Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [577]
There was one problem for the council: the Public Health Act of 1848 – another of the many acts that passed through the nineteenth century parliaments and began England’s modern education, sanitation and factory conditions. The council could be forced to appoint a board of health.
“And then,” Mickelthwaite had explained gloomily to Lord Forest, “the whole matter will leave the highway directors’ control – the health board will oversee not only the water channels but the chequers as well. And worse, if they recommend improvements, they can be levied on the general rates.”
“Which I pay.”
“Exactly.”
For Lord Forest, who had long since given up his grandfather’s house in the close, whose interests were all in the industrial north now, or in his Indian plantations, and who only twice visited Sarum in his life, still owned half of one of the city chequers.
“Do what you can,” he told the agent.
The battle had raged two years. A group of councillors who owned quantities of slums, and with whom Mickelthwaite had discreetly allied himself, fought tooth and nail. They lost.
It had been early the previous year that Joseph Porters, civil engineer, had obtained a post in Salisbury and travelled down from Leicester to inspect the place.
He set to work cheerfully, filling in the old water channels and inspecting the chequers. He had been as appalled as Doctor Middleton by what he had seen.
But he enjoyed the sleepy close, with its comfortable gentry and ecclesiastics in tall black hats, the busy market town with its sudden influxes of livestock, the sheep fair at nearby Wilton, the racecourse up on the high ground.
“There are years of work here,” he declared, with some satisfaction; and he looked for comfortable lodgings.
Joseph Porters was thirty-seven. He wore, always, a buttoned frock coat, grey waistcoat, white shirt, tie in a small, neat bow, side-whiskers clipped rather short, and black top hat. His hair was sandy and thinning. He was not quite without humour, but did not feel sufficiently confident of himself to take any chances with his appearance. He had worn a moustache when young, but had abandoned it later because it did not seem to go with his half-moon spectacles.
Since his arrival in Salisbury, two things had fascinated Joseph Porters. The first was in the drains. For as these were cleared, they revealed a fantastic quantity of articles, the refuse and careless droppings of six centuries – combs, shears, clay pipes, coins – a treasure trove for the antiquarian. Though he had no training in this field, he began to study them, and it was soon a regular occurrence for the workmen to stand back respectfully while Mr Porters so forgot his dignity, and the whiteness of his shirt, as to poke about in the mud for half an hour at a time before hurrying back to his lodgings in Castle Street to store his new found treasure and change his shirt.
“In time,” he told the dean, “we shall need a small museum for all this, you know.”
The second – it had taken Porters some time to dare to admit to himself the second thing that had fascinated him – was Miss Jane Shockley.
The little library in the Shockley house was upon the main upstairs floor. It was a modest, pleasant room, and less full of the Victorian clutter that had now appeared in the drawing-room where heavy draperies on the table, two potted palms, an ornate clock, a bowl of wax flowers and four china figures had already forced their way in.
The library only contained, besides its floor to ceiling bookshelves, two leather armchairs, an uncovered walnut table, and a bureau, at which Jane was writing.
It was three in the afternoon and she had already composed four letters, when glancing out of the window, she saw Joseph Porters in the street below.
“Oh dear.”
Why had she ever spoken to him? She remembered their first meeting perfectly. It had been a year ago, not long after he had arrived: