Paddington Green, page 10
‘Well, at least you know it’s in the North,’ Snow said after a sharp glance at William’s now gleaming face, for the room was getting warmer as the oil lamps threw heat as well as radiance from their tall glass chimneys. ‘We bumpkins must be grateful for that, no doubt!’
There was a snort of laughter from Rupert, and William, now quite discomfited, threw him a furious glance, but Rupert merely grinned back at him and turned his attention to the woman on the table.
She was lying on her back, her hands held close to the table by heavy leather straps, and her ankles and knees held equally fast. She was rolling her head from side to side, moaning softly and occasionally opening her eyes to stare blearily about the room, only to close them again with another groan.
Behind her Nancy held a white china cup with a spout and occasionally leaned over and coaxed her to drink some of its contents and the heavy scent of brandy filled the air each time she gulped. She was, quite clearly, completely and helplessly drunk.
Abel moved across to stand at her side and peer down at her and said loudly, ‘Mrs Finn! Mrs Finn, do you hear me, Mrs Finn?’
The woman opened her eyes, tried to focus them in the direction from which the sound came, and closed them again, muttering something thickly but inaudibly, and Nancy said cheerfully, ‘Oh, she’s far gone, sir! I gave her twice the usual amount, poor creature, for I’ve seen the state of her and ‘twill be hell and all its devils as she’ll suffer before this day’s out. Far gone, she is—’
‘By God, but it’s no way to treat patients, this,’ Snow said abruptly. ‘To fill their bellies with brandy before you can touch ’em with a knife! I’ve no doubt that the brandy makes the blood run more free, and impedes the surgery and the recovery more than is necessary! And brandy or no, they suffer—’
‘I’d not be able to touch the woman at all without it,’ Abel said shortly, and began to remove the dressing that covered the left side of her chest. ‘Oh, I’ve heard you on the subject before, Snow. Seeking a way to promote insensibility without spirits. But you must admit it’s an unlikely idea, to say the least!’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Snow said, and leaned over to help as the bandages began to unravel. ‘I’ve been hearing of a leech in Shropshire, some twenty years ago. Gave animals carbon dioxide to inhale, as I understand it, and made ’em quite as insensible as any surgeon would require.’
‘Aye, but what happened afterwards? Did they wake up again? It might be easier to operate on the insensible, but where’s the sense if they don’t recover their senses? That becomes the mere practice of surgery, not the use of it to ameliorate a man’s ills. Or a woman’s—’
There was a silence as the last dressing came off, apart from the thick soft moan that the woman produced and they all stood looking at her bare breasts.
On one side the curve of flesh was soft, even seductive, for the woman was quite young, not three and thirty yet, and the nipple stood firm and tiptilted above the gentle swell. But in the other breast the nipple was lopsided, curving over towards the armpit, and though the flesh still looked healthy and agreeable towards the centre of the body, there between the arm and the nipple lay an open weeping sore. Its edges were hard and inturned as though punched out and the veins which ran into it were swollen and tense and dark as they made their tortuous way across the pallid skin. The livid flesh within the ulcerated area looked hot and tight, and Snow put one hand forwards and then withdrew it, and Abel said almost inconsequentially, ‘The ancients called this noli me tangere, as I recall.’
‘Aye,’ said Snow. ‘Or the Wolf. It is indeed a great eater of flesh. How long since she came to you?’
Abel’s voice seemed to harden. ‘About five weeks.’
‘Five weeks?’ Snow looked up swiftly, and frowned. ‘Did you try no treatment in that time?’
‘Oh, indeed I did!’ Abel said, and turned his head so that he was staring very directly at William, who was standing hard against the wall, looking down at his feet. ‘Indeed I did. I recommended the application of caustic salve, to burn away the cancerous tissue and promote the granulation of new. Nancy was bid to apply the treatment twice a day, without fail. Did you fail, Nancy?’ And still he was staring at William.
