with Officer Goodin, and her husband, for Shiloh had sent John with a message that he was accompanying Dev and that Sean and Shannon were at the stables.
Cheney knew she wouldn’t be able to rest until the men returned, so she decided that if she had the energy and could concentrate clearly enough, she would autopsy the woman Officer Goodin had brought in that morning. As she walked, she worked to clear her mind of the feverish stew of speculation the last few hours had induced. She looked up at the heavens, praying a little, relishing these small hours of night when the Lord often seemed nearer than during the distractions of a busy day.
After her walk she went to Roe’s. The lanterns inside and out still shone brightly, which meant that James and John were still there. Sure enough, when she came in, they were playing checkers by the stove. At their feet Sean and Shannon looked up with sleepy curiosity and then came alive. They were not wiggly, eager sort of dogs. They were slow and deliberate and dignified, even as puppies, so they got up and plodded to meet her, blinking and yawning. Sean bumped his head against her knees and Shannon leaned against her legs, their favorite greetings for the people they loved.
She petted both of them as she greeted the boys. “No, please, don’t get up and interrupt your game. I just came by to get the dogs. You two aren’t staying up baby-sitting them, are you?”
“No, Dr. Duvall,” James answered. “Mr. Irons-Winslow told us we could take them to the office any time. We just decided we wanted to wait up for them, for we know Balaam and the policemen’s horses will need warming up and brushing down when they get back. You can leave Sean and Shannon with us if you like.”
“No, I’m going to be working down in the laboratory, so I think I’ll take them with me,” she said, smiling. “Give them a change of scenery. When the men return, will you tell my husband and Dr. Buchanan where we are?”
“Sure, Dr. Duvall,” James answered.
John rose and went to the post of the door of the first stall. “Here’s their mufflers, Dr. Duvall. I expect you’ll be wanting them to wear them. It’s likely cold down in that old cellar.” He sounded vaguely reproachful. Cheney found it amusing that people fell so in love with those two dogs that they took all sorts of liberties with advice and reproofs.
“Thank you, John. It is cold down in the lab, but I’ll try to make them as comfortable as I can.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, sounding unconvinced. He wound Shannon’s pink muffler around her neck and then Sean’s plaid one around his. Of course, they both had on their handmade matching booties, and Shannon had her two pink bows at the base of her enormous ears. The two looked up at Cheney as though very pleased with themselves.
“Silly dogs,” she murmured affectionately.
She turned to go, but James called out, “Here, Dr. Duvall, we made them some chew toys. You’d better take a couple of them. Wouldn’t want them chewing on anything down in your laboratory or—” he elbowed his younger brother in the ribs—“or anything in the morgue, especially!”
“Stop it, James. They wouldn’t,” John said uneasily.
James and John had taken narrow lengths of leather, tightly braided them, and formed them into shapes like great bones. Then they had soaked them in water and put them by the stove to dry and harden.
Obediently Cheney took them. “Thank you, James, John. It was very kind of you to make them toys.”
“Kinda had to,” James said with amusement. “They were starting in on the workbench, and we figured they’d have the stables eaten up in a week or so. Not to mention that at your office—”
Now John elbowed his brother and said loudly, “They’re just like babies, aren’t they? Teething and all. Well, bye, Dr. Duvall! We’ll be sure and give Dr. Buchanan and Mr. Irons-Winslow your message!”
“Good-bye,” Cheney said with amusement, hoping that whatever had happened at the office did not involve any personal injuries.
Since Cheney had the dogs with her, she went down the outside steps that went to the cellar entrance. The dogs followed her, their noses raised high, sniffing curiously. Cheney had not yet brought them into the lab, and she hoped they wouldn’t be bothered by the strong medicinal smells or made nervous by the morgue. She had learned that Sean and Shannon were sensitive dogs, alert to Cheney’s and Shiloh’s moods, to the atmosphere in a room, to tone of voice. Certainly Cheney had no silly superstitions or fears concerning dead bodies, but she did know that dogs had a phenomenal sense of smell and the scent of the dead might upset them. As she came in and turned up several of the gaslights, she watched Sean and Shannon carefully.
They split up, as if by plan, Sean taking the far end of the laboratory, walking down the long row of cabinets and shelves, sniffing ponderously, looking up at the darkened windows, eyeing some of the jars and boxes with suspicion.
