Dark Waters

by Robin Blake

  You didn’t have to be Nostradamus to guess what Grimshaw was doing tonight. In order to get his fellow Tory burgesses to hang the heavy gold chain around his neck at the next mayoral election he needed to anchor them securely in his debt. One way of doing this was by spending more freely than those on the Tory side in the election. The two out-of-towners he was drinking with tonight looked like brothers, and their document looked like a deed. Grimshaw was probably negotiating some land deal, no doubt highly advantageous to the brothers, in which the currency exchanged was not just money, but their votes.

  There was a small commotion near the door and I saw that a group wearing Whig ribbons in their hats had burst in. They bullied their way into possession of the largest table in the room and began baiting Grimshaw and any other Tories in the room, singing anti-Jacobite songs and calling healths to King George, Lord Derby and Sir Harry Hoghton. After a while Grimshaw decided withdrawal was his best tactic. He rose, bowed to his co-conspirators and shuffled past the Whigs’ table, to a barrage of whistles and insults. At the door he turned and shook his fist at the room in general.

  ‘Ruffians!’ he shouted before he left. ‘Outrage and disgrace!’

  A few minutes later Fidelis returned, interrupting my enjoyment of these activities.

  ‘Titus, I think you should come and take a look, as coroner, at this man upstairs.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Is the fellow dead?’

  ‘He will be soon.’

  As we entered the inner passageway, from which the stairs led upwards, a door swung open and a servant emerged carrying a tray laden with plates of roast meat. Fidelis caught the kitchen door before it closed behind the man and, without explanation, darted inside. He came out a few moments later carrying a small earthenware jar with a cork stopper.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘he’s up here.’

  * * *

  The room was small, with space for a single pallet bed, a wooden chair and a narrow table on which a candle burned and smoked. Rhythmical groans mixed up with a rasping sound came from the bed, as the sick man struggled for his breath. The smell in the room was repellent, a rancid mix of sweat, faeces and vomit.

  I could just make the sick man out in the gloom, a restless, recumbent form under the blankets. Fidelis returned to the door and called loudly for more light.

  ‘Who is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Man named Allcroft, a farmer from Gregson. He’s also got a good lot of land on the Fylde.’

  The fertile, flat country known as the Fylde, which lay to our north-west, provided vast quantities of produce for Preston’s market, meaning that Allcroft was likely a prosperous yeoman. At some point he must have acquired from the corporation the freedom of Preston, and a right to vote, which I presumed he had come to town to exercise in the election.

  A serving girl came to the door with two oil lamps. Fidelis gestured her to bring them inside but she shook her head, and handed the lamps through the door to him. Once they were brought in, the detail of the room was revealed: the writing table with a jug on it and the remains of a meal, the tangled heaps of clothing and towels on the floor, the soiled bedclothes, the full chamber pot lying amid spillage and spattered vomit. Allcroft was lying on his back, wearing a linen nightcap saturated with sweat. His upturned face was fixed in an expression of horror, as if he could see a vision of hell burned into the ceiling. His throat pulsed and his mouth worked open and shut. It produced a single, hoarse request.

  ‘Drink! Water! Anything!’

  I reached for the jug, but Fidelis stopped me. He took the jug himself and sniffed it.

  ‘That’s beer. We’ll leave it where it is.’

  He called the servant back and asked her to bring up some cold milk with a raw egg beaten into it and a clean spoon. Then he pulled the chair to the bedside and sat down, taking his patient’s wrist between finger and thumb.

  The egg and milk arrived, though the girl would still not enter the sickroom. I took the jug and spoon and brought them to Fidelis.

  ‘Did you recognize her?’ I asked in a whisper.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The girl. That was Maggie Satterthwaite, formerly of the Ferry Inn.’

  He merely grunted, having more pressing matters to think about. Then he gripped the jug between his knees, lifted Allcroft’s head, dipped the spoon into the mixture and put it between his patient’s lips, carefully tipping the liquid onto the tongue.

  ‘Mr Allcroft, I’m Dr Fidelis,’ he said as he applied the spoon again. ‘I’m here to help you. Can you speak?’

  Allcroft’s assent was little better than a croak.

  ‘When did you first feel this coming over you?’ went on Fidelis gently, now leaving the spoon in the milk and feeling Allcroft’s pulse once more.

  ‘Afternoon,’ came the struggling reply. ‘Ate my dinner. Went out. Felt queer, very. Vomited. Worse and worse. Came back.’

  ‘How long after you’d eaten did you feel ill? Half an hour, an hour, two hours?’

  ‘Don’t know. Hour. Two. Three. Who cares? Give me a drink for pity’s sake.’

  ‘This is milk and beaten egg,’ Fidelis told him, giving him more of it, then gesturing towards the table on which stood a soup plate with the congealed remains of some hotpot and potatoes.

  ‘Is this all that you ate today?’

  Allcroft seemed unable to answer in words, but he moved his head and momentarily closed his eyes in a way that indicated it was. Fidelis stood up and handed the milk jug to me.

  ‘Would you nurse him for me, Titus?’

  Gingerly I approached and sat down beside the bed.

