Hope - Lesley Pearse [116]
Bennett stifled a gasp of horror for her colour told him exactly what she was suffering from. He had never treated anyone with the disease before, but he remembered the effects of an epidemic that had occurred before he began to study medicine. He had, however, studied the disease in theory and knew how serious it was, and his stomach churned with alarm as he recalled how fast it could spread.
The young man’s symptoms were identical to the woman’s, but his pulse was even slower. Bennett looked up at Hope, saw her exhaustion and the fear in her eyes, and he was afraid to tell her the truth.
‘How long is it since they were taken ill?’ he asked.
‘Only yesterday,’ she said. ‘Betsy said she felt poorly the night before, and Gussie wasn’t quite himself either, but we all thought it was just the heat. Is it typhus, doctor?’
‘No, it’s not typhus,’ he said, wishing it were as the recovery rate from that disease was much higher.
‘Then what, doctor?’ she exclaimed. ‘Tell me, for pity’s sake.’
He knew he had to tell her the truth. He must give her the opportunity to decide whether she would flee to save her own life now, or stay and catch it too. She might even have it already, for he knew it was a fickle disease. In some it took days to manifest, in others, like these two, it struck fast and without mercy, death following in less than a day.
‘It is cholera, I’m afraid,’ he said softly, a lump coming up in his throat at having to name the disease which frightened him above all others.
She gasped and covered her mouth in horror. ‘Hundreds died of that the year I was born,’ she said, tears springing into her eyes. ‘I remember my mother talking about it to my sister. Can you make them better? Can we get them to the hospital?’
‘Your friends are too sick to move now,’ he said gently. His mind was whirling, weighing up how quickly the disease would spread to the others in this house. He recalled hearing some wailing as he came down the alley, which might have been another victim. Only this morning Uncle Abel had mentioned that there had been reports of several deaths among the destitute Irish immigrants, and now in the light of what he’d seen here, he thought it very likely that was cholera too.
He feared a mass panic when word got out that the dreaded disease was back in the city, and if people began swarming out into the countryside it could lead to a huge, countrywide epidemic.
But these two patients were his primary concern for now. It would be soon enough when he left here to inform the authorities and let them decide what was to be done.
‘I will give you some opium to put in their water which will help their cramps,’ he said. He knew he ought to tell the girl that her friends’ blue colouring meant they were already in the final stages, but he couldn’t. At least the opium would make their deaths gentler.
She might have been told about the cholera epidemic in ’32, but Bennett had seen it for himself, for he had been twelve years old then. He often felt it was that epidemic which had prompted him to become a doctor. His childhood home was two miles from Exeter, but in the city people died like flies that summer, often dropping in the streets. His mother had been terrified by the disease, refusing to let him go out for fear of catching it, but he had slipped out and seen the bodies being flung on to an open cart, heard the church bell tolling as the mass graves were filled. He could never forget the bonfires on which victims’ clothes and bedding were burned, or the fear in people’s eyes as they swarmed from the city trying to escape the disease.
That same fear was in Hope’s eyes now; she looked at him as if knowing he was holding something back, but afraid to question him further. ‘I’ve been giving them cinnamon tea,’ she burst out. ‘That is, until they stopped drinking. I put mustard poultices on their bellies too. Was that right? Should I go on doing it?’
‘All that is excellent,’ he said, astounded that a girl so young could be so unselfish and practical. ‘You