An infant, obviously no older than a few hours or possibly a day at most, lay with eyes pinched shut, fists at its face, turning its head this way and that with mouth wide open.
Maeve stared in astonishment.
Chapter Six
“A baby? Nora, you found a baby in a storage bin?”
“Not in a bin. Between bags of oatmeal, almost right out in the open and near the entrance to the apartment. Is the little grah mo chee all right?” After referring to the infant as sweetheart, she handed off the bundle to Maeve.
Maeve took the baby just as Dr. Gallagher joined them. Nora explained again where she’d found the child. “Someone had wrapped a flour sack around her and left her like that.”
He peeled the apron all the way back, revealing the pink infant’s froglike legs and several inches of umbilical cord still attached. Her skin still bore streaks of mucus and blood.
“She’s a newborn,” he said unnecessarily. He glanced at Maeve. She hadn’t seen him wear this look of discomfort before. “I haven’t had much experience with infants.” And he stepped away. “I’ll get a basin of warm water so you can bathe her, and then I’ll listen to her heart and lungs.”
“What about my shoulder?” Miss Coulter called from the examining table.
“Your shoulder will be fine,” Flynn told her. “I think it’s just a little bruising.”
“Perhaps you could call on me tomorrow to make sure I’ve improved.”
“Certainly,” he replied and saw her to the door.
Maeve exchanged a glance with her sister. “An unending stream of young ladies have sought medical attention since yesterday,” Maeve whispered. “The good doctor is obviously prime husband material.”
Nora only had eyes for the baby in Maeve’s arms. “Will she live, Maeve? She’s puny, is she not? You’ve seen a lot of babies born. What do you make of this one?”
“Let’s clean her up and look her over.” Maeve asked Nora to spread out towels on the examining table and proceeded to sponge the infant with clear warm water.
“All babies this young look puny,” she told her sister. “She’s average from what I can tell. She seems perfectly healthy and quite obviously hungry, the poor dear.”
Once the baby’s skin was clean and dry, Maeve made a diaper from the cotton bandages Flynn kept stacked nearby. Flynn opened a drawer on the other side of the room and offered a folded shirt.
Nora accepted the garment. She studied the intricate embroidery and monogram and asked a question with her expressive blue eyes.
“It’s just a shirt,” he said. “Cut it up to make her gowns. I have plenty more.”
Nora used his bandage scissors to cut off the collar, sleeves and buttons and crudely fashion a garment.
“She appears fine,” Maeve told her. “But we need to feed her.”
“Rice water?” Nora asked.
“No, milk is best.”
“It will have to be goat’s milk.” Flynn took a small tin container from inside a cabinet and headed for the door. “The sailors have a nanny aboard. I’ll be back with milk.”
Nora glanced about. “How will we feed it to her?”
Maeve handed her the now-squalling baby and searched in earnest for a feeding method. “We could soak towels…or gauze.”
She opened a cabinet and picked up a length of rubber tubing. “Better yet. We’ll use this.”
“That?” Nora asked, cuddling the infant.
“Aye. It’s pliable, see. We’ll puncture a couple of needle holes in it for the milk to come through and bend it like so. The baby will suck on it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Stick your finger in her mouth and see if she doesn’t latch onto anything.”
“I’ve just washed all the sailor’s breakfast dishes, so I expect my finger’s clean enough.” Nora offered the baby the tip of her index finger, and the crying stopped immediately. Nora got tears in her eyes. “The poor grah mo chee is so hungry.”
“We’ll have her fed in no time.” Maeve placed the tubing in a kettle of water. “I’m going on deck to boil this.”
Nora’s eyes widened. “And leave me here alone with her?”
“You’ll be fine,” Maeve assured her. “Just cuddle her, as you’re doing. She likes your warmth and the beat of your heart. If you’d like conversation, Sean McCorkle is lying in the next room.”
“Who would leave their newborn baby on sacks of meal, Maeve?” Nora looked into her sister’s eyes with a look of concern and disbelief. “She’s only just been born, wouldn’t you think? Aboard the ship…maybe right there in that storage apartment?”
“Seems likely, it does. But why her mother abandoned her is a mystery. If she’d died, someone would have found her body—or at the very least we’d have heard of a death.”
“Maybe her mother couldn’t care for her,” Nora suggested.
“Her mother was the one with milk to nourish her,” Maeve reminded her. “She could have cared for her better than we.”
“Perhaps something happened to her and she was unable to return. If she was a stowaway, like those boys, she may have been hiding in that storage depot.”
“We’ll do everything we can. Have a seat. I’ll be right back.”
The situation did puzzle Maeve. Perhaps the woman would show up. Perhaps the infant had been left there by accident. Maybe she’d been taken from the mother. There were too many questions to think about, without any facts, so she set about doing what she could to help.
* * *
Flynn explained the situation to a couple of the sailors seated near their pens of chickens and only several feet from the goat’s enclosure. The men generously gave him a cup of milk and told him to come back any time he needed more.
The newborn’s presence knocked him a little off-kilter. Returning to the dispensary, he regarded the situation. He’d cared for children aboard ship, of course, but he hadn’t been in close proximity to a baby only hours old since his own son had been born. The thought caused him more pain than he could deal with now.
Two years ago he’d lost his young wife and tiny son to the deadly cholera that had spread through Galway and so much of Ireland. His countrymen referred to potato blight and epidemics as an Drochshaol, the bad times, which were still prevalent and still a threat to lives and livelihoods. He’d read that after thousands had died, nearly a quarter of the remaining people had fled to other countries.
An Drochshaol was personal to Flynn. Unbearable. He’d studied to learn how to treat people and heal them. He’d devoted his life to medicine and research…but when the shadow of death had come to his own door, he’d been unable to do anything to save his wife and child.
He’d cared for them feverishly, night and day for weeks. Jonathon had gone first. Sturdy and strapping though the boy had been, his eventual dehydration caused by vomiting and diarrhea had been more than Flynn could stave off.
Grief-stricken, he’d buried his son and turned his attention to his wife, only to lose the same battle. Once they were gone, he had avoided people—even his family. He hadn’t wanted to practice medicine, turning instead to research in an all-consuming drive to understand