  ‘How dangerous is this, Luke?’ I whispered. ‘Surely there is contagion!’

  My friend’s reply was low and level.

  ‘Possibly. But I don’t think so. Just continue with the milk, a little at a time, on the tongue.’

  Allcroft still lay with his mouth open, fetching his breath in rapid intervals. I copied my friend’s earlier action, putting my hand under Allcroft’s neck and raising his head to receive the drink. His flesh was clammy, as were his hair and cap, and I could smell the foulness of his breath.

  As I got down to my task, Fidelis was busying himself behind me. Hearing the clink of metal on chinaware, I looked round and saw him bent over the table, scraping the leftover meal from the plate, and into the jar that he’d got from the kitchen. He closed the jar, then taking a small sampling bottle and a funnel from his medical bag, picked up the jug of beer and filled the bottle from it. Pressing home the stopper, he took writing materials from the table drawer and scrawled a few words and figures on a sheet of paper, which he then wafted in the air to dry the ink, before folding it.

  ‘Titus,’ he said, ‘for a lawyer, you nurse the sick well enough, but now it’s time for you to leave off.’

  He handed me the paper.

  ‘Will you go to the apothecary and ask him to make up this preparation and send it round here at once? Make clear that it is needed urgently.’

  When I had tucked the paper into my pocket Fidelis handed me the bottle and jar.

  ‘And will you take these to your house and keep them safe? I fancy it is the food that has poisoned this man, but it may have been the drink. Don’t let anyone open them.’

  ‘Of course. And you will stay here?’

  Fidelis nodded towards the bed.

  ‘I had better. No one else will come near.’

  * * *

  The street door of Thomas Wilson’s apothecary shop was locked, but a faint light showed from a back room. I rapped at the window and Wilson himself came out to open to me, a man of about fifty wearing a cap and slippers, and holding a candlestick. When I handed over Fidelis’s paper, and passed on his instructions, the apothecary accepted the commission without complaint. The hour was late, but no one successfully plies the druggist’s trade unless he is willing to return to his mortar and his scales at the snap of a doctor’s fingers, any time of the day or night. Wilson was regarded as one of our be
st apothecaries, if not always as the best of our men. He had spent years in London, where he learned his trade under the most capable masters, before returning to his home town with a wife and sufficient capital to open the shop on Church Gate.

  He swung round and headed back to his inner sanctum with rapid, shuffling steps. I followed, shutting the door. As in all apothecaries’, the air had a pungency like no other shop: a faint, dry, organic rankness mixed with something mineral, sharp though sweet. Wilson had slipped behind the counter and through the door on the other side, and there I joined him. The inner room contained a stool, a bench with pen and ink, and an open ledger in which Wilson had been writing. Above it hung a shelf holding his brass scales and other instruments for milling, measuring, heating and pouring, while the surrounding walls were lined with shelf upon shelf of labelled bottles and jars containing liquids, powders, crystals and roots – the raw materials of all medicine. Wilson had already placed his candle on the bench. Now he sat on the stool, pushed the ledger to one side and opened the paper, bending to examine it in the candlelight. His lips fluttered as he read the prescription.

  ‘Ah, yes!’ he said at last. ‘I see the case very clear. The patient must be bad set.’

  ‘He is,’ I agreed. ‘I’ve seen him. He’s dying, I think.’

  Wilson gave me a knowing look and indicated the paper.

  ‘If he needs this, he must be.’

  ‘What is the receipt for?’

  But Wilson widened his eyes and shook his head, his loose jowls wobbling.

  ‘My goodness, I cannot tell you that, Mr Cragg. That is a matter of confidence. My lips are professionally sealed. It is enough to say that the poor fellow must be very bad set, yes, very bad set indeed.’

  He rose and scanned the shelves, finally reaching down a flask labelled Spirits of Wine, which he brought back to the workbench.

  ‘You will send the preparation round to the Gamecock as soon as it is ready?’ I said, watching as he took down a measuring vessel, inscribed down its side with a graduated scale. ‘Dr Fidelis says the case is urgent.’

  Wilson lifted the stopper from the jar and remounted his stool.

  ‘Have I not indicated that I know the urgency, Mr Cragg? I will be ready to take the preparation there myself in fifteen minutes, if you will be kind enough to indulge me.’

  I accepted the hint and left Wilson to his work, picking my way through the darkness with care for the bottle and jar that Fidelis had entrusted to me. A few minutes later I let myself into my office and locked Fidelis’s samples inside a drawer in my desk, to await his collection in the morning. I felt considerably reassured now. I remembered Fidelis’s words as he had handed them to me that, far from lying in the miasma of Allcroft’s room, the sickness that had seized him was in his food and drink. I myself had breathed Allcroft’s air for half an hour or more, but I had not eaten his food, or drunk his beer, and the thought made me feel lighter in my mind as I passed through the connecting door and into my house.

  Chapter Eight

  I WAS SITTING BEHIND my desk at the office, looking over some affidavits, when Luke Fidelis appeared shortly after ten the next morning. He was carrying a wicker basket, of the kind that might be used to transport small birds to market. This he deposited, without explanation, on the floor beside his medical bag and sat down with a heavy sigh in my client chair. His face was pale and drawn. I suppressed the desire to ask what was in the basket.

