Lora of Two Worlds

The old physician had been an army surgeon. A lifetime with neither son nor daughter; at fifty-eight he left the barracks and came out with these old soldiers to East Manor. Men had called him ”old physician” so many decades running that he had clean forgotten what surname he ever bore. The five hundred-odd souls of East Great and East Little had all of them, one way or another, come under his helping hand. Only, his temper ran a little cracked — and everyone said that was why no woman had ever married him. By now he had lived his fifteen years at East Manor. Everything else served him well enough — but his eyes had drawn a film over them like frost, and the seeing gone blurred. They said he knew the gold-spatula art of scraping the eye clear; a man cannot very well scrape his own, and so it was let drag on, day upon day. When they carried Norton in, the old physician stripped off his shirt, bent in close, felt and looked a long time — and his heart beat an unsteady drum: The head was into the lung. Draw it out, and the barbs must slice a blood vessel across — and that was a dead man. The old physician had known Norton back in his mute days — the boy forever trotting after the carts between East Manor and the Odenheim house, hauling in the season’s fruit and greens; deaf and dumb, and laughing the whole day long. Everyone had been fond of him. Never had the old physician dreamed that the boy’s deaf-and-dumb silence could be mended by any man — and far less that this same Norton, whole and merry, should be standing at the door of life and death within a blink’s turn. That was what had put the sour temper in him — sour at eyes that could not see, sour at holding no certainty of saving the young man: ”If it offends you so, have your godfather carry you back to the Odenheim house. Isn’t there a house physician there to see to your ears? This arrow wound is past me. Be off with you.” Norton knew the man — cold face, warm heart, always had been. He held his chest and worked up a wry smile: ”That wasn’t my meaning... I only don’t want... her seeing me in this state.” ”I truly can’t treat it. The head missing your heart is your luck. But it’s in the lung. Your voice still has a deal of wind in it — it may be the thing hasn’t gone clean through. Yet I dare not draw it for you. Round the heart and lungs it is all vessels. One small nick and the bleeding starts, and before your last words are out of your mouth you’ll be standing in the queue for your next turn at the wheel.” The old physician put it out flat. He had no wish to hold the boy’s treatment back. Lora came to Norton’s side. At the wound the tail of the arrowhead could still be made out; the old physician had already laid styptic powder over the outside. The seeping was heavy — and the old man’s scruple was a just one: the place was dangerous past arguing. ”It would need to come half an inch higher yet, to be sure of clearing the bleed.” The speaker was Leon, an outer robe drawn over his shoulders, wheeled in in his chair. He had made a close study of the one-stroke dagger art that takes a man’s life — and with that very art he had put the bandit chief Wyman down with a single thrust. ”Half an inch? And can you see into a man’s body, then?” The old physician gave it no credit. Leon spoke from the fighting man’s experience. But it had lit a lamp for Lora: of course — with no dissection of the body ever done, the physicians had no true map of what lay within. It was not that they could not take up the knife, nor that they could not sew; it was that they knew a vessel touched meant a hurt no art could mend. Intestinal suturing had been known since the days of the Loenbergs. Under the Empress-Queen who followed there was suturing of the belly wall — and the craft of it layered, from the inside outward. The old physician had spent his whole trade among just such hurts. It was not ignorance in him. Lora turned and sent Lilac after paper and brush. She could rough out the organs and the vessels of that left quarter of the chest — and matched against Leon’s fighting reading, might that not carry the physician to his judgment? Paper and brush came. There was no desk in the room, only the long rack for compounding medicines, and Lora stood and drew at the rack. The vessels were many, but steer past the two main ones, and the danger shrank by half and more. A rough draft, then a fair copy — and the placing stood near enough right. Leon studied her drawing, mapped it once against his own body, and confirmed the place she had marked — marveling, too, that she should have drawn the inward organs as if she had looked at them with her own eyes. The old physician took the sheet, carried it to the doorway, and held it close in to his face. A drawing is not writing: bring it near and the whole of it is lost — nothing whatever to be made out. He flung the sheet on the floor and grumbled: ”Can’t see it. Take the man away, quick. There’s no treating him by me.” But to jolt Norton all the road back into the city — that was a coin tossed blacker still. ”Old physician — your eyes...” Only now did Lora see it: the white cataract drawn across them. No wonder he had been shoving them out the door. But she had never once had a surgery so fine and high in her own two hands; a head full of the principle was worth nothing here. ”Today’s army surgeons would dare no knife either — how many years is it since the Lohenheim regiments fought?” The old physician walked back into the room, talking on to himself: ”Quick, and there may be a chance. Let the time run long, the lung leaks its air — and past that, treatment goes hard.” ”Lora!” Lora had only just taken the sheet up off the floor when she heard her third brother call. She looked up — and it was not Roland alone; several men stood with him, and one of them was her cousin Felix, back from months away. ”Brother — Cousin! How are you here?” Wasn’t he due back tomorrow and no sooner? The awkwardness of months ago had gone clean off Felix; the old composure sat on his face again. He smiled: ”Little cousin — kept well, I hope?” The sight of Felix lit it in her on the instant: we’ve our own man at the shire court now! She asked, quick: ”Has the Windsor case come to trial?” ”No trial. Into the cells a few days to cool their swagger — I’ll hear it after the constables have run their three days of hunting. That bully-boy I had the Windsors carry home on their own backs to doctor. Alive or dead, they’ll not lay him at another door. How goes Norton?” ”Holding, so far. What we need is a physician who’ll put knife to him. Brother — run back to the barracks and find one!” But Roland only laughed: ”The man the Royal College of Physicians itself couldn’t fetch — I’ve fetched him to you.” Lora followed his eyes. Behind the two of them stood a tall, spare young man, his skin the very brown of years spent going into the mountains after herbs and drying under that sun. ”Dr. Osler?” — from inside the room, Leon, surprise and gladness together. He alone, of everyone, addressed him so. It went back to the year Osler’s father cured Leon’s mother of a bowel abscess — another hour’s delay and the pain alone might have finished her. Ever after, the mother had had young Leon style the elder physician ”sir” — and the son who practiced medicine beside him, Osler, no differently. ”How do you go on? Felix said your joints still gave you twinges. That rang wrong in my head — so I came along with him.” Osler’s voice ran low and full, the kind a man trusts before he means to. ”The knee is whole again. You took your trouble for nothing.” The old friends, met again after so long, forgot the small woman standing in the room entirely. Osler went to the bedside and looked into Norton’s wound. The old physician was moving to head him off — Roland laughed: ”Old physician, this one is a physician too, come down from Augustburg. Let him look — see whether it can be treated.” ”From Augustburg, all the more reason to wash his hands! In the door and straight to touching — his craft looks no better than that young lady’s!” So the old physician grumbled. He had marked it all: when the young lady went to the wound just now, her hand never once touched — she looked, and drew back fast. Osler bowed with his hands folded, smiling: ”The elder’s correction is just. Old friends before my eyes — I forgot myself. The fault is mine.” Only then did Leon remember Lora’s drawing of the organs, and he turned and beckoned her over: ”You’ve stood at the back this whole while — I forgot the introduction. Dr. Osler is the man who treated my legs. He’s an old close friend of mine, Roland’s, and Felix’s. The man lives like a stray cloud off its leash — he sets the King himself at nothing. Don’t stand on ceremony with him.” ”He’ll put the knife in? Then Norton can be saved!” So he walked straight past me without seeing me, was all. As if I’d turn chicken-gutted over a little thing like that.