“I can’t seem to get him warm,” Gustine says.
“Let him rest near the fire,” Henry commands. “He needs to thaw out.”
He pours himself a glass of brandy and sets it on the library table next to his barely touched dinner of this afternoon. To his surprise, the dress lodger reaches for his glass and throws it back like a professional.
“That’s enough,” he says, taking the empty glass from her. “I don’t like to see you like this.”
She sits with one hand in her lap and the other on the baby’s foot, massaging it mindlessly. Her muddy hair hangs over her face, so that he has to lean down to see her. He could never have imagined her like this: disheveled and drunk like some abandoned dock whore. He finds it very disconcerting.
“So, Gustine,” Henry says at last to break what is becoming an awkward silence. “Have you had a change of heart?”
“I have,” Gustine whispers.
“Then you would like for me to keep and study this child?”
“Yes.” Again whispered.
“You’ve made the right choice,” he says. Poor miserable girl, she is crying into her lap, made more upset, certainly, by all the whiskey she’s consumed. She needn’t have done this to herself, Henry thinks; it’s not as if he’s a monster. He will be good to the child and raise it up almost like one of his own.
“Now please, you must let me give you something in return,” he says, digging into his pocket. “How much do you want?”
At his question, Gustine’s head comes up proudly. She has been rehearsing this speech for the past hour, wandering from pub to pub, searching for the courage to come here. She feels the strange thickness of whiskey on her tongue and hears her own words from far away.
“I want no money from you, only an exchange of services,” Gustine starts, and almost immediately falters. “I have come to make you an offer, Dr. Chiver. You may take my baby and keep him, but let me be close by, to watch over him and soothe him when he is frightened. Take me as a maid in your house. I will cook for you; I will clean and sew. I have worked a long time in the factory, so I have not mastered all the household skills, but I am a hard worker and I will learn. My potter collapsed today—” Her voice breaks with emotion, but she cannot stop before she’s gotten everything out.
“And the Eye has tried to kill my child. I cannot go back there. I have nowhere to go, no way to support him. For his sake, I will give you my baby, but please don’t ask me to part from him. Take me too, so that we may be together, at least until the time when he—I know you are to be married, and I swear to make a diligent and obedient maid to your new wife.”
Henry has been listening in growing alarm. To even consider having her in the same house with Audrey—a street prostitute who has made her life picking through coffins for him—no, no, it is too much. He stares down at the half-naked, drunk young girl, holding her baby up to him like a sacrifice to the pagan gods, and shudders in revulsion. Why does she ask the impossible of him?
“Dr. Chiver, please,” she begs. “After all I have done for you.”
But her appeal to his conscience serves only to make him ashamed and defensive. Henry was prepared to offer her a good sum of money for her very painful sacrifice, but this is simply too much. Of course she can go home; that miserable one-eyed old woman has no power over life and death. Could she truly know his character so ill that she would suggest the obscene arrangement of living here? She is a prostitute, after all, first and foremost; he knows what sort of services she is offering.
“I never asked your help the first time,” Henry says hotly. “In fact, I actively refused it. And as for this woman here”—he gestures toward Fos—“she needed to be removed for purposes of sanitation. Frankly, I am surprised at you, Gustine. While I know it’s impossible we should be friends, I had come to think of you with affection and respect. I had never imagined you a parasite.”
His words sting her far more deeply than he knows. She would never, never have come expecting charity from him. She has always expected to work, she knows no other life. What has she done to make him treat her this way?
“Oh, Gustine. Don’t cry,” he says, exasperated, as the fat tears she tries to master splash upon the hearth. Look at her, on her knees, suppliant, miserable. She is drunk, poor thing, and brokenhearted at the loss of her child. He is stronger than she, after all; he shouldn’t be so harsh.
“Gustine.” He reaches out hesitantly and strokes her matted hair. She has drunk so much even her tears smell of whiskey. He wipes them away with the back of his hand, feeling them burn, like molten drops of snow.
