The Governor sat shaking his head. He had enormous respect for Dr James Barry. But surely the doctor was exaggerating. After all, there had been only one isolated death. The disease was not confirmed. The fisherman was not even a native of the island.
‘I say, Barry, aren’t you being a bit premature?’ The Governor splashed his face with cold water from a pale white bowl.
Barry lost his temper.
‘Sir. I am your Chief Medical Officer, responsible for the health and well-being of every inhabitant in this colony. I am giving you early warning not of the possible advent of a serious epidemic, but of its presence among us. There may well be thousands of deaths. We have no idea how this disease is spread, and so far there is no treatment and no cure. Our only hope lies in prevention. And the measures to be taken will be unpopular and expensive. I am not offering you my candid advice, sir. I am telling you what has to be done.’
There was a terrible pause. The Governor was dumbfounded.
‘I wish you a good day, sir,’ snapped Barry contemptuously. He turned on his heel and stalked out of the Governor’s private chambers, his boots ringing on the tiles as he strode away.
* * *
As expected, the first deaths came among the native populations. At the edge of the town there was an unsightly agglomeration of makeshift huts inhabited by the dissolute and the depraved. The Middens was a sort of growth protruding from the smooth white walls, neatly painted porches and brilliant gardens belonging to the richer residents. There could have been no greater contrast with the fragrant enclosures filled with jasmine, oleanders and arum lilies. The Middens was constructed from discarded bricks, driftwood washed up on the beach and old sailcloth abandoned by the fishermen. It looked like the last camp of a defeated army. A foul gutter ran down the central street into which the inhabitants poured waste water mixed with raw excrement and old food. In hot weather the stench was appalling.
Barry had ordered a pump to be installed at a little distance from this heap of disreputable dwellings to provide the inhabitants with clean water. This was a popular move, but did little to alleviate conditions inside the slum itself. A grog shop in the middle of the mass was a popular haunt of visiting sailors, fishermen and prostitutes. It formed the rotten heart of The Middens and there was much coming and going at all hours of the night.
The Governor had not been inclined to leniency when he first took office and was quite of the opinion that The Middens should be razed to the ground, the rat-infested dwellings burned and the populations dispersed. Barry had argued against this policy on the grounds that the pustule would simply re-form elsewhere. He proposed improvements in the housing provision and a proper sewage system. But the Finance Committee was unwilling to subsidise the evidently criminal inhabitants and regarded Barry’s ideas as a dangerous method of rewarding vice, which smacked of Jacobinism. Barry now wondered whether he should have supported the proposed burning as he entered The Middens some weeks later to inspect the first cadavers consumed by the pestilence.
Here lay a mother and child, browned and fleshless creatures, already frail from immoderate alcohol, venereal infections and persistent hunger. The woman’s breasts were shrivelled and lined like old limes, hanging down from her body, the nipples puckered and enlarged. No one had helped her to die. The child lay in a bundle at her side. Barry had the impression that putrefaction must have set in well before death had occurred. An old man hovered in the doorway. He was too fearful to enter.
‘Mother of God, have mercy upon us,’ he droned.
‘How long have they been dead?’ demanded Barry.
‘A day and a night,’ squeaked the elderly prophet. ‘May God spare us, spare us. Our sins are counted. The day of His Coming is upon us. The night of our souls has begun.’
‘Bring me two men. Tell them to wear masks over their faces and that they will be well paid. Go! Do it!’ shouted the doctor, enraged. The old man hovered for a second, then disappeared. Barry sat down beside the dead.
Her mouth hung open, revealing many lost teeth; a result of malnutrition since childhood, Barry guessed. Her eyes were already covered in flies. Barry brushed them aside with a gloved hand. As he did so he noticed a marching line of ants entering the bundle and knew that they were already excavating the corpse before him. She was young, younger than he, pitiful, vulnerable, exposed in death, her fingers crisped, emaciated, clutching at nothing. She lay alone. No candle burned in the wretched semi-dark of the shack. The hovel was empty of possessions. Either she had nothing, or, more likely, the vultures had already passed as she lay dying. Outside, the heat shimmered in the stagnant gutters. The stench of rotting flesh was overwhelming. Barry waited in the silence. Far away he could hear the sound of dogs barking and barking.
