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She wanted to tell him that she could see his fear, even understand it. But that was not what she was here for. She should have been able to pity him, but so far he had made her dislike him too much for that. He was frightened, so he was trying to transfer the pain out of himself and into her.
‘No,’ she answered the original question. ‘My father died, and that drove out all other concerns. I can imagine very easily how your daughter feels now.’
A look came across his face that was too complex for her to read. There was intense emotion in it, but a mixture of pleasure and pain, a slow relish of something sweet, and a loathing as well.
Then it vanished.
‘I don’t need your sympathy, woman,’ he sneered at her. ‘Just do your job, whatever that is.’
‘Just as well,’ she said before she thought. ‘Because you don’t have it. And my job is to distract you now, and to keep you from ripping the needle out when Dr Rand puts it in your arm. If you do pull it out, you will lose what little precious blood you have.’
He stared at her. ‘Got a tongue like a butcher’s knife, haven’t you?’
She smiled at him as if she liked him, and saw the confusion in his eyes.
‘Like a surgeon’s scalpel,’ she corrected him. ‘Far more precise and sharper. If I have the need.’
Magnus came in and grasped hold of the contraption, wheeling it over the slightly uneven boards of the floor. He stopped it very close to the side of the bed. Hester glanced at the bottle hanging from it, with the soft rubber tubes trailing like tentacles. The light did not pass through the bottle. It was full of something.
‘Please be still, Mr Radnor,’ Magnus said politely. ‘If you fear you might pull away, I can have you strapped down. But the pain will be slight. I cannot answer for a degree of discomfort.’
‘I can hold still,’ Radnor said through clenched teeth. ‘Stop treating me like a child, man. Do what you have to.’
Magnus did not argue with him. He turned to the contraption, and checked all the connections once again, in case the journey across the floor had jarred anything loose. Satisfied, he took a small cloth that smelled strongly of surgical spirit, and wiped the skin on the inside of Radnor’s arm. Then without warning he jabbed the needle into the vein and held it hard.
Radnor gasped and his face turned even whiter than before.
Hester was not surprised. There was something about the shining point of a heavy needle sinking into one’s own flesh that would make anyone shudder, however much they steeled themselves against it. It was far darker than the delicate stitching of the skin a surgeon would do to a wound.
Magnus glanced at Radnor, just to assure himself that he was steady enough, and then he began to adjust the dials and pressures on the contraption.
The glass above the needle this time was dark brown. Hester could not tell from looking at it what it might be. She watched Magnus’s face, his intense concentration, and then she turned back to Radnor. He was lying motionless, but there was a beading of perspiration on his forehead. She decided not to disturb him by wiping it away. To him it would seem like fussing.
The seconds ticked by.
Magnus looked at the contraption, then at Radnor. He fiddled with the rubber tubing to make sure it was still working.
Hester put her hand gently on Radnor’s forehead.
He opened his eyes and glared at her. She saw the fear in him and felt a moment’s pity. She could tell him that his temperature was holding steady, but no doubt he knew that. There was nothing feverish about him. She did not do so because she did not want to provoke him to respond. Instead she told Magnus.
‘Quite steady, Dr Rand,’ she said quietly. She moved her cool finger down to Radnor’s wrist. The pulse was light, but no faster or more uneven than before.
More minutes slipped by.
Magnus told Hester to take Radnor’s temperature properly, with the thermometer. She did so, and his pulse with a stop watch.
‘His temperature is up a degree,’ she told him. ‘Pulse is the same as before, but a little stronger.’
‘Good. Good, so far,’ Rand said with relief. ‘We will continue.’ He did not ask Radnor. This was medicine, an experiment. All that mattered was the result. Radnor as an individual meant nothing.
Carefully, with Hester’s help, Magnus unhooked the dark brown bottle and then attached another, seemingly identical. It was only then that Hester saw the rime of blood on it, and knew beyond doubt what it was that Magnus and Hamilton were doing. It was human blood that they had taken from the children, and were putting drop by drop, into Bryson Radnor. They were replacing his sick, white blood, empty of life, with that of Charlie, Maggie, and whoever else they had in that ward full of children.
It was terrifying, barbaric – and brilliant, if it worked! She had enough knowledge of medical history to know that it had been tried before. As far back as the 1600s doctors had tried to give healthy blood to save sick people. On rare occasions it had worked, for a while. Usually it killed the recipient, most unpleasantly, as if the new blood, which had kept someone else alive, were poison to the one who received it. Nobody knew why.
One great difficulty was that blood clotted – if it did not, then any cut would cause the victim to bleed to death – but you could not put clotted blood into another person. How had Hamilton overcome that? What had he added to the blood he had taken so that it ran liquid and easily through those brown rubber tubes? How much of it was exactly right to keep the blood liquid, and yet so that it still clotted when it had mixed with the recipient’s own blood?
Did Bryson Radnor know what was happening to him?
