No Cure for Love (4 page)

Worry about tomorrow’s woes tomorrow, she told herself. She opened the door to the street, letting in the pale morning light. It had rained overnight and the dirt outside was now mud and mingled with a small stream of pungent fluid meandering towards the bottom of the street. Although it was barely and hour after dawn, the pavements were already alive with people. Widow Rosser was already scooping up her harvest of dog, dirt from the surrounding streets to sell to tanneries on the Southwark side of the river. Ellen and Bridget waited until she reached of the street then stepped out.

‘That devil Danny been after you again?’ Bridget asked, crossing herself swiftly.

‘It’s not Danny. I’m just out of sorts, that’s all,’ Ellen said.

As they made their way to the pump Ellen and Bridget were nearly knocked over by five or six small boys dressed in rags. Despite being barefoot, the mudlarks joked with each other about the rich pickings to be had in the low-tide slurry.

Ellen lapsed into her own thoughts as Bridget greeted her friends who were on the same early morning errand. Danny she could deal with. Disturbing thoughts of Doctor Munroe she could not.

Was he going to call on her, take her to the ball, invite her to take tea with his mother? Of course not! How could she have let herself dream such a thing? But when his eyes had settled on her that was exactly what she had dreamed. For a brief moment she had allowed herself to imagine a man like the doctor wanting and loving her for life, not just for a night or two for the price of a couple of shillings.

All around them the men of the area trudged towards the docks and waterfront to queue in the hope of a ticket to work. Ellen and Bridget stopped and waited at the pump. Bridget looked around swiftly and then said in a low voice, ‘Hard as it is for us, I bless the day Michael O’Casey was taken.’ She spat on the ground. ‘The devil take his rotten soul. You wouldn’t have survived his fist much longer, my precious.’

Ellen’s tongue went to the side of her mouth and the space where two teeth once sat.

‘When Michael’s drunken fist knocked the child from you, I thought I was going to lose you, Ellie.’

Bridget ran her calloused fingers gently along her daughter’s face. Then she started coughing. Ellen put her arm around her, but her mother waved her away. ‘I’m fine,’ she wheezed, then punched her chest. ‘Just the early morning dust shifting.’

A dull ache settled on Ellen’s own chest. She thought of the poor infant, born before its time. Her mother was right. If Michael hadn’t died when he did she would have been in her grave by now. How would Josie and Bridget have fared then?

Forcing her mind back to the present,she stepped forward and put her hand to the pump, working the iron handle until a stream of brown water gushed out. She filled the four buckets and they started back to the house.

Ellen glanced at her mother. There were beads of sweat on Bridget’s brow and upper lip. She looked old and grey, like many of the other women who lived in the squalid conditions around the docks.

‘A few more months and we will be off, you, me and Josie,’ Ellen said, with a too-bright smile. We’ll see Joe and his wee’ uns in America, so we will.’

Bridget smiled, but didn’t answer. She was concentrating on carrying the buckets of water without spilling them.

Entering the house, they found Josie already washed and dressed in her dark serge dress with a white apron over it. Her bright, reddish-brown hair was tied back in two neat plaits that swished across her back as she moved. She grinned at her mother and grandmother as they entered the room. Ellen frowned. Josie, like the young Ellen, was maturing early. Thankfully, the shapeless dress she wore disguised her burgeoning figure.

‘Morning to you, Gran,’ she said, giving Bridget a noisy kiss. The older woman’s stern expression melted as she gazed on the leggy thirteen-year-old bouncing around the room.

Bridget started coughing again and Ellen’s brows drew together.

‘Have a bowl of porridge, Mammy, before you and Josie set out,’ Ellen said, leading her mother to the chair and table by the window.

‘’Tis Josephine who is your child, Ellen Marie, not me,’ she said sharply. But she flopped into the chair and made no complaint when Josie placed a bowl of steaming porridge and a mug of tea before her.

