The Innkeeper's Daughter (27 page)

This was the first time Reuben had referred to his Jewish lineage, although Bella and Joe had assumed it; Sarah it seemed had not noticed.

‘Where is ’synagogue?’ Bella asked him. ‘We still don’t know Hull very well. Are there many Jewish people here?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, accepting a cup of tea from Alice. ‘There are many who were made very welcome here.’

‘Just like us, then,’ Bella said. ‘I thought Hull folk would think we were country bumpkins, but I was wrong.’

‘Jewish immigrants have been landing in the port of Hull for many years,’ Reuben told her. ‘Not all have stayed; some went on to Leeds and York, and London, of course. There were many who escaped from eastern Europe – oh, a hundred years ago – and fetched up here. We’ve always been a problem to someone or other,’ he said pragmatically, and then smiled, his dark eyes twinkling.

‘Where did your family come from, Mr Jacobs?’ Sarah asked.

‘Originally from Russia,’ he said. ‘My father was a successful merchant with a family of young sons; I was the eldest. Then in about 1800 it was decreed that all Jews should work the land as peasants, even those who owned their own land or business. My father had the foresight to move us to Lithuania before he lost everything, which was very fortunate, as later Tsar Nicholas the First decreed that all Jews from the age of twelve would be conscripted into the Russian army, and I would have been one of them. Then when my father saw again how things were going against the Jews throughout Europe, he decided that we would travel to Hamburg in Germany. It was a long and difficult journey, nearly six hundred miles; but we stayed for a few years before trying our luck in England.’

He ran his fingers across his forehead and went on in a quiet voice. ‘Even today, now that I am an old man, I feel sad for him; he died on the ship coming over. His heart gave out, I think; he had had so much worry, trying to keep us safe.’ He was silent for a moment and then added, ‘And now I fear there will be more conflict for many people. Russia is threatening the Ottoman Empire; Nicholas has no time for the Turks or their religion. They cannot live in peace together as he only wants Orthodox Christians as his neighbours.’

‘But what happened to you?’ Bella asked in a small voice, for she knew nothing of any conflict. ‘Who looked after you after your father died? Did you have a mother?’

‘Oh yes.’ He nodded. ‘She was a good Jewish mother, teaching us all we should know. When we arrived in Hull she liked the look of the place and decided to settle here. There was already a Jewish community and they welcomed us. That is why I too like to welcome people to Hull, Jewish or not.’ He smiled. ‘We should all help each other.’

‘You have certainly helped us,’ Bella said. ‘I don’t know how we would have managed without you.’

‘Oh, but you would have coped,’ he asserted. ‘All of you; you have the, erm,
Bestimmung
– the determination.’

‘I’m going to ask you to help us one more time, Reuben.’ Bella glanced at her mother, who raised her eyebrows in a query. ‘I’m going to take over ’account books from my mother, and I want to do it properly. Are you able to show me how, or do you know someone who can?’

Reuben laughed. ‘
Ja
. I can help you to help yourself, my dear; I was an actuary and dealt in assessing and solving financial problems. I am now retired but that was my role. I will be very pleased to be of service to you and your family.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THAT MUST HAVE
been the worst Christmas I have ever spent. Jamie hunched into his coat and scarf on the last lap of his journey back to London. The train was freezing cold, as had been the drive into Hull by brougham. The snow had started as they’d left home, Hopkins driving and Jamie sitting inside the carriage with his trunk. It had taken them almost four hours; the temperature had dropped to freezing during the night and the road was icy. He became very anxious that he might miss the train and then his further connections.

But Hopkins was a good and careful driver and did not overtax the horse, and they had arrived with ten minutes to spare.

‘Tek care, then, sir,’ he’d said, and Jamie replied, ‘You too, take your time getting home. There’s no rush.’

Hopkins had grinned. ‘Right, sir, if them’s your orders.’

‘Yes.’ Jamie had handed him some money. ‘They are. Go and get a hot drink and some breakfast before you travel back – and that’s an order too.’

Hopkins tipped his forehead. ‘Thank you, sir. See you in a couple of months’ time?’

