“It sounds like you want to put him to work,” says Gustine, growing increasingly apprehensive. “He is only four months old.”
“He will work, in a manner of speaking,” argues Henry, “I will study him for the good of all mankind. And with me he will be well fed, well clothed, treated as the most valuable experiment in my laboratory. Consider it. His life would certainly be better than anything you could provide.”
His words go straight to her heart. In giving her what she wants, he intends to take everything. “But he is all I have,” she says woefully, feeling her arms empty and aching.
“You will not have him long if you continue to be selfish,” replies Henry, matter-of-factly.
There it is again: the same casual cruelty that made her hesitate to confide in him the other night. She sees her child in Dr. Chiver’s house, hooked up to wires and prodded with needles. Would his life be worth anything, forced to live like that?
“Let me think about it,” Gustine responds, reaching to take back her child.
Instinctively, Henry tightens his grip. “And of course, I will recompense you handsomely,” he says quickly, trying to read her impassive face. “What do you say?”
“I said I’d think about it,” Gustine answers, blushing hotly. “Now give him to me.”
Henry steps back, disconcerted at her vehemence. Why does she set herself against him, when he aims to help her? He is overcome with the most intense desire to shove her hard to the ground and just run across the field, run with this miraculous baby and never look back. She gave him this child—how dare she now demand it returned? Well, he won’t let it go. He won’t.
“Be careful!” Gustine yells. “You’re crushing him!”
Henry sees he has the child clasped so tightly to his chest, the fragile heart is forced to beat sideways. God, what has come over him?
“There is no need to shout,” Henry says, thrusting the howling baby back at her. “I was merely trying to benefit all involved.”
“Please speak no more of it,” says Gustine, practically in tears herself. Oh God, baby—she presses his hot cheek to hers—I almost lost you.
“Of course not, if it distresses you.”
They stand in silence for some time, Henry choking back his rage, Gustine staring off toward the white castle. She feels the sharp edge of Henry’s invitation like a viper in her pocket. And yet. There is a lovely castle in the distance. Here is a hand-packed picnic. He has given a day of his life to please her, shown her riches she’d never dreamed imaginable.
Henry silently tosses the chicken carcass that would have made enough soup to feed Gustine and the baby for a week, finishes her untouched sherry, and packs up the plates. She cradles the baby while he shakes out and neatly folds the yellow plaid lap robe, then both walk dully back to the carriage. This is a miserable ending to a picnic, Gustine thinks, remembering her trembling excitement on the moor only hours ago. She pulls her shawl more tightly around her. It is nearly seventy degrees, but to her, winter has arrived.
Henry cracks his whip and the team jolts forward. Let her slump against the side of the carriage, as far away as she can get; her petulance is wasted upon him. He cuts through the meadow to bypass wretched Hylton Castle and rejoin the Southwick Lane farther along. There is only stubble in the meadow and a scattering of trees, their branches hopping with songbirds misled by the warm weather. Henry’s thoughts are dark. It has been the most insane of autumns—snowing one day, Indian summer hot the next. All of God’s creatures, not only these maniacally twittering songbirds, over-reproduced in the long warm spell, and now that the first frost has come are beginning slowly to starve. There is not enough food to appease the hordes of squirrels, deer, rats, Wearside frogs, and hunger is thinning the ranks. And as with the animal kingdom, so it goes with people. Henry is not surprised disease has come to this overcrowded, filthy town. He knows Nature, like some dissolute Roman empress, loves to binge and purge, every so often tickling the back of her throat with a feather of famine or typhus or cholera morbus.
He is just about to rejoin the main road taking them back to town when from the corner of his eye he spots a structure sitting alone in the middle of the uncleared field. Impulsively, he steers the horses toward it, marveling more and more the closer they come. How very strange. It is a tall marble temple built upon a shallow incline and guarded by an iron gate, the door to which stands open an inch or two. Above the temple grows a single plane tree, spreading its naked branches to shade those who have no more need of shade. The red earth around it looks churned and fresh-trampled as if just quit of a crowd. How odd, thinks Henry. The resemblance is uncanny.
