Paddington Green, page 5
4
Five students were waiting at the doors that led into the top floor ward of the women’s medical house when Abel came clattering up the scrubbed wooden stairs, their heads together and guffawing at some coarse joke or other, but after one look at his set face and the line of his clenched jaw they subsided, seeming to shrink a little from the boisterous creatures they usually were into frightened schoolboys.
They knew their mentor too well to treat him with anything but the most careful of respect when he looked as grim as this; never particularly easy in his dealings with students, in such a mood as he clearly was this morning he could be blistering in his attacks on any lapse of behaviour, intelligence or concern for the patients.
So, they followed him into the big cold room with their heads down and their hands clasped behind their backs, shuffling a little to avoid the most dangerous place immediately behind him, and resigned themselves to a difficult morning.
Each ward-walking day followed the same pattern; they would start at the top of the women’s medical house, making their way down through each of the three bleak wards it contained, then go to the men’s medical house next door, trailing behind Abel through the dank cellars which had been connected to link the four old houses, finally to walk the six wards of the two surgical houses.
By the end of it, even on a good day, they would be exhausted, heads buzzing with new information, lists of symptoms, medical aphorisms and comments of all sorts thrown at them by Abel, and convinced that never, not if they lived to be ninety, would they learn all that this wretched man expected them to learn before they could call themselves physicians and surgeons.
They knew full well that they were lucky indeed to have places in this medical school; for small an establishment as it was when compared with the great old foundation hospitals of Guy’s and St Thomas’s over the river, poor in possessions as it was when compared with St George’s near the Park or the Middlesex which lay a scant half hour’s walk to the North of them, St Eleanor’s was one of the best thought-of medical schools in the whole of London and promised fair to produce doctors as great as any that might emerge from other, more august, places. So, would-be Charles Bells and Richard Brights, Thomas Addisons and Astley Coopers and Benjamin Brodies came to Nellie’s, as it was vulgarly known, spent their exhausting three years there, and emerged as useful members of their profession, in spite of and because of Abel Lackland.
This morning’s quintet, however, seemed likely to flee long before they reached anything like halfway through their course, for today Abel was exceedingly icy in his condemnation of the least error or slowness in response. He nearly reduced Edward Beddoes, the six-foot, butcher-shouldered, square-jawed countryman who had been known to stand up to a charging bull in his father’s farmyard without flinching, to tears; he so flicked on the raw the quiet Samuel Carey, who never showed any discomfiture whatever when his fellow students teased him cruelly for his studious ways and careful work, that he actually clenched his fist and raised it halfway to Abel’s face. Altogether the morning proved to be even worse than they had feared it would be at first sight of him.
And all because of the half hour Abel had spent, before coming to his ward rounds, in the tiny cluttered office on the ground floor of the men’s surgical house where George Conran spent his days scrabbling among his ledgers and accounts, sniffing dolorously into his straggling whiskers and looking suspiciously sideways at any who came at all near him.
Abel had realized full well that he had started the interview on the wrong foot and that much of what later transpired had been his own fault, but that did not ease his anger at all. He had wanted to approach Conran two days earlier, but the Queen’s wedding and all the excitement and brouhaha it had caused in the town had kept him so hard at work patching broken heads and reducing fractured legs and arms that not until now, the Wednesday following, had he been able to come to see the Bursar; and he had brought his own irritation at the delay with him.
He had stood there with his back to the small fire that burned dispiritedly in the grate, effectively cutting off any heat to the desiccated Conran, and said loudly, ‘So, Conran? What is this nonsense you have been saying about the costs of drugs to Eleanor’s being inflated beyond need? If you have any complaints in this area it is right and proper to bring them to me. You do not go bruiting them about the town to your tavern cronies! I will not have the hospital’s affairs gossiped over in taprooms, d’ye hear me, Conran? You exceed your office in taking Eleanor’s happenings outside the walls of this building!’
