The Dress Lodger (18 page)

Mr. Eliot finishes his makeup and pulls on a blue cavalier hat, complete with curling blue feather. He makes his way down the narrow, dark steps to the trap below stage. Pushing his body up through the hole in the floor, he squeezes into a box, fitting his head inside the tight dome at the top. He has written the scene so that Gripeall, who has barricaded himself in his room for fear of the cholera morbus, will lift the lid from his tray of food and find upon it the head of Jeremiah, in disguise as the blue disease. There are holes cut strategically around the stage. Jeremiah as Cholera Morbus will peek in at the window. He will drop down from the beams. He will slither out from beneath Gripeall’s bed and sit upon his chest, scaring him finally to death. If tonight has witnessed the humiliation of Mr. Eliot the playwright, critics in the audience will later report that this night saw a great actor born. As he hounds Gripeall to his ultimate demise, he will be all ferocity, all confusion, all unexpectedness, all death.

Mr. Eliot hunkers in the dark cramped space below stage, waiting for his cue to spring. Tomorrow the newspapers will be full of him. In the role of counterfeited Cholera Morbus, one reporter will write, Mr. Eliot so terrified us that four grown men ran screaming from the theatre, while a woman of the lower orders went directly into labour, delivered of a son, eight pounds, three ounces. / am Cholera Morbus, Mr. Eliot finally roars, pointing a long blue finger. And I am coming for you!

Jack Crawford wakes in a theatre.

God knows how long he’ s been unconscious; he remembers only laughing at a fat doctor dressed up in saws, and then nothing until he opened his eyes on a glass-fronted cabinet full of the same implements, directly in front of him. It is a shadowy, close theatre he finds himself in, with eight or ten tiers of benches arranged in a circle about him. The stage floor has been strewn with sawdust, the walls hung with strange skeletal and muscular backdrops of the human body. Two players move slowly, performing stage business with tubes and beakers, pausing every once in a while to pour a kettle of steaming water into a tub next to him. He is at center stage, is Jack Crawford, and it takes him a minute to realize he must be starring in a play about his own life. Oh yes, it’s all coming back now. The premise— unlikely as it may be—is that Jack Crawford, sot of Sunderland, climbs the mast of the
HMS
Venerable with a mar ling spike to nail up Admiral Duncan’s colors when the Dutch attack off the coast of Ireland. The Hero of Camperdown, as he is now called, is presented at court for his bravery and awarded thirty pounds a year. Back home they begin to paint him on pots and stencil him onto pearly pink pitchers; soon he finds himself on nearly every mantelpiece in the East End and shipped off for export to Norway and America. But then the years begin to pass, and over a pint (and then another) Jack contemplates his own fraudulence. Jesus Christ, he never wanted to be on the
HMS
Venerable. He was grabbed by the Press Gang on the way to a pub on Pottery Bank and pointedly invited to join the Royal Navy. Aboard ship, he was whipped and sodomized, threatened with court-martial and practically pushed up that pole with the colors between his teeth; then, when the smoke cleared and Admiral Duncan realized improbably that he had won, young Jack was raised up shamelessly as a hero. He knew he was naught but a shill for George’s government, a working-class hero to gain sympathy among the poor for a most unpopular war. Will the audience be surprised, then, when thirty years and however many pints later, poor Jack Crawford finds less solace in his heroism than in the drink?

And here he is in Act V of his life, a tragic end for a tragic hero. His performance must’ve stunk, for he sees he’s driven the entire audience away, all except one man, who slouches in the second row with his great wide head in his hands.

The younger player leans over him and places a cool tube of glass under his tongue. Jack falls asleep again, and when he wakes the bit of glass is being removed and the player is shaking his head.

“Eighty-four degrees,” Henry says. “And the external temperature has dropped to seventy.”

“Let’s get him in the bath,” sighs Doctor Clanny.

“Jack,” Henry says, clasping the old man beneath the shoulders. “We are going to lift you now. Can you grab hold?”

“May I go home?” the old hero croaks, and his breath is icy against Henry’s cheek.

“Not quite yet.”

“He wants to go home! Did you hear him?” The lone audience member leaps up from the second row. How long are they going to keep him in this fiendish operating theatre? Hung round with skeletons and pictures of skeletons—it’s enough to drive a perfectly healthy man to his grave, much less poor liquor-soaked Jack Crawford. “He asked to go home!”

“Not yet,” says Clanny over his shoulder. “He’s still too ill.” They have heen working on Jack Crawford for a good eight hours now, trying first to restore his circulation and then to ease his stomach spasms. His symptoms were most severe the first few hours, when the old hero was convulsing at a clocked rate of once every ten minutes. Nothing Henry had ever seen had prepared him for this disease, and its progress has been almost unbearable to watch. In great heaving waves the old hero would vomit basinfuls of gruely white flocculent matter, the color of soap in hard water. Sometimes he would collapse back into sleep, sometimes the purging would start anew. Over the course of his convulsions it became less violent and more pathetic, just a helpless oozing of white jellylike pus from the buttocks. His uncle collected it in a pan and when they sniffed it for clues, neither could come up with a word to describe it. “Fusty” was the closest Henry got. It had the distilled aroma of every dilapidated back lane lodging house he had ever visited, a damp, mildewy smell, as if the man were spoiling from the inside out.

But the tetanus spasms were what finally drove them to banish Robert Cooley (as they learned Bob, formerly Fustian, was more properly called) to the benches of the operating theatre. They were horrible to behold. Like panicked mice running the length of his body, the contractions would start at the sick man’s toes and race up the legs to his groin: would start in his fingertips and flee down the arms to his chest. Faster and faster they’d try to outrun each other until poor Jack Crawford became one anguished, protracted spasm, jackkniflng across the operating table, only the top of his head and his heels touching the surface. Clanny and Henry would fall on him, trying to hold him in place, while his friend, Robert Cooley, screamed every profanity known to workingmen. Henry’s own calves would start to cramp in sympathy—he could feel the long muscles charley-horsing into knots as he watched his uncle pour medicine down Jack Crawford’s constricted throat. You are poisoning him! Robert Cooley banged the table. What are you giving him? Laudanum and brandy, you misbegotten creature. Now go sit down, you are tormenting this patient.

Jack Crawford is now in the third and usually final phase of the disease, what the doctors who first studied cholera in India termed “the cold blue stage.” Henry had read of it, but never thought it would manifest itself so literally. The disease has pummeled Jack’s face, leaving it a bruised black-and-blue; the old hero’s hands have gone from a freckled white to a deep indigo; his feet have turned blue as if stained with woad. With no fluid to keep it plump, his skin has shriveled and his dry eyes have receded into his head. The constant spasms have so contorted his back and spine that he has become like a hunched old man. It is the most horrible aspect of the disease. Cholera has aged Jack Crawford forty years in a few short hours and turned him into his own grandfather before their very eyes.

“Here we go,” says Clanny, gently lowering the sick man into the steaming tub of water. If they can only get his temperature up, he may have a chance. But Clanny and Henry barely have him an inch into the bath before he cries out pathetically.

“It’s torture!” Jack Crawford wheezes.

“Acid! You’re putting my mate in a vat of acid!” Robert Cooley leaps up and crashes over a row of benches to get at the doctors. “It’s his bones you want, isn’t it? You only care about his bones!”

“Damn it, man!” Henry roars, struggling to support Jack’s dead weight above the surface of the water. “You saw us fill this tub with that very kettle. You saw me pour a pot of tea from it not even an hour ago and drink it. Your friend cries out because he is so cold, even tepid water will feel like a thousand degrees to him. We need to elevate his body temperature or he will certainly die.”

Robert Cooley looks uncertain, but, unwilling to test the acid water on his own beefy forearm, he sits sullenly back down.

The doctors ease England’s whimpering hero of Camperdown farther into the bath and set his arms on either side of the tub to keep his head from going under. We can leave him in for fifteen or twenty minutes, Clanny says. Let’s rest ourselves by the fire.

