“You can’t help. She’s beyond help.” Ian met Hart’s gaze for a fleeting moment, and for the first time in Ian’s life, Hart couldn’t look back at him.
“Get out,” Ian said. “I don’t want you here if I have to say good-bye to her.”
Hart remained rigid and unmoving for a few moments,’ then turned around and quietly walked from the room.
Over the next week, Ian left the bedroom only to shout for Curry if the man was too slow answering the bell. Beth tossed in the bed, her face pink and sweating, groaning when anything touched her side. Ian slept on the bed next to her, or on the chair beside it when Beth became too restless. Curry tried to get Ian to sleep in the next room, to let a maid or Katie or himself nurse Beth while he rested, but Ian refused. Ian had read every book in Hart’s vast library and plenty of tomes at the private asylum, filing away every modern view of medicine in his head. He put into practice methods of nursing festering wounds, methods of bringing down fever, methods of keeping the patient quiet and fed. The doctor brought leeches, which did help with the swelling a little, but Ian didn’t like his oils and ointments and syringes of suspicious-looking liquids. He wouldn’t let the doctor near Beth with them, which led to the doctor’s loud-voiced complaints to an unsympathetic Hart. Ian washed Beth’s wound every day, wiping away any evils that seeped from it. He bathed her face in cool water, fed her spoonfuls of broth, forcing them into her when she tried to turn her face away. He had Curry bring in ice, which he pressed against the cut to stop the swelling, and used more ice to cool down the water with which he bathed her forehead. Ian wished he could move Beth from London, where coal smoke and soot seeped through every window, but he feared jarring the wound open again. He braided her hair to take the heat off her neck, fearing he’d have to cut off her beautiful tresses if the fever didn’t break.
The doctor clucked his tongue and proposed experimental treatments that involved serum from monkey glands and other such wonders. He was developing them in conjunction with specialists in Switzerland, and if he could save the sister-in-law of the Duke of Kilmorgan, he said, it would make his name.
Ian ran him off with threats of violence.
By the sixth day, the fever still had not come down. Ian sat by Beth’s side, his hand loosely clasping hers, and tasted fear. He was going to lose her.
“Is this what love feels like?” he whispered to her. “I don’t like it, my Beth. It hurts too much.”
Beth didn’t respond. Her eyes were cracked open under swollen lids, a blue glitter that saw nothing. He hadn’t been able to feed her today.
Ian felt sick, his stomach roiling, and he had to leave the room to vomit bile. When he returned, there was no change. Her breathing was hoarse and a struggle, her skin painfully hot.
She’d come into his life so suddenly, only a few short weeks ago, and just as suddenly, she was departing it. The sense of loss terrified him. He’d never felt it before, not even with all the loneliness and fear he’d experienced at the asylum. That fear had been self-preservation; this was an emptiness that hollowed him out from the inside. Sitting in this dark room facing the worst brought memories back to him. Ian’s perfect recall played them all clearly, little dimmed by the seven years between now and his years at the asylum. He remembered early morning baths in cold water, taking supervised walks in the garden, where a man with a long walking stick followed him about. The sheepherder, Ian had always called him, ready to beat patients back indoors if necessary.
When other physicians or distinguished guests visited, Dr.
Edwards would give grand lectures, while Ian was made to sit on a chair next to the podium. Dr. Edwards would have Ian learn the name of every member of the audience and recite them back, have him listen to a conversation between two volunteers and repeat it perfectly. A blackboard would be brought out, and Ian would solve complex mathematical problems in seconds. Doctor Edwards’s trained seal, Ian called himself.
His is a typical case of haughty resentment which is festering his brain. Notice how he avoids your eyes, which shows declined trust and lack of truthfulness. Note how his attention wanders when he is spoken to, how he interrupts with an inappropriate comment or question that has nothing to do with the topic at It and. This is arrogance taken to the point of hysteria—the patient can no longer connect with people he deems beneath him. Treatment: austere surroundings, cold baths, exercise, electric shock to stimulate healing. Regular beatings to suppress his rages. The treatment is effective, gentlemen. He has calmed considerably since he first came to me.
If Ian had “calmed,” it was because he’d realized that if he suppressed his rages and abrupt speeches, he’d be left alone. He’d learned to become an automaton, a clockwork boy that moved and talked in a certain way. To violate the pattern meant hours locked in a small room, electric shocks through the body, beatings every night. When Ian became the clockwork young man again, his tormentors left him alone. They at least let him read books and take lessons with a tutor. Ian’s mind was restless, absorbing everything put in front of it. He mastered languages in a matter of days. He progressed from simple arithmetic to higher calculus within a year. He read a book every day and could recite huge passages from each one. He found some refuge in music and learned pieces he heard played, but never how to read music. The notes and staffs were so much black-and-white mess to him.
Ian also couldn’t master subjects like logic, ethics, and philosophy. He could mouth the phrases from Aristode, Socrates, Plato, but not understand or interpret them.