The Shifting Tide (15 page)

The commotion was coming from Ruth’s room—of course it was! She was far too ill to be out of her bed. Hester strode along and pushed the door wide. Helpful or not, she would tear Flo to pieces for this!

The scene that met her eyes was extraordinary. Ruth was propped up on several pillows, an empty cup in her hands. Her hair was wild, her face pale but for the hectic flush in her cheeks, and her expression was one of unmitigated rage.

A few feet away from her stood Flo, her lips drawn back in a snarl. Her hair was half down, as if someone had torn at it, and the front of her dress was soaked in water.

“Stop it!” Hester said in the tone of voice she had heard used during her time on the Crimean battlefields.

Both women stared at her. It was Ruth who drew breath to speak first. “You’re paid to look after me,” she said raspingly. “Get this whore out of here!”

“Who are you callin’ an ’ore? Yer nothin’ but a fancy slut yerself, fer all yer airs!” Flo retorted. “That’s ’cos yer lies wi’ sailors—does that make yer summink diff’rent? Well, it don’t. Yer an ’ore, jus’ like the rest o’ us. An’ keep a civil tongue in yer ’ead an’ speak nice ter Mrs. Monk, wot’s keepin’ yer from dyin’ in the gutter where yer belong, or I’ll fetch a bucket o’ slops an’ toss it right back at yer, yer manky bitch.”

“I’m sure you have plenty of slops to spare,” Ruth said icily. “You smell as if you bathe in them.”

“Silence!” Hester raised her voice sharply.

But it was to no effect. Flo lost her temper and hurled herself forward onto the bed, landing on Ruth, then raising her hand to hit her.

Hester grabbed at it, catching it almost across her own face, and was dragged forward and off balance half onto the floor. Both Flo and Ruth were still cursing each other, but Ruth had no strength to lash back physically.

It was at that moment that Bessie burst in, saw the scene, and charged across to pick Flo up bodily, swing around with her, and drop her on the floor.

“Wot the bleedin’ ’ell d’yer think yer doin’, yer crazy lard arse?” she yelled, first at Flo. Then, turning on Ruth, she went on. “An’ as fer you, yer spotty slag, you mind yer tongue or I’ll put yer out inter the gutter, money or no money! In’t surprisin’ yer lover threw yer out, yer iggerant mare! Yer got a mouth on yer like a midden! One more order out o’ yer an’ I’ll throw yer out meself. Just shut yer face, y’ear me?”

There was total silence.

Slowly, Hester climbed to her feet. “Thank you, Bessie,” she said gravely. She stared at the woman in the bed. Ruth was flushed and weak, but her eyes were spitting venom. “Miss Clark, go back to sleep. Bessie will come to see you in a while. Flo! You come with me!” And seizing Flo by the arm, she strode out, half dragging her along, down the stairs and into the kitchen before she spoke again. “Kettle!” she commanded. “Make some tea.”

“In’t surprised ’e threw ’er out, the turd,” Flo retorted, but she did as she was told. “Din’t give yer much of a kip, did she! Ungrateful trollop!” She took the kettle from the stove. “Thinks ’cos one man keeps ’er, not twenty, that she’s suffink special! Talks like she was a lady—she’s a common slut, like the rest of us.”

“Probably,” Hester agreed, too tired to care what the fight was about this time. It had been thirty-five minutes since she lay down on the bed upstairs. She felt as if she could have slept on the kitchen table—or the floor, for that matter.

“An’ yer got rats,” Flo called, pouring water out of the pail into the kettle. “Yer’ll ’ave ter get the rat catcher in. D’yer know one?”

“Of course I do,” Hester said wearily. “I’ll send a message to Sutton in the morning.”

“I’ll take it,” Flo offered. “Yer don’t want no more tea, or yer’ll be up an’ down all night like a dancer’s knees.”

“What
night
?” Hester responded bitterly.

Bessie came into the room, her hair restored to its tight knot at the back of her head and her face scrubbed and ready for business.

“I’ll go an’ see ’er in a couple of hours,” she announced, looking at Hester. “Me an’ Flo’ll take care o’ the rest o’ the night.” She glared at Flo. “In’t that right?”

“Yeah,” Flo agreed, grinning at Hester and showing several gaps in her teeth. “I won’t kill ’er, ’onest! Swear on me mother’s grave!”

“Yer ma in’t dead,” Bessie growled.

Flo shrugged and put the kettle onto the stove, then bent to open the range and poke the coals to make them burn. “Yer need more coke,” she said with a sniff. “S’pose that’s why yer ’as ter take that kind o’ pig.”

