Chapter 19 What Remained

The society was wound up in the summer. There was an audit, and the audit found the hole, and the hole was larger than anyone had believed, and in the end there was enough left to pay the widows and the orphans a fraction of what they had been promised, and Mr. Trubshaw resigned from the bench and from everything else, and was not prosecuted, because there is a great difference between a man who keeps a false account and a man who can be proved to have kept one, and he knew the difference to his fingertips and had been careful all his life to stand on the safe side of it. He was seen at the chapel the following winter, and people greeted him, and by the spring people had begun to greet him warmly, which is how a town forgets, not all at once, but by degrees, first with a nod and then with a kindness and then with the memory of a kindness. Dr. Creel did not come out of it as he had hoped. He had spoken, and the speaking had done its work, but a man who keeps a private register of his own patients for two years and lets eleven of them die of a poison he had written doubtful against is not, in the end, a hero to a town; he is a witness, and witnesses are useful and then they are finished. He lost the society's practice when the society died and did not get the hospital post, and he went on with his consulting room and his leech jar and his bay window, and after a while he took to greeting Prudence in the street, which he had never done before, and she took to answering him, which was, she thought, all that the two of them could ever be to each other, two careful people who had each been asked to look at a thing in the dark and had each looked away, and had each, in the end, looked back. Alvina Cardew kept the house, and kept the women, and got her infirmary place after all, because the guardians found that a matron who had told the truth about a corpse was cheaper than a matron who had not, and she took to sending Prudence her young women who could not pay for a doctor and to sending Ned Trigg, who had come back to the shop in the autumn, taller, with a bruise that had faded and a face that had lost a little of its question mark, and who now did the society's old rounds for nothing on the Fridays, carrying clean milk and honest medicine, because there was a great deal of honest medicine to be carried now that the free cordial was gone, and no one in the lower town had yet worked out how to pay for it. Ephraim Cope kept his clerkship for exactly one year and three months. Mr. Cobley, who was old, retired at the end of the summer, and the new coroner brought his own clerk, and Ephraim found himself without a desk for the first time since he was nineteen, and for a while he did nothing but sit in the weighing room and read, and then he did what everybody in Cinderthorpe with a good hand and a bad head for anything else ends up doing, and went into the insurance office on the high street, which was not the law and was near enough to it to pay the rent, and took his mother to a better room, and kept the third copy of the returns in a tin box under his bed, and never once had to use it. Dorcas Trewin delivered a hundred and four living children that year, and kept her accounts in her head the way she always had, and said, when she was asked about the winter by people who had not been in the town, that it had been a bad winter, and left it at that, which was Dorcas all over: a woman who knew everything and sold nothing. In the summer, Prudence walked up to Sallowfield one Sunday and found the eleven. They were not together; the poor ground does not lay its people out in a rank, and she had to walk the wall to find them, the cooper and the gatekeeper and the needlewoman and the hawker's wife and the weaver's two children and the girl of nineteen with her baby in her arms, and she stood at each stone for a moment and said nothing, because she was not a woman who prayed and would not pretend to be one, and because there was nothing to say to a stone that she had not already said with a jar. Some of the graves had flowers on them and some had none. That was all the town had to show for the winter: eleven graves, some with flowers and some without, and a fund that had shrunk by the audit to two-thirds of what it had been promised to be, so that the widows who had been robbed once by the poison were now to be robbed again, slowly, by arithmetic, which was the only kind of theft in Cinderthorpe that no one was ever hanged for. Mr. Trubshaw she saw once, in the market, in the autumn, and he looked at her and did not look away, which she had not expected and did not know how to read. She decided, afterward, that it had not been defiance. It had been the look of a man who had signed eleven returns he had not read, and who had learned in his old age that a signature is a thing you cannot unsign, and who would have liked, very much, to have been able to say that he had been deceived, and could not, because a trustee who does not read the accounts he signs has not been deceived. He has been comfortable. She did not hate him for it, and she did not forgive him either. Hatred was a thing a woman in her trade could not afford, and she kept what she had of it, small and cold, for four casks poured into a canal and a girl of nineteen and a child that had looked surprised. And Prudence Ruddock kept the shop on Bellhouse Lane, and sold her bismuth and her grey powder and her cough drops, and was, by degrees and against the register, more or less a chemist. The Society wrote to her in the autumn, a different secretary in the same careful hand, and said that in view of her services in the matter of the Cinderthorpe Unity, the Society would not oppose an application by a qualified person to take her into partnership, which was as far as the law of the time allowed a woman to come to her own trade, and which she folded up and put in the drawer of the balance, under the foils, with the two jars and the list and the note with *doubtful* on it written in another man's hand, because a chemist keeps everything, and because she had a use for it one day that she could not yet see. She taught Ned Trigg to fold a powder in three folds, and to read a label twice, and to keep two accounts, one for the counter and one for the drawer, and to write in the second the things she would not say in the first. And in the evenings she sat in the weighing room with the balance in front of her and the second lamp lit, and she was, in the small and unremarkable way that such lives are measured, all right. ---