Tim Cratchit's Christmas Carol (16 page)

“No, Mr. Howard,” Tim replied after a few seconds. “I was in the area and stopped by to see if Jane was prepared for the party tomorrow night.”

“I am,” Jane said. She was about to say more, to tell Tim that she was eagerly anticipating the event, but she hesitated a moment, not sure how much she wanted to say in front of Howard. The barrister plunged into the silence.

“There's your answer, Doctor,” he interjected. “Good afternoon.” Howard began to shut the door.

“I'll be on my way, then,” said Tim, thinking that Jane's statement had been rather curt. He was unable to decipher her expression. Her face conveyed both surprise and embarrassment. Was she embarrassed that he had found her with a suitor? Or was her distress the result of the man's abrupt dismissal of him? Tim strode down the walk and climbed back into his carriage.

Mrs. Crompton, who had sidled to the foyer door to eavesdrop, rushed to take advantage of the situation.

“Just as I said, James. One suitor after another knocking at our door. This Dr. Cratchit is quite a prominent medical man. He's had his eye on Jane for some time.”

“Is that so?” Howard asked. “No time for other suitors to shilly-shally about, I daresay. The early bird, and all that.”

“Well said, James,” Mrs. Crompton agreed, a wide smile on her face.

“Yes,” Jane added with feigned politeness. “Very well said, if you think that some people are worms.” She looked at the amazed faces of Howard and her mother. “If you'll excuse me, I'm going to tell the coachman that I'm ready to leave.”

Tim's thoughts were a jumble as the carriage wound its way to his office. Who, he wondered, was this Howard fellow, and why was he so upset to have encountered him? Howard might have been one of Archie Crompton's friends or business associates. But if so, why had he come to the door with Jane? And why had Jane seemed uneasy to see him? She had not invited him inside, but instead had said nothing while Howard practically dismissed him. In their conversation the night of the Cromptons' party, Jane had made no mention of a suitor. On the contrary, she had at the very least implied that no other men were courting her. Then again, Tim recognized, he supposed he was not courting her, either.

During his time in Edinburgh, Tim had been invited to dinner at the home of a local surgeon, and met the man's daughter. He had taken an immediate liking to the girl, and over the next few months he had visited her on several occasions. Although he grew quite fond of her, he was reluctant to take time away from his studies to pursue her more vigorously. It would be wiser, he decided, to wait until his education was finished and he could offer her better prospects. By that time, she had gotten engaged to another student.

Tim concluded that he had deceived himself into thinking that his only interest in Jane was professional. If it were not more than that, he would not have been so disturbed to encounter Howard at the Crompton house. He also knew that he was not the type of person who rushed into anything, so he needed to assess the exact nature of his feelings for Jane and determine how to proceed. Then, as the carriage came to a stop at the curb outside his office, he chided himself for taking such a clinical approach to the situation.

Tim decided to call on his partner and give him the bottle of Bordeaux. He hoped that Dr. Eustace would accept it as a goodwill offering and put their dispute behind him. Eustace's clerk, Nathan Penrose, greeted him coolly.

“Dr. Eustace is busy,” Penrose said. “Is that for him?” The clerk nodded toward the bottle. Before Tim could utter a word in reply, Penrose stood, took the bottle from him, and placed it on the floor behind the desk. “I will see that Dr. Eustace gets this. I am sure he will be delighted. He has instructed me to come to your office at six tomorrow evening to settle the week's business. Good day.” With that, Penrose sat and returned to his ledger as though Tim were not even there.

A relatively quiet afternoon in the office was interrupted by a sudden clatter of hooves and wheels on the pavement that brought Tim to the window. A cab hurtled down the street and a small man leaped out of the vehicle as the driver struggled to rein in the horse. The man ran up the walk, and his cap, tattered shirt, and the worn and dirty knees of his trousers told Tim that he was a workman. He opened the door and the man halted.

“Dr. Cratchit, please, sir, you must come at once,” the man said, gasping to catch his breath. “There's been a horrible accident.”

“I'll get my bag,” Tim said. He hurried inside, gathered his medical bag, paused to stuff in extra supplies, then grabbed his coat. He locked the office and followed the man to the hansom. He did not bother to look back. If he had, he would have caught sight of Dr. Eustace, scowling from his office window.

As the cab raced off, Tim listened to the workman's story.

“The whole thing collapsed, sir, no warning!” the man said. “One minute they're up hammering away on the roof boards, and the next it'd all come down!”

“Is anyone badly hurt?” Tim asked.

“Don't know, sir,” the man answered. “Nobody dares go up, afraid the rest of the building will fall in. When they asked somebody to fetch a doctor, I came straightway to you. I remembered folks in Whitechapel saying you was always ready to help in a pinch.”

“Well, I'll have a look and I'm sure something can be done,” Tim said, his tone calm. Panic, he knew, was infectious, and so was self-possession.

“Now, after we arrive, please go to the nearest telegraph office,” Tim said, handing the man a half crown and a note he had scribbled while they rode. It was a message for Henry, telling the coachman not to pick him up. No sense leaving the poor man waiting at the vacant office for who knew how long.

The cab veered sharply to the right and stopped in the middle of a street crowded with people. It was a neighborhood of three- and four-story buildings, where clerks, craftsmen, and their families lived above small shops. The buildings stood close to one another, only narrow foot passages separating them. In the gathering darkness, Tim could see blackened ruins where three of the structures had recently burned down. The one on the far left was being rebuilt, and had been the scene of the collapse.

