Dr. North’s Wound
The letter continued in this vein for a page, the authoress recalling her pleasant times with Andrew North, how she first admired then fell in love with him. How she had accepted his proposal of marriage but how, in the months leading to it she had come to know his pain more and his incapacity. Dr. North’s wound is an invisible one, and over time has become a cancerous. I pitied him.
If he could have felt a mere fraction of my happiness that day I married my Arabella, he would have been one of the happiest men alive. Not even her father’s snorting and insincere good wishes as we left the church (I noted the avaricious glance he gave Dr. North and wondered what influence my employer held over my father in law), not even that could dispel my wellbeing.
“Oh, Jerome,” Arabella said in the carriage as we set off upon our short honeymoon at Lake Garda, “I am joyous today. You have made me feel so…joyous. And now that you are qualified we can live content in our little home and grow old together.”
My tears start in me as I write these words “grow old together”, for how could such a thing ever be, when it was never intended, and I curse God for his cruelty. How can I ever be resigned to this?
And now it comes to this, the part I have dreaded in my narrative. My career as an apothecary was not mercurial, but I set up a small and successful business in town, and Dr. North always refused to send for his supplies from the more prestigious chemists in London and Bath but always put his business my way.
Jane Quinn had lately departed the shop with a package of blood pills for her mother, hair oil for herself and some cough mixture for the cold she persisted in imagining she perpetually had “the house is very damp, you know.” The doorbell chimed as Dr. North entered and placed his order, as he usually did, listed in his fine hand on a sheet of vellum; he never sent his manservant to do this, and I believe he enjoyed the short conversations with me. I came from behind the counter and shook his hand warmly, for my mentor was in no small way responsible not only for the finer points of my training but also for backing me when it came to letting my small shop in the high street.
“And how is the mother-to-be, Jerome?”
“Well, doctor, and it will not be long now, though I fear she is very weak in spite of your advice and ministrations.”
Indeed my darling wife had become a pale imitation of herself, white as frost with lips bloodless and thin and eyes distant. She would wake in the night with cold sweats, sometimes awake screaming with pain in her spine, clutching her swollen womb.
“Arabella is a healthy woman, Jerome, have no fear. She is capable of anything.”
Those words echo in my dreams now, a perverse inverted prophecy, for she was capable of nothing in the end, and her dire shrieks of pain as she tried to give birth to our son will haunt me until the day I die. In that last night, the doctor insisted we take her to his home, in spite of my protests she was too weak to move. But always, always, the doctor knew better than I, and we made her as comfortable as we could and placed her in his closed carriage, swaddled in blankets and bed covers, and we rocked gently through the town and up the drive to Dr. North’s home in its five acres of woodland. Everything she needs will be there, I told myself over and over as Arabella moaned and whimpered in her fever. Everything she needs.
A maid assisted us when we arrived, and the doctor took me with him to his laboratory, for his instruments and drugs, ordering me to find this and that for him, as much I suspect to keep my mind from my wife’s torture as to assist him.
The night was long, so long, and there must have been some while of quiet as I sat in a hard chair outside of the bedroom, for I dozed fitfully as though drugged: I had not slept for many nights and was exhausted.
I was awakened by a scream: but it was not Arabella’s. I did not realise it but my darling girl, my light and my life, had fallen silent forever long before this. Startled, my heart hammering in my breast, I rushed to the door and threw it open.
