With an almighty wrench Ellen freed herself from Danny’s grip and put some distance between them. ‘Not that it is of any business of yours, but Doctor Munroe was telling me of his plans to stay in the area,’ Ellen said.
Danny glanced down at the bundle of washing hooked over her arm.
‘What do you want to wash and scrub for, woman, when you could earn a deal more money swivelling on my lap?’
Danny reached up and traced his chubby finger down the side of her face. His bitter breath wafted over her and she almost gagged.
Her arm ached with the bundle she held. It was only some shirts and a few petticoats, but it was becoming heavy.
As his jagged nail scratched along her cheekbone Danny gave a low chuckle.
‘Ellen O’Casey thinks she’s too grand for the likes of us,’ he said to Black Mike but keeping his gaze on Ellen. ‘She’s forgotten how grateful she was when she was offered a chance to earn a bob or two singing for my customers.’
Ellen’s head snapped around. ‘I bring in custom and coin from all over the city for you and you still pay me short of my worth,’ she told him, glaring up at him.
‘See what I mean, Mike, too grand she is now that Doctor Munroe’s turned her head,’ Danny spat out.
‘You must have been drinking your own foul brandy to imagine such a thing,’ Ellen said, trying to keep her voice steady.
‘Don’t play the respectable widow with me, Ellen O’Casey. You were flirting with him, so you were.’
Danny had let go of her, but before she could put any distance between them his left arm shot around her waist. His other hand went to her skirt and he grabbed at her private parts.
‘It’s been over ten years since you had a man, you must be like a she-cat on the tiles by now. Let me ease you.’
Ellen shoved his hand away and dropped the washing. Danny laughed and Mike joined in. She gave them a contemptuous glare and stooped to retrieved her bundle, which had landed square on a pile of rotting fish heads. It would take her a good hour to scrub the smell out of the shirts.
Trembling with anger she spun around and faced Danny. He remained astride the pavement with his fists balled on his hips, grinning down at her.
‘Let me past, Danny Donovan, or by the Holy Mother Mary and Joseph, I’ll curse your devil soul where you stand,’ she said through clenched teeth.
At last, with a hard laugh, he stepped aside. Ellen swept past him, her eyes blinded by tears of rage and frustration.
Five
Robert and his student doctors had strolled through the wards for the past two hours and seen everything from a sailor with scurvy to a young lad who had cut his foot on a spike of metal in the Thames mud the day before.
Unfortunately, there was one illness his trainee doctors did not see because the damn fool hospital trustees wouldn’t allow patients suffering from it to be admitted.
They were now back in the laboratory.
With his hand lightly resting on the microscope, Robert looked at the four students who sat around the scrubbed bench. ‘Now, tell me what you know about cholera, St John.’
‘It comes from the East, India,’ St John answered.
‘Benthan.’
Benthan adjusted his cravat. ‘The first sign is fever followed by nausea and watery bowels.’
‘What then, Maltravers?’ Robert asked, seeing Bulmer, the hospital manservant, entering the room.
‘Cramps in the guts and thirst, often followed by death in twenty-four to forty-eight hours,’ Maltravers answered.
Robert gave them all a broad smile and their shoulders relaxed. ‘Good, good. Now, what causes it? Young?’
‘I believe the current understanding is that it is carried in foul air,’ Young answered.
Robert pursed his lips and clasped his hands behind his back.
‘I believe the majority of my peers would agree with you,’ he said. Young looked smug. ‘I, on the other hand, do not. I believe cholera is carried in the water, by invisible entities or germs.’ All four students looked sceptical. ‘You must have read Needham’s work on
infusoria animalcules.
Or Spallanzani on killing these “germs” by boiling so that no decomposition occurs?’
The students shuffled under Robert’s challenging gaze, then Maltravers spoke. ‘How so, sir?’
Gripping the microscope Robert leant forward. ‘Because I believe, through reasoning and deduction, there are organisms smaller than the eye can see at present, even with this. He lifted the microscope in his hand. ‘I believe that a minute organism, or germ, is the cause of cholera, and many other diseases besides. It is only a matter of time until we can prove it.’
