Tessa swung round to face her, still holding the pretty parasol, making no attempt to put it up to protect her white skin from the sun’s rays.
‘What are you trying to save me from, Annie? Why is it that suddenly I’m not allowed to visit Ashton Lane? Why can’t I see for myself these people who have been struck down by something which may or may not be fever, which may or may not be scarletina, or measles? What is there that . . . that Will . . . Dear God, it’s Will, isn’t it? He doesn’t want me to . . . to see what? Tell me what it is he doesn’t want me to see?’
‘Nay, lass, don’t. I give ’im me word . . .’
‘To do what, Annie?’ All the while the terror grew and grew within her, threatening to crush her heart and freeze the blood in her veins. ‘Tell me the truth, Annie. You might as well because, whatever you say, I shall go to Ashton Lane and find out. As soon as the carriage comes I mean to go there, or the infirmary, or wherever Doctor Salter and Will are, and find out whatever it is you’re keeping from me.’
‘Tha can’t, lass. Doctor Salter won’t let thi . . .’
‘Won’t! Doctor Salter has no authority over me, Annie Beale, and neither have you. See, here is the carriage. Now, will you come with me or will I go alone?’
She climbed into the carriage, nodding at Thomas who helped her in, giving him instructions to drive her to the old Clegg warehouse in Ashton Lane. Annie sat beside her, saying nothing, for what was the use?
It was the stench which hit her first, the foetid, appalling air, so hot it lay thickly against her skin. It was dim in that first moment and she could not make out what it was that retched and gasped and groaned and cried out as she moved beyond the open doorway which led from the warehouse yard to the ground floor of the building.
The room was crowded with iron bedsteads, cots, even mattresses laid out on the bare floor. Some sort of attempt had been made to keep the beds separate from one another but to Tessa it seemed that it was impossible to get from one side of the room to the other without stepping on the prone figures that crowded it. There were men and women, children, tiny and silent, others writhing and vomiting, and moving from one to another was Doctor Salter and half a dozen women, some of whom she recognised from her own recently opened pin-heading factory.
‘Dear, sweet Jesus,’ she whispered. ‘What is it . . . ?’
‘Now yer ’ere, lass and thy’ve seen it, yer might as well know. Dr Ellison reckons it’s cholera.’
‘Cholera! Oh, dear God . . .’
‘Aye.’
‘But what is being done about it?’
‘There’s not much can be done ’cept let it run its course. They’re tryin’ ter keep ’em separate from . . . the rest. There’s none o’t suspects gone to’t th’infirmary since weekend. Authorities ’ve bin informed an’ all them ’ouses in’t back o’ Jagger Lane, where it began, ’ave bin limewashed an’ t’bodies an’ all.
‘Dear God, why was I not told?’
‘What good would that a’ done?’
‘I could have . . . helped . . .’
‘’Ow, lass? Tha’ knows that ’usband o’ thine wouldn’t let yer come ’ere ’elpin’ out. I wanted to mesen but . . . I were persuaded I could do more good in other quarters . . . as you can.’
‘Where is Will, Annie?’
Annie’s disjointed words dried up abruptly and she put a hand on Tessa’s arm as she began to move forward into the packed mass of suffering humanity. Flies buzzed lazily over a pool of excrement which dripped on to the floor from the cot of a quiet child and Tessa knew quite definitely that the child was dead. There was vomit on the blankets which covered the shivering, sighing bodies and bluebottles gorged there, but still Tessa pressed on.
‘Where is Will, Annie?’ She knew if she did not find him soon, if she did not see his tall, dependable, strong and beloved figure bending over some bed she would run, screaming his name, into the warehouse yard. She could feel the panic, the horror, the dread, the awful, awful fear fill and expand her lungs until she knew they would burst. She could feel it rise in her throat, threatening to choke her. She wanted to cry out his name, shout his name at the top of her voice, but Annie had her by the arm, struggling to drag her back from the appalling, writhing misery.
‘Tell me where he is, Annie.’
‘No, lass, tha’ can’t. He asked me ter keep thi away.’
