第7章 Throstle House

Throstle House stood at the end of a yard off Sallowfield Road, a long low building that had been a malting shed and had been a refuge for thirty years, and its kitchen was the warmest room Prudence had stood in all winter. The range was banked with coke that Alvina Cardew bought by the hundredweight out of her own pocket rather than ask the guardians for it, and on it stood a great iron pot of gruel and a kettle that never came off. Women sat at the long table with shawls round their shoulders and babies in their arms, and the room smelled of milk and scorched cloth and the particular salt smell of a house where women are delivered of children. Alvina poured tea for two and sat down opposite Prudence and put a hand flat on the table, as though she were taking an oath. "Now," she said. "The society sends us the cordial. It comes with the visitor on Fridays, the same as it goes to the members. It is poured out here into the bottles we keep, and the women drink it, and I have watched three of them die of it. What do you want from me?" "Two things. A bottle of the cordial that has not been opened, if you have one, and your account of how it comes." "I have two. Take them both." Alvina went to the dresser and brought back two stone bottles, one nearly full, one half. "Do you see the wax on the cork? The visitor seals them when he pours, and he writes the day on the wax. He is very particular, is Mr. Coombes. Never a Friday's round without the day written on it." Prudence turned the bottle in the lamplight. On the shoulder of the wax she could just make out, scratched with a pin, *Nov. 17*, and, below it, a small mark that was almost lost in the wax. She held it closer. It was not Coombes's hand. It was Skell's: the same upright little figure she had seen on his ledger, a stroke with a hook, the mark he made when he had counted a thing and was satisfied with it. "Mr. Coombes does the rounds alone?" "Mostly. Some Fridays Mr. Skell comes himself, in the afternoon, to see the women and to hear how the infants do. He is very fond of the infants." Alvina's voice was even. "He came the Friday before the girl died." "Which girl?" "Lottie Nunn." Alvina nodded at a young woman by the range, who was feeding a baby with the blank, careful face of someone who has been told she is lucky and does not feel it. "This is her sister, who is here with her own child. Lottie died in the room at the back and I laid her out. But you shall hear the sister yourself, for I will not have you take my word for anything I did not see with my own eyes." She called the young woman over and sat her down and said, "Tell Miss Ruddock about the cordial, Nelly, the way you told me." The young woman called Nelly folded her hands in her lap. She was nineteen or twenty, thin, with a country softness about her that the town had not yet rubbed off. "My sister was brought here in October. She was not sick, only poor, and the place was for poor women, and they gave her the cordial, and I took some too, because they said it was good for the milk." She stopped. "It made me sick in the mornings. I thought I was bearing again, but I was not, and I stopped taking it, because there was a taste in it I did not care for. Lottie kept on with it, for she liked the taste, she said, and she grew worse and worse, and she would not let me take her bottle away, and then she was gone." "You stopped taking it. And you were well." "I was sick for three days and then I was well." Nelly looked at her hands. "Lottie liked it. She said the taste was bitter but it was free." Prudence sat with that a moment. It was the first living proof she had held: two women, one bottle, one poison, and the difference between them nothing but whether or not they drank. She looked at the bottle in her hand again and wondered what a chemist would call a bitterness that a poor woman might come to like, and thought of the sugar in it, and thought of what sugar is for. "May I keep the half-drunk one as well as the full?" "You may keep everything," Alvina said, "so long as you keep my name out of it until the last. I have the women. If the society breaks me, the women have no roof, and a roof is worth more than a clean conscience in Cinderthorpe, and I have learned to live with the difference." "I will keep your name out of it," Prudence said, "for as long as there is any other name to put in its place." Alvina brought the house book then, and laid it open on the table, and turned the pages with the flat of her hand. Thirty years of women, and the entries in a dozen different hands, and the last page in her own. Prudence read the autumn down. Four women in the house on the cordial; three of them worse; two of them dead; one, Nelly, who had stopped and lived. Against each of the dead, in Alvina's careful writing, stood the same three words she had seen on every paper in Cinderthorpe, *puerperal fever*, and under them, in a smaller hand, the words that broke it open. *Child stillborn. Mother sank of the same.* "Every one of them sank of the same," Alvina said. "The lying-in and the cordial and the fever and the grave, one behind the other, so regular you could set the church clock by it. And I will tell you the thing that made me first look twice at the bottles. The infants. I have laid out more infants in this house than I have women, and the infants of the women who took the cordial were born slack, and cold, and would not take the breast, and were gone before the week was out. I have a name for the poor and a hard heart, Miss Ruddock; you cannot do this work thirty years and keep a soft one. But I know when a house is being made to lose more than the town loses, and this house has been made to, and no one has asked me why." Prudence looked at the book and thought of what antimony does to a body, which is to make it throw off everything it is given, and thought of what that would do to a woman carrying a child, and had to look away from the page for a moment. "If the whole house went on the cordial," she said, "you would have a graveyard, not a refuge." "The whole house does not go on it. The women who can buy something else, buy it. It is the poorest who take the free bottle, and the poorest are the ones the society most wishes to be seen to help." Alvina closed the book. "Make of that what you please. I have told you everything I know and a little more, and now I would be glad if you would drink your tea before it goes cold, because I cannot abide a woman who lets good tea stand." She walked home with two bottles under her coat and the fog on her face, and in Bellhouse Lane she passed under the gas lamp and saw a figure standing in the door of the shop across the way, not close, not following, only standing, with the flat patience of a man who has been told where to wait. She did not look at him twice. She went in, and bolted the door, and stood in the dark of her own shop listening to the bell she had not rung, and the bell did not ring again, and after a while the figure in the doorway was gone. ---