第10章 The Relieving Officer

The Board of Guardians of the Cinderthorpe Poor Law Union met on the first Tuesday of the month in a room at the workhouse that had been built for a chapel and never quite stopped being one, so that the guardians sat under a painted text about the poor being always with us and looked continually, whether they meant to or not, like men being judged. Prudence went with her ratepayer, the retired sexton, and stood at the back with the ratepayers and the reporters and the suppliants, and waited for the item on the agenda that she had come for, which was nothing more than the quarterly report on out-relief, and which she intended to turn into something else. The chairman was Mr. Trubshaw, a colliery agent with a face like a well-fed Sunday, a large gold watch chain, and the manner of a man who had never in his life been contradicted by anyone he could not dismiss. He was also, as half the town knew and nobody said, a trustee of the Cinderthorpe Unity, which had lent the union's sickness fund nothing and borrowed from it a great deal less than rumour claimed, and which was the reason he now sat with his eyebrows slightly raised as the clerk read out the quarter's figures and the room listened to the sound of the poor costing money. Prudence waited for the report to end, and then did the thing she had come to do, which was to rise and ask, in the voice of a ratepayer with a question of economy, how much the union had spent this quarter on the cordial recommended on the relief orders, and whether the guardians had satisfied themselves as to its contents. The room went still in the particular way a room goes still when someone has asked the question everyone has agreed not to ask. Mr. Trubshaw looked at her for a moment, and then at the clerk, and then back at her, and his eyebrows came down. "The guardians are not aware that a ratepayer has any concern with the contents of a charitable gift," he said. "The cordial is not paid for out of the rates. It is not paid for out of the poor rate or any other rate. It is given." "It is recommended on the order," Prudence said. "The relieving officer writes it. The applicant believes the order is the parish's word." "The order is the parish's word upon the applicant's need, and the recommendation of a remedy is a matter of charity, and charity is not the ordinary business of this board." He set both hands on the table. "You may write to the guardians if you have a complaint, and the guardians will consider it in the usual way. I would advise you to consider very carefully what you put in the letter." She had the letter in her pocket, written out fair on two sides, with the copper test and the list of names and the batches, and she understood that she was being told, in the plainest courtesy, that no letter she could write would ever reach the part of the room where it would be read. She left it in her pocket. Outside, on the steps, the relieving officer caught her up. His name was Mr. Cottrell, and he was a small, tired, decent man who had spent his life saying no to people who needed yes, and who had thereby acquired the only two qualities that life can give a man in that trade, which were patience and a settled sadness. "Miss Ruddock." "Mr. Cottrell." "You did a good thing to come, and a foolish one to speak." He glanced back at the door. "I write the cordial on the orders because it was recommended to me when I took the post, and because to write anything else on an order is to send a poor man to a chemist who will charge him for it, and I have buried too many of the poor to spend their pennies on principle. If it is what you think it is, I have been sending them their deaths with their bread for six years, and I do not know how I am to live with that, and I would rather not know for certain, which is why I have not asked." He took off his hat and put it on again. "I am telling you this because you should know what you are asking of the men you ask it of. Every one of us has signed it. Every one of us has written our own small hand in the book, and none of us can afford to have written it wrong." "I know," Prudence said. "That is why I am not asking you." "Then who are you asking?" "Whichever man cannot afford to keep writing it right," she said, and left him on the steps with his hat in his hand. She had barely reached Bellhouse Lane when she found the constable waiting for her at the shop door. Sergeant Rounce was a heavy, careful officer of the old sort, who knew every family in the lower town and the price of every peace he kept, and he stood with his thumb hooked in his belt and looked at the sign over her door as if he had never read it before. "Miss Ruddock. I have had a complaint laid before me that there are poisons in this shop sold without a licence, and that the shop is open without a licence either, and I am to look at your stock and make a return on it." "Then come in," she said, "and look." He came in. He looked at the shelves, and at the jars, and at the locked cupboard, and asked to see the key, and she gave it him, and he opened the cupboard and looked at the arsenic and the prussic acid and the corrosive sublimate, all of them in their proper bottles in the poison cabinet, all of them recorded in her poison book, every sale entered with the name of the buyer and the purpose, which was more than half the registered men in the town troubled to do. "Your book is in order," Rounce said, and shut the cupboard, and locked it, and gave her back the key. "I keep it so." "Aye. I have seen them that do not." He stood in the middle of her shop, a big man in a small space, and for a moment he looked less like a constable and more like what he was, which was a man from the brick court who had risen two rungs and remembered the ladder. "I will make my return, and my return will say the shop is in order. But I will tell you what I told the man who complained, and I will tell you more because you have kept my wife's drops straight these ten years when the dispensary could not. He did not want me to look in the cupboard. He wanted me to look at you. There is a difference, and it is the difference between a police and a purse, and I know which I am paid from." "Who complained?" "You know who complained." He put on his helmet. "Be careful, Miss Ruddock. The society has long arms and short tempers, and I cannot stand in your doorway every night, and a woman alone on this lane has a great deal to lose that a woman is not supposed to have." He went out, and the bell rang behind him, and Prudence stood in the shop with the key in her hand and understood that the turning of the screw had begun. ---