‘That’s no secret.’ He took the inkpot from me and, with something like petulance, placed it where it had sat before. ‘Mr Harold Sweet.’
In one respect I was fortunate; at least the man proved easy to discover. I found him at his molasses yard, standing – keenly purposeful so he resembled some bearded circus ringmaster – before two carts being unloaded of their barrels; efficiently directing the half dozen souls struggling to bring the objects down to the ground. This last was no easy task, as evidenced by one barrel that lay shattered and oozing beside the cart wheel, filling the air with its overrich sweetness.
‘Is it Joshua?’ Peering at me for a moment, uncertain, Sweet regarded me with some surprise, even alarm. ‘Whatever’s happened to you? You look as if you’ve been dragged round the streets of London head first.’
I was in no mood to be distracted. ‘I’ve not come here to exchange news and pleasantries, Mr Sweet. I’m here because of the Cholera raging in St Giles. I’ve seen it at work, with my own eyes. Something must be done.’
‘St Giles?’ He frowned. ‘Near the Seven Dials? But what were you doing in such a place? It’s a dreadful spot.’ He again stared at my clothes.
‘It is a dreadful spot,’ I agreed. ‘All the more so when it’s rife with the Cholera. And when the Parish Union Poor Law Guardians – of whom, I believe, you yourself are the commander – choose neatly to obstruct every assistance to those afflicted, even to the point of preventing doctors from tending to their needs.’
Such strong words were not without effect. Sweet looked at me afresh, re-appraising, absorbing this unexpected – but informed – attack, from so strangely altered an acquaintance. Not that he was persuaded by my denunciation; rather he regarded me with disappointment – something like hurt – as if I had betrayed him. ‘This, from you of all people. I never counted you among the pauperizers.’
So there it was. The answer to so many questions. The theory of anti-pauperization was now raised into some kind of holy doctrine: unquestionable, requiring nothing short of tribal obedience, to be upheld regardless of consequence. Perhaps I should have known; what of the lecture Sweet had delivered to Jem on the muddy shore before Jacob’s Island.
‘Charity can be a dangerous thing.’
‘And I,’ I answered, ‘never counted you as a killer-of-men. As one who would deliberately deny assistance to the sick.’
Sweet did not rise to my words, remaining coolly controlled, though his eyes seemed faintly to glow. My claims did not seem to surprise him, and I realized I was likely not the first to have voiced such things. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ he insisted. ‘You don’t know these people. Put them in a hospital and they’ll never want to leave. Offer them food and they’ll see no purpose in working ever again.’ He shook his head, knowing. ‘You claim yourself as their friend, but in truth you’re proposing to enslave them. Nothing less.’
‘But you misjudge me.’ I struggled to keep as tight a reign upon my feelings as he did his. ‘I do know these people. Indeed, I am one of them. You must know that I myself have lately suffered the Cholera and – thanks to your rulings – no doctor would come.’
Probably he doubted my claim, suspecting it to be no more than an over-stretched device of rhetoric. Still he exhibited concern. ‘But why did you not tell me you’d been ill?’ Regarding my battered frock coat, his glance seemed to soften, perhaps at the thought that he had found a device by which my criticisms might safely be dismissed. Indeed, his voice took on something like enthusiasm. ‘You’re in a poor state, Joshua. I don’t know what you’ve been doing with yourself – especially in such a place as St Giles – but you’ve gone downhill fearfully. No surprise you’re so excitable.’
I wondered at the phenomenon stood before me. And I myself had admired him. ‘Will you call a meeting of the Guardians this day?’ I demanded. ‘And do away with every one of these rulings you introduced?’
Though irritated, he refused to be so easily swayed from his forgiveness. ‘You should take a look at yourself, really you should. You cannot go on as you are.’ He reached into his waistcoat pocket. ‘Now…’
In the legal view, I realized, he had likely committed no wrong; he was not a man to be caught out in such matters. He might be viewed as over-zealous in his defence of the ratepayers, but nothing more. He might even escape reprimand by his superiors, continuing to be regarded as a good citizen – if a touch stern – hard working, and well deserving of his position. Indeed, for all I knew there might be countless others who had acted just as he.
