Paddington Green Read online

  THE PERFORMERS

  1. GOWER STREET (1973)

  2. THE HAYMARKET (1974)

  3. PADDINGTON GREEN (1975)

  4. SOHO SQUARE (1976)

  5. BEDFORD ROW (1977)

  6. LONG ACRE (1978)

  7. CHARING CROSS (1979)

  8. THE STRAND (1980)

  9. CHELSEA REACH (1982)

  CLAIRE RAYNER

  PADDINGTON GREEN

  Book 3

  THE PERFORMERS

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-84982-058-5

  M P Publishing Limited

  12 Strathallan Crescent

  Douglas

  Isle of Man

  IM2 4NR

  United Kingdom

  Telephone: +44 (0)1624 618672

  email: [email protected]

  Copyright © 1975 Claire Rayner

  e-published in 2010 by M P Publishing

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author is grateful for the assistance given with research by The Burroughs Wellcome Medical History Library and Museum; Macarthy’s Ltd, Surgical Instrument Manufacturers; The Paddington Society; Leichner Stage Make-up Ltd; Professor Philip Rhodes, Dean of St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, London; Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, theatrical historians; the Marylebone Reference Library, London; The Law Society, London; the Wardens and Congregation of the Synagogue of the Sephardi Community, Bevis Marks, in the City of London; and other sources too numerous to mention.

  Claire Rayner

  FAMILY TREE

  1

  It had been raining since before dawn, a thin icy rain that slicked London with a grey sheen, turning the meaner streets into reeking gutters and the better ones into expanses of freezing mud. It dripped dolefully from the trees on to the greasy pavements beneath and sent the chill striking through to the very bones of the crowds that were already forming along the route between St James’s and Buckingham Palace and up Constitution Hill.

  It wanted half an hour yet to seven o’clock, but there they were, clustered in little huddles in an attempt to keep warm, chaffering and steaming, throwing ribald jokes at each other about the difference there would be in Her High and Mightiness this time tomorrow morning (if His High and Mightiness knew what he was about, that was, which some took leave to doubt), fighting for good vantage points, arguing and screeching and generally behaving as London crowds always did when given any excuse at all to forget the narrow meanness and drabness of their lives. And was not the little Queen’s wedding day as good an excuse as they had had since the end of the French Wars? They were going to enjoy themselves, come hell come devil, and in they came pouring, from Hoxton and Stepney, from the villages of Fulham and Chelsea, streaming over the elegant new Waterloo Bridge from Southwark and Lambeth and Camberwell, Londoners on holiday.

  Abby, standing at the window of her bedchamber and staring out at the mournful patch of greying grass that was all that was left of the once rural Paddington Green to which she had come as a bride, was well aware of the fact that the day was to be a holiday, and was thoroughly angered by it.

  She was as careful and thoughtful an employer as any, she told herself, and saw to it that her people had good conditions and were paid promptly. So their calm assumption that the Queen’s wedding gave them leave to depart from the manufactory in the Harrow Road and the work there for the whole of the day, despite the number of important orders waiting to be filled, was plain ingratitude. What was the Queen’s wedding to them? Hadn’t they their own lives to consider, and the needs of their employer? Who were they to think it reasonable to run wild on the streets today instead of working?

  She let the thoughts run round in her head as she stood there sipping her morning chocolate, trying hard not to face the real reason for the deep sense of depression which she knew quite well lay behind her irritation. But she could not keep the thoughts battened down for long, and being Abby, as practical and altogether honest as she had always been, she stopped trying and let her mind do what it wanted to; which was to take itself back to the day eleven years ago when she had looked from her bedroom window on to sheets of rain and thought about weddings.

  But that had been her own wedding, not that of a diminutive Queen, and a true love match, not a matter of political importance. But the rain had been the same, albeit it had been April, and not February. She remembered how aware she had been of the warmth of that spring rain when they had arrived here at this house beside the Green starred with daffodils which bent their heads under the great elm trees that had towered over the little house and shop that was to be her new home.

  Hers and James’s.

  It was extraordinary how sharp it could still be, thinking about James. She had long since lost the image of his face, could only conjure into her mind’s eye a freckled sandiness, a presence that was pale and thin and ill. Yet thinking of him hurt; or to be more honest, she told herself, it was not the thought of him so much as the thought of herself, her own sense of loss, of outrage, of bitter fury that she should have to suffer so. She had given up so much to marry him; father and mother, brothers and sisters….

  Not fair, she told herself now, for the thousandth weary time. I am not fair, for did I not go into it with my eyes so wide open that I saw clearly that my time with him would be short? Did I not deliberately seek him out, deliberately speak to him of my desire for him? I cannot cry hard-done-by now—and yet for ten years that is what I have done. Railed against the fates that selected so good and kind and caring a man for early death; that selected me, who wanted only to be useful and busy and happy, to be so lonely. Not fair, in every sense she could think of, not fair.

