The Winter Rose Page 6

  India leveled her chin at Sid. "I'm not afraid of you," she said.

  "Nor should you be, Miss--Doctor Jones. I would never lay a hand on a woman. Frankie and Tommy neither. Men... well, they're a different matter. There's no telling what my lads will get up to with Mr. Lytton. They don't call Frankie Mad Frank for nothing. He's a bit unpredictable."

  The doctor's eyes grew round. She bent down for her bag and jacket, then said to the woman she'd called Maud, "You're destroying yourself."

  "Oh, for God's sake, India, stop being such a bore. You never have any fun and you don't want anyone else to, either."

  "Is addiction fun, Maud? Is syphilis?" She turned to Sid. "Not only are you enslaving addicts, you're exploiting young women for financial gain."

  "We don't take prisoners here, Dr. Jones. If a girl's at Ko's, it's because she wants to be."

  "Wants to be? You're telling me that she wants to be degraded? That she wants to expose herself to disease?"

  "No, I'm telling you she wants to earn her rent money. It's warmer in Ko's than it is on the streets. And a damn sight safer."

  The doctor shook her head. She looked as if she wanted to say some-thing more, but she didn't. She put her jacket on and left. Sid cast a last glance around the room; Ko was nowhere to be seen. He followed the doc-tor down the stairs, simmering with anger.

  She and her silly society were not a threat, but Lytton was. He compli-cated things. When he got outside, he saw that Lytton and the doctor were already halfway down the street. The rain had stopped.

  "You know where he's going, don't you? And it won't be the local boys he fetches this time. It'll be some big noise from the Yard," Frankie said.

  Sid nodded. He couldn't have that. Not yet. Teddy would need time to set the place to rights first.

  "Oi! You two!" Sid shouted after them. Lytton turned around. Sid nodded to his carriage. "Get in."

  Freddie took the doctor's arm and kept walking.

  "Persuade them, lads," Sid said.

  Frankie and Tom took off after them. There were words, another scuffle, then Lytton and the doctor were walking back toward Sid. Lytton helped the doctor into the carriage, then Tom climbed in and sat down next to them. Frankie and Sid took facing seats.

  "Whatever you're planning, Malone, you won't get away with it," Freddie said. "Dr. Jones comes from an important family and so do I. There will be people looking for us."

  "What the hell are you on about?" Frankie asked.

  "The bollocks thinks we're kidnapping him," Sid said, rubbing his temples. "Where do you live, Dr. Jones?"

  "Don't say a word, India. You don't want this man knowing your address," Freddie warned.

  Sid took a deep breath and blew it out again. His head had started to ache. "Either give me an address, in West London, or I'll drop you both on the Ratcliff Highway." He didn't know if the doctor would recognize the name, but he was certain Lytton would. The highway was the most dangerous stretch of road in London, teeming with thieves, whores, and cutthroats.

  "Sloane Square," Lytton said.

  "Chelsea, Ronnie," Sid yelled out of the window to his driver. "Make it quick."

  The carriage lurched off. Sid noted with satisfaction that Lytton was nursing a fat lip. He couldn't see the doctor's face; she was looking at the floor. Her leather bag was on her lap; her hands were gripping its handle. He saw that they trembled and he was sorry for it. He would have happily popped Lytton in the gob himself, but he did not make a habit of frightening women. She looked up just then. Her frank gray eyes met his and held them and he saw to his surprise that she wasn't frightened at all. She was angry. Furious, in fact.

  "You're despicable," she said, her voice shaking with emotion. "You trade in misery. You batten on people's despair. Do you know what drug addiction can do? What it can drive people to? The people in those rooms, they're spending their rent money on that poison."

  "That's not my lookout, is it, Dr. Jones? I'm just a businessman. Certainly isn't up to me to tell people how to spend their brass," Sid said.

  "Have you ever seen an opium addict when he can't get the drug?" India continued. "He starts out shaking and sweating. Then the pain starts."