Hester went back upstairs with profound gratitude, and sank into a dreamless sleep until nearly seven o’clock, when the day’s duties began. Mercifully, when she looked in on Ruth, she seemed to be quietly asleep, hot but not delirious, and breathing fairly well.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Bessie was making gruel for those who were well enough to eat, and Flo was asleep in one of the chairs, her head fallen forward onto the table.

When Margaret arrived shortly after ten o’clock, she took one look at Hester’s face, and then Bessie’s. “What’s happened?” she asked, her eyes wide with alarm.

“We need more ’elp,” Bessie replied before Hester could say anything.

“And the rat catcher,” Hester added. Flo was already fetching more water from the well along the street.

Margaret made a slight flinch of distaste, but she was not surprised. Rats were a condition of life in places like Portpool Lane.

“How’s Ruth Clark?” she asked Hester.

“She’ll live, more’s the pity,” Bessie replied. She jerked her head towards Hester. “Bin up most o’ the night, wot wi’ m’lady Clark, ’er an’ the poor bint wot come in wi’ a knife cut in ’er arm. Which ’minds me, I in’t never took ’er no breakfast yet.” And suiting the deed to the word, she ladled out a dish of gruel and went out of the room with it, leaving Hester and Margaret alone.

“We do need more help,” Hester admitted. “But we’ve got no money to pay anyone, so it’ll have to be voluntary. Heaven knows, it’s hard enough to get money. I’ve no idea how we’re going to persuade someone to give up their time to a place like this.” She glanced around the candlelit kitchen with its stone sink, pails of water, and wooden bins of flour and oatmeal. “Unfortunately, heaven’s not telling me!”

Margaret made tea for both of them, and toast from one of the loaves of bread she had brought. She even had a jar of marmalade, taken surreptitiously from her mother’s kitchen. She had left a note in the larder, in case the cook or one of the other servants got the blame for its disappearance.

“I’m not sure where I’ll ask,” she said when they were both sitting down. “But I have one or two places at least to start. There are women who have no money they can dispose of without their husbands’ approval, but they do have time. It is possible to be very comfortably well-off and bored silly.”

Hester was in no position to quibble. She would be very grateful for any help at all, and she said so.

It was a hard day. Two more women were admitted with bad bronchitis, and a third with a dislocated shoulder which took Hester and Bessie considerable difficulty to reduce, and of course was extremely painful for the woman. She let out a fearful scream as Hester laid her on the ground, put her foot as gently as she could into the woman’s armpit, and then pulled steadily on the hand.

Flo came rushing in, demanding to know what had happened, and then was furious to discover it was nothing she could do anything about. The woman, gasping to cry abuse, staggered to her feet and only then realized that her shoulder was back to normal.

Just before five there was a knock on the back door and Hester opened it to find the costermonger in the yard, his barrow behind him.

“Hello, Toddy. How are you?” she asked with a smile.

“Not bad, missus,” he replied with a lopsided grin. “Just got me usual. Yer don’t think as it’s summink serious, do yer?” A flicker of anxiety showed for a moment in his eyes.

She affected to give his aches their proper consideration. “I’ll get you some elder ointment that you can rub in. Bessie swears by it for her knees.”

“That’s right nice o’ yer,” he said, obviously comforted. “I got ’alf a dozen pounds o’ apples it in’t worth me takin’ ’ome. More trouble than it’d be worth. D’yer like ’em ’ere?”

“That would be very nice,” she accepted, going inside to fetch the ointment. She returned and gave it to him in a small jar, and found him standing there with the apples and a small sack of mixed potatoes, carrots, and parsnips.

Margaret left to go home at eight o’clock, and it seemed a long night. Hester was able to snatch no more than an hour or two of sleep, in bits and pieces, catnaps when the chance arose. Flo fetched and carried, but her quarrel with Ruth Clark rumbled on, and by daylight everyone was exhausted. The best that could be said was that none of the patients gave cause for fear that they were close to death.

At half past ten Margaret arrived, bringing with her two women. They walked into the clinic behind her, then stood in the main room, the first staring quite openly around with a look of disdain. She was a tall, rather thin woman with dark hair, and she was considerably broader at the hip than the shoulder. Her face had been handsome in her youth, but the marks of discontent detracted from it now that she appeared to be in her middle forties. Her clothes were smart and expensive, even though she had clearly selected her oldest skirt and woollen jacket in which to come. Hester knew at a glance that they were well made and of good fabric. Five years ago they had been the height of fashion.

