Flint and Roses (37 page)

And she was still puzzled, still half offended when we met at Tarn Edge a few days before the event, the only afternoon, it seemed, when Aunt Verity could hope to gather her family together under her own roof, Caroline having only that much time to spare and Georgiana being quite determined, no matter what other claims her husband might have on his time, to go over to Galton for the hunting. But even when we were all assembled and had received our gifts, somewhat in advance, from the lavish Barforth tree, our menfolk were called away from us one by one, Giles to a human confinement, Matthew Chard to an equine complication, Nicholas to his combing sheds, where a group of hand-combers were showing every sign of ill-will towards his property. His father went off to assist him, Blaize to see the fun, leaving us with no male company but the infants Dominic and Noel Chard, installed in lonely state in what had been Caroline's nursery, and the infant Gervase Barforth who, carried downstairs by his mother, was tickled and tossed about by her for a while as if he'd been a puppy and then carelessly abandoned on the edge of a sofa, to be rescued by Aunt Verity.

‘Poor little soul,' she said. ‘You may leave him at Listonby with me, Georgiana, when you go over to Galton, you know. I shall be staying with Caroline until the New Year and would enjoy having my three grandchildren all together.'

But, glancing across at her son settled comfortably in his grandmother's arms—remembering his existence perhaps— Georgiana suddenly clapped her hands in delight and shook her head.

‘Do look at the firelight on his hair. I told you, did I not, that it would be red, and so it is—red as a carrot at the moment, but it will darken, just like me and Perry. Oh yes, he is a wild, red Clevedon, that one, there is no mistaking it.‘

We saw in the New Year with my mother, who, still saddened by the premature decay of her admirers, talked of returning to France now that it was safe again, the new Republic in fact being destined to fall an early victim to a second Bonaparte, a wily gentleman who, after spending some years of exile in London, would before long win election to the presidency and, like his Uncle Napoleon before him, soon set about the business of making himself a king.

‘I think this new France will suit me,' she said, ‘for these political adventurers understand the value of gaiety.'

But somehow her journey was never made, only half planned, half prepared, abandoned a dozen times, so that she was with me on the May afternoon that Giles came unexpectedly into the hall, letting the door slam shut behind him, and, when I went out to meet him, said quickly, ‘Don't touch me.'

‘Giles—?'

‘Let me wash my hands first. I'll be with you presently.'

And, as he hurried up the stairs, he called out, ‘I have sent a message to Mayor Agbrigg, asking him to call. He should be here almost at once.'

‘There is trouble,' my mother said. ‘One can always feel it. I shall leave you. Faith. I have little talent for trouble and would only be in the way.'

Mayor Agbrigg came and spent an hour with Giles behind a locked study door.

‘It is nothing,' Giles said to me. ‘I must go out again.'

‘It is nothing,' he said much later on his return. But, when he had scrubbed himself and changed his linen—stowing his dirty linen away, I noticed, in his laboratory at the back of the house—I stood in front of him and demanded, ‘Tell me. I am not a child. I must know.'

‘There may be nothing to know,' he said, walking away from me, making the brandy-glass in his hand a barrier between us. ‘Dr. Overdale is sure I am mistaken, and Dr. Blackstone has called me a dramatic fool. I hope they may be right. I believe I have seen a case of cholera in Simon Street.'

‘But—Giles—there is always fever, surely, in Simon Street?'

‘Yes, indeed. Typhus, typhoid, scarlet—any kind of fever you would care to name, and some that have no names at all. You may find them all in Simon Street, any day of the week. I said cholera, Faith, not fever.'

‘But you are not sure.'

‘I saw it ten years ago in a London hospital. This seems, the same. But no, I am not sure, because I want to be wrong.'

‘And Dr. Overdale?'

‘He has seen it too. He is an older man and he remembers the epidemic of 1831. He wants me to be wrong so badly that he is insisting upon it, while Dr. Blackstone, who is even older, would like me confined to a madhouse. He takes the common view—as you did—that there is always something amiss in Simon Street.'

‘What can you do, Giles?'

‘Go back there,' he said, ‘in the morning and see how far it has spread.'

Mayor Agbrigg called again, late that night, and, as they sat at my fireside drinking brandy, silence thick all about them, I said, ‘What is cholera?'

‘I don't know,' Giles answered, his eyes on his glass, his face in shadow. ‘Nobody knows.'

