Chapter Thirty-Five #3
‘Alright Meg, I’ll get the cart up theer and have her fetched down to the hospital.’ Joseph Cashmore told the girl, then spoke to Tildy.
‘Now then, my duck, what can I do for you?’
As with Augustus Bartleet, Tildy and Joseph Cashmore had conceived a deep mutual respect and liking for each other during the course of the epidemic, and the man’s eyes were warm as he looked at Tildy.
‘If you please, Master Cashmore, do you have the full list of cholera cases here?’
‘I do,’ he informed her. ‘Why does you ask me that?’
‘Can I see it please?’
‘Surely, you come on inside, and you can look it over whiles I’m fetching Mother Cater down to the Hop Garden.’ The man raised his voice and shouted back over his shoulder, ‘Wife, see to Mistress Crawford, ’ull you. Bring that list o’ names that’s on the dresser for her to see.’
Tildy sat at the table and carefully scanned the list of names.
She knew enough of them to be able to picture their homes, and a sense of excitememt began to build in her as she thought that she could discern a distinct pattern.
Vague ideas swirled around in her brain, and with her eyes still fixed on the beautifully written copperplate list, she tried to steady and grasp those swirling ideas and clearly formulate them.
She could see that there were groupings of cases, and she racked her memories to try and visualise exactly what the locations looked like where the groupings occurred.
Mostly those locations were slums, and Tildy could appreciate the theory of a miasma being responsible for the disease in those slum areas.
But the Pitts’ house was not in a slum area.
It stood alone, in one of the most healthy and salubrious quarters of the parish.
There could be no miasma created as a result of filth and ignorance there.
She sat upright in the straight-backed chair and a sensation of tightness constricted her chest and caused her breathing to become fast and shallow.
‘If cholera is contagious, then why have I not caught it from the Pitts family? Why has Mother Cater caught it and not me, or Lucas Royston?’ Her thoughts raced in wild spirals, and among those spirals one single word reappeared again and again and again. Water. Water. Water. Water.
Memories of both Mistress Pitts and Maria Pitts begging for water came sharply into Tildy’s consciousness, and more memories of how after drinking that water varying intervals had elapsed before they had suffered relapses, and had again begun to void and vomit.
She considered Paoli’s Row and the number of cholera cases there.
‘They all draw their water from the Big Pool, don’t they, and that man was found drowned in the Big Pool.
Sweet Turf down in the Ispley Parish part of Bredon had also suffered many cases, and she recollected that the people there drew their water from another surface pool, which was partially fed from the same stream that helped to fill the Big Pool. ’
The certainty that she was on the verge of discovery suddenly exploded in Tildy’s mind, and she felt dizzied with it.
Her initial impulse was to run to Parson Clayton and the various doctors and tell them of her discovery.
Then she forced herself to remain seated, and consider the matter more calmly.
For long, long minutes she sat and struggled to calm her turbulent emotions and slowly she regained control of herself.
‘I think that somehow or other the cholera travels through the water, and people drink it and become infected,’ she now concluded, and was surprised at how calmly and rationally she could accept that conclusion, now that the first waves of dizzying excitement of discovery had exhausted themselves.
‘Now, the Pitts’ house draws its water from a well, and just below it the Round House is almost in a straight line, and there have been cases of cholera there. Does the same stream feed both wells, I wonder?’
She marvelled at how clearly her brain was able to evaluate what scant information she had of the water supplies, and decided in the same instant that she needed to know more about the water supply at each focal point of the separate outbreaks of cholera in the parish.
Tildy was alone in the cottage, Mistress Cashmore having gone out on some errand. She thought briefly, and decided that she could safely borrow the list of cases for a few hours.
‘I’m going to go to every household that’s had cholera and find out where they take their water from. Then, when I go to tell the parson and the doctors of what I’ve discovered, I’ll have the full information for them to act upon.’
A sudden exultation of battle filled her being at the realisation that if she was correct in her assumptions, then she would be striking back at this terrible disease, and perhaps on the way to gaining victory over it.
‘If I’m right, then we shall begin to know you.’ The cholera became a single malignant entity in her imagination, and she hurled her defiance at it. ‘If I’m right, then you will be beaten, just as I always said you would. You’ll be beaten!’