‘And what about you, sir,’ I said, pushing my face close to his so that he might stare into my devilish mask. ‘Are you without sin? The sin of lust, of pride? Those are sins that you chose, sir, and they do not become you.’
I turned on my heel and walked away. I thought of Aberlady’s letter, its talk of God and the Devil. Perhaps he had believed, in the end.
I took the medicines and prescriptions for the Blood’s outpatients over to the Seaman’s Dispensary. Outside, young Toad was lolling on the kerb. He was eating an enormous currant bun. His feet were filthy, his coat as stained and muddy as ever, his trousers grazing his skinny ankles.
‘Hello,’ I said.
He looked at me warily. He stuffed the last of his bun between his champing jaws as if he feared I might be about to snatch it from him.
‘Mornin’, sir,’ he muttered. Beneath his coat was a waistcoat of embroidered silk.
‘Aren’t you looking fine!’ I said. ‘Just like a gentleman.’
Young Toad looked pleased, and pulled aside the greasy flaps of his coat to reveal the finery below. The waistcoat was second-hand, I could see that. It bore a nebula of dark stains about the pocket, and was worn from where a watch had been slipped in and out. The embroidery was frayed and tatty, but to Young Toad it was an object of beauty.
‘New!’ he said. He looked down at it and smiled. ‘I’m a reg’lar gen’man now.’
‘So you are,’ I said. ‘Is Dr Proudlove about?’ I didn’t wait for an answer, but walked straight into the dispensary.
Dr Proudlove was not there, but his sister was.
‘I’ve not seen him today,’ she said. ‘Nor last night. I assume he came home late and went out again early, but I don’t know where, and look at the men waiting.’
She wrung her hands and looked out at the men lined up on the hard, wooden benches of the dispensary waiting room. It acted as an outpatient department for the Blood, and there were many men there who had been treated on board. Others came to the dispensary and were given a ticket of admittance to the ship; still more came for medicines to treat minor ailments, or to have their dressings changed. It was busy that morning. A tall black man dressed in the uniform of a Dutch sailor watched Miss Proudlove with interest. A Chinese man spat a mouthful of tobacco juice into one of the spittoons, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand; beside him, a Lascar sat with his eyes closed. They all wore seamen’s boots, they all had faces tanned and weathered from the seas. None of them said a word to Miss Proudlove, but sat there meekly awaiting their turn. I remembered the outpatients’ waiting room at St Saviour’s. Men, women and children all packed in together. The place had been hot and noisy, and the moisture – condensation from the closed windows, the damp clothing and the cheap coal – had run down the walls. I had never been able to decide whether the fetor or the humidity had sickened me most. Here, with the door standing open and the men sitting or standing in orderly ranks, the place seemed a model of good order.
‘I have started already,’ she said, looking out at the scarred and weathered faces of the patients.
‘You?’ I could not stop myself.
‘Yes, Mr Flockhart. I, a woman, have made decisions about medicines and ailments that are usually made by a man. Shall I call back those who have already left and you can check my prescriptions?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not at all, I just meant—’
‘But that is exactly what you meant, sir. You meant “Why on earth did she not wait for her brother?” and “How on earth can she know what to do!” And you possibly also meant “She’s descended from savages, she has probably prescribed crocodile blood and powdered monkey’s brains”. Or perhaps you just meant that any moment now it will all prove too much for me, and that I should sit down before I fall down and need to be taken to Angel Meadow to have my brains removed and put into a jar!’
I let her words hang in the air for a moment. Then, ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I meant all of those things. How well you read minds, Miss Proudlove.’ I took off my jacket and plucked an apron from the back of the apothecary door. ‘Now that we understand one another so well, perhaps I might help you.’
No one else from the Blood came in. Through the dispensary’s open door I saw Dr Cole arrive there, and Dr Antrobus soon after. Neither of them came over to the dispensary. Miss Proudlove saw me watching. ‘They never come,’ she said. ‘Not unless they have to. The dispensary is run by Erasmus and me.’
‘And what does Erasmus think of that?’ I said. ‘Surely his ambitions are greater than running a seaman’s dispensary? He’s a clever man.’