Shannon, meanwhile, sniffed all around the walls of the morgue, her head down to the joint where the walls met the floor. Finally she came to the door and sniffed fast and lightly, as dogs will when they are eager. She lifted her head, looked up at the door as if she were looking for something, and started to wag her tail.
Watching her, Cheney giggled. “Shannon, try not to be so sensitive and high-strung.” Shannon turned her head to look at Cheney reproachfully, and her long red tongue got caught hanging out the side of her mouth, which made Cheney laugh even harder. “Silly old puppies,” she said softly.
Both of them kept nosing around the lab area while Cheney stored her coat and gloves and started preparing the dissection instruments. Sketes had made the dogs a feather mattress, a cushion made of flannel and stuffed with goose down, that Cheney laid in front of the stove. They found this and started investigating it, their tails going like lopsided metronomes, at Sketes’s scent, Cheney figured. They loved Sketes as if she were their long-lost mother, though she kept up a continual monotone of rebuke when she was with them.
Satisfied that the dogs were going to be just fine, Cheney went in the morgue, rolled out the body, and went to work. An autopsy, particularly if it was requested by the police for purposes of investigation into cause of death, was a painstakingly slow process, made even more so because Cheney believed that the autopsy notes should be made at the time of the autopsy, not afterward, to ensure the highest degree of correctness and detail.
As generally happened when Cheney was utterly absorbed in something, she became oblivious to her environment. She could be making complex notes in a patient file, for instance, and not hear someone speak to her. She could look up from a book to think of something, stare into space, and not see a person walk past. And she had found in the past months that when she worked too long without moving, sometimes her legs and feet would half freeze and swell up so much that she could barely walk when she finally got up to do so. As she went to work now, Cheney made a promise to herself that she would stop every so often and walk around to keep the blood flowing in her legs.
She tested the rigor mortis of her victim—which had passed—and recorded the fact. Then she shaved the woman’s head where the injury was located, made a careful drawing, and wrote a meticulous description. By then she realized that her feet were freezing, so she put down her pen and notes, stretched, and walked in circles around the dissection table, also working her head around in circles to loosen the already tight muscles of her neck.
Abruptly she stopped and looked around the cavernous room. “Sean? Shannon?” she called, a little shocked at how tense she sounded. The dogs were nowhere in sight.
They haven’t disappeared, you idiot, Cheney chided herself. But I’d better find them. They don’t need to go up the stairs. The thought of Shannon strolling into Henry Norton’s cubicle with her pink bows on those ridiculous ears and her little pink booties made Cheney giggle as she lit a lantern and turned it up high. “Sean, Shannon, you bad children, where are you?” she called, rounding the corner of the morgue.
She distinctly heard a whine, not of distress or warning, but just in recognition that she had called them. It came from the farthest end of the cellar, down at the other end of the rows of storage shelves. Cheney briskly went to the end of the rows, stopped and lifted the lantern and peered down each row. At the third she saw a light blur far down. “Shannon? Is that you?” she scolded, moving toward the dog. “What do you think you’re doing, standing there in the dark like some—”
She had come near enough to make out the dog. Shannon turned and looked at her as she approached, and Cheney saw that her big sad-clown face looked uncharacteristically intent. The dog swiveled her head back around front quickly.
As Cheney neared the dog, she could see a shadow moving beyond Shannon. The shadow of a man, sliding back and forth as if he were at a dead end. Then Cheney saw, beyond the shadow, another blur. Sean was there. The two dogs had the man cornered.
Irish wolfhounds are not at all aggressive with humans. They are called gentle giants because of their sweet dispositions. Neither Sean nor Shannon was growling, and when Shannon had turned, Cheney could see that she was wary of the man, but not agitated.
All of this went through Cheney’s mind in just a few seconds as she stood still and silent, her lantern raised high and throwing a glare that lit her face starkly. She understood that the man could see her much better than she could see him. “H-hello?” she said weakly. Quickly she cleared her throat and managed to sound less afraid and more confident. “Who are you? What are you doing down here?”
The shadow stopped his odd dodge-and-pace and stood still.
Cheney didn’t move, her heart in her throat.
