Suffer the Little Children (The Chronicles of Christoval Alvarez Book 5) Page 3

  She looked frightened and shook her head.

  ‘Oh, I could not!’

  Master Ailmer, the deputy superintendent, was the one who ran the hospital, for the superintendent’s role was purely honorary, and the governors keep but a distant eye on St Thomas’s. He was not always an easy man, sometimes interfering, but admirable at his job. And he would put the fear of God into Mellie’s master.

  ‘But I must find work,’ the girl said, her voice thin with anxiety.

  ‘Have you no family who could take you in, at least until you are strong again?’

  She shook her head mutely.

  ‘Mellie? That’s an unusual name.’

  ‘I was baptised Emilia, but I had a little sister who could only say Mellie, so that’s what I came to be called.’

  ‘So you have a sister.’

  She shook her head. ‘All dead.’

  Well, it was not such an unusual story. When disease swept London, whole families could be wiped out in days. It did not even need to be the plague. It could be the sweating sickness, which killed in hours, though it had not been known of late. Or a long drawn out weakening and death from the bloody flux.

  ‘I will talk to the governess of the sisters,’ I said. ‘Sometimes there is work in the hospital. Sometimes she knows of a vacancy for a maid or an apprentice. I know you were a house maid. Do you have any particular skills?’

  ‘I can cook,’ she said. ‘I often helped the cook at . . . at that last place.’

  ‘Then perhaps there might be a position at a bakery or a pie shop, or in the kitchen of an inn or an ordinary.’ I looked down again at the baby, who was stirring and pursing her lips as if she was hungry, but she was not awake yet.

  ‘What are we to do with the babe?’ I asked gently. ‘Do you want to keep her?’

  A look of distress came over Mellie’s face and the tears welled up and ran down her cheeks.

  ‘Before,’ she said, clutching her hands together, ‘before, I wanted nothing to do with it, after that filth . . . after what he did to me. But now she is here, and she is so small, and so pretty, and . . . she is part of me as well. I don’t know what to do. Could I keep her? Do you think I should keep her?’

  I feel my chest tighten in sympathy. I had never borne a child and if my life continued as it was, I never would, but I could feel that terrible force pulling Mellie toward her child. Yet she was hardly more than a child herself. She must make a new start, in a new place, and put the horror of her past behind her. How could she do that, with a child?

  ‘You must think about it very carefully,’ I said, ‘and you need not decide yet. But I think it would be best for both you and the child if you do not keep her.’

  The tears were falling faster now. ‘Then she would go to Christ’s Hospital?’

  ‘Aye. And it is a fine place. A good place. She will be fed and sheltered and given a safe home. She will even go to school and later she will be found an apprenticeship.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘I never went to school. Nor I didn’t have an apprenticeship, though my Pa, before he died, meant to ’prentice me.’

  I was conscious I must not try to influence her too much. ‘Think about it. Look, she’s waking.’

  I lifted the baby out of her crib and she opened wide unfocussed eyes at me. As I continued down the ward to visit my other patients, I was aware that Mellie was feeding her and crooning over her, the tears still falling.

  The other mothers in the ward were all doing well, though two of them were very near their time and might be delivered today or tomorrow, so I left them to the care of the nursing sisters and went through the door at the far end which led into the children’s ward.

  While Whittington’s lying-in ward was devoted to one purpose only, the children’s ward was another matter. St Thomas’s was both a hospital caring for the sick poor and also a hospice for the weak and enfeebled, the destitute poor. Although Bridewell took in what were known as sturdy beggars – healthy vagrants both men and women – and put them to useful work, St Thomas’s here and St Bartholomew’s north of the river served a double purpose. Many of our people were not sick, or at least not of a treatable illness. In the almshouse attached to the hospital we housed and fed the aged and infirm, the blind, the simple-minded, in short those citizens who could not care for themselves.

