Long Acre Page 6

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It proved to be a great deal easier than either of them would have imagined possible to keep Amy’s presence in the hospital a secret.

  Each day, very early in the morning before the hospital was awake, she slipped out of her little cubbyhole to pad silently down to the huge kitchens below, easily dodging the night nurse who made her rounds in a most desultory fashion. In the dark stone-flagged kitchens deep in the basement and inhabited mainly by cockroaches and one very old and very deaf nightwatchwoman who slept soundly beside the banked-up fire, she would wash herself in ice-cold water from the pump, and tidy her gown, and then, as the cooks and scrubbers and porters came clattering down the area steps from the street outside, coming in to work from their hovel homes in the tangle of streets outside, she would slip back upstairs to the main hall of the hospital.

  She learned very quickly how to time her movements so that she appeared there just as the night porter handed over to the day porter, and there she would stand, fresh and beaming, to greet the yawning day man with a cheerful ‘Good morning!’ that made him sure she had just arrived.

  And then she would go tripping up to the ward to sit beside Fenton and chatter to him and cajole him and deal with his crotchets — for he was a most impatient patient — and generally be the most devoted sister anyone could imagine.

  At first the nurses had made attempts to bar her from spending such long hours in their domain. They were not used to such prolonged visits to their patients, for most of them were poor men who, if they had relations at all, certainly did not have any who enjoyed sufficient leisure to permit them to sit all day at a bedside. Their wives and sisters, if they had them, might appear for a little while at the end of their own long working day, coming grey-faced and exhausted to sit in anxious silence beside their men, peering at them worriedly and trying to understand what they were told about their sickness and its progress. But all day? It was unheard of.

  But as Amy put herself to some trouble to ingratiate herself with the nurses, regularly offering to help them by sitting at Fenton’s bedside with a pile of grey charpie on her lap, teasing out the threads to make the soft dressings they used, a task the nurses much hated and for which they were responsible, they were mollified.

  The other patients liked her presence too, finding her pretty face and cheerful chatter very restorative, while the medical students quite adored her, managing to find remarkably frequent and pressing reasons to come to the men’s ward where the operation cases were cared for. Which made Graham Foster both furious and immensely proud.

  It was he who made it possible for her to remain there in the hospital, for each day he brought her food, bread and cheese or cold mutton, and occasionally apples or cake wrapped in a neat white kerchief, coming ostensibly to see his patient, Fenton, but quietly slipping his gift into Amy’s hands as she sat there smiling up at him. And for him, those smiles were more than enough payment for all his efforts (which were considerable; stealing food from his mother’s kitchens, ruled as they were with a rod of iron by that formidable lady, was no easy feat). And he would look at Fenton’s splinted leg, and check that he could move his toes, and then bob his head at Amy, scarlet-faced and adoring, and go away to sit over his books and dream about her thickly lashed grey eyes and her curly hair and the way her mouth moved when she smiled.

  Fenton was very scathing about him, considering him to be the flattest flat he had ever seen in all his life, but Amy was vigorous in his defence.

  ‘How could we manage if he did not help us, Fenton? I have to eat and sleep somewhere. You are here and they are glad enough to treat you for no charge, since you were injured in the street and they have benefactors who pay for such cases — but what of me? You must realize we would be in a sorry state if it were not for Mr Foster.’ She giggled then. ‘Though really, he is very tedious, is he not? If only he would not bob at me so! He looks just like a jackrabbit, the way he bobs and gawps —’

  ‘And if he has his way he’ll behave like a jackrabbit too, if you give him half the chance —’ Fenton said, and moved his leg awkwardly in his bed and swore as a twinge of pain shot down his calf.

  ‘You must not be coarse, Fenton,’ Amy said reprovingly. ‘A coarse mind is very damaging to the countenance. It sets ugly lines upon it, Miss Farraday told me — ’

  ‘To hell and damnation with Miss Farraday! If she’d taught you right, you’d have found a part to play and we shouldn’t have been in such straits that we have to pawn our things, and wouldn’t have had to cross that damned road, and I wouldn’t be here — ’

  And once more, Amy set about coaxing him back into a good humour, stricken as she always was with a huge guilt whenever he showed any distress about his discomfort.

