He had hardly slept a wink for thinking about the disease, and what he could do to prevent it from spreading far and wide. He remembered that during the last epidemic some parish councils had attempted a system of quarantine to contain it. This amounted to forcing the healthy in a disease-stricken area to be shut up with the sick. That to his mind was barbaric, for whole families died unnecessarily under the worst of conditions.
But he rather suspected that Uncle Abel was likely to approve such a plan, as long as it didn’t apply to him. This was why Bennett hadn’t yet told him what he’d found here last night. His uncle certainly wouldn’t have allowed him to come back here today, and that poor girl would be left alone with her sick friends believing he didn’t care about her plight.
After he’d seen her today he intended to notify the authorities that cholera had arrived in the town. If Hope was still healthy, he would recommend she left the area as soon as possible before she found herself trapped here.
He paused as he arrived at her lodging house, shocked by the appalling condition of it. Last night the cloak of darkness had hidden its true horror. He had of course known by the shakiness of the stairs that it was severely dilapidated; he’d also known it must be hideous, but even so he hadn’t imagined anything as bad as what he saw now.
There was no front door, and the wood panelling in the hall had been wrenched off, presumably for firewood; likewise, the banister spindles and many of the internal doors were gone. There were huge gaping holes in the plaster, showing the lathes beneath, and when he looked up the staircase to the top of the house he could see the sky through a hole in the roof.
It was not fit for human habitation, yet heaven knows how many unfortunate souls were compelled to live here, and the smell was so atrocious that he had to clap his hand over his nose and mouth or he might very well have vomited.
He saw the note pinned to the door even before he reached the last landing, and his first thought was that Hope had run off and was asking him to find someone to nurse her friends.
He felt an odd sense of disappointment in her, even though it was he who had suggested that she should go. He pulled the note off the nail.
‘
Dear Doctor
,’ he read.
Sadly Gussie and Betsy died this morning within minutes of one another. I didn’t know what I should do about them. I haven’t got any money for a funeral and I couldn’t stay in there with them, so I thought it better to go. I’m going out into the countryside until I’m sure I haven’t caught it too. Thank you for coming to see them, it was very kind of you, and I hope I haven’t put you at risk too. Yours truly, Hope Renton
A lump came up in his throat. It was astounding that she could write so well, not one spelling mistake, and such good handwriting. But it was the honesty and kindness in her message that affected him most. He thought most people in her position would just run without any explanation or thanks.
He opened the door, but on seeing that the room was full of flies he hastily shut it again. He’d glimpsed the blanket-covered mound on the floor and didn’t need to look beneath it to check Hope wasn’t mistaken.
Two hours later Bennett walked wearily back to Clifton. As the council offices were closed on Sundays he’d reported the deaths to the police, leaving them to contact the appropriate people. Sadly, the man he spoke to seemed dull-witted, unable to take in how serious cholera was, or how quickly it could spread. He said deaths had been reported among the Irish squatting by the river Frome, but he chuckled as if that pleased him. Bennett had been tempted to wipe that smug expression off his face by informing him cholera wasn’t choosy who it struck down, and it could very well be him or one of his family next.
But of course he didn’t say it; to point out the gravity of the situation would only start panic. One thing was certain though: this handful of deaths wouldn’t be the end of it. And Bennett knew that as a doctor he would be duty-bound to help. He didn’t want to – it would be far safer to stay up in Clifton and pray the disease didn’t get that far. At least half the stricken would die, and with or without a doctor that ratio would remain the same. But he’d made his oath to help the sick and that was what he must do.
The young girl Hope worried him too. She might be infected, and without any money, a roof over her head or anyone to turn to, she could be in a desperate situation.
He tried to think where she was likely to have gone. She’d only said ‘the countryside’, which could mean anywhere around Bristol. It would be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack!
As the sun was beginning to set on Sunday evening Hope looked down at the Avon Gorge from a viewpoint in Leigh Woods with tears streaming down her face.