‘But we have had it before?'

‘Oh yes. Our troops found it in India, thirty years ago. Then it appeared in Russia and spread like the plague, which is what they called it at first. So many peasants died in Eastern Europe that for a time they believed the aristocrats were poisoning them, thinning them out so they'd be easier to govern, and there was nearly a revolution. It moved west, until every city of any size had it, and in thirty-one it came to London and killed eight thousand people there—sixty thousand, they say, in England as a whole. God knows how many really died. They didn't know what caused it, or how to treat it, and we still don't. Like everything else, it takes the very old and the very young to begin with, the under-nourished and the weak—the easy pickings. It lives on dirt, breeds in rotting garbage heaps and open sewers such as you can find so easily in better places than Simon Street. And when it gathers strength it seems to take anybody who gets in its way. I don't know, Faith. Some say it comes from the inhalation of bad air. Some say it comes from the drinking of water that has been fouled by excrement, and we've plenty of that in Cullingford. It involves massive vomiting; the bowels open and the body can retain nothing. If it lasted long enough, the patient would starve to death. But it's quick, and exceedingly filthy. We're at the beginning of May. If it
is
the cholera, then you should pray for a cool summer.'

‘Aye,' Mayor Agbrigg said, ‘And what can I do for you, lad—if it is the cholera? I'll take the council by the scruff of its neck for you, not that I'll need to, for they're old enough to remember the last time, same as I am. What can we do?'

Giles shrugged, refilled the Mayor's glass and his own.

‘You can educate them to stop drinking cess-water in Simon Street and provide them with water they can drink.'

‘That I can. But tomorrow morning, lad—what then?'

‘Chloride of lime,' he said slowly, his eyes still on the warmly swirling brandy. ‘The houses in the stricken areas should be limewashed. You could get them to shift the dung-heaps, though God knows where they'll put them. They burned barrels of tar and vinegar, I believe, in the streets the last time. I don't know if it helps, other than to make people feel that something is being done.'

‘I'll see to it, lad.'

And when Mayor Agbrigg had gone, leaving Giles still sitting by the fireside, I slipped my hand in his and asked him, ‘Are you afraid?'

‘Of course. If I could choose between going back to Simon Street tomorrow morning or taking the London train tonight with you, then I'd take the train.'

‘I'd come with you, Giles, gladly.'

‘I know,' he said, smiling, that great air of quietness still about him. ‘What a pity there is no choice.'

He left early the next morning, a beautiful pink and blue day, returning late in the afternoon, the distance he placed between us confirming my fears. In the same family in Simon Street one child had died, three others were ailing; also the woman next door and two more across the street, six people in the same bed next door to that, so that even Dr. Blackstone was in doubt no longer.

‘I am on my way to the Infirmary,' he said. ‘Every bed will be needed, and so I must send home—or turn out—as many as I can.'

And Prudence, who had come to spend the evening with me, said quietly, ‘I'll come with you.'

‘My dear, you'll do no such thing.'

‘But I shall. Do be sensible, Giles. Not one of your nurses will remain when they know what is coming, or the ones who do will be too drunk to be of service. Gallantry is all very well, but you will need every pair of hands you can muster, and I shall oblige you to take mine.'

‘And mine,' I added, with not the least expectation in the world of being refused, since he had never refused, me anything before, until he said in a voice that was quite strange to me. ‘I think not. In fact I absolutely forbid it.'

‘My goodness!' I told him, half laughing. ‘Then I shall just have to disobey.'

‘No—no. You will do just as I tell you.'

‘You must decide that between you,' Prudence said calmly, beginning to fasten her bonnet. ‘But you have no authority to forbid me. Only mamma may do that, and I am well able to manage her. I may come and go as I please unless she denies it, and there is every likelihood that she will bolt all the way to France and leave me with Miss Mayfield, who is even easier to handle.'

‘I cannot take you to a source of danger, Prudence.'

‘You cannot stop me. You must make the best of it.'

But in my case he was adamant. ‘You are my wife,' he said much later that night, when I had reasoned and pleaded and threatened to no avail. ‘The law allows me absolute authority over you and I shall exercise it.'

‘Good heavens, Giles! I had no idea you could be so pompous. You can hardly lock me up. Not even my father ever threatened me with that.'

