Thirty-One Names

The first sign was not medical. It was commercial. On the morning of the eleventh of February, the baker on Havant Street — a man named Pollard who had continued working through the outbreak because bread was required regardless of what else was happening and because his ovens generated heat that the fever could not survive — reported that his morning trade had increased. Women who had not left their lodgings in weeks were appearing at his counter, purchasing loaves with money that had been hoarded against the possibility that the worst was not yet over, spending now because the instinct that had kept them indoors had reversed itself overnight without explanation or announcement. They did not say the fever had broken. They said they needed bread. The meaning was the same.

Creed confirmed what the baker's trade suggested. His rounds on the eleventh and twelfth covered the same households he had been visiting for six weeks, the same staircases he had climbed, the same doors he had knocked upon with hands that had stopped bothering to warm themselves between calls because the cold outside and the heat inside alternated so frequently that his skin had abandoned the effort of adjusting. The change was unmistakable. Fevers that had held steady for days were dropping. Patients who had been unable to keep broth down were asking for food. Children who had lain motionless on mattresses for a week were sitting up, blinking at rooms they had last seen through the distortion of delirium, rediscovering the dimensions of spaces that illness had compressed into the narrow territory between the mattress and the ceiling above it.

The change was not uniform. Three households still held patients whose condition Creed judged critical — the Briggs caulker on White Hart Lane, whose fever had maintained its grip longer than any other case in the parish, and two elderly men on Oyster Street whose age left them with insufficient reserve to mount the recovery that younger bodies were beginning to produce. These patients would require continued attention. One or more of them might still die. The fever's retreat was a trend, not a guarantee, and Creed had practiced long enough to know that trends reversed themselves with a spite that seemed, if one were inclined toward such interpretations, intentional.

But the trajectory was clear. The outbreak had peaked in the final days of January and the first days of February, and it was now receding along a curve that matched, approximately, the pattern Creed had observed in 1752 — a steep climb, a brutal plateau, and a decline that was more gradual than the ascent but no less definitive. The organism responsible, whatever it was, had burned through the available population and was exhausting itself for lack of new hosts. The survivors — and most of those who had contracted the fever had survived, a fact that the thirty-one dead tended to obscure — were rebuilding their strength with the slow, unglamorous determination that recovery demanded.

Thirty-one dead. Henry Coward had recorded each of them in the parish register with the precision that characterised all his administrative work — name, age, date of death, cause listed as fever, burial date, burial location within the churchyard. The entries occupied three pages of the register, their density visible even before the individual names were read, the ink forming a block of text that was disproportionate to the entries surrounding it — the ordinary baptisms and marriages and singular deaths that constituted the parish's normal business. Three pages of concentrated mortality, bracketed by the routines of a community that had existed before the fever arrived and that would continue after the last grave was filled.

The names formed a cross-section of the parish's dockside population. Eleanor Simmonds, aged four. The widow Bridges, aged sixty-seven. Arthur Fenton, aged twelve. Peter Aldridge, aged forty-one. Agnes Moody, aged eighty-one. The washerwoman on Tower Street, whose name — Dorothy Price — appeared in the register for the first time at her death, her life having been conducted entirely within the informal economy of laundry and domestic service that the parish's official records did not track. Three infants under the age of one, for whom the register recorded only surnames and the notation infant, their Christian names either not yet bestowed or not known to the sexton who reported the burials. Two unmarried dockyard labourers whose deaths were reported by their landlord rather than by family, because they had no family in Portsmouth, having come to the dockyard from elsewhere in search of work that was plentiful during wartime and scarce after.

The remaining twenty dead were distributed across the ages and circumstances that the dockside streets produced — men and women in their twenties and thirties and forties and fifties, some with families who mourned them and some with neighbours who noticed their absence and some with no one at all beyond the sexton who carried their bodies and the churchwarden who recorded their names and the curate who had spoken the words of commendation over each of them in rooms that blurred together in Nathaniel's memory like the pages of a book read too quickly and under poor light.

Catherine Simmonds had survived. This fact occupied a space in the record that the register's columns could not accommodate, because survival was not an event the register was designed to capture — only its opposite. Catherine was alive, recovering, eating the broth that her mother spooned into her mouth with hands that had not stopped shaking since Eleanor's death and that might never fully steady again. The twin who remained would grow up carrying the outline of the twin who did not, a presence-shaped absence that would accompany her through whatever years the same body that had fought off the fever would provide.

