‘One or two cases, that’s all,’ he said, ‘and they’re in the Shambles and Skeltergate. Nowt for you to worry your head about.’
‘All over the meat!’ she shrieked. ‘What we’re supposed to eat. Oh, I won’t stay here. Mek up your mind to it, George. Not in this hell-hole. Not another minute. You must do summat. Don’t you understand? You must get us out of it.’
He didn’t know how to cope with her. She looked as if she’d gone lunatic, with her eyes staring and her hair falling out of her cap and her face twisted as if it was being blown sideways by some great gale.
‘Do you hear me?’ she shrieked.
‘Aye,’ he said angrily. ‘The whole house can hear you. Have ’ee no shame?’
‘Shame!’ she yelled. ‘Don’t talk to me about shame. You’re the one who should be ashamed. Leaving us here in this hell-hole. You’re a disgrace to the universe.’
‘Shut your mouth!’ he yelled back at her, now thoroughly angered. ‘I won’t be spoken to like that in my own house. Do you hear me?’
‘I’ll speak as I please,’ she shouted back. ‘’Tis my children we’re talking about. Don’t you understand? My children, what I love to distraction. I’ll not stand here and let ’em be took by the cholera and you needn’t think it. I’ve lost two and I’ll not lose any more. ’Tis more than human flesh and blood can stand.’
Even in his anger he could see that she was lunatic. Lunatic and out of control. And although it was ridiculous and unpleasant to have to admit it, he knew he’d have to give in to her or she’d go on shrieking all night.
‘Very well then,’ he said, calming himself with an effort. ‘Since you can’t see sense and you’re determined to make a scene, you can go to Whitby, and good riddance to you. I will order the carriage for you first thing tomorrow morning. But I warn you, you’ll not be very comfortable. Some of the houses are finished but they’re poorly furnished. They’re not what you’re used to.’
She wasn’t the slightest bit interested in furnishings or comfort. ‘Oh thank God!’ she said. ‘Thank God! I’ll go and get packed.’
‘What about dinner?’ he said. But she was already out of the door.
It seemed most peculiar to be dining alone, especially when he’d had such a victory over the Board, but what else can a man do when his wife runs lunatic?
Jane Cartwright was worrying about the cholera too. She and Nathaniel were discussing what to do over their dinner.
‘Should I take them to Ma’s, do ’ee think?’ Jane asked.
‘Would she have room?’ Nathaniel said. His face was creased with concern, for really this outbreak was very worrying, especially as he would be working on the Selby–Leeds railway for the next couple of weeks and wouldn’t be able to get home He couldn’t bear to have any of his darlings taken ill with the cholera. That was too dreadful to contemplate.
‘She’d mek room. I’m sure.’
There was a modest knock on the dining room door and Audrey came in, very quietly because she could see they were talking.
‘Which one is it?’ Jane said anxiously. Audrey always came down at once to tell her if either of her babies was stirring.
‘Neither of ’em,’ Audrey said at once. ‘Sleeping like babes, they are, dear little lambs. Not a peep out of ’em. No, no. ’Tis Mrs Hudson come. Shall I show her in here or tek her to t’parlour?’
She was ushered into the dining room and urged to sit at the table with them, flustered and dishevelled as she was. She was red in the face from her exertions and so out of breath from her rush to their house that it was several seconds before she could tell them why she’d come. But when she did, what she had to say – once they’d managed to decipher it – was the solution to their worries.
‘I’ve had such a to-do as you’d never believe,’ she said, ‘what wi’ packing and worriting an’ all, I’ve been at my wits’ end all day. I’ve not know’d where to turn, to tell ’ee true, and then Mr Hudson being … Well, you know how he can be sometimes. Not that I blame him. He works so hard he can’t be expected … But really he were so late home I thought he were never coming but he did in the end, thank the Lord, although he weren’t at all agreeable about it – disagreeable is more the word, truth to tell, well, you know what I mean – perhaps I shouldn’t say disagreeable but anyroad I won through in the end, my dear, can ’ee imagine? – although how I did it I really cannot think – and we’re going tomorrow and not a minute too soon. I thought of you in the middle of the packing, my dear, and how worried you must be – well, we all are. Who wouldn’t be? And I thought, I’ll go straight round and see if she’d like to come with us. What I mean to say, if you’d like to come with us, which I’m sure you would, what I mean to say I hope you will. This is all such a worry. You and the babies and Audrey and anyone else you need. The house will be plenty big enough. It’s going to be a hotel.’ At which she stopped, now being completely out of breath, and beamed at her friend.
