‘Do not always assume that you know best,’ Dr Simpson said, more gently now. ‘An over-inflated sense of your own capabilities will lead you to trouble. Guard against complacency, Dr Raven. Or there will be hell to pay.’

FIFTY-SIX

aven could feel the sweat cooling on his skin as he reluctantly shed his coat. The room was surprisingly cold for somewhere so small, particularly a chamber in which an expectant young mother had laboured so long. She was in her first confinement, its extended duration causing a neighbour sufficient worry that she had sent out for help.

As Assistant Medical Officer to the Maternity Hospital, the majority of deliveries Raven attended were ‘outdoor’ patients: assistance provided by the hospital, but the patients delivered in their own homes. Often these outdoor cases could prove challenging, even when obstetrically straightforward, given the lack of heat and poor lighting in the crowded dwellings to be found here in the Old Town. Raven often wondered whether he should start carrying coal and paraffin in his bag in addition to his forceps.

The effort of his ascent to the fifth floor of the West Port tenement had warmed him, but it would not last against the coldness of the room. As he climbed, he thought of how often he had heard Dr Simpson stating cheerily, ‘It’s always the top.’ Raven wondered about the truth of this, reasoning that it seemed that way because only the occasions that affirmed it brought the notion to mind. Those cases on the lower floors did not, so their plenitude was forgotten. He wondered again at his folly in pursuing his imagined new disease.

Louis XIV of France said that only the small man desires always to be right. It struck Raven that the route to discovery and knowledge lay not in the desire to be right, but in one’s preparedness to be wrong. Perhaps seeking proof that tested one’s contention was as important as garnering proof to support it. Only if the latter outweighed the former could one be certain of its soundness.

Raven cast an eye over the suffering woman before him. Alone, with no one to support her in her time of trial but her neighbour.

‘Her husband died six months ago, poor thing,’ the neighbour told him. ‘He caught a fever. A decent man.’

His thoughts turned to Sarah. She would not be left to labour alone, not with him and Dr Simpson keeping an eye on her, but she too was faced with raising her child without its father.

Archie had asked for his help in that matter, an easier request than the other intercession he sought. Of course, Raven would gladly assist, but what he offered would not be – could never be – the help of a husband, the help of the child’s true father. He wondered, in fact, how much assistance he would be permitted to give: how close Sarah would allow him to be, to her or her child.