The Dead Boy's Papers

Chapter 1: The Curtain

The trick was never the cutting. The trick was making sure the patient looked at her father.

Catherine Lydon pressed a folded rag soaked in whiskey against the man's forearm while Dr. Abel Lydon stood at the bedside, swaying like a mast in mild wind, and spoke with the ghost of authority he still wore like a threadbare coat.

"You'll feel some pressure," Abel said. His voice carried the old steadiness, the way a cracked bell still rings. "My assistant will hold the wound while I work."

The assistant was his daughter. The work was hers.

Cate stood behind a curtain of muslin that divided the surgery from the rest of their cramped parlor on Sycamore Street. The curtain was stained with iodine and lamp oil and the particular amber of old blood that never quite washes out. She had hung it herself at fourteen when she realized her father's hands had begun to shake badly enough to nick an artery.

She was nineteen now. Five years of standing behind that curtain, threading catgut through a curved needle while Abel narrated as if he were the one doing it.

"Steady now," Abel murmured, and Cate made the first suture.

The patient was a German immigrant named Hessler—no, she corrected herself, a German immigrant named Pfeiffer, a tanner from the riverfront whose hand had met a fleshing knife at an unfortunate angle. The wound ran from the base of his thumb to his wrist, deep enough to show the pearlescent sheath of tendon but mercifully short of severing it.

Pfeiffer stared at Abel's face, as patients always did, because Abel still looked like a doctor even when he wasn't one. Tall, gaunt, with deep-set eyes that suggested either profound thought or profound exhaustion. His white hair was dramatic. His jaw was firm. He was the picture of medical competence, provided you didn't look at his hands.

Cate's hands, by contrast, were small, rough, and absolutely still.

She placed six sutures in the time it would have taken her father to place two, if he could have placed them at all. Each one was tight, even, and spaced precisely a quarter inch apart, the way the anatomy text on her bedside table prescribed. The text was Astley Cooper's Surgical Essays, stolen from her father's shelf and read so many times its spine had cracked.

"There," Abel said when she finished. "That should heal clean."

Pfeiffer looked down at his hand, wrapped now in clean linen, and nodded with the particular gratitude of a man who has no idea what just happened.

"Thank you, Doctor."

"Rest it. Keep it dry. Come back in a week."

Pfeiffer left a dollar on the table—more than they usually got—and limped out into the October evening. Through the front window, Cate watched him cross the muddy street, favoring his left side from some older injury, and disappear toward the canal.

Abel sank into his chair and reached for the bottle he kept in the instrument drawer.

Cate pulled the curtain aside and began cleaning the table.

"That was good work," Abel said.

"You should eat something."

"I said that was good work, Catherine."

"I heard you."

He poured two fingers of whiskey and drank them in one motion, the way other men drank water. His hands were shaking again. They always shook worse after a patient visit, as if the effort of pretending steadied him temporarily and the release of pretending cost him double.

"Your mother would have—"

"Don't."

He closed his mouth. This was their oldest negotiation. He could mention her mother's name in passing, in the context of domestic memory—her mother's bread, her mother's garden, her mother's singing voice. But he could not invoke her mother's opinion about Cate's future, because her mother was dead and opinions belonged to the living.

Marguerite Lydon had died bearing Colin, Cate's younger brother, who had then died of scarlet fever at six, leaving behind a baptismal certificate, a pair of small shoes, and a gap in the family that no one discussed because discussing it made Abel drink faster.

Cate wiped the table with lye soap and hung the instruments to dry on their hooks. Scalpel, forceps, tenaculum, bone saw. Each one was good English steel, bought in Abel's prosperous years, and each one bore the faint patina of use that no amount of polishing could remove.

They were the most valuable things the family owned.

"Cate."

She turned. Abel was looking at her with the expression she dreaded most—not drunk, not distant, but clear. Lucid. Present. In those moments he saw exactly what he had become and what he had made her become, and the seeing was worse than the blindness.

"You're better than I was," he said quietly. "At your age. Better than I was."

"Stop it."

"It's true."

"It doesn't matter if it's true. True doesn't feed anyone."

She hung the last instrument and dried her hands on her apron. From upstairs came the sound of Prue coughing—a dry, persistent cough that had started in August and refused to leave.

"I'm going to check on Prue," Cate said.

Abel nodded and poured another drink.

The stairs creaked in the same three places they had always creaked. Cate knew them by heart: third step, seventh step, the landing. She climbed them the way she did everything in this house—quickly, efficiently, without looking back.

Prudence Lydon was sixteen and had their mother's face, which meant she was beautiful in the way that made practical people nervous. Dark hair, wide-set gray eyes, a mouth that curved naturally toward amusement even when nothing was funny. She was sitting up in bed with a book open on her knees and a shawl around her shoulders, and she was not reading.

"How's the tanner?" Prue asked.

"He'll keep his thumb."

"And Father?"

"He'll keep his bottle."

Prue smiled, which was the saddest thing about her. She smiled at everything, including the things that should have made her cry, as if she had decided early that the world was going to be terrible and she might as well find it funny.

"Aunt Lavinia sent a letter," Prue said, nodding toward the dresser.

Cate picked it up. The handwriting was their aunt's—precise, slanted, disapproving even in its loops.

"She wants to visit next week," Prue said. "She says she's worried about our situation."

"She's worried about her reputation."

"Same thing, to her."

Cate set the letter down without opening it. Aunt Lavinia was their mother's sister, a widow of comfortable means who lived on the respectable side of town and treated the Lydon household the way one treats a stain on a good tablecloth: with aggressive attention and faint horror.

"How's your hip?" Cate asked.

Prue's smile flickered. "Fine."

"Prue."

"It aches. It always aches. It's been aching since June. Asking me about it every day doesn't make it ache less."

"Let me look."

"You looked yesterday."

"Let me look again."

Prue sighed and shifted the blanket aside. Cate knelt and pressed her fingers gently against the swelling on Prue's right hip, just below the crest of the ilium. The swelling was harder than it had been a month ago. Warmer, too.

Cate kept her face neutral.

"Well?" Prue asked.

"It's the same."

It was not the same. It was larger. But Cate had learned from five years behind the curtain that the first thing a doctor must control is not the patient's body but the patient's fear.

"You're a terrible liar," Prue said.

"I'm an excellent liar. You're just too smart for your own good."

"Runs in the family."

Cate tucked the blanket back around her sister and stood. Through the window she could see the river, brown and sluggish in the autumn light, carrying flatboats and keelboats and the particular stink of a city that had grown too fast for its sewers.

Somewhere out there, cholera was waiting.

It always was, on the river.

"Read to me?" Prue asked.

Cate sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the book. It was a novel—one of the romances Prue loved and Cate tolerated—and she read two chapters aloud while the light faded and the sounds of Sycamore Street rose through the floorboards: cart wheels, a dog barking, a man singing badly in what might have been Irish.

When Prue fell asleep, Cate went back downstairs.

Abel was unconscious in his chair, the bottle empty, his mouth open. He looked old. He was forty-seven, which was not old, but drink had added twenty years to his face and subtracted them from his competence.

Cate covered him with a blanket, locked the front door, and sat at the kitchen table with a candle stub and her father's copy of Bell's Operative Surgery.

She read until the candle guttered out.

Then she sat in the dark, listening to her father breathe and her sister cough, and thought about all the things she knew how to fix and all the things she didn't.

The river moved outside, carrying its cargo of commerce and disease.

The curtain hung in the parlor, waiting for morning.