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‘Oh dear. Then it all rests upon what Hester says, apart from the three children.’
‘They are too young to testify. And their parents accepted money to provide food for the youngest child still at home.’ He said it with a degree of bitterness he did not even try to hide. ‘How much can you blame parents who convince themselves that an older child will be all right if they sell him or her to someone who will pay enough money to feed and save the babies left behind, crying with hunger?’
She looked away, her eyes filling with tears.
‘I’m sorry!’ He wished profoundly he had thought before he gave words to something she should not have had to know. ‘Beata . . . I’m sorry . . .’
She swivelled back to face him, her eyes blazing through the tears. ‘Don’t you dare protect me from the truths of life as if I were a child, Oliver! I don’t deserve that!’
He was stunned. ‘I’m . . . sorry. Was I doing that?’ He was truly appalled at his own clumsiness.
‘Yes, you were. Please don’t do it again. I have seen my share of cruelty, injustice and grief. I do not need to be treated like some flower that will bruise if you touch it.’
For the first time he considered what she must have felt when Ingram York said some of the things that he had. What private, intimate cruelties had she suffered that she could tell no one, ever? What shame did she feel on his behalf that she could not speak? What dreams of hers might he have crushed, like a slowly tightening screw?
He knew how his own disillusion with Margaret had hurt him, though perhaps it was a good deal his own fault. He had chosen to believe she was different from how she really was. Awakening had cost him not only the future but the past, taking the meaning and the heart out of what he had thought it to be.
What had Beata lost that she would be humiliated to give name to? He would never ask and, please heaven, never be clumsy enough to assume again. But another apology would only make the issue bigger than it already was.
‘Medical ethics are so complicated,’ he said. ‘Experimentation is fraught with the chances of failure, and pain or even death. Yet without it we learn nothing. No new cures are found and ignorance has destroyed progress. It depends so much on whose view you have. If someone I loved were ill, I would probably consider any price payable to save them. If I were ill myself, I don’t know. I might be too tired and in too much pain to want to struggle any more. If I were starving anyway, who knows what I would do? I might go willingly, but what idea would I have of the pain I would suffer? Even the changes, perhaps irreversible, that would happen to my body, or my mind.’
‘Are you going to say that in court?’ Now she was watching him with interest, no anger left, no thought of herself at all. ‘Are you going to point out that consent cannot be informed if it is from a person with no medical understanding of what the experiment means?’
He did not bother to say again that it would be Ardal Juster that was speaking, not he. ‘Yes,’ he answered thoughtfully. ‘And I will sound as if I am standing in the path of all progress.’
‘Rand could have used someone else’s blood,’ she pointed out. ‘An adult more able to understand and willing to take the chance.’
‘That’s the thing,’ Rathbone said ruefully. ‘There is something in the blood of these three children that works every time. He has already tried others, and failed.’
‘Oh . . .’
‘There is not only the question of life, but of the quality of life,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps Radnor is more a victim of this than he realises. I have a lot of studying to do before I advise Juster what to do.’
‘Expert witnesses? Other doctors?’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Don’t forget professional rivalry, Oliver. The defence will have experts, too. People perjure themselves for many reasons; some don’t even realise they are doing it. You are safer to stick to the emotional facts. Hester was taken against her will, and kept prisoner. Is there any way you can make the jury realise that if she had not been rescued, and Radnor had died, that Rand would have killed her?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘But I believe it . . . and that is a good deal of the way there.’
‘You have let your tea go cold. Let me send for a fresh pot, and eat your pie. Cook really is very good.’
He relaxed back into the chair. ‘Thank you.’
They spoke of other things, long into the evening. By the time he left he could think of little to do with the case, only how intensely he cared for Beata. How long would Ingram York cling on to his raging, damaged life, locked up in the asylum, half paralysed in a world of nightmares and silence? Surely it was also mercy to hope for his release?
Rathbone spent the rest of the week speaking to other doctors who were experts on diseases of the blood, or death from the shock of injury, and the consequent loss of blood. At Hester’s suggestion he also spoke to midwives who had delivered healthy babies, only to lose a mother from bleeding that took too long to stop.
The more he learned the more he understood the desperate need to find a solution to giving blood that a healthy person could easily spare, and which would restore life to someone who would otherwise die.
He even asked himself what risks he would take, if the dying person we
re Beata. Could he watch her fade away, suffering, if the gift of someone else’s blood could save her?
What was the great terror? Death? Annihilation? Being alone for ever? Being guilty of some irreversible sin? Or cowardice? The eternal blame of those you ignored, or of those your courage could have saved?
On Friday evening he went to see Ardal Juster in his home. It was considerably later than good manners would have permitted calling, especially upon someone you did not know well. He still went.
Juster was surprised, but he realised immediately that the matter was grave. As soon as they were in his comfortable, overcrowded study he closed the door and faced Rathbone.
‘What is it?’