Like shall cure like. Henry hears the words of his uncle Clanny as clearly as he hears Dr. Knox saying to them at Surgeons’ Square, It is perfectly natural to feel as you do. This perfect whore, so freshly dead. It is better to acknowledge the lust than to be so consumed by it you sneak in one night and enact something perverse. Why is he thinking about this now? Henry tries to shake off the memories of two years ago, the night they laid Mary Paterson beneath her yellow pane of whiskey. But all he can smell is Gustine’s tears, sweet like the taste of gin on her lips when she kissed him the night he pulled away. He had shut his eyes and tried to think of his mother, but it had been too much for him when Knox cupped the girl’s breast appreciatively, murmuring, Beautiful, isn’t it, my boy? Just beautiful. For three months, he’d had to fight his feelings for a sinful, whiskey-drowned woman with her thighs parted and her mouth open, as if daring him to take her, as he didn’t dare when last they met.
And if only he had lain with her, perhaps Burke would have passed her by. Chosen her friend Janet or one of the other broken-down Canongate whores. But because he ran away, she is here, looking up at him through her yellow eyes, accusing him. You could have had me, and kept me alive. Instead now you want me, and you cut me to pieces.
Like shall cure like. If a body wants to purge, supply it with an emetic to push the poison out faster. He tells himself this as he watches his hands, the same soft white hands that had been seared by grave dust back at the Trinity pit a month ago, reach out shakily and move her shawl. Tonight she could meet his depravity with depravity. They are both so wicked, so unnatural. And he wants her; he has wanted her for three long, whiskey-soaked months. Her skin is mud-scurfy and cracked, except where the snow has melted it into slicks. She looks at him confused and frightened by his strange behaviour, but it is why she came, is it not? To call this out in him? His soft white hands slip into the neckline of her soiled shift and peel the fabric from her shoulders. They are just as he remembered them; he sighs, rubbing his face against her mud-sweaty breasts, smearing his cheeks with her filth.
“No,” Gustine whispers. “What are you doing?”
“Mary …,” Henry breathes.
Gustine struggles. “Please, Dr. Chiver, my child …”
“He is thawing. He is thawing,” Henry murmurs, pushing the skirt of her shift higher and higher up her thighs. She is naked beneath, her legs goose-pimply around the mud, and locked tight. Why does she pretend? His soft white hands pry those lying legs apart, cracking the seal of mud between. He fumbles with the buttons on his trousers, never in his life so excited and terrified at once.
Yes. With a moan, he drives into her sump, letting himself wallow, rut like the depraved animal he is. He is where he belongs, at last, splashing himself with swill. He breathes in her hair, smelling the perfume of worms and cold earth, of rotted wood and human decay. Her tiny cunt is loamy with dirt, this little whore. Henry pounds and pounds, driving six feet deep inside her. Not yet. Not yet. He moans, and from the corner of his eye sees the baby staring at him, his heart beating like a slow blue dirge. No. Henry tears his eyes away, the terror, the excitement too great to bear. The sweet, vicious stench of whiskey. The deep peaceful feeling of suffocation. She is his fever and his cure, and he is falling. Falling. He cries, and with a shudder spends as into his own grave.
When he at last rolls off, Gustine sits up and slowly pulls her
muddy pottery shift around her. She is numb from lying awkwardly on the hearth, and she has lost the feeling in her right leg. But Henry, like a convalescent suddenly awakened from delirium, is ravenously hungry. His attention turns to his food from earlier today, the pale cold chicken breast and the gray-green artichoke. He reaches for the plate.
“Do you always eat the same meal?” she asks.
Annoyed with her observation, he pushes the food away. “I am very sorry I can’t take you on, Gustine,” he says. “It would be unspeakably wicked of me to keep a lover here while my wife was in the house. I have never been that sort of man.”
She is standing over the hearth, where, despite his proximity to the heat, her baby is still strangely cold. Henry follows her helplessly, wishing she would speak, recognize what just passed between them, even if neither meant it to be. But what, after all, can he expect from a hardened professional? She is silent and mechanical, stooping to lift her child, to brush her mussed, muddy hair from her eyes. She crosses to the door and starts down the steps, still not speaking.