‘I, sir? Fail your instructions?’ Nancy raised her head and stared at Abel with her face filled with amazement. ‘Mr Abel! You should know better nor to say such a thing to me! This is Nancy, remember? Not one of yer gutter nurses as you—’
He threw her a swift look and smiled reassuringly. ‘I know, I know. You must forgive the stupid question.’ He turned his gaze back to William.
‘So, the fault, if it is not in the applying of the ointment, must be in the ointment itself. That seems a reasonable supposition?’
Rupert leaned forwards and stared at the ulcer. ‘I see no sign of any salve here,’ he said and his voice was high and thin. ‘You may believe your instructions were fully carried out, sir, but I see no salve here or—’
‘Then look at this!’ Nancy said loudly, and reached across to scrabble in the bowl where the soiled dressings had been thrown. She pulled out a messy looking piece of greyish charpie, the soft bundle of teased linen threads that Nellie’s always used for dressings.
‘See this? Look, Master Rupert, and then tell me there was no salve applied! O’course it’s not to be seen on the ulcer, on account the stuff was so poorly made that it ‘ad no sticking power at all! I put it on the dressing, as you see ’ere if you do but look, and set it into its place, and not a bit of goodness come out of it on to the poor woman’s body! ‘Twas me as told Mr Abel ’is salve wasn’t no good! It used to be a good salve, this one did, but look at this and then tell me I ain’t done as I was bid!’ And she waved the dressing almost under Rupert’s nose, so that he reared back, for it smelt foul; but all could see quite clearly the heavy brownish mass that adhered to the cloth and the way it was packed so heavily into the fibres.
‘What mixture is it, for heaven’s sake?’ Snow said, taking it from her hand and peering at it. ‘This is a poor quality substance, Lackland, and no mistake. There should be sweet mercury in it, and red lead and balsam of sulphur and—’
‘And oil of amber and spirits of wine and opium,’ Abel said harshly, ‘caustic and soothing in turn, all with a task to do in the concoction—’
‘There was no opium in it, I’ll tell you that,’ Nancy said flatly. She took the dressing from Snow’s hand and stared at it for a moment, and then dropped it back into the bowl. ‘No opium, on my life as I stand ’ere, for she shrieked pitiful when I applied it, and if there’d bin opium, why, ’er pain would ‘ave abated. And it didn’t.’
‘So, William!’ Abel’s voice was harsh now. ‘Can you perhaps explain the matter? The salve was prepared at Wapping like all the materials we use here. What went wrong with this one? For I have looked in the pots, and I tell you now, they contain a mass of the base, but the minimum—if any!—of the essential ingredients. You must remember that I too am an apothecary, and I know how these plasters and salves and cataplasms you make should be! And I cannot understand why the ones we are here using should be such cheap and rubbishy concoctions when we are paying for the best of quality. Can you help me to understand?’
William at last raised his head to stare at his father and his face was sullen and heavy. He looked at him for a long moment, and then sighed heavily, his nostrils dilating sharply to make his face seem momentarily to spread and soften.
‘So, I have been lax in the supervision of the apprentices and they have not been following the receipts as they should,’ he said. ‘I cannot help that, though, since I must be out and about all the time to the wharves and warehouses buying the materials and the drugs you seek. I cannot do that and be by their side always watching them!’
‘Perhaps not,’ Abel said softly. ‘But if they are not using the materials in the concoctions, William, then those materials should still be about the place. And you tell me they are not! That is what you meant, I believe, when you told me that the stocks of all our expensive medicaments are shocking low? And that the prices have risen so high that you must go and buy at the top of the market’s prices, and thus demand more money than we budgeted for Wapping in this quarter?’
William’s face changed again, the ready colour rising and then receding like a tide, to leave his face pinched and sallow. ‘I cannot discuss that now,’ he said shortly. ‘You can come and check the stores for yourself if you so wish. Rupert will come with you, no doubt, to see that both our interests are fairly represented—’ He looked swiftly at Rupert, but he was looking down at the ulcer on the woman’s chest, his lips pursed softly as though he were whistling, and seeming to be quite oblivious of the conversation around him.