‘Where is he, Annie? Take me to him or, by God, I’ll search every bed in this place until I find him.’ And Annie, perhaps with the picture in her mind of the elegant Mrs Drew Greenwood handling every stinking, shivering body in the makeshift hospital in her search for Will Broadbent, led her to him.
He had been put in a corner beneath a window which someone, with a decent attempt at cleanliness had tried to wipe over. He lay on his back, his unfocused gaze on the high ceiling. His short hair lay limply to the shape of his head and his face was grey and withered. A blanket covered him and his large hands plucked at the wool, bony somehow, the flesh already burned away, as it was from the rest of his big frame, by this disease which could kill a healthy man in twenty-four hours. He muttered and mumbled, his head turning towards her as she bent over him, though he didn’t know her, then away again as he heaved convulsively in a great spasm of vomiting.
‘Will . . . Will . . . Oh, Lord God . . . Will . . .’ She reached for his hand and from behind Annie tried to stop her from touching him but she sank down beside his bed, oblivious to the stench which came from him, her hands smoothing his forehead and cheeks. ‘Oh my dearest, what . . . ?’
‘Dear God in heaven, woman, what d’you think you’re doing? Get away from that man, Annie Beale, and who in hell’s that . . . ? Goddammit, woman, have you no more sense than to touch that man? Oh, Mrs Greenwood, I beg your pardon, but would you come away from my patient? Do you not realise how . . . how unwell he is and how dangerous . . . ? You could take the illness with you . . .’
Doctor Salter, his young face old and hard and lined, tired beyond endurance, dragged quite forcibly at her shoulder, not caring any more for the niceties of their differing social position in his desperation to get her, not only from the dying man in the bed, but from this hospital. But she struck his hand away, bending, incredibly, to place her lips on the man’s brow.
‘Mrs Greenwood!’ This was not, of course, the time for amazement at Mrs Greenwood’s behaviour, though that was incredible enough. He simply could not cope with visitors, for God’s sake, in the midst of this catastrophe which had come upon the town of Crossfold. ‘Please, Mrs Greenwood, this man needs attention . . .’
She rose crisply, no hint of the soft anguish she had just displayed lingering in her decisive manner.
‘Which he shall have, Doctor Salter, but not here.’
‘I don’t understand you, Mrs Greenwood, and I’m afraid I have not the time to stand and discuss it with you. As you can see, I am an extremely busy man.’ He waved his exhausted hand in the direction of the dozens of people who lay about them awaiting his attention.
‘Which I shall help to alleviate at once, Doctor Salter.’
‘I cannot imagine what you mean, ma’am, so if you will excuse me.’ He began to turn away but she had not yet done.
‘What nursing does this man need, Doctor Salter? Is there anything special in the way of . . .’
‘No, ma’am. All we can do is try to make their passing a little easier . . . more comfortable . . .’
Her face spasmed in horror and he relented somewhat. ‘Go home, Mrs Greenwood. There is nothing you or Miss Beale can do here. It will run its course, this . . . fever, and you are needed and can do so much more elsewhere. We are deeply grateful for all the help you have . . .’
‘Thank you, doctor, but I have done nothing. Now, if you could find me some men . . . you have men to carry the patients in, I presume? . . . Good, then if you would be so kind as to fetch them, and my coachman . . . no . . . very well, I suppose it would not be fair to ask him to risk himself . . . some blankets which
I will replace, naturally. I shall take Mr Broadbent to . . . oh, no, not to Greenacres, there are children there, but to the home of my good friend, Miss Beale. I intend to nurse Mr Broadbent myself, Doctor Salter.’
‘Tha can’t do this, Tessa,’ Annie said, all the way back to the cottage at Edgeclough.
Her face was like stone.
‘I am doing it, Annie.’ She held his mumbling, tossing head in her lap, drawing the blankets more closely about his heaving shoulders though the sun’s heat struck fiercely even through the carriage top which Thomas had put up.
‘Tha can’t do it, lass. Doctor Salter said . . .’
‘I heard what he said and it appears to me that Will had just as much chance, more, of . . . of surviving in your cottage than he has in that stinking . . .’
