Dr. North’s Wound
It is generally supposed, by poets and philosophers, if not by men of science, that love resides within the heart. Until my apprenticeship to Dr. North, indeed, I too believed this to be so.
Late in the year of 1878, in the tenth month of my indenture to him, the doctor chose to make an example of me before his dinner guests at one of his renowned soirees. There were eight of us at table, and to my mortification Arabella Fanshawe was one of the party; I could have forgiven my employer anything but cutting me down before her, which he chose to do with some relish. Dr. North, handsome, sallow-faced with a smile like a fox said in response to my comment on the question about where love resides: “As an analytical thinker, Jerome, a chemist—of some talent I might add”—and here he winked provokingly at Arabella who sat to his left—“You surely cannot subscribe to such rhetorical rot.”
I felt myself grow pale as I saw the blush flare on Arabella’s cheek; but whether this was from anger at Dr North or shame for me I could not say, and neither could I look either the Doctor or Arabella in the eye, such was my humiliation. This was particularly the case when my employer compounded the slight with: “Perhaps you should relinquish your training as an apothecary and take to writing romantic doggerel for spinsters and young girls.”
Laughter rippled like the legs of a centipede around the table. Arabella thankfully did not participate.
Harold McKenzie, the wealthiest landowner in the county of R— by contrast, brayed, even as he was playfully slapped across the back of his hand by his usually timid wife.
“Write something for my dear Gwendolyn, too,” he said, pinching his wife’s cheek. “For, she says I have not a romantic bone in my body. Though,” he added, “I did not hear you complain last night, eh, my dear?”
The ladies around the table, the ancient Mrs Quinn and her prissy daughter Jane in particular, were horrified at this off-colour remark, and some of the men too, myself included, took to studying intently the remains of the entrée on their dinner plates. Dr. North, however, saw this as another opening.
“Oh,” he said, “I am speaking not of physical love, of lust, of animal passions, but of the so-called union of souls.”
“Ah, so you believe in the soul, doctor?”
This from my friend and cousin, Robert Theakston, a playful irony in his tone.
Dr. North stiffened somewhat at this; and Arabella put a napkin to her lips, and I could have sworn by the fetching creases at the corners of her eyes, that she was smiling behind it.
“I speak in the sense of energy fields, Mr Theakston. Galvanic experiments, the new work with electricity, has demonstrated the existence of such energy. It is no small matter to—”
Robert interrupted: “Reanimating the amputated leg of a dead frog is hardly proof of universal energy, sir.”
By now it was my turn to try to conceal a smile. Robert cherished debate and was contradictory never from strong conviction by merely from the pleasure of the game. My mentor’s eyes took on the cyanotic hue of rainclouds, and I feared another tantrum building. I need not have worried, for now that I know him better it is clear that he is too clever, too manipulative to make such an exhibition before guests who might be of service to him in the future. Yes, I know the man now: these dinner companions commanded power in the community, and if Dr. North desired anything it was that power, or at any rate the ability to harness it. The desiccated Mrs Quinn, who sat next to my cousin opposite her daughter, would easily identify with this desire, for the widow of the mill owner, Bartholomew Quinn, had acquired power through just such social engineering, forming alliances and committees and political collectives of the wealthy and influential around her to further her own ends; her daughter, Joan, showed no such cleverness, unless her fluttering and obvious admiration of Dr. North and her flirtatiousness with him were a ruse by which she hoped to gain such power for herself.
The debate continued a while longer, the doctor’s motion being for the existence of universal energy as the spark which animates all life, and within which love—if such a thing can be empirically proven—must be a part. Robert, sometimes abetted by Mr McKenzie, presented counter arguments, or toyed with the doctor’s point of view, now seeming to side with it, now knocking it down again in light-hearted ways, to the amusement of all at the table, including it appeared, Dr. North himself. His witty counter arguments drew smiles and admiring glances from the ladies.
It was within my power to break the stalemate by revealing the nature of the doctor’s lifelong work. But to describe, or even hint at the experiments with which I presently assisted him, would have put in jeopardy not only my present position and sole means of income, but any prospects for my future here or anywhere else.
In the end, neither side won. Love was to remain a mystery for the evening.