At last two desperate-looking men appeared in the doorway, carrying an old blanket. One of them wore a large earring and had a black hat pulled low over his eyes. Barry gave the other his own handkerchief as a mask.
‘Wrap the baby together with the mother. Don’t touch them. Then follow me.’
All the doors of The Middens remained closed as the bizarre cortège passed by. There was no cry of grief or formal orchestrated weeping, no followers, no family to mourn the young lives lost to the first kiss of the pestilence. Barry learned later that she had been the dead fisherman’s mistress, and that she had worked as a prostitute in the grog shop. They carried her out beyond The Middens through the rim of bush surrounding the town and into a deserted vineyard. The old roots were still flushed with fresh green, but unpruned, struggling, smothered in bright weeds. And it was here that they dug the first pits consecrated to the disease. Barry ordered lime to be thrown upon the bodies. There was no priest, no prayers. Barry stood above the grave, gazing past the burning hills to the dark sea beyond.
Late that night he called upon the Governor again. The Middens were burnt to the ground.
Despite this terrible step, the disease would not be checked. Like a dog who has had the pleasure of the first kill, the pestilence set off through the dark streets, hungry for the slow slaughter by black vomit and liquid excrement. Barry’s usual hygiene precautions had improved the level of public health in the poorer quarters of the town. The regular burning of the rubbish piles, once picked over by stray hounds and cats, had reduced the usual levels of dysentery. The morning passage of the closed wagons, emptying the privies, became a popular sanitary improvement, and the education sessions at the maternity clinic had made a little difference to the rates of infant mortality. But the pestilence, certain of its ground, tenacious, enterprising, stepped casually past all his barricades, evading the bonfires, which became a regular and dangerous sight on the streets. During the first few weeks of May the early summer heat increased and the number of deaths rose alarmingly. Barry ordered the immediate cremation of the bodies and a total blockade of the port. The English inhabitants retreated to their summer mountain homes in panic. The economy was paralysed; the Governor’s nerves were in shreds.
No one knew how the disease was transmitted, but Barry suspected that the water supply was contaminated. He became even more fanatical on the subject of cleanliness and gave emphatic commands concerning the spring source above the hospital. All water was to be boiled. No matter what its provenance. Official notices concerning the new sanitary regulations were posted on walls all over the town. The hospital incinerator worked overtime. The danger of fire increased. Their stock of sheets and dressings was almost exhausted. Some of the colonial ladies donated their silk petticoats and fine curtains, which were duly shredded and restitched. Mrs Harris set up a committee, The Ladies’ Health Defence League, which met to discuss fund-raising for widows and orphans and pronounced freely on all subjects. The loose morals of the islanders were responsible for bringing the pestilence down upon them all. Significant changes would have to be made. The Ladies set about the process of moral rearmament with zeal and gusto.
Stray animals were killed on sight. The schools were closed. A curfew was
put into effect, which curtailed the activities of the taverns and the grog shops. The usual pilgrimages up to the monasteries on particular saints’ days were cancelled by order of the Governor. Against this order there was much murmuring and dissent. If ever the island needed the intercession of the saints it was now, in the time of judgement and despair. Some of the people made the journey anyway, only to find the monastery doors locked against them by the terrified monks.
Barry hardly slept. From his office at the hospital he kept track of the disease on a great blackboard to which he pinned a detailed map of the island. He calculated the number of deaths, the locations of fresh outbreaks. He feared that it looked like the cricket scores. He could chart the progress of the pestilence, but he was powerless to stop it. The disease, indifferent, arrogant, mocked him with its success. The blockade of the port was complete. The island was solitary, adrift.