‘Tha knows what I mean, Tessa.’
‘No, I don’t, unless it is that you do not want us in your house. I’m sorry, Annie, I had not thought. The fever is infectious, dangerous, I suppose, and Will could bring it with him.’
‘Now then, madam.’ Annie’s voice was sharp and biting. ‘Don’t tek that tone wi’ me. Will . . . an’ thissen are welcome in my ’ouse whenever tha wants, illness or no. I told thi that years ago, but it’s thi ’usband an’ family I’m thinkin’ on. Tha knows ’ow it’ll look ter folk, Mrs Drew Greenwood nursin’ a man who was once overlooker in ’er family’s own mill. It does look a mite strange, don’t tha think?’
‘You’ll be there, Annie, to safeguard my reputation, if that’s what concerns you.’
But it was clear to Annie that Tessa was not really listening to what she was saying. She bent over the delirious man, her face no more than six inches from his foetid breath, her arms holding his head to her breast, supporting him on the carriage seat. Her face was strained and pale and her eyes enormous in her anxiety. She stroked his cheek and murmured his name, soothing him, whispering to him that they were almost there, my darling, telling him that soon he would be in a clean bed and she would give him a sip of soup, broth to keep up his strength, and soon, soon he would better. She had not the slightest notion of what she was taking on, Annie could see, believing naively that once had Will away from that dreadful place, which surely had been doing him no good at all, he would begin to recover. A warm bath, a hot drink and a good night’s sleep: wasn’t that the remedy for all the illness Tessa Greenwood had yet seen in her life and wasn’t that what she would give to her love, Will Broadbent, her attitude said? Annie knew that Drew Greenwood was away from home on one of his frequent visits to his autocratic and privileged friends. Was it shooting, fishing or just some drunken debauch which they got up to with such regular monotony? She didn’t know or care. She only knew that when he came home and found his wife had taken the carriage to Edgeclough with the intention of helping to nurse Mr Will Broadbent, a director on the Chapman’s own board, he was not likely to be charitable about it.
They got him out of the carriage and up the stairs to Annie’s bedroom with the help of Thomas who couldn’t stand by and see his mistress and her strange friend struggle with a sick man, whatever he was supposed to have.
‘You must go home now, Thomas,’ Mrs Greenwood said crisply, ‘and tell them I shall stay here for a day or two to help Miss Beale nurse her . . . friend. Mr Broadbent has no one at his own home to . . . to look after him, you see, so we shall keep him here until he has recovered. Now then, here is a list of the things I . . . we shall need. See that I . . . we have them within the hour.’
And Thomas had driven home to Greenacres as though the devil himself sat in his carriage, declaring to the ring of fascinated servants who, thankfully, were not aware of the growing epidemic in the town, nor of Thomas’s involvement with one of its sufferers, that Miss Tessa had taken leave of her senses, really she had. There would be holy war when he came back from his jaunt to Cheshire and found her gone!
They bathed him first with cooling water, stripping him naked on Annie’s plain bed which had known the weight of no man. Together, without embarrassment, they performed the intimate task of cleansing every part of his body as he mumbled and fretted under their hands, knowing neither of them. They dressed him in a nightshirt which had come from Greenacres, watching with dismay as it was stained with the thin contents of his bowels. They changed him, and the bed linen, again and again since he had no control of his bodily functions and they were both obsessed with the need to make him as comfortable as they could. The boiler in which Annie washed her own garments was never taken off the fire and on Annie’s clothes-line in the strip of yard at the back of the cottage, sheets and blankets hung limp and unmoving in the humid heat.
‘Tha’ll ’ave ter leave ’im naked,’ Annie said wearily, as she watched Tessa shake out the last dry nightshirt, ready to drag it over Will’s head. ‘’E don’t know any difference an tha’s only tirin’ thissen over what don’t matter.’
‘But the sheets?’
‘Give ’em ’ere. I’ll put ’em in’t boiler but them’s the last. Tha’ll ’ave ter spread squares o’ linen under ’im until them on’t line’s dry. We can’t keep up wi’ ’em, lass, an’ ’e don’t know.’
