George Maddox seemed surprised that we had actually returned to tend to his family. I introduced Harris and Lambert to him, and then we got to work on the tiny room occupied by Isabel and young Arthur Maddox.
The boy had weakened more overnight, and Isabel’s mind was even more … suspicious.
“I don’t know you,” she said to Lambert, who was attempting to bathe the woman while Harris unfolded a sheet from the small pile of linens we had brought in. “Did he send you to kill me?”
Lambert stopped her ministrations to look up at Isabel. “Pardon me? No, madam, I am here to help you.”
But Isabel Maddox was already recoiling, having gotten a glimpse of Nurse Lambert’s birthmark.
“You are a witch!” the woman screeched, pointing at the nurse’s face.
Lambert dropped her washing cloth and backed away herself. “I am no—what? Why am I so accused?” She blanched at what I imagined was the worst insult that had ever been hurled at her.
I inserted myself between the raving woman and my valued nurse.
“Mrs. Maddox!” I said sharply. “You are ill and not in your right mind.”
I glanced to my right, where George Maddox stood in the room’s entryway, his expression one of mortification. “Bella, please …” he said helplessly.
Isabel Maddox was obviously parched and in a delirium as a result of spattering her bowels’ contents for two straight days. It was a wonder she had not yet died. Perhaps she was of a far stronger constitution than I had credited her with.
Whatever her condition, she was determined to find fault in others. With Lambert now forgotten, she pointed a brittle-nailed finger at her husband, the new object of her venom.
“It was Barton! Always the bad son! Always convinced of your own brilliance. But I know what you did. It will be eternal damnation for you, won’t it?”
Isabel’s hair seemed to be coming undone of its own will, and those piercing gray eyes of hers were burning a hole straight through me. Clearly Isabel Maddox was chastising her husband in the name of his brother.
Fortunately, she calmed down after this particular outburst, so Harris quickly moved to change the woman’s bed linens. The nurse moved to toss the thin, torn, filthy sheet the woman had been lying on into the fireplace, but I stopped her.
“We must not show disrespect to anyone’s belongings,” I said quietly. “No matter how meager.”
Harris nodded in understanding, and instead began folding it as if someone would eventually wish to reuse the ratty thing.
Lambert was going through our foodstuffs in an attempt to make a palatable tray of food. I decided in that instant that we would leave everything behind for this family. I had enough allowance from my father to replace it all.
I knelt down next to the Maddox boy. He stank of old sweat and new vomit. His breathing was shallow, and he did not respond to my gentle movement of his shoulder. He was so frail I thought he might break at my mere touch.
“Try to get some beef tea between his lips,” I instructed Lambert. “He might respond to an enticing aroma.”
I had little hope for the poor boy, but he would at least be as nourished as possible.
I left the nurses to complete their work, signaling to Mary to join me in the outer room with George Maddox, who had retreated there to idly do some work.
He looked at me hopefully from where he stood with a mallet in his hand as we joined him around his messy worktable.
“You did truly come for us,” he said. “Thank you, Miss Nightingale. How do my wife and child fare?”
I hated to add to the ash heap of the man’s woes, but I also did not wish to offer false hope. I had offered enough of that with Richard.
“Your son is not well, sir. Surely you know that,” I said.
He silently passed a hand over his eyes.
“Your wife, however, seems to have an iron constitution. I believe vitriol may carry her back to good health.”
“Forgive my wife,” he said. “She is so sick. What am I to do if she dies? And I apologize for my earlier … condition, Miss Nightingale. You caught me at a very low point of weakness. I’m afraid I haven’t been quite myself lately. Now with illness upon my household …” His expression was bleak.
The more he spoke, the more I realized he had an upper-middle-class sound to his voice. “How did you come to be in Soho?” I asked delicately. “I don’t sense that you have lived here all your life.”
“No, I haven’t. Sometimes I can hardly believe this is what has come of my life. And to think that it is likely to become worse. You might not believe it, Miss Nightingale, but I come from a prosperous family.”
I nodded. “Actually, I do believe that.”
“My father was an upholsterer, and I inherited all his tools and supplies. But the demand for my work is not so great here as it was in my father’s shop in Regent Street. He was quite well known and was hired quite regularly by the officers within the East India Company after he came up with some designs that blended Indian patterns and concepts into our own English style. Father even had a few pieces displayed at the Great Exhibition’s Indian Court. He enjoyed some royal patronage when he was hired to make a special chair for Princess Vicky to sit in during her first birthday celebrations back in ’41.”
So the Maddox upholstering business had been profitable thirteen years ago, anyway.
George began absentmindedly playing with a stray tack on the table, twirling it about on its head as though it were a miniature spinning toy top. “We had a nice life, our family. My father had moved us into a new, three-story townhome with a forty-year lease on reasonable terms. But my father was unhappy.”
I, too, had been born to comfort and had been vastly miserable.
George continued, “Neither my brother nor I wished to partake in the upholstery business. Barton was anxious to join the Army. He’d been enamored of the scarlet uniforms, the sashes, and the medals since he was a young boy. The thought of being imprisoned among bolts of fabric and crates of horsehair nearly drove him mad. I thought my father would also go insane the day my brother ran off in ’39, leaving behind a note.”
