Jack saw the woman hesitate only as long as it took for Anna to give her a look that could not be misinterpreted.
While the matron did as instructed, Anna was arranging instruments on a cloth she had spread out. Then she uncorked a bottle and the piercing smell of carbolic struck Jack hard enough to make him step away, and then back again, lest she think him so easily put off.
The liquid went into the empty basin, along with a pair of scissors and an instrument with handles like a scissors, but that ended in small paddles. She caught his glance.
“Forceps,” she said.
The sound of Anna’s voice had given the matron courage to speak. “And what is all this for?”
Anna ignored her, took a towel from her bag, and, turning, walked along the row of cots until she came to one where one child was sleeping and the other sat, neither awake or asleep.
She handed Jack the towel. “To protect your clothes. Please hold him in the crook of your arm while I get a few things ready. Talk to him, your voice will help.”
“Help what?” the matron asked, her tone much sharper. “What exactly do you think you’re doing, miss?”
Jack had introduced her to the matron as Dr. Savard, but the woman seemed to have forgotten that or gave it no credit. Now Anna paused and turned toward the matron, every fiber of her being thrumming with barely contained anger.
“That child—” Anna pointed toward the cot where Jack still stood. “That little boy is starving to death.”
The matron’s mouth fell open and snapped shut. “He is fed, I assure you. He receives a full ration, three times a day, the wet nurses see to him like the others—”
Anna interrupted her. “But he takes almost nothing.”
The matron drew up. “And how would you know that?”
“Because,” Anna said, biting off each word. “He is starving to death.”
“Do you see how many children we have in just this one room?” the matron said. She looked over the room. “We don’t have the time to force-feed picky children.”
All the color blanched from Anna’s face.
She turned away from the matron and looked at Jack directly. In an alarmingly calm tone she said, “Could you bring him here, please, and hold him firmly in the crook of your arm? I need to look in his mouth.”
“His mouth?” the matron sputtered.
Jack hoped never to experience a look like the one Anna turned on the matron.
“Whoever examined this child when he was admitted failed to notice that he has ankyloglossia. The frenulum that anchors his tongue is abnormally short and tight, which makes it impossible for him to suck properly. And that,” she said, enunciating every syllable, “would account for his pickiness.”
The matron started to protest, but Jack had had enough.
“Leave,” he told her. “Don’t come back before Dr. Savard has finished here.”
The matron looked at Anna and Jack and back to Anna again, and she fled the room.
“Thank you,” Anna said. “Now if you could bring him to me.”
The child weighed less than Anna’s doctor’s bag, a bundle of bones held together by tendons and skin. The belly was distended, and the eyes dull and sunken.
“Hold him gently, but don’t let him move.” She spoke to Jack, but all her attention was on the baby. With her left hand she pressed gently on the child’s cheeks until the mouth opened. She had poured more carbolic over her hands, and it made his eyes water.
Very quickly she used two fingers to explore the open mouth, her head turned away, Jack thought, to concentrate on what touch told her.
“This will take just a moment,” she murmured to Jack. To the boy she spoke more softly, a low crooning. “You haven’t been able to eat, have you? But that’s about to change. You’re a very strong boy to have survived this place as long as you have.”
The child blinked at her drowsily.
In a series of swift, tightly controlled movements, Anna used the forceps to grasp the boy’s tongue and hold it away so that she had a clear view of its underside. With her free hand she took up the scissors, reached in and snipped, as cleanly as a seamstress cutting a wayward thread.
With that the boy finally roused, jerking in Jack’s arms. He opened his mouth and wailed, full throated, insulted, alive, his lethargy banished.
Anna had dropped the bloody instruments back into the basin and picked up a square of damp gauze. When she turned back to Jack she gave him a small, tight smile. “Almost finished,” she said. “Hold him still, please.”
Inside the open mouth the small tongue flapped wildly, as if sudden freedom were more than it could manage. This time when Anna opened the boy’s mouth he tried to turn away from her, but she held his face firmly and packed gauze under his tongue.
“It will stop bleeding quite quickly,” she said. As if Jack had challenged her somehow.
Then she looked up and gestured to the matron, who stood in the shadows by the door. Reluctantly the woman came toward them, her arms crossed at her waist.
“I will report this,” she began, and Anna cut her off with a motion of her hand.
“Not before I do,” she said. “Now listen, because you need to remember and follow these directions I’m about to give you exactly.”
Jack had never served in the army, but he had the idea that no general could sound more sure of himself as he sent men into battle. Anna rattled off instructions on how and when to change the dressings, what and when and how much to feed the boy, what trouble signs to watch for. The matron was to rinse out his mouth with salt water three times a day.
“The wet nurse must be patient with him when he’s feeding,” Anna said. “He will have forgotten how to suckle, and it will take a little time for the natural instinct to come back to him. You can be sure that his hunger will overcome the discomfort of the incision once he realizes his belly is filling up. It may take a half hour for him to get his fill, but that will improve quickly. If his malnutrition is not too far advanced, he may recover. His chances are not good, but they are better than they were ten minutes ago.”