  ‘How is the sick man?’ I asked instead.

  ‘No longer sick. May I have the samples you brought away with you?’

  I unlocked the drawer containing the jar and bottle that Fidelis had entrusted to me, and handed them over.

  ‘That is excellent news, Luke!’ I exclaimed. ‘So he’s on the mend after all.’

  ‘No, he’s dead,’ said Fidelis, finding room for the samples in his medical bag.

  My elation subsided.

  ‘So, it was just as you’d predicted.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And in spite of your prescription from Wilson.’

  His answer was a little brusque.

  ‘That wasn’t intended to cure the man, only to make him more comfortable until the end.’

  ‘And the cause of death?’

  He scrubbed his face with his hands.

  ‘Look, Titus, it has been a long night. Might I trouble you for a plate of something and some small beer?’

  I immediately hurried around the desk and raised him up by the arm.

  ‘Of course, Luke. How thoughtless of me. Come into the house.’

  Fidelis picked up his medical bag and followed me back through the outer office and into the house, where I sat him in the dining parlour and called for Matty to bring some breakfast. A moment later we were interrupted by a loud, importunate knock on the front door. Matty was piling food onto a tray for the doctor – food which, I am sure, she would willingly have spooned down his throat if he had asked her – and Elizabeth and her mother, who still stayed with us, had gone to market. So I was forced to appear at the door myself.

  I opened to Denis Destercore, the red-headed political agent whom I had last seen sneering at the Shuttleworths’ meeting in Market Place. His bearing was confident, straight backed, legs apart. His big-framed servant Peters stood behind him on the step below, holding a notebook, pen and inkhorn.

  ‘Good morning, my friend,’ Destercore began, smiling with an expression I had previously seen on the mouths of certain fish lying on the slab. ‘We have not been introduced. I am Denis Destercore, friend to Mr Reynolds in the coming election. Today we are conducting the canvas, so I would be much obliged if you would tell me which of the candidates you propose to support.’

  Destercore, with his lists and political intriguing, was interesting to me, in spite of his fish’s smile and his presumption that I was his friend. So, instead of sending him away like the hawker that, in one sense, he actually was, I agreed to see him next door at my office.

  ‘But it will have to be a little later in the morning. My clerk will make an appointment and, in the meantime, you may canvas him, as he too is an elector, and may even be one of your supporters. His name is Furzey.’

  As my tone had been ostentatiously neutral, I was sure Destercore detected the ghost of mockery in it. He certainly did not like being put off, though there was not much he could do about it. So he produced a watch from his fob pocket and frowned at it.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, resuming his outward cheerfulness, ‘we shall see you later.’

  I went back in to find Fidelis eating slices of veal pie. He looked a good deal fresher and more alert.

  ‘By the way, what’s that basket you left in the office?’ I asked.

  ‘It is for you. I am hoping you might be visiting Middleforth Green again today, to see how your cousins are doing. If not, I shall have to go over myself, for I want to collect something from old Isaac Satterthwaite.’

  ‘Well, you are in luck. I’ve been asked to call in on legal business. I can also call at Satterthwaite’s on my way back, if you wish. But why will I need the basket?’

  ‘To bring back the rat that I wish you to get from him.’

  I was taken very much by surprise.

  ‘A rat? What do you want a dead rat for?’

  Fidelis shook his head.

  ‘You don’t follow me, Titus. I don’t want a dead rat.’

  ‘But surely any rat I get from Satterthwaite will be dead. He is a rat catcher.’

  Fidelis laughed.

  ‘He always has a few live ones that he’s trapped. He uses them to train his terriers, and he also sells them. He is selling one to me. I have sent him a note with instructions to have it ready.’

  ‘All right. If you really want a live rat, I shall bring one. Do you have any preference as to colour, age and gender?’

  ‘Any, just so long as it is adult and healthy.’

  ‘Will you tell me what it is for?’

  But at this moment, between que
stion and answer, I was thwarted. Elizabeth and her mother came in from market, and all discussion of rats was necessarily suspended. My wife took her produce straight through to the kitchen but Mrs George, upon hearing that Dr Fidelis was within, immediately rushed to the dining room to join us, without even taking off her bonnet.

  ‘Now, Doctor,’ she said, her eyes shining at the prospect of conversation with the handsome physician, ‘tell me, is it true what I hear from my daughter – that you have been up all night at the Gamecock Inn bravely tending a dangerously sick man that’s come to town to cast his vote?’

  ‘I have, madam,’ he replied, ‘but the fact is my efforts have been useless.’

  ‘Oh, dear! He has succumbed?’

  ‘Yes, Mr John Allcroft died at eight this morning.’

  At the mention of this name, she started.

  ‘Mercy! Mr John Allcroft who farms at Barton and Gregson, was that him?’

  ‘Did you know the man?’

  ‘Certainly I did. Mr George has done business with him. I have visited Susan, his wife, and she me. We have all dined together. Oh, poor man, he’s dead, is he? Requiescat.’