Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain Read Free Page B

Olaf. He might find refuge in another town, build a new practice, care for his mother for as long as he could. But he had no time to find the cure.
    â€œCome inside,” the schoolmaster said again. “Men can only do so much.”
    â€œWe can heal the soul,” Olaf answered. “We have the power.”
    Then he accepted the outstretched hand, because faith alone did not grant him the strength to rise.

T HE B URNING
    Richard Shaftsbury lit the fire and then a single candle. In the early days, the first days of his marriage, he and Gardenia burned dozens of candles before she returned to the kitchen and he set out lines of silver tankards. Tallow had flowed like ale, and the tavern had the warmth of expectations: they’d build a mahogany bar, stencil flowers above every door, serve chocolate, from London, which Gardenia had seen once. The King’s Inn, they’d called it, raising the carved wood sign. Now, four years later, only the soft light of the evening’s candle held promise.
    The one early customer sat across from Richard, though Doctor Clementius Steenwycks never paid a cold shilling for his evening libations. People whispered that he wasas odd as his father, who pickled animal heads and sliced them apart until he lost his reason entirely. He’d raped a woman — Clementius’s mother — in the shadows of the docks where she awaited her young husband, a man who raised Clementius as a son, despite a shroud of rumors and ignominy. As a youth, Clementius found love only with the feebleminded daughter of a blind locksmith, and she bore him one son, Jan, now grown and gone, before she succumbed to fever.
    â€œRaining again,” Clementius said, silk robe parted over narrow chest, pipe filled with Indian tobacco. His eyes, a peculiar hazel that appeared to change hue as his gaze shifted — first to Richard, then to the kitchen, then to the smoke rising before him — had a self-satisfied glimmer, as if the doctor had peered into himself and found everything in perfect order. Though his shoulders hunched awkwardly, a symptom of long nights of study, he remained fit and well groomed. “Are you ready?”
    Richard nodded. Rain kept all but the rowdiest drinkers away, and the night promised brawls. On rainy nights, he thanked the Lord for bringing Doctor Clementius Steen-wycks to his inn, thanked the Lord that he had a medical man on hand, and one willing, on occasion, to snatch drunkards from their stools and thrust them into the darkened streets. Most evenings Richard bemoaned the fact that he’d let his two best rooms to Clementius for halftheir worth. He’d thought the doctor’s practice would bring business. Never once did it occur to him that the practice would never be large, or that the few patients who arrived each day would feel too sick for lime punch and whiskey.
    Clementius pushed his half-empty cup across the table. Tonight he would stitch broken lips and wrap bruised arms and bent fingers — tasks beneath a doctor with vast experience and interests, but which Richard respected far more than the strange remedies imported from London or the careful studies the medical man did on the hogs in the New York streets. Clementius had curious interests, but then, he was an unusual man.
    â€œPerhaps Gardenia will prepare roast beef?” Clementius said, a demand more than a question. The doctor would eat and drink as he pleased tonight. The fact that Gardenia was indisposed and unable to cook did not matter. “And an apple crisp with cream.”
    Richard wiped the tabletop with the torn cuff of his shirt. What bothered him more than the menu, which would keep his lovely servant girl in the kitchen all evening, was the gnawing certainty that the doctor had requested the dishes for exactly this reason. Richard should never have confided in Clementius. But the two had spent so many evenings in the flickering light of the tavern that the