The beauty of the scene in front of her was incomparable: the majesty of the rocky gorge, the orange sinking sun reflected in the water, the deep green of the woods on both sides. The tide was high and a large three-masted sailing ship was being slowly hauled down towards the sea by horses on the river banks. She could hear the sailors calling to one another, and someone unseen was playing an accordion. On the ship’s deck there was a lady in a white dress and a feathered hat, holding the hands of two small boys.
Hope had come to this spot many times when she was collecting wood, and whatever the weather, she had never tired of watching the ships, or imagining where they had come from, where they were going or what cargo they were carrying.
But today she didn’t care if that lady and her small boys were sailing to America or some other far-off land. She didn’t care if the ship was marooned without wind for weeks at the river mouth, or even if it sailed into a tempest. Gussie and Betsy, her dear friends, were dead, and she couldn’t even be there to say some prayers for them when they were buried.
Betsy had once laughed at her for feeling sad that a dead neighbour had a pauper’s burial. She had said that whether you were taken to the graveyard in a gilded coach with six plumed horses, or trundled there on the parish cart, you still met the same end under six feet of earth. Maybe that was true, but it was so unfair that her friends who had been so vibrant and beautiful in life should meet such a horrible death, and then for them to be tossed into a pit without any ceremony was too much to bear.
Hope was afraid for herself too. Except for that one night when Albert had thrown her out into the rain, she’d always had someone to run to. Gussie and Betsy had rescued her soon after that, so she had never been tested to see if she could cope alone. She might have learned to make a living, to cook meals in one pan, even to keep clean under terrible conditions. But she’d had her friends to praise her efforts, comfort her when she felt like giving up, and they’d been there every night, their bodies keeping her warm and their laughter cheering her.
It was so quiet here in the woods, the only sounds the odd rustling in the undergrowth and the occasional coo of a wood pigeon. That was why she’d always liked it so much here, for down in the town the noise was incessant. But it wasn’t good to know there was absolutely no one around, not when at any moment she could begin to shiver and feel stomach cramps. She might very well die up here in the woods. There would be no one to hold a drink to her lips, to rub her limbs or offer any words of consolation. Her corpse would be picked clean by crows and no one would ever know what happened to her.
Just two days ago she’d been torn between her friends and the position in Royal York Crescent. Now both options were gone. Even if she felt well tomorrow morning, she couldn’t present herself at number 5 and risk taking the disease with her.
Ironically, she had more money on her today than she’d ever had in her life before. She’d found one pound eight shillings in Gussie’s pocket, another four shillings in Betsy’s, and she had five and sixpence of her own. She’d felt awkward about taking her friends’ money, but whoever came to collect their bodies would take it, and Gussie and Betsy would have wanted her to have it anyway.
If not for the cholera that money would have bought her a good second-hand dress and a pair of boots. There would be enough left over to set herself up in a cheap room, and buy flowers from the market to make a living for herself by selling them.
But she couldn’t go back into the town until she knew she was well. And if the cholera was raging there by then, it would be folly to return.
In the past weeks of hot weather she’d often tried to persuade Gussie and Betsy to come up here with her and sleep under the stars. But they’d been horrified at the idea. They said woods were scary and they liked being around people. Betsy had even laughingly said that too much fresh air was bad for a body used to Lewins Mead. Hope had done her best to tempt them by telling them it would be fun, describing how they’d make a shelter, light a fire and get water from a stream, but they only shuddered at the idea.
She had had the presence of mind to bring the old teapot and a few other essentials from Lamb Lane, but it didn’t look like fun now; without Betsy and Gussie it felt like a terrible punishment for not dying with them.
‘You’re just tired, you’ll be fine after a good night’s sleep,’ she told herself, struggling to get a grip on her emotions. Resolutely she turned and made her way back to where she’d left her things. Maybe tomorrow she’d recover the will to build a shelter, and find the pond she’d discovered some months back so she could bathe herself. But tonight she was too overwhelmed with grief and exhaustion to do anything more than wrap herself in her old cloak and sleep.
