Page 13 of There Are Rivers in the Sky

—O— ARTHUR

By the River Thames, 1854

I t is the last day of August – a sweltering afternoon. London is a greasy cauldron – fuming, fetid. Stinking odours rise from every quarter of the city – the tanneries, fellmongeries, piggeries, furnaces, factories, slaughterhouses, cesspools … The noxious fumes harbour all manner of disease. Early in the summer, the General Board of Health issued a warning that anything giving off a strong and unpleasant smell must be burned or otherwise disposed of – and that invariably means discharged into the Thames. Now the river, heaving with flotsam and jetsam, can barely flow; neither gushing nor rippling bright and blue, it simply slithers, sluggish and grey like a cold-blooded reptile.

Arthur does his best to protect himself and his family from the menace of miasma. By walking fast on his way to the office and back, he hopes that less of the dank air will enter his lungs. Despite the unbearable temperature, he covers his nose and mouth with a damp cloth. But as soon as he arrives home he asks his mother to keep the windows open to allow a light breeze to circulate around the basement, as a still, suffocating room is an even bigger danger. The ventilation in the flat they share with another family is dismal, and, in truth, it is not much better at the printing press. It makes him nervous to have to work in closed, stuffy spaces. Indoors and outdoors, he worries about catching diseases from the air.

Thursday afternoon, with the heat having reached an intolerable level, work has stopped early at the printing press. Arthur walks cautiously out of the office, mindful not to step in horse manure. He has read in a magazine somewhere that there are 300,000 horses across the capital. If one horse defecates between 4 and 13 times a day, he quickly calculates, it would amount to up to 12,000 tons of dung daily. Each day a huge hill of shit builds up in the city, and it is mostly boys like him who sweep it away.

Time and again, he has seen horses skid and flounder on the mud carpeting the streets. They slip as though on ice. Whenever a carriage topples over, a crowd gathers at the scene. The driver tries his best to keep thieves away, but often there is little he can do to stop them. In the blink of an eye, a carriage can be stripped down, all its upholstery peeled away and metal parts carried off. It is not only animals that fall down in the mire: humans, too, often lose their balance. People sprain ankles, break hips. Arthur knows he has to be extra careful, for, if something were to happen to him, his family would have nothing to eat.

He fingers the coins in his pocket – it’s the money the late Mr Bradbury gave him. He has made it a habit to get treats for his family whenever he can. Eel pies and pickled oysters for his brothers, and, for his mother, an ivory button, a hairpin, a velvet ribbon … How she rejoices in these surprises! Yet today Arthur is going to buy her a proper gift. It may be sweltering hot, but his mother’s hands are always cold. He will get her the gloves he saw for sale on Broad Street.

He could have forgotten about those gloves, as pretty as they were, but he hasn’t. He does not forget anything.

Broad Street is lined with bright shops on both sides, customers sauntering in and out, murmurs of an easier life on their lips. Arthur passes by the house where the poet and printmaker William Blake was born, and the family hosiery where the artist once worked as a delivery boy. Blake – who saw trees with sinuous roots up in the sky, conversed with angels and spirits floating in his mind, and heard the calls of meadowlarks from Arcadia – has been widely considered a radical, if not a delusional eccentric, dying in obscurity, but Arthur has devoured his entire oeuvre and examined his engravings, and he wishes he had been his contemporary so they could have met.

With these thoughts in mind Arthur drops in to the haberdasher’s on the corner. After spending a long time admiring the surfeit of silk ribbons, velvet buttons, flowing foulards and chenilles, and the reels of satin, moiré and taffeta fabrics of all colours, he leaves the place with a package under his arm. He cannot believe how much a pair of gloves costs! He has no money left to get something for his brothers. But, as he crosses the road, another idea occurs to him. He will bring them water – cold and fresh. Fortunately, he has his flask with him. That way his mother will not have to queue today in front of the lone fountain in the slum tenement, which is so clogged it merely trickles.

There is a cast-iron pump just around the corner. Not every source of water in London can be trusted. Some are so filthy no one dares to approach them, not even stray dogs. But this is one of the best on the east side, always reliable and very popular. Patiently, Arthur joins the people waiting in line. He fills his container, his mind as light as the day is bright and clear.

Once home he sets the water on the table. The family they live with have a tendency to help themselves to other people’s things, which infuriates his mother, but Arthur does not mind. In his bag, he has a book he is looking forward to reading. He was there as it came off the press – The Poetical Works of John Keats.

We have imagined for the mighty dead;

All lovely tales that we have heard or read:

An endless fountain of immortal drink,

Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.

The words flow over his tongue like warm honey, but, exhausted from the day’s grind, his eyelids begin to droop. Maybe he should doze a little; there is no harm in having a nap.

In a few minutes, the twins tiptoe into the room, keeping a watchful eye on their elder brother snoring on the mattress. The rhythmic sound, a low rumbling, makes the children giggle. Sneaking up to him, they tousle his hair to see if he will wake. He does not.

That is when the little boys notice the package. Ripping open its pretty paper, they are thrilled to find a pair of lady’s gloves! Each child puts one on, beaming.

After that, it is not long till they discover the flask on the table. One downs a cupful immediately as the other waits his turn. Outside on the street, a drunkard shouts profanities, furious at some slight – real or imaginary. His words are so salacious that the other child, who has just taken his first mouthful, bursts out laughing, spluttering and spraying water everywhere and soaking his clothes.

Arthur, disturbed by the noise, stirs in his sleep. The boys run out, laughing.