  Sometimes we took in whole families. It was the task of the almoner to decide who should be admitted and who not, and if it seemed to him that a whole family was incapable of caring for itself, they all came under our wing. What this often meant was families with too many children to feed, or families where both parents were dead and the children had come into the care of a grandparent who could no longer provide for them. After the late wars against Spain, in which thousands of soldiers and sailors had died, their widows struggled to feed themselves and their orphaned children. So it was that I had divided the children’s ward into two rooms with screens – one side for the sick children, the other for those who were merely destitute. In the past they had all been thrust in together, but I was sure the merely poor and hungry should be separated from those who were ill. We would find places for those children who were old enough to work, the younger ones would go to Christ’s, the permanently enfeebled would move to the almshouse.

  It had seemed a good plan at first, but you had as soon try to herd wild birds as children. The pauper children quickly grew strong on St Thomas’s diet of plain but nourishing food, so they were soon running about, in and out of the whole ward. As the sick children began to recover, they were little better. Even in the women’s ward I could hear a rumpus, which barely subsided when I entered the children’s ward. Mistress Maynard generally deputed two of her younger and gentler sisters here, reserving the older and more experienced ones for the often unpleasant and disturbing duties of the men’s wards, where surgeons had frequently to be called in to amputate limbs damaged in the cruelly hard labour of these Southwark men. Today two young girls were trying, and failing, to keep order amongst the children. They were much the same age as I, but my physician’s gown and my title of doctor gave me an authority they did not possess.

  ‘What is all this hullabaloo?’ I demanded, attempting to sound as fierce as Mistress Maynard. It was difficult not to smile, for I had caught young Davy – one of the paupers – turning handstands down the centre of the ward. Someone (I hoped it was not the sisters) had pushed back the screens, so that the children in both halves of the room could watch.

  ‘You will be waking the babies in the next ward with your noise,’ I said, ‘and then Mistress Maynard will be after you, and no dinner, I warrant.’

  That sobered them. For those who had known the pain of an empty belly it was no idle threat.

  ‘Back to your bed, Davy,’ I said severely, and he complied somewhat sheepishly. Despite his antics, he had a rattle in his chest which gave me cause for concern.

  The two sisters rushed to replace the screens and restore some order to the tumbled bedding. I had some sympathy for the children, especially for those well enough to be up and about, but I could not have my truly sick patients disturbed. Fortunately there was only one serious case at present, a girl, Ellyn, with suspected consumption, whose condition worried me. The others were recovering from childish ailments of one kind and another, except for a lad who had been knocked down by a carter. He was badly bruised and the knock on his head had left him unconscious for two days, but now he was mending fast.

  I pulled up a stool to Ellyn’s bed and checked her heartbeat, which was steady, then laid my ear on her chest to listen to her lungs.

  ‘Deep breaths, Ellyn,’ I said.

  The rustling which I had heard when she was first admitted, coughing and spitting blood, had gone. The sound of her breathing was normal. I smiled at her.

  ‘Good. You are much better. Do you feel better in yourself?’

  She gave me a quick nod, but her face was pinched and pale below a thick mass of copper red hair. She reminded me in some w
ays of Mellie in the other ward. There was a kind of undercurrent of fear in her demeanour.

  ‘Now, Ellyn,’ I said, sitting back and clasping my hands between my knees. ‘When you came in, you would tell us nothing, but you were spitting blood and that worried us. You are old enough to know the signs. What are you? Twelve?’

  ‘About that, I suppose, sir.’ It was no more than a whisper, and almost the only time I had heard her speak. Usually she kept her mouth tight closed.

  ‘Well, you will know that is a sign of consumption, which is a very serious illness, but I am glad to say that you do not have consumption. So why were you spitting blood?’

  She did not answer, but glanced around fearfully, as if she expected to be threatened.

  ‘Open your mouth,’ I said. ‘Nay, wider than that.’

  The child had certainly had a chest infection which had made her cough, but I had thought of another explanation for the blood.

  Reluctantly, she did as she was told. I tilted her head toward the window in order to see better. My guess had been correct. I released her chin and laid my hand on hers.