It was Nathaniel who made sense of it. ‘You are leaving York?’ he said, and it was only just a question.
She nodded, puffing from her exertions.
‘Tomorrow?’
Another nod.
‘Where are you going?’
This time she managed an answer. ‘Why, to Whitby, Mr Cartwright, where Mr Hudson has all those houses and a hotel and I don’t know what all.’
‘’Tis a kindly offer,’ he said, inclining his head towards her and smiling, ‘and we thank you for it.’ Then he turned to Jane. ‘I think you should accept it, my dear.’
So early the next morning the two families set out, travelling in a convoy of two four-horse carriages, followed by a dray-cart carrying their luggage. They were a large company: Lizzie and Jane and their six children, Audrey and Milly with their charges and Sally, who was now nursemaid to Georgie, Ann and little John, and very proud of her new status and her new uniform, and Mrs Cadwallader to cook for them and two of Lizzie’s scullery maids to share all the other work and travel in the cart and look after the luggage, to say nothing of three Moses baskets for the babies, three picnic hampers full of food, various sunshades and umbrellas, a jar of sugar plums to placate the four-year-olds if they got fretful and Dickie’s little dog, Spot, which was not impressed by being put in a coach and escaped the minute he could and barked off to spook the cart horses.
Lizzie was harassed and anxious while they were packing and clambering aboard, but once they’d left the terrible danger of York behind them and were away from the smoke and the stink and out in the clear, clean air of the countryside, she grew steadily more cheerful and by the time they’d passed a place called Norton, which the coachman said was their halfway mark, she was quite herself again. They found a suitable field where they could stop for their picnic and they all tumbled out of the carriages and stretched their limbs while Mrs Cadwallader and Jane and Lizzie unpacked the hampers and spread the cloth on the grass and handed out pies and fruit and table napkins as if it was the sort of thing they did every day of her lives.
‘Isn’t this fun!’ Lizzie said to her eldest.
And Dickie, who was eight years old and adventurous, said it was ‘the best ever’.
It got even better on the second leg of the journey for now they were climbing some extremely steep hills and had to get out and walk to help the horses, which meant that he and Spot could go running off into the fields again and although both of them were getting very grubby nobody seemed to mind. And best of all was when they’d reached the top of a particularly long climb: when they looked down, there was a blue lake shining beneath them. It was the sparkliest thing he’d ever seen and so big he couldn’t see across it to the other side.
‘That,’ Milly told him, ‘is because it’s the sea.’
‘Where does it end?’
‘The sea don’t end,’ she said. ‘Don’t ’ee remember, I showed ’ee on the globe. All that blue. It goes round the world, round and round and round.’
Wonders would never cease.
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br /> ‘When we get to Whitby,’ Milly told him, ‘what is where we’re a-going, we’ll be right alongside of it and you can walk into it and get your feet wet. How will that be?’
He could barely believe it. ‘Truly?’ he asked.
That made her grin. ‘Truly,’ she said. ‘An’ I’ll come with ’ee and get my feet wet an’ all.’
Whitby was a revelation to all of them, all those boats in the harbour and men in great boots and knitted caps and jerseys instead of jackets, and huge baskets standing on the quayside full of fish, and great grey and white birds everywhere swooping and calling and snatching up pieces of fish in their great beaks, ‘caw, caw, caw’, and everything smelling salty and a rickety bridge that Milly said was like something out of a fairy tale.
