first inclination was to protest that he needed to be getting back, but then he realized that both Luke and Dr. Christie were no doubt occupied, and that there would be little for him to do and no one for him to talk to at the doctor’s house. Better to chew over old times with Morgan and Sally, he decided, even if it meant being subjected to the unwavering stares of the twins. Maybe he’d get used to them.
Chapter 5
Luke sat in the armchair behind the big desk in the office, glumly trying to ignore Mul-Sack’s toothy grin. After breakfast Dr. Christie disappeared into the kitchen with Mrs. Dunphy. Thaddeus went off in search of Morgan Spicer, not even stopping to ask the way to the Burying Ground. No doubt, Luke figured, he already knew where it was.
His father and Dr. Christie seemed to hit it off. That was a relief. Although Luke’s rooms were ostensibly his home now, they didn’t feel like it, and he was too aware that he was living in someone else’s house. Christie was more than gracious in welcoming Thaddeus, but the dynamic of the household could have been difficult had the two men detested each other on sight.
It seemed very odd to Luke to be doing nothing after the frantic years at medical school, when every day was filled to more than capacity with knowledge that must be learned, tasks that must be done. No one had told him that real doctoring would entail long periods of waiting for something to happen, yet he knew that no one would call for a doctor unless there was an accident, or some illness that swept through the village. He would need to find something to keep himself occupied while he waited for calamity to strike the residents of Yorkville.
Books: Dr. Christie had whole shelves of them. It was books that had led him to the shop in the little lane off Notre Dame Street in Montreal. As soon as he’d arrived in the city he had gravitated to the cluster of booksellers on St. Vincent Street, drawn both by the knowledge their books contained and the warmth of the shops. Most of the texts he needed for school were sold, usually at exorbitant prices, at the university, but all of the Montreal book dealers had small sections of medical books. Some of the titles were on the local curriculum, but many of them were obscure, out-of-step with current medical theory, or English and French translations of foreign texts. Even so, he browsed through these as long as he dared, in particular lingering over the illustrations of anatomy, trying to absorb as much as he could in preparation for the lectures he would hear during his classes. Most of the proprietors of the shops chased him away after half an hour or so, cautioning him to either buy or be gone.
Ferguson’s was different. To begin with, it wasn’t in the heart of the bookselling district, but just at the periphery of it. The tall, thin proprietor seemed not to mind how long Luke dawdled in front of the heaped tables and shelves of books, or how long he stood in the aisle reading them. It was a tiny shop, crowded with bookcases and bins and racks, but there was a stove in the corner that filled the space with a fragrant heat that seeped into his frozen limbs. He stood for hours, comfortably lost in the mysteries of the human body.
Eventually Luke hadn’t bothered with any of the other shops. As the season turned to a hard winter, he tramped along the snowy streets to Ferguson’s, where he consulted the texts on matters that had puzzled him during the day’s classes. He seldom bothered to stop at his room first. The temperature in the attic was only a few degrees warmer than outside and he knew that he would not be able to study there. He would fall into a fitful sleep, huddled under a thin blanket with his coat still on. At least at Ferguson’s he could accomplish something useful.
And when he tired of tracing the veins and arteries and muscles shown by the illustrated plates in the medical books, and when he grew weary of reading about the symptoms of the many complaints that could plague a human body, he turned to some of the bookstore’s other offerings. He found a wealth of literature — accounts of daring explorations and doomed expeditions, memoirs and biographies, bins full of maps, shelves full of novels and stories. He delved into these and stood with his nose in them until hunger or closing time chased him out of the shop.
He wasn’t sure how long the owner would have been content to let him haunt the store without saying anything. Possibly forever, he reflected, had he not walked in one day just as the man had finished tying a bundle of books together with twine.
“Would you like to earn a few coins?” he asked in a soft Scottish accent. “A customer needs these books delivered right away, and if I take them myself I’ll have to close the store while I’m gone.”
Luke was happy to run the errand, and although he was quite desperate for money, refused the coins the man offered in payment.
“It’s the least I can do,” Luke said. “I’ve read my way through most of your stock.”
“Fair enough,” the man agreed with a smile that transformed his long, thin face. “I’m Ben, by the way, Ben Ferguson.”
Luke often ran errands for Ben after that, in exchange for reading privileges. He began taking his class notes with him to the store. He could sit at a small table by the stove and study them. Ben supplied him with regular servings of tea and coffee while he worked. Gradually Luke stopped being so jittery and started sleeping again. Lectures were no longer the torment they had been, and when he didn’t understand something that had been said, he had no hesitation in raising his hand and asking for clarification. He was no longer afraid that this would make him appear inadequate. He was there, after all, to learn.
As he struggled to absorb the information he needed to get through the examinations that were looming, he began to turn to Ben for help. The older man knew nothing of medicine, of course, but seemed happy enough to use the notes Luke had taken to grill him on the indications for the use of cupping and plasters, the pros and cons of administering ergot in cases of prolonged labour, and the pharmacological properties of recipes, compounds, and formulae from the endless list of preparations commonly encountered in a modern medical practice.
It was clear that Ferguson was an educated man, but when Luke asked about this, he merely shrugged, and said that he had had “a few years of schooling, but not in anything useful.” He had a grounding in classical studies, “like all good Scots,” but beyond that he had little to say about his life before he had come to Canada and opened his store.
Luke asked no further questions, although he was curious about Ferguson’s background. The man appeared to love anything that was printed on paper. He constantly tidied the bins of maps that became disarranged when a customer shuffled through them, straightened shelves, and dusted books with a reverent care.
“Knowledge is everything,” he said one time as he rearranged a section of reference books, “and this is where it’s kept.”
Dr. Christie seemed to share Ben’s respect for the printed word, if not his liking for tidiness. The small parlour at the front of the house was filled with encyclopedias and dictionaries, compendiums of English literature and periodicals of every nature. Newspapers spilled from a table under the window and the office itself was home to a stack of leather-bound medical texts jammed, in no particular order, into a bookcase behind the desk.
Luke ran his finger along the titles. There were the usual tomes on medical chemistry, surgical techniques, and midwifery, but Christie had collected numerous other related publications as well. Randomly, he pulled out a book with handsomely marbled boards. It was The Complete Herbal and English Physician Enlarged by Nicholas Culpeper, apparently an addendum to a book called The English Physician by the same author. It was no more than a curiosity, its medical theory based on the movement of the planets, but it did have a number of handsome coloured plates that illustrated the herbs and other botanical sources that Culpeper had found useful, and which Luke recognized as the basis for the current knowledge on pharmaceuticals. He was soon absorbed in the work,