Tim easily reconstructed the accident in his mind. The buildings' owner had salvaged lumber from the wreckage and had used it to begin rebuilding one of the structures. The two partially completed stories that still stood were framed with charred timbers, some sections already sheathed with slightly burned boards. The damaged wood was too weak to support the accumulated weight of the rafters and the men laying the roof boards and had collapsed, bringing down the uppermost story and the chimneys.

Clutching his medical bag, Tim wormed his way through the onlookers who had come to gape at the disaster. When he reached the front of the crowd, he saw three constables spread out at fifteen-foot intervals, holding the people back. He stepped forward.

“You there!” the nearest constable bellowed. “Stay back.”

“I'm a doctor,” Tim said, lifting his medical bag.

“Sorry, sir,” the constable said. “Just trying to keep order.”

Tim approached the unfinished building. A ladder built of scrap lumber leaned against the structure, extending more than twenty feet to the rubble-strewn third level. The ladder looked rickety, but Tim figured that if it had held the workmen, it could bear his light weight. He took off his coat, grasped a rail with his left hand, and planted his left foot on the bottom rung. The ladder was more solid than it appeared, and Tim made his way to the top with relative ease. Stepping carefully onto the floor, he looked about.

Debris lay everywhere: irregular piles of timbers, boards, and chunks of brick. Dusk was settling fast, long shadows falling over the clutter. Tim observed a man lying facedown on a heap of boards, another, half buried, sitting propped against the remnants of the back wall.

“I can't do this,” Tim said aloud to himself. These people needed a doctor, not the medical impostor he had become since he'd joined Eustace's practice. He turned and scanned the street below, but no one else had come forward to help. Tim sighed. He would have to do this alone. Maybe I can do it, he encouraged himself. I delivered Molly Beckham's baby. So maybe I haven't lost all my skills. And I have an obligation to help these men. I have to try.

“Constable!” he called down. All three policemen looked up. “Send up two men with lanterns, and send someone for a bucket of clean water.”

“Yes, Doctor, right away,” one of the constables replied. He turned and began issuing instructions to some of the men in the crowd.

A few minutes later two workmen clambered up the ladder, each carrying a lantern. The first stepped gingerly onto the floor, testing its strength.

“I hope it'll hold us, sir,” he told Tim.

With the help of a lantern, Tim picked his way toward a partially buried man whose head and left shoulder protruded from the wreckage. Tim and the workmen removed the debris, and a quick examination revealed no injuries other than cuts and bruises. Tim told the man to go home and rest.

Advancing farther into the rubble, Tim reached the prone figure he had noticed earlier. The man rolled onto his back and muttered something.

“Lie still,” Tim told him. He checked the worker and discovered that the man's left collarbone was broken. Tim bound his left arm to his body to stabilize the fracture and the worker assured him that he could climb down the ladder without help.

Tim resumed the search. A protruding nail head caught the left sleeve of his shirt, tearing it. He glanced at his arm and saw that the skin was scraped, but not cut. Good. The last thing he needed was blood poisoning.

“Here's another one!” a workman cried.

Just then a third workman reached the top of the ladder, a steaming bucket of water in one hand and the handle of a lantern held between his teeth.

“Doctor?” he asked after he had shifted the lantern to his free hand.

“Over here,” Tim said, as he approached a man with a foot-long splinter protruding from his thigh. An expanding pool of blood on the floor below the leg indicated that the splinter had pierced the man's femoral artery. Tim knelt in the sticky pool and tied a tourniquet above the wound. He carefully removed the sharp piece of wood, rinsed the area, and sutured the arterial wall and the cut in the man's skin. Then Tim removed the tourniquet and covered the injury with ointment and a thick dressing.

Tim turned his attention to another injured man, who was gritting his teeth in pain. Tim's examination revealed a dislocated right shoulder. He gripped the man's upper arm tightly and wrenched the shoulder back into place.

“Oh, the devil!” the man screamed. “That bloody hurt!”

“I'm sorry,” Tim said as he arranged a sling, “but it's easier if you don't see it coming. Rest here until you're steady on your feet, and then you can go home.”

While Tim tended to the man with the dislocated shoulder, the workmen found three more victims. One was uninjured and hustled down the ladder as soon as he was freed from the rubble. The second had a broken ulna, the smaller bone in the forearm. Tim splinted the arm and the man climbed down the ladder with great agility.

“Here's the last fellow, Doctor,” a workman said. Tim cleared debris from around the man's head until he could see the bearded visage of a man of about sixty. Tim held the lantern close to the man's face, which seemed familiar. The man opened his eyes.

“By heavens, it's Tim Cratchit,” he croaked.

“Mr. Barrow?” Tim asked, recognition quickly dawning.

“Aye. I'm downright glad to see you. I thought it more likely I'd be seeing Saint Peter.”

“We'll have you out of here and fixed up in no time,” Tim assured him. Francis Barrow was an old neighbor from Tim's childhood in Camden Town, a skilled carpenter who had done repairs at the Cratchit home on more than one occasion.

Tim found that Barrow had suffered three fractured ribs. Truly miraculous, Tim thought, as he bound the man's chest with a long strip of cloth. So much damage, but everyone had survived and would recover.