Tobias Oates watched his adversary as he slowly fell back into the cushions of the wing-back chair. To the maid who rushed forth from the shadows, he said:
“You may send him to my house at nine tomorrow morning. I’ll treat him then.”
52
WHEN TOBIAS OATES returned home it was already dark and he found the entire household—his wife, his sister-in-law, the housekeeper—all gathered in a circle in the kitchen, bathing his wailing baby boy in a metal tub.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
The women did not turn, and this alone made his pulse run the faster.
“What is it?” he cried and forced himself into the circle. There he saw his infant son, his face quite pale and his little chest now hugely inflamed. What this morning had been a pustule now seemed to look more like a growth. It was red and very hard, and when his papa touched it with his fingers, the little fellow emitted a thin weak wail.
“What ails him, for God’s sake? What is it?”
“It is witch’s milk,” said the housekeeper, laying her large broad finger tips gently on the swelling. “Set hard as rock.”
“He has a fever,” his wife said. “I sent for Dr Grieves. I sent the grocer’s boy, but the boy has somehow upset the doctor, for he was sent away with no message.”
“That boy!” exclaimed the old housekeeper, continuing to sponge the whimpering child. “He would be better back in Ireland praying to the French. He should not be here, nor neither should his mother.”
“Damn Grieves,” cried Oates. The three women looked at him with such alarm, that he immediately began to smile, and coo, and pat his hands in the air.
“Grieves . . . ah, Grieves,” he said. “Poor old Grieves.”
“What is wrong with Dr Grieves?”
He could not think what to answer them, and, saying only that he would fetch the doctor himself, he fled back out into Lamb’s Conduit Street just as a hackney cab came trotting by. He hailed it before he knew quite what he was to do with it.
He looked up at the mulish driver who, in turn, glowered down from his bench, with his many-skirted coat wrapped tight around him. He was a thug-like fellow with heavy brows and great yellow teeth like tombstones in his mouth.
“So what’s your pleasure, Sir?”
“I need a doctor nearby. Do you know of a doctor?”
“Doctor, Sir. Yes, Sir. Straight away.”
And off they set up Lamb’s Conduit Street, along Gray’s Inn Road, down across to the other side of Saffron Hill, passing on the way a number of buildings with lanterns advertising doctors.
“Now listen, fellow . . .”
“Yes, Sir.”
“I only have a shilling or two about me. Where were you going to take me?”
“Why, to Merton Street, to Dr Hardwick’s.”
“What sort of doctor is he?”
“Blessed if I know, Sir,” shouted the cabby, “but he is a doctor, and well thought of, I do know that.”
Tobias Oates wondered what class of person thought well of this doctor, and for what reason. But he had no choice: “Very well,” he said, “to Dr Hardwick’s.”
Soon enough they rolled into a dismal little street in Clerkenwell. The cabby pulled up before a high narrow house, distinguished by the smoke-blackened lantern burning faintly by its door. Had it not been for the evidence of this miserable lamp, Tobias would have thought the building abandoned.
“If this is only for the shilling,” said the cabby, “you best move smartly, Sir.”
“Very well,” said Tobias. He alighted, approaching the dark deserted pile with some uncertainty. The front gate was crooked on its hinges, and the stone stairs leading up from the street smelled as if a herd of cats had been encamped there.
He knocked on the door once, twice.
Very soon he heard a distant shuffling and then a cry of, “Who’s there?”
“I have a sick baby. I need a doctor.”
A male voice replied—a single word—but Tobias could not distinguish it. He knocked louder. “I need a doctor.”
There followed a loud noise of chains being dropped onto a floor. Then the tall door opened a fraction, and in the darkness—for there did not seem to be so much as a candle lit inside—he saw the shadow of an old man’s face, or rather, what he took to be the face of an old man, for the voice that came out of it seemed very old indeed.
“Who’s there?”
“Excuse me. Are you Dr Hardwick?”
