Oil and Ashes

The child had been dying for three days, though dying was not the word Ann Simmonds would have used. Dying implied a process with a direction, a movement from one state to another that could be observed and perhaps resisted. What had happened to Eleanor was closer to an erasure — the fever stripping away function after function, capacity after capacity, until what remained on the mattress bore so little resemblance to the girl who had been chasing her twin around the room a fortnight earlier that Ann had to remind herself, repeatedly and with increasing desperation, that this was the same child.

The vomiting had stopped on the seventeenth. This should have been a relief — it was not. The vomiting stopped because Eleanor's body had ceased the effort of expelling what it could not process, a surrender that Creed recognised when he visited that afternoon and that he communicated to Ann with a slight change in the angle of his shoulders and the duration of his silence before speaking. He did not say the child was dying. He said the fever had progressed. The distinction was one of professional vocabulary, not of meaning, and Ann understood both what he said and what he did not say with the clarity of a woman who had been watching her daughter disappear for twelve days and who had run out of ways to pretend the disappearance might reverse.

George Simmonds had improved slightly — enough to sit upright against the wall, enough to take broth without assistance, not enough to stand or to help Ann with the children or to do anything beyond occupy space on the mattress that his family shared and watch events unfold with the helpless fury of a man whose body had betrayed him at the moment his family needed it most. His fever had broken on the fourteenth, leaving him weak, drenched, and possessed of a recovering clarity that was in many respects worse than the delirium that had preceded it. Delirium had spared him the details. Clarity forced him to absorb them.

James, the eldest, had recovered enough to sit by the cold fireplace, wrapped in the coat that served as his blanket. His face carried the hollowed look of a child who had lost weight he could not afford to lose, the cheekbones too prominent, the eyes too large in a face that had been thinned by fever and insufficient food. He watched his sisters on the mattress with an expression that contained nothing a seven-year-old should have been required to feel — the knowledge that one of them was leaving and the other might follow, presented to a mind that possessed no framework for processing it and no language for expressing what it produced.

Catherine lay beside Eleanor, their bodies touching along their full length as they had touched every night since birth. The twins had been inseparable in health — Ann had learned early that separating them produced a distress out of all proportion to the physical distance involved, as though the few feet between one side of the room and the other constituted an unbearable exile. In illness, the inseparability had become something else. Catherine's fever burned at the same intensity as Eleanor's, her symptoms following the same trajectory, her body responding to the same invisible assault with the same diminishing resistance. The difference — the only difference, and the one upon which everything now depended — was that Catherine was still fighting. Her breathing was laboured but rhythmic. Her eyes, when they opened, tracked movement. Her hands gripped the blanket with a force that Eleanor's had lost two days ago.

Eleanor died at twenty past six on the morning of the twentieth. There was no dramatic moment, no final convulsion, no last breath that announced itself as the last. Ann was holding her — had been holding her through the night, the child's body cradled against her chest, the heat of the fever radiating through the blanket that separated Eleanor's skin from her mother's — and at some point between one breath and the next, the breathing simply ceased. The transition was so quiet that Ann did not recognise it immediately. She continued to hold the child for several minutes, adjusting the blanket, smoothing the damp hair from the forehead, performing the gestures of care that had become automatic over twelve days of vigil, before the stillness of the body in her arms communicated what her exhausted mind had been refusing to register.

George made a sound. Not a word — something more primitive than language, forced from his chest by a grief that his weakened body could barely sustain. He reached across the mattress toward his wife and his dead daughter, his hand finding Ann's arm and gripping it with a strength that his illness should not have permitted, the pressure of his fingers saying what his voice could not produce.

James did not move from the fireplace. He watched his mother holding his sister's body with the same stillness he had maintained for days, the same watchful immobility that had replaced whatever childhood behaviours he had possessed before the fever entered this room and rearranged everything within it. The infant Robert slept in his drawer beside the mattress, oblivious, his breathing the only sound in the room that followed a normal pattern.

