“I’m willing to answer your questions, Mr. Comstock, but one by one. Could you start again?”
“I am Inspector Comstock,” he said stiffly. “And I’ll start again, but at the end. Are you familiar with the pamphlet that was found in her dresser drawer?”
“I was never in her home, and I know nothing about the contents of her dresser drawers.”
“Come now, Dr. Savard. Are you familiar with the pamphlet we found, or not?”
“I don’t recognize the title,” Anna said.
“No? Well, if the coroner will permit me to show it to you—”
Anna didn’t wait for the coroner’s opinion. She just held out a hand, looking Comstock directly in the eye. His mouth worked, puckering and jerking with pleasure he didn’t try to conceal. He stood up to approach her, but the coroner’s clerk stopped him.
“I’ll take it, sir.”
Anna could not let herself smirk at Comstock, and so she smiled at the clerk and thanked him.
She turned the pages of the pamphlet deliberately, slowly, and then handed it back to the clerk.
“I have seen pamphlets on hygiene, of course. Not this exact pamphlet, but others like it.”
“Isn’t it true that the hygienic measures described in that pamphlet are also used to induce abortion?”
“If there is a discussion of abortion in that pamphlet, I didn’t see it.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
Anna decided to give him the information he so clearly wanted. She said, “I have treated women who flooded themselves with lye soap, carbolic acid, rubbing alcohol, gin, quinine, bleach—the list is very long and the results are often ugly. Women with a little more money sometimes take medicines. Most of them are nothing more than weak tea; others are as bad as arsenic. Many women try three or four times with such medicines and then seek help elsewhere. The very poor care for themselves. They use straws or wires or bougies, almost any kind of spoon or slender, long instrument. Rubber tubing, metal probes, whalebone stays from old corsets. Your pamphlet addresses none of these things. And as far as I could see, it provided no instructions on terminating a pregnancy. Does that answer your question?”
Comstock met her gaze with sputtering animosity. He said, “I have no further questions at this time.”
“Then let’s move on,” the coroner said.
Anna turned toward him. “If I may suggest a solution to the question on the table?” Without waiting, she went on. “Dr. Lambert could speak to the question of how capable women are of injuring themselves. Dr. Lambert?”
Lambert’s whole face contorted with surprise, but he spoke to Anna directly. “I think this point won’t be settled without a second postmortem. The remains?”
“The Bellevue dead house,” said the clerk.
Anna sat back, clearly satisfied to have achieved exactly this outcome. The coroner seemed less pleased, but he didn’t try to object. The jury would go to the morgue and the inquest would reconvene at four.
Conrad leaned forward and touched Sophie’s shoulder. “Go with them,” he said. “Your testimony will be compromised if you don’t.”
Sophie inhaled a sharp breath. The idea of a second autopsy in the damp recesses of the Bellevue dead house was unwelcome. It wasn’t so much the smells of putrification and mold, or the water that leached into the walls from the East River; those things were never pleasant but could be coped with. It was the idea of the men in the jury gathered around Janine Campbell, poking and prodding when she had been through so much already. But she would have to be there. With a female physician present the others would be utterly professional and focused on procedure. She only wished she could ask Anna to come along, but it was too much of an imposition.
Then help came from another quarter. Mary Putnam waved her closer, took Sophie’s hand, and shook it firmly. Small and wiry, a plain woman who could be transformed and animated into something more when she had a medical issue to debate. Mary Putnam had also been one of their professors at medical school. Her expertise as a physician and a scientist was unquestioned, even by the most unapproachable male doctors. She was without a doubt the most exacting instructor Sophie had ever encountered. Together with her husband they made a formidable team. And they were both here.
Sophie reminded herself that she could reveal every facet of the Campbell case to Abraham and Mary Putnam Jacobi without hesitation or fear, because she had given the best treatment there was to offer.
“I’m coming too,” Mary Putnam said. “The more female practitioners present, the better.”
“Will it be possible to keep Comstock out of the room?” Sophie asked.
“It will be possible,” she said. “I will see to it.”
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