Beloved Poison (9 page)

Gabriel fell asleep at my father’s feet, his mop of dark hair glinting in the firelight. Will slipped a cushion beneath his head and covered him with a blanket. The boy should have accompanied me on my final rounds later that evening, but I hadn’t the heart to bother him. I was tempted to go out to Angel Meadow there and then, and demand that Dr Hawkins tell me what was going on. But I did not want to be away from my father for long, and so I put the thought from my mind as best I could and went out to the wards.

After the silence of the apothecary, the hospital was a pandemonium. The doctors had finished their rounds long ago, and the place was now the domain of Mrs Speedicut and her minions. I went from ward to ward, my lantern in my hand, the mutterings of the patients and the observations of the nurses as commonplace and boring as ever.

‘Oh yes, Mr Flock’art, he’s been purged reg’lar this past week. Feels all the better for it,’ and ‘Dr Catchpole do love his leeches sir. Worked wonders he has!’ and ‘Blue Pill, sir, same as usual.’

Leeches! We went through thousands of them. Why, the previous year alone we had spent two hundred and fifty one pounds, nine shillings and sixpence on the things. ‘Where would St Saviour’s be without blood!’ Dr Graves had cried when I dared to object. As for Blue Pill . . . There was not a doctor in the place who could see it for what it was: mercury bound with chalk and as poisonous a substance as you might wish to find. It was used on the most persistently costive patients – which included pretty much all of them. I had fallen out with Dr Catchpole on the matter of its use on many occasions. Could they not see that a similar effect might be produced with psyllium husks or a bowl of stewed rhubarb? I had told Dr Catchpole the same that very morning. ‘Good lord, Mr Flockhart,’ he had bellowed across the ward. ‘I am a physician, not a gardener, and this is a hospital, not a pie shop!’ The patients themselves were no better. ‘Dr Catchpole says I must ’ave the calomel,’ one of them had remarked as Dr Catchpole turned away. Already he had the black teeth and copious saliva characteristic of mercury poisoning. ‘Dr Catchpole’s a proper doctor. I’ll not ’ave no fruit. And no seeds, neither!’ Dr Bain was the only man there who saw sense. Leeches and Blue Pill indeed. Some of them were still cupping too!

There was nothing remarkable on any of the wards, which was just as well, as that evening my mind was elsewhere. All at once the ordered and predictable world of St Saviour’s seemed to be coming apart at the seams. I had not realised how unsettled it had made me feel. But what better remedy for disquiet than the routine of the evening ward rounds? I stalked between the beds, allowing the noise and stink of the place to wash over me like a soothing familiar balm. The reek of vomit and effluent took its effect upon my spirits almost immediately. Purged, for the moment, of any sense of regret that we would soon be obliged to leave the place, I paused at a window and flung it open. A cold blast of night air, laced with the whiff of the tannery and the brewhouse blew in from the east.

‘Please, sir,’ a voice quavered from beneath a mound of frayed blankets beside me. ‘No air, for pity’s sake! You’ll kill us all!’

Out in the corridors the night nurses chatted and cackled. They were a different stock to the nurses who worked the wards during the day – less biddable, noisier and rougher in their manners and habits. They fell silent as I approached, but I knew they were a raucous lot when left to their own devices. In the wards, the inmates tossed and moaned, hunched beneath their blankets, coughing and farting in the gloom. Usually, I was accompanied about the infirmary by Mrs Speedicut. There was no need for her to come with me, but she insisted. She still remembered me as a child – how she had enjoyed walloping me through the wards when I was an apprentice! That evening, however, she was nowhere to be seen.

‘She’s out, sir,’ said the nurse. ‘She went down to the apof’cary a while ago and I ain’t seen her since.’

‘I was in the apothecary a while ago,’ I said. ‘I didn’t see her.’

‘That’s where she went.’

‘And where is she now, pray?’

The woman shrugged. ‘’Oo knows, sir?’

‘Sweep the floors, can’t you?’ I said, suddenly irritated by her insolence. ‘I saw a rat earlier.’