  "Being a little dramatic, aren't we, luv? From what I saw, a handful of tossers was smoking themselves silly. Seemed pretty harmless to me."

  "Those people were ruining themselves, Mr. Malone, body and soul. Can't you see that? Can't you see that what you're doing is terribly, terribly wrong?"

  "India...," Freddie cautioned, his eyes darting nervously to Sid. But the doctor didn't hear him. Or she didn't care if she did.

  She has bottle, Sid thought, I'll give her that.

  "Come to London Hospital, Mr. Malone," she pressed. "I'll give you a tour of the psychiatric ward. I'll show you what addiction does. I'll show you how harmless it is."

  "India, for God's sake, let it go," Freddie hissed. "You're not going to reform Sid Malone."

  "And what makes you think that I, or any of Teddy's punters, want to be reformed?" Sid asked. "Those dope fiends looked a damn sight happier than you do, luv."

  Frankie and Tom laughed. Freddie shot forward in his seat, a threatening look on his face. Frankie pressed his fingers into Freddie's chest and eased him back. Sid could see that Lytton was seething, and that he prob-ably would have taken a shot at him had it not been for Frankie. That took balls. As he watched him, he saw Freddie cover India's hand with his own and squeeze it. Ah, that's it, he thought. Nothing made a man stupider than being shown up in front of his girl. Sid looked at the doctor with new inter-est, as if he'd somehow forgotten in all the prior commotion that she was, in fact, a woman.

  He could see how it might happen--the forgetting. She did little to keep it fresh in a man's mind. Her hair wasn't styled; it was just pulled back into a hasty twist. She might be pretty; it was hard to tell with those awful glasses. Her clothes were awful, too. She wore a dark skirt and waistcoat that completely hid whatever figure she might have, and no jewelry except--he saw now--for a gold chain that ran across the front of her waistcoat.

  "... men will take bread from their children's mouths to get opium. Women will sell their bodies..."

  Good Christ, he thought. She's still at it. He leaned forward and tugged on the chain. A watch emerged from her waistcoat pocket. She gave a little gasp.

  "Very nice," he said, flipping it open.

  "You wouldn't dare," Lytton said.

  "What's a watch like this go for, Frankie?" Sid asked, ignoring him.

  "Gold case, diamond markers ...I'd say a hundred quid, easy."

  "A hundred quid," Sid said thoughtfully. "You know, that would feed and clothe a docker's family for a year. Fine thing, isn't it, Frankie, to tell other people what they should do when you're going home to a fire in the grate and a nice hot meal and the poor bleeders at Ko's are working fourteen-hour days in some hellhole of a factory, living five or six in some shithole of a room, eating bread and marge three times a day because it's all their rotten teeth can handle." India, still glaring, blinked, but Sid did not. "Why, if it was me in their shoes, Frankie," he added, "I'd smoke me fuckin' head off."

  Sid returned the doctor's watch to her pocket. It was quiet then and remained so for the rest of the ride. The carriage rolled westward, hugging the river. He was relieved when he finally saw Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament. A few minutes later, Ronnie veered north off the Grosvenor Road. Sid rapped for him to stop as they neared the Pimlico Road, near Sloane Square. He'd decided to boot his passengers out just shy of their destination in case the good doctor got it in her head to make a farewell speech.

  She did not disappoint him. "Mr. Malone, I must once again implore you..." she began, as the carriage slowed.

  "Dr. Jones, it's been a pleasure," Sid said, opening the door before the carriage had fully stopped. Freddie scrambled out, then took the doctor's hand and helped her down. He was reaching back in for his coat when Sid said, "Mr. Lytton, Dr. Jones, do not let me
catch either of you on Saracen Street again."

  "You won't be seeing Dr. Jones there, but you'll be seeing me," Lytton warned. "You'll go down, Malone. Sooner or later. You'll make a mistake. And when you do, I'll see that you're put in prison. You have my word on that."