“Where are you going with the baby?” he asks, surprised, trailing behind her down the steps. “You just gave him to me.”
She picks up the wet wool charity blanket she dropped on the way in and wraps it once more around the shivering child. It is too damp to be comfortable, but it will keep the worst of the snow off.
“I made a mistake,” she says.
“It’s too late,” he calls. “I have an appointment with a solicitor tomorrow and I intend to seek legal custody of that child.”
“You would take him from me? Without my consent?” she asks, stunned.
“It is for his own good,” Henry says, growing increasingly more frustrated. “Look at you: drunk, carrying him about in the snow, bringing him here to watch—” He breaks off, for she is opening the door without listening to him. “Gustine, wait!”
She turns back to him with fury in her eyes. Of course, he knows why she is angry. How stupid could he be? Henry digs in his pocket and extends her a pound note, slightly moist with perspiration. “Here, take it,” he says. “For the other … I would never cheat you.”
Looking at his extended hand, Gustine realizes that her vision, which a month ago penetrated Henry’s linen shirt down to his duplicitous flesh, now sears straight through to the bone. Gone are skin, pores, and hair, all the surface markers that make a man seem unique. Now all Gustine sees is an anonymous disarranged picket fence of bones. The doctor’s voice echoes in a funny, flapping mandible. He stands upon two obscene codpiece patellae. Where once her vision allowed her to distinguish the difference between him and other men, she seems now only to register his white skeletal sameness. She reaches out and takes his money. At last she sees the hollow in his chest for what it really is.
Cholera morbus began its career, piously enough, as a pilgrim. It traveled the Ganges pilgrimage routes, stowing away with the elderly in litters, crawling with children, stumping with amputees, biding its time, hoping to silently ride its transport home where it might infect a village, a city, a province. Hundreds of thousands would die before it sunk back into the ground, now sloshing in subterranean pools all across India, now lying in wait for another pilgrimage or fair, any unsuspecting convocation of men. This had been the Hindoo cycle for centuries, and would have remained happily unknown to us in Europe had not His Majesty’s East India troops, in their baleful march across the continent in 1816, inevitably intersected with those same routes of pilgrimage.
From that moment on, cholera marched with the army. By 1818, the disease had reached Bombay. By 1820, ferried across the Bay of Bengal with the army’s provisions, it had taken the Indian archipelago island by island until it regained land at China. A new generation of cholera, perhaps struck with the same pioneering spirit that was spurring the world toward America, took sail west, gaining Persia by 1823, Moscow by 1827; and by 1830, when Gustine, then fourteen years old, first realized her belly was beginning to swell, it had reached Sunderland’s main trading partner at Riga. William Sproat, the first to officially die in all of England, illicitly sold a few lumps of coal to the cook aboard a Riga ship stuck behind the Quarantine, but what was the harm in that? No harm at all to Gustine, had he not then sat next to her fellow lodger Fos at Les Chats Savants.
But why pause here for a lesson on the pandemic history of cholera morbus? Well, sometimes the world intrudes into a story, just like it intrudes into a town; sometimes no matter how we guard against it or pretend it does not exist, the They of someplace halfway across the globe become the Us of here and now. Tonight, the cholera morbus, bred in the East End of the very World—in Bengal, as filthy as Mill Street; in Jessore, as poor as Sailor’s Alley; passed hand to hand like a pestilential Olympic torch—has come for the being Gustine loves most in the world. How unfair, it seems to us, to pit a disease fed on the deaths of millions against a single little baby.