  Not that it was a very great discomfort. Mr Caspar, who came to see his prize patient every afternoon at six o’clock, was, for so self-contained a man, quite obviously cock-a-hoop over the success of his operation. There had been no fever to signal underlying putrefaction, no general malaise in Fenton that could not be accounted for by the tedium of being incarcerated in a hospital bed, and clearly he was making a steady recovery. Within two weeks he was able to move about the ward with the aid of a pair of crutches, and after three was begging Mr Caspar at every visit to remove the splint, which he found irksome in the extreme.

  ‘Four weeks and no sooner, Mr Lucas,’ Mr Caspar said firmly. ‘Four weeks, or I will take no responsibility. By then it is my belief your bone will have knitted well, and we may remove the splint and examine the state of your wound. If we do it too soon, why then, all would have been wasted. And you might even lose your leg yet — ’

  Which threat sufficed to silence Fenton when Mr Caspar was about, though it did not halt his constant grumbling to Amy.

  It was perhaps because she was more tired than she realized by her devotion to Fenton’s care, and more debilitated than she knew by the long hours cooped up inside the fetid hospital ward without adequate exercise, or because her alertness had been dulled by the ease with which she regularly emerged from her cubbyhole each morning and disappeared into it each evening; whatever the reason, she did allow herself to be discovered.

  It was about a quarter to six on a cold Wednesday evening. The ward, in spite of the big coal fires burning at each end, felt chilly, and the men lay hunched and quiet beneath their blankets. There was none of the usual buzz of conversation which followed the modest supper of hot soup and bread and ale that the men had at five o’clock. Outside it was snowing, the lowering December sky having been threatening it all day, and now the thick white flakes were drifting against the big uncurtained windows in a way that made Amy feel very mournful.

  She had had a very miserable day; Fenton had been crotchety and unkind from the moment he woke; Graham had brought the most disagreeable of cold mutton pies for the third day running, apologizing profusely for providing such short commons but finding himself unable to offer her anything better; his mother had just dismissed her cook for pilfering, and the new cook had not yet succumbed to Graham’s wiles. And Amy had the headache too, a dull throbbing pain that settled itself over her eyebrows and made her feel very dolorous.

  And now the snow — that added deeply to her distress, for it suddenly made her remember Christmas and the way it had been at home when she was a small child and funny, indolent, indulgent, lovely Papa had been alive. The way she had been used to walk with him through the snow in the streets of Boston, and how he never minded when she made balls of it and, squealing with delight, had thrust them down his collar, to reach which she had to stand on tiptoe. The way he would bring her the most absurd and delicious of Christmas gifts, sugar plums strung together into dolls, bought from the little Dutch grocery shops she loved so dearly, or French dragees in silver papered boxes or oranges wrapped in the shiniest of blue and green paper. And now Papa was dead, long dead, and so was Mamma who, for all her dull seriousness and constant tiresome nagging about decorum and proper behaviour, had lov
ed her dearly, and done all a mother could be expected to do for so wilful and headstrong a daughter.

  Sitting there in the dreariness of the big quiet malodorous ward, Amy felt her eyes fill with tears, and knowing how Fenton hated to see her cry she turned her head away from him and said huskily, ‘Fenton — I am very tired and have the headache. If you will forgive me, I think I will not sit with you any longer tonight but go away and go to sleep. I am sure I will feel better in the morning and be better company for you — ’

  Fenton, who was reading a five-day-old newspaper with some difficulty, for the gaslight was turned low above his bed, did not look up.

  ‘If you like. I do not ask you to sit here all the time, so do not blame me for your megrims — ’

  Which piece of injustice made her eyes smart even more, but she felt too wretched to give the spirited retort she would usually have offered, and merely bent and brushed his forehead with her lips, and turned to go.