  Sid's arm shot forward. His hand closed on Freddie's tie. He jerked him into the carriage, using both hands to twist the fabric tight. No one threatened him with prison. No one.

  "Freddie?" he heard the doctor call. She was standing on the pavement and couldn't see inside the carriage.

  "Let go!" Freddie wheezed, his fingers scrabbling at Malone's.

  "Does the doctor care for you, mate?" Sid asked him.

  "Take your filthy hands off me!" Each word was gasped.

  "Answer me."

  "Let go! Jesus..." His eyelids fluttered. He was going blue.

  "Does she, Freddie?" Sid asked, tightening his grip.

  "Y-yes!"

  Sid released him. "Then for her sake, lad, don't come for me alone."

  Chapter 4

  "Liverpool Street!" the conductor barked. India felt the train slow as it neared the station. She hoped the doors would open quickly. It was only 7:30 and already the underground was impossibly crowded. People were mashed together and a horrible man in a bowler hat was making use of every lurch and pitch to rub against her.

  "Stop it or I shall call the guard," she hissed. He didn't and she finally thought to put her doctor's bag between them. At last the train stopped, the doors opened, and she was carried along in the surge of people. She made her way up the stairs, bumped by briefcases and poked by umbrellas, vowing to take the omnibus home.

  Outside the station, a woman clutching a baby to her chest pressed a dirty palm up at her. "Please, miss, a penny for the baby," she said, her breath reeking of gin.

  "There's a mission on the High Street. You can get soup there and milk for the baby," India said, but the woman, hollow-eyed and desperate, had already moved off. She saw her tug on the sleeve of a man in a suit. He gave her a few coppers. India frowned. He'd meant well, she knew, but he was only encouraging drunkenness.

  "The Clarion! Getcher news 'ere! Read about the Chairman! King of Crime! Only in the Clarion!" a newsboy cried on the pavement, waving the morning edition at her. The Chairman. That's how Freddie had referred to Sid Malone, India thought, shuddering at the memory of their meeting. She briskly sidestepped the newsboy and his pile of papers, glancing at the headline. "The New Underworld," it said. There was a sketch underneath it. The artist had gotten the shape of the face right, but not the eyes. They don't look like that, shifty and brutal, she thought. His eyes were hard, but piercing and intelligent. They had unsettled her. Far more than his violent reputation had. The memory of them unsettled her now, so she put it out of her mind. She had more pressing things to think about this morning.

  She crossed Bishopsgate and headed for Middlesex Street, a busy thor-oughfare that would take her to Whitechapel's High Street then to Varden Street and Dr. Gifford's surgery, just south of the London Hospital. She cut a crisp figure in her black straw hat, gray duster, and white shirtwaist, all of which were several seasons out of date, but freshly starched and pressed. Her pace was brisk and her expression eager. It was her first day at Gifford's. She remembered how she'd gotten the job--by agreeing to accept roughly half the salary a male doctor was paid for nearly twice the hours--but even that memory couldn't dampen her spirits. She was truly excited--excited to be a practicing doctor at last, and excited to be practicing now, in 1900, at what many said was the dawn of a golden age in medi-cine. The advances of the last half century were astonishing, and India found their implications for the future nothing short of mind-boggling.

  The contributions of Lister, Pasteur, Jenner, and Koch to the under-standing of germ theory--combined with advances in anesthesia--had enabled amazing gains to be made in surgery. Wounded or fractured limbs, once certain to become gangrenous, could now be disinfected and repaired instead of amputated. Cancers could be excised. Why, entire organs could be removed without hemorrhage or infection--she'd seen it done. The eminent American gynecologists Simpson and Kelly had made successful hysterectomies and ovariotomies, and there had even been recent reports of a successful Cesarean surgery, in which both mother and baby had actually lived.

  In Germany a man named Roentgen had discovered light rays that could pass through human tissue, and already battlefield doctors were using them to locate bullets in soldiers. In France, Becquerel's work with ura-nium and the Curies' with radium promised that doctors would soon be able to peer all the way inside the body without cutting, blood loss, shock, or infection.

