When he at last rolls off, Gustine sits up and slowly pulls her muddy pottery shift around her. She is numb from lying awkwardly on the hearth, and she has lost the feeling in her right leg. But Henry, like a convalescent suddenly awakened from delirium, is ravenously hungry. His attention turns to his food from earlier today, the pale cold chicken breast and the gray-green artichoke. He reaches for the plate.
“Do you always eat the same meal?” she asks.
Annoyed with her observation, he pushes the food away. “I am very sorry I can’t take you on, Gustine,” he says. “It would be unspeakably wicked of me to keep a lover here while my wife was in the house. I have never been that sort of man.”
She is standing over the hearth, where, despite his proximity to the heat, her baby is still strangely cold. Henry follows her helplessly, wishing she would speak, recognize what just passed between them, even if neither meant it to be. But what, after all, can he expect from a hardened professional? She is silent and mechanical, stooping to lift her child, to brush her mussed, muddy hair from her eyes. She crosses to the door and starts down the steps, still not speaking.
“Where are you going with the baby?” he asks, surprised, trailing behind her down the steps. “You just gave him to me.”
She picks up the wet wool charity blanket she dropped on the way in and wraps it once more around the shivering child. It is too damp to be comfortable, but it will keep the worst of the snow off.
“I made a mistake,” she says.
“It’s too late,” he calls. “I have an appointment with a solicitor tomorrow and I intend to seek legal custody of that child.”
“You would take him from me? Without my consent?” she asks, stunned.
“It is for his own good,” Henry says, growing increasingly more frustrated. “Look at you: drunk, carrying him about in the snow, bringing him here to watch” He breaks off, for she is opening the door without listening to him. “Gustine, wait!”
She turns back to him with fury in her eyes. Of course, he knows why she is angry. How stupid could he be? Henry digs in his pocket and extends her a pound note, slightly moist with perspiration. “Here, take it,” he says. “For the other … I would never cheat you.”
Looking at his extended hand, Gustine realizes that her vision, which a month ago penetrated Henry’s linen shirt down to his duplicitous flesh, now sears straight through to the bone. Gone are skin, pores, and hair, all the surface markers that make a man seem unique. Now all Gustine sees is an anonymous disarranged picket fence of bones. The doctor’s voice echoes in a funny, flapping mandible. He stands upon two obscene codpiece patellae. Where once her vision allowed her to distinguish the difference between him and other men, she seems now only to register his white skeletal sameness. She reaches out and takes his money. At last she sees the hollow in his chest for what it really is.
Cxholera morbus began its career, piously enough, as a pilgrim. It traveled the Ganges pilgrimage routes, stowing away with the elderly in litters, crawling with children, stumping with amputees, biding its time, hoping to silently ride its transport home where it might infect a village, a city, a province. Hundreds of thousands would die before it sunk back into the ground, now sloshing in subterranean pools all across India, now lying in wait for another pilgrimage or fair, any unsuspecting convocation of men. This had been the Hindoo cycle for centuries, and would have remained happily unknown to us in Europe had not His Majesty’s East India troops, in their baleful march across the continent in 1816, inevitably intersected with those same routes of pilgrimage.
From that moment on, cholera marched with the army. By 1818, the disease had reached Bombay. By 18 2o, ferried across the Bay of Bengal with the army’s provisions, it had taken the Indian archipelago island by island until it regained land at China. A new generation of cholera, perhaps struck with the same pioneering spirit that was spurring the world toward America, took sail west, gaining Persia by 18 2 3, Moscow by 18 2 7; and by 18 3 o, when Gustine, then fourteen years old, first realized her belly was beginning to swell, it had reached Sunderland’s main trading partner at Riga. William Sproat, the first to officially die in all of England, illicitly sold a few lumps of coal to the cook aboard a Riga ship stuck behind the Quarantine, but what was the harm in that? No harm at all to Gustine, had he not then sat next to her fellow lodger Fos at Les Chats Savants.
But why pause here for a lesson on the pandemic history of cholera morbus? Well, sometimes the world intrudes into a story, just like it intrudes into a town; sometimes no matter how we guard against it or pretend it does not exist, the They of someplace halfway across the globe become the Us of here and now. Tonight, the cholera morbus, bred in the East End of the very Worldin Bengal, as filthy as Mill Street; in Jessore, as poor as Sailor’s Alley; passed hand to hand like a pestilential Olympic torchhas come for the being Gustine loves most in the world. How unfair, it seems to us, to pit a disease fed on the deaths of millions against a single little baby.