Henry shovels a few more coals onto the brazier and pulls a hard, cane-backed chair next to his uncle’s. Robert Cooley sits all alone in the shadowy operating theatre, where many a surgeon-to-be has dozed through lectures on the pahnaris brevis of the hand or the thirty pairs of nerves that originate in the backbone’s dorsal medulla. The man looks like he could use some sleep, but Henry knows that, for fear of having a plaster slapped across his nose and mouth, Cooley won’t shut an eye. It’s strange. Henry has practically grown up in rooms like this, has never thought of an operating theatre as a fearful place, but he can see how to a simple man like Robert, a suspicious man, this auditorium must appear a house of horrors. Is he more frightened of floating fetuses in specimen jars arranged neatly on bookcases, Henry wonders, or of the human skeletons, dark brown and oily-looking, suspended by delicate cords of silk? The paneled walls are decorated with prints by the master dissector/illustrator Albinus, of bug-eyed muscle men flexing their exposed tendons in front of felled Corinthian columns, of animated skeletons (front and back view) posed before grazing rhinoceroses. Henry has always looked at them and seen the Lesser sciatic notch, the Occipitalis, the Flexor Hallucis Longus, isolated muscle and bone he would have to identify on a test. Seen through Robert Cooley’s eyes, though, the engravings are rather macabre—all these flayed reanimated carcasses cavorting through Arcadia. No wonder he’s afraid to go to sleep.

Henry reaches out for the ceramic cup of tea he left on the hearth after their last break. The handle has stayed hot next to the fire, but the liquid inside is cold. Having worked two solid days on the corpse Gustine procured for him, and now staying up all night with Jack Crawford, he is on the point of collapse. It is hard to keep from shaking as he drinks his cold tea.

“We need to alert the Board in London,” Clanny says, leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed. “1 would imagine they’ll lock us down even tighter.”

All summer the debate over Quarantine had raged. The merchants and landowners led by Lord Londonderry argued against it—self-servingly saying that a suspension of trade could only further bankrupt the poor and drive them more rapidly to their deaths. Clanny and a good number of the other doctors, backed by the London Board of Health and thus His Majesty, claimed it was their only protection. They’d all read the numbers in the newspaper: thirty thousand dead in Cairo in twenty-four hours, five hundred cases a day in Saint Petersburg, anti-doctor poison riots in Hungary, Paris, and Berlin. Cholera morbus must not be allowed into the realm. This was a disease to enrage the people, to bring down governments, and with Reform Riots already flaring in Nottingham and Bristol, His Majesty decided it in the country’s best interest to quarantine all incoming vessels.

“What do you think they’ll do?” asks Henry. His uncle shakes his head.

“Did you read the latest Sanitary Code? ‘It may be necessary to draw troops around infected areas, so as to utterly exclude the inhabitants from all intercourse with the rest of the country.’”

“Londonderry will never stand for it. He needs to sell his coal.”

“Then let him take responsibility for the pestilence.”

Clanny stretches his long legs toward the fire. “Do you remember back in August when Dr. Dixon called me in to look at that keelman Robert Henry? We thought he had the summer diarrhea, but twenty hours later, he died of it. And earlier this month, that girl … what was her name— Hazzard? Only twelve years old and dead after twelve hours. I think the cholera has been here since the summer. I think it’s been moving among us for months.

“For that matter, who knows how many of them have died without our even knowing it?” Clanny continues. “They don’t trust us, so they don’t send for us. Our behaviour is as responsible for the spread of this disease as anything else.”

Henry looks over at Robert Cooley, sitting watchfully in the second row. Why would they trust us? We bully them, confuse them, experiment on their kidney stones in hospitals no respectable person would consider entering. We dig up their bodies, steal them from their parlours, hire desperate men to murder them while they sleep. It is a wretched business being a doctor, thinks Henry. But what else are we to do?

“I have a theory,” Clanny interrupts his meditations. “On why they turn blue.”

“What is it?”

“Too much carbon in the bloodstream.” Clanny sits up when his nephew doesn’t answer. “Think about it. Blood changes from bright red to blue when carbon swallows all the oxygen. All summer and into the autumn it was so humid—now it is cold, but still damp. Atmospheric pressure forces the free carbon back into the body where it cannot be properly expelled. It’s why we are so languid and unnerved in July and August.”

“So you think it is atmospheric rather than contagious?” Henry asks, slightly confused by his uncle’s theorizing.

“I’m not saying it’s not contagious. But it may not be imported. The atmosphere in Sunderland could be responsible for its generation; men could be responsible for its spread.”

“I don’t know, Uncle.”

“I don’t know either,” says Clanny, “but I’m certain of one thing. I’m going to sleep with the doors and windows cracked at least an inch until this passes over.”