Hope - Lesley Pearse [114]
Even more awful was the way they looked. When she held a candle near, their eyes seemed to have sunk into their faces, and their skin was mottled and dark. She talked to them constantly as she rubbed their limbs to ease the cramps, and even though they seemed unable to reply, she felt sure they knew what she was saying.
Raised voices from below suddenly alerted her that a stranger had come to the house. In the eighteen months she’d lived here, she’d grown used to this early-warning system. Anyone coming into Lewins Mead who wasn’t known to the residents was treated with suspicion, and by calling out to the visitor, usually quite rudely, they made the stranger’s presence known to the whole lane.
Hope opened the door and peered down the dark, rickety staircase. There was the usual cacophony of noise, and more light than usual for many doors were open, but not enough light to see who was there.
‘Up the top of the stairs, mister,’ someone called out.
A wave of relief welled up inside her, for it had to be the doctor. She nipped back into the room, grabbed a candle and went back on to the staircase to light his way.
The only doctor Hope had ever met was the one in Chewton that she’d been sent to when her parents were ill, so she expected this one to be of similar age and size. So she was somewhat taken aback when a tall young man with fair hair came into view.
‘Are you the doctor?’ she called down to him.
‘I am. Dr Meadows,’ he replied. ‘And you must be Hope? I’m sorry to say Miss Carpenter didn’t tell me your full name.’
‘Thank you for coming, and just Hope will do fine,’ she said when he reached her. ‘I’ve been so afraid as my friends have become even sicker since I spoke to Miss Carpenter.’
Dr Bennett Meadows had thought himself fortunate when his uncle, Dr Abel Cunningham, invited him to join him in his Clifton practice when he qualified. He had no money to start up his own practice, and he knew that in all likelihood any other doctor offering to take him on as his junior would expect him to work very long hours for a mere pittance.
As a child he’d spent many holidays with his uncle, and he knew that most of his patients were wealthy people, so he imagined that it would only be a couple of years before he’d be in a position to branch out on his own.
But to his disappointment his uncle was no different from any other successful doctor; he kept his best patients to himself and only allowed Bennett to treat the poorer ones.
‘Ask for the shilling fee as soon as you arrive at a house call,’ Uncle Abel had advised him. ‘If you wait until you’ve treated the patient they’ll think you’re soft and find an excuse not to pay you.’
Perhaps Bennett was soft, for he found it impossible to demand his fee before looking at a child in the grip of whooping cough, or a man in agony from a crushed leg. And his uncle was right; he often didn’t get paid afterwards. At first this frustrated him, but as time passed he came to learn that the poor never called for a doctor unless it was for something very serious. He found he just wasn’t callous enough to take their last shilling if it meant the whole family would go hungry because of it, and if he could save the patient, the satisfaction was his reward.
It was because of his altruistic attitude that Uncle Abel mockingly called Bennett and Mary Carpenter ‘Twin Souls’. Abel had been a friend of Lant Carpenter, Mary’s late father, but he shook his head in bewilderment that the preacher’s well-educated daughter had chosen to devote her life to a Ragged School. When Abel first introduced Mary to Bennett he had smirked and said that they ought to get along famously because they were both champions of lost causes.
Bennett didn’t think a free school was a lost cause, and neither was the