Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [576]
Why should that flag suddenly move her? Was it the far-off places, the thought of the soldiers there and in the Crimea? Was it the reminder of empire and service? Might it be guilt at her own easy life? Perhaps.
Slowly she walked towards the door. A disused flag and a twenty-three-year-old girl. A strange combination.
“But trailing clouds of glory do we come.”
The line from her favourite Wordsworth poem, the Immortality Ode, suddenly came to haunt her. Clouds of glory. That was it. The tattered flag hanging so modestly there seemed, that morning, to bring her a fresh vision. A vision of service, and sacrifice, a vision of distant places and of her own heroism. She knew what she must do. It was time to write those letters to the hospitals.
Joseph Porters stood, erect but with his head slightly bowed, and stared at the drains.
“Progress, sir, and empire. That is our destiny. Make no mistake.”
Porters nodded absently as Ebenezer Mickelthwaite, agent to Lord Forest, expressed these trenchant views.
“And these drains, these houses?” he interposed quietly.
“Safe. Safe as the Bank of England.”
“I think not. They are pestilential. We shall have cholera here again.”
Mickelthwaite eyed him. The lengthy disquisition he had just made on the empire was for the purpose of making Porters change the subject and it had not worked.
“The expense of your improvements would be very great.”
Porters shrugged.
“It mainly falls on the council rates.”
“Not all. Anyway, we pay rates.”
They were standing in the middle of the chequer, looking up the centre strip into which the assorted refuse from some forty courtyards and tiny allotments seeped to form a black, muddy morass that was something between a drain and a swamp. It produced a dank, alkaline stench – a persistent presence in winter, in summer a vicious enemy that rose to strike.
“The water is utterly foul.”
“Yet I heard that when they sunk a new well hereabouts, they discovered a mineral spring.”
“So it was thought, from the colour and pungency of the water, which people were drinking. In fact, Mr Mickelthwaite, they had penetrated a cess pit.”
The situation in the city had become a scandal. The centres of the old chequers, where often no new drainage had been constructed in centuries, were disease-ridden. The water channels down the streets, though they seemed at high water to be clean, were in fact polluted and constantly drawing in more poison from the area around.
“They call this city the English Venice,” Mickelthwaite said defensively.
“I call it an open sewer.” He was getting impatient. “In any case, Mr Mickelthwaite, you have lost your battle, all of you, and I am recommending the complete drainage of this chequer, new sewers, drains for every house. It will be all dug up. And those workshops,” he pointed with disgust to a collection of buildings that resembled two lines of wooden hovels stacked one on top of the other – “those will have to go.”
“We get rent from them,” Mickelthwaite growled.
“Not any more. You’ll have to build again.”
He started to go. Behind him he heard the agent mutter: “That damn doctor.” He smiled, and turned. “This is progress, Mr Mickelthwaite,” he said softly.
The battle had been a fierce one. For many years, the water channels had been under the control of the city’s directors of highways, who had done little to improve them; as for the insides of the chequers, they were under the control of individual landlords who had usually done nothing at all.
In 1849, cholera struck Salisbury. There were some fifteen hundred cases, deaths in hundreds. A certain Doctor Middleton, visiting the city and seeing its sanitation, was appalled. He protested. Reluctantly the council commissioned a survey of the water sources. Deep drainage