SOPHIE AND MARY Putnam left with the jurors and the coroner to make the trip to Bellevue while Anna stayed just where she was. She said good-bye to Conrad and his law clerk and spoke to the friends who had come to lend support, but she never moved from her seat.
Finally the reporters approached her, but she sent them off with a sharp shake of the head. She had no answers for them, but she did have an unanswered question of her own, one that had been growing in her mind since her aunt put it there: Ubi est morbus?
It was the right question to put to the jury, and she had come very close to saying as much. Then Comstock had interrupted her with his outrage over that pamphlet, one he claimed to have found in Mrs. Campbell’s dresser. Nothing Comstock had to say was a surprise, but the pamphlet had been something of a shock, because she really had never seen it before.
From that fact followed two questions: what happened to the pamphlet Sophie had sent to Mrs. Campbell, and where had the one Comstock showed her come from? Which made Anna wonder what else she had gotten wrong from the start. It should have occurred to her that Mrs. Campbell would visit other doctors and midwives in the hope that someone would give her the help that Sophie would not provide.
Contrary to what Comstock and the physicians on the jury seemed to believe, women in distress could find a way to end an unwanted pregnancy, so long as they could pay for it. For every case that came to public view because something went terribly wrong, there were a hundred or more that remained a private matter. Though she had not said as much to Jack, Anna knew of three midwives and two male physicians who performed the procedure as a matter of course, and without ever having lost a mother. She knew another, who was retired, very well: her own cousin Amelie had cared for women in the city for forty years.
It occurred to her now that she didn’t know who had delivered Mrs. Campbell’s first three children. More than that, it was possible, she admitted to herself, that in her desperation Janine Campbell had put herself into the hands of a charlatan, one of the men and women who worked the darker corners of worst neighborhoods. Someone who took her money and promised results but had not the slightest training or interest in anything but the coin to be had.
Ubi est morbus?
Janine Campbell’s social standing and income made it unlikely that she had ventured into the tenements to find the help she needed. And so Anna found herself back at square one.
By the courtroom clock she saw that she had an hour and a half until the inquest reconvened. A lot could be done in that amount of time, and so she left, slipping through one of the side entrances onto the street, where she hailed a cab to take her back to the New Amsterdam. If she thought about something else hard and long enough, often the answer to a difficult question that evaded her would present itself.
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WHEN JACK FINALLY got to the New Amsterdam he found he had missed Anna by a quarter hour. She had gone back to the Tombs, where the inquest was about to reconvene.
Oscar hailed a cab and they reached Judge Benedict’s courtroom just as the jury took their seats. From their expressions it seemed to Jack that they had not come to any kind of concord, which might mean another hour or more before the coroner closed deliberations for the day.
Anna sat in her usual spot beside Sophie, both of them in conversation with another woman Jack didn’t know. Conrad was listening closely while his clerk took notes.
Jack followed Oscar to the back of the room to stand against the wall, the usual spot for any police officers who had an interest in a trial or inquest. He watched Hawthorn, who stood behind the bench, thumbs tucked into his vest pockets while he stared at the floor. His complexion had gone the color of old cheese, and even from the back of the room the perspiration on his brow was obvious. Jack had the idea that he wouldn’t be eager to watch another autopsy anytime soon.
Hawthorn cleared his throat a number of times before he could be heard. “I am going to poll the jury on a single question, before we proceed. Gentlemen of the jury, on the basis of the evidence you have just seen, do you concur with the testimony of Dr. Savard, in which she stated her opinion that it was Mrs. Campbell herself who performed the operation to end a pregnancy?”
There was silence for a long moment, and then Abraham Jacobi spoke, his tone modulated and professional. He was not a big man, but his voice was deep and had a rasp, as was sometimes the case with men who were too free with tobacco. His German accent was strong, but there was nothing in the least inarticulate about the way he expressed himself.
He said, “I agree with Dr. Savard that the operation was done in a violent way, and I find it hard to imagine any practitioner, even a new or poorly trained one, could have done such damage. For those reasons, I am satisfied with a ruling that identifies Mrs. Campbell as the cause of her own death.”