Antidote To Murder (3 page)

The girl nodded.

“And this will clear up the effects of the lead poisoning.” Dody uncapped her pen and reached for her prescription pad. “Have it made up by the chemist, not the apothecary,” she said, tearing the paper from the pad and handing it to the girl, “and he will write the dose on the bottle.”

“But, Doctor,” Esther said, looking searchingly from the prescription and back to Dody, “will it make me bleed?”

* * *

T
he Clinic was part of a scheme devised by Dr. Elizabeth Garrett to put disused buildings to use as temporary free clinics for women of no means. Doctors and nurses prepared to work for nothing were hard to find, and all those who worked there had private incomes or other paid employment.

Dody slipped her note onto the admissions desk in front of Nurse Daphne Hamilton and held her breath as she waited for the verdict. Nurse Hamilton was one of Florence’s suffragette friends; like Dody, she was from a wealthy family and devoted two days a week to the Clinic. Many of her kind treated their charity work as a game, coming and going as their whims dictated, but Dody had always been impressed with Daphne’s stamina and dedication and had been encouraging the young woman to undertake an official nurse’s training course. If she could persevere with the rigours of hospital-based training, Dody felt sure that Daphne Hamilton would make an excellent qualified nurse.

But birth control was a divisive subject amongst the militant suffragettes, with many against it. Dody knew that if she failed to get the support of the Clinic staff, she might as well give up now on her newly hatched idea.

When Daphne nodded with approval, Dody had to stop herself from jumping on the spot like a child. Daphne’s support should have been no surprise; she had probably seen as many of the tragic results of ignorance as Dody had.

“‘A weekly lecture at the Clinic on health and hygiene,’”
Daphne read. “I take it you also mean birth control?” she added in a whisper.

Dody nodded. It was against the law to explicitly advertise, though not to discreetly provide, contraception education. “Thank you, Nurse, I’m very glad you feel that way,” Dody said, slipping the draft note in her pocket with the intention of revising it once the other doctors had been consulted and a timetable clarified.

She attempted to adjust her boater by feel—the Clinic did not provide such luxuries as mirrors—and Daphne reassured her that it was on straight. Thank God Florence had not chosen the Ritz this time. Looking the way she did, she would surely be directed straight to the kitchen entrance.

“Will you sound out Dr. Wainright for me, Daphne? I can’t stay to see her today; I’m meeting Florence for lunch. But please tell her I’d like to talk to her tomorrow about a series of lectures we could give between us.”

Dody glanced around the waiting room. Women of all ages, shapes, and sizes; snuffling children; and wailing babies filled the seats. Dr. Wainright was in for a busy afternoon.

“Certainly, Doctor. I’m sure she and the other doctors will be behind you, too. And say hello to Florence for me,” Daphne said with a conspiratorial twinkle to her eye. “Tell her I’m looking forward to our return to the fray.”

Chapter Three

T
he restaurant hummed with patrons who’d suspended their aquatic activities on the Serpentine for luncheon. Dody and Florence occupied a table for two by a long window. Outside, families picnicked and children hunted for minnows in the muddy water. Uniformed nannies steered cumbersome perambulators from one shady tree to the next while City men lounged on benches sans jackets and coats. It wasn’t even the weekend, but all around them, well-heeled Londoners found time to relax and enjoy the hot weather.

“That poor girl—poor you, too, to be put in such a rotten position,” Florence said. She drained her glass of barley water and placed it on the table with a sigh. “That apothecary—Zimmerman?—should be shot for selling sugar pills to such a vulnerable girl.”

Dody agreed, to a point. “The annoying thing is that with a little education and a knowledge of the preventatives, the problem could so easily have been averted and no one would need to bother with Widow Welch’s.” She pushed her unfinished meal away. The fish was too fishy for her taste, the white sauce almost rancid. London was in the grip of strikes, and fresh produce and ice were in short supply. “So I’ve decided to start conducting education classes in the Clinic.”

“Sounds like a jolly good idea to me,” Florence said. “Young women must be educated not to yield in the first place. As woman is morally superior to man, it is up to her to be the stronger of the two.”

“Indeed. But I hope to take my course a bit further than that and give the women some knowledge of the preventatives, too.”