Catherine turned her head toward her twin. Her eyes were open but unfocused, the fever blurring whatever her vision presented. Her hand found Eleanor's arm and rested there, fingers curling loosely around the wrist, maintaining the contact that had been the baseline of her existence since they shared their mother's womb. She did not cry. She may not have understood. The fever had taken her deep enough into its own country that the events occurring around her reached her only as impressions — warmth withdrawing, a stillness where movement had been, the particular quality of silence that a room acquires when it contains a body that has stopped being a person.

The neighbour who fetched Nathaniel was a woman named Grace Weller, wife of a dockyard caulker, who lived in the room across the landing from the Simmonds family and who had been helping Ann with water and broth since the outbreak began. She arrived at the rectory at half past seven, her shawl pulled tight against the January cold, her face carrying the composure of a woman delivering information she wished she did not possess. The curate was needed on Butcher Row. The Simmonds girl had died. The family wanted the rites.

Nathaniel had administered the sacrament of communion to the sick. He had read prayers at bedsides. He had performed the formal rituals of pastoral care that his training and ordination authorised him to conduct. He had not yet administered last rites over a body. He had not yet spoken the words that the Church of England prescribed for the commendation of a soul to God in the immediate aftermath of death, the words that were supposed to provide comfort to the living and dignity to the dead and assurance to everyone present that the transition from life to whatever followed was not a descent into nothingness but a passage into the care of a loving Creator.

He knew the words. He had studied them. He had practised them, once, in the empty chapel at Christ Church during his final year, speaking the Order for the Burial of the Dead to rows of vacant stalls because his tutor had suggested that familiarity with the liturgy would prevent hesitation during actual performance. The rehearsal had gone smoothly. The words had emerged in the correct order, with appropriate gravity, in a voice that filled the chapel with the sonorous confidence that Oxford training was designed to produce.

The chapel at Christ Church did not smell of urine. Its pews were not occupied by a man too weak to stand and a woman holding a dead child. Its acoustics did not include the breathing of a four-year-old girl whose twin had just died beside her, or the small unconscious sounds of an infant sleeping in a drawer, or the silence of a seven-year-old boy sitting by an empty fireplace with his knees drawn up to his chest.

The room on Butcher Row received Nathaniel the way it had received everything else that January — without ceremony, without adjustment, without making space. He entered through the doorway that required stooping, stepped over the threshold where the nail still protruded from the frame, and stood in the twelve-by-nine-foot room where Eleanor Simmonds lay in her mother's arms, her face slack, her skin cooling from the fever's heat to the room's ambient chill, her body beginning the imperceptible changes that would, over the coming hours, make her unmistakably dead in ways that her current stillness only suggested.

Ann looked up. Her eyes met Nathaniel's across the width of the room — six feet, perhaps seven, a distance that contained the full measure of what separated his experience from hers. She did not speak. She did not need to. Her face communicated everything that was required: do what you came to do.

Nathaniel opened the Book of Common Prayer. The leather binding was stiff in the cold air, the pages thin beneath his fingers, the text familiar from years of study and weeks of use and one rehearsal in an empty Oxford chapel that now seemed to belong to a different man's life. He found the Order for the Burial of the Dead and began to read.

The words came out wrong.

Not wrong in their content — he read accurately, omitting nothing, adding nothing, following the prescribed text with the fidelity that his ordination required. The wrongness was in the quality of the words themselves, in the gap between what they asserted and what the room contained. He spoke of resurrection and life. Eleanor's body was cooling in her mother's arms. He spoke of God's mercy. The room smelled of twelve days of illness in a space too small for the suffering it had been asked to hold. He spoke of the certain hope of eternal life. A four-year-old girl had died of a fever contracted in a lodging house that a landlord maintained because it generated income and that a parish tolerated because the alternative — acknowledging that its poorest members lived in conditions that bred disease — would have required expenditure the vestry could not afford.

