With Every Breath (6 page)

“Kate?”

She shook herself. Trevor had been feeding her data while she stared at the dying man. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

He did, but Kate’s fingers trembled as she recorded the data. When her husband died, it had been quick. One moment Nathan was framing the fifth floor of a new office building, and the next moment the scaffolding beneath him collapsed. She was told he’d died before they even got him out from under the rubble. She prayed it was so, that he never suffered agony or knew what was happening. Ephraim Montgomery knew exactly what was happening to him, and the resignation in his eyes made her want to weep.

When they’d finished their rounds, Trevor showed her to the office they would share, a rectangular room with two desks in it. She hadn’t realized she would be working so closely with him. Trevor’s desk was placed beneath a window overlooking the wooded area behind the hospital. The smaller desk was on the other side, with a worktable in the middle of the room. One wall was lined with wooden filing cabinets.

“We will be sharing this office for as long as you are employed here,” Trevor said. “I won’t feed the rumor mills, so the door must always remain open.”

“Certainly.” It would be mortifying if anyone imagined she and Trevor were up to no good behind a closed door.

She tugged the mask off her face, relieved to feel cool air on her skin again. “Why do you only take dying patients? Why don’t you take people who might be cured?”

Trevor pulled out his desk chair and sat. “Tuberculosis starts in the lungs. It’s possible to live for decades so long as it remains confined in the lungs, but if it gets into the blood it can spread to other organs, and people die fast. All our patients have it in their blood, which means it’s likely to infect their organs soon. The serum I give them is rich in nutrients, and I’m hoping it will strengthen their blood enough to help slow the spread to the organs. I estimate it buys the patients an extra six months of life.”

“What’s in the serum?”

“It’s a concentration of beef bone marrow and minerals, all distilled into a cod-liver-oil base. The patients drink it twice a day.”

Kate wrinkled her nose. “Cod liver oil is disgusting. Can’t you mix it into something like honey or tea?”

“Cod liver oil has a high concentration of nutritious properties. If the patients don’t like it, they can go somewhere else to die.”

She smiled tightly. “There’s that warmhearted man I’ve always admired.”

He handed her a file. “Henry Harris is the laboratory assistant who analyzes the samples. Have him show you around the rest of the clinic. And give him a sputum sample while you’re at it. He will be testing you monthly, so get used to it. I may have time to be back later this afternoon. If not, I will see you tomorrow morning at nine o’clock.”

“You’re leaving?” It was her first day and she was already completely overwhelmed.

Trevor hung his lab coat on a hook beside the door. “You’d be surprised how much time sunning myself on that rock requires.”

He left the room without looking back.

* * * *

Henry Harris was a mighty bull of a man. He wasn’t fat; rather, he gave the impression of a solid wall of muscle. He
literally had no neck. His massive shoulders sloped toward a broad face that looked like a gentle giant.

“Princeton football, national champions, 1878!” he introduced himself with pride.

“Congratulations,” Kate said as she shook his hand. The center of the lab was dominated by a long table with a black countertop, topped with a series of sleek microscopes arrayed like soldiers lined up for battle. Shelves loaded with dark bottles and empty glass beakers covered the walls of the lab. It was Henry’s job to evaluate the samples taken from the patients, and afterward the data would be passed to Kate for analysis.

“I’ve got the best job here,” Henry said, hunching over a microscope. His beefy hands looked too large to manipulate the tiny dials and wheels of the microscope. “I look at the blood and saliva samples and track the numbers. You would not believe the things you can see under a microscope. It’s like a whole world of tiny cells and weird creatures.”

He showed Kate how to look into the eyepiece and rotate the dial until the sample under the glass zoomed into focus. He was right! “Is it only because these people have tuberculosis that all these little things are living in their saliva?”

Henry reached behind him and grabbed a glass plate and slid it into position beneath the column of the microscope. “Have a look at this one. This sample came from Nurse Ackerman, and you’ll see hers doesn’t look much different, except there are no little cells that look like purple grains of rice. If those little purple tubes show up in your sample . . . well, I guess it’s best not to think of it. Just wear your mask when you’re around the patients, all right?”

