The Curate's Hands

The smell had changed. In the first week of the outbreak, the sick rooms had carried the sharp, sour odour of fever sweat — an acrid but recognisably human smell, the body's distress translated into something the nostrils could identify and the stomach could tolerate. By the third week, the smell in the worst-affected houses had deepened into something else, something thicker and sweeter, a composite of soiled linen that could not be washed fast enough, chamber pots that could not be emptied often enough, the particular exhalation of bodies burning through their own reserves, and beneath it all the faint metallic thread that Creed had learned to associate with the transition from illness to dying. The physician could walk into a room and know, before he touched a patient, whether the smell carried recovery or death in it. It was not a skill he had sought or valued. It was one the winter had forced upon him.

Nathaniel had acquired the same skill without recognising it. Three weeks of daily visits to the dockside streets had educated his senses in ways that no curriculum at Christ Church had anticipated. He could distinguish, by smell alone, the room where a fever was breaking from the room where a fever was winning. He could read the particular quality of silence that a household adopted when its members had passed beyond fear into the territory of endurance that lay on the other side. He could identify, in the faces of the women who met him at doorways, the difference between the exhaustion of ongoing crisis and the stillness that meant the crisis had resolved — in one direction or the other.

Nine dead in twenty days. The count had a rhythm to it that Nathaniel had begun to track against his will, the way a man lying awake at night tracks the chiming of a clock he cannot stop hearing. Eleanor Simmonds on the twentieth. The widow Bridges on the twenty-second, found by the woman from the room below who had taken over the broth-carrying duties after Mrs Croucher fell ill. Arthur Fenton, aged twelve, on the twenty-third — the eldest son whose labour had supplemented his family's income and whose death reduced them to a dependency on parish relief that would persist long after the fever passed. A stillborn child on Havant Street on the twenty-fourth, delivered by a mother whose fever had broken two days earlier but whose body had sustained damage that the infant could not survive. The washerwoman on Tower Street on the twenty-fifth, dead in a room so small that the women who came to prepare her body had to take turns entering because three people could not stand inside simultaneously.

Four more after that, in houses Nathaniel visited with a prayer book that was acquiring a water stain on its spine from being carried through rain and sleet, its pages soft from the humidity of sick rooms, its binding loosening from the repeated opening and closing that each death required.

He was not sleeping. The rectory provided quiet and a bed and the physical conditions necessary for rest, but rest required a mind capable of disengaging from the material it had absorbed during the day, and Nathaniel's mind had lost that capacity somewhere around the fourth death. He lay in the dark and catalogued. The names. The rooms. The faces of the women — it was almost always women — who had looked at him with an expectation he could not fulfil and a patience he did not deserve. The sound of his own voice reading the Order for the Burial of the Dead, repeated so many times now that the words had detached from their meaning and floated free, syllables without weight, prayers without destination.

He ate when he remembered to, which was less often than his body required. The rectory's housekeeper, a widow named Mrs Partridge who had served Father Harding for fifteen years and who regarded the new curate with the measured concern of a woman who had watched one priest work himself into the grave and did not wish to watch another follow, left bread and cheese on the kitchen table each morning and removed whatever remained each evening. The quantities she removed had been increasing. She said nothing about this because Mrs Partridge was not a woman who said things when observation would serve, but she had begun leaving the bread closer to the door through which Nathaniel passed on his way to and from the parish, reducing the distance between the curate and sustenance in the hope that proximity might accomplish what appetite could not.

The morning of the twenty-eighth was a Monday. Nathaniel had been awake since four, having abandoned the pretence of sleep after an hour of staring at the rectory ceiling and listening to the wind move through the churchyard yews with a sound that resembled, if he allowed his exhausted mind to make the association, the breathing of a large and indifferent animal. He had washed his face in water that had frozen at its edges overnight, dressed in the dark, eaten two mouthfuls of bread that Mrs Partridge had left beside a candle she had thoughtfully placed at the foot of the stairs, and walked to Butcher Row in a darkness that would not lift for another two hours.

The purpose of the early visit was the Briggs family on White Hart Lane. Edmund Briggs, the caulker, had been ill for eleven days, his condition deteriorating in a pattern that Creed had identified as likely terminal three days earlier. His wife Sarah had contracted the fever on the twenty-first and was now in the acute phase, her temperature spiking and falling with a violence that left her alternately drenched in sweat and shaking with cold. Their daughter, also named Sarah and aged fourteen months, had died on the twenty-sixth. The child's body was still in the room because the sexton was behind in his work and the ground in the churchyard had frozen to a depth that required a pickaxe before a shovel could be used.