A week later, Hope woke to the sound of rain falling. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, then parted the branches she’d concealed her shelter with. It was barely dawn, and the rain on the parched earth smelled good.
She lay down again, smiling smugly to herself because her shelter was still dry, proving she’d chosen the right spot beneath the canopy of a large oak, and built it well. As small children, she and Joe and Henry had often built such shelters in the woods, but she’d never imagined then that one day something which had been so enjoyable would prove so useful. It was thoughts of her brothers and home that had comforted her in the past week; they took her mind off the horror of her friends’ deaths, helped her cope with her grief and prevented her from giving in to complete despair.
Every ache or pain terrified her in case it was the onset of cholera. It was so tempting to give in to the exhaustion she felt and just wait for whatever fate had in store for her, be that sickness or starvation. But she’d forced herself to scour the woods for the right kind of supple branches she could weave into a shelter, to collect up dry bracken to make herself a bed and store wood for her fire. The meagre provisions she’d brought with her were gone on the first day, but on the third, hunger drove her to walk back down to Hotwells on the outskirts of the town and buy a few things from a stall there.
Nothing had ever tasted as good as those potatoes she baked in the fire, a lump of cheese melting inside them. She had some apples and a bunch of fresh watercress, and somehow she knew as she munched on those peppery leaves that she must be well or she couldn’t possibly enjoy it so much.
Yet bathing in the pond had lifted her spirits even more than the food. She had found the pond back in the spring and on many a hot day in the past couple of months she’d remembered it with longing. It took her some time to find it again for thick bushes hid it from sight. Only a faint gurgling of the spring which fed it had alerted her to where it was.
She had clawed her way through thick undergrowth, half-expecting to find it would have dried up to just a bed of damp mud. She almost shouted aloud with joy when she saw it was even prettier than she remembered: clean, fresh water, shining in the hot sun and completely surrounded by thick bushes. She waded in wearing her clothes, holding on to a thick branch for fear of getting out of her depth, and was thrilled to find it only came up to her waist.
She scrubbed her clothes with soap while still wearing them, then took them off, wrung them out and hung them on a bush to dry. She went back in naked then, washing every bit of herself, soaping her hair and revelling in the knowledge that she would finally be free of the stink and lice of Lewins Mead.
Holding on to a small log as a float, she found she could swim, and nothing in her life had ever felt as good as she floated in the cool, clear water, her limbs caressed and stimulated. She remained in the pond for so long that when she finally got out, her fingers and toes wrinkling from the water, her clothes were almost dry. She felt reborn then, her hair silky, her skin soothed yet glowing, and she vowed to herself that she would always live by water in future so she could bathe herself.
Back in her shelter later, she had studied herself in the small mirror Gussie had given her when she first arrived in Lewins Mead. Her hair shone and curled the way she remembered back at Briargate. Her cheeks were pink again and her eyes were bright. For a couple of hours she had even managed to think purely of her own future, rather than dwelling on the past, and it came to her then that Gussie and Betsy wouldn’t see that as a betrayal, but be glad for her.
Since that day she’d had new purpose. There were many times she found herself crying for her friends, and she knew it would be a very long time before memories of them stopped hurting. But she had stopped wishing she’d died with them, and resolved to let herself recover from what she’d been through with rest, fresh air and food. She had the idea that she’d be given a sign when the time had come to start out again.
As she lay there listening to the rain trickling from the leaves, she felt this was the sign. She hadn’t spoken to anyone other than the man she’d bought food from, and even then she’d only asked the price of his produce. She had glimpsed other people coming through the woods, but she’d kept well away from them. She couldn’t hide here for ever, though; it was the end of August now and today’s rain might prove to be the start of the end of the summer.