  ‘Someone has been drawing your teeth. Two of your new molars are gone.’

  She began to weep silently and hung her head as if she were ashamed.

  ‘Who did this to you, Ellyn? You are too young and those teeth too new for them to have been rotten.’

  ‘My Ma said I had to,’ she whispered.

  ‘Did your Ma pull them?’

  She shook her head. ‘My Pa. He’s a blacksmith. He was a blacksmith, but he lost his place.’

  ‘So he used his blacksmith’s pliers?’

  She nodded. ‘Ma held my head, so I couldn’t pull away.’

  Christ’s bones, it was a miracle they had not broken her jaw.

  ‘They’re going to sell them, your parents, to the men who make false teeth?’

  She nodded again. ‘They took two of my brother’s as well, but he didn’t bleed as much. And I was coughing already. When I didn’t stop bleeding, Ma left me here.’

  I could feel anger rising up through me like a burning flood. ‘Why did you not tell us? I could have given you a salve for your mouth.’

  ‘Pa said, if I told anyone, he’d beat the hell out of me.’

  The words, repeated in that soft young voice, made me shiver, despite the heat of my anger.

  ‘Did he? Well, do not worry, Ellyn. I will not let him lay a finger on you.’

  I was not sure how I would manage it, but I was determined. Before he was done, the brute would probably draw all her adult teeth. She had grown all but those at the very back and they were new, white and undamaged. He would be able to sell the set for a good price, if he found the right buyer, probably as much as he would earn in a year as a blacksmith. And there was a boy, too. At the moment I could do nothing about him, but I might be able to persuade the deputy superintendent not to return Ellyn to her family. Her own mother had gripped her head while the man drew the teeth! I shuddered. There would have been a lot of blood, for some bleed more than others when teeth are drawn.

  I left Ellyn and checked the injured boy as well as the other sick children, then went through to the paupers’ section. They all turned on me such expressions of angelic innocence that I wondered what further mischief they were planning when I left. Davy looked most innocent of all, which did not bode well. It did these children no good to be cooped up here, once they had been brought back from the brink of starvation. They needed something to occupy them, work or play.

  There were some simple workshops at St Thomas’s for those of the paupers who could manage a little light work, and their children would join them there, plaiting straw for the wide-brimmed hats country people wore all summer, and for baskets, or chewing scraps of leather to make embossed ornaments for the cornices of rich men’s houses. Many of the blind did this. The cleaner women who were free from disease might help in the bakehouse or brewhouse, where children could fetch and carry.

  St Thomas’s had once been an abbey, around which a number of famous workshops had grown up, producing beautiful carving and cabinet work, stone carving for the embellishment and repair of churches and monastic buildings, and stained glass which was famed throughout England. There were even famous printing presses. The paupers were mostly unable to carry out the skilled work, but could do menial tasks. From time to time a carpenter or mason who had fallen on hard times might find work here, and children who had come in with their families tended to stay with their families, until they could be found work elsewhere.

  There were, however, other children without families, and Davy was one of them. He had been found in a ditch near one of the tanneries out along the road into Kent and brought in to us a few weeks ago, looking like a plucked partridge, with no flesh on him to stop the sharp angles of his bones poking under his skin. He could tell us very little about himself. He thought he had been born in England, although he had recently come from Calais with a vagabond troupe of acrobats who had found him somewhere and trained him up in their skills. With them he had travelled in the Low Countries, before crossing to England. They had been intending to perform at Bartholomew Fair, but had been diverted by an offer to perform at a yeoman’s wedding in a village near Canterbury. Having missed the Fair, they had wandered about Kent, performing at country markets for the ha’pennies thrown at them, until they had turned their steps toward London. Then one night a quarrel had broken out between two of the men about the division of the money. Knives were drawn.

  Davy would say little more except that he had crawled away and hidden under a bush for the night. In the morning he found one of the men dead of stab wounds and everyone else gone.

