Chapter 2 The Sick List

The office of the Cinderthorpe Unity stood on the first floor above the chapel on Sallowfield Road, and to reach it you climbed a stair whose oilcloth had been renewed the year of the Great Exhibition and never since. Prudence had been up those stairs exactly twice in her life: once to pay her father's levy when he was ill, and once to sign for the money his death had brought her, seven pounds and four shillings, which had buried him and bought the shop its first winter of coal. She went up a third time on the Thursday, in her good coat, and found the door open and the office warm, which surprised her. Barnaby Skell kept a fire even on days when the town had nothing to burn. He was a spare, upright man of about fifty with a small quick face and a trick of holding his pen as though it were a surgical instrument. He was secretary to the Unity and its dispenser both, had been for eleven years, and was counted a model of the virtue the society was meant to encourage. He rose when she came in, as men did for her because she was a woman, and not because she was a chemist. "Miss Ruddock." He set down his pen. "This is a pleasure. Are you well? You never come to the socials." "I am not much for socials." "No. You were always your father's daughter." He said it kindly, and she understood the kindness, and let it pass. "What can the Unity do for you?" "It is what the Unity gives," she said. "The cordial. I have been asked about it, and I find I know nothing of what is in it. A chemist ought to know what her neighbours are drinking." Skell laughed, a dry sound. "You have come all this way to inspect our benevolence? You will find it very dull. Gentian, a little iron, some syrup, a drop of something to keep it from spoiling. The dispensary of the reverend gentlemen would not have it otherwise." "And who makes it?" "I do." He tapped the ledger on his desk. "I make it here, in the room beyond, and I bottle it here, and I send it out with the visitors on Fridays. There is no secret in it, Miss Ruddock. There are no secrets in the Unity at all. Everything is in the book." She looked at the book. It was open at a double page of ruled columns, names down the left and small neat figures across, a record of the sick and the paid and the buried. Somewhere in it were five names that had lately been crossed through. "Then let me ask the book," she said. "How many members lie sick this quarter?" Skell's face did not change, but his hand moved to close the ledger, and stopped, because closing it would have been an answer of its own. "Why do you want that?" "There is a sickness in the Bott court and the courts behind it. I am the nearest chemist and I am asked to make up for it, and I would like to know how far it has run. That is all." He studied her. Then he turned the book a quarter-turn toward her, keeping one finger flat on the page, as though he were holding down a live thing. The columns showed a hundred and forty members. Forty-one were marked on the sick list this quarter, which was high. Of those, eleven had been paid the death benefit since the autumn, which was higher still. She read the names slowly, and did not let her eyes stop on any one of them longer than the others. Bott. Ragg. Cottle. Two children of a weaver called Gantry. A cooper named Figgis. Selina Bott's girl was on the list and not yet crossed through. "That is a great many deaths for a season," she said. "It is a hard town," said Skell. "And it has been a hard winter." "Are they mostly the fever?" "They are mostly the poor." He closed the book. "You will forgive me, Miss Ruddock. I have a levy to collect and coal to buy. You are welcome to the cordial at any time. I will send a bottle down to the shop myself." "That is kind." "It is not kind. It is the business of the society." He showed her to the door, and as she went down the stairs she felt his attention on the back of her neck, light and exact, all the way to the street. She went round by the Bott court, because it was on her way to nothing and she had made up her mind to go. The court was a shoe of cobbles between two blind walls, with a pump at the closed end that had been dry since the summer and a row of doors that had once been one house and were now four. Steam hung over it, out of the wash-houses. A dog with ribs like a gridiron watched her from a step and did not trouble to bark. Selina Bott's door was the third. Prudence knocked and went in, because in a court like that a knock and an entrance were the same courtesy, and found the room hot and close and full of the smell of sick. Selina was a laundress, broad through the shoulders and worn thin at the wrists, and she was on her knees beside a mattress with a basin in her hands and the child in them, a girl of nine who had been pretty a month ago and was now the colour of tallow. "Miss Ruddock." Selina did not stop her work. "Dorcas said you would come." "How long since she kept anything down?" "Three days. She will not have the bread. She takes the cordial, and the cordial comes back, and she takes the cordial, because they say it is strength, and there is nothing else that is strength in this house." Selina wiped the child's mouth and set the basin aside. "Her father took it too, before he went. He said it warmed him." Prudence knelt and looked at the girl. The pulse at the wrist was quick and shallow and her hands were cold, colder than the room, cold the way a person's hands go when the blood has begun to give up. The lips had a faint dark line at the gum, between lip and tooth, the sort of line a laundress might miss if she had spent the week looking at shirts. The palms were clammy. On the girl's breath there was, very faint, under the sourness of the sickness, that dry cold edge of the warm metals she had met in the bottle. She looked at the shelf over the fire. Two stone bottles of the cordial stood there among the plates, one half-drunk, one sealed. "Has anyone else in the court been drinking from that batch? The November one?" "How should I know the batch? It says November on it, and we are in November, and we are glad of it." Selina's voice went hard with the day's end. "Do you know something, Miss Ruddock? Because if you know something, say it, and if you do not, let me get the child warm." "I know the child is very ill and I do not know with what," Prudence said, which was true, and which was the only true thing she could safely say. "Keep her off the cordial. Water, boiled, a spoonful at a time. If you have a little gin in the house, rub it on her feet and do not give it to her to drink." "You are telling a laundry woman to pour gin down the drain." "I am telling you to rub it on her feet. It is cheaper than pouring it down the drain." That got half a laugh, and a tired, frightened look, and Prudence let herself out into the cold. She had seen what she had come to see, or most of it. She had seen the line on the gum and the cold hands and the sinking, and she had smelled on the child's breath the same dry cold thing she had smelled at the cork, and the two together had made a small cold certainty in her, the way two weights on the same pan stop the beam from lying. Dorcas was waiting at the corner, under the lamp, with her satchel. "You were quick," she said. "I was careful." "Same thing." Dorcas fell in beside her. "What did he say?" "That the cordial is gentian and iron and sugar and nothing else, and that the town is a hard town, and that I should mind my own business in the politest words he had." "And what will you do?" Prudence looked down the lane toward the cut, where the water and the smoke and the low sky were all the same grey, and the kilns were throwing their long amber light along the wall of the yard. "Ask the cordial itself," she said. "It cannot be offended." ---