She had been wiping and packing her instruments while she talked, but now she turned to look the matron in the eye. “You must scrub your hands in very hot water and potash soap before you deal with the dressing. You should be scrubbing your hands before you handle any of these children and using carbolic acid in a five percent solution. Never go from one to the next without doing so. Your hands are the most likely source of infection.”
Through all this the baby had been wailing, but Anna’s concentration was fixed on the matron.
“You understand these instructions?”
Reluctantly, her anger plain on her face, the matron nodded.
“If you feel you can’t follow these simple directions, I’ll find the doctor on call—there is a doctor on call, I assume? And go over it with him. Never mind, I’ll do that anyway.”
“That won’t be necessary,” the matron said, her voice fairly dripping with dislike.
Anna looked at her for a long moment. “However you feel about me, you will not take it out on this child. Someone will be coming by tomorrow and again the day after to check on his progress. If he is not improving, I will report you to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. You would not enjoy their examination, I assure you. Do we understand each other?”
Anna took the boy from Jack and held him to her shoulder, rocking him back and forth with her mouth pressed to his ear while she watched the matron struggle to speak.
“Yes,” the woman said finally.
“I hope so,” Anna said. “Primarily for his sake, but also for yours.”
• • •
THE SUN WAS low on the horizon by the time the police ferry had moved away from Randall’s Island. Anna was very quiet, and Jack left her to her thoughts while he c
oped with his own. He had never doubted her intelligence or her training, but now he had a real sense of who she was, as a woman and a doctor.
She roused him from his thoughts by touching his arm.
She said, “My mother died in childbed. I was just three but I remember some of that day. Ma was too old, really, and the pregnancy was a surprise. She herself was born when her mother was near fifty and she drew strength from that. But she went into labor too early and very suddenly while my father was out on a call. There was a—” She paused. “It’s called a placental abruption, a tearing of the womb. I don’t remember any of those details, of course. I learned about all that much later. What I remember is the look on my father’s face when he came in the door and found he had lost my mother and the new baby both.”
She paused to gather her thoughts.
“Not long after, he died in a carriage accident. It was his fault, he wasn’t paying attention. I have always thought that if he had been with her when she died, he might have been less—devastated, I suppose is the word. He might have coped with his grief differently.”
Her tone was very even, and when she raised her eyes to his they were clear.
She said, “I don’t know if it would help or hurt Rosa to see her father. I really haven’t known her long enough to anticipate her reaction.” And then: “What are you thinking?”
The urge to move closer was one Jack resisted in that moment. He said, “I’m thinking that you weren’t with either of your parents when they died.”
She jerked as if he had struck her. “I’m aware of that. Obviously.”
“I’m thinking that somehow, as logical as you are, you still blame yourself for their deaths because you weren’t with them. I can see it in your face when you talk about it.”
“I was a little girl,” she said, her voice catching. “I was just a baby.”
Jack put his arm around her and pulled her into his side. She came to him without hesitation, letting herself be held. They stood just like that at the rail and watched as a storm came in from the west, moving like a great wave in the sky to overpower the sunset and displace the night itself. In the distance the first flicker of lightning and the breeze that washed over them made her shiver. He felt it.
When she turned in the circle of his arm she had to put her head back to look at him, and so he kissed her. It was a gentle, almost-nothing kiss and still through all the clothes between them he felt her tremble, as aware, as alive as the light that forked through the sky. He kissed her again in just the same way, a question without words. In reply she raised a hand and cupped his cheek. Her palm was cold—he had forgotten to give her back her gloves, he realized now—but her touch was sure. This time she met him halfway, her free hand curled into his lapel, her kiss open and warm and welcoming. A strong woman, fragile in his arms.
• • •
AT HOME THE little girls had already been put to bed and Sophie had gone out on a call. There was no sign of Mrs. Lee or Margaret, either, but Aunt Quinlan was waiting for her in the parlor. There was a fire in the hearth, which was a welcome counterpoint to the rain on the roof. All the drapes had been drawn shut with the exception of one, where Aunt Quinlan sat to watch the storm.
She had an open book in her lap but no light except the fire and the occasional blue-white splash of lightning. Anna sat down beside her and watched the trees bending in the wind.
“Did Mr. Lee get things in the garden tied down in time?”
“He always does,” her aunt said with a small smile. “I’m looking forward to the garden this summer. I might move out there entirely, dressing table and clothes closet included.”
Aunt Quinlan had grown up in a small village on the very edge of the northern forests, a world different in every way from the one she inhabited now. Anna had been born in that same village but had only the vaguest memories of it.
Now she said, “Is it the spring that makes you more homesick than usual?”
