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She looked at him closely as Magnus tied up the second bottle and began its slow, steady drip into the glass vial and the needle at the end of it. Did Radnor even wonder whose blood it was? Maybe he thought it was from some animal. Or a convict destined to die anyway.
She took his temperature and pulse again. The temperature was still normal. His pulse was markedly stronger. The skin of his face had lost some of its grey look.
As she was staring at him he opened his eyes. They were a strange, golden brown colour, brighter than before.
It’s working! His pale lips formed the words. They were silent, but she could hear the ring of victory in them as if he had shouted loud enough to fill the bare hospital room with the sound.
By late in the afternoon Radnor was lying back against his pillows drinking beef tea and requesting more food than he had eaten in the entire previous week. His colour had returned, his temperature was close to normal, his pulse steady.
Magnus was pleased, but he did what he could to contain his elation.
‘We’ve had such success before,’ he said warily, when he and Hester were alone in his office. He took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. ‘Sometimes we succeed for a few days, even a few weeks. Then when they are ill again, we treat them again . . . and they die.’ He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. ‘Horribly.’
‘And you don’t know why?’ she said with a sudden chill taking away her moment of victory. That was what it was about – not making it work just the once. She thought of Wilton, and Sherryl’s description of how he had died, and thrust it out of her mind.
She saw in her mind’s eye soldiers lying on battlefields, limbs torn off, riddled with bullets. With current medical knowledge they could be saved, but only for a while. Even with the best care in field hospitals, they died of shock and loss of blood.
And not only soldiers, other people, in street accidents, industrial disasters, women dying in childbirth from bleeding no one could control.
But the blood had to come from somebody. Somebody like Charlie, Maggie, even little Mike. One pint of blood from a child that age – undersized anyway, malnourished, alone and frightened – could be enough to weaken him so the first infection he caught killed him.
There was no way out.
But that also meant no way forward!
All
the men who had died here from war injuries – could blood have saved any of them? Hester couldn’t know. It was all too late now. For Wilton, anyway. What about the next one? All the men in this hospital, other hospitals, all the future?
Did this potentially life-saving treatment always come at this sort of price?
Chapter Four
HESTER WAS fully occupied with her duties caring for Bryson Radnor. He was very sick indeed, and although his daughter, Adrienne, was as much help as she could be, there were still certain things that Hester needed to do, as much for observation as skill in the execution of them.
She found him a disagreeable man, but quite often the very ill were frightened and in pain. Many resented being dependent upon other people for even the most simple things, some of which it was instinctive to keep private.
‘For goodness’ sake stop fussing, woman!’ he snapped at her late on the second day. Adrienne was out of the room.
Hester was making the bed so it would be more comfortable for him. She was keeping her temper with difficulty.
‘If you prefer the sheets wrinkled, Mr Radnor, all you have to do is say so,’ she told him.
He gave what was intended to be a wave of dismissal, but he was too weak to make it effective.
‘Where’s Adrienne?’ he demanded.
‘Asleep,’ Hester answered. ‘She was with you all night. Everyone needs to rest at some time.’
He turned his head and stared at her, moving his eyes slowly down from her face to her body. He did not bother to be discreet about it. She found it unpleasant, almost prurient, as if he were trying to reduce her to the physical necessities as much as he felt she was to him in his dependence.
She wanted to snap at him, tell him how childish and offensive he was, but she knew better than to allow any patient to provoke her like that. And it would give him the satisfaction of knowing he was dictating the relationship between them. Instead she forced herself to smile at him, gently, almost sweetly, as if she were nanny to a rather objectionable child.
He looked away. That was a battle she had won, but she knew there would be more.
She finished tidying the bed and the rest of the room, opened the window to let in the warm fresh air, and went out into the corridor.
She all but bumped into Adrienne, who looked exhausted. Her plain, dark dress was crumpled; her hair was pinned up too hastily and was pulled tight in places. But it was her face that most affected Hester. Her skin was pale and looked like that of a much older woman. There was no bloom to it; she looked almost bruised around her eyes.
