A Song Twice Over (74 page)

‘Fever sheds', wooden lean-tos tacked on to the sides of workhouses, more often than not, and army tents with boarded floors were hastily erected where doctors and nuns and good-hearted women laboured with the patient, grinding despair of cart-horses. Where men like Daniel, with no medical skills, moved bodies, dug graves, restrained those driven to furious insanity at least from harming others. Laboured long and hard, his eyes glazed, his mind empty, although when his own sweating and burning came upon him he walked quickly away, finding death – if that was what assailed him – to be a private matter.

There were no messages to be delivered from
his
deathbed; no hands he wished to hold; no consolation to be given since he believed in nothing, trusted nothing, wanted nothing. Unless it was to be relieved of those images of human misery which had taken over his whole mind lately, become so much a part of him that death – if it meant he would see them no longer – would not be unwelcome.

He returned to his lodgings, therefore, and locked himself in knowing no one would trouble him once the stench of typhus seeped under his door. He knew the symptoms and stages of his disease, having seen enough of it this fair, green Springtime, in the streets and fields of the plague villages, in the workhouse hospitals where the diseased and dying lay on straw packed two or three hundred into the space for twenty. He knew that he would sweat and vomit, become delirious, cry out for water which no one – he had seen to that – would bring him, cry out that he was scorching, parching, consumed by fire. He knew that he would stink and blacken and hallucinate and probably die.

Yet, even as he nailed up his window to stop himself from jumping out into the street and running, contaminated and amok, when the delirium struck him, he was already too dazed by sickness to care. Ought he to care? Very likely. Yes, very likely. If he had strength enough in his weary arms – in his weary soul – to drag himself across to the dresser and pick up that jug of water, strength enough for any of this vague and wearisome life or death to matter. Should he not …? Well –
something? Somebody?
But he could hardly remember his own name, it seemed, much less grapple with the complex names and natures of others. Far better just to lie down and die, hoping – against all the doctrines of his youth – that it would be the end, that he would never have to look again on the complicated sufferings and satisfactions of humanity, never again have to struggle with the ills he could not cure, the hopes he could not fulfil, the love he could not give. That he might never again bruise or be bruised by too close a contact with another beautiful, terrible, desirable,
fragile
human creature, either man or woman. That he might never know pity again, nor outrage, nor tenderness. That he might give no hurt and receive none. That, no longer caring, there would be no more scars.

Far better to be alone. To leave neither footprints nor shadow behind him. To be nothing, when this accursed fire had done with him, but a handful of cold ash.

He lay down and burned, in rancid oil to begin with, then in a fierce, dry flame that gutted him as completely as fire through ancient timbers. He still needed no one to share his end. But, as layer after layer of consciousness was stripped away, the woman who had shared his beginning came to him. His mother, or so he thought, until she became Gemma and then his mother again. Or his mother with Gemma's face. Gemma with his mother's. Dying for him all over again. Blood on lavender silk upholstery the woman lying dead across him, covering his eleven-year-old body with hers. Blood seeping from the wound in her back which had shielded his head and chest. Blood on the front of Gemma's brown satin gown, from the gash he had made in her heart. Her mouth still smiling. Her brown eyes steady. Giving their lives for him over and over, and uselessly, since he was only one man and there was a multitude out there, pressing starved and diseased bodies against his window, breaking through it, knocking down the walls, wave after ghastly wave of them trampling him underfoot.

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 instrument 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.

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.