The Dress Lodger Page 17

  No lamps are lit, and it is dark inside except for a low fire in the grate. In the half-light, he sees bundles of dirty laundry sagging against a long wooden table, abandoned in the corners, and strewn along the floor before the hearth. Near the stairs leading up to the second floor, a box is balanced on two split cane chairs. It is close in the room and stifling hot, and Henry detects the familiar odor even before the pile of laundry on the floor jumps up and scampers over to him.

  “We have a death in the house, so please be respectful,” it says in a whisper.

  Henry looks down on a little girl in an oversized pink dress. Conjunctivitis is ruining her eyes and her neck seems too stingy to support her large head. In her spindly arms she carries another smaller bundle, wrapped in a blanket. This must be the little girl Audrey told him about.

  “Is your name Pink?” Henry asks gently.

  The pile of dirty laundry leaning against the table looks up. It speaks with a slurred husky voice.

  “Doan’t speak t’him, lass,” the pile says. “Yer Da won’t like it.”

  “Yes, my name is Pink,” the little girl answers hesitantly. “Do you want a room for the night?”

  “I’m the doctor sent by the Indigent Sick Society.” He squats to equalize their heights and sees the bundle in her arms wriggle. “There is a woman here who is sick?”

  “Fat lot o’ good you do ’er now,” says a feminine pile in the corner. She is haunched by two smaller heaps of rags, sacked out from hawking fish all day to the poor Irish.

  “We expected you yesterday,” Pink says. “She was sick yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry, I was unable to make it yesterday,” he says. “May I see her now?”

  Pink walks with her bundle over to the foot of the stairs and stops before the plain wooden box. “Here she is.”

  The box, stenciled “Property of Sunderland Parish,” is a rented coffin with a trapdoor that will be leased by the town’s poor until it has worn down to splinters. Inside, a shriveled woman is wrapped head to foot in white cambric, with only the pinched oval of her face showing. A cambric chin strap keeps her jaw from dropping, a sprig of rosemary has been tucked inside as an age-old token of remembrance, and two copper pennies have been placed on her eyelids. This must have been the woman with phosphorus poisoning, Henry thinks. But that is besides the point now. Jesus. Beneath the pennies, her skin is a deep indigo.

  “How long ago did this woman die?” Henry demands of the room.

  “Last night,” answers the pile that leans against the table.

  “We must get her out of the house as soon as possible.” Henry slides the wooden lid over the woman’s face. “I’ll send someone around for her.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” counters Pile. “She’s being waked.”

  “She has died of cholera morbus,” Henry says imperiously. “Her clothes and bedding must be burnt and she must be buried immediately. She will infect you if you keep her here.”

  “Fos had the Fossy Jaw,” says Pink. “There’s no such thing as cholera morbus.”

  “I’m afraid there is, sweetheart. And it’s here in town,” Henry says. “Don’t go near that coffin until I can get her out of here, do you understand? And keep this baby far, far away from it.”

  Henry lifts the baby out of Pink’s hands before she knows what he’s about. The baby, like the woman in the coffin, is wrapped so that nothing but its face shows. What did Audrey say about this child? Only that it had an extraordinary heart. Henry takes the baby to the hearth, where there is light enough to examine it.

  Pink hovers worriedly. “Be careful,” she says. “Don’t poke it.”

  Henry holds his finger before the child’s face and moves it from side to side. Its large blue eyes follow easily. He claps his hands by each ear and the baby turns its head slightly toward the noise. Not blind or deaf. This is a remarkably good-looking baby, he thinks, to be born into such poverty. It is thin, but not nearly so malnourished as most East End infants he sees. It has brought its focus back to Henry’s face and now gives him a bubbling smile which Henry can’t help returning.

  Slowly he unwraps the blanket, releasing the baby’s pink fists and legs. This must be Audrey’s doing, this Irish linen christening gown, for no mother in the neighborhood could afford such a thing. The baby squirms, happy to be free of its tight swaddling. Henry cups one of its tiny red feet and the baby pushes hard against his hand.

