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“I suppose it’s better than nothing,” she said with a tight smile. “I’ve sent Mary out to get some clean straw. She can try the ostler at the end of the lane. His mother’s one of the victims. He’ll do what he can.” She set the gin down on the floor. “I don’t know what to do about the well. I’ve pumped the water, but it smells like next-door’s pigsty.”
“Probably with good reason,” Hester said, tightening her lips. “There’s a well in Phoebe Street that smells all right, but it’ll be an awful nuisance to carry water over. And we’re desperately short of buckets.”
“We’ll have to borrow them,” Enid said resolutely. “If every family spared us one, we’d quickly have sufficient for all purposes.”
“They haven’t got them,” Hester pointed out, setting her bucket, scrubbing brush and cloth away tidily. “Most families around here have only one pan between them anyway.”
“One pan for what?” Enid pressed. “Perhaps they can use their night bucket for scrubbing the floor as well?”
“One pan for everything,” Hester explained. “The same one for scrubbing the floor, for bathing the baby, for waste at night, and for cooking in.”
“Oh God!” Enid stood still, then blushed, robbed of speech for an instant. She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I suppose I’m still very ignorant. I’ll go out and buy some.” She turned on her heel and was about to leave when she almost bumped into Kristian Beck coming in. His face was set in anger, his cheeks burned with color which had nothing to do with the cold outside, and his beautiful mouth was set in a tight line. There was no need to ask if he had met with success or failure with the local authority.
/> Callandra was the first to speak.
“Nothing?” she said softly, no criticism in her voice.
“Nothing,” he conceded. Even in the single word there was a trace of some European accent, very slight, only an extra preciseness which marked English as not his mother tongue. His voice was rich and very deep, and at the moment expressive of his utter contempt. “They have a hundred prevarications, but they all amount to the same thing. They don’t care enough!”
“What excuses?” Enid demanded. “What could there possibly be? People are dying, scores of people, and it could be hundreds before it’s over. It’s monstrous!”
Hester had spent nearly two years as an army nurse. She was used to the workings of the institutional mind. No local authority could be worse than military command, or in her opinion more stubborn or totally fossilized in its thinking. Callandra’s late husband had been an army surgeon; she too was familiar with ritual and the almost insuperable force of precedent.
“Money,” Kristian said with disgust. He looked up and down at the length of the now-scrubbed warehouse with satisfaction. It was cold and bare, but it was clean. “To build proper drains would add at least a penny to the rates, and none of them want that,” he added.
“But don’t they understand …” Enid began.
“Only a penny …” Callandra snorted.
“At least half of the members are shopkeepers,” Kristian explained with weary patience. “A penny on the rates will hurt their business.”
“Half shopkeepers?” Hester screwed up her face. “That’s ridiculous! Why so many of one occupation? Where are the builders, the cobblers or bakers, or ordinary people?”
“Working,” Kristian said simply. “You cannot sit on the council unless you have money, and time to spare. Ordinary men are at their jobs; they cannot afford not to be.”
Hester drew in breath to argue.
Kristian preempted her. “You cannot even vote for council members unless you own property worth over one thousand pounds,” he pointed out. “Or rental of over one hundred a year. That excludes the vast majority of the men, and naturally all the women.”
“So only those with a vested interest can be elected anyway!” Hester said, her voice rising in fury.
“That’s right,” Kristian agreed. “But it helps no one to waste your energy on what you cannot change. Rage is an emotional luxury for which we have no time to spare.”
“Then we must change it!” Callandra almost choked on the words, her frustration was so consuming. She swung around to stare at the empty barn of a place, tears of impotence in her eyes. “We should never have to fill something like this with people we can’t save because some damnable little shopkeepers won’t pay an extra penny on the rates for us to get the sewage out of the streets!”
Kristian looked at her with an affection so naked that Hester, standing between them, felt an intruder.
“My dear,” he said patiently. “It is very much more complicated than that. To begin with, what should we do with it? Some people argue for a water-carried system, but then it has to empty somewhere, and what of the river? It would become one vast cesspool. And there are problems with water. If it rains heavily may it not back up, and people’s houses would become awash with everyone’s waste?”
She stared at him, as much of her emotion drinking in his face, his eyes, his mouth, as thinking of the bitter problem. “But in the summer the dry middens blow all over the place,” she said. “The very air is filled with the dust of manure and worse.”
“I know,” he replied.
There was a noise on the staircase. Mary returned with an undersized little man in a shiny hat and a jacket several sizes too large for his narrow shoulders.
“This is Mr. Stabb,” she introduced him. “And he will rent us two dozen pots and pans at a penny a day.”
“Each, o’ course,” Mr. Stabb put in quickly. “I got a family to feed. But me ma died o’ the cholera back in forty-eight, an’ I wouldn’t want as not ter do me bit, like.”