‘That I shall surely do,’ Abel said, and his voice was loud and harsh in the quiet room, obliterating even the sound of Mrs Finn’s groaning, which was coming more loudly now, so that Nancy bent over to pour more brandy between her clenched teeth. ‘That I shall! But now, William, you shall see the operation that has been made necessary because the salve was not—not as—effective as we hoped, shall I say. That salve, properly constituted and used for a full five weeks, should have halted the spread of the ulcer and hopefully have given us a cure for a while—though she could not hope to live much longer, for the disease is an incurable one. Now, however, surgery is necessary for the ulcer will spread so fast it will eat into her very bones and she will die in greater agony than necessary.’
William moved then, turning blindly towards the door but Abel was faster than he was, and moved across the room with a few easy lopes to grasp his elbow and lead him to the side of the table.
‘Stand you there, so you may see each stroke of the knife,’ he said. ‘It will help, I think, if Mr Snow stands this side of you—aye, thank you, Snow—for then he can hand me the instruments and also see to it that you have a good view of the proceedings. I would not have you miss one atom of it.’
And so William stood, sweating steadily so that rivulets ran down his forehead and the sides of his nose, down his cheeks and on to the starched points of his collar so that they wilted and bent. The light from the oil lamps and the dull grey skylight above him threw every movement of his father’s and Snow’s hands into sharp relief so that he could not help but watch them, though he tried to keep his eyes closed. But the light seemed to come needle-sharp, pushing in beneath his sandy lashes to force them up and make him stare at what was happening in sick horror.
For all he had trained as an apothecary, had been taught the facts of illness and disease, for all the time he had spent working in Wapping and frequenting the corridors of this hospital, he had never before been brought face to face with the cold reality that was surgery. And facing it now he sweated and squirmed, but watched in mounting revulsion, almost as fascinated as he was repelled.
They moved fast, his father and his brother and Snow. Rupert had moved to stand behind the woman and take her left shoulder in a hard grasp, so that he could fix it to the table with all his weight, while Nancy moved across to hold the other shoulder by leaning on it. Snow took the left arm and bent it at the elbow so that although the wrist was still strapped firmly to the table there was room for Abel to move.
And move he did, taking one of his favourite knives in one hand and a wad of charpie in the other. Stylishly tortoiseshell-handled, with a dull satin grey gleam about its blade, the knife moved with a precision that was sure and swift, cutting in a great curve from the armpit round up to the nipple, and back to the point of the shoulder, leaving the yellow-white flesh to part lazily behind it, and small spurts of scarlet blood to go leaping up into the air with a sort of teasing merriment.
The woman started to shriek, a great breathy high-pitched sound that yet had an undertow, a counterpoint, of thick huskiness, and the sound grew and grew even though Nancy held on to her head and shoulder and tried to contain it, grew until the room rang with sound, and it seemed the air would thicken with it and become foggy, as though the din would become concrete enough to dull the lights and make it impossible not only to see and hear but to breathe and think or even be.
But Abel seemed untouched by it, and went on, applying hot pitch from the bubbling pot on the table beside him so that the dancing little jets of blood were stilled and the smell of singed flesh filled the air to mix itself with the sound of the woman’s crying. His knife moved with a great elegance, gouging out the flesh beneath the nipple so that a flap of skin was formed; easing away from the chest wall the ulcerated area, lifting and cutting, manipulating and urging until, quite suddenly there was a flap of dead humanity in his hand, a piece of helpless limp muscle and fat and skin, and he laid it almost tenderly on the table behind him and returned to the body that lay there on the table.
For it was now very like a body, a dead shell, for the shrieking had stopped as the woman fell into a blessed unconsciousness and ceased her heaving and plunging attempts to move and now Abel could work with delicacy, showing his skill in a kind of grace-note way as his hands moved and trilled and spun their web of ties and sutures. The flap came over the armpit, was sewn to the remaining skin on that side so that the remains of the nipple lay ludicrously and pathetically askew, almost at the side of the body. And then he was done, and he and Snow were throwing used instruments down on the table, and wrapping dressings and bandages into place and the woman was beginning to emerge from the blackness of the little peace she had known to start again her great wailing.