Daniel and Mercy Aldridge had not entered the workhouse. This outcome, which Coward had considered likely when their father died, had been prevented by the intervention of the ropewalk foreman, who had offered Daniel full employment at the adult rate on the strength of the boy's six months as apprentice and his evident willingness to work hours that men twice his age found punishing. The income was sufficient to maintain the room on Oyster Street. Mercy continued to keep the household. The arrangement was irregular — a fifteen-year-old boy and his eleven-year-old sister living without adult supervision in a lodging house that the parish overseers would, under normal circumstances, have flagged for investigation. But the circumstances were not normal. The overseers had thirty-one dead parishioners to account for, a depleted poor relief fund to replenish, and a list of surviving families requiring continued support that exceeded their capacity to provide it. Two orphans who were managing without parish assistance were, in the arithmetic of crisis, a problem that had solved itself.

The churchyard showed the winter's work. The ground along the eastern wall, where the sexton had concentrated the fever burials to preserve space in the older sections, was raw with freshly turned earth — dark soil mounded above graves that had not yet settled, the clay heavy and wet from weeks of rain and frost. No headstones marked these graves. The pauper burials — and most of the fever dead had been buried at parish expense — received wooden crosses that would last a few years before the weather took them, leaving the graves unmarked and eventually indistinguishable from the ground surrounding them. In a generation, perhaps two, the location of Eleanor Simmonds and Peter Aldridge and Agnes Moody and Dorothy Price and the twenty-seven others would be known only to the worms that worked the soil and the register that recorded what the soil contained.

The special collection Nathaniel had announced from the pulpit on the Sunday after the vestry meeting had raised three pounds, fourteen shillings. The amount was less than Coward had estimated and more than Greaves had expected, the difference between these projections reflecting the two men's respective assessments of their fellow parishioners' generosity. The customs clerk William Prentice had contributed a guinea. The master sailmaker Robert Aston had contributed ten shillings. The boatswain's widow Margaret Fawley had contributed five shillings and a basket of preserves that she instructed Coward to distribute to whichever family needed them most, a delegation of judgment that Coward accepted without comment and fulfilled by delivering the basket to Ann Simmonds, whose need was obvious and whose pride would not permit her to have asked.

The fund had not run out. This was Coward's achievement, accomplished through a series of economies that the minute book recorded in language so neutral that the human cost of each decision was invisible to anyone who had not watched it being made. Relief payments had been reduced from the augmented rates approved in mid-January to the standard rates that the vestry's budget could sustain. Families whose wage-earners had recovered were removed from relief within days of the recovery, regardless of whether the recovery was sufficient to permit a return to full employment. Burial costs had been minimised through the use of shared graves for infants and the deferral of sexton's fees until the fund could absorb them.

These decisions were defensible. They were also merciless in the way that administrative decisions are merciless — not through cruelty but through the application of rules that could not accommodate the difference between a family that had recovered and a family that had survived, between a man who was well enough to stand and a man who was well enough to work, between a widow whose husband had died three weeks ago and a widow whose grief the vestry's calendar considered to have been adequately funded.

The church was cold on the morning of the twelfth. Nathaniel had entered through the side door, using the iron key that Greaves had given him on his first day, the key whose weight in his hand had seemed significant in October and that now turned in the lock with the unthinking familiarity of a gesture repeated daily for four months. The nave was empty. The pews stretched away toward the altar in rows that he no longer counted, their varnished surfaces reflecting the thin February light in patterns that shifted as clouds moved across the window glass.

He had come to prepare for the Sunday service — his seventeenth at St Thomas's, though the number felt both too large and too small, the weeks since October having expanded and compressed in ways that normal chronology could not represent. The sermon required writing. The readings required selecting. The practical arrangements — the hymns, the order of service, the parish announcements that Coward expected to be delivered from the pulpit with the same authority that accompanied the theological content — required the attention that Nathaniel had been distributing across sixty households and thirty-one deaths and a faith that had been disassembled and reconstituted in the space of six weeks.

The sermon he would preach on Sunday would not resemble the sermon he had preached in October. He knew this without having written it, the way a man who has been through a storm knows that his account of the weather will differ from the forecast he consulted before setting out. The parable of the talents would not feature. The rhetorical techniques he had honed at Christ Church — the structured argument, the classical references, the elegant application of doctrine to daily life — would not serve a congregation that had spent six weeks watching its members die and that needed from its curate something other than elegance.

What they needed, he suspected, was what Agnes Moody had provided in her dying — specificity. Not the general assurances of the liturgy, which promised salvation and mercy and resurrection in terms that applied to everyone and therefore, in moments of genuine crisis, applied to no one. What they needed was their own names spoken. Their own losses acknowledged. Their own endurance recognised not as a theological virtue but as a fact — the bare, exhausting, unremarkable fact that they had continued to exist through six weeks of fever and burial and fear, and that their continued existence constituted, in the economy of a parish that had lost thirty-one of its members, something that deserved to be called by its name.

