The Furies (38 page)

‘Do you really have to leave right now?'

He sighed. ‘There is nothing I would rather do than stay with you, but my travel licence specifies I must present my paper at noon tomorrow and leave the country immediately afterwards. And I don't want to be made a prisoner for the third time in my life.'

‘
Third
?'

He smiled. ‘Another story, Elspeth, for another time.'

Her mouth felt suddenly dry at the thought of him leaving so soon. ‘Will you go back to Austria?' she asked.

‘No. I have a surgical job in Chicago.'

‘
America
?'

He nodded and then she suddenly remembered. ‘Dr Plotz?' she asked.

‘Yes. He acted as my sponsor. I plan to settle permanently in Chicago. I'm booked on a liner that leaves Southampton for New York the day after the conference finishes.'

Permanently, he had said, and she felt an ache in the pit of her stomach. She glanced across at the taxi: the engine was still idling and the pungent smell of exhaust fumes was strong as the driver impatiently tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.

‘In fact,' Gabriel continued, ‘I must go now, if I'm not to miss my train.'

He led her out from behind the stone column and back to the taxi. As he opened the door, she felt an awful emptiness welling up inside herself, as if she was standing on a high tower looking down at the ground far below. He had only just arrived: to have waited so long to see him, and yet to know he would shortly be travelling to another continent – it was almost too much to bear.

He seemed to sense her unhappiness and held her close as he looked into her eyes. ‘Living in America has made me realise how old-fashioned and inhibiting Austria is. The nation will change of course – the Hapsburgs have gone and there will be a republic – but it will take time, and I don't want to waste another moment of my life. I have an opportunity for a fresh start in a country unconcerned by the old conventions and traditions. And women doctors are readily accepted in America. There are already over a thousand women in clinical practice, and in Chicago there are even husband and wife surgical teams—'

‘What are you saying—?'

‘We need to go
now
, pal, or you'll definitely miss the overnighter,' the taxi driver barked.

‘Yes, alright,' Gabriel said to him, then turned back to Elspeth and kissed her hard. Then he drew back. ‘I must go now, Elspeth. Everything you need to know is in the book.'

And before she could say anything, he had ducked into the back seat of the taxi, slamming the door behind him. The taxi immediately accelerated away, quickly rounding a corner in the street and disappearing from view.

It had all happened so quickly that as she stood watching the empty space where the taxi had been, she wondered if she had been dreaming: but her bruised lips told her otherwise. She turned and began to walk back, stopping for a moment in front of the post box. She smiled: she would have to write another letter, she thought, as she walked on and then turned into the infirmary forecourt. Engraved in large gold lettering on either side of the doors were the words that she passed every time she entered the hospital:

“
I was a stranger and ye took me in. I was sick and ye visited me
.”

She strode up the steps and through the door.

‘Did you catch him, Dr Stewart?' Jenkins asked as she entered the foyer.

‘Yes, thanks,' she replied with a smile.

In the empty doctors' office she took her jacket off and hung it on a peg. And then, finally, she pulled out the book.

She could see it had been well used: the moleskin cover was worn bare in parts, the spine cracked, several pages loose. She saw that there was a stiff white card tucked between the pages and held her breath as she carefully pulled it out.

The edges of the card were gilt-embossed and there was a white star on a red flag crest at the top. It was a ticket for the White Star liner the SS
Lapland
, due to depart Southampton on 5 September 1919 for New York. A name was stencilled in heavy black ink in the centre of card:

“Dr Elspeth Stewart”.

She stared at the ticket for a long time.

After a while she sighed, then carefully tucked the ticket back inside the pages of the book and slipped the book into the pocket of her jacket. Then she walked back out onto the ward and towards the operating room, where she knew the evening's work was about to begin.

THE END

Frustration at the failure of the law-abiding suffragists to make significant progress led Emmeline Pankhurst to establish the militant Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903, whose motto was ‘Deeds not Words'. The campaign began modestly enough with the smashing of shop windows, but by 1913 had escalated to arson attacks and the planting of bombs. Nobody was convicted of the bombing of the Coronation Chair in June 1914, but newspaper reports stated that the police interviewed two suspicious women as they left the Abbey, and a feather boa, guidebook and silk purse were found at the scene. Other suffragettes were even more frustrated at the lack of progress, and National Archive records released in 2006 revealed that the police were warned about two suffragettes who had planned to assassinate Prime Minister Herbert Asquith.

However the Great War gave women an opportunity to prove their worth in less violent ways, and the surgeons and nurses of the Scottish Women's Hospitals were one of several women-only groups who cared for Allied soldiers throughout Europe.

Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson
was the chief surgeon of the Women's Hospital Corps, which established a hospital for wounded British soldiers inside Claridges Hotel in Paris in September 1914. She had been briefly imprisoned in 1912 for militant suffragette activities, but letters written to her mother from Paris show that she felt more comfortable doing good deeds rather than violent ones. Based on her war experience, her methods of treating wound sepsis were published in the
Lancet
in 1916. The daughter of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain), Louisa never married, but instead chose to live with Dr Flora Murray, her physician colleague. They are buried together in Buckinghamshire and the inscription on their gravestone reads, ‘We have been gloriously happy'.

