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“Who are they? Did I know them?”
“Yes,” Hester said with a broad smile. “One is the little boy you were so fond of, the one you thought could never survive.…”
“He’s all right?” Enid said in amazement, her eyes lighting. “He’s recovered?”
“Yes. He went home today. I don’t know what gave him the strength, but he survived.”
Enid leaned back against her pillows, a great sweetness in her face, almost a radiance. “And the other?” she asked.
“A woman with four children,” Hester answered. “She went home to them today as well. But how are you? That’s what I came to know.”
It was a question only of friendship. She would make her own determination. The improvement in Enid was great. Her eyes were clearer, her temperature down to normal, but the fever had wasted her and she looked at the very end of her strength.
Enid smiled. “Very impatient to feel better,” she confessed. “I hate feeling so weak. I can barely lift my hands to feed myself, much less comb my hair. It’s absurd. I lie here uselessly. There is so much to do, and I am spending three quarters of my life asleep.”
“It is the best thing,” Hester assured her. “Don’t fight against it. It is nature’s way of healing you. You will be better the faster if you submit to it.”
Enid clenched her teeth. “I hate to surrender!”
“Military tactics.” Hester leaned forward conspiratorially. “Never fight when you know your enemy has the advantage. Pick a time, don’t let him do it for you. Retreat now, and return when the advantage is yours.”
“Ever thought of being a soldier?” Enid asked with a giggle which turned into a cough.
“Frequently,” Hester replied. “I think I could make a better fist of it than many who do it now. Certainly I could barely do worse.”
“Don’t let my husband hear you say that!” Enid warned happily.
Hester’s reply was cut off by Genevieve’s appearance. She looked less harassed than when Hester had seen her last, although she must have been tired, and Hester knew from Monk’s remark that there had been no good news.
She greeted her, and after an exchange of necessary information regarding Enid, they both left to partake of the meal which had been set for them in the housekeeper’s sitting room.
“The fever is definitely abating in Limehouse,” Hester said conversationally. “I only wish we could do something to prevent it coming back again.”
“What could anyone do?” Genevieve asked with a frown. “The way people live, it is bound to arise every so often.”
“Change the way they live,” Hester replied.
Genevieve smiled, bitterness and a kind of revulsion in it, not untouched by both anger and pity.
“You’d have more luck trying to stop the tide from turning.” She speared a piece of meat in her steak and kidney pudding and put it in her mouth, then spoke again the moment after she had swallowed it. “You can’t change people. Oh, one or two, maybe, but never thousands. They’ve lived like that for generations, never enough to eat, the bread’s full of alum, the milk’s half water.” She gave a sharp laugh. “Even the tea is better for poisoning the rats than for humans drinking. Only working men get things like pigs’ trotters or kippers, the rest of the family does without. Nobody has fruit or vegetables. Everybody in the street, in two streets, has to queue with pails for water from the wells, and half of them are contaminated by sewers, cesspits
or middens. Even if they didn’t use the one pail for everything!” Her voice was angry, bitter and racked with emotion. “They’re born with disease, and they die with it. A few sewage pipes aren’t going to change that!”
“Yes they can,” Hester said slowly, her mind dizzy with the force of Genevieve’s passion, bewildered by its suddenness and ringing sincerity. “It’s the drains and the middens where the problem lies.”
Genevieve’s lip curled. “It’s the same thing!”
“No it isn’t!” Hester argued, leaning forward across the table. “If there were proper water-carrying sewers built, then—”
“Water?” Genevieve looked amazed and horrified. “Then it would go everywhere!”
“No it wouldn’t—”
“Yes it would! I’ve seen that, when the tide turns, or there’s a heavy rain, it all backs up, the middens overflow, the gutters run sewage! Even when it goes down again what it leaves behind sits in piles on the pavements! You can shovel it off!”
“Where?” Hester said slowly, an incredible idea taking form in her mind, something so ludicrous it could even be true, wild and absurd as it seemed.
“What?” Genevieve’s face colored painfully. She fumbled for words and found none. “Well—perhaps I haven’t seen. I should have said I had heard.…” She bent as if to resume eating her food, but only toyed with it, pushing it around with her fork.
