A Murderous Malady

by Christine Trent

  Although the leaking cesspit was identified as the primary problem, very little was done at the time to correct the numerous sewage problems in Soho, and it would continue to be a dangerous place until 1858, when the “Great Stink” finally resulted in the creation of a sewer network for Central London.

  Snow is most famous for his work in epidemiology but also made major contributions to anesthesia. He was one of the first physicians to study dosages for ether and chloroform as surgical anesthetics, and in fact personally administered chloroform to Queen Victoria when she gave birth to the last two of her nine children.

  Interestingly, Snow lived for about a decade in the 1830s as a vegetarian and completely abstinent from alcohol. When his health deteriorated in the 1840s, he returned to meat-eating and drinking wine, although he always boiled water before drinking it. He never married. He suffered a stroke at the relatively young age of forty-five and died less than a week later on June 16, 1858.

  Another great influence on the study of disease outbreaks was an unusual one, Henry Whitehead (1825–1896). Whitehead was the twenty-nine-year-old assistant curate of St. Luke’s Church in Soho during the Broad Street Outbreak. Following his ordination in 1851, he took up residence in the crowded slums of the Berwick Street area and became a welcome guest in the homes of his parishioners. His social acceptance proved of great value when he later became actively involved in proving John Snow wrong—only to prove him right.

  Whitehead was very troubled by the cholera outbreak, primarily because he thought news reports of panic and wholesale demoralization of the area were exaggerated. He wrote his own account of the epidemic in 1854 but made no mention of the Broad Street pump. Like Florence, Whitehead was a believer in miasma theory.

  However, a medical committee was carrying out its own investigations and invited both Snow and Whitehead to become members. Snow introduced Whitehead to his ideas, which Whitehead rejected outright. He looked forward to conducting the inquiry into the outbreak, which he believed would firmly demonstrate Snow’s theory to be incorrect.

  For the first half of 1855, Whitehead’s acceptance among the poor of Soho enabled him to interview residents in great detail about their sanitary arrangements, water consumption from the Broad Street pump, and other valuable demographic data. At the conclusion of his interviews, Whitehead could no longer ignore Snow’s theory and became a believer that cholera was spread through water contaminated by human waste.

  In 1866, when cholera again came to London, Whitehead was considered the main authority on the Broad Street Outbreak, since Snow had died seven years earlier. Whitehead’s efforts to caution the city on the public health lessons of the past went unheeded, and the disease raced through thousands of homes in the crowded slums of East London.

  In addition to his work with cholera, Whitehead developed a special interest and expertise in juvenile delinquency during his life.

  Whitehead worked in several other London parishes before moving to the small town of Brampton, in Cumbria, in 1874, and later to Newlands in Cumberland in 1884, finally becoming vicar at Lanercost for five years before his death on March 5, 1896. He left behind a widow and two daughters.

  Although there were indeed churchmen who owned—and profited greatly from—properties in areas like Soho, there is no evidence that Whitehead ever did.

  Stephen Jennings Goodfellow (1809–1895) was appointed as assistant physician at Middlesex Hospital in 1849 and was later made full physician in 1858. He was not only the hospital’s lecturer on medicine, but he was also widely known in both England and America as an expert in the diagnosis and treatment of nervous and hysterical disorders.

  Middlesex Hospital itself was a teaching hospital in Fitzrovia. Founded by twenty benefactors in 1745, the original location was in Windmill Street. It was moved to Mortimer Street in 1757 and opened with 64 beds. The hospital was expanded several times and by 1854 had 240 beds. The hospital remained in its Mortimer Street location until it was permanently closed in 2005.

  It was indeed the first hospital in England to have a maternity ward, or “lying-in beds.” It did also open up a special ward for sick French clergy who had escaped the French Revolution.

  Even more fascinating was that it had the first endowment for a cancer ward—dating back to 1791.

  During the cholera outbreak of 1854, Middlesex Hospital was overwhelmed with the sick and dying. Florence volunteered her services there.

  Reappearing in Florence’s story are Secretary at War Sidney Herbert (1810–1861) and his wife—and Florence’s friend—Elizabeth “Liz” à Court (1822–1911). Sidney Herbert was responsible for Florence going to the Crimea.

  Elizabeth’s father, General Charles à Court-Repington (1785–1861), was a senior British Army command and politician. He joined the Army as an ensign in 1801 and progressed through the ranks to lieutenant-general in 1851. He was promoted to full general in 1856.

  Born the third son of Sir William Ashe à Court, 1st Baronet of Heytesbury, he added “Repington” to his name by royal license in 1855 to comply with the will instructions of a cousin.

  For a short time, Charles à Court served in Parliament representing Heytesbury, but gave up the seat.

  While serving as a major in the 1st Greek Light Infantry, À Court was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath on the occasion of King William IV’s coronation in 1830.

  He was given the colonelcy of the 41st (Welsh) Regiment of Foot in 1848, which he held for the rest of his life. Formed in 1719, this regiment counted a young Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, as one of the men who passed through its ranks.

