Eighteen
The wait for the doctor was agonising for the whole family. Minutes ticked by into hours and there was still no sign of his arrival.
When I had fallen ill earlier in the day, Gethin had been sent out of the house and down to the village to find Doctor Rees. When he got to the doctor’s house he was informed that he was away to attend an emergency with no mention of when he would return. With no surgeries to speak of, and the nearest hospital in Aberystwyth, he had been forced to turn his carriage around and head back to his own village in the hope that his local doctor would be available to take up the case. Now, with no way of informing him of the latest developments and the dire situation that Howell had found himself in, we were all left to pray that he did not come back empty-handed.
Nellie, as expected, had immediately jumped into action to have Howell lifted from the cold stone floor, and Mr Hopkin, with no care for the meal being prepared by his wife, swept the table clean of its contents, sending bowls, dishware and food crashing to the ground to allow space for the boy to be laid out and examined.
Red marks ran down Howell’s neck where he had maniacally clawed at himself while struggling for oxygen, leaving several cuts that needed to be tended. By now exhausted, his body had become limp and he no longer writhed, though this seemed of little comfort to Nellie who was concerned by his shallow breaths and continued to feel around his throat for lumps and blockages. She had initially suspected choking, followed by mumps but there was no swelling to be found, and no reason, she informed us, that it would suddenly starve him of oxygen when he had appeared well only moments prior.
In the time since her son's collapse, Mrs Hopkin had become a nervous wreck and was screaming for the safety and well-being of her child. She had been with him when he went down and it had been the suddenness of it, and the resulting bang to his head on the stone floor as he fell, that had caused the scream we had heard from upstairs. Once Nellie was certain that there was no damage done from the fall, Mrs Hopkin was ordered from the room and escorted to a chair in the sitting room by Nan and Betty where she continued to wail, sending echoes of her cries across the house. Despite their efforts to calm her, she could not be consoled and continued to make attempts to get up and return to her son.
Nellie tore at Howell’s shirt and pressed her ear to his chest. His breaths were shallow and weak and she seemed at a loss for what to do next. She paced, then tapped her chin, then paced some more and continually asked for silence, even though nobody dared speak for fear of breaking her concentration. Beside the stove, she had stacked all of her medical books, which she would periodically pick up and skim through. Seemingly unable to find what she was looking for, or not knowing what it was that she should be looking for, she would return them to the pile and begin pacing again.
The effort of bringing myself downstairs had left me feeling weak so I’d pulled a chair in front of the back door and sat myself down. I still felt as though I was freezing, though I continued to sweat, leaving Gwyn constantly wiping at my face with one of Mrs Hopkin’s tea towels. Nellie had suggested I return to bed to rest, but I couldn’t stand being upstairs not knowing what was happening and she was too distracted to argue, so I stayed put.
“Betty!” Nellie suddenly shouted. Everyone in the room turned their attention to her and Betty ran from the living room to her side. “I need you to chop some ginger. Lots of it. And I need you to boil water. We’ll need at least enough for two jugs.”
Betty did as she was asked, putting two large pans of water on the stove to boil and grabbing all the ginger root from the pantry that she could find.
“What the hell is this going to do?” Mr Hopkin asked impatiently, raising his hands in exasperation while Betty began chopping. He had remained mostly silent throughout but had joined Nellie in her pacing several times. He seemed willing to defer to her in the situation, though shared little understanding of anything she was doing and his impatience was growing.
“It’s to help him breathe,” Nellie replied. “He’s struggling for air. One of my books says that ginger can be an aid when you have trouble breathing and it’s the only thing I can think of. I don’t know what else to do.”
Mr Hopkin didn’t look convinced but there was little he could do to argue if he wanted his son to have any chance of survival and nobody else had any other suggestions that could help.
Gwyn turned his back to everyone in the kitchen and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Is there anything you know that could help him?”
I shrugged, wracking my brain for anything that could assist Nellie. I’d watched a show once where a doctor was caught in an emergency without any supplies and stuck a pen into a man’s throat when he was choking, but Howell didn’t seem to have anything lodged in his airway and I wasn’t about to suggest to his parents that we should stab him in the neck. There was nothing that I could offer to help.
When the water had boiled Betty tipped in the chunks of ginger and gave it a stir, which gave the room a scent that reminded me of Christmas. I’d been expecting that Nellie would have him drink it, but she instead directed Betty to pour it into two large tin jugs and placed one on each side of Howell’s head. She continued to stir at them, wafting the steam towards her brother in the hope of clearing his airways. It didn’t seem to make his breathing even out but it did quieten down the rasping and gurgling sounds he had been making, which Nellie considered a good sign.
“Drink,” Gwyn said, handing me a glass of water. “You need to look after yourself too.” I grabbed the glass and took a gulp but my throat was sore and each mouthful felt like I was trying to swallow a snooker ball. Still, he wouldn’t allow me to stop until it was all gone.
“I think you should go back to bed,” he said, but he already knew that I wouldn’t be moving from the kitchen until I was sure that things were ok.
“Is he going to die?” Sophia asked. In all of the commotion, I hadn’t even noticed that she was sitting on the floor beside me, tucked into the corner of the room and with her hands up over her ears. Either forgotten or deemed to be no obstacle to the movement of the adults, she had been left there to watch as events unfolded, terrified at watching her brother’s struggle.
“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I said, but the outlook was not looking good. With no idea what was causing it and no sign of the doctor, I was beginning to worry that he might not last very long.
Gwyn came to kneel in front of her and brushed a hand through her hair. “We just need to wait for the doctor and then everything will be fine. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
She reached out to hug him, and as she did the sleeves on her dress pulled back revealing a rash on her arm. The irritation of the material moving along her skin caused her to scratch at it and as she lifted her sleeve to do so it revealed an open sore, about the size of a penny, that was deep and oozing.
“Sophia, what’s that?” I said, grabbing her arm. I raised her sleeve as far as it would go and saw the rash had spread right up to her shoulder, flaky and dry. There were another two sore spots, though they were sealed over and looked more like blisters, angry and ready to break under the slightest pressure.
“Nellie, I think you should take a look at this,” I called out. Sophia retreated from my grasp and began to cry. She tucked herself as far back into the corner as she could get, as though she had just been told off and was avoiding punishment. “It’s ok,” I tried to reassure her, but she pushed her face into her knees and curled up tightly.
“What is it?” Nellie said. She dropped the towel she’d been holding over Howell’s face onto the table and made her way to us.
“She has a rash. It looks sore. It’s all up her arm.”
She crouched down next to Gwyn and tried to take hold of Sophia's arm but she tucked it tightly to her chest and wouldn’t budge.
“Sophia, cariad, I just want to have a look.” She tried again, but the girl was unmoving, probably frightened half to death. It wasn’t helped when Mr Hopkin, short on patience at the best of times, bellowed something in Welsh at her so loudly that it even silenced the cries of his wife in the next room. Sophia, now more upset than she already was, filled the newly created silence with loud sobs that made her shoulders shake.
Nellie cast her father a disapproving look and he turned for the cabinet that the whiskey was stored in, poured himself a large measure and knocked it back in one gulp.
“Sophia, I need to look at your arm. You’re not in any trouble, but I need to see it,” Nellie tried again.