第1章 The Weighing Room

The weighing room behind the shop on Bellhouse Lane was colder than the street. Prudence Ruddock had long ago decided that cold came in two kinds: the honest cold of outdoors, which a body could walk away from, and the settled cold of a room that had been damp for years, which got into the brass and the ledgers and the little drawers of gentian and senna and stayed there through every fire she built. The second kind was the kind that lived in her back room, and she had made her peace with it, mostly. She stood at the counter with a pestle in her hand and the shop bell still trembling from the last customer. Outside, the winter afternoon had gone the colour of a wet slate, and the gas lamp at the corner of Sallowfield Road had not yet been lit. Cinderthorpe in December was a town that worked without light and breathed without air. The mills along the cut ran three shifts; the kilns never cooled; the canal gave off a smell that people who lived beside it stopped noticing and people who visited never forgot. Every morning she wiped a fine grey film from the counter and every evening it came back again, as patient as the damp. A woman came in from the lane, hooded, quick, and shut the door behind her as though the weather might follow. "Prue." Dorcas Trewin pulled back her hood and shook the wet out of her sleeves. She was a midwife of some forty years and carried the whole district's troubles in her satchel and her face. "You have any of the grey powder left? The one for the stomach." "There is none better than bismuth," Prudence said, "and I have bismuth." "Selina Bott's girl is bad again. Swollen, vomiting, the sweating coming at night. Near four days now." Prudence set down the pestle. "Fever?" "That is what the doctor's boy says. Gastric fever. Half the court has it, or so they say, and they say it is the water, and it is always the water, and the water has been the water for twenty years." Prudence reached under the counter for the jar of bismuth and measured powder onto the little brass balance she had inherited from her father, a two-pan affair on a walnut post, worn bright at the beam from fifty years of thumb and coin. She still used it for everything, even for things a modern pupil would weigh on scales of iron. It was slow, and it was true, and when she set the weights in place she felt for a moment that she was standing inside her father's hands. Two drams of bismuth. A paper twist of it, folded the way she had been taught, in three folds so the stuff did not shake out into a coat pocket. She handed it over. "Take the child off the junket and off the beer," she said. "Water, boiled. A little milk if she will keep it. And if it is the fever, she will sweat it out and be weak but live." Dorcas did not move. She was looking at the balance rather than at Prudence, which was how she looked when she was about to say something she had turned over more than once already. "There have been five, Prue." "Five of the fever?" "Five dead of it at the Bott court and the two courts behind, since the first frost. Three of them grown, two of them children." Dorcas took the powder and slipped it into her satchel. "I do not need to tell you that a fever that takes the grown and the small both, and takes them the same way, every one of them sweating and sick and then sinking, is a fever. I am telling you because I have washed them, and a body does not lie to a midwife." Prudence said nothing for a moment. Five deaths in one district of a town this size was not remarkable by the arithmetic of poverty. Cinderthorpe buried its children as a matter of course and buried its old people when the coal ran low and the frost came in. What made her pause was the shape of it: the sweating, the vomiting, the sinking. It was the shape of a fever, and also the shape of several other things. "You have been at the wakes," she said. "What did they eat?" "It is not the food. I have asked them all." "What did they take?" Dorcas looked up. "The cordial. From the Unity." "The Unity cordial?" "Everyone on the sick list takes it. It is free. It is meant to be a comfort." Dorcas's mouth twisted. "It is meant to keep a man from drinking the gin." Prudence knew the cordial. She had seen the squat stone bottles in doorways and on window ledges all over the lower town, stamped on the shoulder with the mark of the Cinderthorpe Unity, the friendly society that paid its members a few shillings a week when they were too sick to work and a few pounds for a decent burial when they were past work altogether. The society was old, respectable, and much praised in the newspapers for its thrift. The cordial was part of its benevolence: a mixture of gentian and iron and something sweet, distributed from its own dispensary to any member too poor to buy medicine. She had never thought about it for longer than a moment. It was free, and it was charity, and in Cinderthorpe both of those things were rare enough that a person did not look a gift in the mouth. "How many of the five took it?" "All five." Dorcas pulled her hood up. "That proves nothing. Everyone takes it. You could say it of any five in the town." "Then say it of any five," Prudence said. "You are the one who counted." Dorcas went out into the wet, and the shop bell trembled again, and Prudence stood for a while with the balance in front of her and the smell of the canal coming through the door. She was thirty-four years old. She had been her father's apprentice since she was eleven and had run his shop since he died six winters back, and she had never once been permitted to call herself what she was. The Act that had come in a few years ago had put poisons and tinctures and the naming of drugs behind a counter that only registered men might keep open, and no register in the kingdom would carry her name. The Pharmacy Society had no love for women in the trade and less for a woman who had learned it at a dead man's elbow with no indentures to show. She had written letters. She had got one answer, in a secretary's careful hand, saying that she might employ a man to stand in the shop for her, which was a thing she could not afford and would not do. So she kept the shop in her own name and behind a painted sign that said only RUDDOCK, CHEMIST, and she sold to the poor, who did not ask after registers, and to a few of the middling sort, who asked and were answered by the sign. That was her life: a small trade, a set of scales, a reputation narrow as a lane and just as hard to widen. She had no intention of losing it. Which was why she stood a long time before she moved. She went through to the weighing room at the back and found her father's notebook on the shelf where it had always been, a fat book bound in cracked calf, its pages the colour of weak tea. She had not opened it for a year. Egbert Ruddock had been a careful man and a silent one, and when he wrote things down he wrote them down the way a man writes a will: plainly, and expecting them to be read by a stranger after his death. Half the book was formulas, half was troubles. In the back, he had copied out the tests a chemist may use when a death seems to want explaining, and he had written at the head of the page a sentence she had read a hundred times and understood in her bones only now, in this cold winter, with five names in her mind. *Where the cause is not plain, take the plainest thing the dead have in common, and weigh it.* She shut the book and lit the second lamp. ---