He came to his senses a day and a night later, a corpse which, to his surprise, managed to stagger to the washstand and tip the contents of the jug and bowl over his head, his shaking hands telling him by the colour of their cracked and flaking skin that he had the yellow pestilence, not the black. Not typhus, which maddened before it killed, but the sweating sickness from which here, alone in his room with no other man’s pestilence to re-infect him, he might recover.
If he should think it worth the trouble.
If he could just gather himself together and hold himself together long enough to get those fouled sheets off the bed and bundle them, with the nauseating mess that was his shirt and trousers, into the closet. If he could just strip this mattress and turn it over so that should he lose consciousness again, as seemed likely, he would have a clean, dry place to put himself.
How putrid and pitiful the human body was in its sickness. How loathsome a prison for the mind.
He lay down on the bare mattress, naked with a thin sheet over him and began to sweat again. Yes, that was the way of it. He remembered now. The first attack. Recovery. Relapse. Recovery. Then relapse again. He had survived the first. If he could survive this …? Unless those women who were still muttering in his ear, the same voice speaking twice over or two voices in unison, wanted his death now, in exchange for their deaths, long ago – on lavender silk upholstery – on a narrow school-house bed – his mother dragging him behind her, exposing herself to the guns – Gemma wounding herself to spare him. Both of them calm and smiling. Gemma’s crisp English voice setting the thoughts of his beautiful, whimsical, Irish mother to John-William Dallam’s earth-music.
‘Take what I’ve got to offer, lad, and let’s have no nonsense – since it’s good for you and comes free of charge.’
But he could not take it. Nothing remained in him now that was capable of taking it. The fire had burned his individuality away, and what was left was not a man who could love or desire love but an instrument of retribution. A tool. A weapon. A metamorphosis from human flesh to bloodless and therefore far more efficient steel.
He came to again, parched and drenched and shaking, and relapsed again, waking to what he judged by the light to be mid-morning, aware now of the need for sustenance without which he would probably die in any case. And he did not intend to die now. Food and drink. Easy enough, even in starving Ireland, for a man with his editor’s money in his pocket. If he could just gather himself together and stay together long enough to clean and dress himself so as not to look too much the plague victim, and negotiate the stairs. If he could raise the leaden weights which seemed to be his feet high enough to step over the bundles of human rags flung down in the hall. If he could somehow dispel the vaporous, nebulous substance in which his body was afloat, go out into the decent, respectable, even affluent street and find …? Friends, he thought. Refuge. Escape, dear God. He turned up the collar of his bright Chartist-green jacket and shivered, feeling ice in the warm May breeze, feeling age in his hunched shoulders which had just turned thirty years old. Since he had been living a century in every day had he not – lately?
Had he cried out for help? Very likely. As the Irish people had cried out. As they had cried out last year too and, when it had gone unheeded, had tightened their belts, learned resignation or resentment – according to nature – prayed, kept their minds on the new harvest. But this year there would be no harvest since none had been planted. This year every field was a graveyard. Pestilence stalked the land, unabated it seemed, and greedy. And this year, when the cry once again was unanswered, the people drew the remnants of themselves together, and fled.
To British North America, for those who could still scrape together the passage-money, or whose landlords, either from charity or a less admirable desire to clear the land of a destitute tenantry and start again, were ready to pay it for them. A most convenient method of disposing of widows with small children, for instance, as well as whole cargoes of the old, the infirm, the troublesome. And cheap at the price too, the cost of sending a ruined tenant off to that Bright New World being only half the expense of housing and feeding him a twelvemonth in the workhouse, or having to watch him starve to death in one’s ancestral ditches. Nor, having braved the hazards of the Atlantic crossing, would he be likely to return, particularly if he had made the voyage in one of those floating coffins, under-provisioned and overcrowded, which occasionally sank within sight of the Irish coast, or, if they did manage to limp into a transatlantic port, had often buried a quarter of their passengers at sea.
For they took with them not only their despair and resentment, their grief and their sense of injustice, but their fever.
Or else the plague followed them, killing 17,000 of the 100,000 who made the crossing to Canada in that one plague year of 1847; killing them at the rate of thirty a day in the quarantine sheds where they were landed; killing them in untold, faceless numbers as they staggered off, thinly-fleshed and thinly-clad, into the Arctic winter, hoping to find their way on foot to the land they all knew to be paved with gold. America. New York. Converging there from every point of the compass, on every highway or seaway, without education or any experience of cities, unskilled in any trade or craft beyond the digging of potato patches, often with little knowledge of the Queen’s English, or speaking it with an accent that the Queen herself would have been unlikely to understand.
While those who were even more destitute, those for whom no landlord felt even a ‘coffin ship responsibility’and who could not themselves raise a brass farthing, came to England in the hold of a coal ship free of charge as living ballast, being easier for the sailors to unload than lime or pigs or shingle. Or on the open deck of a cargo boat for the price of a few shillings slipped to them by a parish priest who knew that although the English had failed to understand the oppressions regularly suffered by the Irish people, a man who succeeded in getting to the mainland would not be allowed to starve. The English workhouses serving a rich diet in comparison with their Irish counterparts, including tea, and meat every now and then, and sugar.