The man marched forward confidently. As he walked past Shannon, giving her the widest berth possible, and came into the light, Cheney saw it was Dr. Marcus Pettijohn, a set look of rather forced amusement with a touch of impatience on his face. He began in a loud brazen voice, “There you are, Dr. Duvall! I was not at all sure about these dogs, so I just tried to get by—”
He saw her face, stopped, and his features hardened with sudden comprehension. His eyes narrowed to bare slits. He took another step toward her.
Cheney backed up a step, suddenly feeling fearful. He knew; he had seen from her face that he wasn’t going to be able to brazen it out. He looked desperate but set. And dangerous.
She took another step back.
He began walking toward her.
Cheney turned and ran. Shannon was right beside her, pressing so close to her that Cheney almost tripped. She heard Dr. Pettijohn’s hard footsteps behind her.
Wildly she rounded the corner, ran as fast as she could to her dissection table, let the lantern fall onto it, and grabbed a long bone knife. Whirling, she held it up, her eyes wild.
He came running, his face a mask of fury. Cheney knew that both Sean and Shannon were pressing against her, but she sensed they wouldn’t actually attack him. They might defend her if he attacked her….
By then it might be too late was her panicky fleeting thought. She grasped the knife tightly in her sweaty hand. His burning gaze shifted ever so slightly to the dissection table behind her.
He stopped his headlong run, locking his knees and grinding to a stop like a train that has suddenly had the brakes thrown. He made a guttural moaning sound through clenched teeth. His eyes stretched so wide the whites all around his pupils showed starkly, his face distorted with horror.
“Uhhhh,” sounded his animal groan, “noooo…Manon…Manon?”
They all froze, as still as if they were some nightmarish illustration for a lurid murder mystery: the horrified man, the terrified woman, the vigilant dogs, the waxy corpse.
Without another sound, Dr. Marcus Pettijohn turned and fled as though the hounds of hell were snapping at his heels.
Cheney remained frozen for what seemed like long minutes, but when the outside cellar door slammed shut, she jumped, and the spell was broken. Throwing down the knife, Cheney picked up her skirts and ran. By the time she reached the door, she realized the dogs were running too, trying to get outside. She remembered what Shiloh had said about pack behavior.
I’ll try to get James and John to catch Dr. Pettijohn, but not the dogs. They might just decide that he is truly fair game if he’s running.
Cheney shuddered at the picture of her big bumbling puppies actually running “game” to the ground and maneuvered out the door without letting Sean and Shannon out. She lost precious seconds, though. By the time she had closed the door securely and bounded up the steps to ground level, Pettijohn was just a dark shadow in the trees, running east toward Sixth Avenue.
Helplessly she looked at Roe’s, all the way across the grounds. James and John were there, for the lamps were still lit, but it would be impossible for them to hear her. But even as she doggedly started running toward the stables, she saw a procession come up Seventh Avenue: a hackney coach with a riderless horse tied behind it, Officer Goodin, and—blessed sight!—her husband escorting the coach.
She began shouting, and Shiloh saw her.
Immediately he spurred Balaam. The horse galloped at blurring speed across the grounds, and then did a picture-perfect quarter horse quick-stop, tucking his hind legs under, braking with them, and rearing up, nose to the sky, neighing like a war horse. He came to a full stop just a few feet from Cheney, and as if he could fly, Shiloh sailed out of the saddle and landed right in front of her. “What’s wrong?”
“Dr. Pettijohn. He’s running, that way!” she said, pointing.
“Are you hurt?” Shiloh demanded.
“No. I just hated for him to get away, Shiloh!”
Shiloh turned and shouted to Officer Goodin, who was riding up, slightly less dramatically, on his old gelding Gino. “Pettijohn’s on foot going toward Sixth Avenue!”
Without a word Officer Goodin wheeled the horse and coaxed him to a gallop.
Shiloh turned back to her and grabbed her and hugged her with such strength that she could hardly breathe. “I thought you’d been hurt,” he whispered raggedly. “It scared me.”
“I’m all right. I’m fine,” she said, clinging to him. “But, Shiloh, I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see you riding to my rescue—once again.”
****
Shiloh and Cheney went back down to the lab while Dev took Solange and Lisette into the hospital to get them fed and bedded down in one of the private rooms. By now it was two-thirty in the morning.
The dogs started baying with joy as soon as they saw Cheney and Shiloh return, so Shiloh took charge of them while Cheney covered Manon securely, put her back in the morgue, and cleaned up the dissection trays and instruments. They had barely gotten the dogs calmed down and had sat themselves down at the lab table to try to make sense of the night when Dev and Cleve Batson came downstairs, along with Carlie, who was carrying the blessed tea tray.
