Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [32]
None of this seemed logical to the Doctor. He had only his own reputation and that of his domesticated leeches to worry about. As the flesh around the boy’s wound turned red and septic, he applied the leeches to the swelling, bringing it down considerably. Then the boy grew pale. If only nature had invented a blood-injecting animal as effective as the leech, something puffed up with blood that deflated itself through a sharp mouthlike organ.
The leeches did their work, Dr. Aubrey (for that was his name) explained several days later when the boy awoke from his coma. His vision was bad; his left arm and leg were numb; his speech was slurred. All in all, the Doctor attested, the results were better than he had expected. Without the prompt intervention of a trained physician with a thorough knowledge of the bleeding portals, however, the boy would have been lost. The housewife was to be congratulated—and forgiven—for her quick, if unconventional, thinking. What she did was instinctual, issuing from a good heart and not, as originally charged, an occult affinity.
It did not end there. Her identity had been discovered. The Doctor sought her out on other cases of head injury. She was not just a sailor’s widow; she was in some way a woman blessed with healing powers. People began coming to her for poultices, for bone setting, for the laying on of hands. Yes, it was true: she could regenerate skin after certain burns and other scarring. She knew woodland secrets. Some said she possessed uncanny powers, the sort associated with conjurers and devils (those who heal by suspension of God’s law can also inflict injury at long distance through the agency of the Prince of Darkness), and wasn’t it passing strange that she hailed from Salem, the very town where the prevalence of witches had called special courts into session and brought down God’s severest judgment on the most recalcitrant? She needed Dr. Aubrey’s defense and public-spirited protection, and got it.
In Salem, it had taken twenty years before her special qualities had come out, or at least before she began to trust the voices inside her. In England, it had taken only a year. And by the spring of 1694, the voice had found a shape.
The man’s name was Hubert—we don’t know his last name. Hannah was twenty-four, widowed for a year. He was her age, but in appearance much older, as befit his scholarly bent. His first visit to her Stepney cottage was due to injury—a compound fracture of his left arm—that had grown septic and threatened the need for amputation. He had been bled repeatedly but the reduction in swelling offered no permanent relief. Finally Dr. Aubrey had recommended the Widow Legge and her poultices.
Hubert was a man altogether different from any she’d known. Whereas Gabriel Legge was physically blessed—tall, straight and immensely strong (with the rakish eye patch that added a touch of abandonment and tragedy to all his adventures)—Hubert was bespectacled in the Dutch manner that had become fashionable with the accession of William and Mary. His corn-silk-blond hair was thinning, his ears were long and fleshy, his teeth yellowed from constant pipe smoking. He was educated in Mr. Newton’s New Sciences of Mathematics and Physics and held a position as a researcher with the Royal Society. He had traveled to the Continent and met his colleagues in France and Florence, and spoke of them not as rivals in politics, trade or military force, but as fellow discoverers of sacred knowledge.
In fact, Hubert’s ignorance in matters of the real world rivaled no one’s that Hannah had ever met. She sprang from alert, educated port-city people. Curiosity, within limits (which she frequently tested), was a virtue. Until Gabriel Legge, and then Hubert, Hannah’s investment in the word “discovery” had been limited to people far below her in education, and high above her in what might be called craft, wile and survival. The discoverers she had known proceeded not by experiment, like Hubert, but certain knowledge and unbending ritual, like the forest Indians, or the ministers