The meal proceeded civilly, as these occasions must, with further polite conversation, and some more robust banter between the men when we retired to the smoking room, and the subjects of love and universal energy were laid to rest, replaced with talk of money and society and matters of politics, none of which interested me one whit (unless my fear of failure and becoming a pauper constitutes an interest in money and society). My thoughts, even as I tried my utmost to be an entertaining companion, were elsewhere.
In speaking of love so foolishly, I found none in that house that evening, other than that which I secretly and unrequitedly held for Arabella Fanshawe.
One of my duties as the doctor’s assistant was to keep a log book, a register if you will, of his studies and experiments; this was not his physician’s casebook, mind, for that he recorded in his own hand. The log was a dated record, in tabular form of each experiment, its purpose and protocols, its successes and (most often) failures.
For example, it is recorded that, on the 13th of May 1869, in a treatment of Mrs Susan Middlemiss for influenza, a swab was taken from the inside of each cheek pouch, and droplets of perspiration from her temple. These were distilled with a chemical compound of his own devising and examined under his brass microscope through the finest ground lenses from Switzerland. The log records the microscopic organisms in both the saliva and the perspiration, the degree of salinity in each, and so on. In the box for comments, I was instructed to write “Bacterium. Are the feelings, the senses, also a result of bacterium being transmitted between one person and the next? Are emotions of anger, desire, or love indeed, a consequence merely of the humors which can cause fever?”
I knew better than to comment upon these findings, but my increasing discomfort with the unwitting nature of his subjects’ participation in his experiments, troubled me.
Another troublesome aspect of working with the doctor was his regular disappearances from the town. It was known that he was seeing a woman, though it was not in his nature to discuss their relationship, or even hint at who she was. What was apparent was that his acquaintance never visited Dr. North at home. At first I considered there might be an affair, but given his lack of passion for anything but work this seemed unlikely.
One day I was preparing laudanum for one patient, mercurochrome for another, and a belladonna extract for another who had been poisoned. In the latter case Dr. North was convinced that one poison would counteract the other, though it must be administered with great care.
Tired from long hours of work, the experiments being conducted outwith my normal working hours, unwaged I might add, that I turned as the laboratory door opened and my sleeve caught the laudanum bottle and dashed it to the ground, where is smashed and the pungent liquid was blotted by the Persian carpet.
“Oh!”
“Dammit, man, how can you be so careless?” My employer hissed at me. “You are a buffoon, at times, Jerome! This will come out of your wages.” He had just returned from one of his trips, but I did not have the good grace to put his response down to travel weariness.
Instead I was furious, and I stood up to gaze steadfastly at him; at half a head taller than he I should not have felt intimidated, and yet I did, and my intestines twisted as I rebuked him. “Doctor, how can you expect the best of me if you drive me day and night like a beast of burden? I work hard for you, do I not, and while I am grateful for your tutelage it is more than repaid in my time in assisting you in your experiments.”
“How dare you! I ask nothing of you that I do not ask of myself, and if you are so ungrateful…”
I lowered my eyes, trying in vain to retain my stance of righteous indignation, but said: “It is not only that, Dr. North, but in truth I have concerns about the…other work.”
Having spoken out finally I looked at him again, and to my surprise saw his countenance soften; the cloudy brow cleared and his eyes sparked with mischief. I saw there his undoubted attractiveness, his appeal to the women in his care, but also how he would play with the emotions of others while feeling nothing himself, unless calculation is an emotion. Nevertheless, I let him influence me, as he usually did, and I was even grateful when he said: “Jerome, my boy, you dwell on matters of the heart too much; you are led by your feelings rather than your thoughts. I have harmed no one, and these people are too simple to understand why I test them in less conventional ways than they might expect.”
Less conventional? Euphemistically, the attachment of electrodes to the basal ganglia and cerebral lobes of a man with brain fever, the placement of such devices and the application of electrical charges of various voltages, inducing fits or the facial rictus of a man unmistakably experiencing erotic pleasure, might be said indeed to be unconventional.
He added, as if reading my thoughts: “I do no one harm, and I indeed I hope I do everything in my power to cure my patients of their ailments, and when that is not God’s will, at least to provide them with any comfort I can.”
“Perhaps,” I replied cautiously. “But is it not… unscrupulous… to use these people against their will?”
“Against their will? How can it be against their will when they have no consciousness of what is being done to them? ”
With that, he ushered me into his drawing room, and poured us both a glass of sherry, which I was too tired to decline and which I drank without relish.
“I must clean up your rug, doctor…” I began.