“I’m never taking off for a week again,” Cleve grumbled as they settled down on high stools at the lab table. “Just look at the mess all of you made of our lovely hospital while I wasn’t paying attention.”
Carlie, who was serving, looked so distressed that Shiloh quickly said, “He’s just joking, Carlie.”
Cleve smiled at the boy as he took the steaming cup of tea from him. “I am, Carlie. I would never say such a thing about you. You always do a good job.” He took a sip of tea, then murmured, “Mmm, especially with tea. Takes a special gift to make good tea, Carlie.”
“I know,” he soberly agreed. “Dr. Duvall said I have the gift. Dr. Duvall said I can do something even Iron Man can’t do.”
“She’s right,” Shiloh said lightly. “She usually is.”
Carlie nodded in vehement agreement. Then he asked Dev, “Can I go now? Or are you going to ask me some more questions about Dr. Pettijohn?”
“You can go, Carlie,” Dev said gently. “You did very well tonight.”
They waited until his STEP-step, STEP-step, STEP-step died away on the stairs.
The four looked at each other wearily.
“You first, Dev,” Cheney finally said. “You knew first.”
“All right. I suppose it was because of the way the patients kept talking about the laudanum tasting just like whiskey.” Dev explained the progression of thoughts that led him to believe Dr. Marcus Pettijohn was connected to many of the problems they had been experiencing. His dark gaze rested gently on Cheney as he concluded, “So you see, if he has been tampering with the drugs and the supplies, it could have caused some of the complications we’ve seen lately.”
Cheney moaned. “Rebecca Green…oh, Dev, if she was taking watered-down laudanum and I tried to compensate for her apparent growing immunity to it by giving her too much morphine—”
“No, Cheney,” Dev interrupted sternly. “One thing all of us must realize as pure truth right now is that we did nothing wrong. Anything that happened as a result of Marcus Pettijohn’s crimes is Marcus Pettijohn’s fault. If we start to blame ourselves, then we must also blame Carlie for not tattling on him, as he says; and we must blame my wife for hiring him; and we must blame Nurse Flagg for not discussing Dr. Pettijohn’s shortcomings with us—”
“And me,” Cleve said glumly. “I saw him down here late one night. He had all kinds of supplies and materia medica spread out everywhere and had a big ledger. He told me that the hospital had gotten a big shipment in that day and he hadn’t had time to do all the proper paperwork. I knew it was odd, but as soon as I got back upstairs, I forgot all about it.”
“I did even worse than that,” Shiloh said regretfully. “Because I didn’t forget it. I came in the hospital that night, the first night that Officer Goodin brought Wilhelmina and Geraldine in. I saw him using oil and charpie on her arm. I didn’t say anything, because it was part of a situation that I’ve promised to keep confidential, but I sure could’ve said something about the charpie without breaking that promise.”
“Charpie!” Cheney exclaimed. “We’ve got charpie mixed up with the good linen gauze? Oh, horrors, how are the attendants going to know the difference? And what about the other things—the prepared drugs, the bases that may be tampered with, the tinctures that may be watered down—”
She stopped abruptly, and they all looked at each other with appalled faces. Then, as if they were a Greek chorus, they all turned to look at the far end of the room, at the endless rows of shelves, stuffed from floor to ceiling with medical supplies and drugs.
After a long heavy silence Dev muttered, “We’re going to have to go through every single item in the hospital. And only the doctors can do it. Only we can make a decision about whether it is usable or not.”
“I’ll help,” Shiloh said sturdily. “I will know.”
Cheney looked sharply up at him. He said quietly, “You know it’s true, don’t you, Doc?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“I want to help,” he said simply. “I honestly do.”
Cheney smiled and took his hand. “We need your help, Shiloh. We always have.”
****
Later that morning, Officer Goodin came to the hospital to report. “He got away clean as a whistle,” he said flatly to Dev and Cheney, who were tending to patients while Shiloh and Cleve worked on the supplies in the cellar. “But I’m not going to give up on that lowdown cheating sharp. I don’t even understand what he was doing, or stealing, or whatever, here at the hospital. But I’d like to put him away for good after seeing those little girls. And I’ve got several questions about his poor wife’s death too. I’ll find him. May take me a while, but I’ll find him.”