‘And, if you please, Mr Lackland, you seem to exceed yours in trying to give me instructions about the way in which I perform my functions,’ Conran said, in his whiney little voice, so full of subservience, yet triumphant in its self-righteousness. ‘For you know yourself, sir, that I was instructed always to take my instructions and to hand my reports to the whole Board of Trustees, and not to yourself alone, sir. After all, it was you that so instructed me, and—’
‘Dammitallman, I know that! I made sure the Bursar was answerable not to me personally for the very reason that so much of the money the hospital enjoys comes from my own pocket! I would not have any man say that I have the place run in any but the most pernickety of fashions! But that does not give you the right to bypass me altogether, for I am the one who handles the day to day running of the place, and not the Board! And well you know it! To go and sit in some damned Covent Garden whorehouse and make your whining complaints about the way my son handles the drug accounts is in no way the manner in which such matters should be dealt with. If you have any complaint, make it to me, not to half the neighbourhood!’
‘It was no whorehouse,’ Conran said, and how his head was poking forwards and his eyes gleaming spitefully. ‘But a decent eating place! I know better than to say aught about Master William Lackland in a whorehouse, begging your presence, sir, for it is all Lombard Street to a China orange that he would be there before me to listen! All I did was to take my dinner with Matthew Hodgkin the apothecary and ask him the prices of some of the staples we buy from Mr William, since I was concerned to check the state of the market, and was amazed to discover that we are paying fully twenty per cent more for ipecac and quassia chips, not to mention ginger and rhubarb and squills and other necessaries, and I said to my friend Hodgkin that I was surprised and—’
‘Aye—and said it loud enough for half the town to hear, and so talk about ever since,’ Abel said savagely. ‘William may be no angel in his entertainments, Conran, and I am the first to admit it, but I believe his way of spending his own time is no concern of yours! I know you have not wanted to work with him, from the time he took over the running of the manufactory, but that does not give you leave to spread malicious gossip!’
He stared loweringly at Conran for a moment, who stared back with that sideways glitter of his and said nothing.
‘Dammit all, Conran, I hold no brief for the man, my son or not,’ Abel burst out, irritated beyond measure by the way Conran was staring at him. ‘All I care for is that the hospital shall be run properly! And I cannot have this sort of talk going about outside its walls. I would not have it inside, for that matter! You are to stop this complaining and whining of yours, d’you hear me? I’ve better things to do than deal with the megrims of the Trustees if they hear this Banbury tale of troubles about the manufactory!’
Conran set down his pen and stood up, ostentatiously buttoning his jacket over his scrawny belly, and then starting to remove the calico covers which he had so prudently set over the threadbare cloth of his jacket sleeves. ‘That being so, sir, am I to understand I am no longer to take my instructions from the Board, but from you alone? You will forgive me, sir, I am sure, if I think it right to go to the City and discuss the matter with Sir Daniel and Mr Buckle? I would not for the world do aught to cause trouble between you and if I get my instructions from them as well as from you, and hear them with my own ears, why then, sir, I am in no risk of causing any pother! So I will set about—’
‘Sit down, you great fool!’ Abel roared, and moved forwards from the fire, his head down as rage made his shoulders rigid. ‘Do you dare to try your schoolboy tricks with me? We are not engaged in covering up any matter at all. Of that I assure you! If William is not giving Eleanor’s the service it should have, then by Christ, I will see to it that the matter is dealt with at speed! But I will not—I will not, do you hear me, have the likes of you rushing about so full of slimy virtue and making a great stick out of nothing! You get on with your task, and I will deal with all matters that are above your reach! I am telling you to mind your business and keep out of affairs that are too complex for you!’
Conran sat down again precipitously, but still had that gleam of spite about him, and even though his voice shook a little and he had to lick his dry lips before he spoke, he remained stubborn.
