Is (14 page)

Is pondered. After a while she said, ‘Could
I
do that to folk, d’you think? That Braid job?’

He took a moment to answer, then said, ‘I think it quite possible that you could. You’re a pretty strong-minded lass, dearie! You might be an ornament to the medical profession – only, of course, women aren’t permitted. You’d not be allowed to qualify. But just you watch what I do, as we go the rounds, and you will soon be a great help to me. Furthermore you’ll find that folk put a lot of trust in you, once you’ve Braided them a few times.’ He whipped up the mare.

‘You ever do it to Aunt Ishie? For her lameness?’

‘Couldn’t,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Your Aunt Ishie has all her – ’

‘Oh, look, Doc! There’s someone a-calling to you.’

They were crossing the dock and passing a ship, the
Dark Diamond
, that was being loaded with coal. A bearded man leaning over the rail called, ‘Hey, Doc! Doc Lemman!’

‘Captain Podmore! How are you, man?’

‘All the better for seeing you, Doc!’

‘And the leg?’

‘I’m walking on it, bean’t I? Come aboard for a noggin, and I’ll show you – and while you’re here you can look at one of my men who has the Spanish Quinsy.’

‘We must not stay above five minutes,’ Lemman said, with a quick look about him. Dusk was thickening, and the dock seemed deserted. The mare once tethered to a bollard, they climbed up the companionway on to a deck that was black and gritty with coal-dust.

‘We sail on the night tide,’ explained Captain Podmore. ‘That way it’s easy to run the blockade – bless you, I know all the ways round the sandbanks like the palm of me own hand! Now, just you take a look at this leg, Doc; ain’t that enough to make your heart swell with pride? When you think it was lying separate in the scuppers?’

He pulled up his bellbottomed trouser leg to exhibit a complete ring of stitches round the knee, then executed a few steps of a hornpipe. ‘He sewed it right back on, missy, like you might sew the leg on a doll,’ he explained to Is, while Doctor Lemman quickly examined the crewman with quinsy, ‘and now I reckon it walks faster than the other!’

‘Captain Podmore,’ said Is, who had suddenly been visited by an excellent notion, ‘where do you take your coal?’

He laid a finger alongside his nose and winked. ‘Ah, now, my lass, mum’s the word on that course! I know Humberland is at war with the south, but there’s folk down to Lunnon town as wants their sea-coal, war or no war! And Isiah Podmore’s not the man to fly in the face of turning a few honest guineas just because of a two-three pesky gunboats – no, stap my vitals, he isn’t!’

‘You go to the Port of London? Captain Podmore, did you ever run across a chap called Greenaway – a big, blind cove, lives in a ware-us, Shadwell Dock way?’

‘Know him?’ cried Captain Podmore, pouring out a mug of grog for Lemman. ‘Know Sam Greenaway? Why, bless you, him an’ me’s just like that!’ And he set down the bottle in order to slam one fist into the other palm.

‘Could you take a letter to him, Captain Podmore?’

The captain glanced about warily, as Lemman had done, and said to the doctor, who joined them at that moment, ‘Hearken to the lass! She just wants me to lose my ears and my charter, that’s all! But – ’ to Is, as her face fell, ‘I don’t say but what I might manage it, to oblige a friend of the Doc, here. Let’s have it, then.’

On another sheet from Lemman’s precription pad, Is wrote:
DERE WAL IM AT GRANPA TWITES IN BLASTBURN. THINGS HERE IS DICEY. HAINT SEEN U NO WHO BUT ERLY DAYS YET. CAN YOU PASS WORD AN LOVE TO PEN. ILL BE HERE LONGER THAN A MUNTH I REKON
.

‘I’m reel obliged to you, mister,’ said Is, handing him the note, which he slid into his tobacco pouch. (‘That way, no one’s like to come across it.’)

‘We’d best be on our way, dearie,’ said Lemman, ‘or your Aunt Ishie will be in a fret.’

When they were driving home, Lemman asked Is, ‘If you saw a leg like that, one that had been severed, what would you do?’

She thought. ‘Fust, I’d shove down hard on the spot what stops the blood coming out – here – ’ She demonstrated. ‘then I’d put on a whatyoucallem – the thing where you winds a kerchief round a kindling-stick – don’t tell me the name,
don’t
– a turney-key. Then I’d sew the leg on again, quick as be-damned.’

Laughing, he patted her shoulder.

‘Yes, I do believe you’ve the makings! Too bad females can’t train.’

‘Ho! Can’t they?’ said Is. She stuck out her jaw. ‘Ask me, a whole lot o’ things wants changing.’

‘Did you have another of your hearkening experiences back in the hospital?’ he asked. ‘You were pretty quiet, in there.’

‘Wouldn’t a person
be
? – Yes, I did, though,’ she said. ‘And you were right. I found out how to talk back a bit.’

‘You did? But, dearie, that’s exciting! Who is he? Who is it?’

‘It ain’t a him. It’s a
them
– a whole lot of ’em. They say they are the Bottom Layer.’

6

During the next two weeks Is worked exceedingly hard, going out with Dr Lemman on his rounds by day, helping Aunt Ishie make pockets by night. And when she went to bed, sleeping on a little frame-cot which Lemman had rigged up for her, she had terribly strange dreams. She dreamed that she was all alone in a stone forest, in the dark, trying to find her way; sometimes she could hear whispers and murmurs, as if other people were there, but she could never find them. She woke up from these dreams very anxious and perplexed.

‘What do you think they mean?’ she asked Aunt Ishie, who said, ‘I think you will find out quite soon. My dreams always come through to me in some real-life happening quite quickly.’

The pockets they were making, Is learned, were for the children who worked in the mines.