‘Take these four sovereigns.’ He held the coins before me. ‘That you may feed and rest yourself, and buy some new clothes. Then we’ll talk again.’
I could not help but be struck by the proposal. ‘You’re offering me charity? But surely that is to put me in risk of enslavement?’
‘Don’t be absurd.’ Losing patience, he spoke the words like a dangerous uncle, patting a child gently upon the head when, in truth, he would like nothing better than to throttle his neck. ‘This is a loan, and one I have no doubt you will honourably repay. Now take these.’ He thrust the coins towards me as if they were some kind of revenge in solid form. ‘Then come back when you’re properly recovered.’
I did not reply directly but let his offer – and his hand – hang in the air. ‘Mr Sweet, I’d sooner take the stolen gifts of a pickpocket than have your gold.’
Hobbes I finally discovered, after some searching, in a dingy room above a second-hand clothes shop. Here he was at work performing the sombre rites of passage over a lifeless figure who – by his dress – had evidently been the shopman, though his selling talents and worries were now past their usefulness. His wife sat close beside the vicar, the look on her face one of amazement rather than grief; her husband’s features – though distorted by the squeezings of the disease – were those of a young man, and I imagined the disease had toppled him so swiftly that she had barely had time properly to acquaint herself with the danger. She seemed hardly to hear Hobbes’s words, until he reached their end. Then she grew suddenly excited.
‘Say some more of it, will you, your reverind. Just a bit.’
‘If you wish.’
Later stepping from the room, the vicar received my tale of Sweet and the Poor Law Guardians without surprise. ‘I told you there was no purpose in visiting them,’ he told me, coolly. The strange meeting with the wild-eyed fellow who had thought me a poisoner awoke a touch more interest. ‘Boot Lane? It’s an odd arrangement, certainly.’
‘You know the well’s history?’ I asked. ‘There was some incident during the last epidemic, perhaps?’
‘Not that. But still it’s not undeserving of curiosity.’
The spot was only a few yards distance from the dead shopman’s door, and we were soon stood before the street pump in question, well familiar to me. It was innocent enough to the eye, certainly. Indeed, it was unexpectedly elegant for such a district, possessing a spout in the likeness of an astonished fish, mouth gaping. In the ground beside it was a metal hole cover.
‘The well can be reached by opening that.’ Hobbes indicated this last, then gave the handle of the pump a tug, causing a squeaking sound, and a brief gush of water, its colour that of weak tea with a dash of milk. ‘There were some difficulties in which I myself became involved,’ he explained. ‘This was a couple of years ago. The population hereabouts had been growing swiftly and the well began sometimes to run dry, especially in the hot weather. I was asked if I might help.’
I inspected the dribble of water as it flowed over the dusty ground, slowly sinking away. Did the secret lie there? How many drops or glasses-full would be required to send a fellow from this world? It seemed amazing to me now that I had ever been able to drink such vile-looking liquid. Then again, there had been nothing else.
‘It occurred to me that it might be possible to have a water company to lay a pipe here, so the well could be topped up,’ Hobbes resumed, pausing to try and raise up the metal ho
le cover; it was firmly lodged. ‘They were reluctant to have any dealings with such a spot as here, but finally I managed to persuade one among them to a special arrangement. I agreed to guarantee payment, while the pipe would only be used in times of need, which would keep down the charges. In fact the sums proved very small, and I’ve never had trouble over the matter. The shopowners pay between them.’
I could see the rounded outline of a pipe beneath the ground, close by the pump. So the avenue of study that had begun with the rantings of the mad-eyed fellow might not, after all, end here. ‘Has the well needed topping up of late?’
‘Of course. Every week since the heat began, I’d say.’
I would follow, to wherever the road might lead. ‘What was the name of the water company?’