  There were new drug discoveries, too--painkillers such as aspirin, heroin, and chloroform, and antitoxins for smallpox and diphtheria. Some felt it was only a short matter of time--a year, maybe two--before one was found for tuberculosis.

  There were times when India felt breathless just thinking about these advances and how she would use them to better the lives of the Whitechapel poor. And yet all she had to do was pick up a city newspaper to be reminded of all that medicine had still to accomplish. Scores of pub-lic health acts, designed to safeguard citizens from contaminated water, filthy sewers, and overcrowded housing, had finally caused a sharp decline in deaths from cholera, typhus, and smallpox, but scarlet fever, influenza, and typhoid still raged through the slums. Gin and opium destroyed minds, while malnutrition and poverty destroyed bodies. India knew that for every social reformer, every doctor or missionary trying to pull the poor out of the pub, the gin palace, and the opium den, there was a Sid Malone pulling them back in.

  The challenges to medicine were still many and daunting, and as excited as she was to be starting her professional life, she was also nervous. Could she meet the demands of a busy surgery? Cope with the case load? Cor-rectly diagnose the staggering array of symptoms she would encounter? There would be no Professor Fenwick to back her up now; she was on her own.

  She dodged a group of chattering factory girls and climbed a short flight of steps to 33 Varden Street. It was a sandy-colored Georgian house, two stories high. Dr. Edwin Gifford's surgery was on the first floor; the second was rented out to a family. India paused at the front step for a few seconds to calm herself. It wouldn't do to arrive breathless on her first day.

  She had just raised her hand to knock when the door was wrenched open and a woman about India's age, wearing a nurse's uniform, hurtled smack into her.

  "Oy vey!" she exclaimed, taking India by the arm. "There you are! Got sei dank! Was just on me way to look for you. Dr. Selwyn Jones, innit? Where on earth have you been? I was worried you weren't coming at all."

  India checked her watch. "It's only a quarter to eight," she said.

  The woman snorted. "Are you a doctor or a banker? We start at seven sharp here."

  "Seven? Dr. Gifford said eight."

  "He always tells the new hires that. This is Whitechapel, Doctor. A lot of people here work in factories or down the docks and need to see us before the whistle blows. Come on, let's get you settled."

  She tugged on India's sleeve, leading her past a waiting room full of pa-tients, through a narrow hallway to the back of the building and Dr. Gif-ford's office. She managed to get her hat and duster off along the way and hustle her into a white jacket. The jacket's hem hung down past India's knees and the sleeves covered her hands.

  The woman frowned. She rolled up the sleeves. "Too big, this. Fit Dr. Seymour perfectly, but you're not a man, are you? I'll have to order some small ones." She pointed to an open door leading off the office, and said, "Exam room's through there--" Before she could finish, there was a loud metallic crash. She ran into the room and came out again dragging a young boy by his ear. He wore a black skullcap and long side curls. "Ach, du Pisher! Du fangst shoyn on?" the young woman scolded. "Go in the waiting room and stay put!"

  India was about to ask the woman who she was, but she'd disappeared into the exam room again. India followed and f
ound her on her hands and knees, picking up the tray of instruments the little boy had dumped.

  "Where's the autoclave?" she asked, kneeling down to help.

  "The what?"

  "The water bath. These will have to be sterilized."

  "We don't have one."

  "But how can you not? The need for an aseptic environment during di-agnosis, as well as surgery, has been proven repeatedly. Dr. Lister is very clear on the germicidal properties of--"

  "Well, Dr. Lister ain't here today, is he? I am."

  India sat back on her heels. "But how do you clean the instruments?"

  "I take them home and give them a wash in the kitchen sink. When I can remember," she replied, tossing a scalpel and two clamps back on the tray. "You all set, then?" she asked, getting to her feet. "I'll send the first patient in."