Bulmer was signalling to him but Robert continued. ‘Jenner’s work pointed to it, when he observed the spread of cowpox. Many now are looking seriously at the germ theory.’
Bulmer was now staring at him with his hands behind his back. Robert sighed. ‘I’ll leave you gentlemen to think on these matters while I go and see what has sent Bulmer to find me.’
Rinsing and drying his hands under the pump in the corner Robert made his way over to Bulmer.
‘Sorry to interrupt you, Doctor Munroe, but Doctor Davies asked to see you in his study when you have a moment,’ said the manservant, handing Robert his jacket.
Robert’s footsteps echoed through the corridor until he reached the half-glass partition of Doctor Davies’s door. He knocked and, after the briefest of pauses, it was opened by Davies’s assistant.
The chief physician of the hospital sat behind his mahogany desk and peered at Robert from between two mountains of paper. To one side were an inkwell, several quills, a large blotter and a glass of clear liquid. Around the wall were shelves stacked with books, and more papers.
Thomas Davies was six or seven inches shorter than Robert. He was in his late forties with a receding hairline which he disguised by combing his parting low on the left side.
‘Good of you to come,’ he said as Robert took a seat. ‘Our hospital chairman, Lord Bowden, tells me you are filling the heads of our student physicians with science.’
‘I am.’
Davies lent forward and his face creased in a smile which made him look ten years younger.
‘Good.’
Robert’s shoulders relaxed. ‘I knew I could count on your support. Although, I must confess I am surprised that His Lordship knows my name.’
Davies pulled out two letters from the pile on his desk. ‘You are too modest, Munroe. Your name is known to a great number of people.’ He tapped the papers. ‘I have letters here from Lord Ashley and Sir Malcolm Dyer, both of whom praise your work. Do you know these gentlemen?’
‘I know Lord Ashley by reputation. He is a member of the Parliamentary Commission on Factory Conditions. Sir Malcolm I know very well. He has worked with my father and is the parliamentary representative of the Women’s Society for Moral Improvement.’
‘Of which your mother is chairwoman.’
‘Indeed.’
‘They both urge me to appoint you as the chairman of the Emergency Committee for St George’s parish to investigate the cholera outbreak.’
I would have thought Sir Charles Huntly would be the obvious choice,’ Robert said, trying to contain his excitement at the prospect now opening before him.
‘Not according to Lord Ashley or Sir Malcolm, who urges me to’ - he adjusted his glasses - ‘and I quote, “recognise a gifted young man, who has an incisive mind and exceptional talents”’.
Robert felt his face grow red.
‘Would you accept the post if I offered it to you?’
What he could only do in such a position! He could force the parish street committees to clear the filth from the gutters as they should. He could compel landlords to provide adequate water and sanitation for their tenants. He might even be able to persuade the parish to open a small cottage hospital to care for those suffering from cholera, as had been done in other cities.
‘Not if you offered me the post because of political pressure,’ he replied firmly.
‘That’s just what I expected you to say. I am offering you the post because you are the only doctor I know with a thorough knowledge of the medical and social issues that surround cholera.’ Davies raised his hand to his mouth and coughed. ‘There is a small remuneration attached to the post.’
Although Robert would have taken the chairmanship without any financial reward, London prices were eating up his modest wages of one hundred and fifty pounds, and the seventy pounds dividend from his shares in the new Manchester to Liverpool railway, at an alarming rate. His private practice in Chapel Street generated an income but it wasn’t large, and was less than it could have been because in many cases he charged only the cost of the medicine.
Robert grasped Davies’s hand in a firm handshake. ‘Thank you, sir. I am honoured.’
Six
Josie watched the muscles of her mother’s arms grow taut as she lifted the large copper from the hook over the fire then, in a swift move, pour the steaming water into the tin hip bath in front of the fire. She stepped back as the steam rose upwards and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead.