‘How we ever got across in one piece,’ Lizzie said, when they’d left the harbour and were all safely on the other side of it, ‘I shall never believe.’
And then a town that was built on a hillside, where they had to get out and climb, through narrow alleys and over higgledy-piggledy cobbles and past the oldest shops and houses they’d ever seen, even in the Shambles, until they came to Mr Hudson’s wide streets and squares and the huge house that was going to be a hotel and where they were going to live. They were met at the door by Mr Hudson’s younger brother Charles, who was quiet and gentle and seemed to be the caretaker. When he heard who they were he hastened to assure them that, although the hotel might look ‘summat empty’, appearances were deceptive. There were rooms ready furnished that he thought might suit them admirably and bowed to indicate that they should follow him and see if they agreed. What he showed them was a suite of eight rooms, a dining room that was really rather fine, a drawing room, five bedrooms and a dear little parlour overlooking the sea.
‘There are servants’ quarters alongside the kitchens,’ he said. ‘And coach houses, of course.’
‘’Tis all most satisfactory,’ Lizzie told him, when she’d carried out a full inspection of all the rooms they would need, and she smiled at him happily. ‘Thank ’ee kindly, Mr Hudson.’
‘I’m glad to have been of service,’ he said, smiling back. ‘I live in t’house on t’corner of t’terrace, should you have need of me. I will call in t’morning and see if there’s owt else in the way of furnishings you might be needing.’
Then what a flurry and a scurry there was as the boxes were carried upstairs and unpacked and the coaches eased into the coach house and the horses led to the stables to be fed and watered and the kitchen fire lit and the scullery maids sent to the harbour to buy fish for their supper. And in the middle of it all Mr Hudson returned with two loaves and a pitcher of milk and a note from his wife to tell them where the best fruit and salads could be had.
After he’d left them for the second time, Lizzie said he was so unlike George she could hardly believe they were related, leave alone brothers. ‘I mean to say, such a kind man.’ There was a lot she found hard to believe on that first day – how quickly they settled in, how delicious freshly caught fish could be, how kind it was of Mrs Hudson to send them bread and milk, how good the children were being and how obediently they’d gone to bed and, above all, how absolutely amazing it was that she’d stood up to her husband.
‘If anyone had told me when I were first wed that I’d ever, ever dream of doing such a thing,’ she said to Jane when the children had been coaxed to bed and they were on their own together in the parlour, ‘I’d have told ’em ’twere a nonsense. And yet I did. Can ’ee believe it? I don’t know what got into me.’
Jane was trying to make herself comfortable in the armchair, which, because it was so newly upholstered, was rather unyielding. It had been a long day with far too many new things to be absorbed and understood and she was missing Nathaniel a bit too keenly now that the rush of their journey was over and the children were settled for the night. She spoke out before she could stop to think that it might not be sensible to be so frank. ‘’Twill have done him good,’ she said. ‘High time someone stood up to him.’
Lizzie was horrified to hear her husband criticized. ‘Oh, we mustn’t say that,’ she protested. ‘I mean to say, he’s a good man. Allus has been. If it hadn’t been for the cholera and me being sick wi’ worry, I would never have done such a thing. Never in a thousand years. I know he has a bit of a temper but that’s on account of all the hard work he has to do. I mean to say, just think of what a lot he does, what with the railways and all these properties and the Board of Health and I don’t know what-all. I never knew such a man for work. He has to make a stand to get things done.’
‘Aye,’ Jane said, pretending to agree. ‘Happen. But making a stand and being a bully is two different things, don’t ’ee think?’
‘He’s never a bully,’ Lizzie said loyally.
He were a bully when he were a lad, Jane thought, and if I weren’t such a coward I’d tell you so.
It would have surprised her to know that at that moment bully-boy George was visiting the sick in the most evil-smelling slums in the city and not only commiserating with them in their distress but making diligent notes about what could be done to help them.