Ellen gathered up her coat and slipped on her day shoes. ‘You stay here and watch the copper, Mammy, I’ll go and fetch the linen.’

‘I’m not ready for to be left by the fire while others work,’ her mother said. She leant back in the chair and hugged the mug of hot tea to her. ‘I’ll catch you up presently.’

Robert wiped the blood from his hands and arms, then headed for the sluice room to clean up properly. It had been a difficult operation.

The locals had brought Bobby Reilly in straight from the docks, his crushed arm hanging in ribbons from his shoulder. After he had been lashed down on the operating table, Robert, as the physician on duty and William, his surgical counterpart, had been summoned.

Although Reilly had been made near insensible by the drink poured down his throat, he still had some fight left in him. It took the strength of four orderlies to hold him down while William, assisted by Robert, amputated his arm with a hacksaw.

Robert went into the tiled area with its deep sinks. He grabbed the coal-tar soap and scrubbed at the blood on his arm before it dried. William followed him in.

‘Bad business, a young man in his prime losing an arm like that,’ William said, taking the soap from Robert.

‘Bad business for his family,’ Robert snapped. ‘He has four young children and a sickly wife. They’ll be lucky if they avoid the workhouse.’

He threw down the towel, ran his fingers sharply through his hair and frowned at the dirty water in the porcelain bowl.

‘You seem less than yourself today, Munroe,’ William remarked dropping the towel in the washing basket.

Robert scowled out of the window. ‘I didn’t sleep very well. Too much noise.’

That was a barefaced lie. He hadn’t slept very well because his mind was full of that sharp-tongued Ellen O’Casey. He had spent a futile hour staring at the ceiling and thinking of her rude response to his compliment. Then another hour remonstrating with himself for being such a fool as to care.

‘Are you coming to the mess for a coffee, Rob?’ William asked. It was their habit after an operation.

He shook his head. ‘I thought I might take a stroll along to Backchurch Lane while I have a free moment.’

‘Going to see your lady love then, are you?’ Chafford asked, glancing to the foot-long, brown package that had delivered to the theatre while they operated.

Robert grinned.

‘I’ll see you at dinner,’ he said, rebuttoning his cuffs and slipping on his jacket.

Stepping out of the hospital, Robert stood under the classical portico for a moment and surveyed the scene. He tucked the package under his arm drew a deep breath, and made his way down the white stone steps to the market. The noon stagecoach to Colchester passed just as he reached the bottom, its driver whipping the horses into a steady trot towards the open expanse of Bow Common and the Old Ford across Lea River.

Recognising him as one of the doctors from the hospital, a number of the stallholders touched their forelocks as they cried ‘pippin, luverly pippin’, ‘new water fresh’ or ‘three a penny Yarmouth Bloaters’. The salty smell of fish mingled with the sweet scent of early flowers, while the meaty aroma from the tray balanced precariously on the top of the pieman’s head made Robert’s stomach rumble.

He turned west towards Aldgate. As he made his way past the stalls his mind settled. He relegated Ellen O’Casey and her cynical opinions to their rightful place in the grand scheme of things. He had even begun to see the whole incident in an amusing light.

Then he saw her.

She was standing by a fruit and vegetable stall dressed in a homespun, brick-red day dress and a short black jacket with worn elbows. Her face was shielded from the sun by a narrow-brimmed straw bonnet secured with a tie to one side. The whole ensemble was probably second- or even third-hand. As she stood, the wind billowed her skirt, then flattened it against her body, giving Robert a new image to turn over in his mind. She and the rotund stallholder were deep in conversation. He stood for a moment watching her, then walked towards her.

 

Ellen scratched the skin of the new potato to reveal its white flesh beneath.

‘Are you going to buy that, missis, or are you just making it ’appy by giving it a feel?’ asked a rasping voice beside her.