It feels far more crowded than usual when Gustine pushes her way inside the Labour in Vain, but she quickly realizes it is only full around the edges. The tables have been pushed aside to leave a rough circle in the middle of the room, inside of which squats John Robinson erecting a wall of old red and white wooden panels. His patrons laugh and talk around him, oblivious to the hammering; a few offer advice on the construction of his rat ring, a few angle for odds on Friday night’s championship match. Crown Prince of Ratters is to be decided, a final contest between Whilky’s Mike and whichever mongrel wins tomorrow night. In its place of honour among the ubiquitous Garrison ware on the mantelpiece (John’s own Wearmouth West View 2 ^-Year Commemorative milk pitcher, a porcelain terrier with a trout in its mouth, and Gustine’s potter’s specialty, The Sailor’s Tear) sits the Silver Crown itself, a dented tin chaplet much coveted by the rat baiters of Sunderland. Whether set upon the head of a mutt or a ferret, on Friday night, with the bestowing of this crown, Divine Right shall be recognized.
“What’s wrong wi’ that baby?” asks an old woman when Gustine slips into the back corner cemetery table and starts to unwrap her child’s blanket. It is packed hard with snow and reeks like sour rennet. “He’s discoloured.”
“He’s fine,” answers Gustine tersely.
“If he’s got the whooping cough, you should put a live trout’s head in his mouth. It will suck away the disease.”
“No,” interrupts her friend, an equally dilapidated crone, missing her three front teeth. “Shave his wee head, hang the hair upon a bush, an’ when the birds take it back to their nests, they’ll carry the disease with it.”
“He doesn’t have the whooping cough,” Gustine replies.
“What’s yer poor bairn’s name, girl?” asks the first old crone, kindly. “We’ll say a prayer for him tonight.”
Gustine looks up at the woman blankly. Her child is dying and she never even gave him a name. She said she believed he would live, grow strong, and one day bury her; yet somewhere, in the darkest corner of her cowardly soul, she worried that everyone else was right. Perhaps if he went unnamed, unbaptized, she reasoned, God might overlook him and leave him to her care. Butoh, her hearthow wrong she was. She has been an irresponsible caretaker and God is taking back her charge. Please let him stay, Gustine pleads now, stripping off his stool-soaked blanket. I will give him a name. I will call himI will call him William after our most beloved king, a man who certainly finds favour in Your sight; but even as Gustine thinks the name William, unbidden comes the image of William Marion, vestryman, who left a xylophone of bruises down her spine when he took her on the table of the Corn Exchange. No, William is not the right name. Let it be George then, she thinks, our previous king. But a George forced her to her knees in front of his friends, a Harold, a Buck, a Tim, and a Jerry. No, all of those names are out. Closed too are all Bobs and Bills and Bruces, all Franks, Andrews, and Charleses; and certainly not a Henry. To every name, she can fix a leering, brutal, pitiless face; hands of Dicks and dicks of Thomases.
The old women drift away as John Robinson looks up to see who has taken the back cemetery table. Well now, she is about the last person he expected to see here. John Robinson sighs deeply, for more than anything, he hates conflict, and conflict with a woman is by far the worst type. Setting aside his hammer, he takes a quick shot of gin, steeling himself for the unpleasant business.
“Gustine.” He nods.
“John, please just let us sit a minute.” Gustine wipes away her tears. “I need to warm him up.”
The publican frowns and doesn’t look at her. “Heard you left Mill Street.”
She doesn’t care what he heard. Warming her child is all that matters. “The Eye touched him,” she says. “Look what she’s done.”
Unless the Eye built a time machine and sent the child eighty years into his own old age, she could never have done this, thinks John Robinson. A shriveled old man has taken possession of the infant’s swaddling clothes.
His dull blue eyes have shied into a pinched, dented skull. His tiny fingers and toes are curled arthritically and wrinkled as if he’s spent too long in the bath. If it weren’t for his slowly rustling heart, John would never have recognized the child.
“You can’t stay here with that thing,” her landlord’s brother says.
“He’ll be fine. He just needs to warm up.”
John Robinson shakes his head and walks away. He can’t go on protecting Gustine; it will only bring more trouble upon him. She belongs to his brother and to his brother she must return. He pulls aside the young brat who hawks the Labour in Vain’s ratting events. “Fetch the Eye from Mill Street,”he whispers. “Tell her where she may find my brother’s dress lodger.”