No emigrants these, looking for a bright new world, a Promised Land, hoping to put down roots and prosper like the ones who had gone to America. Not even family groups, in many cases, but the vagrants, the paupers, the squatters, widows with their hordes of small, half-naked children, old women, disabled old men, expecting nothing from England but a bread-ticket and a bowl of gruel. And with nothing to give in exchange but their pestilence.
In Liverpool, with its population of 250,000 native English, 300,000 starving Irish beggars landed in the first six months of the year, necessitating the swearing in of 20,000 private citizens as special constables to control not only Irish tempers but English fears as to the spread of typhus, dysentery, smallpox, cholera. A circumstance so likely, with these most unwelcome visitors herding into derelict houses, condemned as unfit for human habitation, and squatting there as many as eighty to a room, that permission was soon granted to round up all who could be caught at the docks – all those who could not run fast enough – and ship them back to Ireland again.
A sorry spectacle to Daniel, although not unexpected, as he stood on the Liverpool docks himself one June morning, having satisfied the hard eyes and probing fingers of authority, that he had money in his pocket, employment with a journal admittedly not of the kind to appeal to officers of law and order but employment nevertheless, and a relative already established in England, a Miss Cara Adeane of Frizingley who would be glad to vouch for him.
He had used her before, eight years ago, to smooth his way through Liverpool and he employed her name now without a tremor, being perfectly ready to follow it with the name of Gemma Gage should more weight be needed. Either one of them, he supposed, without any particular emotion, would agree to help him. Gemma gladly. Cara grudging him every minute it took, perhaps, but doing it just the same.
Either one of them. And, in his taut and toughened condition, still far more a tool, a weapon, an instrumen
t than a man, it made little difference to him which one. Whichever, at any particular moment, might serve him best.
Cara or Gemma. They both lived for him now at a great distance and a long time ago. When he had conducted himself in a carefree, easy, haphazard manner which now seemed to him both unreal and unworthy. When he had suffered for such trivialities as love, personal ambition, the satisfaction of appetites and ideals which he now knew to be irrelevant luxuries.
No longer. He was a changed man. An Irishman. And no woman of the alien, uncaring English nor any Irishwoman who had absorbed and condoned their ways could deflect him now from his true purpose and identity. From the task he had undertaken.
For the government which had refused to feed Ireland had lately
fallen and he had agreed to stand as the Chartist candidate for
Frizingley again.
Chapter Twenty-Three
He had been three years away from Frizingley, travelling now on the new railway line which had opened it up to Leeds and, hence, the world. Frizingley’s own narrow strip of magic carpet connecting directly with all those others which sped now, at dizzying, dangerous, highly profitable speed, the length and breadth of England, reducing to a few, not too uncomfortable hours, journeys which had taken days or weeks of jolting agony; bringing traders and merchants and news from London on the day it happened; bringing travel, movement, new sights and opportunities and ideas to those who might otherwise never have left their villages. Mixing the population together. Making it possible to move large groups of men quickly, cheaply and at a moment’s notice. Troops, for instance, who could arrive fresh and rested and very promptly these days, to quell the ardour of even the most isolated Chartist demonstration.
Times were changing. Expanding and contracting both together. The streets of central Frizingley, Daniel noticed, cleaner, better-lit and better-policed than they used to be, one half of Market Square dominated now by the ornate façade of the station, the other half by a tall, Grecian-columned hotel offering seventy double bedrooms, a number of suites and private apartments, a banqueting-hall, a ballroom which had so displaced the old Assembly Rooms that they had been knocked down. The site used for the construction of Frizingley’s even more Grecian town hall built to the taste of the gentleman who owned not only the land but the demolition and construction companies employed in its redevelopment, Captain Christie Goldsborough. The building to be opened, sometime after the elections, by Councillor Benjamin Braithwaite, mayor of Frizingley, and skinny, flamboyant Magda, his mayoress.
Several of the old coaching inns had gone too, the Rose and Crown and the whole cobweb of narrow streets around it being replaced by a double row of spick-and-span commercial establishments, so new that their ornate stonework was as yet unblackened by the soot from the Braithwaite and Dallam factory chimneys. A bank and a firm of shipping and forwarding agents stood on the site of the Dog and Gun. The Beehive from where the Leeds coach had left twice daily, had closed its rowdy doors for lack of custom, its business swallowed by the railway, and, after a great deal of refurbishing, had become a well-mannered commercial hotel where the Chartists – also much better-mannered and better-dressed than they used to be – had taken rooms for their candidate.