  “Seems healthy,” he says. The girl Pink chews her lip nervously beside him, watching as the doctor pushes back the gown. Up it goes, past the baby’s flailing legs and dimply knees, inching up its blue-veined baby belly to reveal its ab-sol-ute orig-in-ality, as Gustine calls it.

  Just like the charity lady, Pink thinks when the doctor gasps. That look on his face.

  “Where is this baby’s mother?” Henry demands, his voice cracking with excitement. My God. I am holding a medical impossibility.

  “She’s at work,” answers Pink.

  Does she know what she has created? he wants to shout. Does she realize this baby should never have been born? He looks wildly about the room for someone, anyone, who might appreciate the marvel in his lap. A child born with its heart on the outside of its body! A working, pumping, four-chambered heart, beating under a thin layer of skin. He has read of children born with four legs, of children born with a twin growing from a rib, of a boy from Bengal who grew a head on top of his own head that blinked and breathed and did everything but speak. No one would have thought he could have survived, but he lived until age four, when he was bitten by a cobra. The miracles of science are endless, but they happen to other people, in places far away.

  “Who the hell is this?”

  “Eeek!” Pink leaps from the heath and runs for the coal bin. Henry looks up to see a thick-faced, red-haired tough stomping down the stairs toward him. On his shoulder a startled white ferret digs in its claws to remain upright.

  “Who let a bloody sawbones into my establishment?” the man roars.

  Henry rises, holding the baby carefully against his chest. “I am Dr. Chiver, sent by the Indigent Sick Society.”

  “I am Whilky Robinson,” says Whilky. “And you are trespassing.”

  Whilky has been upstairs with a prospective lodger, a nice young chap with a cheery bottle of brandy. He’s been fluffing Fos’s vacated straw for the man, not minding if he did have a drop, thank you; no harm in starting the wake early. Whilky and the young man were discussing the rumours of cholera that had been floating around the town since Jack Crawford was carted out of last night’s performance. The prospective lodger had lifted a pint with Jack’s shaken mate Robert Cooley earlier that day, and heard all about how they plunged poor Jack in a vat of acid, and how they’d run after Robert with their scalpels to take the skin from his very body. An enemy to the poor man, that’s my definition of a doctor, said Prospective Lodger before he passed out on Fos’s vacated straw. Dastardly followers of Malthus every last one of ’em.

  “Mr. Robinson,” says Henry, “I am here to help.”

  “Help? How? By planting more frog eggs in my house?”

  Henry cups his hand over the baby’s head protectively. “I have come at my own expense to care for that woman and this—”

  “You won’t rest easy until every poor man is dead or in the workhouse! You politicians and medical men flaunting your laws of population!” interrupts Whilky. “You think I’ve not heard of Malthus?”

  “What are you talking about?” asks Henry, completely confused.

  “Using your goddamned cholera morbus to winnow out the poor! You think I’m not onto you?”

  Why does he bother with these people? Henry looks into the ignorant faces of 9 Mill Street: the obstinate, jowly stupidity of this half-drunk landlord, the slack bundles of filthy laundry, slumping across the table or spreading slatternly in the corners. He wishes he did have the cholera in his power—he would thrust it straight down Whilky Robinson’s throat.

  “And who s
aid you could hold that baby?” Whilky abruptly snatches the child away, causing it to set up a terrible howl. He thrusts it in the direction of the coal bin, where Pink darts out long enough to take charge of it, then disappears again.

  “Sir, do you understand how special that child is?” shouts Henry, realizing he does care about one inhabitant of this godforsaken place. He’s barely had a chance to examine it.

  “I understand it’s a drain on my already daft daughter to look after it when she might be out earning an honest wage. I understand it’s bankrupting its foolish mother, who should’ve let it starve months ago. And I understand it’s keepin’ you in my house long after I’ve ordered you to leave!” Whilky strides to the front door and flings it open.

  “Let me take it to my house where it will be safe,” Henry pleads, hating the sound of entreaty in his voice.

  “I’d as soon toss it in the garbage as look at it,” Whilky says sourly. “But I’ll not be held accountable for the fury of its mother should she come home to find it gone.”

