‘Don Quixote de la Mancha — done into English by Gilbert Sheldon from the Spanish of Cervantes.’
‘Once,’ she began, ‘there was a man, and he read so many tales of the knights of olden times and their adventures and how they fought dragons and wicked other knights and rescued beautiful ladies, that at last — he was very lonely and had nobody to talk to but the people in his books — he began to think he was a knight of olden times himself. So ...’ Cervantes might perhaps not have fully recognized the story that she told. Indeed, she felt at first that that part of it did not so very much matter; what Moll chiefly wanted was her attention and the sound of her voice. So kneeling in the firelight with the child in her arms growing drowsier as the cloves and laudanum began to take effect, she meandered on about giants and windmills and thieves and pasteboard helmets and a tall old white horse called Rosinante.
She had been reading the book for what she knew it was supposed to be, a satire on the old style Romance literature, and as such it had not had very much appeal to her; but now, re-telling it to small sleepy Moll, suddenly she found the warmth in it, the humanity and gentleness, and she made contact with the heart of the story as she had not been able to do before, seeing in her pictures in the fire, a gaunt knight riding a thin old horse up a road that, because she had never seen Spain, was a Brabant road barred with the shadows of poplar trees. A figure that was faintly familiar, growing nearer and dearer, that was — Oh heaven, why had she not known from the first moment that it was Thomas? The same scarecrow distinction, the same scarecrow gentleness. Under the ridiculous surface and the windmills, the same lovely inability to compromise, the unbreakable service to what was right as opposed to what was necessary or sensible. She made the discovery with warmth and whimpering laughter, and something of bewilderment because she was not gifted with laughter in her loving.
And away into the rolling Lincolnshire wolds where the dark wind roared like a sea across the open country, Thomas with his long legs folded disjointedly under him, crouched beside a gale-torn fire in lea of a thorn windbreak on the slopes of Bolingbroke Hill. He also was looking into the fire; but his pictures were different ones, and his thoughts, on the eve of battle, went out from him northward through the wild autumn night, to make some kind of contact with Anne’s as they whirled south; so that Anne in a lull between gust and gust had all at once such a sense of his nearness that she looked up as though to speak to him, and then told herself that she must have been half asleep.
Moll was asleep when Christian, returning from supper and looking into the little closet to find her gone, came hurrying in. Anne, still kneeling on the warm hearth, looked up at her anxious henchwoman. ‘It is her poor little tooth. I have put cloves and laudanum on it — maybe it will be better in the morning. Carry her away back to bed, Christian; she’s asleep now.’
But despite her mother’s remedies, Little Moll had a fitful and disturbed night, and in the morning the tooth was not better.
Anne, confronted with a flushed and silently weeping child with one side of its face swollen like an apple, took her decision. ‘It must be drawn.’
‘Today?’ said Christian grimly.
‘Today. Now. At the first possible moment. She cannot go on like this.’
Christian, standing at the other side of the truckle bed in which Moll sat forlorn and humpy as a fledgling fallen from its nest, smoothed down her grey stuff gown. ‘If there’s any tha’ can find to do it, My Lady, wi’ t’drums already beating to t’muster.’
Anne thought. The first person in her mind had been Davey Morrison, but she realized that his hands would be full enough today without a bairn’s tooth drawing, and that applied to his assistants also. But there were the town surgeons. ‘There must be surgeons and apothecaries to spare, in Hull —’ she began.
‘Happen they’ll mostly be down to t’walls by now. Hull’s no place for sick folks today, gin they don’t wear a soldier’s coat,’ Christian said, visibly racking her brains. ‘There’s yon chap that was here last week when t’kitchen maid took t’colic. He’ll be in his house, but —’
‘Then send for him,’ Anne snapped, not interested in buts.
‘That’s just the trouble, My Lady; when Seth went down for some more of t’physic, two days since, he was laid up wi’ t’gout. That’s why he’ll be at home.’
Anne looked at her as though wondering whether she was being deliberately obstructive. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘If he cannot come to us, we must go to him.’
‘My Lady, tha’ canna! Not today, of all days! It’s na’ safe!’
