Sweet Thames

by Matthew Kneale

  Finally the front door opened and she stepped again into view, alone, hurrying up the street towards me. She spoke not a word, answered none of my faminous questions, but simply took my hand in her own, led me back through the front door – past the staring butler – and into the library.

  Her father was still there, even in the same spot. He looked changed, however, looked as I had never seen him before; there seemed an emptiness to his expression, as if the charged silence within him had imploded.

  Isobella did not so much as glance at him, but stood, face flushed, breathing fast. With excitement, or exertion from having run to fetch me? Her eyes were wide, with what looked more like anger. A raw anger I had not sensed in her before. At her father’s objections, I imagined. Indeed, she seemed possessed of something like power, sudden and dangerous.

  ‘I feel that my decision may have been…’ Moynihan, speaking at last, in a flat voice, faltered, as if lost of the moment he was in. ‘May have been over-hasty.’ The way he stood, too, was altered from his usual self, not quite straight. ‘I have therefore decided to assent… to your marriage to my daughter.’

  I strode towards him, hand outstretched. ‘I thank you with all my heart.’

  He nodded with a kind of smile and allowed his hand to be shaken.

  Afterwards, hard though I tried, I never could induce Isobella to explain how she had caused him to change his mind. Indeed, she quietly declined to discuss the matter in any way.

  Chapter Four

  THE CHOLERA: A WARNING

  The National Council for Health urges the population of London of the likelihood of imminent outbreak of the Asiatic Cholera in the capital. All precautions should be taken. Landlords should deal at once with any blocked drains or noxious deposits on their property which might be a source of effluential gases. Parish authorities and Poor Law Guardians should take steps to ensure they command adequate numbers of medical staff, and inspectors to visit afflicted areas. Additional dispensaries of medicines and houses of refuge should be established where required, while…

  The warning was not unexpected. The malady had been spreading slowly but steadily southwards from Liverpool, striking several Midland towns, while a handful of cases – fortunately all seemingly isolated – had occurred in Whitechapel and around the London Docks. Also the weather was changed. For the last three days the sky had been cloudless, the sun strong enough to transform the slop dirt of the gutters into dust, so fine that it would be set flying in the air by every passing carriage; a salty veil that blinded the eyes.

  One comfort, albeit a small one, was that I was as well prepared as I reasonably might be; I thought with satisfaction of the supplies I had acquired – not without difficulty – of olive oil, brandy and chloroform.

  Glancing further into the newspaper I found the edition had quite a number of items on the Cholera, including a long piece on possible causes of the malady.

  What subtle influence passes by, what blighting cloud overshadows the world, when thousands thus fall death-smitten; one moment warm palpitating organisms, the next a sort of galvanized corpses, with icy breath, stopped pulses and blood congealed, blue, shrivelled up, convulsed. All the while the mind remains clear – so strikingly far from the case with Typhoid Fever – lucid, shining strangely through the glazed eyes, with light unquenched and vivid to the last; a spirit looking out in terror from a corpse.

  Fine prose, certainly. The essence of the piece, however, I found disagreeably misleading, insisting, as it did, on describing all theories, however ill-founded they might be.

  Thus it gave a full account of Liebig’s Zymotic or Fungoid Theory – one of the most unlikely of notions – which claimed the cause of the evil to be minute fungi in food and water, attacking the blood in the same way yeast works upon wort, and thus, Liebig conjectured, explaining the blood’s thickened consistency.

  Here in print, too, was the Telluric Theory, which argued the disease to be an emanation from the very earth – a kind of a volcanic phenomenon – and which had for evidence nothing more than the mystery of Cholera never having broken out aboard ship. Also the Ozonic Theory of Monsieur Quetelet – a scientist of doubtful reputation – who maintained Cholera to be the result of a lack in the atmosphere of that newly discovered gas, ozone, excess of ozone causing influenza. As proof the man offered only the strange fact that Birmingham had escaped the disease; a blessing he claimed to be the result of the city’s many great chimneys, and the ozone they generated.

