The True Story of a Forgotten Hero - Blog Tour and Book Excerpt for "A Theory in Vienna"

BOOK EXCERPT

This excerpt establishes the main theme and the high stakes.

Prologue

Vienna, July 1847

Helga winces as a contraction ripples through her. She knows it is time. She dresses and then wakes her mother, who will accompany her to the lying-in clinic. Within the half-hour they are ready, shawls wrapped tightly around them. Helga clutches the banisters as she follows her mother down the stairs and out onto the street. Slivers of dawn start to separate the darkness as the women link arms.

She finds it hard to place one foot in front of the other as they shuffle past dark alleyways. In one of them, an old man bares his teeth and howls. She grips her mother’s hand, grateful for her presence.

The sky before them leaches blood red as they reach the gatehouse of the sprawling institution. Helga slows; her cramps are coming closer and closer. She bites on her shawl as they climb the stone steps in front of them. The oaken door is huge and Helga can barely hear the sound of her own knock.

As dawn lightens the shiny pebbles of the courtyard, the door swings inwards and two nurses appear, one slender, one rotund. They remind Helga of nuns in their dark flannel, floor-length uniforms. They close the door behind her and she falls to her knees, groaning. The nurses lift her and guide her over to a staircase. A young girl is descending, shaking her head violently as she squeezes past them, rags swathing her prominent belly. Helga stares after her. Candles glow in sconces high on the walls, scattering monstrous shadows.

‘Helga, we must ask them. Don’t you remember … all the talk about the clinics?’

Helga stares at her mother, before strong arms guide her upwards and soothing voices smother her. She has a vague memory of a worry her mother had … something to do with the doctors, but she cannot grasp hold of it.

A desk dominates the desolate landing. Helga stares into the pale eyes of the young man sitting behind it, who nods and announces he is a doctor. There are muffled voices far away and she wrinkles her nose at the smells of blood, and sweat.

‘Helga. Please -’

She turns, gritting her teeth as another contraction tears at her.

‘Pray, what is it, Mother?’

Her mother’s eyes are bright with fear.

‘Herr Doctor. Please … where is the ward with the midwives? My daughter would like her baby to be delivered there.’

Helga’s baby kicks her hard.

‘Mother, please … I am quite desperate to lie down.’

The doctor takes his quill and scratches his parchment with a flourish.

‘Madam, it is Sunday morning. From Friday to Sunday we only admit patients to the First Clinic.’

‘Is that the doctors’ ward? The ward with the students?’

‘Yes.’

‘I beg you, no, please don’t take my daughter there.’ She steps back, her hands trembling.

‘Calm yourself, madam. The doctors will attend to the birth. This hospital has rules, and we must follow them.’ He turns to the nurses. ‘Take her to the First Clinic, forthwith.’

‘No … no, you cannot …’

The nurses shrug and there is no surprise in their eyes. They gather Helga’s elbows and walk down the corridor towards the First Clinic. Helga looks back, to see that her mother is weeping.

Inside the ward she feels a chill, despite the fireplaces burning at either end of the room. There are a dozen beds on either side, most of which are occupied. She puzzles how she will get any sleep amid the noise and the clamour. The nurses whisper that the medical students have just arrived from their early morning dissections in the deadhouse. Helga is shown to her bed at last. She does not care that the sheets are torn or that there is paint peeling quite dreadfully on the walls surrounding her; she feels only relief to lift her swollen ankles from the ground.

A student runs over and glances at her, frowning. He tugs his bottom lip and mumbles that he needs to examine her. He raises her petticoats. She closes her eyes and tells herself that it will be over soon. When he has finished examining her he wipes his bloody hands on his waistcoat and leaves.

She loses count of the times that morning that dirty, clumsy hands push inside her. Ragged nails tag and tear. The students tell her to ‘be a good girl and to keep still.’

All the while her regular pains are coming ever closer.

When a nurse brings her lunch, Helga tells her to take the pale soup away. An urgency seizes her, a strong feeling that she should push. Nurses come; they gather at the end of her bed. They glare as the doctors pull up her petticoats and push their fingers inside once again.

‘We must learn,’ a chubby, bespectacled student says. ‘It is so important that we learn.’

*

The cry of her newborn is sweet and she is overwhelmed with joy. She names him Georg. Her baby seems tiny, yet the nurses tell her ‘he is bigger than the average.’

They clean him and offer him to Helga and she swoons as she smells his soft baby scent. How his father would have adored him. He has an abundance of black, silky hair, the exact colour of her own. She is a mother now, and she cannot wait to show him to her own mother. She kisses the top of her baby’s head and the nurses tuck him into the folds of her shawl. She feels healthy and she smiles as she remembers her mother’s unnecessary fears. She must have fallen asleep; when she wakes she hears the gentle clearing of a throat. A young doctor whom she has not seen before is standing at the foot of her bed.

‘Let me take your baby now. You have done well and you need to rest. It is an arduous task, bringing an infant into the world.’