Florence gave Dody a determined look. “Preventatives do nothing but further loosen the slackened reins of male desire, Dody. As Christabel would say: ‘Votes for women, chastity for men.’ This is why we need the vote—why we need women members of parliament. A greater female say would not only temper matters of sexual morality; women’s natural compassion would have a more humanising influence on every sphere of humanity, at home, our politics abroad . . .”

Although Florence and she shared many of the same convictions, Dody had no time for the violent nature of the campaign waged by her sister’s Bloomsbury group and the Pankhursts or, for that matter, many of the members’ narrow-minded attitudes towards birth control and morality. If Dody could have got away with closing her eyes instead of her ears, she might have been listening to a reverend mother addressing a novice. Her wealthy, beautiful sister, dressed in her lilac satin teagown and spouting ideology of the most reactionary kind, never ceased to amaze her.

Dody stifled a yawn. Florence should have been enjoying the summer season with other young ladies of her class, attending balls and fancy-dress parties, polo matches, and regattas. Instead, when not plotting, typing, or folding pamphlets in their townhouse, she was doing the same in one of the often dingy dwellings of her coconspirators. Or worse, some would say, doing what she did now: enjoying the company of her unfashionable elder sister. Most young ladies were advised to give Dody—the “Beastly Science” doctor who refused to wear a corset or allow her maid to do her hair—a wide berth. She smiled to herself; they shared a tight bond despite their differences. But enough was enough.

“Florence, please, I’m hot and I have a headache,” she said. “Your principles are all very well, but they don’t actually solve the problem of young women butchering themselves or being left with babies they can’t care for.”

Florence could not argue with that. Her face softened. “You have no appetite? Don’t tell me your cholera has returned? Few families seem to have escaped it this year. Sir Anton Frobisher had it, his cook had it—the household was in turmoil for a while. Lady Harriet was at her wits’ end. Remind me, I must pay her a call and see how they are getting on.”

“For me it’s the heat this time, I’m sure of it.”

“Yes, ghastly, isn’t it?” Florence used her napkin to flap at her face with unladylike vigour. “Plays havoc with the digestion. Look, Dody, I admire you for your stand, I really do, but it just doesn’t sit comfortably with me.”

“The practice of birth control is not illegal in this country.”

“But the public advocating of it is,” Florence said.

“Which is why I plan to provide verbal instruction only.” Dody paused to smile at her sister. “Besides, when have you been worried about what is legal or not?”

“Oh, you know what I mean. Surely you can understand my point of view?”

“Of course, we are both entitled to our opinions.”

Florence relaxed back into her chair and returned Dody’s smile. “Well, at least you have found something to throw your passions into, something that will take your mind off Pike.”

Dody almost choked on the piece of bread she was nibbling. “Pike—what has he got to do with all this?”

“I take it you have still had no word?”

Dody turned back to the view.

“When I think of all the trouble you went to, to book him into that hospital,” Florence went on, “arranging treatment from the best surgeon in London, and all he did was bolt. War hero indeed! You have every right to be angry.”

Dody did not like to hear Pike criticised this way. She might speak against him, but it was another matter to hear him criticised by someone else. She had thought her temper recovered, but now she felt unsettled again: she could not help taking his behaviour personally. She was a rational woman—a trained scientist—yet the turmoil she had experienced since meeting him the previous year was apparently resistant to all logic.

Most of her patients held her medical knowledge in high regard and took her advice without question or compromise. But here was someone whom she herself held in high regard paying no more heed to her medical advice than he might to any High Street quack. She shook her head in an effort to send the conflicting thoughts flying; she had already resolved that she had no time for this. Let him keep his distance.

“Dody! Dody, speak to me,” Florence was saying. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset.”

“War does strange things to men,” was all Dody could think to say.

* * *

T
hey travelled home in the new open-topped Benz, driven by their former coachman, Fletcher. The traffic was congested and motorcars honked impatiently at the slower horse-drawn vehicles. At Hyde Park Corner there was an altercation for right of way between a whip-wielding hansom driver and a goggled motorist. A scuffle ensued and traffic ground to a standstill around Wellington Arch, until two policemen arrived on bicycles to break up the mêlée. The cabby, obviously beyond rational thought, struck one of the bobbies on the helmet, his whip, decorated with ribbons of coronation colours, flying about like a madwoman’s hair.