  ‘So I scarpered,’ he said. ‘Didn’t want nobody fixing the killing on me, so I asked the way to London, where we was going anyway.’

  He had no money and no food, and made it only as far as the ditch beside the tannery.

  However, now he was almost restored to health, we needed to do something with him, once the trouble in his chest was cleared.

  I sat down beside his bed. We had given him one of the hospital night shifts, but his own clothes were neatly folded on a stool. They were garishly coloured and threadbare. The hospital laundry had washed them, but they would not last much longer.

  I put the case of Christ’s Hospital to him. He was perhaps nine or ten years old, but with a knowing air that came from a rough and unforgiving life on the road. Was it too late for him to benefit from what Christ’s Hospital had to offer?

  He listened while I described how Christ’s Hospital could give him food and clothes and a roof over his head until he was able to be apprenticed. From the expression of wary unbelief on his face, I saw that he thought I was describing the folk tale Land of Cockaigne.

  ‘I an’t taken in, Master,’ he said when I had finished. ‘An’t no such places. You fixing on putting me in prison?’

  ‘Of course not.’ I found I was growing weary of this. I knew Christ’s Hospital could give these abandoned children some hope in life, but Davy – like Matthew and the other beggar children – had been dealt such blows in their young lives that they had learned to trust no one. No wonder they did not believe me. Probably I would be able to place Mellie’s baby there. Fresh into the world, she could grow up lapped in safety and love, but these children were as intractable as the hardened and cruel adults amongst whom they had lived.

  ‘I could take you to see it,’ I said finally to Davy, ‘then you can decide. You would no longer need to work for every crust of bread you eat.’

  He looked at me slantwise out of the corner of his eyes and I knew that he suspected I was planning some kind of trap. I could not spend any longer here with him now. Although I had overall supervision of these two wards, we all of us – physicians, surgeons, sisters – must be prepared to work anywhere in the hospital as need arose, and I had promised to help on the men’s wards today, which were overcrowded.

  I bade farewell to my young patients, who loo
ked rather more pleased than sorry to see me go.

  ‘Let them play a little,’ I murmured to the more sensible looking of the young nursing sisters, ‘but keep them away from the sick children. And use some of the clove salve on Ellyn’s gums. She’s had two teeth drawn by force.’

  There was a standing agreement between Walsingham and the governors of St Thomas’s that when I was needed for his work at Seething Lane I was to be released for however long the need might last. Often I was reluctant to go, for the work of the hospital was never-ending, new patients coming in every day – and sometimes at night as well. Moreover, I had been given much more responsibility at St Thomas’s than ever I had had at St Bartholomew’s, where I was always perceived as my father’s assistant. Now I held the position of a full physician, although I was paid only the salary of an assistant, since I was neither a Fellow nor licensed by the Royal College of Physicians. With my new position and new responsibilities had come an even stronger conviction that this was the work I should be doing, not acting as code-breaker and intelligencer for Sir Francis.

  However, today I was glad to walk out into the fresh air again, where it was still frosty and clear. There had been some emergency surgery in the men’s wards, which I had followed up with physical care, but we had lost one patient, a stone mason who had been working on repairs to Greenwich palace when a crane had collapsed, dropping a block of stone on him. His chest was crushed so there was little we could do for him, apart from give him a strong dose of poppy syrup to ease the pain. He had barely been able to swallow it and had died in great agony. I was thankful that I spent more of my time seeing new life into the world than watching helplessly as a life was snatched from under my hands.

  I fetched Rikki from Tom Read, and as we crossed the Bridge toward the City, my thoughts turned to the other case, Marlowe’s case, and another man hastened out of this world untimely. Even if it were true that this unknown victim was the aggressor (and I was sure Marlowe would gladly lie to escape from a dangerous situation), was it really necessary to kill him? I wondered whether Simon and Tom Kyd had been able to persuade James Burbage to put up the bail money. I would say nothing to Walsingham until I had spoken to Simon.