“Percuss?”
This time I did sigh. “Here, I’ll show you.” I walked across the room and threw myself on the settee by the door, faceup. “Come here; kneel down. Here. No. Wait.”
Remembering I was wearing a corset—which you couldn’t feel a thing through—I stood up and indicated Liam should lie down where I had been; his eyes widened, but he obeyed. His blue coat fell open, revealing a fawn waistcoat over a chalk-white shirt, as I perched on the edge of the settee and leaned over him, placing my hands on his lean abdomen. It felt comforting to be a doctor again, even briefly.
“Touch everything lightly at first, all over—like this—and then with a little more pressure, lightly, your hands like so. But don’t look at your hands. Look at his face. If you touch something tender, the face will show it. If that happens, pay attention to where it was, so you can tell me.”
In disregard of my own advice, I had been looking at my hands, but then I glanced up. I noticed tiny flecks of gold in the blue of his irises; I was aware of the width of his shoulders and his faint smell of bay leaf soap, of coffee and ham. He was motionless except for the subtle rise and fall of his breath, expression inscrutable, yet I could sense his focus on me, as women can. I took my hands off him and leaped to my feet, irritated. This day just kept getting worse.
“You probably won’t get a chance to do it anyway,” I said as I walked to the window. The breakfast parlor was at the back of the house, the view of our scraggly little garden and the backs of other houses.
“Probably not,” he said. He quickly joined me at the window, but I did not look at him. Had he imagined I was making some stealthy sexual advance? Trust me, I thought; if I do, you’ll know.
“For now, just get a history. Ask him about, oh, night sweats, shortness of breath, tingling in the limbs. Headache, faintness, vomiting, spots in the vision. Pain moving the head or difficulty swallowing. If his urine is unusually dark. If his stool looks any different than usual. And itching! Ask him if he itches.”
“What do you think he has?” Liam sounded so alarmed that I laughed. Robert walked in to clear the breakfast things, and our conversation was over.
SHORTLY AFTER NOON, LIAM HEADED OFF ON HIS MEDICAL ERRAND, and I was left to wander the house aimlessly. I had already had my morning conference with Mrs. Smith; my hair and clothing had been worked over by Grace. I had nothing but time, and the unfortunate combination of active brain and idle hands. In the drawing room, staring out at the street, I considered the waste of human capital that I was now part of. Maid, mother, milliner, seamstress, housewife, midwife, fishwife, alewife, barmaid, whore. That was it, except for the odd actress or authoress. Yet intelligent, energetic women had to exist in the same proportion in every era; human nature did not change so fast. How did they manage it, how did so few go insane?
This was a question my time here had brought me no closer to answering. I picked up my sewing and took a seat by the window. Though I would gladly have paid tailors to do everything, perpetuating the illusion of my assumed identity meant a workbasket of sewing supplies and a backlog of projects. Medical training had made me dexterous, but sewing was so boring that I was always setting it aside in favor of a book. We’d read extensively from the period as part of Preparation, but found on arriving here lots of novels that had been lost to history. Often terrible and deserving of obscurity, but fascinating anyway for what they revealed about their time.
So far I had completed two pillowcases, four petticoats, and one and a half shirts for Liam, probably a week’s work for a normal woman. I picked up the half-done shirt; the gathered part where sleeve met shoulder was tricky, but not beyond me, if I paid attention. Heaving a sigh, I threaded a needle and got to work.
HENRY AUSTEN, HIT BY HIS MYSTERIOUS AILMENT IN THE FALL OF 1815, was out of commission for weeks, unable to negotiate on his sister’s behalf with John Murray, soon to be the publisher of Emma. Probably his illness also caused him to pay less attention to the bank of Austen, Maunde and Tilson than he should have at this critical time, with banks failing all over England, a result of economic shocks connected to the end of the war with France.
What I knew came from my study, in Preparation, of Jane Austen’s letters written to her sister in mid-October from Hans Place. One tells of “a bilious attack with fever” that had sent Henry home early from the bank and to his bed, adding, “He is calomeling & therefore in a way to be better.” Calomel, or mercury chloride, is a purgative in small amounts; the Georgians loved dosing themselves with mercury. It did not help; as the letter continues the next day, he is still in bed: “It is a fever—something bilious, but cheifly Inflammatory.” The apothecary had already come twice, taking twenty ounces of blood each time; bloodletting was another popular remedy.
His illness was, in a way, not important: he would recover. Yet if we could manage to become part of his life, Liam trusted as doctor and friend, we would then be in position to observe when, in early 1816, Jane Austen would start showing symptoms of whatever would kill her a year and a half later. Our other major goal was to figure out what that was. You could argue it was irrelevant, centuries after the fact, but her early death has long tormented her biographers and her fans. The hunger to answer this question was why the Project Team had needed a doctor; it was why I was here.
Henry’s illness was the opening, the reason we had been sent at this moment, in this guise. But could we make use of it?
I JUMPED UP AT THE SOUND OF A KNOCK TO FIND OUR CARRIAGE stopped below and Liam at the door. “I thought we might take a ride,” he said to me from the bottom of the stairs. I grabbed my spencer and was out the door in time to hear him sending Wilcox back to the stables. Liam driving himself meant we could talk freely. Which meant he had something to say.
“Well?” I demanded. We were seated on the box and had reached the relative calm of Hyde Park.
“He said he’s been having some kind of attack. But no details. ‘A violent bilious attack, my dear fellow,’ he kept saying.”
“Which probably means vomiting. Did he mention that? How did he seem?”
“Weak. Yellowish.”
“Was he in bed?”
“He talked of getting up later.”
“Did he say whether his skin itched?”
“He said it did. He seemed surprised to be asked.”
“Does he drink a lot, when the ladies withdraw?”
“No more than anyone else.”
“But you both drank heavily, that night you first met.”
“Uncharacteristic. We were having such good talk—one bowl of punch led to another.”
“So, occasional binge drinker.”
I was merely thinking aloud, but Liam said: “You make it sound pathological. This is just life, as they live it now.”
“Was his urine darker than usual, did you ask?”