Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [24]
“Yes, sir.” Nora looked nervously between the two of them.
“Don’t be frightened,” Treves told her. “He won’t hurt you.”
“Indeed.” Carr-Gomm’s eyebrows were raised a fraction and he made a gesture toward his office door.
Nora watched the two men enter the office, then she set off for the Isolation Ward. Apprehension stirred like quicksand inside her. She was as much frightened by Treves’ last words as by the prospect of confronting the mysterious figure she had seen smuggled in. Why should he hurt her? Was he delirious from fever or—she gulped—a madman?
She stopped, drew a deep breath, and tried to stiffen her resolve. Her father had always told his children to advance with courage in the Lord.
After a few moments spent talking sternly to herself, Nora advanced with courage up the stairs to the Isolation Ward.
Francis Culling Carr was a man in whom the strain of hereditary pride had increased in direct proportion to his distance from its source. The family glory was rooted in a faint connection with Field Marshall Sir William Gomm, the distinguished soldier who had begun a great career as Aide to the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular war and at Waterloo.
Francis, younger son of an obscure Kent clergyman, had faced life with two weapons, his Gomm connection and his brilliant facility for the law. Together they had been enough to win him a Major’s daughter for a wife. The marriage, a happy one, had lasted ten years, during which Jeanie had given him two living sons and one dead, and died in childbirth when her husband was thirty-five.
The next five years of his life had been spent in India as a District Judge in the Madras Civil Service, until at last a desire to see how his two surviving sons had fared in his sister’s care had made him return. He had arrived in England to find Sir William Gomm on the point of death.
Grief and loneliness had toughened Francis Carr’s heart, as the Indian sun had toughened his skin. He made a swift decision. Sir William had no children or any close male relatives. His nearest kin was his spinster niece Emily Carr, who was plain, thirty-two, and on her last prayers. Carr used their distant relationship to effect an introduction and they were married within four months.
When Sir William Gomm died the Carrs applied for, and received, the Royal License to assume the surname and arms of Gomm, although to do Francis justice he thought more of his sons (who now numbered three, thanks to Emily’s efforts) than of himself. Now they were Mr. and Mrs. Carr-Gomm, and Emily played the lady of the manor to perfection.
For the last five years Carr-Gomm had been Chairman of the London Hospital. He brought to the job the characteristics of a trained lawyer, and also a mind that had learned deviousness in India. His nature was precise, proud, and subtle. He could be deeply generous, but his generosity was a considered response. There were numerous stories of his kindness, but kindness was seldom his first instinct. As a clergyman’s son he practiced compassion from Christian duty. As a lawyer he practiced rectitude from a sense of good order.
His office was a large, high-ceilinged room, dominated by two huge windows that ran side by side all the way up one wall. In front of this stood the Chairman’s desk, and whether by accident or design Carr-Gomm had placed his chair exactly in the center of the space between the windows. The effect was to throw an almost blinding light on his visitors, making Carr-Gomm himself hard to see.
“I had better confess now that there is no sorcery in my knowledge,” he said when Treves had seated himself. “I saw you helping the patient down the corridor outside this office barely half an hour ago. I presume it is the same man? Or is it woman? It was rather hard to see.”
“It was a man.”
“He has been through the Receiving Room presumably, and all details given at the desk?”
“No, sir. I admitted him myself. You see—”
“In other words, if I had not happened to look out of my office door at just that moment, this man’s presence in the Isolation Ward would have remained