Late that evening Cheney met Shiloh on the stairwell leading down to the cellar. “Hi, Doc,” he said easily. “I was just coming to sweep you off your feet and take you away from all this.”
“And I was coming to find you,” she said, taking his hand. “Before we go home, I want you to come with me.”
She led him to the men’s ward, to one of the private rooms, and they went inside. Chairs were placed by the unconscious man’s bed, and Cheney sat, motioning for Shiloh to take the chair next to hers.
“His name is Cornelius Melbourne,” Cheney said softly. “It was two weeks ago that he picked up his new phaeton and drove to pick up his girl and take her for a ride to show it off….”
Her voice, gentle and soft and low, wove Shiloh in a spell as he listened to the story in the warm, dim room. He watched his wife’s face, so animated, so expressive, so vivacious, as she told him how the dying man had come to hold such an important place in her life in such a short period of time. When she told him of the kiss, he felt pain and it darkened his face, but he never took his eyes from her, and she kept speaking, telling him everything that had happened, and everything that she had felt, and everything that she had thought.
“And so I didn’t tell you, Shiloh, because I was deliberately drawing away from you, trying to hurt you,” she said, her voice now raw and pained. “I was angry because you didn’t want to be a doctor and be involved in this part of my life, so I did things like that to punish you.” She took a deep ragged breath and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she looked at him, looked deeply into his eyes and said, “I am so very sorry, Shiloh. I will try never to be so selfish and hurtful again. Will you forgive me?”
“Always,” he said instantly. “I love you more than my own life, Cheney. How could I stay angry with you? It would be like stabbing myself. I would only suffer. I forgive you today, tomorrow, forever.”
She leaned over, took his hands, and bent to press her lips to them. Quickly she straightened and nodded, her eyes bright in the firelight with unshed tears. “Thank you,” she said simply.
They sat in silence for a while, watching Cornelius Melbourne. He constantly strained, small animal grunts coming from him as his muscles contorted again and again. He was skeletal, his skin like old yellowing wax, his face so distorted it looked more like a naked skull than a man’s features.
“He’s already gone, you know,” Cheney said quietly.
Shiloh looked at her curiously. “Is he?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
She smiled serenely. “Because God is good, full of mercy and grace, and His loving-kindness endures forever. He gave Neil peace, and then He gave his parents peace, and now that I have been his final and faithful witness and told you of him, God has given me peace. I know that Neil is home in heaven, and I don’t have to fear anymore.”
Shiloh stood up and held his hand out to her. “Cheney, it’s time for you to come home now.”
She grasped his hand, rose, and said gratefully, “Home…yes, it’s time for me to come home.”
****
Two hours later, they were sitting on their gigantic bed, sipping tea and eating big slabs of Sketes’s German coffee cake. The one Shiloh had brought to the hospital had been such a huge success—it was the first one Sketes had ever tried—that she’d made another one.
“Fiona and Jauncy thought they were going to eat this one,” Shiloh told Cheney greedily, “but they were sadly mistaken. I took it away from them.”
“For shame, Shiloh!” Cheney scolded. “Taking cake away from them to feed to these horrible dogs!” Sean and Shannon had somehow, in the past days, managed to worm themselves into the bedroom at night, and now they were up on the bed itself. Once again Shiloh and Cheney’s bed seemed too small for them.
“They’re just babies. They need their nourishment,” Shiloh grandly pronounced. “And besides, I noticed that you’re not exactly denying yourself so that the poor starving peasants may have cake, Madame Antoinette.”
Cheney intoned, “Fie on them. I’m hungry. And I do feel like some kind of libertine, taking off when there are four thousand things going on at the hospital and none of them good. I don’t care. I might as well sink on down into full debauchery. I’m going to eat another piece.” She took another enormous bite of cake, all the while being watched intently and soulfully by Sean and Shannon. She broke off a couple of very small pieces—the dogs’ tails thumping ploomp-ploomp against the down comforter—and gave them to the puppies. “Here, we may as well all sink down into the depths of iniquity together.”
“To be so depraved, Doc, you sure look pretty and sweet and happy. In fact, you look about fifty times better than you have in days. You’re really all right, are you?” He spoke lightly, but his eyes were narrow and critical as he stared at her.