Dr Harry Plotz
qualified as a physician in 1912 and only two years later, at the age of twenty-three, claimed to have isolated the typhus bacillus. He did this by culturing blood taken from passengers arriving in New York from the Balkans who were unwell with epidemic typhus. The ‘discovery' was publicised to great acclaim in the
New York Times
in 1914 and published in the
Journal of Infectious Disease
in 1915. That same year his findings were presented to the American Medical Association, where he received a two-minute standing ovation. Plotz named the organism
Bacillus Typhus Exanthematicus
, but as it had not been definitively proved to be the causal organism for typhus, most referred to it as the ‘Plotz bacillus'. Plotz was able to grow cultures of the organism, which he then tried to develop into a vaccine against the infection. The Serbian government, desperate to stem the rising tide of deaths from typhus (more than two hundred thousand had died from the disease by early 1915), invited Plotz to Serbia in order to initiate a vaccination campaign. During the third invasion of Serbia, in October 1915, the Bulgarians captured him. However, his reputation as the ‘discoverer' of typhus was well known and the Bulgarian authorities allowed him to continue his work unimpeded. He also went to Vienna to present his results to the Austrian medical establishment and then returned, as a medical hero, to New York in 1916.

Unfortunately within two years further studies revealed that the Plotz bacillus was not the cause of typhus, but merely a commensal bacterium living harmlessly inside humans. It was the Brazilian scientist Rocha-Lima who finally identified the true causal organism for typhus by examining the intestines of infected lice and he published his definitive results in 1916. He named the organism
Rickettsia Prowazekii
in honour of the two scientists whose earlier work had led him to make his discovery and who had both died from the disease. Plotz subsequently went to Paris to work for the Pasteur Institute, and later returned to America to lead the Virus Division for the US Army. He died of a heart attack working at his lab bench in Washington in 1947. A vaccine for typhus was not developed until the 1930s.

Oskar Potiorek
had been a rising star in the Hapsburg Empire prior to 28 June 1914, but the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had a devastating personal effect on him. Serious questions were raised about his sanity in the weeks following the assassination, so it was a surprise to many when he was promoted to field marshal in command of the Austrian armies that invaded Serbia. After three consecutive offensives failed, Potiorek was dismissed from the army and went to live quietly in Klagenfurt, taking with him the Ottoman couch from the Konak and telling guests it was a reminder to him of the events of that fateful day in June. After the war a military commission was convened to look into his actions during the war, but many first-hand witnesses (General Appel, amongst others) had died of typhus and so the tribunal was limited in its conclusions. Although he was criticised for poor strategic decisions, no negligence could be attributed to his actions. Potiorek was known to dislike women and never married (there were rumours of a relationship with Colonel Merizzi) and he died in relative obscurity in 1933.

Bogdan Zerajic
– like Gavrilo Princip a member of Young Bosnia – had attempted to assassinate Potiorek's predecessor, Governor Varesanin, in 1912, and committed suicide when the attempt failed. The authorities burnt his body, but his head was kept back and his skull used as an inkpot on the desk of Potiorek's chief of police.

Dr Elsie Inglis
, the founder of the Scottish Women's Hospitals, did not approve of the militant actions of the WSPU. Despite her proposal being rejected by the British War Office, she established fourteen Scottish Women's Hospitals, which were sent to France, Serbia, Russia, Corsica, Romania and Greece, undoubtedly saving the lives of many Allied soldiers and civilians. After her repatriation in February 1916, she took another Scottish Women's Unit to Russia to care for Allied troops fighting on the Eastern Front. Again the Scottish women performed magnificently in difficult conditions, but she fell ill and was diagnosed with advanced cancer. She returned to England in November 1917, and died only a day after arriving home. By that time the work of the Scottish women had been well publicised by the newspapers and she was lauded as a heroine. After a lying-in-state at St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, and a memorial service at Westminster attended by both Serbian and British royalty, she was buried in Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh. Winston Churchill wrote of her: ‘Her fame will shine in history.'

Dr Rudolph Fischer
left Sarajevo after the war ended and went back to Graz to live quietly in retirement. He died in 1936.

The characters of
Elspeth, Gabriel, Sylvia, Vera and Anya
are fictitious and any resemblance to characters that lived at that time is purely coincidental. Although I have tried to synchronise my story with real-life events wherever possible, it must be remembered that this is a work of fiction and I have taken artistic licence in depicting events as they may have occurred. In addition, the characterisations and dialogue of real-life figures depicted in this story are also imagined, based upon my interpretation of correspondence and reports from that era.

Many thanks to my amazing editor Ellie Darkins (@EditorEleanor) for helping me to silk-purse a sow's ear. Thanks also to all at Matador Press for their smooth efficiency at getting my novel into the ether. Gratitude also to everyone in the Fischer family (Erica, Gerhardt, Margot) for their memories of The Chief. Mention must also go to Daniel, Jennifer and Nicola for their unstintingly enthusiastic assistance and encouragement. And finally Gillian: for putting up with a wannabe author; without your love and support there would, quite simply, be no book.