Only the Fleece remained intact, no longer the home of Captain Goldsborough who had moved into the greater luxuries of the station hotel, but still his headquarters in a manner of speaking nevertheless, looked after by his lieutenant, Mr Oliver Rattrie, a thin, crook-shouldered, almost painfully elegant man whom Daniel – his mind on other matters – did not remember. Although he remembered the Fleece and, behind it, the sorry raggle-taggle of St Jude’s, a thousand miles away in spirit from the pompous splendours of Market Square but, in reality, just five minutes’ brisk walk between self-conscious, well-drained affluence and those decaying alleys where the sewage ran untreated in open gutters for every child to play in, every stray cat to drown in, in which every disease which squalor bred could lurk and multiply. St Jude’s, a greater pesthole than ever now that the landlord’s agent, Mr Oliver Rattrie – doubtless on the landlord’s instructions – had, these three years past, carried out no repairs, no maintenance, allowing broken windows, rotting woodwork, flooded cellars, to remain in the condition they had fallen, not turning a hair when floors collapsed and ceilings caved in, concentrating – in the painstaking manner for which Mr Rattrie was famous – on the sole purpose of laying down in precise, mathematical arrangements, as many mattresses, and therefore as many tenants, as a room would hold. From one to two dozen, on average, in the better, predominantly English houses. Far more than that when it came to the Irish for whom straw tossed down on bare floorboards seemed sufficient and for whose benefit the demolition of certain, almost totally derelict streets had been halted so that they might squat, for a penny or two, among the wreckage.
An invasion, Daniel was at once aware, which had horrified Frizingley as much as it had Liverpool, a ragged, famished horde descending upon them, a ghastly procession so distorted by famine as to seem members of another species not quite humanity, wilder and more primitive and perhaps more colourful, close to the earth in a way industrial Frizingley had long forgotten, believers in a religion which made Frizingley, and the English in general, frankly nervous. A foreign people worshipping a foreign Pope, speaking what amounted to a foreign language, who, having long been in the habit of crossing to the mainland in dribs and drabs to beg on English roads or, by working for less than any Englishman would take, forcing the price of labour down, were now here in their terrifying hundreds and thousands. A deluge of them, a crushing burden on the poor-rates, filling the workhouses so that the English paupers could not get in, tumbling into paupers’graves for which somebody had to pay the bill, living and breeding and dying in horrible promiscuity in those damp cellars and the abandoned navvy-camps which ringed the town. A skeletal hand looming out of every shadow, these days, to beg. Gangs of them huddled like the droppings of a rag-and-bone merchant’s cart on the front steps of the new town hall, crying for bread, until the constables cleared them away. Bringing nothing to Frizingley but their fleas, their vermin, their idolatry, the strange personal habits of their alien culture, and their fever.
And although no attempt had been made, as in other, smaller places, to bar their entry into the town, Frizingley did not welcome this drain on its facilities which had been sketchy enough to begin with, this blight on its hard-won respectability, the over-tipping of its scales in the direction of degradation and misery, the outbreaks of dysentery and assorted fevers which had started with the first half-naked scarecrows to stagger down the hill from Frizingley Moor.
‘You can’t blame the people for not liking it,’ Daniel heard from the priest who had come with them, a man with the build and seasoned toughness of a navvy, the carefree jauntiness of the farm-boy from Kildare he had once been, not too long ago. ‘Who wants plague and vermin, when all’s said and done? If you had half a dozen fine, healthy children, Daniel Carey, you might not be standing here in the middle of it talking to me quite so casually yourself.’
Just as well then, thought Daniel, that he had no children. No one at all, in fact, to care for at the personal level which might worry him. No reason, any longer, to fret about the weakness, the terrible frailty of one particular human body. No cause to agonize when the wind blew cold, or pest-laden, in any particular direction. All men – all women – were the same to him now. Thank God. Thank Him most truly. For how else could he bring himself to enter Frizingley’s own fever-shed, a sounder model than the one he had helped to build in Dublin, and stroll between the rows of narrow beds with a cool but merciful detachment, looking not for a loved or even a familiar face but for the mechanics of the care that was being given, the distance between the mattresses, the number of blankets, the rapidity, or lack of it, with which excrement and vomit were cleaned up. Not flinching at any odour nor at any voice raised in a plea for assistance or for mercy, since all men and women stank alike and cried
out alike in fever.
Was there a future for any of them here? Father Francis thought not. Or not in this world at any rate. Little hope for himself either, he cheerfully concluded, if the epidemic lasted much longer, since he was now the sole survivor of the dozen priests who had crossed the water with him. An occupational hazard, it must be said, since one took in a man’s breath, after all, with his dying confession, like the good doctors, on both sides of the water, who had been dying like flies. More’s the pity.
A bad business. Although Frizingley, after the initial moment of recoil, had done what it could, realizing – with good sense, thought the good Father – that so many people could not be asked, for reasons of sanitation and economy, to drown themselves in the Irish sea. There was the workhouse, of course, although it had soon filled up with the widows and orphans, the lame and the old, who would otherwise be rounded up as vagrants and shipped back to Ireland again. The same boat-load of disease and despair sailing backwards and forwards, shuttling the same diseased, desperate bodies from one unwelcoming coast to the other. Often Father Francis dreamed of that. But on the whole, Frizingley had been as charitable as could be expected. Official charity – the cold kind – in those bread-tickets and bowls of workhouse gruel. Cold private charity too, maintaining its distance, from ladies who sent blankets and cast-off clothing with the tips of their fingers. Charity of a warmer sort from some other women, like Mrs Gage for instance, who had not only turned her school-house into a soup-kitchen but served an excellent beef and barley broth there to all-comers with her own hands.
A Song Twice Over Page 57