‘I’ll have it and two of its friends, if you please, Jimmy Flaherty, and knock the mud off before you weigh them. I’m not paying for dirt I can get free on my boot,’ Ellen answered.

After collecting the sacks of washing from the regular houses, Ellen was relieved to find her mother almost her old self when they returned. She had left Bridget and Josie scrubbing in the backyard.

She had decided to walk to the Waste, as the scrub land between the city and the Essex countryside proper was called, to get dinner and a bit of something for tea. Watney Street was a nearer market but the stall near the white chapel of St Mary’s often had fresher fruit and vegetables. Many of the journeymen from Essex skimmed goods from their loads and sold them to the stallholders as they passed by on their way to the City.

Ellen eyed a couple of cooking apples. They were old stock and had probably been kept over from the last harvest but they looked whole enough. If she baked them, they’d do for tea.

‘I’ll have those three as well,’ she said, pointing at the apples, ‘and an onion, two carrots and half a swede.’

Jimmy grinned at her as he hung the apples in the scales, ‘Ow’s yer mother?’

‘You know my mammy.’

‘And that pretty Josephine?’

Ellen smiled. ‘Growing like a flower in an Irish meadow.’

Jimmy turned his round, jovial face to the sky. ‘Spring’s round the corner, wouldn’t you say, Ellen?’

Copying Jimmy’s movement Ellen too tilted her face to the sun and took a deep breath in. ‘I certainly would,’ she said, and caught him looking beyond her. Wondering what the stallholder was staring at, she turned.

‘Good day to you, Mrs O’Casey.’

Having tried - and failed - to remove the image of Doctor Munroe from her mind all night, seeing him standing in the fresh morning sunlight not two foot from her was more than a little disconcerting.

‘Doctor Munroe,’ she said, hoping only she could hear the tightness in her voice. She gathered up her basket from the cobbles and balanced it on her hip. ‘Are you buying your su ... supper like the rest of us?’

A smile spread across the doctor’s face.

‘No, just a small gift. Two Seville oranges, if you please,’ he said to Jimmy. He smiled broadly at Ellen. ‘Oranges are very good for you, you know, if you’ve been poorly.’

The stallholder wrapped the oranges and handed them over. Adjusting the package under his arm Doctor Munroe paid for his purchase and turned back to her. His eyes flicked down to the basket she held. Ellen turned towards the City.

‘I see you are going in the same direction as I am, so please let me carry that for you,’ he said, taking hold of the basket handle.

‘But you already have your hands full,’ she replied watching him manoeuvre the long, flat package he was carrying.

‘Nonsense. If I put my fruit on top of your vegetables I can carry it without any trouble.’ He took firm hold of the basket handle.

To her joy or consternation, she wasn’t sure which, Doctor Munroe turned with her. His hands touched hers for a brief instant. He cleared his throat.

‘I did enjoy your singing last night. You truly have a lovely voice. Are you singing at the Angel again tonight, Mrs O’Casey?’

‘No. Not until next week, but I am singing next Tuesday at the Town of Ramsgate by the river at Wapping.’

Robert’s brows pulled together. ‘You don’t walk home from there alone, do you? It’s a particularly rough area.’

The concern in his voice was genuine. Other than Bridget no one had ever worried about her safety. Maybe his compliment last night had been genuine too. They walked on. Ellen let her gaze fall on his hand holding her basket. They turned to cross the street, letting two loaded wagons pass on their way to the City. Robert held her elbow lightly to guide her. She could feel the strength of his grasp through the thin fabric of her coat.

‘I suppose you have been cutting people up all morning, Doctor Munroe,’ she said, as her brain could find nothing else sensible to say.

A smile crept across his face. ‘I am a physician, Mrs O’Casey, not a surgeon. But, as it happens, I have been “cutting people up” all morning. Or rather one person, a poor stevedore whose arm was crushed between a ship and the dock.’ His brows drew together severely. ‘The working conditions in the docks are truly barbaric.’