Henry showed her the rest of the clinic. There were three washrooms: one for the male patients, another for the female patients, and a third for the staff. Apparently even sharing wash
facilities with the patients carried the risk of infection, since a damp hand towel could carry live bacillus for hours.

A staff table was behind the nurses’ station. “We eat all our meals here,” Henry said. “We get the same thing the patients eat. The patients have a hard time keeping on weight, and Dr. Kendall feeds them like royalty. Beef, milk, and eggs at every meal. Hot chocolate. Cheese. And desserts.”

Perhaps this explained Henry’s immense size.

At noon an army of young women arrived, pushing carts loaded with covered trays. Wearing pale pink uniforms with white aprons, these women were at the lowest rung of the hospital-staff ladder. The attendants delivered meals, changed linens, and bathed patients. Each of them donned a white cotton mask before entering the wards to distribute the meals. The orderlies were men who did the heavy lifting and transporting of patients.

It didn’t take long to learn the hierarchy at the hospital. The female attendants and male orderlies were at the bottom. Then came the nurses with their light gray dresses and starchy white aprons and caps. The laboratory staff was somewhat higher. And at the very top were the doctors, who strode about the halls like lords of the manor.

Kate joined Henry at the staff table for lunch. Nurse Ackerman staffed the nurses’ station at the front of the clinic, and Henry had already warned Kate that the woman was as cheerful as a rainy day. Nurse Ackerman wore her severe dark hair slicked tightly back, her only ornamentation two gold rings hanging from a chain around her neck.

“My husbands, may God rest their souls,” the nurse said as she cleared the staff table in preparation for lunch. “I was widowed when I was twenty-nine, and then again at forty-three.”

Nathan’s death had knocked Kate beneath a suffocating avalanche that took years to lift. She couldn’t imagine enduring that
tragedy twice, and she sent Nurse Ackerman a sympathetic look. For a moment she saw the gleam of remembered pain surface in the nurse’s dark eyes. A moment of shared understanding. Only women who’d endured the tragedy of widowhood could understand the hollow ache of such loss.

A pretty young attendant wheeled the meal cart toward them, setting covered plates on the staff table. After trays were delivered, the attendant held a final tray out.

“Dr. Kendall isn’t here?” The disappointment in the girl’s voice was comical.

“Go on with you, Jenny,” Nurse Ackerman scowled. “Dr. Kendall doesn’t have time for the likes of you.”

Jenny rolled her eyes as she put Trevor’s plate back on the empty meal cart. “I just like looking at him,” she said. “I dare not get too close or I’d probably get frostbite.”

Kate hid her smile as the young woman left. It was nice to know she wasn’t the only one who thought Trevor could use a blast of human warmth to melt the ice off him.

4

T
revor strode down the tree-shaded lane on a residential street in Georgetown, hoping to finish his business quickly, then get back to the hospital while there was still daylight. Kate found his departure in the middle of the day appalling, but he had no intention of explaining himself. He was a private man, and Kate was far too nosy. Even when they were in school, she was always nagging him and asking pushy questions. Once Kate picked up a scent, she would chase it like a bloodhound until she ran it to the ground and dragged out all the answers.

It was one of the things he liked about her.

He pushed thoughts of Kate from his mind. The battle he was about to fight was too important to lose. He walked down the sidewalk set close against a row of tidy town houses until he reached the last house on the row and rapped softly on the door.

“Mrs. Kendall?”

He had a key, but would only let himself in if she were asleep. He could hear her shuffling around inside, which was a good thing. He wanted her awake and alert for the battle he intended to finally win.

The dead bolt turned, but a chain prevented the door from opening more than a couple of inches, so he tilted his head so he could wink at her through the opening. “It’s just me, Mrs. Kendall.”

The old woman smiled and closed the door to release the chain. “Trevor, dear! I’ve been making a nice hot custard for you. Come inside.”