“I am, Sir, have been, and will be a good while yet. And may I have the pleasure of knowing who comes knocking on my door while I am in communion with my herrings?”
“My name is Oates, and my babe is sick.”
“How old is your babe?”
“Three months.”
“Then you must know it for a fact—babes are always sick. It is their nature. How is he sick?”
“He has a fever. There is a great red lump upon his chest.”
“If you want to ride for a shilling,” called the cabby from the street, “I cannot wait for you to sign the Peace.”
“Who’s that?” inquired the doctor.
“The hackney cab.”
“Do you owe him money?”
“Sir, will you come with me?”
“Can you pay me?” asked the doctor. “That is always a question worth asking.”
“Yes, yes, I can pay you,” said Tobias Oates.
“My fee is five shillings, and has been since Waterloo.”
“Please, Sir . . .”
“But I have been known to accept chinaware in its stead. More than once, a little Delft. Do you know Delft? I don’t press for it, but I make it known.”
“I thank you,” said Tobias Oates, who had neither Delft nor dosh to pay any bill.
“I only make it known.”
“And I thank you for giving me that possibility to consider.” With these assurances the anguished father was able to get the doctor into the cab without actually lying about his financial situation.
The journey was conducted in almost total silence, and later Tobias could recall little else of it but the strong smell of fish, which he took to be herring, upon which the doctor had obviously been making an enthusiastic attack. It was not until they reached Lamb’s Conduit Street that he had a good chance to look at his companion, and there, by the light of the candle his wife held high at the front door, he saw that Dr Hardwick was a man of perhaps sixty years of age, balding on his top, but with a great shock of ginger hair much streaked with grey. His eyebrows, which were also ginger-coloured, were a very powerful feature of his face, pressing powerfully over his cloudy eyes. His clothing was old, his great cloak actually ragged around the hem and sleeves. Mary Oates, who saw all this at the same moment as her husband, turned as pale as the wax of her candle.
“This is Dr Hardwick, my dear,” said Toby.
His wife burst into tears and ran down to the kitchen where they found her, a moment later, holding the whimpering babe fiercely to her bosom.
The ragged old doctor entered the kitchen as though it were his own, dropped his scuffed old satchel upon the table, and called for water with which to wash.
When he had scrubbed his large freckled hands, he turned to Mrs Oates, who had removed herself as far away as the scullery. She was rocking her babe and talking to him in small and private whispers.
“Now, Ma’am,” said he, “please give the patient to me.”
Mary Oates looked to her husband who, not without serious trepidation, echoed the doctor’s request. The young author then watched his son passed to the old man, recalling at the same time the case of Dr Snipes of Wapping who had killed three of his spinster patients and fed their remains to his fox terrier. He wanted only to cry out, stop! enough! But he watched as the stranger removed the swaddling from his precious son and squeezed his stomach with his knobbly jointed hands.
“Hold him. Not you, Ma’am. You, Sir.”
Tobias Oates did as he was ordered
. He held his son down on the table while the doctor removed a small spirit lamp from his bag and lit it. Toby looked away a fraction. When he looked back, the old man was passing a surgeon’s knife back and forwards under the bright blue flame of the lamp.
“Hold him tight, Sir. Ma’am, look away.”
Tobias Oates looked at the three women who were bunched, his wife at the centre, over by the scullery. The two sisters had a similar expression on their faces, their eyes wide, their lips parted.
Tobias Oates turned away from them.
“Papa’s here,” he said, feeling himself a liar and a fool. “Papa’s here, my darling.”
But as the knife approached the dear little boy’s chest, the tears began to well up in his father’s eyes, and as the blade came down across the swelling on the red protrusion, as the child’s face contorted in outrage, as the little fellow shrieked, as the great river of pus flowed forth from the lanced boil, Tobias Oates cried shamelessly, or so it appeared to all who saw him. In truth, however, the shame was very deep, and when he saw the evidence of infection pour forth from his son’s innocent body, he felt the poison to be all his own.