And it was true. With every hour which passed Will had sunk deeper and deeper into a frightening state of insensibility. His face was grey, just bare, protruding bones and deep hollows. His cracked lips parted as he dragged in a morsel of air and his breathing barely raised his chest. He no longer muttered or roamed restlessly over the bed. He no longer sweated or vomited. It was as though every drop of moisture his body contained had been wrung out of him. His flesh had gone, melting away like the wax on a candle.
Tessa knelt beside him, watching his face as she had watched it for almost twelve hours, ever since she and Annie and Thomas had manhandled him up Annie’s narrow staircase and on to this bed. Only twelve hours and in that time he had lost shape and form and colour with an incredible speed. Even this morning when she had first seen him at the temporary hospital he had still been Will, recognisable, and though ill and delirious a man she would know as the man she loved. Now the face on the pillow could have belonged to anyone. He appeared a skeletal stranger with a grey, mottled face, at first glance already dead, with closed sunken eyes and a ghastly slitted mouth, dry and cracked, which no woman in her right mind would dream of kissing. Even the hair on the apparition looked dead and grey, dusty where the salty sweat had dried on it.
And yet there was something left of Will, something that was just the same. Resting on the dry, cold cheek beneath the closed eyes lay the long and silky lashes she had often teased him about, a soft brown, fine, like those of a sleeping child. In her anguish at the thought that they would never raise again she showered passionate kisses on the wrecked, almost inhuman face of Will Broadbent.
‘Will, stay . . . don’t leave me,’ she whispered. ‘I cannot manage without you, Will.’ The pain overwhelmed her. She had loved him since before she was seventeen; she knew that now. In the nine years which had passed they had lost one another for a while due to her own foolish yearning for something which did not really exist. But for almost three years they had been lovers again in the truest sense of the word. She had bathed in his love, blossomed and grown in it, becoming the complete and loving woman she knew herself to be. Will, strong and lusty, sweet-tempered, good-humoured. Will, unique and irreplaceable. As she watched the disease consume him, dry him out to no more than a husk, the full devastation of what his loss would mean to her struck her a mortal blow from which she knew she would never recover. Robby had been taken from her in the most agonising way but the anguish she had known then had been nothing to what she experienced now.
She could not bear to lose him. She could not face a world without that special blend of gentleness and vitality he gave her. His ardour warmed her female body and his good-humoured wisdom cooled her wild and impulsive nature. His lively, incisive mind sharpened hers. He was positive, daring and filled with his own invincibility and she whimsically into hers that she could rely
on him while he had breath in his body. Though he had laughed at the girl she was, spoken sharply, roughly, she had known instinctively that he was concerned for her, and that concern, compassion and understanding had shaped her, brought her to this moment of true and selfless love. She loved him beyond any love she had ever known. She always would.
She wanted to pray, if only she could find the words; to ask some God in whom she scarce believed not to take Will from her, and not just from her but from the world which would be the poorer without him. She wanted to, she even tried to as her tears fell on to his beloved face. But as the sun sank in the fiery furnace of the sky below the high line of the moorland and Annie moved quietly to light the candle, her tears dried up, and the words of hopeless prayer dried up.
‘I won’t let him die, Annie.’ Her voice was like a splinter of ice. ‘Dammit, I won’t let him. Dear God, does he not know how much I love him?’
‘’Appen ’e don’t, lass.’ Annie’s shadow was huge on the wall of the bedroom, moving slowly as she approached the bed.
Tessa turned to her, startled. Her own face had hollowed during the day, with deep purple fingerprints pressed beneath her eyes. She was bathed in perspiration for despite the open window the room was hot and airless and she knew she smelled sourly.
‘What d’you mean? Of course he knows.’
‘’E’ saw thi and thy ’usband a day or so since . . .’
‘Drew . . . ?’
‘Thi were up on’t tops, ’e said, ridin’ together like thi’ ’adn’t a care in t’world. Laughin’, just like tha used to, you an’ Master Drew, so wrapped up in one another tha didna see ’im pass thi by.’
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