Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [47]
The next morning when she woke from her drugged sleep Mr. Baker Brown was there. She thought at first he was only another hallucination. She lay looking up at him, his smooth, unworried forehead. Then she flung herself at him.
But her nails must have been cut short while she was asleep, she realised, because she didn't manage to leave so much as a scratch on his face, only a slight pink mark under one eye. As if the doctor had brushed against some rouged lady at a ball.
She lay flat, feeling a tide of pain surge up and down her spine. He held her hands flat against the mattress—gently, as if she were a child—and called in Matron to tie them down again.
"Why have you mutilated me?" Miss E howled.
"I have done nothing of the sort," said the doctor. His eyes were full of hurt. "I have performed an operation to prevent you from harming yourself, from making yourself gravely ill to the point of epilepsy, lunacy, and death."
She stared at him, her eyes throbbing.
"An operation, I might add, which has earned me the admiration of my peers, and material success, as well as the gratitude of countless women and their families."
"I want my brother," she said.
The strictest quiet must be enjoined, and the attention of relatives, if possible, avoided, so that the moral influence of medical attendant and nurse may be uninterruptedly maintained.
For six days she was quite alone. She lay on her pillows as limp as an old dress. Sometimes she lay on her side, either the right or the left, it didn't matter. On the seventh day, Air. Baker Brown came in to look at her again. "My dear Miss F., you strike me as rather better. Your skin, your circulation—Matron reports an improvement in your digestion—"
"My back hurts," she said, her eyes following him around the tiny room. "My back hurts as much as it ever did."
He shook his head at her, almost playfully. "You sleep well these nights; you eat," he coaxed her. "Why won't you admit to being a little better?"
"Because I'm not," she said through her teeth. "I demand to be let go. I want to go home to my brother's house."
"Come now, Miss F., you must know that's impossible. Alatron has told you, I never discharge a patient till she is fully cured. Not just cured in body, but in mind."
Her eyes locked onto his.
"Why don't you do a little knitting?" he suggested. "Or try to walk to the window and back?"
She cleared her throat. "How can you bear what you do?"
He spoke with a forced calm. "Miss F., I must tell you frankly that I believe I have rendered you more truly feminine—more healthy in your natural instincts—more prepared to discover real happiness in marital intercourse, if marriage is to be your lot in life, and why should it not, now?"
He meant every word he said, she could see that in his burning eyes. That was the worst thing, that was the pity of it, it struck her now: that he believed absolutely in his mission. "I'm going to tell my brother what you've done to me," she said levelly.
A cautious look came over Mr. Baker Brown now. "I think not. These are delicate matters," he advised her. "I have found, in other cases, that the relatives and friends of my patients do not care to pry into the details of treatment, either before or after."
"When my brother hears my back is no better, after all he's spent—"
The doctor spread his hands. "He understood from the start that I could make no guarantees about any particular symptom."
She lay watching him. "The minute you let me see him, I'll tell him just what you've done to me."
"I very much doubt that," said Baker Brown mildly.
She stared.
"For a woman of your pretensions to modesty and respectability, Miss F., to attempt to convey such intimate information to a young man—her own brother—who would be mortified, I imagine—who would cover his ears at such shamelessness in a sister, or run out of the room—what words would you use to make your complaint, may I ask?" He waited.
"I would tell him—," she growled at last.
"Yes?"
She imagined the conversation; her brothers face. All the words that