Ingenious pain, Andrew Miller [little red riding hood ebook .txt] 📗

There is no repetition of the incident. In the following months his strength, the fine powers of his concentration, are greater than ever, as if the episode had purged him. Despite Munro's insistence that he should take more rest, he works harder. Plans are laid for a building in Grand Parade to be purchased and used as a private infirmary. Six months later they open with Chinese lanterns and concert parties. The upper floors are for inoculations and on the ground floor there is an operating theatre, fine as any in a London hospital, with seating for thirty guests who, for a modest fee, may watch James Dyer cut, slice, and saw his way to eminence.

Munro can also be seen, free of charge, but more often he is to be encountered by the river, sipping from a flask, feeding cake to the swans, or drowsing in nooks of sunshine, wig askew, his hat over his eyes. Occasionally his wife will be with him, sitting at a distance, leafing impatiently through a novel or frowning at the hills, but the denouement - the scandal, the duel, the flight - fails to materialise. Mrs Vaughan, whose opinion is always to be trusted in these matters, declares that the Munros and James Dyer have reached an arrangement, a very improper thing in people of their class, like a farmer's daughter learning the harpsichord. Munro has evidently resigned himself to the inevitable. As for Mrs Munro, she has shown herself to be a very brazen piece, for which the women of Bath have a duty to despise her. James Dyer - well, he could hardly be said to be human at all. A machine for cutting. An automaton. Dangerous.

'Dangerous?' ask the women, pausing with their needles.

Mrs Vaughan inclines her head. 'He appears to have been born without a soul. What, then, has he to lose?'

Patients come from Bristol, Exeter, London. In Grand Parade, James and Munro purchase a second house. James refines his techniques, designs new instruments: probes and forceps and cunning scissors. In the upstairs rooms of the new house he treats victims of the pox with mercury. They lie in the little wards in suits of flannel, gums swollen from the mercury, dribbUng their saliva into pots, two to three pints of it in a day, until they are cured or can stand the treatment no more.

These salivations, and the inoculations in the other building, bring James four hundred and fifty pounds in 1764. Add to this the lithotomies, the amputations, the bleedings, the settings, and his income is close on seven hundred pounds.

In the winter of '64 he has a new and potentially even more lucrative service to offer the people of Bath. He becomes a man-midwife, an accoucheur, after he is called on one night to save the life of a mother in childbed. The woman, a Mrs Porter, had been in labour for three days with Dr Bax and Mr Crisp in attendance. Bax, on the evening of the third day, rubbing his chin with the gold boss of his cane, decides she cannot be helped. Nor will it garnish his reputation to be at the bedside of a dead mother. He gives her over. Mr Crisp stays on, glad of a clear field. He leads Mr Porter on to the landing and in a whisper that fills the house he counsels the extermination of the infant, its corpse to remain inside the mother, two, three days, such that it might soften sufficiently for them to extract it. There is a steel hook he has, so long, which he has used before with considerable success. Thus the mother will be spared; that is, perhaps she wiU be spared,

he can give no assurances; hands of God, the lady's constitution, etc.; these cases, sir, very unfortunate, very uncertain. Mr Porter is aghast, takes hold of Crisp's coat, shakes him violently.

'Damn your hooks! Damn your incompetence!' He runs to the top of the stairs, shouts to one of the servants below: 'Fetch Dyer!'

'Dyer?' cries Mr Crisp. 'That mountebank!'

Exit Mr Crisp, face in a cramp of anger, shouting from the window of his coach: 'On your own head, sir! I wash my hands of it! Folly, sir! Lunatic folly!'

When James arrives it is three o'clock in the morning. The weather, bad all night, has deteriorated into a full storm. Before morning a dozen chimney stacks will be down, and already roof tiles scythe through the darkness. There is no moon, no stars. All the houses are shuttered, all save one.

Mr Porter is waiting in the dining room, holding a lamp up to the window. He has drunk a half-bottle of brandy but has never felt more sober, more appallingly conscious, in his Hfe. He catches a ghmmer of his servant's lantern, and then the horses, heads down, looming.

The moment James enters the panelled hallway and the door is shouldered shut against the wind, his physical presence, the unconsidered precision of his movements, quieten the house. He walks up the stairs carrying his green baize bag. He refuses to be hurried.

Mr Porter has only seen him from a distance, and once only, from the far side of the abbey courtyard. It was raining, and Dyer was sheltering under the west door of the abbey with his friend - his servant? - Marley Gummer. Waiting for someone, for something. Mrs Porter pointed him out. 'That man', she called him. She was only just with child then.

James opens the door. The lying-in room. The sick-room. The death-room perhaps. The hearth is chock with fire. The air is

thick, over-hot. Three women sit around the bed. The eldest of them James recognises as Mrs Allen, a woman said to have powers, connections with unseen forces. Her presence speaks clearly of Porter's desperation. She is chanting over the bed, over the figure in the bed. She stops when she hears James. Turns on him.

'Come to finish her off, have you?'

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