  She shook herself slightly and turned from the window into the warmth and comfort of her handsome bedchamber, so much more elegant in its furnishings than the house which contained it, to set down her chocolate cup and begin to set about her washing and dressing. Bad enough that the day would be lost to her workers; at least she could be about her own business at her counting house desk. Standing here thinking of past sadnesses would be of little value either to herself or to Frederick; and at the thought of young Frederick some of the desolation that had filled her since she woke dissipated and was replaced by a warmth and pleasure that was very comforting. Frederick with his red hair and narrow green eyes, so much a mixture in his looks of the two men she had always loved most, her husband and her father; Frederick with his sharp wits and wicked little lopsided grin that displayed the big front teeth of vulnerable boyhood; dear Frederick.

  And almost as though he was aware of the tender thoughts she had entertained about him, he started his efforts as soon as she entered the little morning parlour to eat breakfast with him. Not precisely wheedling, not precisely nag-nagging, but speaking brightly and yet wistfully of the delights there would be in the streets today, hurdygurdy men and hot-pie sellers and purveyors of sticky sweetmeats; and as he chattered on, with intervals of filling his mouth with hot bread-and-milk, she fought her own deep desire to hide her mood of depression and memories of times lost behind a curtain of ledger work, truly wanting to be the cheerful Mamma he had a right to have. And won the fight and was rewarded by Frederick’s shriek of delight and rumbustious hug when she said crisply, ‘Well, let be, let be! Eat your breakfast, and we will ride the twelve o’clock Shillibeer’s as far as the Diorama in the Park. But you will have to walk from there to the Palace, and it is a long walk! You will not complain about your legs if we go?’

  ‘Oh, no, Mamma! Indeed I shall not! It will be so
delightful to see all the people and the bunting and the fine carriages, and they say there are to be fireworks upon the river tonight, and processions, and—oh, so many things! Oh, thank you, Mamma, thank you so much! I had hoped and hoped—’ and he fell to the remainder of his breakfast with such gusto that he splashed his milk like a silly five-year-old instead of the capable ten-year-old he was and laughed at his own clumsiness with such high delight that Abby found herself laughing too. Dear Frederick, she thought again, and once more shook her mental shoulders against her melancholy; this time with success. Widowhood, for all its pains, could be and often was compensated for by motherhood. She was in many ways a fortunate woman, and well she knew it.

  The rain sluicing down his windows in irritable bursts as the wind hurled itself along Gower Street woke Abel some time before Jeffcoate arrived with the brass can of hot shaving water and his freshly ironed shirt. He lay there hunched beneath the blankets staring at the greyness of the window, not moving when the little scullery maid came sidling in to clear and relay and light his fire against the morning chill, cogitating his plans for the day.

  It was important that he find time to talk to Conran regarding the tales that had reached his ears about the man’s remarks. It was not right that there should be such ill-informed gossip running through the wards and corridors of his hospital, and a stop must be put to it. For all that Queen Eleanor’s now boasted twelve wards and a busy dispensary for street patients and for all that there was now a Board of Trustees some five strong, it was still, in Abel’s eyes, his hospital. Had it not been born of his dreams and his energies, his struggles and not least his and his family’s money? Indeed it had, and that sharp-nosed sniffing little creature of a Bursar should know it! How dare he say the things he had said about the way William was handling the consignments of pills and potions from the manufactory at Wapping?

  Abel turned restlessly in bed, and bunched the bolster beneath his neck. William. Time would have to be found to speak to him, too, damn it. So much to be done today, as every day, with operations he must perform, his session among the street patients and he had promised to go with young Snow, the surgeon-apothecary sent to him by his old friend Bell from Great Windmill Street, to see some particular patient in whom he had a special interest, down near Broad Street, behind Little Earl Street. At least it was near the hospital, so that shouldn’t take more than half an hour out of the day. And perhaps if he postponed one operation on the list, and thus eased the morning’s burden, he could take fifteen minutes at the noon hour or thereabouts to seek out the tedious wretch Conran—

  A loud and raucous cry from the street below, immediately taken up in reply by jovial shouts from the direction of Bedford Square, pulled him from the depths of thought in some puzzlement; such vulgar dins were by no means a feature of life in elegant Gower Street, and for a moment he frowned, wondering why. And then, remembering, cursed aloud. The Queen’s wedding! God damn it all to hell and back, but that would fairly set the seal on the day! With twice the usual number of people in the streets, and the stupid roistering and celebrating that would be an inevitable accompaniment to the day’s activities, the only sure plan he could foresee was that he would be tied fast to the dispensary room mending broken heads and limbs and dealing with the other injuries of the abusive characters who all too often marred a London crowd.

  But by the time he was dressed his irritation had subsided somewhat. If there would be tedious and boring aspects to the day’s work, there was also the fact that often the sort of injuries sustained in streets as crowded as today’s would be could be most interesting. He remembered the many such cases he and Charles had pored over on long late nights of work in Charles’s anatomy room at Great Windmill Street, or his own at Endell Street, and how he had been able to see actually demonstrated the passage of many of the major nerves that fed the muscles with their motive force. Not as interesting, Bell had often told him a little regretfully, as some of the more spectacular inflictions of damage he had observed upon Wellington’s battlefield of Waterloo, close on a quarter century ago, but with their own fascination nonetheless.