  Present, too, was the Specific Volatile Poison Theory. A belief I felt to be particularly misleading, this claimed the malady was carried in people, in quite the same way as the Smallpox virus, lurking within their bodies and being transmitted from one to another. But what, I thought as I read, of the numerous and well-documented instances of doctors who had spent weeks in close proximity to Cholera sufferers, without themselves contracting the disease. Such was not at all the case with Smallpox. Also why the erratic course of the last epidemic – striking one district while leaving its neighbours untouched, then vanishing so quickly away after just a few days – if it were not issuing down from a malevolent cloud passing above?

  Only at the end did the article finally come to the Miasmatic Theory. The idea was described, accepted as the most likely candidate for the truth, but – to my annoyance – nothing more. It seemed astounding the paper could so under-describe the vitality of the proof. Had not the great majority of Cholera outbreaks occurred near criminally ill-constructed sewers? What of the miasma cloud, fed by these abominations, hanging above the rooftops, poisoning city dwellers? Had not many men seen it? Had I not seen it with my own eyes? What doubts could there be?

  My irritation abated only when I turned the pages further. There it was, my own letter.

  DRAINAGE OF LONDON:

  THE BENEFITS OF A SYSTEM OF EFFLUENT

  TRANSFORMATIONAL DEPOSITORIES

  From Mr Joshua Jeavons of 17 Lark Road, London.

  So the world now knew. I was heartened by the sight of the words – so familiar to me – firmly inscribed in black print, and my own name written clearly below. All across the capital at this very instant there could be men of note pondering and discussing my proposal.

  *

  Gerald Prowse left the building housing Moynihan’s office, strode with his loping, young man’s step past the giant building site that was the Palace of Westminster, then entered a beershop to seek some lunch. He was an easy sort to follow unobserved, certainly, and I was well able to keep up with him and even overhear him order his lamb steak. Next I bided my time, waiting until he was hard at work with his knife and fork before seating myself down at the table, just opposite his place.

  ‘Prowse, tell me why you have taken to staring at me as you are at your desk. And pretending otherwise when I catch you doing so.’

  ‘Mr Jeavons…’ The suddenness of my attack caused – as I had hoped – startlement upon the fellow’s foolish, faintly moustachioed face. He reddened, and his fork – supporting a cargo of potatoes and strands of lamb in a united mush – hung in the air above his plate. ‘I wasn’t doing anything.’

  ‘You were doing exactly what I’ve described. Why?’

  The fork came to rest on the uneaten portion of lamb, its load slowly sliding back from whence it had come. ‘It was no more than silliness.’

  ‘What silliness?’

  Fidgeting with his fingers – mentally wriggling – he glanced behind him, as if in hope of discovering some saving distraction. ‘Just on account of stupid talk.’

  I regarded him coolly. ‘What talk?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘It may do very much.’

  ‘Mr Willow said you were going mad in the brain, like old King George.’ Hardly had he uttered the words than he seemed regretful of the admission. ‘It was just his joking. Nothing more. He said that’s as why you’re so short with everyone nowadays, and why you fell over with such a crunch. Nobody took him serious. Honest, Mr Jeavons.
But Davy Hope, who’s working on the Kidderbridge junction behind me, kept saying I should see, as you were afoaming at the mouth and such.’ Again he grew embarrassed. ‘I knew it was just foolishness, of course, but I couldn’t help having a look.’

  A ludicrous business. Or was it? Willow was a beery, noisy fellow – a soul I had never quarrelled with before – but if he had been spreading such stories about me then what else might he have been doing? And Prowse himself? I studied the lad’s face for a moment, watching for any signs of deceit. I saw none, but one never knew. His entire story could be invention; an attempt to divert suspicion from himself. I would keep a close watch on them both.

  ‘I shall expect you to keep this discussion to yourself.’

  ‘I will, of course.’ He nodded earnestly, relieved the interview was ended.