“No, leave it, Jerome, Harris will do it.” Harris was my employer’s maid, a woman of advanced years who had once been the midwife of the practice under North’s predecessor, Oliver Marsden.
“I hear incidentally, that Arabella’s father is opposed to the marriage.”
He changed the subject with the speed and deadliness of a viper. It was true: my relationship with Arabella Fanshawe had blossomed in the past months, the dinner party having unwittingly been the catalyst to our growing romantic attachment, developed with the assistance of Dr. North who contrived to invite her to parties and outings at which I would be present, and who made occasions and locations for us to be alone together. Indeed, thinking back, it seemed that the doctor often praised Arabella’s beauty and cleverness and sensitivity to me, so much so that I thought him in love with her himself until I found that he had equally praised me to Arabella. Should I be grateful for this matchmaking? Did I seem so incapable of attracting Miss Fanshawe on my own? In truth I did feel a little below her, and the more gracious part of me was only grateful for the doctor’s generosity towards us both.
And yet. And yet her father thought less of me than I did of myself. I, a mere student with no dowry to offer, could hardly be considered a suitor for his youngest daughter, his most precious jewel. That she was no less precious to me was no matter; Mr Fanshawe held all the cards. Or so it seemed then.
I said, mockingly: “It is a wonder to me that he allows me to see her at all. It would not surprise me if he were to lock her in a tower like Rapunzel.”
Dr. North gave a short, hoarse laugh at this, and said: “You may be no prince in his eyes as yet, but I see your potential even if he does not. And besides… I have some influence with him. And I have at least some understanding of the politics of love.”
This provided the opening I needed: “I do not think of my relationship with Arabella as political in any respect.” Trying to retain a jovial tone I added: “Perhaps your relationship with your mysterious lady friend is of a more governmental persuasion?”
He smiled, but with no sincerity. The doctor had common sense enough to appreciate his relationship must be known about, and he was clever enough not to show surprise.
“I have known Madeleine for several years, and I have no doubt that she loves me. I have feelings for her. I—” And here he stumbled over his words. “She is… willful. Beautiful. A warm and generous spirit. And yet…”
“You cannot reciprocate her feelings?”
He looked searchingly at me, a vulnerability fleetingly glimpsed in his countenance. “I wish more than anything that I could. If any woman could inspire such feelings it is she. But when I am with her I feel…nothing. The pleasure of her company, of course, and the tenderness of a deep friendship. Yet it is not enough. And yet I seek more, much more.” Dr. North spoke with unaccustomed passion, but it was the passion of a deep thinker and strangely devoid of emotion; a puzzling juxtaposition of opposite states of being.
My eyes sought his in silent enquiry, but it was clear that he was done with the subject for the moment. “But, to work, my boy. You must rest first, but in the morning we have a childless couple to see.”
I was greatly surprised at this. “A childless couple? But that is not your… my… area, doctor. I have no knowledge of such things.”
What he was about I could not say, but I felt greatly discomfited, my imagination placing images before me which I did not wish to examine too closely.
“Blocked fluids, that is all,” he said, smiling. “If love is an exchange of etheric fluid, or energy, which is what I am growing to believe, then procreation is merely an exchange of physical fluid, and fluids can be dammed or redirected at will.”
His bluntness often astonished me. I had watched fascinated a month previously as Dr. North made furious notes while observing a stallion impregnate a filly; the filly had been unable to bear the weight and the doctor had helped the farmer devise a harness which made the coupling possible and less painful for the poor female. Aversion filled me, not so much at the mechanistic means of achieving the desired result, but the dispassionate way that the doctor looked on as the poor filly whinnied in distress, and the stallion’s front hooves which dangled from the harness struck again and again at her haunches until the act was completed.
“I am… sorry that I was angry with you, Jerome.” His tone was soft and earnest and soothed me, the way it must soothe his patients in their distress. “I confess I am tired myself. We will feel the better for letting Morpheus do is work.”
And so we retired for the evening, though I wished the Lord of Dream would not visit me with further nightmares which had lately begun to plague me. A recurrent dream was of walking through a Classical archway, with Doric columns of white marble, Arabella by my side; and as we passed through her hand slipped out of mine and she fell over the edge of a precipice. I screamed her name and rushed to the edge, only to find it was not a cliff at all, but a river bank. And there, beneath the ice, lay my bride to be, in her lace wedding dress, her hands, her dear pale fingers, crossed over her breast, her lips as blue as her eyes, frozen and still, a petrified Ophelia. In the portion of the dream which woke me, I attacked the ice with a woodsman’s axe, but the blade skipped over the surface, as though my arms had turned to mist; and I wept as tears froze in crystal droplets on my cheeks.
