Victor Hart: Volume 1 (winner of 1st prize Litarium Steampunk Competition)

Victor Hart: Case#3 Chapter 1

1

The doctor who had been attending Victor at Guy’s hospital was called Dr. Wigeon. He looked like a criminal and spoke with an estuary twang, but William Gull had insisted he was the best doctor they had on staff.

Dr. Wigeon came to Victor’s bedside. Victor was itching to leave the hospital, where he had been recovering for about a week and had been subjected to just about every test imaginable. So far everything had been fine, but the look on Dr. Wigeon’s face seemed to say bad news before he even opened his mouth. Victor didn’t like to be involuntarily confined, his Romani blood naturally inclined towards freedom; and his stay at the hospital, which had started as a necessity, became a nice gesture and then a prison sentence enforced by manners.

Dr. Wigeon peered into Victor’s eyes, using a concave mirror to lighten them.

“You told the nurse that as you entered the icy water, you saw several flashes of red?” Dr Wigeon eyed Victor as if he was a mechanic looking under the hood of a broken car. “And you actually lost vision for a few moments?”

“That’s right,” Victor tried not to nod, “is there something wrong?”

“That flash you saw was probably your brain trying to cope with damage to the retinal wall,” Dr. Wigeon went on. “It looks as though the retinal nerve wall sustained considerable damage from the shock of the temperature.”

“But I can still see…” Victor was confused.

“For now,” the doctor pocketed the mirror into his white coat, “but your brain’s reconstructing most of the images you can see based on a tiny thread of information.”

“You mean I’m going blind?” Victor’s stomach churned.

“No, it will heal. Provided you don’t give your head any fierce knocks or vibrations, over a few weeks the back side of your eyes should right themselves,” the doctor soothed. “But if you don’t stay away from trauma and heavy machinery for a few weeks you run the risk of detaching the retina completely, and then yes, you will go permanently, irreversibly blind.”

*          *          *

*          *          *          *

*          *          *

When Victor arrived at the ‘King’s Arms’ the tavern owner called Victor over to the bar. It gave him a slight lurch as he could only fathom one reason why and that was that the Masons’ money had finally run out, and Victor was to be cast out onto the streets again. But thankfully that wasn’t the topic the tavern owner wanted to discuss.

The taproom was a dark wooden affair; high wooden seats stood waiting at the bar like Catholics praying at an altar. Behind the barkeep was a triptych of wooden arches defining areas of bottle storage and display. It had the comforting smell of old beer spillages and pipe tobacco.

The patrons of the bar were middle class socialites. Women wearing shawls and men in top hats or bowlers carrying pewter flagons of ale. There were even a couple of children and a white dog present.

Victor parked himself in one of the long legged bar chairs and rested his feet on the brass foot rail that ran along the bottom of the bar. He looked past the beer pumps at the gruff-looking tavern owner’s moustached face.

He had one of those moustaches that joined up to his side-burns without a single hair on his chin, his name was Eades.

“There was a woman here to see you,” The tavern owner said.