An Acquaintance with Darkness - Ann Rinaldi [83]
I stared at him. "You'd let me go?"
"I don't want you to go. I think you know that by now. But I will let nothing and no one interfere with my work, Emily. Ever. I will put nothing before medical science."
"I won't interfere," I said.
He sighed. "Now that we have that cleared up"—and he waved his hand to dismiss the matter—"tell me. Did you let Addie go?"
The question was so abrupt, the brown eyes so accusing. "Yes."
"Why?"
"She begged me. Ever since I've been here. All she wanted was to be free. I didn't think it right that she was a prisoner."
"You didn't think it right?" Tears came to his eyes. He couldn't speak for a minute. And he was white-faced. "Do you think that was your decision to make?"
"Uncle Valentine."
"Do you know what you have done? Letting that woman go was more an act of betrayal than going with those girls to my lab."
I was confused. He was more distressed about Addie being gone than about the police raid on his lab. There was something here. But what? It came to me then that if I could figure it out, I would understand my uncle Valentine.
Maybe I would even understand the secret of life.
"Do you know how long I've been working with Addie? How far I've come with curing her of the Wasting Disease?"
"She was better," I said. "She wasn't coughing anymore. That's why I let her go."
"She was better because she was on my medicine." He turned and picked up a bottle from a nearby table. He set it down, none too gently, on another table before me. "This medicine."
The bottle was dark. Or was that the medicine inside?
"Pick it up and open it," he said. "Smell it."
I did so. It smelled terrible. Like camphor. Yet at the same time like rotten fish. "What is it?"
"I call it Purple Mass. President Lincoln took something called Blue Mass for his nerves and other ailments. Until I find a better name for this, it is Purple Mass. It clears the lungs. I have been working on it since my wife died. It is a mixture of my own making. Made in part from crushed leaves of devil's tongue, a flower Marietta grew in my laboratory. A nightflower."
I remembered the flower. Remembered Marietta saying what trouble she had growing it. Remembered how the flies were drawn to it, how she'd told me it would smell of decayed fish.
He gave a great sigh and took the bottle back. "My wife always had a cough," he said. "Valentine,' she would say to me, can't you find something to cure this cough?' Only I was too busy becoming an important doctor. I had no time for her. I thought she was being petulant because I wasn't paying her much mind. 'Keep away from damp air,' I told her. 'Take hot tea. Soup.' She got sicker and sicker. Then she got bad. Her lungs filled up. I knew nothing about lungs. I still don't know enough about lungs. She died."
He fell silent. He set the bottle down. "I went on being an important doctor. I worked to overcome my grief. Then Marietta came along. She is very knowledgeable about slave medicine, folklore medicine. One day I told her the story of my wife. It was she who told me about the devil's tongue flower. She had all these decoctions written down from before she came north. 1 thought devil's tongue was worth a try for congested lungs. Marietta grew the flowers in pots in my lab at the college. I experimented with them and added my own ingredients. It was working for Addie. She was getting better. But her treatment wasn't finished. And without her medicine, she will sicken again and die."
I stared at him. "She was better," I said.
"No. She was on her way to being better. I explained to her how long the treatment would take. She agreed to it. Oh yes, every day she'd ask to leave. Every morning I'd talk with her, reassure her, tell her, 'Just a little while longer.' And she believed me. Until you spirited her up to be free. You have interfered, my girl. In a most dastardly way. With medical science!"
"I didn't, Uncle Valentine.