That afternoon the chairman of the Board of Health had requested that the members of the Board should provide him with the latest information on the progress of the epidemic. There was no one to keep him at home now that Lizzie had left so, as soon as he’d finished his solitary dinner and taken a glass of brandy to sustain him, he put on his hat and set off along Goodramgate towards old Christ Church and the Shambles to see what was happening.
Until that evening he’d never ventured into the squalid alleys in that part of town. There’d never been anything to take him there. It was just a place where the servants went to buy meat. A place to avoid. He walked boldly into the foetid darkness like a man exploring a foreign country.
At first he found it difficult to see where he was going because there were only a couple of rush lights attached to the walls, but after a while his eyes adjusted and then he was profoundly shocked by what he saw. The cobbles of the alley were so broken and distorted that what he was stepping over was largely bare earth trodden into a mire. The houses rose crookedly from the filth, leaning against one another like drunks, their walls scabbed by occasional flakes of chipped plaster, their windows so grey with dust it was impossible to see through them, their greasy doors standing ajar. The smell of vomit and shit was overpowering. Pity rose in his throat like bile and for a second he was tempted to turn back and go home. But he’d come here to see what was happening and he could hardly run at the first difficulty. There was no honour in that. He covered his mouth with his hand and stepped through the nearest door.
He was in a dark evil-smelling hall, where two dishevelled men wearing an extraordinary combination of ancient clothes and hats that were more grease than cloth were leaning against the walls smoking clay pipes. They looked at him with undisguised suspicion for several long seconds but eventually one of them leant towards him and spoke. ‘What would you be afther, sor?’
‘Board of Health,’ George explained. ‘Name of Hudson. Come to see what help you need.’
The man took his pipe out of his mouth and bellowed towards the nearest door. ‘Bridie! Bridie!’ And when there was no answer, he roared again. ‘Bridie, will ye come out of it dis minute, woman.’
The woman who appeared at the door was as down-at-heel as he was. She was wearing a man’s jacket, a filthy flat cap, a stained shawl and an apron made of old sacking tied round her waist with a length of rope. ‘Stow your row,’ she said to the man. ‘Who’s de gent’man?’
George introduced himself again, adding, ‘Happen you could show me round.’
She took him from room to overcrowded room, each one darker and more noxious than the last. There was a family in every room and at least one sick person in every family. The sick lay on the floor on straw pallets, their vomit beside them and their children huddled in corners, bare-footed and timorous as if the horror was too great for
them to believe or understand. He hadn’t known until then that there were people living in his city in such utter squalor.
In the third room, Bridie confided that she was the midwife. ‘I lays ’em out, may God rest deir souls.’ In the fifth they found a small boy sitting in a corner howling like a dog and when George raised his eyebrows at the noise, she explained, ‘Sure he’s hungry, poor soul, since his ma went to glory.’ Her matter-of-fact acceptance of the situation made George feel angry. Dammit, he thought, this is no way to treat an epidemic. These people need cleaning up and proper nursing. The lad needs feeding. Something must be done and done quickly. He made notes in his notebook and moved on to the next room.
The next afternoon he presented his report to the Board.
‘Our first priority,’ he said, ‘must be to provide t’children and t’destitute with food, bread and soup and such like. That is imperative. We must open a public subscription fund to pay for it. I will personally donate £500 to start it. Then we must provide more beds in the hospital and more surgeons to attend ’em.’
‘How many beds did you have in mind?’ one of the more timorous members wanted to know.
His answer was immediate. ‘Fifty,’ he told them. ‘We’re dealing with an epidemic.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ his colleague demurred.
‘Well, I would,’ George said, forcefully. ‘I’ve been there and I’ve seen it.’
The first soup kitchen was opened three days later.
In Whitby the sun was shining, the sky was summertime blue and Dickie and Spot and the toddlers were paddling in the sea with Milly in happy attendance with her skirts pinned up, wading up to her knees in the water. It was a daily habit and one they never tired of, even though they were now into their fifth week away from home. On that morning Jane and Lizzie had packed a picnic lunch and gone down to the beach with them and watched while they jumped in the water and splashed one another.
Off the Rails Page 16