* * *
When the first deaths came in the barracks Barry evacuated the camp. Isaac was the bringer of bad news. He came to the hospital in the first cool of the evening. Barry was completing his ward rounds, exhausted. Two more of the villagers in St Helen’s had been found dead in their beds that morning. His staff, who had, miraculously, been spared until then, were no longer reliable. One of the nurses had fled back to his relatives on the other side of the island, leaving them short-handed. Isaac rattled the screen door, but did not wait for Barry’s voice. He entered at once.
‘Corporal Jarret, the trumpeter, is dead,’ said Isaac flatly in Greek, knowing that Barry would understand him all too well. ‘He complained of pains, a burning mouth and the fever. He vomited at four yesterday afternoon and died at six this morning.’
Barry looked at him steadily. Isaac returned to English.
‘Master, what is to be done?’
Barry passed a hand over his eyes.
‘Well, there is no one left to blow the last post,’ he said gloomily. Then he turned to Isaac.
‘The plans are laid. We are ready for this. Tell the Deputy Governor that we must evacuate the barracks now. Today. Start this minute. Leave only a minimum force to protect property and prevent looting. Call for volunteers. I want the rest of the regiment to take up their summer quarters in the mountains.’
Barry gazed at the blackboard with its map and lengthening list of the dead, the stack of hospital reports, his great leather account books, untouched for weeks. His usually tidy office was now dusty and cluttered.
Isaac stood close to his master, waiting. Barry patted his arm affectionately.
‘Go now. Tell Walter Harris to act quickly.’
‘Sir. Come home. Sleep,’ said Isaac firmly in English. Barry looked up, surprised. Then he said, ‘Thank you, Isaac. I believe I will.’
Barry had been interred in a terrible dreamless slumber when Psyche’s growling pulled him back into the unyielding heat and the brutal consciousness of the epidemic pushing westwards, into the tiled courtyards and papered salons of the colony’s heart. He sat upright abruptly, alarmed by the implications of the young corporal’s death. You are here to heal the world, to bind up wounds, to cure fevers and putrefactions, to greet the newborn and alleviate the moment of departing, you are here to cut out the diseased flesh, so that the body may possess itself again. You are here to wipe the tears from their eyes. Barry was ruled by the desire to control all the world he touched. He was not a man who found it easy to delegate. He hated the uncontrollable and the unknown. Yet this pestilence was always ahead of him. He had been outwitted.
Someone was knocking at his locked door.
Barry pulled on his jacket. His red curls stuck to his forehead. The room smelt of sweat and eau de cologne. He opened the door. Captain James Loughlin stood over him, red-faced, impatient and anxious.
‘I say, Barry. Sorry to barge in. Isaac didn’t want me to wake you. But we’re leaving. Now. I know it’s on your orders. But I couldn’t go without saying goodbye.’
Loughlin took his leave with the suppressed emotion and iron control expected of a soldier. But he was unable to leave unsaid the very things that were still simmering in the air between them.
They stood facing one another in the half dark. James lost the thread at once.
‘Listen, Barry, I know that you’re in the front line, as it were. And you know how much your friendship means to me. Well, it’s just that, you know, we’re both called James. And I’ve always felt, you being older and all that, well, you’ve got such authority and know so much, I never studied like you did . . . By God, James, you’re the man I could have been.’
‘I hardly think so, my dear,’ said Barry and Loughlin could hear both his affection and his smile. ‘Now off with you. I want the regiment gone before midnight.’
James made one more effort to tell Barry how much he loved him and how terrified he was that he would return to find that the tiny, heroic doctor was dead.
‘I don’t know how to say this,’ he mumbled.
‘Then don’t.’
‘It’s just that – I mean – I might never see you again to say it . . .’
A look of exquisite pain passed over the doctor’s face. Suddenly he reached up to James and embraced him tightly.
‘I know. But don’t say it. You’ll bring bad luck upon us. I’ll miss you too. Take care. Boil all your water. Don’t forget that. Don’t do silly things. Keep William company.’
