The boy’s discreet knock at a blue plank door had summoned an overweight black woman in her late forties. Dressed in a dark blue cotton smock fronted by a stroud apron stained with grease, she smelled of frying bacon.
“I brought Miss Meg a doctor!” the boy crowed.
“You all’s a doctor?” the cook had demanded suspiciously as she stared Doc up and down. Her round face glistened with a sheen of perspiration. Before he could reply, she added, “Come on in. She be down the hall with Eli.”
Only after passing through the kitchen and entering a velvet-walled hallway had Doc pegged the establishment as a bordello. A rather more sophisticated example of the trade than the shabby cribs a block back from the wharfs, but a house nonetheless.
Even as Doc had stopped short in hesitation, Miss Meg had come rustling down the wallpapered hallway. The woman was dressed in crimson taffeta layered with watered silk, her high-piled hair accenting a patrician forehead, angular cheeks, and pointed jaw. She’d pinned Doc with a hard blue gaze that would have melted iron plate.
“Didn’t expect anyone this quickly. This way!”
Not the sort of woman to deny.
And he did need the money.
Resigned, Doc followed Miss Meg to what appeared to be a cramped closet. Doc could have spit across the room’s long axis. The stale air reeked of unwashed human, the stench of corrupt flesh, and old misery. And now he found himself face-to-face with his patient. A sweating man on the table blinked, swallowed hard. His black eyes darted this way and that but seemed unable to focus.
Eli appeared to be in his late forties, emaciated; his sunken narrow cheeks and knobby chin sported a four-day beard. In the amber light cast by the four oil lamps set on wall sconces, perspiration gleamed on the man’s rounded forehead and around his glassy eyes. He wore only a smudged white shirt. Hairy bare legs protruded from beneath a gray blanket that draped his waist.
“Don’t you touch dat leg! I ain’t one of your girls what can be ordered around like a dog.” He shifted to free his right arm long enough to shake a finger at Doc, the burning sincerity behind his eyes like a fire of the will.
Doc took in the whitewashed, rough-cut walls. A stained plank floor supported the raised table with its hanging leather straps. The stench of rot intensified in the sweltering air. In the lamplight the man’s left leg—swollen, blackened, and stinking—extended beyond the table’s edge.
Miss Meg, or Madam de Elaine, as she’d introduced herself, closed the door behind her to block the view from the small hallway. As news of Doc’s arrival spread, it had filled with women dressed as tarts who craned their necks to see into the confining room.
“What do you think, Doc?” Miss Meg’s voice, softer now, was thick with the rasp of whiskey and cigar smoke.
Doc pushed a lock of dark blond hair off his brow and opened his surgical bag where it rested on the room’s one rickety wooden chair. With the door closed, the air thickened with burned oil and the cloying smell of gangrene. He needed but one look at the grossly swollen foot to see sharp fragments of bone protruding from a black scab that leaked yellow pus.
“Cut dat leg and the world gonna go crazy,” the man insisted as he began shaking his head in violent swings.
“Eli,” she told him, “the only thing crazy in here is you.”
For a woman closing on forty, Madam de Elaine might have passed as ten years younger had Doc not seen her in the light of day. Her makeup had been artfully applied; her thick black locks were curled, piled up, and held in place with diamond-studded tortoiseshell combs. She’d slipped a no-nonsense apron similar to the cook’s over her crimson dress.
Given the stout leather straps and buckles dangling below the table, and the positioning of the four lamps, Doc realized Madam de Elaine was no stranger to ad hoc medical procedures in her back room.
This is not the reason I studied medicine.
He fought down his sudden distaste. This was the sort of place Paw would have frequented. Doc had spent most of his life struggling to outrun his father’s shadow. The flight had taken him all the way to Boston and the finest medical school in the land. Paw, of course, had paid for the schooling, but Philip had always wondered if it had been because of guilt, or as a final slap in the face. Whichever, the son need never emulate his dissipated and morally bankrupt sire.
I am a gentleman surgeon!
“Yes, tell yourself that,” he murmured, pulling out his instruments.
“Tell yourself what?” Miss Meg asked. Her gaze narrowed. “You sure you’re a physician? A mite young, aren’t you?”
“You ain’t touching dis leg,” crazy Eli protested yet again. “Better you all let me die with dis leg. Take it off and nothing gonna be the same ever again. Madness. You all hear? Gonna be madness if’n you cut my leg.”
“Madam de Elaine,” Doc began, opening his bag, “I’m going to need you—”
“In this room? Given what we’re about? Best call me Meg.” She gestured toward the straps. “You want me to buckle him down?”
“Maybe after I’ve administered the anesthetic.”
“Don’t know that I want to pay for chloroform or ether.”
Doc met her hard eyes. “I’m not cutting a man’s leg off while he’s awake.” Then he added, “Meg.”
She winced, nodded. “Very well.”
“Don’t do it! It be your fault!” Eli tried to struggle up from the table, reaching out with an imploring hand.
“Easy, Eli,” Meg told him as she stepped over to the bed and laid a hand on his forehead. “No one’s going to do anything you tell them not to.”
Doc shot her a sidelong glance. The lie had rolled so smoothly off her tongue. But then perhaps such facile prevarication came with her profession. He tried
