Read Online The Enterprise of England by Ann Swinfen - Free Book Online

pathetically grateful to have survived not only the siege but also the ending of it. Parma – generous for once – had allowed them to depart in safety, instead of taking them prisoner. Or worse. We all knew of occasions in the past when those surrendering to Spanish troops under a promise of fair treatment were immediately and indiscriminately slaughtered. These men were lucky to reach England alive, despite wounds or severed limbs, festering sores, head injuries or blindness. Perhaps Parma thought they would not survive to fight him again.
    For once, Phelippes admitted that my work at the hospital was more important than my work at Seething Lane.
     
    When the men were first brought in, I was in a small ward where we put women who have had difficult births and have been sent to us by the midwife. They were kept here away from the other patients, partly because my father believed that soon after giving birth a woman is vulnerable to infection, and partly because the crying of the babies would disturb the other patients. Dr Stephens poured scorn on the former idea, but supported the latter, having little fondness for squalling infants.
    ‘You will note,’ my father frequently pointed out to him, in one of their many arguments about my father’s advanced ideas, ‘that when the mothers are kept away from other illnesses, they are much more likely to survive childbirth.’
    Dr Stephens would snort in disbelief. ‘If God has ordained that a woman shall die, bringing forth in the pain which is rooted in Eve’s sin, nothing we can do will save her.’
    My father would smile and say, ‘You do not really believe that.’
    That day, however, they were both occupied in seeing to the new arrivals, so I tended to the women alone. I did not even have the assistance of the young apothecary, Peter Lambert, who was busy with the others preparing salves and poultices in vast quantities. When I had made the last of the women comfortable, I walked back through to the two main wards, which were filling up fast.
    It was a scene from a nightmare. I had never seen so many injured men in my life. Instead of two parallel rows of beds, well spaced, arranged along the two long walls of the ward, there were now four rows, the two outer ones infilled with straw pallets on the floor and two more rows of pallets down the centre of the room. Men were still being carried in and deposited on these. I realised that we were fortunate it was summer, for there would not have been enough blankets in the entire hospital to cover them. As it was, there were no pillows or cushions for their heads. They simply lay where they were put down, on the lumpy straw palliasses which the hospital servants had stayed up all night to make.
    I walked over to my father, who was talking to the mistress of the nurses. She was a formidable woman of ample girth and iron will, but she was wringing her hands now, with tears in her eyes.
    ‘Dr Alvarez, we cannot care for so many,’ she said. ‘I have not nurses enough even to wash their faces. If you expect us to change dressings or clean wounds, it cannot be done.’
    ‘There is nowhere else for them to go, Mistress Higson,’ he said. ‘St Thomas’s is also full. We will all do as much as we can, and we will ask in the neighbourhood whether any of the goodwives can lend assistance.’
    ‘I cannot have strangers interfering,’ she objected. ‘They will do more harm than good. Of that you may be sure.’
    I left them to it and walked down to the far end of the ward to begin checking the patients. It was a sickening business. I had studied under my father since childhood and had worked as his assistant in the hospital for almost four years now, so I was accustomed to the grim sights a physician encounters every day. Yet I had never seen anything like this. It was the stench of festering wounds that struck me first, so that I found myself gagging. And the whole ward was filled with a low moaning, like a storm wind,