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Jack wiped the sweat from his brow as he leaned down to be level with the face of the man on the bed. He despised the sticky, muggy, heat of the Missouri summer. It made him miss the cool air of the California coast, summers in the Rockies, and – more than anything – Australia. It reminded him of his time in the Navy, sailing the Black Sea near Sinop and treating men for canon shot. Eighty degrees day and night and sticky. So sticky. Fitting that it reminded him of that.
“We’re out of ether and chloroform both, and I’m afraid this leg has got to come off. This will be one of the worst minutes of your life, but I want you to bite down on this and think of your favorite place in the world.”
The man thrashed, whimpered, took the tongue guard in his mouth. Jack nodded at the nurse, and she laid her arm across his chest, holding him down and shushing him. At one time, Jack may have twirled his bone saw, taking the “theater” part of operating theater too seriously. But this was his seventh amputation in the last two hours, and it's not like anyone here was paying for showmanship. He set to work on the man’s mangled leg, already missing the foot. Shot off by an exploding shell, the bones left behind fragmented and sharp.
He finished cutting, dropped the saw into the basin of dilute carbolic acid, and started to sew. Curls of blood sank away from the saw. The other doctors thought him mad, but he could hear Belle in his head talking excitedly about germ theory. If there was even a chance that this could keep the scourge of infection away, keep this man’s amputation at the knee instead of to the hip, then he could take a couple extra steps. At a battlefield surgery tent like this he could not keep track of his patients to know if it was working. He suspected it was. He had found reports of a doctor demanding hand washing before delivering babies and how it improved mortality rates. It had taken him days to decipher. His hands were cracked from the chemicals, but clean.
Jack worked in the tent until it got too dark to see. He scarfed down a quick supper next to Agnes, his nursing aide, who smiled wanly at him. His lips twitched upward in response. Fifty if she was a day, strong from farm work, both her sons in this war, she appreciated that he treated her with respect and that he cared about the men. Not like some of the other doctors who were scornful of her abilities like she had not handled the care for her whole family and nursed her husband until he died.
The lanterns had been lit, and it was back to work until they couldn’t stand anymore. The boys arrived in a steady stream from the battlefield.
Jack’s watch read three o’clock, the night pitch dark around him, when he started seeing double from exhaustion. His hands were still steady, of course. They had only been less than steady once in his life, and it was not a time he liked to think about. He set his saw and scalpel in the carbolic acid for a rinse, then bundled them in their leather case. He needed to sleep, but he had things to do first. He tested the edges of his tools, and sharpened those that needed it. He rubbed the liniment he had gotten from a contraband laundress he had doctored into his dry, cracked hands, and fell asleep as soon as he was horizontal.
His sleep was not restful. His nightmares were filled with the faces of patients he could not save. Dead on the table, dead in the wards, dying in their own homes with family gathered around to hear their last words. Many of them dead with only him to mourn their passing. Perhaps they had had people, somewhere, but no one but them knew where and they weren’t talking. It had not been so much of a problem on the Navy ship, since everyone on board knew each other. But he did not know the names of half the boys he had operated on today.
As he always did when he dreamt of grisly death, he dreamt of her. His greatest, most personal failure and his reason for carrying on. He had loved her dearly, his Belle. The dreams were not kind enough to give him a glimpse. Instead it was her mother he saw, like the personification of death. He relived the dawning grief as he observed her mourning clothes. Face pale, jaw set, eyes burning with anger. She is dead, Doctor Dawkins. You killed her.
He snapped awake as the dawn light filtered in. Sometimes he was tired enough to play out the entire scene in his dreams. That was usually better, since Lady Jane had explained there was nothing that could have been done. But it was rare he could get past the two sentences that had broken his heart and haunted him night and day for the last five years.
He stood. Splashed water on his face, neck, pitts, hands and arms to the elbows, and went to the latrine to piss.
And so it went. Jack rotated between the field tents and the hospital every few months. He developed a reputation as a bit odd, but scrupulous and caring. His bedside manner was excellent. His patients lived, more often than not. His tools and his hands stayed clean of the germs that no-one else believed in. And he only amputated when he had to. He had his nurses write impassioned letters to command for more ether and chloroform and carbolic acid. They also wrote to Dorothea Dix, Superintendent of Union Nurses, recommending Dawkins’ posting as a good assignment for younger nurses, for in him they would find an impassioned supporter who seemed to have no concept that a hospital was no place for a woman and who was too haunted to take advantage.
Sometimes, he would glimpse a bit of honey blonde hair in a messy coiffure out of the corner of his eye, or hear a voice that was bold and strident and reminded him of her. He would think she was there, and his heart would beat double time in his chest. Then he would blink, and it would just be Louisa at the end of a long week or Mary bossing around the cook. Once, he heard the other doctors gossiping about a crazy women at a field hospital in Fredericksburg wearing pants and conducting surgery. He felt like he had a frog in his throat as he was filled with a hope he knew was irrational. He grabbed the newspaper and spent all his free time deciphering it. They had run an illustration, and the pants were nothing on that ridiculous riding costume of Belle’s. Her name was Doctor Mary Edwards Walker. His foolish heart broke again. He wrote her a letter in his own ungainly hand. I once knew a woman who would have loved to have met you . . .