  Usually she was much more circumspect. She would stroll with well limned nonchalance down the ward, stopping occasionally to speak a friendly word to another patient so that no one could possibly guess she was actually making her way towards the corner where the little corridor led to her hiding-place. But tonight, with her eyes blurred with tears and her head throbbing so nastily, she simply walked across the ward, making a beeline for the corner.

  All might still have been well if she had remembered the fact that Mr Caspar was so precise a man in all his actions that a clock could be set by him. At five minutes to six each evening he appeared at the door of the men’s operation ward, possibly with a student or two to accompany him, and after some colloquy with the nurse in charge, who at this time was usually hovering by the door awaiting him, would make his solemn round of all his patients.

  But she did not remember, and Mr Caspar, arriving at the door of his ward, was startled to see the figure of Miss Lucas crossing the floor in a very direct way, and disappearing into the little corridor that ran off the far corner.

  He stood for a moment, watching and waiting to see her come out. Perhaps she had torn a ruffle on her gown, or one of her stay bones was pressing into some tender part of herself, and needed attention? Such dilemmas were very much a part of his wife’s experience, and many were the occasions when the patient Mr Caspar had been left standing waiting in a ballroom or in a warehouse while his Phoebe disappeared to deal with such private feminine affairs.

  But Miss Lucas did not reappear with a sweet smile of comfort upon her face, and Mr Caspar was puzzled. It seemed such an odd place for Miss Lucas to go; he knew quite well that there was nothing beyond that corridor but one dusty little storeroom; why was she there?

  He performed his rounds in a slightly distrait manner, examining his patients with as great care as ever, and being as punctilious as he always was with his treatment and decisions, but still, his mind was exercised by the strange little puzzle of the disappearing Miss Lucas.

  When he stopped beside Fenton’s bed he looked down on him and said casually, ‘Your sister, Mr Lucas — she is not with you tonight?’

  Fenton looked up and smiled limpidly, his eyes crinkling very charmingly.

  ‘Why no, Mr Caspar. She had the headache, you know, and I told her it would be better for her to go to bed. So she has gone. It is kind of you to inquire, and I shall tell her you did.’

  ‘Hmm. Yes, indeed, please to give her my good wishes. Now — your leg. You are feeling comfortable tonight, I trust?’

  He finished his round in a thoughtful mood, very aware of the fact that Miss Lucas did not reappear from the corridor, and stopped on his way out, after he had seen his last patient, at the foot of Fenton’s bed. He opened his mouth to speak to him, to ask him more about his sister’s whereabouts, but Fenton looked up again from his newspaper, and gave him his usual sunny smile, and the question died on Mr Caspar’s lips.

  But when he reached the door of the ward, his curiosity was too much for him. He sent his students away about their business and told the nurse he had no further need of her, and with a firm step, crossed the floor and marched into the corridor beyond.

  It was dark and silent, and after a puzzled moment, he moved forwards and set his hand on the knob of the storage room door. It should be locked, of course; it usually was. But there was no harm in trying, so he turned the knob and pushed, and was so startled when the door opened that he almost fell through it, and then stopped short and stood staring.

  Amy was sitting on the pile of mattresses, in her petticoats, and with a heavy blanket thrown across her shoulders. Her gown had been laid carefully across a couple of broken chairs, and her shoes lay neatly side by side on the floor beside it. The mattresses were covered with a rough sheet — Mr Foster had ‘borrowed’ this for her — and on the floor at her feet stood a little penny dip candle throwing its fitful light across the dusty floor and making a small pool of illumination in which she sat, her shoulders hunched, and her head bent.

  She sat up and stared at him as he burst in, greatly startled, and he looked at her and felt a sharp twinge of emotion. He could not quite put a name to the feeling; perhaps it was admiration for her pretty face, for the line of the cheek as it merged softly into the chin and then into the long slender throat was very lovely, or perhaps it was pity, for those cheeks for all their beauty were sadly tearstained. Or — and this thought he found very embarrassing — perhaps it was sheer animal desire, for her shoulders were naked and the shape of her breasts could be clearly seen under her chemise.