It feels far more crowded than usual when Gustine pushes her way inside the Labour in Vain, but she quickly realizes it is only full around the edges. The tables have been pushed aside to leave a rough circle in the middle of the room, inside of which squats John Robinson erecting a wall of old red and white wooden panels. His patrons laugh and talk around him, oblivious to the hammering; a few offer advice on the construction of his rat ring, a few angle for odds on Friday night’s championship match. Crown Prince of Ratters is to be decided, a final contest between Whilky’s Mike and whichever mongrel wins tomorrow night. In its place of honour among the ubiquitous Garrison ware on the mantelpiece (John’s own Wearmouth West View 25-Year Commemorative milk pitcher, a porcelain terrier with a trout in its mouth, and Gustine’s potter’s specialty, The Sailor’s Tear) sits the Silver Crown itself, a dented tin chaplet much coveted by the rat baiters of Sunderland. Whether set upon the head of a mutt or a ferret, on Friday night, with the bestowing of this crown, Divine Right shall be recognized.
“What’s wrong wi’ that baby?” asks an old woman when Gustine slips into the back corner cemetery table and starts to unwrap her child’s blanket. It is packed hard with snow and reeks like sour rennet. “He’s discoloured.”
“He’s fine,” answers Gustine tersely.
“If he’s got the whooping cough, you should put a live trout’s head in his mouth. It will suck away the disease.”
“No,” interrupts her friend, an equally dilapidated crone, missing her three front teeth. “Shave his wee head, hang the hair upon a bush, an’ when the birds take it back to their nests, they’ll carry the disease with it.”
“He doesn’t have the whooping cough,” Gustine replies.
“What’s yer poor bairn’s name, girl?” asks the first old crone, kindly. “We’ll say a prayer for him tonight.”
Gustine looks up at the woman blankly. Her child is dying and she never even gave him a name. She said she believed he would live, grow strong, and one day bury her; yet somewhere, in the darkest corner of her cowardly soul, she worried that everyone else was right. Perhaps if he went unnamed, unbaptized, she reasoned, God might overlook him and leave him to her care. But—oh, her heart—how wrong she was. She has been an irresponsible caretaker and God is taking back her charge. Please let him stay, Gustine pleads now, stripping off his stool-soaked blanket. I will give him a name. I will call him—I will call him William after our most beloved king, a man who certainly finds favour in Your sight; but even as Gustine thinks the name William, unbidden comes the image of William Marion, vestryman, who left a xylophone of bruises down her spine when he took her on the table of the Corn Exchange. No, William is not the right name. Let it be George then, she thinks, our previous king. But a George forced her to her knees in front of his friends, a Harold, a Buck, a Tim, and a Jerry. No, all of those names are out. Closed too are all Bobs and Bills and Bruces, all Franks, Andrews, and Charleses; and certainly not a Henry. To every name, she can fix a leering, brutal, pitiless face; hands of Dicks and dicks of Thomases.
The old women drift away
as John Robinson looks up to see who has taken the back cemetery table. Well now, she is about the last person he expected to see here. John Robinson sighs deeply, for more than anything, he hates conflict, and conflict with a woman is by far the worst type. Setting aside his hammer, he takes a quick shot of gin, steeling himself for the unpleasant business.
“Gustine.” He nods.
“John, please just let us sit a minute.” Gustine wipes away her tears. “I need to warm him up.”
The publican frowns and doesn’t look at her. “Heard you left Mill Street.”
She doesn’t care what he heard. Warming her child is all that matters. “The Eye touched him,” she says. “Look what she’s done.”
Unless the Eye built a time machine and sent the child eighty years into his own old age, she could never have done this, thinks John Robinson. A shriveled old man has taken possession of the infant’s swaddling clothes. His dull blue eyes have shied into a pinched, dented skull. His tiny fingers and toes are curled arthritically and wrinkled as if he’s spent too long in the bath. If it weren’t for his slowly rustling heart, John would never have recognized the child.
“You can’t stay here with that thing,” her landlord’s brother says.
“He’ll be fine. He just needs to warm up.”
John Robinson shakes his head and walks away. He can’t go on protecting Gustine; it will only bring more trouble upon him. She belongs to his brother and to his brother she must return. He pulls aside the young brat who hawks the Labour in Vain’s ratting events. “Fetch the Eye from Mill Street,” he whispers. “Tell her where she may find my brother’s dress lodger.”
“I need a cup of tea, please,” Gustine says loudly.