“Why are we stopping?” asks Gustine dully.
“It is a mausoleum,” replies Henry. “Here in the middle of nowhere.”
“I’ve had enough death,” says Gustine, turning away. “Keep going.”
But Henry drops the horses’ lead and stares, transfixed. With the plane tree shadowing the false Greek temple, and the stones scattered about like ruined columns of a fallen city, this place could have come directly from one of his anatomy texts; all it lacks is an erect skeleton contemplating its own mortality. So isolated, this is surely the abandoned grave site of some old noble family that has moved its dead onto more fashionable pastures, but even knowing that, Henry cannot shake the sensation it is supposed to mean more. Why should we come across a page of my Albinus here in the English countryside? thinks he. What am I to make of this? All around the door, the earth is fresh-trod and the gate has been left half-open. Someone has been laid here since the last rain, which means a body no more than three days old. Have I been led here for a purpose? he wonders, stepping out of the carriage as if in a trance and walking toward the crypt.
“Dr. Chiver,” calls Gustine. “Please take me home.”
There is a Latin epitaph etched into the marble pediment, darkened into readability by the pollen from the tree above. Et in Arcadia Ego; I, Too, Am in Arcadia. Death follows me no matter where I go, thinks Henry, even here to this idyllic place. But I could turn away. Even if Death lays a trail of bread crumbs, I do not have to follow it. Behind him, Gustine sits miserably in the carriage. I should go back to the horses and drive her away from here, he thinks. But the tracks are so fresh, and the gate is ajar, beckoning, as if commanding him to come forward. This is her fault, he thinks irrationally. It was in her power to return me to the living; instead, she has forced me back among the dead.
He steps through the gate, crushing acorns deep into the mud. Yes, people have certainly been here. Many sets of footprints, a procession maybe; large feet, small, even the tracks of children. The person laid inside must have been highly regarded, a lord or a lady certainly, to command such a crowd and such a mausoleum. He will be no different on the inside, though, no matter how well bred; simply another map for his students, another page of notes, another few jars of floating organs.
“Please, don’t go inside!” Gustine shouts.
The ironbound door squeals upon its hinges as he pushes it open and slowly steps into the mausoleum. The old greed is upon him again; he feels as he did opening the door on William Burke smirking at him, offering Mary Paterson no more than three hours dead, so fresh he had to have her. As he did only moments ago, wanting to strike Gustine and make off with the child as if he were some depraved highway robber. Henry is losing control, and it scares him. Becoming involved with this girl who draws bodies to her like a lodestone, risking exposure by breaking into houses. Now pillaging a grave of God only knows who, because the crypt reminds him of his anatomy book. Turn back now, he commands himself. Before it is too late. But of course he does not.
Et in Arcadia Ego. I, Too, Am in Arcadia. Let us see who the procession of footprints laid to rest, who was mourned inside this facsimile of Albinus, who was left for Henry to find. He hesitates in the semidarkness, reaching out to take what belongs to him. Does his troubled conscience conjure that sudden accusing smell of cheap whiskey like static electricity
married to the very dust motes? Or does his fevered mind misgive?
In the carriage, Gustine slumps against the door and draws her child close. She can just make out the doctor’s baffled shadow, as he turns around and around, groping blindly, alone inside the empty tomb.
XI
BOARD OF HEALTH
Last night, while Gustine wept herself to sleep and Henry brooded before the fire, someone nailed a ninety-sixth thesis to the front door of the Sunderland Corn Exchange. Hammered rudely over the medical exhortations—“Do Not Drink, Incontinence Is a Friend to Cholera Morbus”; and “Avoid Pickled Pork, Especially at Dinner”—the resistance flyer sported a noblewoman dressed in the overwrought mode of last century, her wig teased to celestial heights, her skirt barely contained by the poster’s frugal margins. We should more properly say the flyer depicted half a noble-woman, for only her left side enjoyed the excesses of fashion. Her right side was another creature indeed: from the roots of her hair and the seams of her dress, a hideous skeleton emerged clutching a spear. In great red letters, the caption read:
Cholera Morbus:
Death Accusing the Rich of Tyranny.