‘Not sure,’ Jamie admitted, raising his eyebrows. ‘But not a word.’

He was sure. He wasn’t going to hurry back. This was going to be a difficult year and he’d rather stay in his lodgings and study. Any time he might have free he would spend perhaps
going
to Brighton for a day or two, rather than the long trek home to Yorkshire.

He would miss his home and the countryside, of course, but not his father or brother; he’d put his father’s irritability down to his being unwell, but Felix was as grumpy as he had ever been and full of snide remarks about the easy time that Jamie was having in London whilst he was working all hours to keep the estate running. It had been no use describing his days of study, the lectures he had to attend or the late-night poring over textbooks: Felix only responded with a sneer and a look of disbelief.

Jamie had found the previous year’s study very difficult and he had harboured doubts about his ability to complete the course. There was great change happening in medicine, probably more enlightenment than ever before in medical history. Investigative medicine made possible by new scientific knowledge was being pursued constantly, changing doctors’ perception of disease and the possibility of cures; even such a deadly evil as smallpox was being eradicated by Jenner’s immunization programme of vaccination by cowpox.

But can I keep up, he had asked his tutors, and they had replied that the country needed young men such as him and his fellows to embrace the new technology; to accept with an open mind that new ideas were for the good of the people. Inevitably there were some from the old school who pooh-poohed radical thinking, who claimed that scientific ideas had no place in medicine and had laughed at the Hungarian surgeon Semmelweis’s insistence that cleanliness was the key to combating infection during surgery.

Now, though, there had been a development, which Jamie completely believed in and had written passionately about in his tutorial. A Scottish surgeon, James Simpson, was championing the use of chloroform during surgery, and although there had been some disasters resulting from uncertainty about the amount of the anaesthetic to be given, the general opinion was that the use of it would greatly reduce the pain the patient endured during surgery and thus aid their recovery.

He was thinking of these things as the train huffed and chuffed and racketed along, the whistle shrieking at every station they passed through and thick smoke obliterating any views he might have had through the windows. If I decide to specialize as a physician, he pondered, I could be studying for another four or five years, but if I take an apprenticeship as a surgeon I would be finished sooner. But do I want to work in an unhygienic hospital and treat poor unfortunates who are going to die anyway?

He discussed the subject with Hunter that night when he got back to their lodgings and discovered that his colleague had already decided that he would become a surgeon. ‘Thought it over during Christmas, old fellow,’ he declared. ‘I can be finished within a year. I’m not cut out for great things like you. I’ve discussed it with Pa and he’s agreed to pay for an apprenticeship. I shall be able to get work in a hospital whilst I’m training or set up as an apothecary as soon as I’m qualified. I’m getting bored with the whole business, if I’m perfectly honest.’

‘But – I thought we’d agreed to set up in practice together,’ Jamie remonstrated. ‘That’s what we said.’

Hunter stretched out in his chair and wiggled his bare toes. ‘I know we did, old chap, but I’m not as brainy as you and I might not qualify and I’m not willing to spend another three or four years of study while contemplating failure. Besides, I quite fancy setting broken bones or dispensing bitter pills and becoming rich because of it. I’ll leave it to you to come up with a cure for disease.’

Jamie was disappointed; one of the best things about studying had been being able to discuss various aspects of medicine with his friend, though now he came to think of it Hunter’s enthusiasm had seemed to be waning, and there had been times when he had often skipped lectures.

‘I’ll speak to my tutors, I think,’ he told Hunter. ‘Maybe I can continue my studies whilst working with a physician. I think my father is getting fed up with paying my fees, and certainly my brother is voicing his objections.’

His fees had been a contentious issue over Christmas; his father was also paying for the girls’ schooling and Felix had claimed, although not in front of his father, that everyone except him was having money spent on them from the estate whilst he was the only one working for it.

‘But you’ll get the biggest share eventually,’ Jamie had argued. ‘You’ll inherit, not me, so whatever effort you put in now will come back to you. I’ll have to earn my own living.’

But Felix couldn’t see this and only scoffed at Jamie’s reasoning.