For as long as Josie could remember, this had been the Shannahan women’s Friday night ritual: a shared bath in front of the fire, followed by a cup of tea and the rare treat of a sugary bun. The bought bun with its currants and glazing of sugar was terribly expensive, a farthing each. It was the one luxury they allowed themselves. As her gran always said, if anyone in the whole city of London deserved a bit of spoiling on a Friday night it was them, and Josie agreed.
One thing her mother and grandmother both did, day in and day out, was work. As a child, sitting on a blanket on the beaten earth floor, she could remember them bent over a large tub full of soapy washing. As she grew, Josie had joined them in their daily toil. It had always been that way, just the three of them, since her father had met his untimely end at the bottom of the London docks.
Josie couldn’t remember her father. She had still been barely able to stand when he was carried home by three fellow dockers. She had gleaned snippets about him from friends and neighbours and, of course, from her mother and grandmother, and knew that he had had dark curly hair and been admired by the women of the area. She knew that he had worked in the docks - when there was work - and that before marrying her mother he had sailed the coal barges between Newcastle and the Port of London. She also knew that Michael O’Casey had been popular around the streets of Wapping and even now, ten years after his death, she would be told by an old mate of his that ‘your father was always ready to stand his round’.
This had satisfied her as a small child, imagining that her father, had he lived, would have taken her to the fair and treated her to toffee apples and ribbons. She had always assumed that after he died her mother was too heartbroken to think of putting another man in his place.
Not that she had questioned the lack of men in their lives. She wasn’t the only child in the streets around without a father, but most of them had had a couple of stepfathers and the occasional live-in uncle whereas no man had ever put his feet under their table.
Josie hadn’t given this matter a second thought until she overheard a chance remark in the market the day before. One of the stallholders, thinking she was out of earshot, had referred to her mother as a ‘choice armful’ and several around him agreed heartily. It had given the girl pause for thought.
‘Come on, Josie, jump in,’ her mother called, snatching the towel from the rail over the fire and shaking it at her playfully. With a smile on her face, her mother looked like a girl only a few years older than herself. The apron she always wore when in the house was tied tight around her waist, and Josie noted that its circumference had not expanded like some other women’s around and about. Why had no man sought her mother out?
Josie half turned and stripped off her clothes. Although they all lived closely together and even shared a bed, she had become shy of standing naked before her mother and gran. She had noticed a month or so ago that her breasts had budded, making her bodice sit tight across her chest. A number of the boys in the area had noticed the changes, and Josie had started to wonder if they thought her a choice armful too.
‘Stop dallying,’ her gran said in an indulgent voice, looking better than she had earlier. On her return from school Josie had found Gran clutching her chest in the yard. She had tried to brush away Josie’s concern, saying she was just catching her breath.
Josie stepped gingerly into the tin bath. Ellen lifted a pitcher of warm water and poured it carefully over her. She took in a breath as the water flowed over her face. Her mother handed her some soap and Josie set to lathering it over herself. She had to be quick because the water she stood in would chill fast and there were still her mother and grandmother to make use of it. Ellen’s hands were on her hair rubbing in the sage cream to ward off head lice. Josie’s eyes felt as if they were being shaken out of their sockets as her mother applied the pungent ointment vigorously. She didn’t believe there would be any head lice lurking in her hair, not after the painful daily tweak with the small tooth comb that her mother administered before braiding her hair for school. The water fell over her face in a curtain again, rinsing the sage paste into the water around her feet.
Hunching down in the tub Josie rinsed off the remaining soap and stepped out to be enveloped in a large towel by Ellen, who hugged her and kissed her on the forehead, drying her rigorously all the while. When she was satisfied that every last drop of water had been dried off, Ellen handed Josie her long nightdress and swathed her in a crocheted shawl. She then picked up a comb and started to untangled her daughter’s long tresses.
‘Ma?’
‘Mm?’
‘Why haven’t you got married again?’ Josie asked.
Ellen’s eyes opened wide. ‘Whatever put such a notion into your head?’ she replied, bustling to separate strands of hair and not meeting Josie’s gaze. ‘And haven’t I got enough to do looking after you?’