The Tinsmith (40 page)

Matters were no better for Dare. If Thomas Lansdowne died, Dare, guilty or not, would be a murderer and a fugitive. Even if the Englishman survived, Dare's fate on the river was sealed. Nor was it likely that any of his competitors would feel the need to pay full value for a nigger's property, especially not a nigger who'd shot Tom Lansdowne and been forced to flee.

Heavily, Anson positioned himself to lift the wounded man to the wharf.

Dare stopped him. “I'll carry him to the house. All seems quiet enough.”

It was true. Other than the cannery's relentless noises, there were no sounds along the riverbank; most of the fleet must not have returned yet. Anson hesitated. He knew so little of Dare's life, where he'd been, what he'd endured; mostly their correspondence had been of business, and even that had been infrequent. Until this moment, it had always seemed enough, the bond they had forged at Antietam. It had pulsed behind everything, like the sun, even long after it had gone down, pulsed with the promise of more light. And now it seemed that that promise surrounding his friendship with Dare might never be fulfilled. In any case, there was no time to ask everything that might be asked. Wearily, Anson helped position the wounded man in Dare's arms and struggled not to see the old images but to hold on to the present, for the Englishman's sake, and even more for the sake of his gifted daughter.

A few moments later the men crossed the wharf, Dare breathing heavily with the effort of bearing Thomas Lansdowne's bulk, Anson holding the oil lamp just ahead of them. As they came down to the yard, Anson looked up at the bright window of Louisa's room and saw two shadows cross the pane. For some reason, the sight alarmed him. The women, after all, rarely moved from their chairs. He quickened his pace, knowing that Dare would manage to keep up, despite his burden.

At last they reached the veranda. The first floor of the house was in darkness. With the women upstairs and Henry Lansdowne likely at the cannery, it would be quite safe for Dare to carry the wounded man inside. At Anson's suggestion, he did so, laying Thomas Lansdowne gently on the ottoman in the parlour. Then he stood and faced Anson in the shimmering oil light.

“I'm grateful to you, doctor,” he said and extended his hand. “I always have been.”

Anson gripped the hand firmly in return. “I know it, John. I just wish I could be more help to you now. It isn't right. I wish . . .” Anson stopped. What did it matter what he wished? His wishes wouldn't help Dare or anyone. “I'll do what I can for him,” he said and nodded at the prone figure on the ottoman. “And I'll do my best to see that your property receives fair value.”

“My Chinese will help. I'll leave instructions with him.”

“How soon will you leave?”

Dare looked over his shoulder toward the front entrance. When he turned back, his eyes blazed with a strange light. He was almost smiling.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On others. There's no moving in life doesn't speed up or slow down except for others getting in the way. Or out.”

He didn't sound bitter or frightened, only resigned. Anson had a sudden impulse to lay a hand gently on his shoulder.

But just then, a flurry of footsteps crossed the ceiling. Raised voices could be heard. Anson's chest tightened as he glanced upwards and then down again. His mouth was bone-dry.

Dare began to back away.

“John?”

Anson took a step after him, but this felt like he was leaving the sick girl behind. He stepped back.

“My bag's upstairs,” he said. “I'd better go up.”

Dare stopped. A rush of river smell poured off his sweat-slickened face. He might have been standing in the bow of a skiff, the sun fading along his arms.

There was too much to say, too much to go over. Anson faltered, then pushed ahead. “They've been saying slanderous things about you.”

Dare was unmoving, his eyes vivid with will.

Anson had an awful foreboding that this might be their last meeting, that Dare would disappear and never contact him again. He thought a few seconds, then said, “Fighting a war's no use if it takes your belief away. I can't afford to doubt you, John.”

The voices upstairs grew louder. Something hit the floor with a loud bang and made Anson start. But Dare remained motionless. His eyes, fixed on the staircase, filled with a strange longing. He touched something at his throat, under the collar, and spoke with a curious, almost questioning tenderness as he stepped back.

“A man can doubt everything. Even a good man.”

This time, as Dare withdrew, Anson did not call his name. In a matter of seconds, he had slipped silently from the house.