A dead child in a room with two dying parents. This was the reality that the vestry's ledger translated into entries and that the churchwarden's minute book recorded as items of business and that the bishop in Winchester, if he was aware of the situation at all, understood as a pastoral challenge requiring appropriate clerical response. Nathaniel stood in the Briggs household and provided the appropriate clerical response, which consisted of prayers spoken over a body that had been dead for two days and reassurances offered to a woman too fevered to hear them and a man whose eyes tracked Nathaniel's movements with a comprehension that his wife's condition no longer permitted.

From White Hart Lane, Nathaniel walked to Oyster Street.

Peter Aldridge occupied a ground-floor room in a tenement that backed onto the yard shared by six households, the yard containing the privy and the well that Creed had identified, in his report to the vestry, as a probable vector for the fever's spread. Aldridge was forty-one years old, a ship's carpenter employed at the dockyard for twenty-three years, a man whose skill with timber had earned him wages slightly above the labourer's rate and whose position in the parish hierarchy occupied the contested ground between the respectable tradesmen of the front pews and the dockside poor who sat at the back. He attended church irregularly — often enough that Coward's ledger did not flag him as absent, infrequently enough that his face was not one Nathaniel had learned to expect on Sunday mornings.

His wife had died in 1761. His two surviving children — a son, Daniel, aged fifteen, and a daughter, Mercy, aged eleven — had been raised since then by a combination of Aldridge's erratic attention, the charity of neighbours, and the children's own premature competence. Daniel worked as an apprentice at the ropewalk where George Simmonds had been employed. Mercy kept the household — cooking, cleaning, managing the small budget her father provided — with an efficiency that would have been remarkable in a grown woman and that in an eleven-year-old girl carried implications about the childhood she had been required to forfeit.

Mercy had sent for the curate. Her father had been ill for six days, his condition following a trajectory that the neighbourhood had learned to recognise: the fever climbing, the lucid periods shortening, the intervals of delirium growing longer and more violent. Creed had visited twice and would not visit again — not because he had given up, but because he had twenty-three households requiring his attention and his capacity to provide anything beyond observation and palliative instruction had been exhausted days ago. He had told Mercy to keep her father warm, to force fluids when he was conscious enough to swallow, and to send for the curate when the time came.

Mercy judged that the time had come. She met Nathaniel at the door with the composure that had become her default expression over the four years since her mother's death — a stillness of face and posture that functioned as armour, protecting whatever existed beneath from the scrutiny of adults who might otherwise conclude that an eleven-year-old girl managing a household was a situation requiring intervention. Intervention, in Mercy's experience, meant the workhouse or a foster arrangement with strangers, either of which would separate her from her father and her brother, and separation was a price she was not willing to pay for the comfort of adults whose concern, however genuine, did not extend to providing alternatives she would actually accept.

She led Nathaniel through a corridor that smelled of damp plaster and rat droppings to the room where Peter Aldridge lay on a bed that was, by the standards of Butcher Row, almost luxurious — a proper wooden frame with a mattress stuffed with horsehair rather than straw, a blanket of reasonable thickness, a pillow that had not yet been flattened into uselessness. The room itself was larger than the Simmonds' lodgings, with a fireplace that contained actual coals — Mercy had managed the household's finances well enough to maintain a supply, though the fire she had built was small and careful, every lump counted.

Aldridge was conscious. This was the first thing Nathaniel registered, and it altered his expectations immediately. The previous deaths he had attended — Eleanor Simmonds, the widow Bridges, the others — had involved patients who were beyond communication, their fevers having carried them into the territory where the body's systems shut down one by one and the person within retreated to a place that the living could observe but not reach. Aldridge's eyes were open, clear, and focused on the curate with an intensity that the fever could not account for.

He was propped against the wall behind the bed, his chest bare above the blanket, the skin flushed and sheened with sweat. His breathing was audible from the doorway — a wet, laboured sound, each inhalation carrying a rattle that Nathaniel had learned to associate with fluid accumulating in the lungs, the sound that Creed called the harbinger because it preceded death with a reliability that few other symptoms matched. His hands lay on the blanket, large hands with the thickened knuckles and scarred fingers of a man who had spent two decades working with chisel and mallet and saw, hands that had shaped the timber of warships and were now incapable of lifting the cup of water that Mercy had placed on the crate beside the bed.

Nathaniel opened the prayer book. The gesture was automatic — three weeks of practice had turned the sequence of arrival, assessment, and rites into a procedure that his body could execute whilst his mind occupied itself elsewhere. He found the page. He began to read.

Aldridge's hand moved. The motion was slow, effortful, the arm rising from the blanket with a tremor that spoke of muscles operating far beyond their remaining capacity. His fingers closed around the edge of the prayer book and pushed it downward, away from the curate's face, with a force that should not have been available to a man in his condition but that the body somehow produced when the will behind it was sufficient.

Nathaniel stopped reading. The room was silent except for Aldridge's breathing and the hiss of the small fire and the sound of Mercy shifting her weight in the doorway behind them.