  The glory of that sound; the rushing of water, sharpened into a roar by the echo within the drain, as it burst headlong into the daylight, cleansing, carrying away the vile substances, dashing towards the Thames.

  ‘Flushing started already,’ Grant – my sewer guide for the afternoon – observed cheerily. ‘Look at it go, eh.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  The wave of liquid – a surge close on a foot high – flowed from the outlet below us towards the river, filling the air with a most cruel stench, that caused me to cover my nose with my handkerchief. Still I regarded it with satisfaction. What firmer evidence could there be of the Metropolitan Committee for Sewers’ determination to act decisively?

  The machinery for flushing the sewers had long been in place, and was simple enough to operate. In the upper reaches of the main drainage arteries had been constructed walled reservoirs, where river water would collect during high tides and then remain, held by a type of door or penstock. When this was unfastened all the accumulated water would be discharged in a rush, utterly scouring clean the sewer – or so was the intention – and speedily removing the noxious deposits into the Thames.

  A simple enough procedure it would seem, and one that should, surely, have been regularly carried out. Sadly this had been far from the case. The criminally idle nature of earlier metropolitan government had allowed the maintenance of the drains to be wholly neglected, until many were not so much conveyors of effluent, as elongated cesspools. The situation had become desperate. Only three years earlier there had been such an accumulation of rancid gases in the old Fleet River (long covered over and, to all purposes, transformed to a grand sewer) that a tremendous explosion had occurred, bursting through the street by King’s Cross, and causing such a tidal wave of filth that three poor houses in my native district of Clerkenwell had been carried away, and a Thames steamboat smashed clean against Blackfriars Bridge.

  The new authority of the Metropolitan Committee for Sewers, by contrast with its predecessors, had acted with dynamic promptness. Hardly had the threat of Cholera been officially declared than the Committee was sending out gangs of flushermen to effect a thorough scouring. Flushing was, of course, by no means a complete solution to the city’s troubles; many drains were now too clogged to be improved even by a wild rush of water, while the whole system was so pitiably defective that it required not cleaning but replacing. However, flushing remained the only measure that could be undertaken in the short time remaining before an outbreak of the disease was likely to begin. The Cholera-creating effluviential poisons lurking beneath London would be, if not vanquished, at least reduced.

  ‘Come on mister,’ called out Jem. ‘Make the old bloke do the trick with the red bits of wood.’ The urchin must have been in the habit of loitering about the river as this was the third time he had appeared, seemingly from nowhere, to watch us working. He never showed surprise at his rediscovery of our party, behaving as if no time had elapsed since our last encounter.

  ‘You be quiet,’ Hayle brayed, glaring at the boy as he stooped to lay the measuring stick along the edge of the drainage tank. ‘Afore I decide to throw you in.’

  This was quite a threat; the tank was a deep one, the bottom a good forty feet below them. We were on the Southwark bank of the Thames, where the level of the land was so depressed that the effluent could only be discharged into the river at low tide. When the tide was high the drain outlets had to be sealed shut – to prevent the Thames water from rushing back into the sewers, and inundating the lowerlying neighbourhoods – and the effluent left to accumulate in such drainage tanks. Now the tide was out, the river was empty as could be – all the more so for the enduring warm and dry weather – and the tank held nothing but a residual ooze.

  ‘You leave the boy alone,’ I told Hayle. I would have given further encouragement to the nascent interest the lad had shown in our work, but we were too pressed for time. Grant had only two hours to show me four outlets.

  ‘He’s trying to throw me over, he is,’ Jem’s piercing voice rang out, and he clung on to Hayle’s bony frame like a cat panicked on a high branch.

  ‘You get away,’ Hayle retorted, adding, in my direction, ‘I didn’t touch the little bugger. It’s just his fibbing.’

  I had little interest in which of them was right or wrong. ‘I thought I told you to leave the lad alone.’

  Jem disengaged himself and ran nimbly along the very edge of the precipice to where I stood, at once tugging at my jacket. ‘Make him do the stuff with the stick and the red bits of wood. I want to learn it proper, see?’

