The Rose of Sebastopol (18 page)

“I won’t put my body through that,” she said, as I laced the front of my stays. “Why do you do it? You already have a tiny waist.” She sprang up, circled me with her hands, pressed her cheek to mine and planted kisses on my shoulder and chin. “Lovely, lovely Mariella. I wish I could put essence of Mariella on a handkerchief to ward off the bad things in life. But why torture yourself ? ” She swayed me back and forth in front of the mirror.

“I like the shape the corset gives me and I would feel undressed without it.” She was a couple of inches taller, willowy and ivory-skinned, while I looked tiny and demure despite the low-cut bodice.

I tried to cover myself with a lace stole but Rosa whisked it away. “Throw back your head and lift your elbows a little. If you let your shoulders sag you’ll be lost. No wonder Henry finds you irresistible.” She massaged the top of my spine with her thumbs. “What you need is a necklace, something blue perhaps to match your eyes. I have just the thing—I was going to give it to you anyway.” She held out a velvet-covered box. “Now it’s yours.”

The box, as I well knew, contained a heart-shaped gold locket set with a sapphire and with a lock of her father’s hair inside. “I can’t take your locket,” I said.

“I want you to have it. I do. How else can I repay you for all you’ve done?”

“There’s no need for this, Rosa.”

“There is a need. Don’t think I’m not aware of what a trial it’s been sometimes having us here. So do let me, please, give you this. For my sake. Look inside.”

She had replaced the little curl of graying male hair with a tiny braid wound so that it was a coiled spring of brown and gold. “I cut a strand of your hair while you were sleeping. Yours and mine. Now don’t go weeping, Mariella.” She took my face in her hands and kissed my forehead, cheeks, and lips.

“It’s too precious. What about your father’s hair? ”

“I have that still. I don’t need the locket to remind me of him.”

“I won’t be able to wear it. What would your mother say?”

“She needn’t know.”

“I hate secrets of any kind.”

“The locket is mine to give. Don’t spoil my present, Mariella. And anyway, what’s wrong with you wearing it? Everyone knows that we share everything. If Mama notices we can say you’ve just borrowed it for the night. Let me fasten it for you.”

She sat behind me on the bed and her breath fell on my neck as she fiddled with the clasp. For a moment the backs of her fingers rested against me as she leant her forehead on my bare shoulder. As we ran downstairs she floated ahead in her shimmering black silk, her bonnet tumbled half off, ribbons streaming.

The lecture hall was intimidating, because there were few ladies present and the clannishness among the gentlemen seemed impenetrable. Even Rosa was a little subdued as we watched the arrival of what she called
the great and the good.
Father dived in and out of the crowd to report on who was there; not only luminaries from the medical world including Dr. John Snow and Sir James Clarke, both of whom were known to have attended the queen, but a member of the aristocracy, Lord Ashburton, the author Mr. Carlyle, and the politician Richard Monckton Milnes, who was a particular favorite of Henry’s because they both admired the poet John Keats.

I was so nervous, the hall was so hot, and my bodice so tight that I felt a tick in my forehead—the beginning of a headache. There stood Henry in a flare of gaslight, soberly dressed in frock coat and gleaming shirt-front, hands clasped behind his back, barely referring to the notes on the lectern as he spoke for three quarters of an hour about a theory which he said might change surgery forever. I tried to see past this man with his meticulously brushed hair and thick moustache to the boy who used to sit on the drawing room sofa, one leg tucked under the other, absorbed in some impenetrable text. While he read, his left arm was flung round my eight-year-old shoulders and his fingers occasionally played with a lock of my hair as I leant against him and stitched a sampler.

The shadows came and went in the hollows of Henry’s cheek. I loved his voice which, though strong and authoritative, was at the same time measured, with no edge of harshness or patronage. After a while I had to glance away in case he became aware of how attentively I watched him and how, when he half turned his head to address another section of the audience and the lamp-light caught his lip, I remembered that those same lips had kissed mine under the cedar.