The woman behind her was different in almost every respect. She was at least two inches less in height. Her face was soft featured, but there was great strength in the broad cheekbones and the chin. Her hair was honey-brown and had a heavy natural curl. Her clothes were also of good quality, but less fashionable in cut, and looked to be no earlier than last winter’s in style. She seemed to be the more nervous of the two. There was no discontent in her face, but a profound apprehension, as though she feared the place as if there were something in it which was dangerous, even tragic.

“This is Mrs. Claudine Burroughs,” Margaret said, introducing the older woman to Hester. “She has very generously offered to help us at least two days a week.”

“How do you do, Mrs. Burroughs?” Hester responded. “We are very grateful to you.”

Mrs. Burroughs looked at her with growing disapproval. She must have seen the exhaustion in Hester’s face, her hair untidily caught up and her hands red from scrubbing the floor and feeding hot, wet sheets through the mangle. There was a tear in the shoulder seam of her blouse from reaching to winch up the airing rack to try to get the bed linen dry before they needed to put it back on again the next time the beds needed to be changed.

“It isn’t the sort of charity work I usually do,” Mrs. Burroughs said coolly.

“You will never do anything which will be more valued,” Hester replied with as much warmth as she could manage. She could not afford to offend her, full of misgivings as she was.

“And this is Miss Mercy Louvain,” Margaret said, introducing the younger woman. “She has offered to be here as long as we need her. She will even sleep here if it would be helpful.” She smiled, searching Hester’s eyes and awaiting her approval.

Louvain! Hester was incredulous. Was she related to Clement Louvain? She had to be. It was hardly a common name. Was it possible she knew Ruth Clark? If she did, it might be an embarrassing situation, especially if Ruth really was Louvain’s mistress and not that of some fictional friend.

She smiled back, first at Margaret, then at Mercy Louvain. “Thank you. That is extraordinarily good of you. Nighttimes can be hard. We would appreciate it very much indeed.” Not once had Mercy looked around the room as Mrs. Burroughs did; it was almost as if she had no interest in the surroundings.

Hester did not express her gratitude to Margaret in words, in case the depth of her feeling alarmed the two new volunteers, but she allowed it to show in her eyes for a moment when their glances met. Then Hester showed the women the house and introduced them to their first tasks.

“For heaven’s sake, don’t you have servants here of any sort?” Mrs. Burroughs demanded when they were in the laundry. She gazed at the stone floor and the pile of linen on it, awaiting washing, and then at the huge copper with the steam rising off it, her nostrils flaring at the vinegar and caustic in the air. She looked at the mangle between the two deep wooden tubs as if it were some obscene instrument of torture.

“We don’t have money for it,” Hester explained. “We need all we can get for medicine, coal, and food. People are very unwilling to give to us because of the nature of our patients.”

Mrs. Burroughs snorted but made no direct reply. Her eyes went further around the room, noting the pails, the sack of potash, the vat of lard, and the large glass flagons of vinegar.

“Where do you get water?” she asked. “I see no taps.”

“From the well down the street,” Hester replied.

“Good heavens, woman! You want a cart horse to labor here!” Mrs. Burroughs exclaimed.

“I want a lot of things,” Hester said ruefully. “I’ll accept what I can get, and be most grateful for it. Bessie usually fetches the water. You don’t need to concern yourself with it.”

“Bessie? Is she the big woman I saw on the landing?”

“Yes. She would do most of the laundry usually, but we have a lot of sick and injured here right now, and she has learned a little nursing, so I need her to help with that.”

“Skilled, is it?” Mrs. Burroughs asked disbelievingly.

“Yes, some of it is,” Hester replied, again finding it difficult to remain civil. “Some of it isn’t, like cleaning up blood or vomit, emptying slops—that sort of thing.”

Mrs. Burroughs jerked up her chin. “I’ll do the laundry,” she stated.

Hester smiled back at her. “Thank you,” she accepted sweetly.

If Mercy Louvain saw any humor in Mrs. Burrough’s reaction there was no reflection of it in her grave face. Hester showed Mrs. Burroughs where everything was, and the exact proportions to be mixed and put into the coppers. She demonstrated how to use the wooden dolly to move the linen, how long to leave it, and at what temperature. She would have to return in order to help her move it all to be rinsed and then mangled and folded, and the airing rack winched down, the linen put on it, and winched back up again and lashed tight. It was obvious Mrs. Burroughs had never so much as washed a handkerchief. She had a great deal to learn if she was to be of use.