“I suppose it must be. My da has been on my mind today. Now are you going to tell me why it is Detective Sergeant Mezzanotte just helped you out of a cab, or must I torture you to get that information?”
“No torture necessary,” Anna said. “He came to the hospital to tell me that he found—” She glanced behind herself to be absolutely sure they were alone. “Mr. Russo. The girls’ father.”
She related the details as briefly as she could manage. The story of the Infant Hospital she kept to herself, and might never tell at all.
It was true that Aunt Quinlan was not easily surprised, but Anna had expected a little bit more of a reaction when she heard about Mr. Russo’s condition.
Her aunt said, “I didn’t think we’d ever know for sure. That will be a comfort to the girls. Not tomorrow or the day after, but in time. And Rosa has such an imagination, she might have gotten lost in all the things that could have happened to him.”
“You think I should tell them right away?”
The lily-blue gaze met hers calmly. “You are the one to make that decision.”
“I don’t want to lie to them.”
“You don’t want to hurt them,” Aunt Quinlan corrected her. “But it will hurt, there’s no avoiding it. You know that.”
“As a doctor, yes, I know that. But it’s different—”
“When they are your own. Yes.”
It was an odd thought, but one she couldn’t deny. Somehow in the space of a week, Rosa and Lia had become one of them.
“Now tell me about the detective sergeant.”
Even if she wanted to lie to her aunt, Anna knew from past experience that she would fail. Instead she said, “I’m not ready to talk about him yet.”
“Ah.” Aunt Quinlan smiled. “That’s encouraging. When will you see him again?”
“On Sunday,” Anna said, knowing that her color was rising. “The Society for the Protection of Endangered Children, I think that’s what Jack said.” She realized she had used his first name, and found that almost funny. She had yet to use it to his face, even after what had happened on the ferry.
What exactly had happened on the ferry was unclear to her, except that it felt right and good and utterly alarming. Before her thoughts could be read off her face, she leaned forward and took the mail from the table and began to look through it.
Aunt Quinlan went off to bed but Anna stayed just where she was, unopened mail in her lap. It was full dark now, but in the circle of light thrown by the streetlamp just opposite she could see the rain falling, buffeted by the winds so that it almost seemed to be dancing. A man ran past the house holding a newspaper over his head.
A cab pulled up, the door opened, and Sophie’s umbrella emerged and opened all at once.
Anna listened as Sophie opened the door, hung up her things, and then came into the parlor, her color high and her face wet with rain. She fell onto the couch across from Anna, put her head back to look at the ceiling, and let out a long, whistling sigh.
“You know how slimy the cobblestones can be at the produce market,” she began. “Like ice in January.”
“Broken bones? Concussion?”
“Both, and worse,” Sophie said. “She was six months pregnant. Four children under ten at home, and a clueless father.”
“A familiar story,” Anna said. “And a sad one.”
Sophie lowered her gaze to send Anna a puzzled look. “Why do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“You always assume dire things for large families.”
“I do no such thing.”
“Anna, I can give you a dozen examples without trying.”
As sleepy as Anna had been, she came awake at this unusual tone in her cousin’s voice. For a long moment they studied each other, and then Anna put her head back and blew out a breath that made the loose hair at her temple jump.
“I am cynical, it’s m
y nature. You’ve decided all of a sudden that you need to change me?”
Sophie leaned forward to take a peppermint drop from a candy dish. “I don’t want to change you.”
“What do you want to change?”
“Nothing. Everything.”
“No word from Cap, I take it.”
Sophie took her time unwrapping the peppermint. She tucked it into her cheek and then spread the small square of waxed paper out over her knee, smoothing the wrinkles.
“Something else then, if it isn’t Cap. Spit it out, Sophie, would you?”
“I am worried about Cap, but I also have to tell you about Sunday.”
“This coming Sunday?”
She shook her head. “Last Sunday. When you went to see Cap, I went to Brooklyn.”
Sophie watched Anna think this through and saw when the realization hit her.
“I had to do something, Anna. And there haven’t been any repercussions.”
Anna closed her eyes. “Yet.”
She could argue, but Sophie knew that nothing she could say would ease Anna’s worries. Instead she told her about the Reason family, about Weeksville and the cab ride and the fact that no one had asked her for medical advice, not even the new mother.
“You liked it there.”
“Yes,” Sophie said. “I did like it there.” This wasn’t a conversation they had ever had, really, for the simple reason that Anna didn’t see her as a woman of color. If she were to say It was good being among people like me, Anna would not take her meaning unless Sophie provided explicit detail, and then—what? Would she be surprised? Worried? Hurt? Anna’s generosity was bred in the bone, but she lived a narrow life and was often unaware of many things in her immediate surroundings.
“You’re not moving to Brooklyn.”
“Is that an order?”
Anna opened her eyes.
Sophie saw now that her cousin was very tired, and she regretted raising this topic. “No,” she said then. “This is my home. If I’m going anywhere it’s to Switzerland.”