‘Nonsense,’ said Anne. ‘What possible difference can our sally, which isn’t timed to take place until nine o’clock anyway, make to the safety of taking a child to have a tooth drawn within the walls. Do you know where he lives?’
‘Ower towards Charterhouse, ‘twixt there and the Beverley Gate, but —’
‘Send Seth to warn him that we are coming. He can crawl from his bed to his surgery, if he can go no farther. If he cannot —’ stated Lady Fairfax, ‘I shall sit Moll on his bed, and he can do it there!’
Seth was summoned and dispatched. They dressed Little Moll, still weeping silently, between them; and muffled her in her dark green cloak. She was completely unresisting, but when Christian had gone to fetch her Mistress’s cloak and her own, she stole a small frog-cold hand into her mother’s and buried her head against her. ‘Not — Not —’ she struggled with the desperate plea. ‘You put some more stuff on it and make it well, mammy.’
If only she could. If only she could take the pain into herself. It was dreadful to love people and not be able to take their pain from them into oneself; not the black agony of Thomas’s stone, not even little Moll’s toothache. She held the little tense body close. ‘We must go. If I put more stuff on it, it will only be better for a little while, and then it will be bad again. Listen, listen, sweet. Remember how you rode all that way among father’s troopers, and how brave you were then.’
Christian came back, and she detached herself from Moll’s limpet-like clinging. The two women flung on their cloaks, and the party set out, Anne with the child’s hand in hers, the maid following close behind.
This morning there was an atmosphere abroad in Kingston-upon-Hull that was stronger and more potent even than the atmosphere of a seaport town. Anne heard the drums, Brrrm — brrrm — brrrm, brrrm — brrrm — brrrm, Fairfax’s drums beating to quarters, as she turned from Silver Street into the narrow way that led up towards Charterhouse. The streets were becoming crowded. Once she drew aside into a doorway as a company of Manchester’s Foot went swinging by, followed a few moments later by a mob of seamen from the Lion and Employment pouring up the street in a grimly cheerful flood. More soldiers, townsmen, sailors from the merchantmen in the river — a denser swarming every moment.
‘Round here, My Lady. Here’s t’place,’ said Christian at her elbow, and they turned thankfully into a street, hardly more than a cobbled cut between Charterhouse and the Beverley Gate. Anne glimpsed above a ramp of raw piled earth the dark shapes, at once ominous and reassuring, of the Charterhouse guns among their waiting crews. The alley had a battered look, and here and there showed signs of having faced ordeal by fire. That would be the red hot shot from the King’s Fort. The Royalists had sworn at one time that they would burn Hull though they fetched the fire from Hell to do it.
But the narrow shop front that had an air of being jammed between its neighbours with its hat crammed over its eyes, seemed more or less undamaged, as they stopped before it. And looking at the sign over the door, Anne read ‘Phyneas Openshaw, Surgeon and Apothecary’.
There was no sign of Seth, but the door stood open and, as the two women with the child between them hesitated on the threshold, a deep voice that seemed to Anne to be roughened and blurred at the edges called out to them from the gloom inside. ‘If that’s Lady Fairfax, bring the bairn in. Come straight through the shop. I’d not walk another step on this damned foot if ye we
re the old Queen herself. God rest her and the Devil make her merry!’
She felt Moll’s hand jump and tighten convulsively in hers, as the child gave a high pitched gasp of terror, and hardening her heart, she tightened her grasp and swept her little daughter forward into the thronged and shadowy interior of the apothecary’s shop, Christian following close behind and barring all chance of escape. A door stood ajar between the crowded shelves of the further wall, and a gleam of firelight shone through the crack, and a grunt and sounds of human movement came to them from inside. Anne, with the small hand crushed in hers, gathered her skirts again, for the floor struck her as being almost as dirty as the open street, advanced round the end of the counter, pushed the door wider, and went in.
