Free Alchemist by Peter James Page B

unless we operate; the baby will kill her if this goes on. There isa chance if we operate that she will live – and that the baby will also.’
    Alan Johnson wrung his hands. Slowly he nodded. ‘Go ahead, please, you’d better go ahead.’
    They allowed him into the operating theatre and he stood at the rear, in a gown, mask and white clogs, beside the anaesthetics machine, his eyes switching from his wife’s motionless face to the dials of the monitors. He was thinking of the cot in the small upstairs room of their home, with the yellow walls and blue skirting board that he’d painted himself, and the paper frieze of nursery rhymes that he and Sarah had put up together … the pram, and the toys and clothes they had bought although they had not known whether it would be a boy or a girl.
    Until the past few months their marriage had been utter bliss. He had never felt so happy in all his life. He should have realized, he knew, that there was a price to pay. God never gave without asking for something in return, although sometimes it was hard to understand the reasons behind His requests. But God was always right, and they knew that whatever pain He put them through, He loved them both as dearly as they did Him.
    God had tested them for the first three years of their marriage by not permitting Sarah to get pregnant, in spite of their regular and passionate love-making. They understood the value of this test was to make them realize that human life could not be taken for granted, nor could the right to create it. Dr Humphreys had prescribed a course of a fertility drug called Maternox, and within three months of starting to take it, Sarah had fallen pregnant.
    Alan could remember the joy as they had sat together in Dr Humphreys’ small surgery and he had confirmed the news that she was indeed expecting a baby. He thought back with tears in his eyes to those early days of her pregnancy. Apart from the small growing bump, Sarah had hardly seemed affected. None of the symptoms you read about, like morning sickness or strange food crazes. Then she had lost colour from her face and suddenly started feeling very tired, drained of energy. Anaemia, the doctor had told them, nothing to worryabout; he had prescribed a course of vitamin supplements and for a while afterwards she had seemed fine.
    Fine until she had learned the company she was working for was being taken over and rumours were rife that there would be redundancies. A week later the first attack of the rash had struck. Just a small, localized reaction on the right-hand side of her chest and over the top of her shoulder, which Dr Humphreys had diagnosed as shingles, brought on by the stress of fearing about her job. But even he had been surprised how quickly it had faded.
    It was a few weeks later that she had complained of the first headache; he remembered her lying in bed, clamping her skull between her hands and fighting back tears. Then the nausea and the vomiting. Dr Humphreys had become alarmed. For a month she had been able to hold down very little food and he had suggested she should be admitted to hospital. But Sarah was an independent creature and had not wanted that.
    So Alan had taken time off work to look after her, nursing her night and day, exhausting himself, applying ointment and damp towels to the painful rash that had returned with a vengeance in the past month. And which now lay, like burn blisters, in large swathes across her body. Dr Humphreys had had Sarah examined by a dermatologist, who suspected a virulent form of psoriasis, and had taken a biopsy for laboratory analysis. But the rash matched no known strain of psoriasis. The dermatologist’s final diagnosis was that it was a symptom of an unidentified virus that had infected her. He explained that such viruses attacked at random, and there was no other cure than medical supervision, and time.
    â€˜I’ve never seen a viral rash like this,’ the