“Semmelweis has been more or less banished from Vienna,” he said, “where he performed his ground-breaking research, but he continues his work in St. Rochus Hospital, in Hungary. This is what he noticed: in a ward of women who were delivered by midwives, less than three percent of the patients died of puerperal fever, while in a similar ward served by medical students, the death rate was as high as thirteen percent.

“Semmelweis, like everyone else, at first struggled to see what the connection might be but after careful observation he realized that the medical students began their day by performing autopsies, and then went straight into the labor wards to examine and deliver expectant mothers. The midwives, on the other hand, never performed autopsies. From this Semmelweis drew the conclusion that the young students were passing infected matter from the corpses to the mothers, hence the high death rate. To rectify this situation he insisted the students wash their hands in a solution of chlorinated lime before attending a birth, that clean sheets should be issued to each new patient, and that the labor wards should be regularly cleaned. As a result the death rate came down almost immediately to just over two percent.

“Now we, in our hospitals, move from one patient to the next and from one operation to another without washing our hands or cleaning our utensils. The premise that I would like to put to you is that if we were to adopt Semmelweis’s measures, we too might see a dramatic decline in the death rate associated with both surgery and childbirth.”

Though I was listening to Henry with unwavering attention I could not help being aware that there were restless elements in the audience, a good deal of coughing and whispering was going on, and a couple of men had crossed their arms and thrown back their heads derisively. The mutter of pain in my temple had become an insistent jabbing. It had never occurred to me that anyone could disagree with Henry but when he finished speaking the applause was thin and a gentleman with a bald head and immense whiskers leapt to his feet. “What
proof
is there that infected matter is passed in this way from the dead to the living?” he demanded.

“We have no absolute proof. Only the dramatic decline in the death rate once the medical students had changed their habits.”

“Or perhaps, knowing that they were under scrutiny, they simply took more care. They were only students after all, while the midwives were probably old hands. We understand that Dr. Semmelweis has never published his research. Doesn’t that suggest to you that he might have something to hide, or at the very least some doubts in his own findings? ”

“Dr. Semmelweis is not the easiest of men to deal with. Perhaps with reason. He has endured ridicule and opposition and therefore doesn’t trust his colleagues.”

Dr. Snow stood up. “Members of the audience will know that my investigations into outbreaks of cholera have convinced me that infection is somehow ingested through the mouth rather than from the air. The medical profession, including, I might say, the distinguished Dr. Henry Thewell himself, has refused to give proper credence to my ideas, and the cholera continues to kill thousands of our population. Apparently we would all rather blame bad smells and piles of rubbish than believe that food, water, or indeed droplets from another person’s mouth might be to blame. But sometimes, as in this argument of Dr. Thewell’s, the cost of not taking action, when it is possible to do so, is too great. We cannot always wait for statistics and experiment to prove a theory beyond doubt. Even if Semmelweis’s findings cannot actually be proved, what harm can there be in adopting his methods? ”

“Because they are founded not on modern scientific research based on sustained observation and experiment but on a hunch. Dr. Thewell seems to be suggesting that there is something poisonous in the flesh of a dead person. Is this not a little old-fashioned? The days of evil spirits associated with corpses are long gone.”

“I am suggesting that it is the body that is the cause of infection, not the spirit,” said Henry.

“Have you given any thought to how much it would cost to implement these types of changes, to have such measures in place for every nurse, orderly, and doctor, to have the wards cleaned in this way just in case some fanatical Hungarian’s theory happened to be right? How many patients would we have to turn down in order to accommodate Semmelweis’s ideas? ”

“Perhaps it is the case that though fewer patients could be treated more lives might be saved.”

“Dr. Thewell, if we carry your arguments to their logical conclusion, you are suggesting that countless deaths have been caused by the very men who trained for years to become surgeons and physicians and thereby save lives. In fact, you are calling your colleagues murderers. I’m amazed that you would venture to spread such ill-founded and dangerous ideas among the general public.”