The next day, at dawn, one of the twins wakes up with stomach pains. He starts vomiting. The diarrhoea that follows is relentless, and even as hours pass it does not subside. They leave the only window in the room wide open, worried that particles of disease, airborne, have invaded the basement. But that does not explain why only one person in the family has been taken ill. As the day unfolds, a fearful silence descends over everything. The only sound that can be heard is the slow, rattling breath of the sick boy, like the wingbeat of a moth, vainly flapping against a lampshade.

Arthur does not go to work that day. He does not return the book he borrowed. The stench of death is so pervasive it enters through his nostrils and leaves an acrid taste at the back of his throat. Whenever he opens his mouth to say something, it is the same taste that coats his words. Tirelessly, he helps his mother with the cleaning and washing, and towards noon he manages to convince a doctor to make a house call for a small payment, although by the time the man arrives it is clear there is nothing anyone can do.

Meanwhile the other twin, quiet as a dropped stone, watches from a corner, in his gaze a blend of sorrow and bewilderment. Since the day they were born, the two boys were so alike that no one could tell one from the other – this included the neighbours, the vendors and, at times, even their own mother. Now the healthy one is silent, his mind snagged on a gnawing suspicion that he will still be grappling with in his loneliest hours, long after he is a grown man. He wonders whether it is he who was meant to catch the disease and suffer instead of his brother, and if death, too, has mistaken them.

Towards the evening, they carry the sick boy out on to the street and place him on a makeshift bed on the pavement. This way, they hope, he will not have to inhale the toxic vapours assailing their living quarters. It does not help. The child is losing strength, losing water. Horribly dehydrated, his face shrivels into a gruesome mask – eyes sunken, teeth protruding, cheeks hollowed, and his skin a scary shade of blue, the colour of a bruise.

Cholera, the blue terror.

Only a few streets away from where Arthur lives with his family, a doctor named John Snow is bent over his desk, taking notes by the light of a candle. On the open map in front of him he marks the neighbourhoods where the epidemic is raging. One by one, he circles the locations of the victims, and notices a definite pattern emerging. They all have consumed water from the same pump on Broad Street. People who lived around the area but somehow have not come into contact with the same source have not been affected. If his observations can be verified, it is proof that cholera has nothing to do with the quality of the air.

It is all in the water.

The doctor has already written to the city authorities explaining that they must urgently shut down the pump, either by removing it or breaking the handle. He is certain that the well is contaminated, probably through an underground sewer leak. But his letters have been met with ridicule and scorn from the General Board of Health. And so the pump on Broad Street continues to operate.

The maverick physician, refusing to give up, plots ways to disable the pump but cannot quite bring himself to damage public property. With patients waiting to see him, he is unable to spend whole days guarding this spot, trying to talk people out of using it. So, instead, he hangs up a sign warning passers-by about the peril and leaves.

That sign had disappeared by the time Arthur entered Broad Street. Perhaps it was carried away by the wind or stolen by an illiterate urchin who assumed it to be of some value. It does not matter. It is too late for those who have already ingested the water. Inside a drop, invisible to the eye, lies a curved, rod-shaped bacterium with a long tail that helps it to move with extraordinary agility.

People are dying so swiftly that disposal gangs start to patrol the streets, looking for corpses to collect. The bodies, horribly disfigured, are piled up and carted away, although some may still be breathing. Almost all of the victims reside within 250 yards of the crossroads where Broad Street meets Cambridge Street. The small number from outside this coordinate are from destinations where water was carried from the same pump.

As August gives way to September, hundreds of new cases erupt across London. Convinced that infections are caused by miasma and bad smells, the city officials spread tons of lime near the mouths of sewers to reduce toxic gases released into the air. Queen Victoria complains about the ‘evil odour’. In Parliament, MPs and civil servants walk around clutching handkerchiefs to their noses, deploring the stinking, Stygian pool that the once mighty Thames has become. More and more chalk lime and carbolic acid are poured into its slimy depths. Even cemeteries come under suspicion, and some will be relocated for fear that cadaverous emissions are causing all manner of ailments. None of these measures will have the slightest impact on slowing the pestilence.

By and by, as more evidence comes to the fore, the General Board of Health will have to concede that the dissenting doctor – and a few others who had arrived at the same conclusion – was right all along. Cholera is not transmitted by air but through water. Trying to banish the smell of raw sewage by dumping it in the River Thames, the main source of drinking water for thousands of families, has only exacerbated the spread of the pandemic.

Whilst the authorities grapple with this uncomfortable revelation, Arthur, who follows the news with horror and reads every scientific report published, is assailed by an insight of his own. For he now suspects, with a sinking horror, that the flask he brought home contained the deadly bacteria. It will take him time to piece together the truth, but, once he does, he cannot unknow it: it was water that was the cause of death in the family, and it was he who brought the water. He has killed his own brother.

What they call a river is actually multiple rivers flowing in one. Running deep within the same body of water are several currents, like layers of skin that remain hidden to the eye but are scarred by the same wound.

Between 1853 and the last months of 1854, more than 10,740 Londoners die from the blue terror. Death roams the alleys, its earthy breath snuggling in closer as it slips through cracks in the walls and slides under doors, like the low fog. To survive and to heal, the city must reform, and any meaningful change needs to start with the Thames. Now that more people recognize the consequences of dumping filth into the very water they drink from, it is urgent that a proper sewage system is built. For too long Londoners have been saying the river is a silent murderer. But Arthur understands that it is, actually, the other way round. It is humans who are killing the water.