‘I will gladly stay with my business, sir. Indeed, that is all I am trying to do, for it is one of my duties to see the drugs are bought in and to make payments for them, and to do it at the most advantageous rates. It was Mr Hunnisett taught me my business, sir, your own servant as was for many years, God rest his poor soul in peace, and I doubt he taught me wrong. I would be derelict in my duty, sir, if I were to pay these sums out knowing in all truth that I could save four shillings in every pound I disburse. So what am I to do?’
And he sat and stared at Abel and Abel had stared back, knowing the man was right, in part applauding him for his careful watch over the hospital’s expenditure and yet hating him—as he had from the time he had first met him—for the unctuousness of his tone and the self-congratulatory way he had of displaying his virtuous care for his occupation.
The fault, of course, was William’s, too busy about his whoring and his drinking and his gaming to pay half the attention he should to his work. To keep prices down demanded constant attention to the state of the spice and drug market, frequent visits to the docks to go prowling about the merchantmen, playing one greedy captain off against another as the cargoes were dickered over. It needed concentration and application together with a sharp eye and a healthy appetite for clever practice, all of which this disagreeable, scrawny and altogether hateful little man had, and which William so notably lacked. And that this same hateful little man should be the one to underline William’s lacks was galling in the extreme.
So Abel fumed and smarted under his awareness of the whole wretched situation, and George Conran sat and watched him with his face quite still yet carrying in every line of his body a smirk that showed he knew precisely how Abel was feeling and gloried in it.
‘So, what am I to do, sir?’ Conran said again after a long pause. ‘You are so set that I should take day to day instructions from you, and here I find myself sore set about, not knowing what is my duty! I would be glad of a judgement, sir! After all, that was all I was asking of my friend the apothecary, Mr Hodgkin, who knows about such matters— just asking for advice, sir! It goes against my conscience to spend full twenty per cent more for Queen Eleanor’s medicaments than I have need to spend, but if you so instruct me, sir, then of course there is nothing more that I can say—’
‘Be quiet, damn you!’ Abel snapped and then rubbed his face wearily. ‘Don’t be a fool, man! Of course you must not spend more than is required! God damn it all, the manufactory was set up in the first instance to provide Eleanor’s with cheap medicines, and if it fails to do that, then it has no other real function, for the other side of its trade is little enough, in all conscience.’
‘—Another way in which William had been derelict in his duty,’ a little voice whispered somewhere deep in Abel’s mind. The sales of drugs to other hospitals and to those apothecaries’ shops which had no Fellow of the Society always on the premises should have brought in a tidy profit, and it always had in Hunnisett’s day. Since William had taken over, it had dwindled steadily. It was becoming ever more abundantly clear that it was at William’s door that all the real trouble lay, not at this dismal gossiping old woman of a Bursar’s.
Again Abel rubbed his face and now he spoke a little less harshly. ‘You must, of course, save every penny you can, for the hospital is hard put to it to raise all the money it needs at the best of times. I doubt your friend Hodgkin can provide us with our needs at any saving, so don’t go thinking that—’
Conran smirked. ‘Oh, sir, I was not thinking of any such thing, for he is a man in a very small way of business, I do assure you! But I have heard talk of a man who can provide us for even less than twenty per cent difference, and I am quite set upon seeing him and discussing—’
‘Not yet,’ Abel said, with a return of the edge to his voice. ‘The Wapping manufactory exists solely to provide us, and if I cannot find out why prices have risen so, and see to it they plummet again, why then, I shall close it down! But until I do, then we shall not, I believe, approach any other source. You understand me? We have no special needs at the moment which are unmet?’
‘Oh, no, sir, for I have always been most careful to call in all supplies we require well before there can be any diminution of them to the patients. I may not be a surgeon or physician, sir, or one directly concerned with saving lives but I know the importance of making sure the supplies come through, and I spend long hours here, sir, even late into the night, with no thanks or personal recompense, just to make sure that all is as it should be. My function here at Eleanor’s may be a very humble one, sir, but I do my best—’
Abel grimaced. ‘I am sure you do, Conran,’ he said. ‘But let us be clear. There is to be no more of this malicious gossip, outside the doors—or within ’em, for that matter—and I will set matters in order at the manufactory! For the rest I bid you a good morning!’
