England’s railway surgeons were just starting to learn techniques and methods from America’s Civil War doctors, for both the Union and Confederate armies had made extensive use of freight cars and bunk cars to transport injured soldiers to regional hospitals. Such locomotive ambulances were virtually non-existent in England when I started my practice. But railway surgery was finally being recognized as a specialty with its primary goal to study accident and trauma surgery, and in America, the railway surgeons had already introduced their concepts to civilian medicine. My country’s railway doctors were finally creaing emergency packs with medicines and sterile dressings for the trains, the forerunners of the first aid kit. They trained the railway workers as well. But ‘normal’ British physicians objected to this, feeling that laypersons could not administer medical care correctly.
“What they really fear,” Uncle said, “is that their own lofty importance might be diminished.”
He and I found this ridiculous; where urban surgeons operated was a far cry from the make-shift and filthy conditions under which we had worked at the Norfolk crash. We were ecstatic that these railway trauma surgeons were starting to be recognized for their revolutionary concepts in patient care. Uncle had recently read about a railway employee, a flagman, who broke his leg when it caught in a running gear. The conductor, who had received emergency training from the railway doctor, wrapped the jagged bone in sterile gauze, stabilized the leg with a splint, and gave him pain medication. A telegraph was sent to a nearby depot where a railway surgeon awaited the patient’s arrival. In a special car fitted with operating equipment, the boy was anesthesized; the doctor sterilized his hands with carbolic acid before setting the bones and stitching the wound. After a few weeks in the railway’s own hospital, the boy went home. He survived.
I had thought about closing up my faltering practice in London to become a railway doctor. The specialty was growing, and with the number of accidents and railway-employed doctors beginning to swell, I thought perhaps even a female doctor might be welcomed into the budding medical specialty.
I was wrong, of course. Such musings were hopelessly optimistic.
Even though railway surgeons were far more progressive than their typical colleagues, it would not be until the late 1890’s that a female surgeon would be hired by a railway. The appointment of Dr. Carrie Lieberg as a division surgeon for the Northern Pacific would send tidal waves across the medical community. It would not be until 1907, by which time I was in my fifties, that a railway hired a woman as chief surgeon.
I was considering my options and day-dreaming about what kind of life I might lead in the frontier if I mustered up the courage to travel to America just as the clock on the fireplace mantel rang out, reminding me that I was due to meet Oscar Wilde in a few minutes. I put away the journal and locked up my office.
As I hurried to meet Oscar at the restaurant, I thought back again to that horrible September night when the two trains collided near my home in the Broads. Sherlock had refused to help us tend to the injured; all he could think about was unearthing the details of the crash. It was the first time I had really witnessed how cold and calculating, how unfeeling he could force himself to be, but it was not the last. For that reason, and many others, soon after we parted on uneasy terms, but he had finally sought me out at Oscar’s poetry recital to try to make amends. And, for reasons that escape me, I sought him out a few weeks later.
6
On that hot afternoon in early July, just a few weeks after I’d run into Sherlock at Oscar’s recital, I went to the lab after having had lunch with my brother Michael. When I entered, Sherlock had spread before him an assortment of coloured plates, pipes and tobaccos. Of course, I had asked him what he was up to.
“I have recently revisited Friedrich Tiedmann’s Geschichte des Tabaks, published in the year of my birth, 1854. It spurred me on to take all the more seriously my research into the distinctive characteristics of ash.”
“And why is that relevant to your avocation as a consulting detective?”
“Vocation,” he said deliberately. “It is not a hobby, Dr. Stamford. And it is important because a person’s habits are part of his or her identity. For example, if the perpetrator of a crime left a note, I would compare handwriting. Or let’s say you were arrested and the only evidence against you was a footprint left at the scene. I would compare the size of your boots to the footprints left behind. Or what if you were accused of a crime and an eyewitness had described the criminal as a delicate flower, slender as a sapling, tiny in stature, with blonde hair, and as colourful as an Easter bonnet? I would immediately point out that you could not be the suspect.”
His words precisely painted an image of Effie, Oscar Wilde’s cousin, my best friend and my brother’s young wife, now deceased. I missed her terribly and for a moment, I looked down at the hat I held in my hands, the one she had made for me. It was made of bright blue fabric with a black lace ruffle around the narrow brim. It had a black feather plume and a short train of black tulle. I remembered she laughed and asked, “Doesn’t this have high society written all over it?”
“Poppy, are you listening?” Sherlock asked, bringing me sharply back into focus.
I blinked and looked at him. “I’m sorry. You were saying something about a witness identifying someone.”
“And that someone could not be you because you are tall and athletically built. You have dark hair, not blonde. And,” he added, “It is only on the rare occasion
