‘Is he having any difficulty breathing?’
She took a step forward and gazed down at the sleeping child and shook her head. ‘Not so far—thank goodness.’ In the lamplight, he could see her hairstyle had collapsed on one side. One slippery coil of dark hair hung down against her cheek almost to her waist. The rest of that side of her head charmingly resembled a bird’s nest. Rumpled and groggy with sleep, she appeared younger and much softer than usual. Instead of their usual wariness, those soulful dark eyes were now filled only with concern for the little boy. ‘The fever came on so suddenly.’
‘His temperature is not unduly high now.’
Almost as if she didn’t believe him, her own palm brushed against the boy’s brow and she exhaled in relief. ‘I mixed willow bark with feverfew, echinacea and chamomile in a tea to fight the fever and have been feeding him it every two hours since midday. I didn’t know what else to do.’
Joe took in the scene, the open windows, the ice, the cool cloths draped over the boy’s arms and head. The child’s distinct lack of a nightgown. ‘I think you did everything I would have done. You have managed the symptoms perfectly.’
‘Not all of them. He’s wheezing and his tonsils are badly infected and he is in a great deal of pain. I mixed a generous dollop of honey in with the tea because I recalled you said it had healing properties against infection. I have no idea if it has actually made a difference, but it seemed to help.’
She really had thought of everything. ‘The warmth of the tea will have soothed them and the honey will help to fight the infection. As for the pain, I think you have alleviated a great deal with your quick thinking—he is sleeping very soundly. I doubt he would be so deep in the arms of Morpheus if he were still in the grip of pain. I was expecting to walk into a crisis, but thanks to you, it was deftly avoided... Well done.’
She smiled at him shyly but then brushed the compliment away. ‘I can assure you, it was merely borne out of necessity. When we learned you might not return for hours, I sent for Dr Bentley and the fool refused to come.’ The flash of annoyance had her scowling. ‘And the man has the cheek to call himself a physician!’
‘Dr Bentley is quite particular about who he treats.’ People with no money to pay him for his services up front, for example, were callously ignored. Joe hated that, yet at the same time he was strangely grateful for the fellow’s ambivalence. Had Bentley been a good doctor who treated first and sought payment after, then nobody in his Retford practice would have given Joe a chance. His willingness to treat all comers and to accept whatever payment in kind the families could afford had granted him a level of acceptance he would never have enjoyed otherwise. Of course, it also meant he was given all manner of things he had no use for—like the ornate lady’s hair comb which had been sent to his surgery only yesterday by an elderly patient who was as fit as a fiddle but imagined she suffered from everything. Nothing he could use to pay the wages of an assistant to help him with his growing workload.
‘Doctors have no place being selective in their choice of patients. Ignoring a sick child is nothing short of cruelty. In fact, it is criminal!’
‘I keep trying to appeal to his better nature.’ Joe refrained from saying what he truly thought. Dr Bentley was motivated by money rather than the need to heal. Meanwhile the poverty-stricken people suffered unnecessarily from his neglect. However, knowing what he did about Dr Bentley’s archaic and draconian practices, he supposed it was just as well he was not more charitable. His antiquated methods rarely worked and often made things worse. If Joe ever found himself bleeding to death in the middle of the road, the very last person he would call was Dr Bentley, as he’d probably end up dead.
‘I am not sure that man has a better nature. I didn’t take to him when I first met him and respect him less now. It is a wonder that he is still condoned by the locals when his attitude towards the sick is so appalling.’
‘Dr Bentley has been practising medicine here for as long as I can remember. People are unwaveringly loyal to him after so many years of service.’ And, of course, it helped he did not have the unfortunate surname of Warriner.
‘Service?’ She was so outraged she forgot to whisper. ‘Leaving a sick child to potentially die is hardly service!’ Her fierceness amused him and reminded Joe of the way he had seen Dr Bentley glare at her as he left her the other day. Lady Isabella clearly hid a bit of a temper beneath her usually silent, suspicious exterior. It made her forget to be silent and it was nice not to be on the receiving end of her disdain for once. The noise roused their patient and he whimpered slightly. The change in her was instantaneous. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Tom.’ Her hand brushed his hair affectionately. ‘Dr Warriner is here. He is delighted to see you getting better. Would you like something to drink?’
The boy nodded and she began to fuss over him, so different from the uptight and dour woman he had always assumed her to be. To be still here because a foundling was sick and to be treating him as if she genuinely cared about him was...well, frankly nothing short of admirable and not at all what he would have expected of her. She stepped aside while Joe did his own examination of the boy, watching with barely disguised interest from her preferred spot nearest the door as he took his stethoscope out of his bag and used it to listen to Tom’s chest. ‘His lungs are clear. The wheezing is in his throat, not his chest.’
‘You can tell such things just from listening?’
‘Yes, indeed. With this wonderful instrument I can hear all manner of things I couldn’t before.’
‘Is that Laennec’s stethoscope?’ She took two steps forward. At her apparent fascination with the instrument he passed it to her to examine. She took another step forward, took it eagerly and scrutinised both ends of the wooden tube whilst holding it as if it were as precious as the Holy Grail. ‘I read his paper last year but have never seen one used before.’
She kept surprising him. ‘You read his Treatise on the Diagnosis of the Diseases of the Lungs and Heart?’
‘I didn’t understand all of it,’ she said, holding his stethoscope like a telescope and peering through the hole, ‘but his claims that different diseases caused the chest cavity to sound different was intriguing.’ Lady Isabella was the first person he had ever met who had read the great Dr Laennec’s work, a surprising choice of reading matter for a young lady, yet one which proved she had more than a working knowledge of all things scientific if she had read that weighty academic essay.
‘I had one made to Laennec’s exact design as soon as he began to publish his successes. He has used it to great effect when diagnosing the treatment of consumption. I have heard of a few other physicians who have started to use a stethoscope rather than rely on just their own ears—but it is still a relatively new invention. Everyone who tries it, swears by it. It’s amazing how clearly one can hear congestion in the lungs, or an irregular heartbeat—which in turn makes diagnosis and treatment of such dangerous conditions faster. When an illness affects the lungs, without swift intervention a patient can quickly develop pleurisy or pneumonia. That stethoscope you are holding has saved a few lives here in Retford in the two years I have been using it.’ In fact, it was Joe’s most essential piece of equipment aside from his spectacles. Without those, he couldn’t read a damn thing or see anything close up. ‘I have been experimenting with it with expectant mothers. During the first stage of confinement it is also possible to hear the heartbeats of a foetus.’ Was it appropriate to discuss such things with a gently bred young woman? Probably not, yet her eyes lit up and he reminded himself she had read Laennec.
‘How can you be sure you are simply not hearing the mother’s heart?’
‘Because I can clearly hear both, beating in tandem. The mother’s is louder, as one would expect with