The prayers were beautiful. Cranmer had written them two centuries earlier with a command of English prose that Nathaniel had admired since his first encounter with the Book of Common Prayer as a grammar school boy. The cadences were measured, the theology was precise, the assurances were comprehensive. They covered every contingency that death presented to the faithful: the grief of the living, the fate of the dead, the justice of God, the promise of reunion. They were, in every technical respect, adequate to the occasion.

They were not adequate to this room.

The inadequacy was not a failure of the words themselves but of the assumption upon which they rested — that language, however beautiful, could bridge the distance between doctrine and experience. The prayers assumed a congregation prepared to receive comfort. Ann Simmonds was not prepared to receive comfort. She was holding her dead daughter and enduring the continuation of time, which demanded that she keep breathing, keep her arms around the body, keep existing in a world that now contained one fewer person than it had contained an hour ago. Comfort was not what she needed. What she needed could not be spoken, because what she needed was for the twentieth of January to not be happening, and no prayer in any book addressed that particular request.

Nathaniel read to the end of the prescribed text. The final words settled into the room's silence and stayed there, inert, offering nothing that the silence had not already provided. He closed the book. The leather covers met with a sound that was too small and too precise for the occasion — a bureaucratic sound, the sound of a procedure completed and a page turned.

Grace Weller had entered the room at some point during the reading and now stood beside the doorway, her hands folded, her head bowed in the posture of a woman performing the expected gestures of respect. She would help Ann wash the body. She would help carry it down the narrow staircase to the room below, where Jessop had agreed to let it rest until the sexton could collect it. She would help because helping was what she did, and because the systems of mutual aid that sustained life on Butcher Row did not pause for grief any more than the fever paused for prayer.

The arrangements for burial would follow the parish's established procedures. Coward would record the death in the register. The sexton would dig the grave — a small one, requiring less labour than an adult's, occupying less space in the churchyard that was already crowded with the dead of previous generations. The fee for a pauper's burial was two shillings and sixpence, payable from the poor relief fund. There would be no headstone. The Simmonds family could not afford one, and the parish did not provide them for those buried at public expense. Eleanor would lie in St Thomas's churchyard beneath unmarked ground, her location known to the sexton and recorded in the register and forgotten within a generation, her four years of life compressed into a single line of Coward's copperplate: Eleanor Simmonds, daughter of George and Ann, aged four years, buried 22 January 1765.

Catherine Simmonds did not die that day. Her fever held at its current intensity through the morning, neither climbing nor breaking, her body suspended in the territory between the outcome that had claimed her twin and the outcome that had spared her father. She lay on the mattress where Eleanor had lain beside her, her hand still resting on the space her sister had occupied, her fingers curling and uncurling against linen that was still warm.

Whether she would survive was a question that Creed, visiting that afternoon, declined to answer. He had learned, across twenty-two years of practice, that prognosis in cases of fever was an exercise in guessing dressed up as expertise, and that the honest answer — that the body would decide what the body would decide, regardless of what the physician predicted — served his patients better than false certainty in either direction. He checked Catherine's pulse, felt her forehead, noted the rate of her breathing, and told Ann to continue doing what she had been doing.

Continue. As though continuation were a simple thing. As though the act of persisting — feeding, washing, holding, watching — did not require a decision to be made fresh each hour, a choice to remain in a room that had just become the place where your daughter died and to tend to the daughter who remained with hands that had held a body that was no longer your child but not yet anything else.

Ann continued. She had no alternative framework available. Grief was a luxury that required time, and time was a resource that the living consumed faster than the dead. Robert needed feeding. James needed watching. Catherine needed whatever Ann's presence could provide that medicine could not. George needed help reaching the chamber pot. The room needed its daily negotiations with cold and hunger and the accumulated smell of illness that no amount of opened windows — had the window not been broken and stuffed with rag — could have dispersed.