‘I’d give it another year if I were you.’ Hunter yawned and stretched. ‘Sit the next exam and then ask the tutors; they’ll probably grovel at your feet begging you to stay with them.’

‘Idiot!’ Jamie laughed and threw a cushion at him.

But it was a serious issue and he was a serious and caring young man. He recalled his first year at the Hull Grammar School, when there had been another outbreak of cholera in the town. It had been an isolated incident and not as severe as the 1832 epidemic; the authorities had acted swiftly and placed tar barrels in the streets of the poor where the disease had occurred and the students were banned from those areas.

From time to time since then there had been other outbreaks and of typhoid too, but the disease that was now worrying health officials most of all was influenza, which on being caught by one person ran through his whole family with seemingly nothing to stop it.

When Jamie had first come to London he had wanted to acquaint himself with the city and often walked by the Thames. He watched the mass of shipping plying the river, the steamers, the sailboats and the coal carriers, and sometimes at dusk as he leaned on the broken walls overlooking the bubbling mud flats where the mudlarks fished for anything they could retrieve to sell or eat, he noticed the row-boats, coggy boats as they were called in Yorkshire, nosing between the moored ships, as silent as the slippery eels which lurked beneath the dark lapping waters; some of them held wooden crates or casks and the rowers headed towards the wharves
and
warehouses which bordered the river, where the glow of a single lamp showed that they were expected.

The first time he had gone there the stink of the Thames made him hold his breath. ‘It can’t be healthy,’ he had declared to anyone who would listen. ‘And it’s the poor who live close to the river and it’s the poor who become sick.’

Many of his tutors nodded and agreed with him but there were others who smiled benignly at a young man’s foolishness. But now he wondered which direction to take. If he became a surgeon as Hunter was planning to do, he could qualify with the Royal College of Surgeons and begin work in a hospital mending broken bones and dispensing remedies; if he became a physician he could study further medicine, diagnose and give advice on medical problems, but not treat them.

I don’t know what to do, he thought. I want to help the sick, but I also want to know
how
to help them and I can only do that through further study. I’m in a quandary.

CHAPTER THIRTY

BELLA WAS SITTING
with her mother at the kitchen table, waiting as Sarah read a letter just arrived from Nell. Sarah bit on her lips and wrinkled her nose as she read, and occasionally took a deep breath.

‘So what does she say?’ Bella could wait no longer. ‘Where is she?’

‘Hm? Doesn’t say where she is, onny that she’s on her way to Manchester.’

Bella picked up the envelope. The postmark was Leeds, the town where they had been told the company from the Royal Theatre had gone for their next show.

‘And? What else does she say?’

‘Here, you’d better read it. I’ve got ’dinner to prepare afore we open up.’ Sarah got up from the table and went to the sink. ‘That lass’ll go to ’devil in her own way and nowt we say will alter that.’

Bella silently agreed, even before she’d read the letter, which judging by the scrawl and bad spelling had been written in a hurry. But Nell conveyed in a few words that she was very happy, was going to be an actress as well as a singer and expected to get a contract very soon.

‘Most of ’women’s parts are played by young men,’ she wrote, ‘cos there aren’t enough women who are willing or able to go on ’stage, so I’ll have plenty of work. Don’t worry about
me,
Ma. I’m doing what I always wanted to do. Your loving daughter Nell.’

‘Bella!’ Joe popped his head round the door. ‘You’re wanted!’

Bella frowned. She was assimilating the contents of Nell’s letter and the undertones of it. Was she really acting or not, and what kind of situation was she in if there were few other women?

‘Who wants me?’ She looked up at Joe, who was grinning all over his face.

His eyebrows shot up. ‘Somebody special! Pinch your cheeks, straighten your hair.’

Bella concealed a small gasp. It couldn’t possibly be the person whom, although she would never have admitted it even to herself, she thought of wistfully from time to time. ‘Who?’ she asked again.

‘None other than
Mr Justin Allen
,’ he said in a mock stage whisper. ‘And he asked
specially
for Miss Thorp!’

‘Better go then, Bella,’ her mother broke in, ‘if it’s you he wants to talk to. Mebbe he’s got summat up his sleeve he wants to discuss.’