Bartholomew Fair (31 page)

‘Nay,’ I said, backing away a little, as if I had somehow been caught out. ‘I am free for a few days, so I am enjoying the fine weather taking a walk.’

He looked puzzled at this, for I was not known for idling away my time taking walks, like a gentleman of leisure.

‘I start at St Thomas’s on the twelfth,’ I said, by way of explanation. ‘Come to say farewell to the old place.’ I nodded toward the hospital.

‘Well, I hope you will not forget us,’ he said. Then he smiled again, rather shyly. ‘I have been meaning to write to you. I have some news.’

‘You will take your final apothecary exams soon?’

‘That too. Early next year. What I was going to tell you–’ he coloured, ‘the fact is, I have asked Helen Winger to marry me, and she has agreed.’

‘You are affianced!’ I seized his hand in my good one and shook it warmly. ‘That is splendid news, Peter.’

‘We cannot marry until I am fully trained,’ he said, ‘and have a salary enough to wed and support a wife. We will need to rent our own home. I cannot go on living in my room in the hospital. It will be some time next summer. The governors say that they will keep me on here.’

‘You have done so well for yourself, Peter,’ I said. ‘I am truly glad for you. Such changes in life for both of us! Shall we go and drink to your good fortune at the tavern?’

‘I wish I could, but it will need to be later,’ he said regretfully. ‘I am sent with a potion for a patient who went home yesterday. An old man, and stubborn. He
would
go home, though we wanted to keep him a few more days.’

I laughed. ‘Not like some we have known, eh? The ones who like the warmth and the food and the nursing care so much that they want to move in. Do you remember that fellow we could hardly get rid of, when we needed the bed for the soldiers from Sluys?’

‘I do.’ He grinned at the memory. ‘He had a shrew of a wife. Found it much more peaceful here.’

He turned away, then seemed to notice my bandaged hand for the first time.

‘You have injured yourself!’

‘A burn,’ I said. ‘I’m recovering!’

When Peter was gone, I followed the familiar way back from the hospital to Duck Lane. I had walked it so often with my father, I could almost imagine he was walking beside me still. I would take one last look at my old home, then never come here again. I felt I was closing one door after another on the past.

The woman I had seen before, the day I returned to London, was coming toward me from the other end of the lane, with a basket over her arm. Mistress Temperley, the wife of the new physician who had taken my father’s place. She had her little boy with her, but not the baby. I supposed the reliable maid must be minding the house and the baby. She caught sight of me in my gentleman’s doublet and dropped a courtesy. Her face showed no sign of recognition. I inclined my head, and watched her go into my home. My old home.

I turned my back on it and walked away.

I asked the servants to wake me before dawn on the twelfth. It was a long walk to St Thomas’s from Wood Street and I did not want to risk being late. I donned my new cap and gown, which I felt looked impressive, but I had no stomach for breakfast. The previous evening Sara had helped me put a smaller bandage on my left hand and I felt it no longer looked too serious. I was leaving Rikki with Anne again, but I would need to find some permanent arrangement. The gatekeeper at Barts had always been fond of Rikki, but there was no knowing what the gatekeeper at Thomas’s would be like. He might hate dogs.

It was strange to be walking through the City so early in the morning. The streets were almost deserted except for the homeless beggars still asleep, huddled for shelter in the doorways of shops. Soon they would be woken and kicked out by the apprentices. At least it was not yet cold. I did not know how they could survive in the cold of full winter.

The night soil men had finished their work and the street traders were not yet abroad. London seemed remarkably peaceful with so few people about. I saw a young shepherd herding a flock of sheep along Cheapside. They would be destined for the market at Smithfield. A couple of women were gossiping beside the Great Conduit, their buckets forgotten at their feet. They turned to stare at me as I passed in my finery, then, like Mistress Temperley, they curtsied. I inclined my head, suppressing a smile. Clothes maketh the man, it seemed.