  He gave himself a mental shake; that he, the husband of a woman acknowledged to be among the most beautiful in London, should feel so was quite shameful, and his awareness of his self-disapproval hardened his face and made his voice sound harsh even in his own ears.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here in such a state, Miss Lucas? You amaze me!’

  She stared at him for a long moment, her grey eyes seeming almost black, so dark and huge were the pupils in the dim light, and her face a white blur against the dirty wall behind her. And then she shook her head, and tried to speak and couldn’t and burst into tears, cradling her head on her arms and rocking to and fro like a frightened child.

  ‘My dear child,’ Freddy was horrified at the effect his words had created, and he almost ran across the room to squat down in front of her, and set his hands upon her shoulders and tried to peer into her face. ‘My poor dear child, you must not so distress yourself! I did not mean to alarm you, but I was so surprised to see you! What are you doing here? I do not understand!’

  She snorted softly and shook her head, and then extricated one hand from her blanket to rub the back of it across her nose in a very childlike gesture which he found most touching. It reminded him forcibly of his eleven-year-old daughter, Cecily, who never could find her handkerchief when she needed it; and almost without thinking he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a big square of white cambric and used it to mop away her tears, and even held it to her nose so that she could blow, just as though she were in fact eleven years old, rather than just looking it.

  ‘There, there,’ he almost crooned it. ‘There, you really must compose yourself — there is not need for such weeping.’ He wiped her nose quite firmly and then thrust the handkerchief into her hand and she grasped it tightly and sniffed and looked up at him with swimming eyes.

  ‘I am so sorry, truly I am! I did not mean to be so — to behave so badly, and I know Mamma would have been so dreadfully — though Papa, he would have laughed, I daresay and — well, it was not my fault, nor Mr Foster’s either, for I nagged and nagged at him, and the poor boy could not — for after all where else could I go? Poor Fenton so set about and all my fault too, and the hotel bill and everything — but I am so wretched, and so cold and I do have such a headache — ’ and she mopped her eyes again and sniffed and looked at him with a face so woebegone that he could not help but laugh.

  ‘I am not sure that I fully understand what it is all about, but of this much
I am certain. I shall never understand sitting here in this dust hole, and freezing half to death! Put on your gown and shoes now and then come with me to my office, where I believe there is a fire, and possibly some small sustenance for you. Come along — ’

  Obediently she came along. He turned his back prudently as she struggled into her gown, and then in the most fatherly manner possible helped her to fasten her bodice at the back and then, when her shoes were on, led her quietly out of the door. He stopped in the dark corridor outside and held out his hand and she cocked her head and looked at him inquiringly.

  ‘The key,’ he said gently. ‘I cannot believe that you do not have it?’

  She reddened and thrust her hand deep into the bodice of her chemise and drew it out. ‘If I had done as Graham said, you’d never have found me. I should have locked it every time I went in, but tonight, my head was so aching and I felt so blue-devilled I did not think about it — ’

  He said nothing, locking the door and pocketing the key, and led her out to the ward and she looked fearfully across to Fenton’s bed, but he was fast asleep. He would be angry with her in the morning, and what would she do? Where would she go? She could not help allowing another sniff to escape her and Mr Caspar patted her shoulder and said gruffly, ‘Come — no need for whimpers! We shall set it all to rights, I daresay, one way or another!’

  Childlike, she followed him from the ward and down the stairs. It was very comforting to be told what to do. Very agreeable, however miserable she might be underneath, to know that she was no longer alone except for Graham and Fenton. Graham had done his best and a very good best it had been, but all the time when she was with him she was aware of being in charge, the controlling influence. With Mr Caspar she felt anything but in charge, and very much controlled, and it was a great deal more pleasant to feel so than she would have thought possible. As for Fenton — well, what could he do to help her, tied as he was by his splint? But this Mr Caspar would help her, if she tried to explain to him what was amiss. Wouldn’t he? Had he not had that familiar look in his eyes, just for a moment, when he had stared at her there in her hateful little cubbyhole?