53
WHEN THE WOUND HAD been stitched and the old doctor had liberally swabbed the entire of little John’s chest with a violently coloured purple tincture, when the patient’s cries had begun at last to become less fierce, and he had been dispatched with the women-folk to the nursery, the doctor packed away his knife and spirit lamp and snapped shut his enormous bag. Then he turned his rheumy eyes and tobacco eyebrows towards Tobias Oates.
“Now . . .” he began.
He did not have to venture any further—Tobias knew what was to come next, and he came dancing out from the crease to meet it.
“I look forward to your account.”
At this, everything which had been solicitous in the old man’s manner, that which had given the suppleness to his old fingers, and drawn the steel so kindly across the child’s infection, was now withdrawn, and Tobias Oates saw the old man’s head pulled down into the neck, the shoulders up towards the ears, his very flesh contract around his bones.
Dr Hardwick folded his forearms across his pale, discoloured waistcoat. His great hairy brows came down upon his eyes.
“I keep no accounts,” he said coldly. “I am not an inn keeper. I need the five shillings, Sir, and I made that very clear when you dragged me from my dinner.”
“Pray do not embarrass me,” began the young man.
“Pray do not anger me,” said the doctor, now very quiet indeed.
He closed his bag briskly, shrugged on his ragged cloak. Tobias, relieved to imagine the painful scene to be in its final act, followed the tattered garment up the stairs to the hallway. There he found that the stranger, far from departing, was intent on pushing his way deeper into the family’s life.
Dr Hardwick took a candle from the wall sconce and walked into the front room where he began a close perusal of the objects on its walls and tables. “You are just newly established here?” he asked in a manner more like that of a customer in an auction house than a visitor in a private home.
Tobias was disinclined to answer so impertinent a question, and yet he was weakened by his impecunious position. “Some few months,” he answered.
“What is your profession, Sir?”
“I am a man of letters, Sir.”
The doctor picked up a small porcelain ornament on the mantelpiece, turned it over, then dismissed it.
“You would be wiser to have waited a little longer before you married. Until you had a little capital.”
Tobias tried to laugh. “What do you know about my capital?”
The doctor held the Bluebell plate which Mary had displayed proudly in the centre of the mantelpiece. “Only what I see. But the evidence does point all one way.”
Only later, when the fellow had gone, could Tobias Oates admit how boorish and ill-mannered Dr Hardwick had been, but at the time, during the moments he was being so brazenly insulted, he was like a man who sees at some distance a human form falling from Waterloo Bridge—he did not quite believe what it was he witnessed. When, at the end of the doctor’s stock-taking, Lizzie came down the stairs to announce that the babe was finally asleep, there was nothing in Tobias’s manner to suggest to her that anything improper was taking place. Indeed, he laboured to give the impression that all was well.
“I was just telling Dr Hardwick,” he said, “that we were newly arrived in Lamb’s Conduit Street.”
“Oh yes,” she said brightly. “We were previously at Furnival’s Inn.”
The doctor held the sputtering candle high. “And was it in Furnival’s Inn that you received the gift of that necklace?”
“Oh—” Lizzie’s hand rose to touch the necklace, an old-fashioned little confection of silver and small blue stones. “Well, yes, indeed, it was at Furnival’s Inn, although it was a rather sad kind of a gift for it was bequeathed to me by my grandmother, a dear old lady of whom I was exceedingly fond.”
“Give it to me,” said the doctor.
Lizzie hesitated.
“No need to remove it,” said Tobias quickly, holding out his hand for the candle. “I will hold the light so Dr Hardwick can see.”
“No, no.” The doctor fixed his eyes upon the young woman. “Please be so good as to take it off.”
“No,” cried Tobias. “You must not.”