  Charles and his friendship were a great comfort to him, Abel thought now, making his usual morning way to Dorothea’s bedchamber. How he could have borne the past ten years without his unswerving support he could not imagine. Not, of course that it had ever been expected that the situation would last so long. Poor Dorothea, he thought, as he moved across the deep carpeted floor towards the silent bedside to stand in the flickering morning firelight looking down at the thin little face on the pillow. Poor Dorothea. To live in death so long; how could any have foreseen such an outcome to that long ago day?

  Charles had said often enough, however, once the first year had passed, that with the devoted nursing Abel insisted she have there was no reason why she should not live her full life span.

  ‘I have seen such cases before, m’dear fellow,’ he had once said in his soft Scots burr. ‘Dead in the head, ye understand, for the pressure of the injury precludes any passage of sentience from brain to body, or body to brain, but with the vegetative faculties unimpaired. In such cases I have often thought that perhaps the loving devotion of a nurse can be in some sort a handicap to the families of such sufferers—’ But Abel had looked at him sharply at that so Bell had nodded soberly and said no more, leaving the unspoken all too clearly understood between them, together with an equally wordless and well understood agreement never to mention the matter again.

  He put out one hand now to smooth the pillow beside her head, for the nurse had not yet washed her or arranged her for the day, having gone first to the kitchen to collect the pap on which she was fed, and he noticed almost with a shock that the fair hair was greying quite rapidly. He often noticed such small evidences that she was still physically living—sometimes that her fingernails were long and in need of trimming, sometimes a flaking of the skin upon her birdboned arms—but each time he made such an observation it brought a sharp twitch of surprise, as if each were totally new. For all these years she had lain here unmoving, her face as smooth and young as it had ever been—for why should it ever become lined like others’ faces, since no expression or awareness ever crossed its delicate pallor?—and it was hard to remember that this was a breathing living woman.

  A breathing living stubborn woman, he thought now with a sudden memory of the way Dorothea had been before her injury. Weak, drooping, quite maddening in her meek acceptance of her downtrodden state, and quite immovable on any matter that she cared about. She had made up her mind to wed him, had made up her mind to stay with him, and so it had been. And he knew, now, she had made up her mind that he should one day love her as she loved him, with the same helpless, hopeless, dead sort of love. And hadn’t she obtained just that? Standing beside her bed on this cold, wet February morning he knew she had won, and touched her fragile hand in a gesture that said so.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Lackland.’

  He turned his head to see Miss Ingoldsby standing quietly just within the bedchamber with her hands crossed before her on her brown merino dress and with her brown hair pulled back into an unfashionable soft knot at the nape of her neck. They looked at each other for a comfortable moment and then he nodded, knowing that now in all truth the day had begun, that he could turn his back on wife and household in the sure knowledge that both would be cared for in perfect detail.

  And she returned his nod, as cool as he was, but finding satisfaction in the look of his spare and elegant body, the smoothly thick pepper-and-salt hair that crowned his bony face and the way his sober dark clothes sat so neatly across his wide shoulders, for she was a woman with a passion for order and neatness and methodical living; in her eyes he was a very satisfactory employer, so very reliable and organized a man as he was. He made life in this household much more agreeable than she would ever have thought possible a dozen years ago when she had first entered it as a governess, employed by the rather fluttering and timid Dorothea to look after her you
nger children. But that had been before; so much had happened in this house since then! Now she looked at him approvingly and was content with the way her lines had fallen.

  They waited until the nurse returned from the kitchen and then went downstairs to breakfast together, she walking beside him with a bouncy little step that sorted ill with her essential dignity, but which was inevitable in one as small as she was (William often teased her about being ‘even smaller than the Queen, and no one is smaller than that!’), and leading the way to the breakfast parlour.

  Both Rupert and William were already ensconced at table and Miss Ingoldsby lifted one amused eyebrow at the sight of the latter. It was rare indeed that he was any but last at breakfast, and was all too likely to arrive dishevelled, because he had dressed hurriedly, and foul-tempered for want of sleep, for William was a great reveller and rarely saw his bed until the small hours.

  ‘Oh, don’t look so knowing at me, Madam Mouse!’ he said now in high good humour. ‘I’ve told you before, I left the schoolroom long since, and I’ll have none of your bullying now! You set about someone of your own size if you wish an argument!’ and he stretched his long legs under the table and nodded briefly at his father.

  Abel paid no attention to either of his sons, only nodding to quiet, drab little Martha at her place at the end of the table behind the coffee equipage; and immediately she bent her head and poured for him his favourite morning brew of bitter black coffee. Miss Ingoldsby seated herself composedly beside Rupert, who sketched a polite if abstracted attempt to rise, and took for herself some bread and butter from the plate set ready before her.

  ‘I have already received some letters this morning,’ she said after a short pause which was broken only by the rattle of cups and plates and the slightly noisy gulping of William, who chose to break his fast the very modern way on hot bacon and boiled eggs and cold beef rather than the traditional bread and butter and toast which satisfied the rest of his family. ‘And I have messages of affection for you all from Barty.’