Carts were rumbling down Gracechurch Street, come from the market gardens in Shoreditch and further afield. They were loaded with every kind of vegetable: cabbages, onions, leeks, carrots. There were cages of squawking chickens and ducks, baskets of eggs, and here and there a few rabbits hanging upside down from the tailboard of the cart. The farmers must have left home even earlier than I. Some would be heading to Newgate market, others would be going the same way as I, over the Bridge to Southwark to the markets there, where disputes sometimes broke out between these farmers from the north of the City and the farmers with smallholdings on the fringes of Southwark, who regarded the southern markets as rightfully theirs. I quickened my pace to get ahead of the carts before they reached the Bridge.

Even the Bridge was quiet this morning. A few people were passing on foot toward me, those who lived in Southwark but worked in the City. There were no pedlars or entertainers here yet. Overhead, maids were throwing open shutters and shaking out bedding. No need to dodge the contents of piss pots here, as one must in the London streets. The maids would simply tip them into the river, adding to the filth.

I had learned to avoid looking at the spiked heads over the gate at the southern end of the Bridge, though I had never quite forgotten how they had haunted my childhood nightmares. Today I had other worries. I slowed my pace now I was in Southwark, for after walking fast I was flushed and hot, in no state to arrive at the hospital. In any case, I was early. Instead I ambled along, looking about me at the unfamiliar streets with a new eye. I would be spending most of my time here now, and I would get to know the back streets and crowded alleys – and their inhabitants – as I had known the poor districts around St Bartholomew’s. Both districts were poverty stricken, but this was probably a rougher area. The men and women who worked in the stinking industries banned from London lived here, as did the prostitutes of every sort, and those who were employed at the bear baiting and bull baiting. Although the Rose playhouse had been built here two years before to avoid the restrictions of the Common Council, it had to rub along with these coarser forms of entertainment. Although the Queen was said to love a play – and Simon had appeared before her even when he was one of St Paul’s boy players – the playhouses and their actors were still regarded by many as hardly better than vagabonds. The Puritans, those godly people, like the man I had seen ranting at the Fair, thought them creatures born of the Devil.

It was time. I made my way under the gate and into the great doorway of St Thomas’s, still with the fine carving surrounding it from its monastic days, although empty niches on either side showed where statues of saints had been removed. Perhaps one had been St Thomas à Becket. No Tudor monarch would wish to have him presiding over a public building, a man who had dared to stand up to his king.

I knew my way now to Superintendent Ailmer’s office, and strode along the corridor as though I already had every right to be there. Perhaps I had, but I would not be quite sure of myself until I was formally given my duties. Mistress Maynard was coming out of the room as I approached and rewarded me with a curtsey and a smile. I bowed in return.

‘Dr Alvarez,’ she said, ‘I am glad to see you. Dr Colet left two days ago and we have had an outbreak of vomiting amongst the young children of the parish. I hope to see you on the wards as soon as you have seen the Superintendent.’

This was promising. If they were short handed, there was unlikely to be any question over my appointment.

Her eyes went to my bandage. ‘You have hurt your hand?’

‘It is nothing,’ I lied. ‘Besides, I am right handed.’

I knocked on Ailmer’s door as she hurried away further along the corridor and turned to ascend a staircase.

‘Come.’ The Superintendent’s voice was abrupt, but in fact he looked relieved to see me. I had decided that, in the interests of harmony, I would give him the title he was not quite entitled to.

‘Good morning, Superintendent,’ I said.

‘Good morning, Dr Alvarez. I will not keep you long. Initially I have assigned you to take charge of the unmarried mothers’ ward and the children’s ward. We have many children at St Thomas’s. These people breed like rabbits.’

Perhaps seeing the look of distaste on my face, he altered his tone, adding hastily, ‘It is a young population. Young families. Not many live to a great age who work in the tanneries and brickworks. We have many cases of congestion of the lungs. Many young people from the country settle here as well. They cannot afford the London rents, even if they work in the City.’

‘I have seen them crossing the Bridge of a morning,’ I said.