  ‘A model pupil,’ Grant murmured dryly. He was a lean, bemused sort of fellow, who seemed to derive a calm but deep satisfaction from his work in and about the sewers. He had been giving me a most informed account of the idiosyncrasies of the Southwark outlets.

  ‘Another time,’ I told the urchin. ‘We’re too busy today.’

  ‘Go on, go on,’ he yelped, all at once quite changing tack.

  ‘Give us a shilling. I’ll hold your jacket for a shilling. Go on. Hot day and all.’

  In the end I gave him the thing to carry, just to quiet him, choosing the less begrimed of his arms to place it upon.

  The district where we were working was surely the most fantastical and sickly in all the metropolis. Jacob’s Island, close on Bermondsey, was a haunt of crazed wooden houses – so ramshackle that a stiff breeze would seemingly have had them tumbling – all vying with one another for space, as old men arguing on their death beds. Many had tacked to their sides precariously overhanging galleries, extra sleeping rooms, and rickety bridges connecting them with other houses, so they altogether resembled residences in some medieval painter’s imagining of hell.

  Flowing beneath were a whole set of creeks and sewers, giving the neighbourhood the name of ‘The Venice of Drains’. We had earlier crossed one of the most notorious of these, the Dock Head Creek, its water – much affected by the dyes of the leather dressers – coloured scarlet, and covered with scum resembling a giant cobweb, through which loomed the patterned carcasses of animals that had tumbled in, as so many ill-wrapped packages.

  Glancing up at a row of toppling-over houses beyond the drainage tank where we were working, I observed a bucket being lowered by a rope from one of the upper galleries. Slowly it descended, into the very ooze itself, where it tipped, filled, and then, wobbling with the weight of its contents, began its journey back upwards. When it finally reached the gallery a hand darted out from shadow to claim it. I pointed out the sight to Grant, and he shook his head with a kind of grim amusement.

  ‘There’s some of them who drink it.’ It was a thought not only vile but seemingly impossible, but Grant was insistent. ‘Those that can’t get themselves Thames – that are too sickly or hemmed in from the river to be able – generally haul up what they can from a creek or such, straight below their houses. ’Course they let it stand for a day or two first. Some boil it even. Still I can’t think it tastes too sweet.’

  The notion left me feeling sick in the stomach. ‘What of the water companies?’

  ‘Place like this isn’t worth their while.’

  Hayle had completed his m
easuring of the tank perimeter and I felt I had seen more than enough of the outlet. ‘Let’s continue along to the next.’

  It was only as we turned to walk along the river bank that I observed a figure picking his way over the mud towards us. His step was energetic yet careful, as some large creature that has trained itself to dwell among far smaller animals without crushing them underfoot. Behind him a Thames boat – those hansom cabs of the water – lay beached, its commander drooped listlessly over his oars; evidently the vessel from which the man had sprung. As he drew nearer I recognized him, as much as anything from his beard, as none other than Harold Sweet, molasses trader.

  ‘I thought it was you I spotted up here.’ He seemed proud of his intrepid arrival, cheerily waving his hand towards the boat with the air of one posing, without great success, as a dangerous pirate. ‘How’re you progressing?’

  ‘Very well, I’m glad to say.’ I shook his hand.

  Grant, whose assistance had been secured through Sweet’s agency, greeted him respectfully.

  ‘We’ll come to this dinner of yours.’ Sweet smiled at me with the air of one distributing favours. ‘I wrote to say so just this morning.’

  ‘I’m most glad.’ Nor was I otherwise, although, of course, it was Sleak-Cunningham I was most eager to hear from.

  He regarded me keenly. ‘Lucky I should find you like this, it is. Why don’t you come along with me to the warehouse site for an hour or two. It could be useful for us to look over the place together. Take in the lie of the land.’

  So that was it. I had rather guessed he had not strode up from his boat only to exchange pleasantries. ‘I still have quite an amount of work to do here.’