Yellow broom plants around the cottage which was once mine and Arabellas’, coconut scented in the breeze: the perfume always takes me back to my wedding day, as I waited in the churchyard, Robert by my side trying to calm me while in the distance, Dr. North stood in the archway of the graveyard’s yew trees, threshold between this world and the next.
But I am ahead of the tale, my garden’s perfume through the window as I write drawing me aside from what I must set down that it may be read by others I am gone from this world. Though I write for myself primarly, in penance or in an attempt to understand, part of me hopes that another will read my text. Perhaps a scholar, or a merely curious individual may come upon my manuscript and through it come to better understand the nature of love, the only inheritance I leave.
The next morning I awoke refreshed, my nightmare having not returned: perhaps the good doctor had put a potion in my drink that I would rest easier, and if he did I mentally thanked him for it.
We chose to walk to the patients that day, for it was fine, blustery and with flashes of sunshine between scudding banks of cloud. We saw ten people in the morning and although it was not my custom to join the doctor on his visitations he felt it would be educational for me to witness how my pills and potions were put to use, and to understand that often they need not be used in any case.
“Illness is often merely a matter of willpower, Jerome,” he explained as we approached the house of the Allardyces, the infertile couple. “One may choose to be well or to be ill, I have found.”
“But surely there are infections over which willpower has no control?” I myself had seen many people overcome severe illness by sheer force of will, but I did not subscribe to the doctor’s over-generalisations, although I expect there were stated to provoke discussion rather than to be statements of fact.
“True, but how one deals with illness is a matter of choice. We can lie down and die or fight against inertia. A man who works in the fields all day expects his wife to cook his meals, wash his clothes and so on, and if he takes ill he expects her to nurse him. But in that nursing he will do nothing to help himself, but instead reverts to an infantile state. When my parents died—did I tell you they died in a fire when I was eight?—I had to master my grief, since I knew otherwise it would overwhelm me.”
I made no reply, sensitive to the delicacy of such a rare confidentiality though unsure what might have prompted it.
He continued: “My nanny was a wicked woman and would punish me for any sign of weakness or bad behaviour. She once beat be across the back with the handle of a broom for stealing apples from a neighbour’s tree. But I never cried. Not once. The power of the will, you see? Grief, pain, illness, love; I have mastery over them.”
He smiled distantly as if unaware of my presence. And presently, we arrived at a small white cottage and the doctor knocked upon its door. Frank and Pauline Allardyce were a handsome couple, he in his early 40s perhaps, she in her mid thirties. That she should want a child now I wondered at, and thought it unlikely they could conceive at their time in life, though I confess I know little of the gynaecological science.
As we waited for tea, Frank filling his pipe at the fireplace while we sat at the oak table by the small cottage window, the doctor whispered to me: “She had a child last year. Stillborn.”
Frank Allardyce was greying but had the fresh rosiness in his complexion of one who works outdoors all day long, and the ready smile of an innocent. After some initial discomfort at my presence, Frank relaxed and drew meditatively on his pipe. The discussion went back and forth about the probability of a child, about the causes of the death of the first child, of diet and so on. And then Dr. North said something very queer.
He said: “Mr Allardyce. Frank. Do you…love your wife?”
I was aghast, and saw our host first pale then a flinty look come to his eye. “Doctor. I have loved that woman since I was sixteen; and to this day she can make me feel the age I was when I first met her. I don’t know what’s behind your question, but there it is, sir.”
Just as he finished speaking I realised his wife was in the doorway, with a plate of food. She put a hand to her mouth in surprise and perhaps pleasure, but moving towards us she said playfully: “Don’t listen to that rogue doctor; it was that soft talk that let him catch me in the first place.”
We all laughed a little, and the doctor stood, touching the woman’s elbow and, leading her aside and whispering to her, turned to us and said: “Jerome, you and Frank take tea; Mrs Allardyce and I have some business to attend to.”