“I need a cup of tea, please,” Gustine says loudly.
He pours a cup from the strong sugared pot boiling in the fireplace, and sets it before her. Carefully, she cools a bit in a saucer and holds it to the baby’s lips, hoping to tempt him, but he makes no move to drink, just stares up bewilderedly, looking for all the world like he would cry if only he could only raise the tears. She wishes he would scream or flail about; she could bear anything easier than this fixed, mute suffering.
“What do you expect for that child, Gustine?” asks John, still standing over her. “Ye should’ve drowned it the day it was born, as Whilky said. It has no kind of life.”
“I will give him a life,” she whispers fiercely, holding his two small hands over the steaming cup of tea.
“And if he grew up, what would he grow up to be? An invalid? A monster in a freak show?”
But she has imagined a future for him, she realizes, though she’s never put it in words. “He would grow up like him,” Gustine says, staring at the pitcher upon John Robinson’s mantelpiece: The Sailor’s Tear, her potter’s most popular item. When she stops to think about it, that is how she has always pictured her grown son. A thin, sinewy sailor, healthy enough to leave her behind. The sailor jumped into the ship/As it lay upon the strand, [_ But, oh! His heart was far away_]With friends upon the land. She stands on the shore in a lame turban with trembling ostrich feather, her matching earrings and necklace flashing in the dying sun, waving him off to war. That’s her boy on deck, all grown up, his arms too long for his jacket, his pants justabittoo short. He’s outgrown every piece of clothing she’s ever bought him, but where most mothers would bemoan the expense, she has always been secretly delighted. Every extra inch of him has been wrested from death, every popped button and let-down hem means another year of victory.
He thought of those he loved the best,
A wife and infant dear And feeling filled the sailor’s breast
The sailor’s eye, a tear.
Yes, of course he will be married and a father. It took her a while to learn to love his wife, Gustine admits, for she was pert and strong-minded and Gustine hated giving up any place in her child’s affections; but at last she grew to love one who loved her own so well. Lying exposed for all to see, her son’s heart had been the target of too many trifling East End girls, but the one he married never sought to break it. She treated him gently and gave him a son, exactly the same age today as he was that awful cholera winter they had the scare. Oh, Gustine can laugh about it now, but she thought she’d lost him then, so blue and cold had he lain at the Labour in Vain. She lifts his own rosy pink son and waves his chubby fist for him. Be safe! she cries, straining to be heard over the hungry gulls following the boat, but he has already turned away, his eyes averted, his hands warding off the sentiment.
She leaves him there, in the exact attitude of the Garrison pitcher, unable, she realizes, to make out his features in their deflection, or to know his body except in its turning away. She has never seen the face of the man whose life she imagines for her son. He is painted perpetually leaving her. “Baby?” she whispers, for he has grown awfully still. The boy John Robinson sent out slips back through the doorway. He hisses to his master, I met her on the street. She’s coming. “Who’s coming?” Gustine asks, looking up sharply. John Robinson takes away her cup of tea, pretending not to hear her. “Who’s coming?” she repeats, looking around at the old sotted women, the lightermen, the burly day labourers, who have stopped drinking and fallen silent in anticipation. She’s the one that clout the Eye. Ran away from home; now the Eye’s come after. Should be here any minute. Who needs a ratting? They are getting their fight early.
No, she must not find us here. They must get out fast, before the Shadow of Death catches up to them and finishes her business. Gustine frantically snatches up her poor sick child, pressing his shuddering body to her breast. Why did she think she could trust John Robinson any further than the rest of them? So he spoke a few kind words, so he kept her bed neat; he is still no better than a dishonest bartender and cheap brothel keeper. And her landlord’s brother.
“Excuse me. Please!” Gustine shouts, trying to squeeze between two wooden tables. But it is too late. A girl can only lose her shadow for so long. Even as she breaks free, the door flies open, scattering those who sit nearest. When they discuss it later, no one will remember having ever seen the Eye look so fierce. Blood and snow wind down her forehead across the bridge of her flat nose, pinkly dribbling from her chin. Because the swelling from Gustine’s blow has completely obscured her atrophied eye, her one good one has taken on even greater intensity. She is all vision now, all-seeing single-minded vengeance. She carries the wet reproach of Gustine’s dress in her arms. Climb back in, treacherous rat. Do not make me chase you.