‘He must accept it,’ she said shortly. ‘These men need help, and so help them we must. But that does not mean that it is fair, or that either of us should like it.’
She sank into a resentful silence. I watched her flick through the prescription ledger, and the pharmacopoeia, and slip some jars back onto the shelf where they belonged. I had never seen a woman working in an apothecary before, and for a moment I felt disconcerted. She spoke to the patients, and attended to their ailments with confidence, and acted as though we were equals, as if she dared me to contradict her, to challenge her decisions or her actions. And yet in the eyes of the world I was not her equal, for in the eyes of the world I was a man, and as such I was set above her. Wasn’t I? For a moment, I understood how men must feel to have their dominion threatened by a woman. And yet, I was not a man. Could I not delight in the evident competence of a sister?
My jealousy and perplexity lasted only a moment. After all, did I not have the same plan in my heart for Pestle Jenny? I watched Miss Proudlove attend to a seaman with an ulcerated leg, and I felt only admiration – though I knew better than to tell her so and be called patronising. Besides, there was something else about Miss Proudlove that resonated with me. Something in her unhappy face, her determined gaze and her concentration. She was lonely, I could sense it; lonely and sad and angry. I had been like that too once, though time had dampened my sorrow. It was only when I was with Eliza that I had felt any different, and it was when I lost her that my heart had broken. I had Will, of course I did, and I loved him dearly. But it was not the same. It could never be the same.
The ailments we treated that morning were little different to those we had tended at St Saviour’s, though the problems the seamen brought to us were often more advanced, or had been attended to badly, so that the results of poor care – or no care – had to be remedied before the situation could be improved. Miss Proudlove was known to many of them already, and they greeted her with a knuckle to their brow, or a nod of the head. None of them spoke to her roughly or without respect.
The dispensary closed at midday. ‘You know a lot about physic, Miss Proudlove,’ I said, as she locked the doors.
‘I’ve worked alongside my brother for a while now.’ She went to the window to pull the blinds.
‘You hardly needed me at all.’
‘No, sir, I did not. Though I admit that your assistance was of some use today.’
I grinned. It was a long time since I had been anyone’s assistant in an apothecary.
She closed her eyes as the sun peeped out. ‘Oh, I’m so tired of these grey streets and walls,’ she said. She pressed her forehead to the cool glass of the windowpane. ‘And the constant noise of the place.’ A dray loaded with barrels rumbled past. ‘But then where else might I go?’
‘There are worse places than London,’ I said. ‘And you have friends here at the riverside. Purpose. Your brother.’
‘At least he has a profession, even if I do not. He works hard, Mr Flockhart, hard to make a name for himself, to be something more than the sixpenny doctor he is forced to be. He is better than his so-called friends on board the Blood.’
‘So-called?’
‘They’re not his friends, no matter what they say, or what they ask him to do.’
I waited for her to say more, but she was silent. ‘What about Mr Aberlady?’ I said. ‘Did you know him well?’
She shrugged. ‘He was a friend of Erasmus’s. He seemed a good man to me, though like all of them a little too fond of experimenting. Have you noticed how few stray dogs there are near the Blood?’
‘Did he come to Siren House?’
‘Very occasionally. Usually with a prescription, or to treat the pox. It was the others who came mostly. They took it in turns, or if there was an emergency – sometimes a confinement – whoever was on the Blood came along.’ She looked over to the floating hospital. ‘I see you have a little physic garden there now. It’s something Mr Aberlady never bothered with.’
‘Would you like to see a real physic garden?’
‘Where?’ She pulled out a pocket watch, an old one of her brother’s, I presumed. ‘I have to get back for some errands before this afternoon’s prescriptions.’ I waited. ‘But . . . yes,’ she said. ‘I would like that.’ She still had not smiled. I wondered how she would look if she did.