The Westminster and Thames Water Company office, filled with rows of clerks sat at splendid desks, was not busy that afternoon; the scribblers were most of them idle, while I found myself to be the only visitor to the shop, and so able to stride directly to the two fellows in authority. These were both young, and of something of a lounging disposition, which – doubtless at the sight of my attire, indicating me to be a most unlikely customer – they made little effort to conceal; as I drew near, one of them, a thin-faced sort with a budding moustache, raised an eyebrow to his colleague, as if I were some fairground novelty.
‘Sorry uncle. Westminster Gaol’s round the corner.’
The other coughed laughter.
To answer sharply – though tempting – would hardly add to my chances of learning what I needed. ‘I’ve come for information.’
Further raising of eyebrows. ‘Oh yes? What exactly? An estimate for your Hampstead Villa, fully piped, perhaps?’
Grinning, the other could not resist chiming in. ‘Kitchen, bathrooms and fountain in the garden? Or just the filling of the lake?’
‘In fact no.’ I spoke as if taking their words as seriously meant. ‘It’s to do with a wager.’
‘Indeed? Ha’penny farthing? Or not so much?’
I pretended not to notice. ‘You have a pipe run out to a well in Boot Lane, close by the Seven Dials. I’ve drunk from there many a time, and have no doubt it’s Brentford Thames. I know the taste. Yet there’s a fellow across the way from me who insists it’s Fulham.’
Budding moustache yawned, growing tired of the game. ‘Sorry uncle. Can’t help. Off you go back to Whitechapel Poorhouse, or Bedlam, or wherever it is you’ve sprung from.’
‘It’s important.’
To my relief, the other then joined in. ‘I might even take a small’un myself. Seven Dials? I’d say that’s the Chelsea intake.’
‘Never. It’s Hammersmith.’
‘Five bob?’
‘Five it is.’ Budding moustache stood up from his desk and reached up to the giant maps on rollers that were hung from the wall behind him. ‘Let’s see how your luck’s doing, uncle.’
The Thames at Chelsea. A picturesque scene it made, too, with Wandsworth dairy farms visible on the far bank; cows roaming the yellowed fields between the cottages, and a church spire rising up in the distance. I paid little heed, however, to such prettiness, as my attention was concerned with details closer to hand.
The tide was low and, stepping carefully over the mud by the water’s edge, I had no difficulty discovering the long bulge in the slime that marked the Westminster and Thames Water Company’s intake pipe; the very pipe that, by some tortuous route, led all the way to the fish-fashioned spout of the Boot Lane street pump. The position of the intake could hardly have been more remarkable. Not thirty yards upstream was the gaping mouth of one of the largest sewer outlets in London.
No doubts were left.
I remained perched upon the slippery river shore for some little time, as barges and rowboats floated lazily by, causing murky waves to spread before me on to the mud and vanish. Above, seagulls hung erratically in the breeze, squawking into the warm sky. A sky which contained no miasma cloud of poisonous gases. Which never had contained a miasma, as no such thing, I now realized, existed. A sky dark with nothing more than the swirling smoke of hundreds of thousands of fireplaces.
Whatever could have put such a notion into our heads? Perhaps the simple stink of the metropolis; a stench so abhorrent it was easy to regard as cause of any evil. Still it seemed extraordinary I had not seen it before. That none had.
None? My thoughts turned to the Jacob’s Island deputation – awkward in their patched and polished Sunday best, as they found themselves in the empty corridors of the Metropolitan Committee for Sewers and the stringy fellow who had acted as their spokesman.
‘It’s in the water.’
And they had gone there to urge the ending of the flushing of the sewers. The flushing… In such a wide and peaceful place, the scale of the disaster seemed to creep through me, as a numbness. Thousands of tons expelled into the Thames, to leave the air cleaner. Except that the air was of no danger, while half the people of London were drinking Thames.
I glanced at the sewer outlet. How much had been shot from there? With the water intake pipe just below, the effect would hardly have been more direct had the stuff been poured straight into people’s mouths. And yet so many of us, myself included, had had faith in Sleak-Cunningham’s flushings.
Just as we had believed in the miasma.
Sleak-Cunningham. The man had been punished, certainly. Although it was not of this that he had been accused. The Times had been as convinced of the miasma theory as everybody else, and had destroyed the man not for having caused the deaths of hundreds – perhaps thousands – but for his slowness to act, his power-loving secrecy. His fall, though just, had been only accidental.