Her white hair was braided into a tidy coil around the back of her head. When he was a boy, he was always amazed at how Mrs. Kendall could engineer her hair into that perfect coil. Her face was now wrinkled and spotted with age, her eyes tired, her back stooped . . . but that fastidious hair was exactly the same. It was a good sign.

“Tea?” she asked.

“Yes, please.” He didn’t really want any, but Mrs. Kendall loved to fuss over him. It was why she still insisted on making custard every time he came over. He wanted to tell her not to bother, because it took at least an hour of standing over a stove to make, but work was important for a woman like her. If she lost her sense of purpose, she would decline even faster.

He scanned the room. It was a generous space with a kitchen along the side and a bedroom off the parlor. He was pleased to see she had the window cracked.

“I brought you some raspberries,” he said, setting them on the small dining table. She sucked in a breath, a little life sparkling behind her faded blue eyes.

“Oh, heavens, I hope it was not too much bother.”

“Not at all.” He had them shipped from Philadelphia, but she didn’t need to know that. As soon as she set a glass of tea before him, he motioned for her to sit.

“Let’s get the business over with first,” he said. He handed her a piece of paper. “Cough and spit.”

Her cough didn’t sound good. It was rasping and wet, but at least there was no blood on the paper she handed him. Without letting any sign show on his face, he swiped a glass slide over the paper, wrapped the plate in a handkerchief, and slipped it into his coat pocket.

“Any problems I should know about?” He held his breath, waiting for the answer, but she brushed the question away.

“Just the same old things,” she said, drifting over to the stove, where the custard simmered over a low flame. A warm vanilla scent filled the room as she stirred, awakening painful childhood memories.

Mrs. Kendall knew all his secrets. To this day he kept everything about his past carefully guarded, and Mrs. Kendall was the only person in the world who knew his full story. She taught him how to cover his tracks and protect himself. During those awful years when he first came to America, she had been his savior. To the rest of the world she was only the head housekeeper in Senator Campbell’s household, but for him she had wings and a halo.

And he wanted to return the favor.

“There is a new tuberculosis sanitarium opening at Saranac Lake in upstate New York. I can make arrangements for you to have a private room and the best care available.”

The scrape of the wooden spoon on the bottom of the pot did not break tempo. “But my home is right here.”

“There is no chance of a cure for you here. The humidity is too hard on your lungs, and you will die if you remain here. You need the thin, dry air of the mountains.”

“And all those people you’ve got up on the fifth floor of that hospital? Is that what you tell them? There is no hope?”

His patients were too far gone to have any hope for a cure. Even under the best conditions, only a tiny fraction of people
who traveled to remote sanitariums in the mountains were cured, and that only happened after years of complete rest.

“I can’t save those people, but I can try to save you,” he said. “Your lungs are getting weaker. You will die if you stay here.”

“I’ll die if I leave my home,” she retorted.

“Please don’t say that. They have quality facilities up there, and I’ll make sure they treat you well.”

She moved the custard to the back burner, then came to sit in the chair opposite him. She was wheezing as she plopped onto the chair. “My daughter is here in Washington. My church is here. This is my home, and these people mean something to me. It will take a cannon to get me out.”

That was the thing about Mrs. Kendall. She might look like a sweet old grandmother, but she was as crafty, determined, and downright stubborn as any person he ever met. Half his techniques for staying one step ahead of the dragons that chased him all his life had been learned from her.

He folded his arms across his chest and narrowed his gaze. “Genghis Khan could have used you when he was rounding up the Mongol hordes.” He would give anything if he could save Mrs. Kendall, but he wasn’t going to win this battle today. To the bottom of his soul he wished he could return the favor she had done for him, but that was going to take a miracle.

Then again, Trevor had never shied away from wishing for miracles.

* * * *

The first thing he saw on returning to the hospital was Kate Livingston playing with a mangy dog on the front steps, dangling a twig just above the dog’s snout, and it seemed delighted to play along. He’d seen that dog around in recent weeks but always ignored it. Then he noticed the empty lunch box beside her.