He slammed out of the stuffy little room leaving Conran sitting staring at his books with his mouth curved happily under his straggling whiskers and his eyes very bright when he lifted them to stare out of his window into the street below.
And Abel went storming on his way to his ward rounds to terrify his students, to flurry Nancy and her collection of nurses more than somewhat and even to alarm some of the patients a little (though he was usually well able to treat them with gentleness and concern, however sharp he could be with the healthy). He would have to use some of his precious time to set William right, and it was this that angered him most; bad enough that there had been gossip, that William had been revealed as being incompetent and lazy. Bad enough Queen Eleanor’s precious money was being wasted. But that he would have to lose precious operating time in going down to Wapping—that was the most galling thing of all. It was little wonder that Edward Beddoes nearly wept, and Samuel Carey nearly struck him. He was within an ace of weeping and striking out himself, he was so put about.
5
Jonah had never liked Friday night at the supper rooms, not from the very start. He knew it was, together with Saturday, one of the most important nights of the week from Celia’s point of view, for the market men were paid on Fridays and went to work with a will to spend their all as soon as they received it; there was rarely any left for Monday’s entertainment once Saturday had collapsed into the small hours of the Sabbath morning, swilled with beer, spent with food, and hoarse with singing and shouting. So Mondays to Thursdays were quiet nights at the Celia Rooms, nights when the better class of company came from beyond the immediate streets of the market to eat and drink and listen to the entertainment. But because they were a better class of citizen they were prudent with their money, and those four evenings garnered only enough to cover brewers’ and butchers’ bills, to pay the meagre wages Celia gave her people, and to provide their own small family expenses. It was Friday and Saturday that brought in the profits, that made the running of the business worth while at all. And Jonah hated both nights cordially, but Friday most of all.
Tonight he sat in his place beside the small stage wings from which vantage point he controlled the twice nightly show, seeing that each act succeeded the other fast enough and that each musician was ready with the right music in time, watching the crowded floor below him in considerable uneasiness.
Each table was crammed full, extra chairs having been dragged up from the cellars below and in some places two men had to sit crushed uneasily together on one stool, so popular was the Celia Rooms tonight. Beer was slopping over the tables, the floor was awash with it, and the smell was so heavy that it was almost as though a miasma of malt fumes hung over the smoky oil-lit room.
That wasn’t the only smell that assaulted the hot air however, for there were game pies on the menu tonight, made of well-hung hares and some venison that Celia had shrewdly haggled from a French packet master, down at Tilbury, and so ripe had it been that a great deal of cloves and mace and cinnamon had been needed in the baking to mask it. And what with the smell of that, the boiled cabbage for which the Celia Rooms’ clientele had a vast appetite, and the reek of heavy shag tobacco added to the all-pervading beer, Jonah felt decidedly qualmish.
Not that anyone else seemed to be aware of the atmosphere, for the men were shouting raucously and with huge good humour at each other, mauling lasciviously at the serving girls’ skirts, pinching their behinds and trying to thrust their hands down into the bodices of their dresses as they leaned over the tables to unload their trays; and the girls, accepting it all with a sort of weary familiarity, shrieked and slapped back at them, particularly Letty who was wearing the tightest and lowest-cut bodice of them all.
Down immediately in front of Jonah the three sweating musicians scraped away at the violin, blew anxiously at the flute and thrummed busily at the mandolin, trying to make themselves heard above the hubbub but providing only a whining undertow of thin and tinny music; while from the kitchens came the crash and clatter of dishes, the sound of Celia’s voice rising and falling as she harried her sweating scarlet cooks about its stoneflagged greasy expanse, and their hoarse shouts as they rushed between the roaring fire and the table where the orders were spread ready for the girls to scoop them up and go weaving away through the mob to their customers.
