The two cramped, crowded rooms we found ourselves in were probably unbearably hot in the summer and cold in the winter. The wind howled through two small windows in the first chamber. They had probably never had any plaster in them, just a frame with material for blinds and perhaps some shutter-planks. The shutters were long gone, probably burned for winter fuel, and the ragged flaps which were all that remained of the blinds did little to keep out the gale's blast, letting wind and rain billow in.
In this room ten or more people, from babes-in-arms to shrunken ancients, huddled on the floor and a single pallet bed. Their hollow eyes watched as we were ushered quickly towards the room beyond by the crippled waif who'd brought us to this midden-rack. We entered this next chamber by pushing through a tattered fabric door-covering. Behind us, the people muttered to each other with a harsh, lisping sound that might have been a native dialect or a foreign language.
This room was darker, its shutters just as absent as in the room before but its windows covered with the bellying forms of coats or jackets pinned across the frames. Rain had collected in the sodden fabric of the garments before flowing in little rivulets from their bottom edges down the stained plaster of the walls to the floor, where it had pooled and spread.
The floor was curiously sloped and ridged. We were in one of those extra storeys that are added to already cheaply built tenements by builders, landlords and residents who value economy above safety. There was a slow groaning noise from the walls and a sharp cracking, snapping noise from overhead. Water leaked from the sagging ceiling in a handful of places, dripping to the grimy, strawcovered floor.
A thick-set, wild-haired woman in a gruesomely filthy dress greeted the Doctor with much wailing and crying and hoarse, foreign-sounding words and led her through a press of dark, foul-smelling bodies to a low bed set against the far end of the room beneath a bowed wall whose lathe showed through straw-hung lumps of plaster. Something scuttled away along the wall and disappeared into a long crack near the ceiling.
"How long has she been like this?" I heard the Doctor ask, kneeling by the lamp-lit bed and opening her bag. I edged forward, to see a thin girl dressed in rags lying on the bed, her face grey, her thin dark hair plastered to her forehead, her eyes bulging behind her tremulous, flickering eyelids while her breath came in quick, shallow gasps. Her whole body shook and quivered on the bed and her head twitched and her neck muscles spasmed continually.
"Oh, I don't know!" wailed the woman in the dirty gown who had greeted the Doctor. Under the unwashed scent she smelled of something sickly sweet. She sat down heavily on a torn straw cushion by the bed, making it bulge. She elbowed a few of the other people around her out of the way and put her head in her hands while the Doctor felt the sick child's forehead and pulled one of her eyelids open. "All day, maybe, Doctor. I don't know."
"Three days," said a slight child standing near the head of the bed, her arms clamped round the thin frame of the crippled one who'd brought us here.
The Doctor looked at her. "You're…?’
"Anowir," the girl replied. She nodded at the slightly older girl on the bed. "Zea is my sister."
"Oh no, not three days, not my poor dear girl!" the woman on the straw cushion said, rocking back and forth and shaking her head without looking up. "No, no, no."
"We wanted to send for you before now," Anowir said, looking from the wild-haired woman to the stricken face of the crippled girl she was holding and who was holding her, "but-"
"Oh no, no, no," the fat woman wailed from behind her hands. Some of the children whispered to each other, in the same tongue we'd heard in the outer room. The thick-set woman ran her grubby fingers through her unkempt hair.
"Anowir," the Doctor said in a kindly fashion to the girl holding the crippled child, "can you and some of your brothers and sisters go down to the docks as fast as you can and find an ice merchant? Fetch some ice. It doesn't have to be in first-quality blocks, crushed is fine, in fact it's best. Here." The Doctor reached into her purse and counted out some coins. "How many want to go?" she asked, looking round the host of mostly young, tearful faces.
Quickly a number was settled on and she gave them a coin each. This struck me as far too much for ice at this point in the season, but the Doctor is unworldly in these matters. "You may keep any change," she told the suddenly eagerlooking children, "but you must each bring all you can carry. Apart from anything else," she said, smiling, "it'll help weigh you down in that gale outside and stop you blowing away. Now, go!"
The room suddenly emptied and only the sick child on the bed, the fat woman on the cushion — whom I took to be the invalid's mother — and the Doctor and I were left. Some of the people in the outer room came to peer through the tattered door-cloth, but the Doctor told them to keep away.
Then she turned to the wild-haired woman. "You must tell me the truth, Mrs Elund," she said. She nodded to me to open her bag while she pulled the sick child further up the bed and then had me bunch the straw mattress up underneath her back and head. As I knelt to this, I could feel the heat coming off the girl's fevered skin. "Has she been like this for three days?"
"Three, two, four.. who knows!" wailed the wildhaired woman. "All I know is my precious daughter is dying! She's going to die! Oh, Doctor, help her! Help us all, for no one else will!" The thick-set woman suddenly threw herself, with some awkwardness, off the cushion and on to the floor, burying her head in the folds of the Doctor's cloak even as the Doctor was unfastening the garment and trying to free herself from it.
"I'll do what I can, Mrs Elund," the Doctor said, and then looked at me as she let the cloak fall off her shoulders and the girl on the bed started to splutter and cough. "Oelph, we'll need that cushion, too."
Mrs Elund sat up and looked round. "That's mine!" she cried as I gathered up the burst cushion and stuffed it behind the sick girl's head while the Doctor held her upright. "Where am I to sit? I've given up my bed for her already!"
"You must find somewhere else," the Doctor told her. She reached down and pulled up the girl's thin dress. I looked away as she examined the child's mid-parts, which appeared inflamed.
The Doctor bent closer, rearranging the child's legs and taking some instrument from her bag. After a while she put the girl's legs back together and pulled the patient's dress and skirts back down. She busied herself with the child's eyes and mouth and nose, and held her wrist for a while, eyes closed. There was silence in the room save for the noises of the storm and the occasional sniffle from Mrs Elund, who had settled on the floor with the Doctor's cape wrapped half around her. I had the distinct impression the Doctor was trying to control a desire to shout and scream.
"The money for the song school," the Doctor said tersely. "If I went to the school now, do you think they would tell me it had been spent there on Zea's lessons?"
"Oh, Doctor, we're a poor family!" the wild-haired woman said, putting her face in her hands again. "I can't watch what they all do! I can't keep watch on what she does with the money I give her! She does what she wants to do, that one, I tell you! Oh, save her, Doctor! Please save her!"
The Doctor shifted her position where she knelt and reached in under the bed. She pulled out a couple of fat clays, one stoppered, one not. She sniffed the empty clay and shook the stoppered one. It sloshed. Mrs Elund looked up, her eyes wide. She swallowed. I caught a whiff from the clay. The smell was the same as that on Mrs Elund's breath. The Doctor looked at the other woman over the top of the empty clay. "How long has Zea known men, Mrs Elund?" the Doctor asked, replacing the clays under the bed.