“I feel amazingly well, and yes, I am happy because I’m so glad to be home with you,” she said, her eyes bright.
He searched her face a few moments longer, then nodded, satisfied. “Okay, Doc. It’s hard to believe you’re doing so good after all that’s happened. Let’s start with that crazy murdering lunatic,” he said darkly. “What’s the story on his poor wife?”
Cheney sighed. “I don’t think she was murdered, Shiloh. She had a bump on her head. It had rough splinters in it and it had bled profusely, but there was no weapon found at the scene. You know that people can sustain a blow to the head that begins fatal bleeding in the brain, but they can live and even feel fairly well for hours, sometimes days. I think she fell and died of a subdural hematoma. I think she was taking so much laudanum—probably also Dev’s presurgery absinthe prescriptive—that she was walking around in a drugged stupor.”
“Poor lady,” Shiloh said in a low voice. “Evidently she’d sunk pretty low since she came here. Mrs. Bowdoin said she was a successful opera diva in Paris.”
“I know. Victoria said she’d heard of Manon Fortier, that she had been well-known for several years. Do you know what the sad thing was, Shiloh? In the autopsy I found that she had hyperthyroidism.”
“She did? That thyroid disease? Did she have goiters?” he asked shrewdly.
“Yes, she did,” Cheney answered sadly. “Very small ones, but they definitely were pressing on her trachea. Enough to have affected her voice—particularly her operatic voice, as fragile as is that gift.”
“I thought that people with hyperthyroidism had tendencies to lose weight and have a lot of nervous energy. Manon had gained weight, hadn’t she?”
“Yes, but my theory is that Dr. Pettijohn prescribed laudanum for her so that he wouldn’t have to bother with her problems. And I think she became addicted to it, and therefore probably was very inactive, so she gained weight. I don’t think he ever realized her thyroid condition. That is so easily cured. She could very possibly have continued with her career. I think if Dr. Pettijohn had known that, he certainly would have been pushing her back onto the stage.”
Shiloh frowned darkly. “I wish I could find that sorry wretch. I’d teach him a thing or two about skulking around down in cellars. Me and Syl Goodin would have him buried under the cellars in the Tombs.”
Cheney sighed. “You know, when Dev and I were trying to figure out exactly what Dr. Pettijohn had done, the enormity of his crimes almost overwhelmed both of us. It’s been a long time since Dev horsewhipped anyone,” Cheney said with melancholy humor, “but I shudder to think what he would do if he had a horsewhip in his hand and Marcus Pettijohn in front of him.”
“He’d have to take his turn,” Shiloh grunted. “Anyway, Doc, besides his poor wife, what else did he do? I mean, I assumed he must be messing around with the drugs and supplies and probably had found a way to make money on them. Like the laudanum. He was watering it down, wasn’t he? What was he doing, cutting it with whiskey and then selling the good stuff he’d siphoned off?”
“That’s exactly what he was doing. Though Marcus closed his father’s apothecary shop, old Mr. Pettijohn had developed a very lucrative mail-order business. He had initially set it up by personally calling on clients in all of the five boroughs, and in a couple of years it had developed so well that he didn’t even have to make personal sales calls anymore. Well, Marcus kept the mail-order business going, and that was his outlet for the supplies and drugs he stole from the hospital. He was fiddling the paperwork and doing all sorts of clever things. Put all together, Dev and I think he may have been making two or three hundred dollars per month.”
“But what about the effect on the patients? I knew I shoulda said something! Do you think that filthy charpie and that gunk he was putting on her arm is why Wilhelmina got gangrene?” Shiloh asked, obviously worried.
Cheney took his hand and looked him straight in the eyes. “Shiloh, I think Wilhelmina got gangrene for the same reason that Geraldine got puerperal fever. I think Dr. Pettijohn thought he was so much better and smarter than everyone that he didn’t think he needed to wash his hands like us barber-surgeons. I think he provided very poor care to Wilhelmina, and then he examined Geraldine and infected her. And I know for certain that it was not your fault, and it was not your responsibility. It was Marcus Pettijohn’s fault and his burden to bear.”
Shiloh listened to her gravely. “You’re right. You’re exactly right, Doc. So you know this about the other patients too? Like Rebecca Green and especially Cornelius Melbourne?”