‘Aye. And then there are the Strangers,’ he said, using the common London term for anyone not English born. ‘We have some strange folk hereabouts. Sailors, some of them, with dark skins, or yellow skins and slit eyes, speaking gobbledegook.’

Ailmer, I decided, was not a tolerant man, but that did not mean he could not manage a hospital. He was clearly busy and distracted. He had not even asked me to sit down.

‘Come,’ he said, rising from his chair, ‘I will show you the way to the two wards I am putting under your care. You will, of course, be required to assist in the other wards when you are needed, but you will be responsible for the smooth running of these two.’

Suddenly he caught sight of my bandaged hand.

‘What is that? Are you injured?’

‘A burn,’ I said. ‘It is nearly healed. It will be no impediment.’

He led me up the staircase where I had seen Mistress Maynard disappear. The lying-in ward was large, airy and well appointed. Silently I congratulated Mayor Whittington on his gift to unmarried mothers. What an extraordinary man he must have been, and a good deal more tolerant than Ailmer. Almost every bed was occupied. Most of the women looked pale and thin, hardly the bouncing whores common gossip spoke of when they mentioned the Winchester geese. Some were nursing newborn babes, some had yet to give birth, some were trying to sleep, despite a rich cacophony of infant wails.

‘The children’s ward is next door,’ Ailmer said. ‘Ah, Mistress Maynard! Will you take Dr Alvarez to the children’s ward? I have a great deal of paperwork awaiting me. Later, introduce him to the almoner and show him the apothecaries’ room.’

He turned to me. ‘Mistress Maynard and John Haddon, the almoner, should be able to tell you everything you need to know. If there is anything else, you may come to me.’

It was clear from his tone that he hoped this would not be necessary.

‘Shall we see the children’s ward, then, Mistress Maynard?’ I said. ‘An outbreak of vomiting, you said. How have you been treating them?’

So began my work at St Thomas’s hospital, Southwark. It some ways it was no different to my previous work at St Bartholomew’s, but in other ways it was. The lying-in ward for unmarried women was, I believe, unique in the world, and it was always busy, for the prostitutes of the Southwark stews were forever getting pregnant. In other towns and cities, such women would have done anything to rid themselves of an unwanted child, but the enlightened practice here meant that the pregnancies usually went full term, the woman were better cared for and better fed than ever before in their lives, and the babies had some hope of a future. An unusual situation, to say the least.

Then there were the different practices regarding admission here, for St Bartholomew’s turned away all patients whom two doctors judged to be incurable. Of those desperate cases refused treatment, some managed to drag themselves across the river to St Thomas’s, which turned none away. This had been the practice here as long as anyone could remember. All were to be admitted, save those with leprosy, who were despatched to the Lazar House of St Mary and St Leonard, which was situated here in Southwark, without St George’s Bar. Yet there were few lepers nowadays, compared with what we were told of the problem a century or more ago.

As a result of St Thomas’s policy of admitting every sick person, in addition to the poor who lived south of the river we also treated the incurable cases from the City itself, which had been rejected by St Bartholomew’s. This meant that all we could do for many of them was to ease their suffering, keeping them clean and warm and fed until they died, but my fellow physicians took some pride in the challenge of these seemingly hopeless patients, and occasionally succeeded in curing them. I found I soon shared in their keen desire to treat these cases. There was a mostly friendly rivalry between the two hospitals, and I found my loyalties sometimes severely tested.

In my second week, I approached the gatekeeper, Tom Read, for I had noticed that he had a dog, an ancient wolfhound, stiff in his joints, which spent his days sleeping in the gatekeeper’s small room in the gatehouse.

‘Goodman Read,’ I said, ‘I see you are a lover of dogs.’

‘Aye.’ He looked at me suspiciously. ‘Superintendent says I may keep Swifty here. I have permission. He helps to guard the gate.’

‘Indeed,’ I said. The wolfhound lay snoring at his feet, and I had never seen him move whenever anyone went in or out at the gate. I crouched down and rubbed the old fellow behind the ears.