‘They have none, otherwise,’ Ishie told Is. ‘The gals wear naught but a short skirt, or breeks like the boys. They have no shirts, for they work mostly on all-fours, hacking the coal or pulling the trucks along, and clothes would only hinder them – some are naked. So they’ve no place to tuck in a handkerchief, or a bit of bread or cold potato. That’s why I make the pockets, you see, with a flap and a button, pockets they can tie round their necks.’

For once, Is had nothing to say. She just nodded and went on helping.

‘I am not permitted to take the pockets to the miners myself,’ Ishie went on. ‘I have asked Roy repeatedly, but he will not allow it. And,’ with a sigh, ‘even if I were allowed through the mine gate, I fear the distance would be too great. Some of the galleries are five miles from the entrance.’

‘Five miles under the sea?’

Aunt Ishie nodded. ‘As I told you, that is why the workers are never allowed out. They live in the mine. Mercifully I am lucky enough to have a – an associate – who undertakes that part of the task, delivering the pockets to the colliers and hurriers – ’

‘What’s a hurrier?’

‘They bring the coal in trucks from the rockface to the loading area.’

‘Who takes the pockets for you?’

‘Well, my love, I think I had better not tell you his name. He is a simple fellow, slightly crazed, but it is a dangerous mission; and what the ear does not hear, the tongue cannot divulge. Even your grandfather does not know him – ’

‘It’s not Arn Twite – nor Davie?’ Is asked anxiously.

Aunt Ishie shook her head and laid her finger on her lips.

chanted Grandfather Twite, passing through the kitchen with a bale of paper.

‘Easy, Grandpa! A clock!’ Is shouted after him down the stairs to the cellar. The sound of her voice made him trip and drop the paper; she ran down after him and helped gather it together again.

From her rides with the doctor, Is quite soon began to have a fair knowledge of the underground city of Holdernesse, not only its grander main squares and avenues, but also the smaller, darker streets near the sides of the great cave, close to the mine entrance. Here the less prosperous citizens lived, some of whom had already begun to wish they were back living out of doors again; they found that the benefit of never having wet or snowy weather outside the front door was quite outweighed by the stuffy atmosphere, and the lowering effect on their spirits of never being able to see sky through the windows, or feel the wind.

‘Even if ’tis grey and bitter and blowing marlin-spikes,’ one old man said, ‘at least ’tis
there
! I’d dearly like a sight of the old moon, or a star or two. I reckon ’Im Above sent us the weather to keep us ‘opping on our pins; ‘tain’t natural to live without, ’tis like vittles wi’ no salt.’

There were a great many rats in Holdernesse, too. But they were not mentioned by polite people.

At the end of the second week there was an explosion at the iron-foundry; one of the blast furnaces had blown out. Dr Lemman was sent for urgently.

The ironworks lay close to the docks. As they approached, Is could see lines of rail wagons and great piles of iron ore – rusty purplish-brown powder, rough and dirty as it had been dug out of the ground – waiting to be cleaned of its impurities, melted down and made into pots and tools and machines. Like brown sugar, she thought, waiting to be melted into candy.

Ahead of them lay the blast furnaces, rearing up like giant brick beehives.

‘What do they burn in them?’ asked Is, while the old mare picked her way among piles of scrap metal and files of trucks.

‘Coke; that’s coal with the gas baked out of it. They do that here first, in those kilns on the left.’

‘Why not use coal?’

‘Coke heats up hotter. Also, coal’s full of gas, likely to explode.’

‘Well they got an explosion now anyway, don’t they?’ said Is.

‘That’s because they never take enough care. There’s always a bit of gas left in the coke.’

Dr Lemman, followed by Is, walked into a huge place like a frightful satanic cathedral, with a high roof supported by pillars of iron; a place which echoed all the time with the clang of machines and the roar of furnaces and other unidentifiable noises – wrenching, hissing, grinding – as well as human screams and shouts. The humans were there, but could only be seen dimly among jets of flame and clouds of smoke, among heaps of coal or slag, among pipes and machinery, and the sudden awful glow of red-hot metal.

People were running about frantically. Lemman was wanted everywhere at once.

‘Doctor! Doctor! Here for God’s sake, come here!’

At first Is helped him, handing remedies and bandages as fast as she could; then, since there were so many waiting for attention, she began dealing with the less serious cases herself. They were mostly terrible burns, which Lemman treated with wet cloths dipped in bicarbonate of soda, or with a mixture of olive oil and lime-water. And, over and over, with his quiet, soothing, potent suggestion that the sufferers were walking into a river of cool, buoyant water which would help to heal their hurts. Some of the cases, not so serious, were simply anointed with lard; Lemman had stopped at a butcher’s shop on the way and picked up several large tubs of it.

One boy had lost his hand in an overflow of molten metal. He lay on a pile of sacks, moaning.

‘No sense treating
him
, he won’t be much use after,’ said one of the overseers, passing near.

Is caught the boy’s eye. He was conscious; he had heard what the man said.

Blazing with fury, she determined to save him if it could be done.

  

  

‘Doc. Doc! Could you come and see to this feller? I’ll do the gal with the burned back, I can manage that. –
Please
, Doc!’ as he hesitated.

He gave a sudden grin and a nod, changing places with her; she heard him say to the boy, ‘We’ll fix you up, dearie, don’t fret.’

Kneeling on the muddy, puddly, coaly ground, Is carefully poured oil over the girl’s back.

The girl, who had been whimpering faintly, caught her breath and said, ‘
That
helps. Thanks, love!’

‘You been here long?’ Is asked, carefully laying on court plaster (which was silk treated with isinglass and balsam of Peru; she had helped Lemman prepare a quantity of it earlier in the week).