Yet, when I persisted, finding it unthinkable that I should not be allowed to share his burden, he said simply, ‘Help me, Faith.'

‘But that is what I want to do.'

‘Then do it. I am no hero, Faith, I am uncertain and afraid, and in these next weeks or months, or however long it may be, I shall very likely grow more afraid and extremely tired. I have to know that my wife is safe, or as safe as you can be in these circumstances. I cannot function otherwise. I have never asked you for anything before. I am asking you now for this. Help me.'

And there was nothing more for the moment that I could say.

I remained at our fireside, fretting, through those early summer days, painful with anxiety, as frantic for escape—to get to his side—as a caged bird. Many times I had wanted to make a sacrifice on his behalf, to perform some huge act of courage for his sake in proof of my devotion and gratitude, and, now that it had come to me, this tame cowering in the safety of my chimney corner was harder than any ordeal I had imagined.

‘Dear God, there must be something I can do, Giles. I do believe, sometimes, that I am going mad.'

And his answer was always the same. ‘I need you now, just as you are. I have asked you to help me. Am I asking too much?'

Within days, it seemed, the Infirmary was overflowing, the vagrants and whores, the lost children of the Simon Street district being picked up nightly in their dozens, drunk and terrified and vomiting their lives away, while in the alleys, the damp, befouled anthills my father had created, every house had its tragedy, the stench of burning tar and vinegar heavy on the air, the stench of fear threaded evilly through it. From one of those back streets alone, seventy-two carts of manure, animal and human, were removed by Mayor Agbrigg's volunteers, the half-rotted carcasses of dogs and cats fished up from the streams and those festering waste-land pools where Simon Street commonly drew its water. Chloride of lime was issued free of charge by a terrified Corporation, aware at last of the marriage between dirt and disease, too late—for those who were to die—to effect its separation.

No one now could really cleanse those abominable hovels, where windows, pasted or boarded up to exclude winter draughts and summer flies, converted each overcrowded room into a stinking oven. No one could even persuade those who lived therein to give up their dead for burial before it suited them, the Simon Street custom of laying out adult corpses on what could be the family's only bed, infant corpses on the kitchen table, continuing to be observed, partly from the habitual delay in scraping together the funeral expenses, partly because undertakers and grave-diggers were increasingly unable to cope.

The illness, as Giles had told us, struck swiftly and was just as swiftly over. A child could be playing in the streets one morning, splashing happily in the sewage channels, and could be dead the same evening. A man could walk briskly to his employment, whistling in the hazy summer dawn, and be on his knees in a retching, malodorous agony in the mill yard by breakfast-time. Yet the Barforth men, the Hobhouse men, the spare, grey-faced Mr. Oldroyd of Fieldhead, continued to turn on their engines at five o'clock every morning, to stand at their gates, watch in hand, to admit the punctual and to lock out the latecomers, continued to patrol their weaving sheds and spinning sheds and combing sheds, admitting no reason why their production targets should not be met. The Piece Hall continued to open its doors for the Thursday market-day, the ladies of Cullingford, even, to continue with their tea-parties, feeling this infection of the bowels—somewhat indelicate in itself, even had it not been so lethal—to be largely a matter for Simon Street, until a parlourmaid of the Battershaws collapsed with a horrific clattering of tea-time china and silver, a Hobhouse coachman and then a Hobhouse child began to vomit and excrete and shake without hope of control; at which moment Cullingford began to close its doors.

Prudence moved in with me, my mother, who could not prevent her attendance at the Infirmary, refusing to expose her own person to the ‘miasmatic vapours' Prudence might well carry into her house. I received a firmly penned note from my sister Celia requesting me neither to call upon her nor to answer her letter until the danger of contamination should be over. ‘You are unable to avoid it,' she wrote. ‘But I know you will have consideration for those of us who may.' Caroline remained at Listonby. Uncle Joel and Aunt Verity were already in Bournemouth and wisely chose to stay there. But Aunt Hannah, who did not approve of hospitals, was among the first to march up the cobbled slope of Sheepgate to the rickety converted dwelling house we called the Infirmary and, finding, as Prudence had warned, that such nurses as were available had either taken to the gin-bottle or run away, promptly rolled up her sleeves, donned an apron and set about the boiling of fouled bed-linen, the preparation of turpentine compresses, the constant washing and even the consoling of the dying.