While the matron did as instructed, Anna was arranging instruments on a cloth she had spread out. Then she uncorked a bottle and the piercing smell of carbolic struck Jack hard enough to make him step away, and then back again, lest she think him so easily put off.
The liquid went into the empty basin, along with a pair of scissors and an instrument with handles like a scissors, but that ended in small paddles. She caught his glance.
“Forceps,” she said.
The sound of Anna’s voice had given the matron courage to speak. “And what is all this for?”
Anna ignored her, took a towel from her bag, and, turning, walked along the row of cots until she came to one where one child was sleeping and the other sat, neither awake or asleep.
She handed Jack the towel. “To protect your clothes. Please hold him in the crook of your arm while I get a few things ready. Talk to him, your voice will help.”
“Help what?” the matron asked, her tone much sharper. “What exactly do you think you’re doing, miss?”
Jack had introduced her to the matron as Dr. Savard, but the woman seemed to have forgotten that or gave it no credit. Now Anna paused and turned toward the matron, every fiber of her being thrumming with barely contained anger.
“That child—” Anna pointed toward the cot where Jack still stood. “That little boy is starving to death.”
The matron’s mouth fell open and snapped shut. “He is fed, I assure you. He receives a full ration, three times a day, the wet nurses see to him like the others—”
Anna interrupted her. “But he takes almost nothing.”
The matron drew up. “And how would you know that?”
“Because,” Anna said, biting off each word. “He is starving to death.”
“Do you see how many children we have in just this one room?” the matron said. She looked over the room. “We don’t have the time to force-feed picky children.”
All the color blanched from Anna’s face.
She turned away from the matron and looked at Jack directly. In an alarmingly calm tone she said, “Could you bring him here, please, and hold him firmly in the crook of your arm? I need to look in his mouth.”
“His mouth?” the matron sputtered.
Jack hoped never to experience a look like the one Anna turned on the matron.
“Whoever examined this child when he was admitted failed to notice that he has ankyloglossia. The frenulum that anchors his tongue is abnormally short and tight, which makes it impossible for him to suck properly. And that,” she said, enunciating every syllable, “would account for his pickiness.”
The matron started to protest, but Jack had had enough.
“Leave,” he told her. “Don’t come back before Dr. Savard has finished here.”
The matron looked at Anna and Jack and back to Anna again, and she fled the room.
“Thank you,” Anna said. “Now if you could bring him to me.”
The child weighed less than Anna’s doctor’s bag, a bundle of bones held together by tendons and skin. The belly was distended, and the eyes dull and sunken.
“Hold him gently, but don’t let him move.” She spoke to Jack, but all her attention was on the baby. With her left hand she pressed gently on the child’s cheeks until the mouth opened. She had poured more carbolic over her hands, and it made his eyes water.
Very quickly she used two fingers to explore the open mouth, her head turned away, Jack thought, to concentrate on what touch told her.
“This will take just a moment,” she murmured to Jack. To the boy she spoke more softly, a low crooning. “You haven’t been able to eat, have you? But that’s about to change. You’re a very strong boy to have survived this place as long as you have.”
The child blinked at her drowsily.
In a series of swift, tightly controlled movements, Anna used the forceps to grasp the boy’s tongue and hold it away so that she had a clear view of its underside. With her free hand she took up the scissors, reached in and snipped, as cleanly as a seamstress cutting a wayward thread.
With that the boy finally roused, jerking in Jack’s arms. He opened his mouth and wailed, full throated, insulted, alive, his lethargy banished.
Anna had dropped the bloody instruments back into the basin and picked up a square of damp gauze. When she turned back to Jack she gave him a small, tight smile. “Almost finished,” she said. “Hold him still, please.”
Inside the open mouth the small tongue flapped wildly, as if sudden freedom were more than it could manage. This time when Anna opened the boy’s mouth he tried to turn away from her, but she held his face firmly and packed gauze under his tongue.
“It will stop bleeding quite quickly,” she said. As if Jack had challenged her somehow.
Then she looked up and gestured to the matron, who stood in the shadows by the door. Reluctantly the woman came toward them, her arms crossed at her waist.
“I will report this,” she began, and Anna cut her off with a motion of her hand.