And that was all there was to it. Other than the doctor later explaining that he had instructed Frank Allardyce to perform the act of love before our arrival, so that he might take a swab and test the validity of the fluids. But he took more than one sample, one for the chemical tests, another for his experiments. He subjected the fluids to electrical charges, chemical compounds, microscopic examination and even made a potion with it.
Let me tell you about the potions. Dr. North kept them in stoppered phials, in wooden racks. These in turn were locked in a cabinet in the coolest place in the house, the pantry, where meat and milk was kept cool and salted fish sat in a barrel. It was my supposition that he drank these potions, a supposition confirmed one day when I stumbled upon his diary.
The doctor was suddenly called away to a man in his death-throes, a choking illness which filled his lungs with water. I noticed his desk drawer left ajar and to my shame I opened it and found the diary. Why I took the invitation of the open drawer I am not sure to this day, but part of me always suspected the doctor’s motives for his experiments and his sometimes unpredictable character might be explained by the diary.
Within the pages of closely-written script, the hand of a man meticulous and always in control, I found that, indeed he took these potions, sometimes drinking them, sometimes opening a vein and applying them to the wound. He made inhalations with them, heated them or cooled them in icy water, made gels of them to be applied to the skin, but all in vain in seemed. I thought this dangerous, for it anyone from whom he had extracted blood or tears or sweat or the moisture of procreation had a congenital illness, or was diseased, the doctor could himself grow ill, or even die.
But it was the back of the book which gave me at least part of the answer. In it was folded a letter on yellowing paper, in a loose, childlike hand, a trace of perfume retained in the weave of the paper, and a signature: Madeleine.
The letter, dated a week ago, began thus:
My darling Andrew (the doctor’s Christian name, which I never used),
It pains me to write this, but I now realise you can never love me as I have loved, and still love, you. That you are, in fact, incapable of love, though you have always shown me the greatest kindness and endearments. You have a great sorrow about you would you but recognise it. It may be that the darkness within you was there at your birth, and it breaks my heart to see it.
You are delightful company, greatly admired by everyone, and yet it as though you are not really present. You are at times, an absence, as if your mind searches vainly for feeling it cannot conjure up. But, my love, I know that you wish it more than anything else, to feel something more than your clever mind can calculate: for love is not a formula, an equation, but a gift.
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.
What I saw was a vision of Hell, and if there is a Hell after life it can never burn me the way this did.
The bed linen was awash with gore, all dyed red and fitfully black in the guttering candlelight. Arabella’s strangely peaceful face contrasted horrifyingly with her eviscerated womb, split from chest to reins, my twisted bloody child locked in its chamber lifeless, curled and stilled in the midst of its struggles to live, the umbilical around its neck. But it was the doctor who almost stopped my heart: his hands, his arms, his chest, were covered in my dear wife’s blood, and he was smearing his face with the gore, over and over, wiping it across his lips and cheeks and eyelids:
“It’s not here,” he said, coldly, angry, “Not here. I’ll never find it now, never.”
And then he looked at me, no emotion in his eyes, not so much as a hint of pity for me or sorrow for my wife.
“Look, Jerome,” he said, gesturing at Arabella’s open womb: “This is all we are. How can this… THIS… be conceived of love?”
Something had broken in him finally, I can see that now though I can never forgive it. So far as I am concerned he murdered Arabella and may he be damned for it. I will never know whether he tried to save the child, or save himself, but he failed on both counts, and succeeded only in taking away my hope and joy. But though love was never alive in him, he will never kill mine.
I see him now as I write these final words, in the archway of yews as I waited for my bride to join me at the alter. He was fascinated by the yew tree archway, the door from one state of being to the next, as though it might permit him, Dr Andrew North to move from his fated way of being to the one he most desired. It unnerved me how he circled their monstrous calloused trunks as though plotting their diameter by guesswork, or considering how deep their roots might grow. I care not what he thought or felt, if he felt anything, for I know only Arabella lies there now, ensnared by those roots for ever.
But Dr. North was a good tutor above all else, and what I learned from him ultimately was this: love does not indeed reside in the heart, or in the head or in any physical organ in either a real sense or a metaphorical one; and yet, how can it be that while my heart remains alive I feel at its very core a love which burns for my dearest one with a flame that can never be quenched?
John Dodds lives in Scotland and works as a Communications Manager at Communities Scotland. He is currently writing a crime novel, Bone Machines.
Copyright © 2001 by John Dodds.