I was perspiring even in my light gown and the headache had become like the blade of a knife through my cheekbone and jaw. Why do they speak so savagely to each other, I wondered. Where is their humanity and comradeship? After the lecture the hall divided into two distinct groups, those for Henry’s argument and those against and my father went about anxiously testing their opinions. “The good thing is,” he murmured, “that Henry has provoked controversy. They may not like what he says but they will remember it. In the short term, maybe, it might do him no good, but in the long term, if he is proved right ...”

I gripped Rosa’s arm. “What do you think? Will it have damaged him?”

“Hardly. He is in many ways brilliant and he has courage. You must be so proud that he is not afraid to take on the establishment.”

At last Henry came over and took my hands. My headache retreated a little at his touch. “Ella, my dear. Do you know, when I saw you watching me so sternly, I remembered how when you were a little girl you used to test me whenever I had to learn a text by heart. She was very strict,” he told Rosa, “she wouldn’t let me get a word wrong even though she was only eight and had to follow the tiny writing, some of it in Latin, with her finger. I used to watch for the way her little tongue poked out when she was concentrating.”

“Oh, you mean like this,” said Rosa, catching the tip of her tongue between her teeth. Henry glanced at her mouth and then looked away. “She still does that. Your lecture made complete sense to me, by the way. I cannot understand why your colleagues are being so obtuse.”

“We all hate change. And the suggestion that at the moment we are actually harming patients cuts very deep. No doctor could find that easy to stomach.”

“What do you think of Dr. Snow’s point, that the same type of backward thinking applies to his work on cholera? I have read another report in
The Times
,” she added in a low voice, “about the terrible losses among our troops from cholera. Can nothing be done? ”

“The best cure would have been to move the troops away from what is obviously a very unhealthy spot but that is down to our generals. At any rate, I believe the latest news is that they will set sail from Varna imminently.”

“They say thousands of men have already died. It’s such a pitiful waste. I’d hate to think that my stepbrother Max’s life might be thrown away in a bout of unnecessary sickness. He’s survived the Australian desert, after all. How futile it would be if he now died of a contagion much closer to home.”

Why did she do it? I wondered. I had hoped that they were now good friends so why, on a night when Henry was fired up with the exertion of giving his lecture, had she raised the one subject guaranteed to make his eyes go bleak? “The war office has not chosen to seek my advice again thus far,” he said, “and if it did . . .”

“Must you wait for them? Couldn’t you insist that they listen to you? After all if it’s common knowledge that cholera is passed from one person to another in close proximity . . .”

“Common knowledge does not count as medical proof, as you’ve heard tonight. Even Snow isn’t sure enough yet to publish a definitive report on cholera. I’m afraid it’s not my job to advise anyone of the dangers to our troops.”

“But you were
out
there. You are responsible.”

I was dismayed she should speak so forcefully that her remarks had been overheard by many in the room. Henry’s color was high. “I don’t think I can be held responsible for every death in the Russian War,” he said quietly, then turned to me. “And what about you, Ella, did you enjoy the lecture?”

“I did. You spoke so clearly, it seemed to me that nobody could doubt the truth of what you said.”

He took my hand and smiled lovingly. “I think some of my colleagues would say you were mistaking conviction for truth.”

“Perhaps. But sometimes I hear something and immediately there is no doubt in my mind that it is true.”

He pressed my hand in both of his and glanced briefly at my bosom. “I haven’t told you ... You are looking...What a beautiful necklace, Ella. I’ve never seen you wear it before, I think.” He reached out and picked up the locket so delicately that his fingertip barely brushed my skin.

“It’s Rosa’s,” I said, “she lent it to me.”

He studied it for a moment longer, then let it fall abruptly and turned to a couple of gentlemen who were waiting to speak to him.

But still Rosa hadn’t finished with him. “Dr. Thewell, I must just ask, how is the little boy Tom? The one who lost his leg that day in the hospital.”

He said curtly: “Died the next day, rather as I feared.”

“How dreadful, to put him through so much, and then for him to die.”