He did not yet know what that name was. He knew it was not faith, as Oxford had taught him to understand faith — a set of propositions to be defended through argument, a structure of belief to be maintained through discipline, an intellectual commitment to doctrines whose truth could be demonstrated through logic and scripture and the accumulated authority of the Church's tradition. That faith had served him well enough in the library and the lecture hall and the chapel where he had rehearsed the burial rites for an audience of empty stalls. It had not survived Butcher Row.

What had survived was something he could not yet articulate, something that had entered him in a room that smelled of lavender and wood smoke and that had not left, something that resided not in his intellect but in his hands — the hands that had held the prayer book through five deaths and that had felt, in Agnes Moody's room, the weight of the book change without the book itself changing. His hands knew something his mind had not yet processed. They knew that the work of a priest was not the production of correct theology but the willingness to enter rooms where theology was insufficient and to remain there, present, inadequate, offering nothing beyond the fact of having come.

He sat in the front pew of the empty church and looked at the altar and the cross above it and the window behind it through which the February light entered with the particular quality of English winter — pale, thin, carrying no warmth but carrying light, which was not the same thing as warmth but which was, on the twelfth of February in the year 1765, enough.

His professors at Christ Church had assured him he was destined for a cathedral. The assurance had been genuine — his academic record merited preferment, his intellect was suited to the demands of a larger stage, his career trajectory pointed toward positions of increasing influence and comfort within the Church's hierarchy. A few years at a parish like St Thomas's, followed by a more prestigious appointment, followed by the gradual ascent toward a deanery or a canonry that would provide financial security, social standing, and the leisure to pursue the scholarly work for which his education had prepared him. This was the path. This was what Oxford produced its graduates to walk.

The path was still available. The bishop in Winchester would consider a request for transfer sympathetically, particularly if accompanied by Coward's report on the curate's performance during the epidemic, which would demonstrate the resilience and pastoral commitment that the Church valued in candidates for advancement. A letter to his former tutor would set the process in motion. Within a year, perhaps two, Nathaniel could be installed in a parish whose congregation did not live eight to a room and whose churchyard did not contain thirty-one fresh graves dug in six weeks.

The thought moved through his mind with the momentum of something that had been travelling for a long time and that arrived at its destination only to discover that the destination had moved. He examined it with the detached curiosity of a man looking at a map of a country he no longer intended to visit. The cathedral. The canonry. The comfortable living. The scholarly work. The career that his father had saved and sacrificed to make possible, the career that represented not merely Nathaniel's ambition but the ambition of a shipwright who had wanted his son to rise beyond the dockyard and who had measured that rising in the only terms available to a working man — distance from the place where the work was hard and the pay was poor and the people died of fevers that no one could prevent.

Jonathan Blackwood had wanted his son to leave Portsmouth. The realisation carried a weight that Nathaniel had not previously felt, because he had not previously been in a position to understand what leaving would mean. Leaving would mean carrying the prayer book to a parish where its words would cost less to speak. Leaving would mean preaching sermons to congregations that would receive his Oxford rhetoric as the intellectual exercise it was designed to be. Leaving would mean comfort, advancement, the fulfilment of every expectation that his education had created and that his father's sacrifice had funded.

Leaving would mean that Mercy Aldridge would receive her next curate as a stranger. That Ann Simmonds would explain her circumstances to a man who had not stood in her room and counted the cost of her existence in pennies. That Ruth Garner would bury her grandmother's memory in a parish whose priest had not been present when Agnes spoke names into a room that should have been empty. That the thirty-one graves in the churchyard would be tended by someone who had not read the words over the bodies they contained.

Nathaniel did not make a decision. Decisions implied deliberation, the weighing of alternatives, the conscious selection of one path over another. What happened in the front pew of St Thomas's Church on the morning of the twelfth of February was not a decision but a recognition — the belated acknowledgement of something that had already occurred, somewhere between the first death and the last, somewhere in the accumulation of rooms entered and prayers spoken and hands held and names recorded, somewhere in the process by which a curate who had arrived in October believing he understood his parish had been educated by his parish into understanding that he did not and that the not-understanding was itself the beginning of the only kind of ministry worth practising.

The young curate who had walked through the doors of St Thomas's on the fifteenth of October, carrying an Oxford degree and a sermon about talents and the quiet confidence of a man who believed his education had prepared him for whatever ministry demanded, was gone. He had died somewhere in the streets between the rectory and Butcher Row, buried without ceremony in the same ground that held Eleanor Simmonds and Peter Aldridge and Agnes Moody, his passing unrecorded in any register because the registers did not contain a column for the death of assumptions.

Father Blackwood remained. He sat in the pew of the church that would be his for thirty-four years, in the parish he would never leave, and he began to think about what he would say on Sunday to ninety-two people who had survived something that the language of sermons was not built to contain.