Cheney sighed. “You know, Shiloh, it’s possible that Marcus Pettijohn may have caused their deaths. Mrs. Green’s, by weakening the laudanum so that when I gave her a true morphine injection, she overdosed. And Neil Melbourne may have contracted tetanus from those cheap horse-gut sutures Pettijohn bought and substituted for our good sutures. But we’ll never know. We’ll never know Rebecca Green’s cause of death because even an autopsy may not reflect her particular difficulties with her idiopathic reactions, and she certainly did have a terminal illness anyway. And Neil may very well have contracted tetanus from the street mud.
“But God has given me grace, and peace, about these poor patients, Shiloh. My conscience is clear, for I know I did the very best I could do. And so have you, my love. Especially with Mrs. Green.”
Shiloh nodded. “Now that I’m hearing you say it, I know it’s true. I did everything I could for her. But all the time, I knew she was slipping away. It was just her time, and I think you knew that about Melbourne too.”
“I did,” Cheney said soberly. “But Shiloh, what is really important here, what I want to talk to you about…again, though I don’t want to upset you…or—”
He pressed a finger to her lips. “There’s something I want to talk to you about first. First and second, ’cause there’s actually a couple of things.” He cleared his throat, his blue eyes began to dance, and he intoned, “It’s all their fault. Sean’s and Shannon’s.”
The dogs lifted their heads, and their silly long thin whips of tails started thumping ploomp, ploomp. “Forget it, no more cake for you. I was just sayin’ it was all your fault for bein’ Frog dogs.” He looked back at Cheney and said only half jokingly, “You knew I was trying to—uh—what’s that word I can never remember and then can’t say it when I do?”
“Dissimulate?” Cheney suggested, mystified.
“Yeah. Dissemble-ate. You knew it, didn’t you? ’Bout the dogs bein’ Frogs?”
“I surely did,” Cheney said with mock sternness. “But I was so busy dissemble-ating myself about Neil Melbourne that I thought I was imagining things about you, telling dark lies about the dogs.”
“Nope, they’re Irish-Frog dogs,” Shiloh said cheerfully. “What I was lyin’ about was that I can speak Frog.”
Cheney stared at him for long moments, then finally managed to stammer, “Huh? You speak—”
“Frog. French,” he grunted. “I didn’t want to tell you because I have a surprise for you. It was s’posed to be for Christmas, but—anyway, here it is.” He pulled a long parchment envelope from under his pillow and handed it to her.
The front of it read, in Shiloh’s handwriting, Pour Cheney, ma belle femme. Slowly Cheney took out the fine parchment paper and began to read.
It was a love letter, written in French. Shiloh told her eloquently, simply, and from his heart what she meant to him, and how she had enriched his life, and that he promised to love her forever.
She cried, and Shiloh handed her one of his big clean linen handkerchiefs. It smelled like his Royal Lyme cologne, and Cheney cried some more and buried her face in it. Shiloh waited patiently, watching the dogs with secret amusement. They were watching Cheney with such concern that Shiloh thought they might start crying themselves. Ladies and dogs, he thought, were very emotional creatures.
Finally Cheney stopped crying and said, “Oh, Shiloh, no wonder I love you so! How could I not love such a man? You mean you learned French just so you could write me a love letter?”
“Not exactly,” he said gravely. “I learned French because you’re such an important part of my life, Doc, that I try to figure out ways to be close to you so we can share. And that’s why—” he watched her closely, his brow furrowing—“that’s why I’ve also started learning Latin.” He waited.
Her heart bounded. “Latin? Latin, as in the language of…of…physicians?”
“Yeah. I’m gonna need it when I start the College of Physicians and Surgeons next year,” he finally said, watching her cautiously.
She stared at him openmouthed.
He cocked his head, waiting…
She gave a whoop, hopped up, and started jumping on the bed. The dogs bounded up and ran to cower in the corner of the bed. Cheney jumped and yelled, “Col-lege-of-Phy-si-cians-and-Sur-geons! You’re—real-ly—going—to—be-a-doc-tor! Yay, yay, yay!”
“This means you’re glad, right?”
Cheney jumped and whooped. The fat down comforter bounced so hard it slid right off onto the floor. Except the corner where the dogs were pinning it down.
“It’s okay,” Shiloh told the dogs, bouncing slightly as Cheney hopped. “Just remember, when she does this, it’s a good thing.”