‘I can catch it for you, if you like, sir,’ came the reply. ‘Dr Graves gives me a shillin’ for every half dozen.’

I went up to the surgical ward. The night nurse was dozing on a chair in the corridor. Her mouth hung open, as brown as the inside of a tea pot. She reeked of gin, her nose bluish in the light from the lantern, the blood vessels on her face standing out against her sallow cheeks like red pin worms. I left her where she was. I knew her for a sharp-tongued gossiping ninny, and as much of a trollop as any of them. I was glad not to have her braying in my ear as I walked amongst the beds, though I’d be sure to give her chair a good kick as I walked past later.

Most of the patients were drugged with laudanum and seemed to be sleeping. I checked Dr Bain’s amputee. Dr Bain had given instructions for the man’s wound to be dressed every day. New, clean lint and linen were to be used and the area washed out with a weak carbolic acid solution. The patient was still and quiet. I pulled back the dressings. The wound was clean, and there was no sign of suppuration, though it was too early to comment on the success of the operation. I would check again in the morning.

The night nurse had not drawn the blinds and, for once, the moon was as bright as a new shilling. It shone full into the ward, painting the patients’ blankets silver. But even the moonlight could not impart glamour to the scene, and the place resembled an overcrowded churchyard: the beds the mounded graves, severed stumps projecting like the bony remains sometimes visible in the workhouse burial ground – a place where a good many of them would end up.

I stood at the window. Below me, in the main courtyard, Edward VI’s shoulders were cloaked in silver. Beyond him, I could see the dim yellow squares of the apothecary windows. I wondered whether I had been rash to leave my father in the care of Will Quartermain. After all, before that day I had never met the man. Now I was entrusting him to look after my only relative. And yet there was something about the young architect that I had liked immediately. He did not try to prove himself a better man than I. He did not question my knowledge and authority. He made me laugh. His curiosity matched my own. I wondered whether he would prove so agreeable if he knew who I really was.

On the opposite side of the square the eight tall windows of the Magdalene ward gleamed as black as onyx in the moonlight. I caught a movement at one of them. Was a patient out of bed? The night nurse should be on hand to prevent such wanderings. No doubt she was cackling with the rest of St Saviour’s midnight coven out in the corridor. I cupped my hand about the glass, pressing my nose to the cold pane. All at once a white face appeared, emerging from the darkness of the opposite ward the way a drowned corpse might rise up from the black depths of a mill pond. Mrs Magorian! Her small, round face stared down, the bottle-green ribbons on her bonnet hanging limp against her cheeks like strips of weed. Beside her, tall and slim, stood Mrs Catchpole.

I clicked my tongue. What in heaven’s name were they doing on the wards so late at night? I had not noticed them when I had passed through the place not half an hour earlier, and it was far too late for a Bible reading. I knew that I should go over there directly and tell them to go, but I had no stomach for a pair of lady almoners that evening and no wish for a confrontation. I waited for one or other of them to look up and see me. But neither of them did. They seemed to be engrossed by something at the far end of the courtyard. I followed their gaze.

Eliza had her cloak pulled close and her hood up, but her small quick figure was unmistakable. She was in the shadows with somebody, a man, though from that distance in the darkness I could not be certain who it was. All at once she ran across the courtyard and disappeared out into St Saviour’s Street. Behind her, in the doorway to the library, her companion watched her go. He shifted in the shadows, his face suddenly visible in the moonlight.

Dr Bain.

For a moment he stood there. Mrs Magorian stared down, her expression unreadable. But Mrs Catchpole was not so guarded. Even from the opposite ward I could see her lips twist as she struggled to master her sense of betrayal, her hand clutched to her breast, her face frozen in a mixture of such pain and fury that I felt myself blanch.

As the clock above the hospital struck the half hour, the door to the laundry opened. Within I could see great bales of bedding illuminated like mounds of pale flesh – limbs, arses and torsos. The laundrywoman appeared, her arms folded, and leaned against the door-frame. Dr Bain hesitated; but not for long.