“This is the brother of whom your wife spoke?” I asked.
“Yes, but I have no idea what she’s talking about. I suppose he was the bad son in my father’s eyes for running off, but he never harmed anyone in his life. Or at least he didn’t do anything to deserve damnation.”
I could at least soothe George Maddox on this count. “Be of rest, sir. Many people who rave while ill have no recollection of it when they come to their senses. No doubt your wife won’t even remember it and would be most penitent to know she had uttered such slander.”
He sighed and nodded. “To my knowledge, she never even met him.”
“What happened after your brother entered the Army?” I asked, more interested than was probably proper in the situation. I figured he would tell me that his father’s madness had led to the fall of the business. But the truth was worse than that.
George winced, and I saw that he had accidentally stuck himself with the tack. A drop of blood appeared, and he wiped his finger against his trousers. “He turned all his attention to me, assuming I would be his grateful heir after Barton had been such an ingrate. But I, too, wished for a different future.”
He then turned to a messy stack of small boxes along one wall and selected one, managing to pull it out without the rest collapsing. He handed it to me. I pushed aside some of the debris on his worktable and lifted the lid. Inside were yellowing pages covered in a cramped, spidery scrawl, with many scratch-outs.
“I had—have—a love for the written word. I wrote my novel in secret for a long time, knowing my father would disapprove. Besides, it wasn’t as though anyone was begging to publish my manuscript. But when my brother fled the household, I felt I must share my desires with my father so that he would understand I did not wish to carry on with the family business either.”
I stood in this jumble of a room,
pretending not to notice what was going on in the next room. Poor Bella Maddox groaned. There still wasn’t the tiniest chirp out of Arthur, though. I hoped he still lived, even now.
With mild curiosity, I flipped through several pages of George Maddox’s manuscript box as he continued his story. “Father reacted much as I expected, informing me of what a ridiculous specimen I had become and threatening to turn me out of the house for following my brother in ruination of the family’s future. I argued with him daily until I was hoarse from it, and my mother took to shutting herself up inside her bedchamber.”
Maddox’s story appeared to be about an Arthurian knight on a quest to rescue a maiden. The writing was flowery and overwrought.
“Despite all of that, we three limped along together without Barton for nearly a year, until he was reported killed. He’d barely gotten his ears wet. My father was devastated, particularly since we never saw his body. We didn’t even know where he was buried. As angry as my father had been that Barton had run off, now he had the realization that there was no hope whatsoever that his eldest son might come home one day and take up the reins of the business. My father was stuck with me, and here I was, crouched in a corner with ink all over my fingers. Meanwhile, my mother almost never came out of her chamber, partially because of my brother and partially because of me.”
My own mother wouldn’t have dreamt of allowing me to miss the benefit of a tirade by staying in her rooms upon the great occasion of my proving a great disappointment to her.
“Barton had always considered joining the Army to be his patriotic duty to England, and I attempted to write some odes to his service in order to cheer my father up, but they only made him morose. And angry at me.”
“So terrible,” Mary uttered, shaking her head sadly. I could see that she had deep empathy for this man, who was likely to lose his spouse, as she had also lost hers all those years ago.
“I met Bella at a stationer’s shop one day when I was out buying writing paper. She was simply perfect. Sweet, kind, loving. And beautiful. Why was she interested in a wastrel like me? But she was, and I was not about to waste a stroke of blessing. She was so different then. She was interested in what I had to say, letting me talk on about my brother and about my father’s disappointments.”
Mary was still shaking her head in sympathy. “A loving spouse is so critical to one’s happiness, isn’t it? I was married to my Milo for nearly thirty years before God saw fit to take him from me. We were never apart, except for when he was tutoring his young pupils. In fact, we even—”
I surreptitiously elbowed Mary, and she had the grace to cease talking about the sainted Milo for the moment.
“Bella found it interesting that my father had a successful upholstery shop and wanted to know all about it, in addition to asking me about my writings. Knowing that my brother was gone, she was determined to reunite me with Father. She managed to charm both me and my father into it, and soon we were married and living with my parents. Bella had a good head for …” Maddox paused, as if deciding on the right term.
“A good head for motivating others to work.” He nodded in satisfaction at his phrasing.
“So Mrs. Maddox was a very good wife to you,” I prompted. “Until her recent illness, I presume?”
He frowned. “I’m not sure when things specifically happened to Bella. My father became withdrawn and isolated from the family, and I cannot say it was a surprise when he took a plunge from Westminster Bridge. However, it left me with a business I did not want and a mother to care for.
“Bella was magnificent. She cared for my mother night and day, even while heavy with our son, and used every opportunity to urge me along in the business. Despite Bella’s care, though, Mother died about a year later.”
Mary made sympathetic noises.
“Did she also … inflict her death upon herself?” I asked.
“No. She just sort of wasted away without warning. I always assumed it was too much for her to live without my father. Arthur’s arrival eased that pain. But that didn’t last, either.”
