AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Protect it from what?” he asked
“I already told you I don’t know!” She felt confused and defensive, as if a horrible truth were slipping out of her hands but leaving even uglier lies in its place. “But do you think Lambourn was a failure and a suicide?” she demanded. “Are you trying to prevent me stirring up something embarrassing-at the cost of Dinah Lambourn’s life?”
A sharp unhappiness filled his face, and she knew she had hurt him.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “That wasn’t fair, and I wish I hadn’t said it. I feel helpless. I know there’s something terribly wrong, and I have too little time to make sense of it.”
He made a small gesture with his hand, dismissing her accusation. “You haven’t changed, have you? Haven’t learned.” He dropped his voice a little and there was a great gentleness in his face. “I’m glad. Some people should never grow old-not inside. But be careful, girl. If there really is something to this, then it is very bad indeed, and very dangerous.” He leaned across to the desk and picked up a pen and a piece of paper. He scribbled a name and address and passed it to her.
“This is a man who helped Lambourn. He asked a lot of questions about opium, its use and its dangers. He works among the poor, scraping a living the best he can. He may not be easy to find. He’s erratic, happy one day, wretched the next, but he’s a good man. Be careful who you ask for him.”
She took the paper and glanced at it. Alvar Doulting. It was a name she did not know. “Thank you,” she said, putting it into her small reticule. “I’ll see if I can find him.”
It took her well into the next day before she at last found Alvar Doulting, working in a room next to a warehouse down by St. Saviour’s Dock. He had half a dozen patients, suffering mostly deep bruises and crushed or broken bones. With only the briefest of introductions, merely a mention of the Crimea, she began to help him.
He was a young man, earnest and pale, perhaps from exhaustion and the sudden, harsh change in the weather. His lean face was both powerful and sensitive, at the moment marred by a growth of stubble and deep lines of weariness. He wore ragged clothes, several layers of them to try to keep warm, even a woolen scarf instead of a tie or cravat around his neck.
He watched her for only a moment or two before seeing that she was experienced with wounds, and that the obvious poverty and physical dirtiness of the patients were of no importance to her. She noticed only the pain, and the dangers, first of bleeding and then of gangrene, always of shock, and-at this time of year-the cold.
They worked with rags, makeshift bandages made from torn strips of fabric, splints fashioned from anything that was strong enough, cheap brandy given both as a drink to dull pain and as a way to clean wounds before stitching them with needles and gut. He had little opium, and he used it only on the worst cases.
It was more than two hours later when they were alone and there was finally time to speak.
They sat in his tiny office cluttered with books and piles of papers, which at a glance looked like notes on patients he was possibly too tired or too busy to trust to memory. She remembered doing the same. There was a small wood-burning stove in one corner and on it a kettle. He offered her tea and she took it gratefully.
“Thank you for your help,” he said, handing her the steaming tin mug.
She dismissed his gratitude with a gesture so tiny he might not even have seen it. She did not waste time with preamble.
“I’m trying to save Joel Lambourn’s widow from being hanged,” she said bluntly. “I don’t believe she killed anyone, but I don’t know who did.”
He was sitting on a makeshift stool. He looked up at her with hopelessness in his eyes, and a pity so deep he did not attempt to express it in words.
“You can’t save her,” he said simply. “You’re fighting a war nobody’s going to win. We ruined the Chinese, now we’re ruining ourselves.” He gave a bitter little laugh. “A little drink of opium to still the baby’s crying, ease the stomachache, get a little sleep. A deeper draft of it to dull the agony of wounds for the soldier, the man with the crushed leg, with the kidney stones he can’t pass.”
His face twisted sharply. “A pipe full for the man whose life is a gray drudgery, the one who’d rather be dead than give up his escape into dreams.” His voice dropped. “And in a few cases, a hollow needle and a thin glass vialful into a vein, and for a while hell becomes heaven-but just awhile-then you need some more.”
He blinked. “The blood spilt and the profit made on this drug will drown you. Believe me, I know. I lost my home, my practice, and the woman I was going to marry.”
She felt fear closing in as if the shadows were darker around her, and yet a surge of strength also; she had finally found someone who wasn’t offering her denials.
“What did Joel Lambourn find out that was worth killing him to hide?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Doulting replied. “All he told me about was the number of children who died unnecessarily, because packages were not labeled. Their mothers gave them gripe water, teething medicine, dosages against colic and diarrhea that didn’t say how much or how often it should be taken. The
figures are terrible, and its names are proprietary brands we all know and think we can trust.”
“What else?” she pressed, sipping from her tea. It was too strong, and certainly not fresh, but it was hot. It reminded her of her army days.
“He didn’t tell me,” Doulting assured her. “He knew someone was trying to stop him, to make him look incompetent. He was careful. Everything was documented.” His face was very pale as if misery and guilt crowded him. Every now and again he winced, as if he too had his own pain to battle. “I tried collecting information myself, and I gave him all I had. I asked questions, took notes. Some of the stories would break your heart.”
“Where are your notes?”
“My office was burned, and all my papers and records were lost. Even my instruments, my scalpels and needles, all my medicines-everything was destroyed. I had to start again in a new place, begging and borrowing what I could.”
Hester was cold, chilled from the inside. “Do you know who did it?”
“Names? No. Intent, I’m not sure. More than simply to stop the report that would regulate the sale of opium. It will cost to measure and label everything, and require that all medicines are sold only by people qualified to say what they are, but not that much. There are those who consider it to be limiting the freedom of poor people to buy the only relief from pain that we know, but it won’t. What they’re really concerned about is their own freedom to sell it to the desperate as often and as easily as possible.
