第8章 The Physician

Dr. Osmund Creel had a consulting room in a house on the better end of Sallowfield Road, with a brass plate and a bay window and a small, superior garden that had been allowed to go to seed on principle. Prudence had never been inside it. She was shown in on the Thursday morning by a servant who looked at her boots and decided not to comment, and she was kept waiting eleven minutes, which was four minutes longer than the clock in the hall required, and then shown up. He rose and gave her a chair, and offered her nothing, and sat down again, and folded his hands. The room was a physician's room, and it told her more about him than his speech did. On the wall, a chart of the pulse; on the mantel, a jar of leeches in a green glass and a row of books that had been bought to be read and not to be admired. On the desk, a great ledger of cases, ruled and indexed, and beside it a smaller book that he closed with his elbow as he sat down, so smoothly that a person less used to watching hands than Prudence Ruddock would not have seen the closing at all. She marked it and said nothing. A man who keeps one book for the world and another for himself is a man who has already made the distinction she needed him to make. "Miss Ruddock. You came to the inquest." "I did." "And you said what you said, and I have been asked about it twice since by persons I would rather not have had to answer, and so I have sent for you, and I will be plain with you, because I think you are not a fool and because I would not trouble to be plain with a fool." He looked at her over his folded hands. "You have no standing in this town, and you know it. You practise without a licence. The Pharmaceutical Society could close you in a week if any person cared to write them a letter, and there is no person in Cinderthorpe with more reason to write that letter than the man you accused in a public room on Friday." "I accused no one. I said what was in the cordial." "You said what was in the cordial, before a jury, in the hearing of every tradesman in the town. If you believe a thing like that can be said without accusing a man, you do not understand this town, and you have not understood it for fifteen years, which I doubt." He leaned back. "I am going to tell you what I know, and then you are going to go home and sell your bismuth and forget the cordial, and if you do, nothing further will be said about your shop." "I am listening." "I attended those deaths. I am not a hireling of the Unity, whatever you may think; I am its physician because a physician in this town either serves the societies or starves, and I serve three of them and take their poor for nothing, which is the only charity I have the strength for. I have seen gastric fever in every shape it takes. I have seen it run through a court and take six in a fortnight and leave the seventh untouched, and I have seen it take the strong and spare the weak, and I have written fever on more certificates than I can count, and every one of them was true to the best of the art. And I have seen what you have seen, Miss Ruddock. I have smelled the breath of a woman dying of a warm metal. I am not ignorant. I am only careful." "Careful of what?" "Of being wrong." For a moment the polish went off him, and something older and tireder looked out. "If I swear a poison and I am wrong, I break a society that keeps two hundred poor families from the workhouse, and I break my own word, which is the whole of my practice. If I swear a fever and I am wrong, a man may go on doing it, and I will not have been the one who stopped him, but I will have been the one who tried. Do you see the shape of it? I am not defending him. I am defending the difference between a certainty I can stand in a witness box and a chemist's hunch that will be laughed out of an assize." "You have attended them all. You have stood at the bedside and watched them go. Tell me what you saw, and do not tell me the certificate." He was silent a moment, and she saw him decide, and the deciding cost him something. "I saw the same thing eleven times," he said at last, "and I will not write it down and I will not swear to it, so you may have it for nothing, since a thing told to a chemist in a consulting room is worth exactly what it is worth. I saw a sickness that comes on a day or two after the draught and runs fast, three, four days, vomiting, a burning in the throat, a coldness in the limbs that comes before the worst of it, a pulse that flutters and then falls, and in the last hours a sweat that is cold and beaded and does not smell of the fever at all. A gastric fever of that town's ordinary kind is a slow thing, ten days, a fortnight, and it stinks of the body, and the tongue goes brown and the skin goes yellow. This was quick and clean and grey, and the tongue stayed red, which is a thing I have seen in a poisoning and never once in a fever, and it is a small difference and I am a careful man, and there is no bench in England that will hang a man on a tongue." "A small difference is all a chemist has," she said. "You have just given me three." "I have given you three ways to be ruined," said Dr. Creel, and he meant it, and it was the truest thing he said all morning. "Then help me make it a certainty." "How?" "Give me an order for an exhumation." The room went very quiet. Outside, a cart went by on the wet road, and the sound of it came in through the bay window, and Creel looked at the window for a long moment before he looked back at her. "You are asking me to put my name to a thing that would ruin me if I am right and hang me if I am wrong," he said. "I will not. And here is the end of my plainness: if you go on with this, you will not be stopped by me, because I am not the stopping kind, and I will not help you either, because I am not the helping kind. What will stop you is the society's friends, and you have now made a great many of them, and the first will be the magistrates' clerk, and the second will be the guardians of the poor, and they will not argue with you. They will simply reach into your life and take the shop out of it, and then they will reach in again and take the roof, and you will find that a woman who keeps a chemist's shop and has nothing to lose has considerably less than she thought she had." He stood. "Go home, Miss Ruddock. I mean it kindly. It is the last kind thing I shall have time to mean." She went out into the fog. On the step, she stood for a moment and turned the two stone bottles over in her mind, and then she did the arithmetic that had been sitting under all of it, waiting: Creel had said he had smelled the warm metal. He had smelled it. And he had still written fever. And a man who has smelled it once will smell it again, and a man who keeps a register of the things he does not write down is a man who expects one day to need it. She went to find Ephraim. ---