Dody held tight to her sister’s gown as Florence leaned out of the Benz to boo and hiss at the police as they led the cabby away. She wouldn’t put it past Florence to leap from their motorcar and join the fracas. At last they were moving again. Dody glanced at her fob and willed Fletcher to drive faster. She needed some time at home to put the finishing touches to a research proposal she planned on presenting to Dr. Spilsbury in a few days’ time.

Once they were driving peacefully again, Florence tightened the broad tie of her motoring hat and dropped her head into a novel, the pages barely stirring in the weak draught. In honour of the coronation, the suffragettes had temporarily ceased their violent protests, and with little else to occupy her mind, Florence had taken to reading novels of a popular nature. This one involved secret agents and the German threat, which Dody felt was grossly exaggerated by the press for no other purpose than to distract the population from the troubles at home. She glanced at the book’s cover:
The Riddle of the Sands
—one of the better written, so she had heard. She smiled to herself. Despite her antiestablishment convictions, her sister was still a patriot at heart.

Fletcher turned from the congested Euston Road into their quiet street and dropped the sisters outside their front door before taking the car to the mews to be garaged. Home was one of a series of roomy Georgian townhouses that formed a semicircular terrace fronting Cartwright Gardens: a miniature version of Bath’s Royal Crescent, Dody always liked to think.

The house and trappings were paid for by their mother with money she had inherited and which, out of respect for his wife, their father had laid no claim to—even though he was usually against money spent on what he saw as “frippery.”

Dody and Florence passed between white columns standing sentry on the porch and entered the house through the colourful leadlight front door. They found themselves immediately beset by a terrible weeping and wailing.

“Good Lord,” Dody said, exchanging worried glances with her sister. “What on earth is going on? Has someone died?”

There was an agitated thumping on the basement stairs and the door leading from the kitchen was flung open by their parlour maid, Annie, her face as white as her lace cap, her hair sticking out at all angles as though she had suffered an electric shock.

“Ever so sorry, misses,” the girl said, “I couldn’t meet you at the door—we’re having a dreadful time downstairs. Cook’s lost her rag and threatening to hand in her notice. She wants poor Lucy to clobber ’em with the rolling pin and Lucy’s refusing, saying clobbering rats is not what a scullery maid’s paid for, and I says we need to call the rat catcher—”

Florence covered her mouth with her hands. “Rats? Downstairs? In our kitchen? How revolting!”

Realising at last what must have happened, Dody shot the maid a sharp look. “Annie, I told you not to clean my study. In fact, I asked you not to go into that room at all.”

“You’ve been keeping rats in your study?” Florence exclaimed. “Dody, how could you?”

“In preparation for some research . . .”

“I only took a little peep, miss, opened the cage door. Then one of their scaly tails brushed through my fingers and I panicked and the cage fell off the table. They must have been hungry ’cos they rushed in a mob down the stairs and headed straight for the kitchen.”

Dody had difficulty maintaining a straight face. She asked Annie to fetch the cage from her study.

Florence collapsed onto the hall chair.

“Come on, I need your help,” Dody said as she headed with the wire cage to the kitchen.

“You don’t need me; you need the Pied Piper.”

Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats
they were not—they were special laboratory rats, a new line developed for scientific purposes by the Wistar Institute, and Dody had had them shipped all the way from America. They were precious and not only for their rarity. Dody found that she had become quite fond of the docile creatures with their soft white fur and beady pink eyes. Although her rats were destined for inevitable euthanasia, she could not abide the thought of their senseless clobbering with a rolling pin.

She had less trouble coaxing them back into the cage with a hunk of bread than she had settling the servants’ nerves. Lucy was instructed to make Cook a strong cup of tea laced with medicinal brandy and then assist Annie with the tidying and disinfecting of the kitchen.

Florence was waiting in the hall for her return. Dody could not help herself. With a flourish, she produced a particularly robust specimen from behind her back. “Florence, meet Edward, my favourite, named after our late king.”

Dody had never seen Florence mount the stairs with such speed, and she laughed for the first time in weeks.