They are killing the Poor, a Duty
Which belongs to Him.
Now this morning, if you look down High Street, Death Accuses the Rich as far as the eye can see. The skeleton shakes his spear into the litigious window of Odgen and Gray, Attorneys at Law; he upbraids mammon outside the gate of Mr. Backhouse’s bank. From Place Shipping to Lamb and Co. coal owners, cholera morbus fearlessly challenges the potentates of Sunderland.
A restless crowd has gathered before the poster nailed upon the door of the Exchange, where hundreds press in to read it or have it read to them. No one knows who paid to have the posters printed or who risked prison to put them up, but you might be certain just about every poor man in the crowd wishes it had been himself; just as every poor woman dependent on his wages gives thanks it was not. But why should a crowd have gathered around this particular sign when, as we noted, they litter all of High Street? Let’s just say if a perverse meteor took a fancy to strike the Corn Exchange today, the widows woefully picking through the ruins would number among the wealthiest in Sunderland. The entire social register has gathered inside; and not only the town’s prominent merchants and shipowners, but even our neighborhood’s offering to the House of Lords, the Marquis of Londonderry. As luck would have it, these worthies have come together to contend and vote over the exact theme posted upon the Exchange door: the Board of Health, chaired by Dr. Daun, His Majesty’s emissary from London, has called a meeting to address the cholera morbus.
“Please let me through,” commands an unshaven Dr. Henry Chiver, holding his breath against the stench of the crowd. “I have business here.”
“He has business here,” one man mocks. “They’re killin’ us too slowly, so a meeting’s been called to speed up the poisoning!”
A young man, no older than twenty, lanky and long-faced, elbows Henry in the ribs. “Hey there, mister, I wrote a song. Listen up, ye might learn somethin’!” Henry tries to back away, but no matter which way he moves, he finds himself walled in by corduroy and chintz. The grinning young man elbows himself a space and bellows loudly in a thick East End accent:
My sinkers! We’re all in a fine hobble now,
Since the cholera com to our river
Aw wadn’t hae car’d if ’twas ought that one knew
But the outlandish name maks one all shiver!
Our doctors are all in a deuce of a way
And some says they’ve Clannied to wrong us;
But I think we’ll all curse the Daun o’ that day
The block-headed Board com amang us!
In time to his song, he improvises a shuffling dance, laughing oafishly and slapping his bony knees. With a cheer, his compatriots fling pennies at him, calling for more verses.
“What d’ye say, sir?” he bows, holding out his cap to Henry. “Spare a penny for a poor daft singer?”
“Get out of my way,” Henry cries, digging in his shoulder and tunneling toward the Exchange entrance. A nervous-looking porter cracks the door and lets him squeeze through. We’ve already sent word to the constables, sir, the porter announces. They should be here any minute.
Down the hall, Henry squeezes through a tight corridor of silk and brushed wool, only slightly less odoriferous than the throng on the street. He spots his uncle across the mobbed room, seated near the podium, where Death (as he Accuses the Rich) is being taken down a peg by a furious Dr. Daun.
“This is the response to our sanitation bulletins,” shouts the chairman, shaking a copy of the offending poster, ripped from his own front door this morning. “Suspicion and subversion! We are failing to convince them of our seriousness.”
“There you are,” says Dr. Clanny when Henry at last reaches him and takes up perch on his uncle’s armrest. He sizes up his nephew’s ragged cheek and frowns. “I came round to your house yesterday but you weren’t home.”
“Went for a drive in the country,” Henry replies evasively. “I needed some air.”
“We could have used you. Eight more cases yesterday.”
“I am sorry,” Henry apologizes, and quickly changes the subject. “What have I missed?”
“Not much,” Clanny informs him over the chairman’s harangue. “Reading of the last minutes. Roll call. Seems everyone with more than five pounds to his name is here today.”