Nancy went to the door, and William for the first time was able to look away from the woman on the table to stare almost blankly at the two hefty men who came in.
‘Take her back,’ Abel said shortly. ‘And we shall hope to see some improvement in her. But I cannot be too sanguine.’
He stood back, and the porters unbuckled the straps and with Nancy’s help lifted the blanket-wrapped shape to their shoulders and went stumping down the stairs so that the crying that had become so much a part of the room went fading away in a diminuendo which left them all, and William most particularly, blank and a little dazed.
‘The quality of the materials you produce at Wapping does matter, you see, William,’ Abel said and his tone was quite conversational. ‘If you did not see that before, I think you will now. Good afternoon to you. I must go to the wards for my visits. Rupert? Snow? Will you join me? Excellent. We shall see each other at home, I believe, William. At dinner.’
And it was then, left alone in the too-bright, too-quiet room at the top of the house, that William began to vomit.
9
‘You make too much of the matter altogether,’ Celia said again, and bent her head more closely over her sewing. They were in their little sitting room, the house blessedly silent beneath and around them with only the distant rumbling of the first carts coming into the market over the rattling cobbles to tell them that any but themselves were awake in all London.
Fully two hours had passed since the last customer had gone rolling out into the midnight darkness of King Street, skintight with beer, stuffed with food and dazed with music and brawling, to leave the proprietors to their weary nightly cleaning of their establishment; and now it was done.
Below stairs in the kitchen the last embers of the cooking fires warmed the bony shanks of the girls who had chosen to drag their pallets in front of it to sleep, for it was a bitter cold night, with the frost still biting hard at the roofs and walls of Covent Garden’s houses, seeping in through the grimy brick to chill the flesh of all within. Along the passageway Oliver and Phoebe slept heavily, and all over the house the fading smells of game pies and boiled ham, beer lees and tobacco carried ghostly reminders of the evening’s business.
Celia had twice told Jonah to go to bed, as she settled herself to the sewing of the spangled costume Norah Norton had torn so badly when one of the customers, in a sudden access of drunken desire, had gone reeling up on to the little stage to grab at her and join in the singing, much to the audience’s raucous delight.
‘In all truth, the thing is falling apart,’ she had said, wearily surveying its bedraggled seams and the trailing sequins on the bodice. ‘But it will cost far more to get a new one made than I’m inclined to spend on that one. She’s not that good a performer, and you must look to replace her, Jonah, as soon as you may. But she’ll need it for tomorrow’s performance, so mend it I must and now. Do go to bed, and don’t stand there gawping at me! I will come as soon as I am done, and I’ll be done the sooner without you there—’
But Jonah, tired as he was, had known that he would not find a better chance to talk to her of his plans and arrangements, so had sat down firmly in the chair facing hers and after a moment she had looked at him and shrugged, and bent her head to work.
He had watched her, staring at her smooth dark head in the pool of lamplight, at the way her long fingers flashed and twisted among the crimson and purple and violent green sequins, at the pale line of her cheek and the firm set of her mouth that was beginning to look much more narrow than it once had as lines etched themselves a little more deeply from its corners to her nose. He remembered suddenly and very poignantly the round-faced softness she had had when he had first seen her in the wings of the Haymarket theatre, watching him as he sat in the stage box, and the memory was so oddly painful—and why it should be so he could not imagine—that he blurted it out without stopping to think, without at all choosing his words in a way that would mollify her.
‘I am very concerned about Phoebe. It is wrong—very improper— that she should see the things she has to see here.’
Celia bit off a piece of thread, with her teeth snapping whitely in the soft light and began to thread her needle. ‘Oh, I know you were put out about it,’ she said irritably, and squinted at her needle, ‘and talked of nothing else all week. But really Jonah, you make too much of the matter! I told you—it was just one of the customers being friendly. And the child enjoys it, after all! I saw more and heard worse when I was half her age, and went on hearing and seeing it until I was full grown. And I doubt I have come to any harm.’
