'Alive, are you, Thomas?'
'I'll pull through, I reckon, sir,' I rasped.
'Don't try to talk. You have a bad rope burn on your throat. I believe you'll be spending some time in hospital.'
'No, sir!' I have no love of hospitals any more than any other public institution. 'Could I not recuperate at home?'
'What did I tell you, Terry?' he said, turning toward the inspector.
'You've got a corking little terrier here, Cyrus,' he responded. Terrier, indeed!
'He's in no condition for questioning. I'll stop by your office in the morning with a prepared statement. You can question him in a day or so, if that is agreeable.'
'Be at my office tomorrow for questioning,' Poole countered, 'and I think we can wait until he can talk again.'
'Done. Let's get him home.'
Racket's corpse was to remain for the coroner, Vandeleur, to issue a death certificate. A constable was assigned the task of taking Barker and me back to Newington in that fateful hansom which had twice brought me so close to dying. Death had no sting for me at the moment. After Barker gingerly lifted me into the cab, still clad in blankets, I lay back in a corner and drifted into a sound, dreamless sleep.
29
I floated on opium clouds for several days. Barker's physician, a dried apple core of a fellow named Allcroft, kept me on a steady diet of morphine and little else. I had endured a severe trauma not only to my body but to my brain as well. Dr. Allcroft feared brain fever, and with good reason. Due to the heavy tissue damage, I ran a high fever. Any weight I may have gained due to Dummolard's cooking and the nice restaurants in which we had dined, melted off my frame quickly. I must have looked quite the apple core myself, I suppose.
Barker decided that the logistics of the situation called for turning the infrequently used sitting room into a convalescing room. He and Mac carried my bed and mattress down the stairs and consigned much of the sitting room furniture to the lumber room upstairs. Nurses were hired round the clock. Apparently, things were rather touch and go one night. I had an irregular heartbeat, and Allcroft feared there might have been damage to the muscle itself. Somehow I pulled through. Later, Barker asked me how it was to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I recalled intensely vivid dreams, constantly changing like a child's kaleidoscope, but the events in these dreams slipped through my fingers when I finally woke.
A woman's face came into view, a careworn but friendly enough face it was, with a healthy dusting of freckles.
'Who are you?' I croaked. My throat was raw.
'So you're awake, are you?' she said. 'That's a mercy. How do you feel?'
'Like I've been crucified.' My throat was afire.
'You just take it easy-like, young gentleman. I'm your nurse. We'll fetch the doctor in. You've had a lot of people here concerned about your health.'
'May I have some water, please?'
She sat me up a little, to pour a tumbler of water down my parched throat. It was the first time I realized I was in the sitting room. I tried to raise my arms but found myself almost incapable of movement. My shoulders and back had received a great strain, and only time and the Great Physician Himself would ever heal them again.
'What o'clock is it?' I asked.
'†'Tis three in the afternoon, if you must know,' the nurse said. 'Did you have an appointment you must be off to?'
'And the day?'
'It's Thursday.'
'Thursday,' I repeated to myself. Four days. My mind was on the case. Was it over? What had Barker been doing without me these last hundred hours? I tried sitting up, to get out of bed. I've made many mistakes in my life, and that was definitely one of them.
'Now you've gone and done it, young man,' the nurse chided me as I lay, my teeth gritted, and every muscle in my body screamed at once. 'You stay there and don't you move, or so help me, I'll have straps brought in and we'll lash you to this bed. I'm calling in Dr. Allcroft directly.'
The doctor came within the hour. He looked in my throat and under my eyelids, he took my pulse, he prodded me in a thousand places, then asked me a thousand times if that hurt. Finally, he pronounced me on the mend, though not completely out of danger, and reduced me to only partial doses of morphine. Had I been able to move, I would have tossed him down the front step. As it was, I just lay there, while the tide of dreams washed over me again.
'Lad.' I opened my eyes.
'Hello, sir,' I answered weakly.
'Back among the living, are we?'
'So it would seem. How's the case?'
'Spoken like a true assistant. It's all but over. I've just been tying up the loose ends. All that remains is the presentation of the bill, and I won't do that until you are up and about.'
'Tell me about the case. How did youЧ'
'Another time, Thomas. Allcroft is a capital fellow. He'll soon set you to rights. You just get some rest. Plenty of time to discuss the investigation later.'
I relaxed and the spectacles faded away into nothingness.
It was morning, presumably Friday morning, although I couldn't be sure. Mac was opening the curtains.
'Good morning, Mr. Llewelyn,' he said. 'I trust you've slept well.' He came round and fluffed my pillows. 'The nurses have all been dismissed, more's the pity.'
'Sorry I missed them,' I rasped.
'Are you hungry?'
'Starved,' I admitted.
'Guv'nor's spread the word to Cook that he's to fatten you up a bit. I saw Dummolard bringing in a goose liver pie a half hour ago. I'll tell them you're awake.'
He glided out, and I closed my eyes. I was in a rather enviable position if one forgot for the moment that I couldn't raise my arms. I had nothing to do but lie in bed and wonder what a first class chef was preparing for my breakfast. It turned out to be crepes with heavy cream and strawberries. The strawberries had been preserved in kirsch brandy. The meal came with a tisane, hot honey and lemon with a bit of single malt.
'I suppose you can't raise your arms.'
'Not an inch.'
Mac grumbled under his breath and cut the first crepe into quarters. I opened my mouth just in time, before he would have plastered cream all over my face. It was very rich. It wouldn't take much of this to put the weight back on me.
'Drink!' I said, almost gagging on the clotted cream in my throat.
'This will wear thin rather quickly, I think,' Maccabee complained, bringing the cup to my lips.
'I'll remind you, I was injured trying to save your people,' I told him, when I could breathe again.
'We are forever in your debt,' he said archly, cramming another bite in my mouth. The combination of preserves and cream was delicious, but I wasn't much up to swallowing yet.
The meal was mercifully short. Mac replaced the empty plate and cup on the silver tray. He turned back at the door.
'Actually, you have a visitor waiting.'
Was it Rebecca, perhaps, or Zangwill? Possibly it was Ira Moskowitz. I had made more friends in the last