He knew full well what the doctor intended, but when Lizzie, having silently reproached her brother-in-law, raised her pretty little hands to the clasp, he did not trust himself enough to forbid her once again. He watched in dismay as she delivered the precious article— that adornment of which she was, in all the world, most fond—into those alien freckled hands.
Dr Hardwick gazed down upon his treasure, his head tilted a little sideways, looking for all the world, so Tobias thought, like a crow upon a dust mound. When he looked up again, his eyes seemed to have cleared.
“This is very beautiful,” he said.
“Thank you,” said Lizzie, colouring with pleasure. “I don’t think my brother-in-law has ever really noticed it before.”
“Elizabeth!”
“It is worth a great deal more than the five shillings,” said the doctor.
“Oh yes,” said Lizzie. “The Jew on High Holborn offered me two guineas without my even asking his opinion.”
“Then it is worth four,” said the doctor. “Would you let me, if I promised to be very careful with it, would you let me borrow it a day or two?”
Lizzie looked at the untidy old man in confusion. He smiled at her; she coloured and looked to her brother-in-law, who gave her— so she later complained—no help at all.
“I’m sure that I could have it back to the young lady by Wednesday. Would you not say so, Mr Oates?”
“Tobias . . .”
The old man continued. “You will be needing me back again. I should say, by Wednesday. Or Tuesday if the fever has not abated. In any case, you will be pleased to see me, I am sure of it.”
“You will give us a receipt, of course,” said the writer.
“If you have the pen and paper,” said the doctor to Lizzie. “And if you will be nice enough to give the article some clear description, then I’ll sign it.”
“I would describe it only as my grandmother’s necklace, Sir, but what do you want with it?”
“I am a student,” the old man said, dropping the necklace into the deep pocket of his filthy cloak, “a student of the human body, of the human nature, and of objets d’art of all descriptions.”
“Tobias?” inquired his sister-in-law.
But Tobias Oates again affected not to hear. He busied himself at the little table by the window, engaged in making a minute architectural description of the necklace and its fastening. As he wrote these hundred words, his dancing mind was once more occupied with the question of money, with how to get it and get it quickly, so that he might get this necklace safely home again.
54
AS HER BROTHER-IN-LAW escorted the peculiar old doctor from the front room, Elizabeth Warriner stayed by the lace curtains looking out into the bright moon-lit street.
While the loss of her necklace had disturbed her, this disturbance was a very small rain-drop in the storm of emotion contained within her slender frame. She watched the shadow of the peculiar old doctor passing the window, and she turned to find him who occupied her every waking thought standing before her, his dear face clearly visible in the moonlight.
“Best light a candle,” he whispered.
“She is gone to bed by now.”
“There is still Mrs Jones. She would think it very odd were she to find us in the dark.”
“Mrs Jones is sleeping in the nursery with little John.” Lizzie took the unlit candle from Toby’s hand and waited for him to embrace her. “She is asleep,” she insisted.
She saw his mouth quiver, his chin ripple. “I am so very sorry,” he said.
She put a finger on his lips.
“Oh Toby, you silly man.”
She embraced him then, but his body was stiff and unyielding with preoccupation, and when he heard a creak of the floor boards above their heads, he sprang away from her.
“We must light a candle,” he insisted.
She took his hand, he held hers fiercely.
“I’m so sorry about the necklace,” he said. “You will have it back tomorrow.”
“Tobias, I don’t give a fig for the silly necklace.”
“Dear sweet Elizabeth.” This time he embraced her completely, holding her passionately around the waist, pressing himself hard against her, so hard, you would imagine, he must feel everything that was agitating her heart.
“Dear sweet Elizabeth, it is your only ornament. What did I hear you tell Closter’s wife about the stones? Did you not say what happiness it gave you, just to gaze upon them in their little case?”
“Now it is less important.”
“It is less important because I was foolish enough to let them be stolen from you?”
“Toby, you do not mean stolen.”
“You will have them back by lunch, I promise you.”