We headed north, away from the river and up towards St Saviour’s Street. She seemed nervous to be leaving those familiar cramped and dingy streets, despite her contemptuous words earlier, but most people were too busy to pay us any attention. We walked quickly, her stride long, like mine, her boots beneath her skirts striking the pavement confidently. Her bonnet prevented me from seeing her face, though she walked with her head up, proudly, unafraid to meet the gaze of passers-by. She had a basket on her arm, for her ‘errands later on’, she said, the contents covered with a muslin cloth. She didn’t tell me what she carried, and I didn’t ask.
We did not talk, not then, and I fell to thinking about Will, and wondering how he was getting on at Deadman’s Basin. Should I have sent young Toad to fetch him? He would have been delighted to come – he loved the physic garden. But he was settling into his work at the basin, and the sooner it was done the sooner he could leave the place forever. He would be busy, I said to myself, and so I had not sent for him. But the truth was that I wanted Miss Proudlove to myself. There was something I wanted to ask her.
As I pulled the physic garden key from my pocket Miss Proudlove traced her fingers over the plaque at the gate. ‘Flockhart and Quartermain,’ she read. Beneath it, as insisted upon by Gabriel – who had been told that his surname, Locke, would only be added once he had passed his apothecary examinations – was a skull and cross-bones.
‘You deal in death, Mr Flockhart?’
‘Behind this gate lies the most comprehensive poison garden in all of London,’ I said. ‘It is not for the uninitiated. But we have other things in here too.’
I pushed open the gate and stood back. I was not generally given to making dramatic gestures, but I could not help it. I wanted her to be impressed. I knew she was familiar with the pharmacopoeia, and yet she had never seen a physic garden? I watched her face as the gate swung open, the sun – who could have predicted it – shining through a gap in the jaundiced clouds like the light of God depicted in a church window, three broad golden beams of celestial light, falling onto my garden. The colours glowed like treasure. I had not seen her smile before, but I did then, a look of real pleasure and delight. I grinned back, and bowed her in at the gate.
I have never been able to decide which season I preferred in the physic garden, for they all offered delight. The dry cold of a crisp winter’s day, each twig neatly sheathed in frost; the green explosion of spring, with its luminous unfurling leaves and moist, thrusting shoots. In the summer, I loved the bright, louche blowsiness of the place, and now, in the autumn, it was perhaps at its most beautiful, as the leaves turned and the fruit ripened. We strolled through the beds, the sun warm on our faces. She allowed her bonnet to fall from her head and it hung down her back in its ribbons. I showed her as much of the garden as I could. She was knowledgeable, having worked alongside her brother for so long, and interested. The poison beds fascinated her too.
‘Hemlock,’ she said, pointing. ‘Yew. Henbane. Bloodroot. Monkshood.’ She walked to a gate in the wall. ‘Where does this lead?’ she said.
‘To the house next door.’
‘Do they come in here? Is it your house over there?’
I laughed. ‘No, my home is above the apothecary on Fishbait Lane – when I am not on the Blood.’
‘So who lives there? Why do they have a gate into your garden? Did you not say the poison beds were dangerous?’
‘No one lives there now,’ I said. ‘But it was owned by a medical man. He used to work at St Saviour’s. He liked to have access to the physic garden.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He’s dead,’ I said.
She stood up and went to the gate. The house was not what it used to be. The gardens had once been mown and tended, but now they were ravaged by weeds. Clouds of thistledown and burst dandelion clocks were forever drifting over the wall and settling amongst my medicinal plants. The house itself was a plain cube of a building. I rarely looked over at it now, but I knew that its windows were boarded over with ugly black planks, and its once white walls were streaked by the rain and stained with smoke. We stood side by side and looked over.
‘So what is it you wanted to ask me?’ she said, as if she had read my mind.
‘I wanted to ask whether you knew a girl called Eliza Magorian,’ I said. ‘She used to work in Mrs Roseplucker’s on Wicke Street. I don’t know where she is now. I used to know her—’
‘You want me to find a prostitute for you?’
‘Yes. If you can.’
She turned to me, her face furious. ‘I am not a pander, Mr Flockhart. I do not “find” street girls for men, no matter what.’
‘We were friends. I need to find her.’
‘Friends?’ I heard the scorn in her voice, but I persisted. I had to.
