? ? ?
IT WAS PAST three by the time Jack got back to the New Amsterdam, where he found Anna waiting for him in her office. To his gently raised brow she said, “Her blood loss was too severe and the infection too far advanced. She began to convulse and I lost her. Someday when blood transfusions are safe, cases like this one will take a better end.”
Jack sat down across from her, rested his elbow on the arm of the chair and his chin on his palm, and regarded Anna. Her demeanor was resigned, as it must be, he understood, for anyone who practiced medicine.
He said, “Her husband passed me on my way out, earlier.”
Anna closed her eyes. “Yes, I know.”
“Very distraught?”
“Angry, I would say. Confrontational. When I told him she had asked for Dr. Savard by name, he looked at me as if I had been caught in a lie. He said, ‘She has a proper doctor at Women’s Hospital, she has no business in a place like this.’ As if the New Amsterdam were a brothel. I was glad he didn’t ask me about a cause of death. I don’t think he would have liked hearing about an abortion.”
“Has the coroner been notified?”
She stood and stretched. “Yes, Mr. Abernathy took care of it. There will be an autopsy and an inquest, and I’ll have to testify. But not until Monday. Shall we go?”
? ? ?
IN THE END Anna was glad to have missed the family party on the river. Once Cap and Sophie had sailed, they would spend the afternoon together in the garden with the visitors; for now it suited her to sit on Cap’s terrace in the late afternoon sun with the people she loved best in the world.
Then Sophie surprised her. As soon as Anna started to describe the emergency surgery that had caused the change in plans, her cousin went very still.
“Don’t you remember, Anna? I told you about Mrs. Campbell, you must remember. It was the day you went to Hoboken in my place.”
Jack sat forward, his attention suddenly focused.
Sophie was saying, “Her fourth boy, the oldest barely five, and she was terribly afraid of another pregnancy.”
Anna did recall. “The woman married to the postal inspector.”
“Ah,” Jack said. “I crossed paths with the man when he got to the New Amsterdam.”
There was a small, fraught silence in which Anna knew she and Sophie were thinking the same thing: Mrs. Campbell had asked about contraceptives, and Sophie had sent her a pamphlet, anonymously.
Sophie asked, “How was he with you?”
Anna would have liked to forget Archer Campbell, who had raged at her like a man dressing down a groom responsible for the loss of a valuable mare. She had held on to her temper and swallowed her irritation, and most of all she had subdued her own feelings about losing a patient. Campbell was condescending and insulting, but he was also newly bereaved and must be shown both patience and compassion. Nothing she said had satisfied him, and in the end he went off to see what was keeping the coroner.
“He didn’t know she was pregnant,” Anna said to Sophie.
Sophie inclined her head to one side as if she had something to say, but then thought better of it. Instead she hummed, a low rough sound.
“He’ll never accept that she had an abortion. I can only imagine what he’s telling the coroner.”
Jack rubbed her shoulder. “They’ll do an autopsy, won’t they?”
Anna made that same soft sound, neither yes or no.
“Get used to that sound,” Cap told Jack. He sat a little apart from them, wrapped in blankets even in the warmth of the sun. To Anna he seemed content and agitated all at once, as though he had just come back from a long and strenuous hike and was determined to leave on another in short order.
“Used to what sound?” Jack asked.
“That rough humming in the back of the throat. They both do it. Ask any medical question that has to do with an actual human being and their voices drop a register and all you get is that noncommittal throat clearing. I think they’re taught how to do it in medical school, like a secret handshake.”
Sophie gave him a half smile. “Oh dear. Who told you about the secret handshake?”
Cap turned to Anna. “How many vertebrae in the human spine?”
She considered not answering, and then gave in. “Five fused together that make up the sacrum, the four coccygeal bones that form the tailbone, then seven cervical, twelve thoracic, and five lumbar vertebrae.”
“Thank you,” Cap said. “I’ll get out my abacus to add that all together later. Now I’ve been meaning to say that I’ve had a stitch in my side all day. Does that mean something?”
Anna and Sophie turned toward him, heads canted at the same angle, and hummed in exactly the same key. Then they exchanged a glance and laughed.
“You’ve figured us out,” Sophie said to Cap. “Now I will have to show you the secret handshake.”