  The regiment was sent to the First Anglo-Afghan War, seeing action in Kandahar and Ghazni. It would later be sent to the Crimea.

  The 5th Dragoon Guards was a cavalry regiment raised by the Duke of Shrewsbury in 1685 as the Duke of Shrewsbury’s Regiment of Horse. It was renamed the 5th Regiment of Dragoon Guards in 1788, and then as the 5th (Princess Charlotte of Wales’s) Regiment of Dragoon Guards in 1804. It saw service in major battles such as Blenheim, Salamanca, Balaklava, Sevastopol, and at least two dozen battles during the Great War. They were consolidated with the Inniskillings (6th Dragoons) to form the 5th/6th Dragoons in 1922. The regiment was not present for the Disaster in Afghanistan.

  The complicated Anglo-Afghan Wars were fought in three conflicts: 1839–1842, 1878–1880, and a final clash in 1919. Great Britain fought from its base in India, seeking to oppose Russian influence in Afghanistan. Although much of the cause of this series of wars was ongoing competition for control in Asia between Britain’s East India Company and Russia, there were also misunderstandings regarding motive and ambitions between the two countries.

  Control of the area was also the primary cause of the Crimean War, which had already started by the time of this story.

  The First Anglo-Afghan War, also known as the Disaster in Afghanistan, was destined to occur from the moment that Dōst Mohammad Khan (1793–1863) ascended the throne of Afghanistan in 1826.

  Dōst Mohammad realized that both Great Britain and Russia were posturing for influence in Afghanistan, and he was concerned for the independence of his nation. His actions to preserve his nation’s identity caused the British to believe he was hostile to them, or at least unable to resist Russian invasion. Great Britain decided to take control of Afghan affairs, first through an unsatisfactory negotiation with Dōst Mohammad, then by attempting to place a previously deposed—and despised—leader, Shah Shojā, on the throne in Mohammad’s place.

  The British were wildly unpopular with the Afghans. The country was so poor that even a private could live very well there on his meager salary. The British became known for extravagances beyond the Afghans’ wildest dreams—installing enormous pleasure gardens, building ice-skating rinks, furnishing mansions with elaborate crystal chandeliers, staging horse races, playing cricket, and hosting lavish dinners. Many in the British leadership were viewed as imperious and arrogant.

  But t
heir greatest offense was in the treatment of Afghan women. Because the British could easily live like kings, many poverty-stricken Afghan women—who were considered great beauties by the British—were willing to enter into romantic relationships with the men. Some were paid for their services, but other relationships resulted in marriages. In fact, Dōst Mohammad’s own niece married a Captain Robert Warburton, and a Lieutenant Lynch married the sister of a tribal chief. The Afghan men considered it humiliating to see their women fall in love with “infidels.”

  For their part, the British found the Afghans to be a wild, undisciplined, uneducated, and heathen people, whose greatest shortcoming lay in their moral code of Pashtunwali (“the way of the Pashtuns”). This strict set of rules for the men of the Pashtun tribe (the dominant ethnic group) contained a command that a man had to avenge any insult, real or imagined, with violence, in order to be considered a man. The British also reviled the Afghan practice of honor killings against the women who had taken up with members of the Army. Moreover, these tribesmen had no military training, but were ferociously warlike and forever fighting one another, much to British disdain.

  In the military incursion that followed, Mohammad surrendered to British forces following the capture of his family in 1840, and he was deported to India. However, Shah Shojā and the East India Company forces would not long maintain the upper hand. The Afghans would tolerate neither a foreign occupation nor a king imposed upon them by a foreign power, and constant insurrections broke out. The British strongly pressured Shah Shojā to implement a standing army, but knowing that this would do away with the power of the individual tribal chiefs, the Shah Shojā rejected the idea on the grounds that Afghanistan lacked the financial ability to fund a standing army.

  Shah Shojā was killed in an 1842 rebellion, and as the British (around 4,500 British and Indian troops and 12,000 camp followers) attempted a retreat from the capital of Kabul, they were massacred by bands of Afghan fighters.

  Mohammad returned to the throne, and Great Britain continued to be unhappy with growing Russian influence. Parliament took control of India in 1858, and the East India Company completely dissolved in 1874. In 1875, the newly appointed governor-general of India, Lord Lytton, announced that he was sending a “mission” to Kabul. On the Afghan throne now was Shīr ʿAlī Khan, the third son of Dōst Mohammad. Shīr ʿAlī refused the British permission to enter Afghanistan, but in 1878 admitted Russia’s General Stolyetov to Kabul.

  Viceroy Lytton decided to crush Afghanistan over the insult and launched a second invasion in November 1878. Shīr ʿAlī fled Kabul, and the British government recognized his son, Yaʿqūb Khan, as emir of the country. In return, Yaʿqūb Khan agreed not only to hosting a permanent British embassy but to conducting foreign relations according to the wishes of the British government.