  Henry picks up his bag and storms to the door. He bangs his shin on the split cane chair holding poor indigo Fos in her box.

  “You have a cholera body in your house,” he says, advancing on Whilky. “I’ll have the Board of Health come around if you don’t get her in the ground.”

  “Get ’er in the ground so that you can dig ’er up, you mean?” laughs Whilky. “Not on yer life.”

  The landlord gives Henry a shove with his shoulder and slams the door behind him. It is cold and dark in the lane and Henry is shaking with fury. Bloody barbarian! He steps off the stoop and into a stream of coursing whitewash, splattering his good pants and ruining his shoes. Bloody bastard! Henry looks around for the paintbrush thrust in night soil, wrenches it free, and plunges it into the paint. It gives him great satisfaction to scrawl the word across that bloody barbarian bastard’s front door.

  SICK, Henry paints in big dripping letters. And flings the brush away.

  He wasn’t looking for her when he turned off Mill Street onto Sailor’s Alley, a low passage where women leaned in doorways, their legs crossed at the ankle, their hands on their hips, watching him beneath hooded lids—women who murmured as he stormed past, Four shillings, sir, clothes off for five. He wasn’t looking for her on the Church Walk, in the crotch of the young girl who startled him by lifting her skirt to display milk white thighs and a thatch of brown hair. He was not looking for her outside the theatre where he’d seen her last night, nor down by the bridge where she had taken him a week ago; but by the time he reached the Labour in Vain, shaking, exhausted from walking the city not looking for her, he was exceedingly relieved to find her.

  “I have been insulted.”

  She was sitting with another gentleman, a nervous, thin man who jumped up the moment Henry arrived and bolted through the front door. Henry took his seat and began speaking, low and angrily. There is a man, he told Gustine, an ignorant, obstinate, cretinous landlord who keeps a low lodging house. In his parlour a woman lies dead of the cholera, poisoning his lodgers. It is unsafe. It is wrongheaded. But nothing I said would convince him of his error. “He threw me out of the house! I want that body, Gustine. For the lodgers’ sake, I mean, it must be removed.”

  Gustine looks startled to see him, as startled as he is to be here. After what happened outside the theatre, she thought never to see him again. “Tell me what happened,” she says.

  Where to begin? Maybe he should he start with last night when Robert Cooley ripped naked Jack Crawford’s body from their hands and ran off with it screaming, You’ll never carve him, bloody sawbones, you’ll not cut him up! Or earlier that evening when a corpulent common actor insulted his uncle, a pillar of the community? No, certainly his case against Whilky Robinson begins back in Edinburgh when the mob burned Dr. Knox in effigy and ruined his mentor’s distinguished career. When have the ignorant poor not set themselves against him?

  “It is the insolence of willful ignorance I cannot abide,” he says. “He is so proud of his house. I’ll show him how safe he is in his house.”

  “Where does this landlord live?” asks Gustine.

  “Mill Street—9 Mill Street.”

  Henry is so on fire with his plans, he fails to notice the nervous look she throws over her shoulder at the bartender, John Robinson, her land-lord’s brother.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” she suggests, rising quickly. “We can speak more privately there.”

  Beside the bartender, he notices for the first time the old woman with whom he always sees her, watching them intently. Her enormous gray eye fixes on him, and for a split second he feels she can see his heart beating, like that baby’s, his clenched, angry heart pumping bile through his veins. He doesn’t like the idea of being mistaken for one of Gustine’s customers, but perhaps it is safer to speak privately.

  “We can take her while he is sleeping,” Henry says under his breath, following her up the stairs. “From under his very nose. And if we get caught, I will say I am operating under the authority of the Board of Health. This woman is a nuisance, she is a pollutant. I am only thinking of the other lodgers.”

  Gustine unlocks the second door down the hall and automatically slips the ribboned key around her wrist. A small Argand lamp sits on the floor next to a calico-covered straw mattress. This is Gustine’s usual room at the Labour in Vain and John Robinson, out of friendship to his brother, keeps it a little bit cleaner for her. Henry looks around. There is no place but the bed to sit.