There was yet more tragedy in this poor man’s life? I wondered how many times this story had played out throughout this densely populated neighborhood.
“My father had left behind a large backlog of orders, plus more continued to pour in, so I decided to hire a manager to assist me in handling the customers and bills so I could focus on the upholstery work. Snead ended up stealing nearly everything my father had worked so hard to build.”
I looked around. Perhaps George Maddox should have hired an upholsterer and managed the business himself.
“What happened with Mr. Snead?” I asked.
Maddox shrugged. “I confronted him over the thefts. He admitted readily to it and offered to make restitution, so I agreed that he could work off the amount he had stolen. Bella didn’t like it much, thought I should drag him into court at the very least, but doesn’t every man deserve forgiveness?”
Mary nodded her agreement solemnly at the man, and I followed suit.
“Before he could even begin paying me back, he disappeared,” Maddox said.
“Disappeared?” I repeated. “Where did he go?”
Another shrug. “I don’t know. He left one day to purchase a shirt to replace one that he accidentally tore in the shop, and didn’t return. I never heard from him again.”
The hairs on my neck prickled. I didn’t like the sound of this at all. “So you never recovered your money, either?”
“No. I gave up the lease on our home and moved us into smaller quarters. But it wasn’t enough. I just didn’t seem to have the same ability to attract customers that my father had. I wasn’t able to secure any additional work with the East India Company, and everything began tattering. Soon I wasn’t able to afford the lease on my shop, so I sold much of my equipment, and then moved my wife and son here because it was all I could manage on my earnings.” He swept a hand to demonstrate that all he could afford were these meager quarters.
That was when I noticed some wet plaster in a corner of the ceiling. It was sagging and black with mold. In fact, most of the ceiling was stained, peeling, and bulging downward.
“You have tried to establish your business here, then,” I said, already understanding the rest of the story.
“Yes. As you can imagine, there isn’t much use for my talent here. I’ve made a few pieces for the Lion Brewery. They maintain quarters for their shift managers, and I’ve picked up work that way. Tried to convince the British Museum to let me make some of their seating benches inside their corridors, but they were dismissive of me. No doubt they only want to use upholsterers who have the royal warrant.”
I glanced over at the chair in the window. I didn’t think that was the reason at all.
“What of your writing?” I asked, handing him back the manuscript box.
“In my spare time, I’ve worked on my novels, but have never found a publisher interested in them. Not even William Blackwood and Sons, who seem to be taking on so many authors. You don’t happen to know any publishers, do you?” he asked hopefully as he took the box and laid it on top of a tottering stack along the wall. I held my breath, but the tower did not collapse.
It was my own great hope to be able to publish my own thoughts on nursing one day as an instruction for women who wished to learn proper techniques. How discouraging to think that getting a book published was so difficult.
He saw the expression on my face and said, “No, I wouldn’t have thought so. Anyway, my life has rotted away like a gangrenous toe will eventually eat an entire leg. Bella became very unstable once we moved here, and who can blame the dear girl? Nothing turned out the way she had planned, and she worked so hard to help me. Now this is how she will be repaid. The vagaries of life can mean such cruelty for those who don’t deserve it.”
“No one is promised an easy life,” I said, recognizing my own grievous hypocrisy. After all, my own difficulties had never extended into miserable poverty, just multiple ba
ttles of will against others. “We can only manage with what we are given,” I finished lamely.
He nodded in a thoroughly unconvinced way. “I suppose we must. I have been thinking lately …” He paused as if unsure whether to share his thought.
I waited calmly and without complaint for him to make his decision, much as I would with a hospital inmate who could not decide whether to take a cup of hot beef tea or a bowl of Turkish broth to accompany her buttered toast.
Finally, he decided he would include me in his ruminations. “I’ve been thinking of trying something completely new. The Lion Brewery is looking for a supervisor for its long overnight shift. Mr. Davies says he would consider me because of my business experience. I don’t know much of anything about ales and stouts—well, other than sometimes overenjoying them, I suppose.” He looked at me sheepishly.
“It would certainly be steadier income in your situation,” I said.
Maddox nodded. “Oswyn Davies is the manager there and runs the public house part of the brewery. He was once in the Army and says he would like to show benevolence to the brother of a dead soldier. But either John Huggins or his brother, Edward, would have to approve me. They own the brewery. I’m just not sure if I should do it.”
I couldn’t believe the man’s hesitance. “Why would you not do it?” I countered.
He hesitated again. “It’s just … I think both my father and my brother would have been disappointed in me. My father for not carrying on the business, and my brother for not pursuing book publication. I wouldn’t have much time to myself for writing if I worked at the brewery. Anyway, I suppose I have wasted too much of your time on my woes, Miss Nightingale. My apologies; I’m certain you have other people who need attending to.”
“Actually, Mr. Maddox, I have learned a great deal by spending time here in Soho. I should have come sooner.” I meant it.
He offered me a strange look that suggested I had taken leave of my senses. “Don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say they should spend more time in this wretched place.”
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