  Once more, the victory was short-lived. In 1879, the British envoy was murdered in Kabul, and British military forces were once more dispatched to occupy the capital city. Yaʿqūb Khan abdicated, and his nephew, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, became emir in 1880. During his reign, the modern boundaries of Afghanistan were drawn up in an effort between the British and the Russians. The lines effectively became a buffer between Russia and British India.

  The third Anglo-Afghan War was a short, month-long conflict in 1919. When the existing ruler of the time was assassinated at the conclusion of World War I, his son Amānullāh Khan took possession of the throne and declared total independence from Great Britain. Although Afghanistan was now nominally self-governed, Great Britain still exercised great influence on the country’s affairs. Thus began yet another conflict. This time, however, the British Indian Army was exhausted from the demands of fighting the world war, and a peace treaty was quickly signed that recognized Afghanistan’s independence.

  At the same time, the Afghans concluded a treaty of friendship with the new Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union and became one of the first nations to recognize the Soviet government.

  Many British voices, from Lord Aberdeen to Benjamin Disraeli, would criticize the war as rash and nonsensical, as the “threat” from Russia was overexaggerated given logistical problems she would have to solve to scale impassable mountain barriers in order to invade that country given resources available at the time.

  In 1979, during the Cold War, the Soviets entered Afghanistan to prop up the communist government there against a growing insurgency against Soviet influence. However, the Afghan resistance proved too much, and Kabul returned to Afghan control in 1992.

  The United States led an invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to overthrow the Taliban. Russia did not participate, although she did permit supplies to pass through Russian territory.

  Major-General William George Keith Elphinstone (1782–1842) was the British officer in command of the British Garrison in Kabul. He was elderly, unwell, indecisive, and utterly unfit for his post. He is buried in an unmarked grave in Afghanistan.

  Captain Sir Alexander Burnes (1805–1841) was a Scottish explorer and diplomat. He traveled in disguise through Afghanistan in 1831, thus providing the first detailed accounts of Afghan politics. He later became a regular political agent at Kabul.

  Because of Burnes’s reputation for womanizing and the Afghan agitation against British occupation, a mob gathered outside the captain’s residence in Kabul in 1841, killing both Burnes and his brother.

  It was actually Burnes who kept an Afghan slave girl belonging to a Pashtun chief. However, it suited my story better to have it be true of General Charles Ashe à Court.

  General à Court’s son, Charles Henry Wyndham à Court (1810–1903), was fairly unremarkable. In 1852, he was elected MP for Wilton in Wiltshire. Like his father, he resigned his seat, but to become a special commissioner of property and income tax in Ireland. There is no speech of his noted for the entire three years of his term in that position.

  He did marry Emily Currie in 1854, and more notably produced a son, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles à Court Repington, who became a leading Times military correspondent. The son is believed to be the first person to use the term “First World War” in September 1918, hoping that the title would serve as a reminder that a second world war was a possibility in the future.

  Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Sheridan Norton (1808–1877) led an unexpected life of social reform. The granddaughter of playwright Richard Sheridan, she was in near poverty after both he and her father died a year apart.

  Salvation seemed to come in the form of marriage to George Norton (1800–1875) in 1827. However, despite three children, the marriage was a public nightmare of violent tantrums and lawsuits. Their relationship devolved much as I have described it in the story.

  However, despite her sufferings, Caroline’s intense campaigning would lead to the passing of the Custody of Infants Act of 1839, the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, and the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870.

  A younger Sidney Herbert was involved with Caroline for a few years in the early 1840s, but when it became apparent that she was not going to be able to procure a divorce for herself, he looked elsewhere and married the vivacious Elizabeth à Court. The two would go on to have seven children together and were both avid proponents of Florence’s work.

  Caroline was a prolific author of political pamphlets, poetry, novels, and plays. Stuart of Dunleath is a thinly veiled autobiographical novel Caroline wrote in 1851. Was it a paean to Sidney Herbert? I shall let the reader decide.

  ALSO AVAILABLE BY CHRISTINE TRENT

  FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE MYSTERIES

  No Cure for the Dead

  LADY OF ASHES MYSTERIES

  A Death on the Way to Portsmouth (A Lady of Ashes Short Story)

  A Grave Celebration

  Death at the Abbey

  The Mourning Bells

  A Virtuous Death

  Stolen Remains

  Lady of Ashes

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

  In addition to the new Florence Nightingale mysteries, Christine Trent is the author of the L
ady of Ashes historical mysteries, about a Victorian-era undertaker, as well as the author of three other historical novels. Christine’s novels have been translated into Turkish, Polish, and Czech. She writes from her two-story home library, where she lives with her husband, five precocious cats, a large doll collection, entirely too many fountain pens, and over 4,000 catalogued books.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Christine Trent

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-68331-929-0

  ISBN (ePub): 978-1-68331-930-6

  ISBN (ePDF): 978-1-68331-931-3

  Cover design by Melanie Sun

  Book design by Jennifer Canzone

  Printed in the United States.

  www.crookedlanebooks.com

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