Chapter Text
The rat died on a Friday morning beside the tanning vat, and no one—least of all the rat—considered this event to be of any particular significance. Rats died in Bermondsey every day. They died in the vats, in the lime pits, in the narrow alleys behind the warehouses where the stray dogs fought over scraps of cured hide. They died with such regularity that the tanners had long since ceased to remark upon it, in much the same way that a Londoner ceases to remark upon the fog. The fog is there. The rats are there. Both are unpleasant. Neither is interesting.
It was a boy who found this particular rat. They called him Small, for the obvious reason, and also because the men who worked the tannery vats were not, as a rule, given to poetic invention in the matter of nicknames. Small was the youngest of the yard boys—a category of employment that existed in the ambiguous space between "apprentice" and "stray," and which involved crawling into the spaces beneath the vats that were too narrow for grown men and too foul for grown men's sensibilities. He was perhaps eleven, perhaps thirteen; his age was a matter of some uncertainty, as the parish records had been destroyed in a fire some years earlier and no one had ever thought to reconstruct them. He had been working in the tanneries since he could walk, more or less, and he had the hands to prove it—cracked and stained and scarred in a way that made them look like the hands of a much older man attached to the wrists of a child.
He lifted the dead rat by its tail and squinted at it for a long moment. This was not, strictly speaking, part of his duties. His duties involved clearing the drains, fetching the lime, and staying out of the way of the foreman's boot. But Small was a boy of considerable curiosity, which is to say he was a boy who had not yet learned that curiosity was a luxury the world did not afford to those who crawled beneath tanning vats for a living. The rat's fur was wet. There was something dark and crusted around its mouth—dried blood, perhaps, or something else that had bubbled up from its insides. Its eyes were clouded, filmed over with that particular milky opacity that arrives shortly after death and makes the dead look less like the living and more like objects. Small had seen dead rats before, scores of them, hundreds of them, enough to fill a barge and then another. He had never seen one that looked quite like this.
He did what any sensible boy of eleven or thirteen would do, which is to say he did not think about it very much. He carried the rat to the edge of the tannery yard, where the stone lip of the embankment dropped away into the brown water of the Thames, and he tossed it in. The rat described a brief arc through the grey morning air, its tail trailing behind it like a question mark, and then the river swallowed it. Small wiped his hand on his trousers—which were already so stained with tannin and grease and the general filth of the trade that one more stain made no perceptible difference—and went back to work.
By Monday, he was feverish.
There was nothing unusual in this. Fever was a condition so common in Bermondsey that it barely registered as a complaint. The tanners worked in air thick with the reek of rotting hides and curing chemicals and the sour breath of the Thames at low tide. Their skin was perpetually damp, their lungs perpetually irritated, their bodies perpetually fighting off one infection or another. If a man did not have a fever, it was generally assumed that he was either too drunk to notice or too stubborn to admit it. Small's fever was unremarkable. He went about his duties as usual, hauling the raw hides across the wet cobbles, ducking beneath the dripping beams, cursing old Moxley for being too slow and the foreman for being too quick with his fists. He complained, as he always did, about the smell and the cold and the quality of the bread they were given at midday. He did not complain about the fever. There was no point in complaining about a thing that everyone had.
By Wednesday, there was a hard swelling at the back of his neck, the size of a pigeon's egg, tender to the touch. By Thursday, he was coughing blood.
It was old Moxley who found him—the same old Moxley whose sluggishness Small had been cursing all week, and who was, as it happened, the closest thing to a guardian the boy possessed. Moxley had been a tanner for forty years, which meant he had survived longer than most men in his trade, and he had done so by cultivating a philosophy of strategic indifference. He did not get involved in disputes. He did not volunteer for extra work. He did not, as a rule, concern himself with the welfare of yard boys, because yard boys came and went with the regularity of the tides, and mourning them was an investment of emotional energy that yielded no practical return.