The low-ceiled inner room was almost as dark as the shop behind them, and almost as full of pestles and mortars, instrument cases, pill boards, pitch pots and physic jars. But clearly it combined the office of surgery with that of living-room, for the fire that she had glimpsed burned brightly on the hearth, and there was the remains of a meal flanked by a black bottle at one end of the stained and battered table, and a few books stacked among the grey Lambeth-ware drug jars on the shelves added their smell of old calf bindings to the mingled smells of drugs and herbs, stale tobacco, mice and Hollands, which was the distinctive flavour of the room. A large shaggy man in a greasy doublet was hauling himself painfully by the arms out of a wing chair beside the hearth as they entered; and Anne turned on him, rather than to him, for she was having doubts. Was he really a fit person to have the mauling of a child’s mouth? If only Moll’s tooth had flared up a few days ago, and she could have summoned Davey Morrison to deal with the emergency. ‘You are Mr Openshaw?’ she all but accused him.
How big his hands were; and that foot swaithed in flannel until it looked like an enormous pudding would certainly have worsened his temper, and therefore, probably his gentleness. ‘I am.’ He made her a small awkward bow — awkward physically by reason of his gouty foot, but in no other way. ‘And I gather from the manservant who was here but now, that you have need of my professional services.’
Anne drew the shrinking child forward. ‘My little daughter — She has been awake half the night with the toothache. Something must be done.’
‘So. And to what set of circumstances do I owe the honour of a Fairfax tooth for the drawing?’
‘My husband’s regimental surgeon will be otherwise occupied today, and my maid here told me that Surgeon Openshaw was laid by with the gout, and therefore the one surgeon in all Hull who could be relied on to be at home at this rather unfortunate moment,’ Anne said frankly.
His long mouth twitched, and she saw how mobile it was in its ragged fringe of pepper coloured beard. ‘Truly, I am honoured! Allow me to point out that my particular gout is of the poor man’s variety. It has small chance to be otherwise.’
Meeting the humorous challenge of his gaze, Anne was inclined to believe him, for clearly Hollands was his drink, and it was wine and not spirits everyone knew that brought about the ordinary kind. Mr Phyneas Openshaw turned his chair towards the light that slanted in through the broken window, and sat down again with something between a grunt and a groan, heaving his gouty foot on to a low stool. ‘I have sent my boy off to make himself useful under the army surgeons; that was before your man came. Your maid must act as Cub for me instead.’
‘I can do all that is necessary,’ said Anne.
The man shrugged his heavy shoulders. ‘Have it as you please, My Lady. Fetch that stool from the corner and set the bairn down here, facing the light.’
Anne did as she was bid, and set Moll on the stool against his knee where he indicated. She sat frozen, her hands clenched, her eyes, enormous in her paper white face, staring straight before her; and the big man leaned forward and spoke to her for the first time. ‘What’s tha’ name, lass?’
‘Moll.’ It was a whisper through white lips; her eyes slid a little towards his face, then straight ahead again.
‘Moll.’ It grumbled deep in his chest, but it was an unexpectedly gentle grumble, and Anne found something of her misgivings slipping from her. ‘Heart up! Head up, Moll; mouth open. I must see this troublesome tooth.’ Then as she shrank away, ‘Na Na, I’ll do nought but look. Maybe we shall not need to draw it at all.’
Anne, kneeling beside her, took one of the little cold fists in her hand, and Moll with a piteous gasp, opened her mouth. ‘Wider,’ said Mr Openshaw, ‘wider nor that. Come, tha’d open wide enough if ‘twas to let in a sugared strawberry.’ His big spatulate finger was inside her mouth, exploring, probing, as he bent his great rough head to peer, and Anne, remembering a previous occasion, wondered whether he was shortly going to be bitten. But either Moll was too terrified to bite, or she recognized his authority as she had not done that of the Leeds apothecary. ‘So so. I see.’ He withdrew the finger, still unbitten, and across the child’s head his bright harsh gaze met Anne’s. He nodded, and brought something out of his pocket; a small hideous tool that glinted dully in the light from the broken window.
The thing was very quickly done, Anne slipped her arm round the child’s quivering body and held her fast. She felt her own heart tighten, her stomach cringe with nausea as he brought up his hand. Moll shrieked, arching herself back in a bow of frenzied agony across the man’s knee, and Anne caught her hands as they came beating up. Surgeon Openshaw made a quick wrenching movement, and dropped the dentist’s key, with the small bloody tooth still in its clutches, into the pewter bowl that waited for it. ‘All’s over.’