He had just arrived back at a convalescent hospital from a field posting when it happened. He was still exhausted and gearing up to treat dysentery and typhus and teach the new nurses how to keep wounds from getting infected. It was her voice he imagined first, more strongly even than when he had first arrived in San Francisco, years ago.
“Doctor Miller, unhand me. I am a volunteer doctor and you will not stop me from saving this man’s arm!”
Jack winced. Miller and he had gotten in a half dozen fights about bloodletting the first time Jack was posted here. Jack had finally won, and taken the win as the best he was going to get for a while. Now he and Miller rubbed on well enough, mostly because Jack pretended he couldn’t hear him when he spoke. He was old fashioned and mean, and the nurses knew to avoid him.
Jack knew it was not her. It had never been her before and never would be again. But it sounded so like her. He supposed it was time to start the next round of arguments with Miller anyway as he walked into the room. Probably about the value of female nurses, so Miller would stop terrorizing the women and trying to get them transferred. He glanced at her for a split second before looking away, looking at Miller, blinking rapidly. She looked so very like his Belle. Rail thin. More practically dressed than his love had ever been. Unfashionably tan. With honey blonde hair in an uncaring coiffure. He could not bear to look at her and have her not be who he wanted.
He focused on Miller. The other doctor had her golden wrist in a vice-like grip, holding her hand with a cloth soaked in a debriding agent away from the patient, whose arm was in the early stages of infection. Jack stepped between them, grabbing the other man’s wrist just so. Miller was forced to release her with a wince.
“Let the lady work,” Jack said levelly as Miller sputtered.
He released his wrist. Miller pulled it back, rubbing it.
“How dare you Dawkins!”
The woman took a sharp breath, unheeded by the glaring men.
“That creature has no right to touch one of my patients, and you have no right to touch me.”
“More hands to help with the patients means better care as the burden is shared. These women are charged with nursing their families at home, why should they not help in this country’s hour of need?”
“It is unseemly!”
“It is necessary. And it improves the patients’ chances.”
Miller, surly, unconvinced, unprepared and out of arguments, stormed away. The next round would be more challenging.
Jack turned to look at the woman. Sort of. He knew it would be too painful to look directly at her, so he focused all his attention just over her head.
“Sorry about him, ma’am. He does not seem to be aware that it is 1863. You should avoid him as best you can until I finish winning this argument.”
“I will have you know that it’s “Milady,” Jack, and I can make my own arguments.”
Her voice had an odd timbre to it. Wavery, like she was choking back tears. His heart stuttered in his chest. She knew his name. She asked him to call her “Milady.” His eyes snapped to hers, making eye contact, really looking for the first time.
His knees got wobbly.
“Belle?” he whispered, shaking his head. She nodded hers vigorously, tears streaming from her eyes. He groped for a chair, missed, all but collapsed to the ground as his knees stopped supporting him.
“It can’t be. You’re dead. You died 5 years ago. Your. Your mother. She came to me in the prison. Told me you had died. That I had killed you.”
Her skirts billowed as she sunk to the ground beside him, reaching for his shaking hands.
“I’m exhausted. My imagination has run away with me again, my tired brain playing tricks, and I am seeing things. You can’t be here.” He looked imploringly into her eyes, “You cannot be here.”
“I never thought I would see you again,” she said, having gotten a hold of his hands now. His grip was painful, desperate. “Fagin told me that you were in America, that you thought me dead. America is so big”
He was shaking all over now, face blotchy and tears beading at the corners of his eyes, but not yet falling. She glanced around and realized they were giving the men in the beds a show.
“Come,” she said, standing, “we need to get someplace quiet.” She pulled him up and he stumbled. She stopped him from crashing into a bed. She walked with him to a room that was once a library in this big converted house and is now a chapel.
She settled him on the settee. She pulled her hands away from his and he let out a punched-out sounding sob at the loss. She settled herself on his lap and gripped his wrists, wrapping his arms around her body in a loose hug. He was so shaken, so shocked, his arms moved like a rag doll’s.
“I am here, I am real,” she chanted, barely above a whisper. She ran her fingers through his hair, gently scratched his scalp, stroked her hands down his back from nape to waist. “I am here, I am real.”
They were so close that he could breathe her in. The once so familiar scents of oat, honey, and antiseptic flooded his nostrils. Her touch grounded him. His hands flexed spasmodically, and then he was holding her like his life depended on it.
“I am here, I am real.”
He broke, burying his face in the high neck of her bodice as he began to cry. She was safe. She never died. He never wanted to let her go. He never wanted to be separated from her ever again.
“I am here, I am real.”