But Small was different. Small reminded Moxley of a boy he had known forty years ago, a boy who had also crawled beneath the vats and cursed the foreman and dreamed of something better than the smell of rotting hides. That boy had died of a fever in the winter of '47, and Moxley had not thought of him in decades, but Small's face—sharp-chinned and quick-eyed and perpetually smudged with grime—had summoned him back like a ghost. So when Moxley found the boy curled beside the tanning vat, his skin burning to the touch and his breath coming in shallow, laboured gasps, he did not do what strategic indifference would have dictated. He did not call the foreman and return to his post. He knelt down—slowly, because his knees were not what they had been—and put his hand on the boy's forehead, and felt the heat radiating from him like a coal fire that had been banked but not extinguished.
"Small," he said. "Small, can you hear me?"
The boy's eyes opened. They were glassy, unfocused, the pupils dilated in a way that made Moxley's stomach tighten. He had seen that look before. He had seen it on the faces of men dying of cholera in the epidemic of '54, and on the faces of men dying of typhus in the camps during the Crimean winter. It was the look of a body that was losing a fight it did not know it was in.
"Tell my mum," Small said. His voice was thin, reedy, the voice of a much younger child. "Tell her I didn't mean to get sick."
Moxley did not ask who Small's mother was, or where she lived, or whether she was still alive to be told anything. He simply nodded, and squeezed the boy's shoulder, and went to find the foreman.
The foreman was a man named Briggs, whose primary qualification for his position was a pair of fists the size of Christmas hams and a temperament to match. He looked at Small, lying on the straw pallet where Moxley had carried him, and his face arranged itself into an expression of irritated inconvenience. "He'll have to be moved," he said. "Can't have him here. The others will take fright."
"Take fright of what?" Moxley asked, though he already knew the answer.
Briggs did not say the word. He did not need to. The word hung in the air between them, unspoken and undeniable, like the smell of the Thames at low tide. Plague. It had been three months since the outbreak in Whitechapel, three months since the quarantine wards had been dismantled and the bodies buried and the newspapers had moved on to fresher horrors. But the memory of it lingered in Bermondsey like a stain that would not wash out. Everyone knew what had happened. Everyone knew what it looked like when it began. The rats died first, and then the people.
"Where is he to go?" Moxley asked.
"There's a shed at the back of the yard. Used to store lime. It's empty now. Put him there. If he recovers, he can come back to work. If he doesn't—" Briggs shrugged, a mountainous rolling of his shoulders that conveyed a complete and utter indifference to the fate of a yard boy. "There's always another boy."
Moxley carried Small to the lime shed himself. It was a low, windowless structure built of unfinished timber, its walls crusted with the white residue of its former contents. The floor was packed earth, cold and damp. There was no bed, no blanket, no water. Moxley fetched a straw pallet from his own quarters—such as they were, a corner of the curing shed partitioned off with a piece of old sailcloth—and a tin cup of water, and a scrap of bread that he had been saving for his own supper. He placed these items beside the boy with the careful deliberation of a man setting out offerings at a shrine.
"You'll be all right," he said, though he did not believe it. "Rest here. I'll come back in the morning."
Small did not answer. His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow and rapid, the swelling at his neck more prominent than it had been an hour before. Moxley stood in the doorway for a long moment, looking at the boy, and then he turned and walked back across the tannery yard to his post.
That night, alone in the lime shed, Small dreamed of rats again. They were swimming in the Thames, hundreds of them, their wet fur gleaming in the light of the gas lamps on the bridge. They were trying to crawl out of the water, but the embankment was too steep, and one by one they slipped back into the brown current and were carried away toward the sea. In his dream, Small was standing on the bridge, watching them. He was not afraid. He was only tired. And when the last rat slipped beneath the surface and the river was smooth and dark again, he lay down on the cold stone and closed his eyes, and the fever burned through him like a fire that had been waiting all his life to be lit.