And Anne, cradling the convulsed child against her, was mopping the poor little bleeding mouth with the kerchief she had brought for the purpose, telling her again and again, ‘It is all over. It’s out. Bad old tooth is all gone. There now — Shushie, shushie now, it’s all over.’
Christian, who had stood by in fierce rigidity throughout, was kneeling beside them, helping with the mopping up process. ‘Poor lamb, she’s half murdered!’ She raised an indignant face to the surgeon. ‘Did tha’ need to brutalize her poor little mouth like yon?’
Mr Openshaw growled very low, too low for the child to catch through her frantic sobbing. ‘Ach no, my dear woman; it is just that I like the smell of blood. Did tha’ not know me for an ogre?’
‘Nay now, she’s well enough,’ Anne intervened, rocking her little daughter against her. ‘She is frightened, but it is all over now — all over now, my honey.’
‘If ye’re thinking to clean the bairn up,’ rumbled Surgeon Openshaw, ‘there’s water ready drawn in the kitchen yonder. Take her away and wash her.’
Moll’s terrified sobs had died away to a shaken whimpering that now and then rose to small yelping wails. In a while they got her quieted and into the hugger-mugger kitchen. They were still washing her when into the waiting murmurous quiet, pin-pricked by distant shouted orders, fell the note of a church clock striking the hour of nine. A few moments of complete hush followed the last thrumming note that tossed away on the wind; a hush that was like a long breath caught and held in the moment before action. And then to the two women in Surgeon Openshaw’s kitchen came the swiftly purposeful rolling of drums, and a sudden wave of cheering. Anne could see as clearly as though it were before her eyes, the leaves of the Beverley Gate creak back, and the Northern Division swing slowly into motion, surging forward like a tide released. Across Moll’s head, her eyes met Christian’s; then she finished drying the child’s white swollen face, and hurried her back into the living-room where Surgeon Openshaw sat still and listening in his chair.
‘Tell me your fee,’ she said quickly. ‘I am most grateful to you ... We must be on our way.’
‘A crown is my usual fee,’ said the surgeon; and then as she thrust a hand through her pocket slits in search of her purse, ‘But there’s no hurry. You’re not going back through the streets yet awhile.’
‘The sally is begun,’ Anne said. ‘The sooner we are back in the Governor’s Palace, the better.’
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sp; His eyes met hers, unexpectedly masterful; also unexpectedly kind. Until now his kindness had been only for Moll. ‘But to get there, tha’ must go through the streets. And the streets may be safe enough, now that the sally is launched but — God knows — we may be under fire in a few minutes. Safer to stay here for a while.’
She hesitated, and he added flatly, the growl deepening in his chest: ‘For you and your maid, well enough; ye’re grown women and ye’ve a perfect right to risk yer own necks if ye choose; but ye’ve no right to risk the bairn’s.’
Anne was silent a moment longer: then she said, ‘Very well, we will accept your shelter for a while, and give you thanks for it.’
‘Good. Then put the bairn down there on the settle; she’ll do better to sleep for a while. Better still for some warm milk inside her first.’ He turned to Christian. ‘Woman, go and see if there’s some milk in the blue crock in the kitchen. If there is, warm it up.’
It was while the milk was warming that Anne, sitting beside her small daughter, and looking anxiously at the too rigid figure and set white face that seemed in the shadows almost transparent, thought that a gift might help. Colonel Cromwell’s coin should by immemorial custom have gone under the child’s pillow to be found there in the morning, but it would do more good here and now. She felt for her purse again. ‘Moll,’ she said softly, ‘you remember when Colonel Cromwell came in the night, and father went back with him?’ A small nod and a pair of tragic eyes raised to her face. ‘He left you a present.’
The shadows behind the child’s eyes lightened a little with something of inquiry, something of anticipation.
‘I told him about your tooth, and he gave me this for you, for when it came out. You cannot spend it, it’s just to keep; an old, old coin that he found once and had carried since he was a little boy. He said, “Give it to Moll for her poor little tooth, and pray God bless her”.’ And she put the age-worn, dully gleaming thing into Moll’s hands.
The Rider of the White Horse Page 22