Henry looks out upon the roiling sea of powdered wigs and romantic spit curls, the tightly trousered leg chafing against the stolid knickered one. Last century is always depressingly in attendance at meetings like this, and while Henry might wax poetic over candlelit theatres or antique furniture, his appreciation for the past does not extend to its fashions. The musty, confining old clothes trap disease like pig blankets, while the false hair breeds biting fleas and lice. Against the suffocating heat, a few men have de-wigged, and fan their flushed red faces. Score one for the old-fashioned: the modern men sweat unrelieved.
“This poster is positive proof our message is being ignored,” shouts Daun, crumbling Death into a tight ball and heaving him at the floor. “If we cannot convince the poor that cholera walks among them, they will never protect themselves! And if they don’t protect themselves, we are done for.”
In the crowd, Henry recognizes many familiar faces from his early days in Sunderland when he was more frequently invited to dinner. Mr. Thomas Brunton, proud owner of a lime kiln, shipyard, and colliery, is here at the side of his friend Mr. William Chaytor, who escorted Audrey from the theatre the night Henry attended Jack Crawford. Old Mr. Dixon (owner of Gustine’s pottery) slumps in the corner, looking ready to faint from the heat, while his son and heir has given up and sits cross-legged on the floor. In a plush chair just on the other side of the podium, languid Charles William III, the Marquis of Londonderry, observes Dr. Daun as if the chairman were one of those fascinatingly horrid animalculae beneath a microscope. The Marquis’ thoughtless elegance (the tight trousered style Henry prefers, the black cashmere frock coat, the velvet cravat) bespeaks his income (or at least that of his wife) as clearly as the well-worn uniform of the chairman announces him to be an army surgeon on half-pay.
“I am confused, Doctor.” John Hepple, Albion and British Ship Insurance, takes the floor. “If this disease is so damned contagious, why haven’t I got it? Or you? Or Lord Londonderry there? Our grandparents, God rest their souls, many of ’em remembered the last plague, and this seems to have nothing on it. Could we not be suffering with plain old English cholera, or the summer diarrhea?”
Dr. Kell, surgeon to the 82nd Reserve Regiment, and the only one in the room who has any previous experience at all with the cholera, rises to address the question. This gentleman saw what havoc an epidemic wreaked on the troops in Jessore and wasted no time locking down the garrison as tight as a convent.
“Diseases have their nature,” says Kell, “but they are deeply rooted in the nature of man.
This particular disease seems to shun the healthy and upright in favor of those who are dissolute and wicked. The very old and very young seem to be especially adversely affected, yet I have also known it to take out soldiers in their prime. That said, having treated the disease, here and abroad, I cannot deny that what we have in Sunderland is the same cholera that has devastated the Continent. While the symptoms are similar to summer diarrhea, vomiting, cramping, loose stool,” says Kell, warming to the subject, “cholera morbus is far more deadly—it produces its own sort of rice water stool—”
“Please, please, Dr. Kell,” demands Lord Londonderry, putting up his hand impatiently. “As fascinating as I find this discussion of bowel movements, I insist we stick to the topic at hand. We are here to discuss the Quarantine and how soon we might see it lifted.”
“Thank you, Lord Londonderry, for recalling our attention,” says Daun starchily. “As most of you know, on the recommendation of our Board of Health, His Majesty has just sent a man-o’-war to patrol the harbour and enforce a second Quarantine. It has been difficult waiting fifteen days to receive imports, and we know it will be a far greater hardship on the port businesses to wait another fifteen days to export their goods, but in light of the contagiousness of this disease—”
“Wait a minute!” shouts John Harkas, sawmill owner. “My doctor told me if everyone would just stay away from oysters and cucumbers we wouldn’t number a case among us.”
“There is a great debate on the contagiousness of the disease, Mr. Harkas,” answers the chairman. “Our medical community is split on whether it was imported or generated on local soil. Some believe it can be transmitted from person to person and thus we need the Quarantine; others that we take it straight from the atmosphere, and no Quarantine can help.”