Anna tried to smile. It made sense that Aunt Quinlan would worry about such things, simply because she had suffered so many losses herself. Nathaniel was gone, but she had also lost three girls before age ten, one to childbirth, and her second youngest to a cancer of the breast when she was just fifty. Only her oldest was left. There were grandchildren and great-grandchildren; she had her brother Gabriel, though she hadn’t seen him in a long time for the simple reason that she would not go home to the village where she was born, and he wouldn’t leave it. She was closest to her sister-in-law Martha, who wrote every week and did sometimes come to the city. And there were nieces and nephews and their families. But she felt the losses, and how could she not?
She said, “Auntie, I was right here, beside you, when the worst news came. I’d like to think that I learned something from you. That I have some of your strength.”
“That’s just it,” her aunt said. “That’s the hardest part, being strong enough to let the hurt in, and deal with it, and then let it settle in time, as it will.”
“Yes,” Anna said. “I see that. I can make one promise at least. I will think of you and this conversation when things are hard, and try not to turn away from it.”
“That’s all I’m asking,” said her aunt. “Now eat before you have to go off to the courthouse, or Mrs. Lee will scold me without mercy.”
“I have a few more minutes.” Anna bit into a sandwich, thinking. When she swallowed she said, “You’ve been following the news about Janine Campbell in the paper?”
“I have.”
“The rumors going around are that she killed her boys.”
Aunt Quinlan had a particular look, one that said she was at the end of her patience, and it was there now. “That’s pure foolishness.”
Anna swallowed another bite. “What do you think happened to them?”
“I can’t say, but I do know that nobody is asking the real question, the important one. Ubi est morbus?”
Anna laughed out loud to hear her aunt quoting the great physician Morgagni. Where is the disease?
“Where did that old chestnut come from?” she asked.
“This family is chock-full of doctors,” her aunt said. “You know when your ma and pa came to Paradise to take over Hannah’s practice, they lived with us at first. And did they love to talk medicine. They did it over every meal. Sometimes your aunt Hannah would be there too and they’d get into arguments and drag out books to prove each other wrong or themselves right. Nothing mean-spirited about it, mind. They were laughing half the time. And when they couldn’t get anywhere with a case, one of them would put that question on the table, Ubi est morbus?, and they’d start looking at the evidence again, from the very beginning. And most of the time, they figured out what was going on, and more than that, why they had been looking in the wrong place.”
“You’re not asking me what disease Mrs. Campbell had.”
“No, I’m saying that you have got to look and think symptom, not disease. If she’s a symptom, then ask, where is the disease?”
And Anna knew two things: her aunt was right, and she wouldn’t be able to get it out of her head until she could talk it through with Jack.
? ? ?
THE COURTROOM WAS crowded and hot, and Sophie wished herself away, someplace where she wouldn’t have to sit and listen to men talk about Janine Campbell. A woman they had never known and would never understand, not if her ghost came forward to answer their questions.
When the coroner announced that Archer Campbell was delayed, there was a great sigh from the reporters at the back of the room. Then he called Anna to the stand and Sophie thought that they would have enough to write about, once Anna started to testify.
She took her seat across from the jury of men who were, supposedly, her peers. With the exception of Comstock, all of them dressed in somber colors and expensively tailored suits. Most of them had been reading journals or newspapers, but as she approached, Abraham Jacobi and Manuel Thalberg met her gaze and nodded, as colleagues greeted each other across a room. Dr. Lambert even raised a hand, which was a bit of a surprise. She couldn’t remember ever speaking to the man, but apparently he knew Anna.
The coroner left most of the questions to the physicians, and there were many of them, but Anna was a good teacher and that carried over to her testimony. Even when Josiah Stanton asked the same question three times like a particularly dull student, she stayed calm. She described her education, talked about medical school and work at dispensaries and clinics when she was an intern, about postgraduate work and the professors she had studied with in New York and abroad.
Stanton wore an expression of unapologetic surprise that a woman physician should have such credentials. For a moment Sophie thought he was going to challenge Anna, but then he thought better of it. And good for him.
The coroner had only one real question for her.
“In your professional opinion, Dr. Savard, how did Mrs. Campbell die?”
Sophie appreciated the man’s clarity and lack of melodrama, and so did Anna, because she answered in kind.
“Sometime late on Tuesday or early Wednesday Mrs. Campbell attempted to induce an abortion on herself by means of an instrument as much as ten inches long, with a keen edge. In the process she punctured her uterus and caused damage to other abdominal organs. Infection will have set in immediately and once that happened, her death was inevitable.”
“Why would you assume that?” Hawthorn asked.