Quite an education I underwent on that muddy shore. Edwin Sleak-Cunningham – beacon of the sanitary and governmentalist movements – revealed as the grand poisoner of thousands, myself among them. Harold Sweet – self-made man, paragon of the creed of political economy – shown to be a giant of inhumanity, prohibiting help to those struck, myself among them.
The process of self-dismantlement; once begun it can run far indeed. Certainties long prized seem to shimmer, precarious and needful of fresh testing. Notions leant upon, as strong crutches, show themselves frail and splintering. Until not a notion remains so sacred that it can linger in its lazy bed of assumption. So it was that distant afternoon.
No, the Cholera had not been the only malady to afflict the metropolis that long summer; another sickness had also been roaming, unchecked and unseen. A fever of belief. Symptoms: restless energy, great swelling of self-importance, impaired powers of doubt and reason. These growing ever more acute, until the patient reaches a critical state, his humanity dangerously diminished, perhaps beyond repair.
Restless energy, absence of doubt… Had Sleak-Cunningham and Sweet truly been the only sufferers? Sadly, I realized, it was not so.
Slowly I peeled the leather sack from my shoulders. A scheme so fine that it would answer all needs; that would fuse together the opposed causes of governmentalist and anti-governmentalist; that would both cleanse London of effluent and make its citizens wealthy. That – not least among its attractions – would bring fame and gratitude everlasting to its creator, Joshua Jeavons. That would somehow banish all dissatisfactions, recasting the world, in the manner of some glistening miracle.
Had not Hove, in his plodding way, seen more than I? As if the farmers of England would have need of such a grotesque quantity of nightsoil. And the populations of each district would be pleased to have in their midst a giant and stinking steam-powered mechanism, to process their own vilenesses. No, I too had been blinded by fever. I had barely paused to wonder if my plan was a practical one; I had been too determined that it should somehow answer, at one stroke, to the world’s every conceivable need. And to my own.
One swing, a second – wider of arc – a third, and then – arm pulled taut, high before me – I opened my fingers. The sack sailed gracelessly into the air and landed in the water with a light spl
ash. The river was low, and for a moment I wondered if it would remain lodged where it had dropped; as I watched, however, the current gave it a sleepy tug, pulling it from its place. Soon it turned upon its side, water seeping in through the opening, causing its profile in the water to decline, and, doubtless, the ink on so many pages of frantic descriptions and illustrations to run, and dissolve away into the Thames waters, staining them a little darker than before. I was still watching when it slipped beneath the surface and was gone.
What means pure belief? Belief quite severed from the humour and character of its proponent? Answer: all but nothing. It is as neutral and flavourless as pure spirit; as a house awaiting its first inhabitants. It is a thing that may yet be swung towards either good or evil. The most fine-sounding notion (as I was all too aware) can be warped to wicked effect. No, a philosophy is no better than the humanity – or absence of it – with which it is directed; the self-critical intelligence.
Joshua Jeavons quietly emptied of faiths on the soft mud of the Thames bank. A haunting, stilled moment, and one I will carry with me always. Though it was not quite despair I felt. My feet had never seemed to me so solidly stood upon the surface of the earth, my eyes had never seen with such clarity. Small comforts, you may think, but they were to grow within me.
A small crowd gathered to watch the drama. The pump handle proved by no means easy to remove; after vainly trying to smash it with a small hammer, we resorted to using some house-breaking tools of an acquaintance of Jem’s, first attempting to prise it out with a crowbar, then, more effectively, striking it with a thick metal pipe. Slowly the iron began to weaken, the handle to bend away, until it snapped free completely.
The watchers seemed uncertain of the usefulness of such destruction, and looked on gloomily. Even Hobbes seemed a touch doubtful. ‘Let’s hope this’ll prove of some purpose, beyond only adding to the walk required to reach water.’
My thoughts were still dark with what I had learned on the Chelsea shore. ‘It will. I’m sure.’
Sweet Thames Page 26
