Clara said, “I do. I would like the record to show that my concern is first and always the health of my patients. My responsibilities to the women who study medicine I take just as seriously.”
Stewart looked long and hard at Comstock, who had flushed to the roots of his hair. His whole body was shaking with rage. Comstock amused Stewart and many of the other men in the courtroom, but Anna was less dismissive. In him Anna saw a man who was controlled by the most basic and childish of impulses, a man who had convinced himself that dealing out pain and humiliation was a sacred mission granted to him by a loving and discriminating God. Because he had earned that right. Most of all, Comstock was a man who had just been humiliated and who would not forget or forgive. He would vent his anger on Clara if he could, and if not, on someone like her.
The judge’s gavel gave one sharp rap.
“All charges are dismissed. Dr. Garrison, you are free to go. Court is adjourned.”
Anna turned to Sophie. “Tell me about this Mr. Campbell.”
Sophie stood up but lowered her voice. “It was his wife who asked me about contraception. She was very low.”
The details came to Anna right away, and with them her voice caught, her voice gone dry. “Did you realize—”
“No,” Sophie said, her voice low. “I had no idea he works for Comstock. Of course I had no idea.”
“Have you already sent the pamphlet?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think his wife could be working with Comstock too?”
Comstock did make a habit of setting up elaborate traps for physicians he suspected of providing patients with information about birth control, but Sophie could not imagine that a woman in labor would have been part of such a scheme. She remembered too well how overwhelmed Mrs. Campbell had been. Desperation like that could not be feigned so easily. She shook her head.
The crowd inched forward, and they went with it at a pace that threatened to bring them face-to-face with Comstock and his associates. The crowd shifted and Anna found herself suddenly close enough to Mr. Campbell to see flecks of tobacco caught up in his red whiskers. At that moment his gaze turned to her and he stilled, as if the sight of a woman in the crowd was more than he could explain to himself. Then he saw Sophie—Anna watched his gaze shift and then focus.
Without looking away he spoke a word into Comstock’s ear and the two of them pivoted like puppets. Anna looked away, but not before her eyes met Comstock’s, as calculating and distant and dark as a bird of prey.
? ? ?
WHEN SHE GOT back to the hospital Anna found that her patient was just coming out of the state of unconsciousness that had made her surgery possible. Two of Anna’s best medical students were with her, but the girl was confused and in pain, and she batted fitfully at the glass being held to her mouth. The other women on the ward were watching with interest, and Anna jerked the privacy curtain shut behind herself.
She said, “No luck finding someone who speaks Hungarian?”
“Here and gone,” Naomi Greenleaf said. “She talked to the patient and I took notes. She has an odd name, Aleike—”
“—Gyula,” Ada Wentworth finished, pronouncing the unusual name carefully. “Sixteen years old. Her husband is a laborer on the new bridge.”
There was a pause while they all looked out the window, a habit that had dug itself in over the last years as the Brooklyn Bridge neared completion. It was so improbable—its size, the idea that anything man-made could span the expanse of the East River—that the sight of it against the sky might be taken for an illusion. And still the newspapers claimed that this spring it would open for traffic.
Ada went on, “He brought her here and went to work for fear of losing his spot. She asked through the translator if she can still have children. We were careful to make sure she understood about the surgery. She wanted us to know she doesn’t have any money and she asked for a priest again. The translator said there’s a priest who speaks Hungarian up near the Foundling; she’ll send word. And we got a good amount of broth into her, but as you can see, she won’t take the laudanum.”
The girl settled a little when Anna came to sit beside her and put a hand on her brow, damp with fever sweat. She was so young, and still in her expression Anna saw that she had already resigned herself to one kind of death or another. Despite the exacting measures they took to achieve and maintain hygienic conditions, in a case like this infection was very likely and might well claim her life. If it didn’t, if they could save her, she would fall pregnant too soon with the same outcome, or worse. She had only one purpose in life, to bear and raise children. If she was brave and determined enough to seek out a way to avoid pregnancy despite such expectations, the law would punish her.