Having delivered this motherly advice in so intimate a way, Dr Barry executed a brisk salute and sent Captain Loughlin off down the steps, away down the dark roads, on the first stage of his journey to the cool safety of the mountains. James looked back and saw the small, tense figure of the doctor, holding up the lantern, back straight, head up, peering out into the night.
* * *
By September the hottest part of the season was over and the daily tally of victims began to drop. Barry’s scoreboard registered the retreat of the disease. Gorged, satiated, the pestilence gathered itself up and withdrew from their gates. The cremation fires no longer blackened the eastern aspect of the vineyard. The lime pits were marked and sealed. By October the churches, freshly painted, were reopened and the thanksgiving mass shook the brilliant, coloured domes. The icons were carried gleaming through the streets and then replaced in their ranks before the screens on beds of fresh, scented pine. Like a summer storm, the visitation had passed over the island, then blown itself out beyond the seamed white cliffs in the great expanse of blue.
Out of a population of roughly fifteen thousand, nearly three thousand were dead. The English colony had escaped largely unharmed, as had the rural poor, the solitary shepherds and their families, lost in the mountains. Some never even heard of the epidemic until the danger was long past. But the town itself and the fishermen’s habitations had been mercilessly liquidated. The people regarded the pestilence as a judgement, paid over their fortunes to the churches and wept for their sins. Barry attributed the rapid spread of the contagion to poor hygiene, bad housing and inadequate sanitation. The Governor shook his head sadly. His daughter had prayed for the doctor’s safety, with increasing fervour, every night in the mountains. It was high time that she was removed to England.
The blockade of the port was maintained three weeks into November. When no fresh case had been reported for over twelve weeks, Barry lifted the quarantine regulations and the boats which had been stranded, bobbing all summer in the blue water, could finally enter the harbour or depart. Sometimes the owners were dead and lengthy histories of insurance and inheritance were told in the refurbished grog houses and taverns on the wharf. Some of the sloops lay rotting, subsiding gently at their moorings until they were dragged ashore and dismembered to rebuild The Middens. For the pustular swelling on the cheek of the town was regrouping its forces and preparing to rise, like an already putrefying Phoenix, from its own ashes. Barry watched over its corpulent swelling, helpless and depressed. He could not simply order the people not to be homeless, drunk and poor. But when the first winter rains came, tender, gre
y and misty in the mountains, the streets smelt fresh and clean, as if the earth wept for the lost and promised a gentle restoration. The redcoats marched back into town with a spring in their steps, returning victorious to retake the territory once the enemy had long since departed.
The first boat from England sailed into the harbour, carrying a six-month mountain of outdated newspapers and longed-for rolls of cloth, with new patterns and fashions from the best haberdashers and outfitters in London and in Paris, to be greeted by a makeshift band and a cheering crowd. The port health authorities and the customs officers were jostled by the excited colonists as they climbed aboard. Barry watched the arrival through his telescope from the eyrie on the hospital verandah. George Washington Karageorghis was somewhere among the mass, searching the cargo hold for the hospital stores. The doctor left instructions at the hospital for their unloading and then returned to his house and his studies.
He was reading Pierre Louis’s Essay on Clinical Instruction, a volume which exactly corresponded to his own views on scientific hospital medicine. Barry believed not only in diagnosis based on the patient’s symptoms, but also in the importance of each patient’s individual and family history. Observation, watchfulness, intuition were the hallmarks of Barry’s methods. He kept abreast of all the latest developments. He now owned a wooden box containing three mono-aural stethoscopes, each handsomely polished, and, being Chief Medical Officer with a licence to terrify the sick, he now used them openly, spreading consternation and relief in equal measure among his patients, who were convinced that he possessed infallible methods of detection. He listened to their bodies, bubbling and rasping at the other end of his long tube. He did not believe that Nature was implacably opposed to him. Indeed, he sought to understand the elements in her struggle with disease and to fight alongside her. He was impressed by the Paris school. He wished he had studied in Paris.
James Miranda Barry Page 29