Aldridge's eyes held Nathaniel's. The fever had stripped his face of the social calculations that ordinarily governed interactions between a working man and a clergyman — the deference, the performed respect, the careful management of a relationship defined by an authority that the carpenter had never fully accepted and would not pretend to accept now, with death close enough that pretence had become a waste of whatever breath he had left.

What came from Aldridge was not speech in the conversational sense. It was a series of statements, delivered between laboured breaths, each phrase costing visible effort, the words emerging with a rawness that had nothing to do with the fever and everything to do with the content they carried. He did not shout. He did not curse. He spoke with the deliberate precision of a man who had been composing this speech for days, perhaps longer, and who understood that this was his final opportunity to deliver it.

He told Nathaniel that the prayers were empty. That the words in the book the curate carried had been written by men who had never stood in a room like this one, who had never watched their wife die in a bed that smelled of sickness and futility, who had never explained to a seven-year-old girl that her mother was not coming back and that she would need to take over the cooking and the cleaning and the raising of herself because her father was going to work in the morning and could not do both. He told Nathaniel that God, if God existed, had constructed a world in which a man could work honestly for twenty-three years and die in a room that his eleven-year-old daughter had to maintain because no one else would. He told Nathaniel that the promises the Church made — salvation, mercy, resurrection, the reunion of the faithful in a kingdom that no one had ever seen or verified — were the currency of an institution that traded in hope because hope was cheaper than help.

He said these things without rancour. That was what made them impossible to deflect. Anger could be met with patience. Blasphemy could be met with compassion. The raw, measured assessment of a dying man who had examined the Church's claims against his own experience and found them bankrupt — this could not be met with anything Nathaniel had been trained to provide.

Mercy stood in the doorway throughout. Her face did not change. She had heard her father say these things before, in the evenings when he drank more than he should have and the grief for his wife surfaced through the daily discipline he imposed upon it. She had learned to wait until the words exhausted themselves, to bring water or broth when the silence returned, to manage the aftermath the way she managed everything else — competently, without complaint, without asking anyone to notice the cost.

Nathaniel closed the prayer book. He did not leave. He sat on the edge of the bed that Peter Aldridge's skill had earned and that Peter Aldridge was dying in, and he stayed. Not because he had an answer. Not because his presence provided comfort. Not because the Church of England's pastoral guidelines suggested that remaining at the bedside of a man who had just dismantled everything the curate represented was the appropriate clerical response.

He stayed because leaving would have required him to stand up, and his legs did not seem willing to perform that function, and the prayer book in his hands had become an object whose weight he could no longer justify lifting.

Aldridge died at half past two that afternoon. His breathing slowed over the course of two hours, the intervals between each inhalation lengthening until the interval became permanent. Mercy was beside him, her hand on his chest, her fingers registering the moment when the movement beneath them ceased. Daniel arrived from the ropewalk twenty minutes later, still smelling of hemp and tar, and found his father dead and his sister sitting on the floor beside the bed with her back against the wall and her hands in her lap and her face wearing the same expression it had worn when she answered the door that morning — composed, contained, armoured against whatever came next.

Nathaniel administered the rites. He read the words from the prayer book that Aldridge had pushed away, speaking them into a room that had already received and rejected their claims. He spoke them because they were what he had, because the structure of the liturgy provided a form that could hold the formlessness of what had just occurred, because the alternative to speaking was silence and silence in that room had already said everything that needed saying.

The words came out flat. Accurate, complete, ritually correct, and entirely flat. They carried no conviction because conviction had been removed from them — not gradually, not through the slow erosion of faith that theologians described as spiritual trial, but suddenly, in the space between Aldridge's hand pushing down the prayer book and the sound of his final breath leaving his body. Something had broken in the mechanism that connected Nathaniel's mouth to whatever interior source had once animated the words he spoke, and the break was clean enough that he could feel the edges of it, sharp and precise, the way a carpenter might feel the grain of a piece of timber that had split along its natural fault line.

He did not know if the break was temporary or permanent. He did not know if what had broken was his faith or merely his confidence in the particular forms through which his faith had been expressed. He did not know if Peter Aldridge had been right, or wrong, or asking questions that the categories of right and wrong were not equipped to contain.

He knew that the prayer book in his hands was lighter than it had been that morning. He knew that the walk back to the rectory would take him through streets where other families were waiting for his visit and where other sick and dying parishioners would expect him to open this book and read from it with the authority that his ordination conferred and that the room on Oyster Street had stripped from him as efficiently as the fever stripped warmth from the bodies it consumed.

Mercy Aldridge watched the curate leave. She did not thank him for coming. She did not ask when the sexton would collect her father's body. She closed the door behind him and turned back to the room where the tasks that required her attention — washing, arranging, managing the practical aftermath of a death that was also the end of her childhood in whatever residual sense the word still applied — were waiting with the same patience that had characterised everything the fever demanded of the people it touched.