Immediately Anson raced up the stairs, the practical demands of living and dying a spur to his purpose. But even so, Dare's last words echoed on the air. What did they mean? That a man could learn to doubt goodness? Or that even a good man could learn to doubt? Anson had done the latter and he'd come dangerously close to doing the former. But seeing Dare again, even under these tense circumstances, or perhaps because of them, had saved him from that most fatal wound.

He reached the second floor just as the voices in Louisa's room rose to a crescendo.

II

July 1881, Chilukthan, British Columbia

At first Anson couldn't believe what he saw. The room appeared full of people; their shadows stained the walls in grotesque patterns. One lamp spilled a crackling yellow against the mildewed wallpaper of faint roses and over the planks of the floor. His eyes remained fixed there, on the bodies clustered almost in a circle, as if in worship. But what faith could explain the prone young woman with the frozen gaze and Thomas Lansdowne's wife, on her knees, propped up under the arms like a limp puppet?

“What is this? What's happened?”

He didn't even wait for a response from the startled faces. The girl groaned and he hurried to her bedside, stepping over the young woman who had not turned at his rapid approach. As he passed, he recognized the Southerner, Richardson, his white-framed features flushed and wavering in the dimness, his mouth open as if he was about to speak. But Anson's immediate thought was for the child.

She burned as hot as ever, the spots along her collarbone and chest like circles of flame. A linen cloth, slightly damp, lay like an infected scab on one shoulder; much of her body, including her feet, was exposed. Anson could hardly register the meaning of what he'd come upon; it was like some sort of dark ritual. And yet the girl's mother and aunt were present. Confused and outraged at once, Anson quickly checked the girl's pulse. It was rapid. He found a clean cloth on the bedside table and doused it in a basin of lukewarm water. Then he pressed it lightly to the child's brow.

From behind him came the sounds of motion. Anson pulled the sheet up the child's body and turned, ready to order the room cleared immediately. But the two Lansdowne women, their pathetic postures like those of statues melted by their own tears, cooled his wrath. He went to them.

Mary Lansdowne cried openly, her round face slick and red.

“Oh, doctor,” she said. “Thank goodness you've come! Edney's had a spell. I don't know what it is, but . . . oh, doctor, I shouldn't have allowed them up, I knew it was wrong!”

“Calm yourself, now. Bring me a chair.” Anson held Thomas Lansdowne's wife against his chest as she seemed about to collapse. She was rank with sweat, and her heart thudded against him as if he'd wrapped a bat in a towel. Yet as she pulled her head back, Anson saw that her face also wore a strange repose. The contrast was terrible. If not for the heartbeat throbbing along his lower chest, Anson might have thought her dead.

As he guided the woman into the chair, he realized he didn't have time for either explanations or apologies. Thomas Lansdowne lay bleeding in the parlour. The best time to operate would be while he remained in shock. Anson looked into the woman's eyes. She did not look back. He touched her stomach, feeling for the child. When it moved, he did not know if it was a good thing or not.

“I had meant to help,” a recognizable voice spoke at his shoulder. “If I had possibly known of the presence of the evil . . . doctor, I assure you, I wouldn't have brought Miss d'Espereaux into such a house.”

The Southerner's face appeared ravaged; he might have aged twenty years. The blue in his eyes was washed out. A muscle in his cheek twitched repeatedly. He clutched a handkerchief like a limp dove in his hand and spoke with a deference that took Anson by surprise.

“If you would be so kind, doctor, to attend to Miss d'Espereaux, I would consider it a great favour. I fear she has been quite overcome.”

Anson looked down. The young woman remained still, but her eyes opened and closed slowly, her chest moved in an easy rhythm under her finery. She had a remarkable beauty. Her white skin shone with it. The rough character kneeling at her side and fanning her face only made her fragile charms more evident.

“Who is she?” Anson said, moving closer. “What's she doing here?”

“Miss Elizabeth d'Espereaux,” Richardson said brokenly. “One of the world's most gifted spiritualists.”

So that was it. Anson had heard of spiritualism, of course, knew how popular it was in certain quarters of society. He had even read attacks against it in medical journals: spiritualism, according to these articles, was a haven for quacks and frauds of the most villainous kind. But this young woman was clearly not acting. Something had terrified her. She had, however, begun to emerge from her fright.