‘I loved her. I still love her.’ I felt my face burning, and all at once my old feelings of inadequacy returned. I was too ugly to be loved. The very idea that anyone could look at me with anything other than pity and revulsion was absurd. I saw myself as she must see me, a naive fool, fancying himself in love with a street girl whom he had paid to pretend that she loved him. But I had told her nothing of myself, nothing of what Eliza had meant to me. Gethsemane Proudlove had filled the gaps in her knowledge with her own jaundiced view of the world, a world without kindness and love, where women were exploited and treated shamefully by men until the pox killed them.
She turned to leave.
‘No!’ I said. I felt myself blushing, my face turning uglier still. ‘It was not like that!—’
‘You’re no different to all the rest. I was foolish to think that you might be—’
I seized her wrist, holding it tightly in my grasp. I could not let her go, not without showing her what I meant, who I really was.
‘Yes I am,’ I said. ‘I am completely different.’ And I pushed her hand to the crotch of my britches. She screamed, twisting her hand and trying to push me away. She was strong and wiry, and for a moment I thought I had lost. But I could not let her go now. I pushed her against the wall.
‘Miss Proudlove,’ I said. Tears ran down my cheeks. I tightened my fingers on her wrist and held her palm against me, pressing her fingers between my legs. ‘I am nothing like the rest. Nothing like them at all.’
I saw her expression change from fury to horror, and just as quickly to pity, and then finally, amazement.
‘What—? What is—? You’re—’ She put a hand to my breast, feeling the swell of it beneath my bindings. ‘You live like this?’ she whispered. Her eyes were wide, her lips parted. Her breathing was shallow. Her hand, relaxed now, was still cupped against me. ‘For how long?’
‘Always,’ I said. ‘Since I was a child.’
‘But why?’
I shrugged. ‘My father’s idea. He’s dead now so I can’t ask him.’ I did not want to explain myself, I just wanted her to know. Was I foolish to reveal my gravest secret? Time would show me. ‘I know no other way of being.’
She stepped back from me. ‘And this girl was your friend?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your lover? She knew?’
I hesitated. ‘Yes.’
‘London is a big place, and it is full of girls. I know only a small number of them. But it seems we are more alike than I had imagined, Mr Flockhart.’ She watched me, without smiling. ‘I will do what I can.’
We walked back to the river in silence. I asked her whether I might carry her basket and she laughed. I felt my blood grow chill at the sound of it. Would she prove a friend, or not? If she chose to reveal who I was, my world would be overturned.
‘I can carry it myself,’ she said.
‘What’s in it?’
She didn’t answer, not at first. Instead she said, ‘There are more girls down here on the waterfront than you can count. What can we do for them? Nothing. If they were not on the streets they would starve, as there is no work for them. Or if there is, it is work they don’t want to do.’
‘You have medicines from the dispensary for them?’
She hesitated. ‘Yes.’
I twitched the muslin cloth from her basket. Beneath were nestled thirty or so tiny dark blue poison bottles. I snatched one up.
‘You would judge me, Mr Flockhart, but what do you really know? Nothing.’
I sniffed it. ‘Laudanum?’
‘A weak mixture. I steal it from the Blood and water it down a little. They give laudanum to the patients at night, but I swap it for a sleeping draught of my own formulation when I can. Valerian and hops mostly. It’s more effective if it’s sleep that’s wanted, and there is no likelihood of a habit forming. Unless I deem a patient requires an opiate for pain relief I don’t see the value of using laudanum as a regular sedative.’
‘I quite agree,’ I said. ‘But what are these for?’
‘For the girls. If they want it. It helps to take the sting out of what they have to do.’
‘But—’
‘Oh, don’t judge me, Mr Flockhart,’ she said crossly. ‘There will always be prostitutes. Men will always make whores of us, though we do not have to like it. I cannot cure them of the pox, I cannot make their lives happy and worthwhile, I cannot give them a comfortable home, or a sense of self-worth. How can anyone do that?’
The Blood: What secrets lie aboard? (Jem Flockhart Book 3) Page 25