The Heart Specialist Read Online Free PDF Page B

sketch pad and a pencil and turned to a clean page. The sketches were not proportional, but to me they were better than the paintings in any museum. I had become a woman, Miss Skerry said. What she called “menses,” from the Latin word for month, was not a malady. It was simply discharge from the uterus as it restarted the female cycle of fertility. I was fertile, no different than an animal reaching maturation, or a field become ready for sowing, or the wives and mothers who walked every day on the streets of St. Andrews East. I had come of age.
    I did not feel “of age.” I looked down at my body, which had altered drastically over the past year, rounding and softening where it had once been flat and hard like the body of a boy. Now there was blood and an ache in my belly Miss Skerry called menstrual cramps. I was not sure I wanted any part of it. The information was overwhelming, but at least I knew I would live. I was all right.
    Miss Skerry communicated all of this as she would anything else she thought I should learn, in language precise and clear. The menses, she said, were a time to stay quiet and think about things. The female body was like a garden, with cycles of birth and growth and death. A woman had to tend and respect it in its various seasons.
    The cure for cramps was heat, which, on that cold January day, came as much from the governess’s smile as from the hot water bottle she prepared and pressed against me. “There,” she said, tapping it lightly so the water inside jiggled. “Being a woman can be painful at times, Agnes White, but I assure you, it is hardly ever fatal.”

4
    JUNE 1885, MONTREAL
    It is sad but true that people tend to dwell on the troubles of their lives and forget the riches. I am no exception, for in this account of my early days I am skimming over the two years I spent in Miss Skerry’s company out at my grandmother’s farm, which I count among the happiest years of my life. Of course, I did not realize how happy I was while I was living them. Happiness is a strange thing. It is something I tend to recognize only after it has passed, when I realize I miss it.
    In Miss Skerry I discovered a companion every bit as intellectually driven as I was. I had not met anyone like her, and it freed me in ways at which I still marvel. Although I could not know it at age thirteen, when she arrived at the Priory to take charge of me she was a mentor, dropping from the sky as Athena did in The Odyssey to guide the fatherless Telemachus. It was Miss Skerry’s idea that I leave St. Andrews East. She instigated the plan and worked tirelessly to ensure its success, even though she knew it meant we would have to separate. The year I turned fifteen Miss Skerry announced she had taught me all she could. There were gaps in her own education — algebra and geometry — which would become gaps in mine if I did not get myself out of the Priory and off to a regular school.
    She did not boast about how splendidly she had prepared me in other respects. I was exceptionally strong in natural history. It was our mutual passion. She had also taught me a great deal about literature and history. I read widely in both English and French and was fluent in dead languages — Latin and Greek — which Miss Skerry had learned from her father.
    Just before I turned fifteen Miss Skerry discovered an educational institution that she thought would suit me — Misses Symmers and Smith’s School in Montreal. She arranged a visit so I could write the entrance exam. She sat with me on the train, waited three hours in the corridor while I wrote the exam, and, after I had won a full scholarship, presented such a strong case for my enrolment that Grandmother had to accept.
    I found myself in June of 1885 in a tiny room with a crack on the ceiling fanning out at one end like the River Nile, and a girl called Janie Banks Geoffreys snoring in the bed beside me. Janie was lying on her back with her limbs flung out in all