An Instance of the Fingerpost Read Free Page B

a doctor?’
    I bowed. ‘Marco da Cola of Venice.’ It was a lie, of course, but I was sure I was at least as able as the sort of charlatan or quack she would normally have engaged. ‘And you?’
    ‘Sarah Blundy is my name. I suppose you are too grand to treat an old woman with a broken leg, for fear of lowering yourself in the eyes of your fellows?’
    She was, indeed, a difficult person to help. ‘A surgeon would be better and more appropriate,’ I agreed. ‘However, I have trained in the anatomical arts at the universities of Padua and Leiden, and I have no fellows here, so they are unlikely to think any the worse of me for playing the tradesman.’
    She looked at me, then shook her head. ‘I’m afraid that you must have overheard wrongly, although I thank you for your offer. I cannot pay you anything, as I have no money.’
    I waved my hand airily and – for the second time that day – indicated that money was of no concern to me. ‘I offer my services, none the less,’ I continued. ‘We can discuss that payment at a later stage, if you wish.’
    ‘No doubt,’ she said in a way which again left me perplexed. Then she looked at me in the open and frank way which the English can adopt, and shrugged.
    ‘Perhaps we could go and see the patient?’ I suggested. ‘And you could tell me what happened to her as we go?’
    I was as keen as young men are to engage the attention of a pretty girl, whatever her station, but I won little reward for my efforts. Although she was not nearly as well dressed as I, her limbs showing through the thin cloth of her dress, her head only as covered as decorum dictated, she seemed not at all cold, and scarcely appeared even to notice the wind, which cut through me like a knife. She walked fast as well, and even though she was a good two inches shorter than myself, I had to hurry to keep up. And her replies were brief andmonosyllabic, which I put down to concern and preoccupation with her mother’s health.
    We walked back to Mr van Leeman’s to collect my instruments and I also hastily consulted Barbette on surgery, not wishing to have to refer to a book of instruction in mid-operation, as this does not reassure the patient. The girl’s mother had, it appeared, fallen heavily the previous evening and had lain alone all night. I asked why she had not called out to some neighbours or passers by, as I assumed that the poor woman would scarcely have been living in splendid seclusion, but this received no useful response.
    ‘Who was that man you were talking to?’ I asked.
    I got no answer to that either.
    So, adopting a coldness that I thought appropriate, I walked by her side down a mean street called Butcher’s Row, past the stinking carcasses of animals hung on hooks or laid out over rough tables outside so that the rain could wash the blood into the gutters, then continued into an even worse row of low dwellings that lay alongside one of the rivulets that run around and about the castle. It was utterly filthy down there, the streams clogged and unkempt, with all manner of refuse poking through the thick ice. In Venice, of course, we have the flow of the sea which every day purges the city’s waterways. The rivers in England are left to block themselves up, without anyone thinking that a little care might sweeten the waters.
    Of the miserable huts down in that part of the town, Sarah Blundy and her mother lived in one of the worst: small, with the casements boarded with planks of wood rather than paned with glass, the roof full of holes blocked with cloth, and the doorway thin and mean. Inside, however, everything was spotlessly clean, though damp; a sign that even in such reduced circumstances, some pride in life can continue to flicker. The little hearth and the floorboards were scrubbed, the two rickety stools were similarly looked after, and the bed, although rough, had been polished. Apart from that, the room had no furniture beyond those few pots and platters which even