  “Last night I came across a woman dying in childbirth,” she offers, settling herself carefully on the edge of the mattress. “Not far from here, on Spring Garden Lane. Shall we not take her instead?”

  “Gustine,” says Henry angrily, “you are not hearing me. I must have that woman. From Mill Street.”

  “Why do you need her in particular? Is it only to make the landlord angry?”

  Henry bristles, annoyed she would think him so petty. “I don’t need that woman,” he says, “but she is a contaminant, Gustine. Her clothes and winding sheet are vessels for the disease itself, her rotting body is putting out who knows what sort of miasmas, and the whole lodging house is in danger unless she is removed. A child lives in that house, the most amazing child I’ve seen. For the child’s sake, if no one else’s, I should take that body.”

  “You saw a child?” she asks, surprised.

  “A prodigy. How he has survived in that squalid tenement is beyond me. His parents should be taken out and shot for their irresponsibility.”

  “Why do you call them irresponsible?” she asks, concerned.

  “They should have immediately alerted the medical community. I have read of only one other case of a surviving ectopia cordis, back in 1671. In most cases the ectopia is complete and the heart is born naked. No child could survive that severe a deformity. But in the older case, as in this one, the ectopia was partial, with the heart being herniated and covered by the thinnest layer of skin. With proper medical care, that patient lived into his seventies. I know I could preserve this child’s life, too, if I could only get to it.”

  Into his seventies? Though she has understood nothing else Henry has said, she’s grasped that last: with his help, her child could outlive her. She nervously passes the key around and around her wrist. Here the doctor is saying what she most longs to hear, that he might cure her child, and yet she hesitates. Speak, Gustine, she commands herself. Now is the time: throw your child upon this doctor’s mercy and beg his help. But he called her irresponsible and claimed the child’s parents should be taken out and shot. Nor has she forgotten the look of horror with which he regarded her outside the theatre. It kept her up in tears last night thinking that all her plans were ruined.

  “I must get back to work,” she says at last, hearing the old woman move on the other side of the door. “Go to Mill Street between two and three; I will see the door is left unlocked so that you may remove the woman.”

  “Thank you,” Henry says, noddi
ng solemnly.

  What he has proposed is far more dangerous than claiming a body from the morgue or resurrecting one from the cemetery, and Gustine is suddenly afraid. She is about to allow a thief into her own home, to invade her landlord’s cherished privacy and take what belongs to him. She has her doubts, but for her child’s sake, it must be done.

  “Gustine,” Henry says, embarrassed, watching her fit the key into the lock. “Do you have to go so soon? Downstairs they’ll think we—they’ll think I couldn’t—of course, we wouldn’t—”

  Gustine turns back in surprise. With a few words, the stern surgeon of moments before has been transformed into a blushing schoolboy. She smiles at him from the doorway before slowly refastening the lock. I have nothing to fear from you, thinks she gratefully, watching his cheeks redden. You need me as much as I need you.

  “Will ten minutes do?” she asks with a grin. “Most don’t even last that long.”

  VIII

  FOS

  Though Whilky took what little you possessed—2s. 10 sewn into a handkerchief, a handful of matches with their powdered glass friction sheet, the ticket stub to Les Chats Savants, a charity blanket, a comb, a well-thumbed Bible inscribed with pencil, “The Meak Shall Inherit the Earthe”—you have left a legacy for 9 Mill Street. Your first beneficiary, Whilky’s prospective lodger, who in passing out removed all eventuality from his situation, right now is having a vivid, drunken dream in which a bare-breasted glowing woman appears at his bedside. Between her long fingers she holds up a match for him to blow out; but when he tries, the alcohol on his breath, instead of extinguishing the match, causes it to flare. He watches helplessly as the match falls upon his bed, screams as the straw combusts in cold blue flame. He doesn’t know it, but five more men in the coming weeks will try to blow out that same match, each with identical results. The sense of humour that eluded you in this earthly life seems destined to be yours in the Great Hereafter.