My skin grew hot, then cold. How could he court Eliza and then go immediately to a great fat trollop like that? Not two months ago I had come across him in the ironing room, beached on a dune of sheets, the laundrywoman stripped to the waist and sitting astride him. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Flock’art?’ she’d said. She had lifted up a great swaying breast in each hand, the way a baker might weigh up two lumps of dough before flinging them into the oven.

Later, Dr Bain had begged me not to tell anyone. ‘A man has needs, Jem,’ he’d said. ‘At least until he’s obliged to marry – and even then there are passions that fall beyond the compass of a wife. But perhaps you’d care to come along with me one night? Mrs Roseplucker in Wicke Street has some new girls. Clean too. What d’you say? A young chap like you must have something of an appetite, eh? And we’ve not been there together for a while.’

But I knew about men’s needs well enough: did I not visit the foul wards every day? Now, I wished I had not been so easily persuaded to say nothing. Dr Bain was my friend, but Eliza deserved better. And now Mrs Magorian, and Mrs Catchpole, had seen them together. Dr Bain, I knew, could look after himself, but Eliza?
Damn the man
, I thought. Could he not be content with whores and doctor’s wives?

I was about to return to the corridor and wake up the night nurse with a kick and a bellow, when I heard a noise. At first I thought it was Mrs Speedicut come to find me, but there was no laboured breathing and no rustling skirts. Had the night nurse woken up? And yet I could still hear her snores out in the corridor. I was hidden from view by a cupboard, and was invisible to anyone coming in at the door. I could not tell who had entered, but I saw a shadow, tall and thin as a scarecrow, rearing against the walls. Perhaps Dr Bain had not stayed in the laundry after all, but had come to check on his patient. He was curious and diligent as a doctor, whatever his faults might be as a man.

I had left my lantern on the table in the middle of the ward, but the visitor seemed not to have noticed. He had his own lantern and he raised it now as he stood over Dr Bain’s patient, looking down. Dr Graves. His face was white, almost greenish in the light, his eyes two dark hollows. He put his lamp on the table beside the patient’s bed, and began gently to open the man’s bandages. The patient did not move. The sleeping draught he had been prescribed had been a powerful one. Dr Graves slid a hand into his pocket, and produced a small glass phial.

‘Good evening, Dr Graves,’ I said, stepping into view. ‘The patient is healing well, is he not?’

Dr Graves cried out and sprang away from the bedside. He tried to slip the phial back into his pocket, but in his haste the thing fell to the floor.

‘Let me help,’ I said.

‘No!’ Dr Graves plunged beneath the bed. The phial had not smashed, but had rolled away from him. I too dived beneath the bed. There was a scrabbling of fingers. My fist closed about the phial but Dr Graves clawed the back of my hand with his long brittle nails. ‘I do apologise,’ he said through clenched teeth as he seized the glass from my slackened grip.

We stood up, both of us panting. ‘Thank you, Mr Flockhart.’ Dr Graves grinned at me, a trickle of sweat running down his temple. He plucked a handkerchief from his breast pocket and swabbed at his face.

‘Think what you’re doing, sir.’ I nursed the back of my hand, wet with blood. ‘Consider your reputation—’

Dr Graves said nothing. His face twitched.

‘And your conscience,’ I added.

Dr Graves looked at me, his face blank. A dry rattling sound came from his throat and his eyes bulged. He put out a hand to steady himself as I started forward. Had he somehow managed to slip himself some of his own poison? I had been able to do no more than glimpse the contents of the phial in the dim light beneath the bed – a white, crystalline powder. What was it? Arsenic? Oleander? Cyanide? All were fast acting and quite deadly.

And then I realised that he was not dying at all. He was laughing.

I was awoken by the sound of someone moving about the apothecary. I had slept on Gabriel’s bed beneath the table, while Gabriel remained in his blanket at my father’s feet. Only Will Quartermain had spent the night in the space he had been allocated: the truckle bed in my room. I was glad to have been spared that forced intimacy, at least for another night. Still, the sight of him pottering about the apothecary was most welcome. He had poked the fire back into life, and on the stove top sat a large, fat-bellied flask, dark flecks eddying in the amber-coloured liquid. Will seized the neck of the thing with a pair of tongs.