第6章 The Register

On the Tuesday she was in the town's other hours, the hours that belong to the errand and the queue, and she used them to go where a chemist may go without excuse: to the dispensary of the Cinderthorpe Charitable Dispensary on Sallowfield Road, where the poor were given advice and drugs by a visiting physician, and where she had once stood in a queue herself, as a girl, with her father, for a bottle of cod-liver oil that the shop could not afford. The dispensary was one long room with a counter at the end and a bench for the waiting, and the bench was full, because it always was. Behind the counter a dispenser measured out powders and talked over his shoulder, and on the wall was a board of printed notices and a book on a chain. Prudence joined the queue with a purpose in her carriage and no medicine in her hand, and when she reached the counter she asked for the relieving officer's register of the sick poor, which any person might consult who had a ratepayer to stand for them, and she had a ratepayer, a retired sexton who had been her father's friend. The clerk fetched the book. She read it standing, turning the pages as though she were looking for a name she knew. It was a plain record: the parish's poor, the days they had applied for relief, the reason given, the order made. And in reason given, over and over, in the same three words, marched the fever. She looked for her eleven names. She found nine of them. Seven of those nine had applied for relief on the same day, or the day after, that Ephraim's table said they had fallen sick. Two had applied for relief on the day before. That was the whole of it. That was the shape in the register, and the shape was this: a person fell ill, and the household had no money because the wage had stopped, and so the head of the household went to the dispensary and to the relieving officer, and both of them wrote *gastric fever* in their tidy hands, and neither of them went to look at the well, because the well of a man who is sick is not the business of the person who writes the order for his bread. But there was another column, a small one at the far right, that gave the *recommended remedy*, and in that column, for seven of the nine, a single phrase was repeated in the clerk's abbreviated hand, the same phrase she had read on a hundred orders in her life, and never once thought to question. *Un. cord.* The Unity cordial. Recommended by the parish itself, dispensed free at the society's own counter, sent out with the bread. She stood in the queue that smelled of wet wool and camphor and wondered how many years she had walked past the phrase and never read it, and how a thing could be printed in front of a whole town and still be read by no one. She asked the dispensing clerk where the recommendation came from, and he answered without looking up, because to him it was a question as ordinary as the weather: the society had offered the cordial to the parish years ago, and the parish had accepted it the way a parish accepts anything that is offered for nothing, and the order was written now out of habit, and the habit was printed on the form. Who had offered it, she asked, and he said the secretary, the same secretary that had offered everything, and then he pushed her paper across the counter and said next, because the queue was long and his dinner was late. She made a note of his answer in the little book she kept in her pocket, and under it she wrote the words *parish, society, habit*, and drew a line under all three, and looked at the line for longer than it deserved, because she had a growing sense that she was looking at the whole architecture of the thing: not a crime hidden in a cellar, but a charity standing in the light, printed on forms, recommended by officials, drunk by the poor, and wrong all the way down. When she came out into the fog, Alvina Cardew was waiting on the step. She was the matron of Throstle House, the refuge for lying-in women and for women who had fallen and wanted to be something else, and she was a small, stout, ferociously tidy woman of sixty with a shawl over her head and a face that did not often ask permission. She and Prudence had known each other a long time in the way of two women in a town who do the same sort of work for the same sort of people and never meet socially. "Miss Cardew." "Miss Ruddock." Alvina did not waste the morning on greeting. "I saw you reading the register, and I know why you are reading it, because I have been reading it myself since Martinmas, and I have come to tell you that you are not wrong about the cordial, and that if you go on as you are going, you will be ruined, and I would rather you were ruined with a friend than alone. Walk with me." They walked toward the cut, in step, two women whose business was the dying of the poor. "Three of my women have died since October," Alvina said. "They lie in, they take the society's cordial because it is free and we have nothing better to give them, they sweat and vomit and sink, and the doctor writes fever, and I sign the paper because I have no other word to sign, and I lay them out. The last one was a girl of nineteen. I laid her out myself. I have laid out hundreds of women, Miss Ruddock, and I will tell you what I told the visitor from the Unity, and what he did not want to hear: a body that has died of a fever stinks of a fever, and a body that has died of a warm metal stinks of nothing at all. That girl smelled of nothing. She was clean as a new pin and cold as a stone, and I have not been able to sleep for it." Prudence stopped in the middle of the road. "You said it to Skell?" "I said it to the visitor. The visitor wrote it down, and the next day Mr. Skell came himself, most courteous, and asked whether the house had need of coal for the winter, and whether my name was still before the guardians for the new infirmary place, and whether a midwife who had been heard to slander the society's benevolence would find the place still open to her. He did not say the words. He did not need to." Alvina looked at the kiln fires down the lane. "So I have kept quiet, and I have kept signing, and I have hated myself every night. And now I have seen you reading the register, and I am telling you that whatever you mean to do, do it quickly, and do it in a way that a magistrate cannot look away from, because the society has a great many friends, and I have only the women, and the women are dying." "I mean to," Prudence said. "I have not worked out how." "Then let us work it out," said Alvina Cardew, "over a cup of tea in my kitchen, before the day gets any shorter." They walked back along Sallowfield Road in step, two women whose whole trade was the dying of the poor, and neither of them said the thing both of them were thinking, which was that a cup of tea would not be nearly enough and would have to do. ---