“Lizzie? Can you hear me? Are you all right now?”

The rough character's sincerity softened his crudely hewn face. He turned, perplexed, to Anson.

“She's never done that before, doc. Never. Has she hurt herself any? I couldn't catch her before she fell. The colonel there . . .” He glowered at Richardson. “He got in my way. But it's the only time he's going to touch her, I'll vouch for that.”

Much to Anson's surprise, Richardson did not even defend his honour. He merely sighed, his shoulders sagging.

“If I'd known about the evil,” the man said at last, “I'd not have brought her here. But she'd have come anyway. She is so good, you see, that she would risk her life to help a spirit find peace. The fever meant nothing to her.”

The young woman had a slight bump at the back of her head but was otherwise unhurt. As Anson examined her, she kept repeating, “It's gone now. It was here, but it's gone.” There was no longer any fear in her voice, however—just a confused kind of wonder. Anson instructed Mary Lansdowne to find suitable places of rest for the two women. Then he took Richardson aside.

“I need your assistance. Some good may yet come out of your return to this house.”

Anson briefly explained the situation that awaited in the parlour. The Southerner took the news without interest; the words hardly seemed to reach him. He was no more substantial than the long shadow he cast. But he nodded gravely once Anson had finished.

From downstairs came a mournful howling. Thomas Lansdowne's dog, Anson supposed. Somehow the creature's misery affected him as deeply as the human suffering around him.

“Meet me in the parlour,” he said and hurried off to get his bag.

Ten minutes later, with Thomas Lansdowne shirtless and laid out on the dining room table, Anson carefully examined the wound. It was bad, high up in the shoulder, the humerus fractured. Anson removed what bone fragments he could, all the while desperately trying to convince himself that he could avoid amputation. It had been years since he'd performed one, and he hardly trusted himself even to make the correct diagnosis, let alone to carry out the surgery. Circumstances were decidedly against him.

Thomas Lansdowne's dog continued to howl outside, as if about to crash through the window at any moment, and the sound, along with the smell of chlorophorm, to which he was no longer so accustomed, had a powerful effect on Anson's imagination. He kept looking at the long, thin fingers of Ambrose Richardson, pressed, upon instruction, on the subclavian artery, and seeing instead the hand of Dare, as if it had reached out of the mud-clotted darkness to help as it had done so many times before. But Anson knew his current assistant had once been his enemy on those distant battlegrounds and knew, moreover, that this same long-grieving man had endured the loss of his own left arm. The conjunction of images and memories worked against Anson's concentration as much as the strange mixture of fatigue and exhilaration had focused it in the past. As if guided, he searched rapidly through the gore and shadows . . . there was something he'd seen in . . . what was it? . . . an amputation at the shoulder joint had not proved necessary because enough of the upper humerus remained intact. He asked for the light to be brought closer.

Mary Lansdowne lowered the taper over the wound. Good woman, she had recovered her senses and could now be depended upon. Anson felt encouraged. He let his thoughts remain in the past, in a barnyard open to the elements and crowded with wounded. A senior surgeon, a very experienced man who wasted no energy on saving limbs, had surprisingly saved a young soldier's arm in just such a case as this, by . . . 

Anson peered at the bloodied gash as if he could see through it. What was it that man had done? He had made an incision . . . yes . . . and extracted the splintered head of the humerus. If there was enough upper bone . . . Anson probed with his fingers. The breathing of his assistants faded into the dog's howls, then even the howls diminished. Anson picked up his knife.

“Wipe, please,” he said.

Mary Lansdowne quickly mopped the sweat from his brow.

Anson's hand was firm as he made the incision, firm as he removed the head of the humerus, firm as he sewed the wound shut and positioned the arm upwards, indicating to Mary Lansdowne how a sling would be required to keep the bone as high as possible. Only when Anson stepped away from the table and the lived years rushed together into the strange, living present, and the voices of the wounded were replaced with other voices at the dining room door, did his whole body go so limp that he almost lost his balance. He found a chair and gingerly lowered himself into it. His lower back ached and his hands were weak. He let his eyelids fall.