BOOK TWO

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1

"There's another letter," said Caleb, holding The Times at arm's length. His voice hummed with the small satisfaction of seeing a predicted catastrophe come to pass.

Beersdon and Snow sat in the library of Snow's house two mornings after the party at Lady Tewksbury's. It had been days since the two had talked. Snow slouched in an armchair, his legs stretched out before him, a cup of tea perched at an angle on his thigh. He'd summoned his friend in the hope that Caleb would send Snow's mind back to work. It was almost ten and he should have left for his street rounds two hours ago. But since waking he had felt leaden and unable to concentrate. And even worse, uninterested. If he had been asked at that moment about the cause of cholera his honest answer would have been, I don't give a bloody damn.

All he could think about with any concentration was Lillian Aynsworth, and the sweat on her upper lip as they had danced together. It was impossible to think of her without thinking of Constable. It caused him an almost physical pain.

Caleb rustled the pages of the newspaper. Without waiting for a response from Snow he read the letter out loud in mock oratory, one hand on his chest.

If a certain doctor is to continue with his illicit surveys in Soho and Lambeth the authorities must assume he has no faith in the sovereign management of the Public Health. He implies that any number of impurities are being sanctioned by those in authority when in fact major reforms on the public waterworks of the areas in question are nearing completion. Is this man so concerned with his own advancement through artificial publicity that he refuses to see the illogical nature of his pursuit? We advise him to discontinue his persecution of the bereaved families of cholera victims, and encourage his return to private practice.

He ended with a flourish worthy of Hamlet's soliloquy.

Snow kept his eyes on his tea. "I expect they're right." He took a sip. "I may as well quit." He said the words just to see how they would sound.

Caleb touched one of the deeper pockmarks on his cheek and said quietly, "Perhaps you should. If you stop now there's still a hope of putting your practice back together."

"You don't mean that, do you? I wasn't serious." Snow jerked his arm and his cup hit the arm of the chair, breaking with a surprisingly melodious crack. His finger and thumb still gripped the delicate handle, and he felt the missing weight of the cup as one might feel the drop of a suddenly severed finger, before the pain throbbed up.

Caleb looked startled, and defensive.

"Surely you don't expect me to quit my research because of crank letters in the paper!" continued Snow. "All that data. I've just got to think of a way to use it." He tried to think of himself as an ordinary doctor, with no papers in print, no reputation, and how it would sound to Lillian if he ever had a chance to be alone with her. He began to pace.

"Besides," he went on, "at this point so many people want me to quit that I want to go on just to spite them." Then he told Caleb about the meetings with Constable, and the attack in the alley. He said nothing about Mango and the prostitute, or the falling cornice and the dog bite. He was afraid he would begin to sound obsessed.

As it was, he wished he had said less.

"You want me to believe the Board of Health is trying to threaten you? That's absurd." Caleb's voice was flat under his protest. "It must be coincidence. London is full of thugs." He shook his head and went back to reading the paper.

Snow decided not to pursue it. "You know, maybe you're right," he finally said. "Not that I should quit, but that I can't prove anything with this data."

The data, all the data. The lists, the papers, the hundreds of brown bottles lined up against the wall above his microscope. If only he could see the body causing the disease, he could have found it in those bottles, at least when he first collected the water.

Ignoring Caleb now, he went for the hundredth time to the microscope and took out a clean slide, took one of the bottles from the shelf and put a drop of water on the slide. With a short stab of guilt the memory of Sophie came up; that first night with her, when he had those bottles in his pocket. He hadn't thought of her once since meeting Lillian. He bent his head to the eyepiece.

"Could I have a look?" Caleb had stepped over.

"By all means, waste your time if you like. There's nothing. As always."

Caleb bent over for a minute. "Nothing?" he asked. "There's stuff floating all through here!"

"Protozoa. Dead ones. Harmless. They're in everything we drink. They mean nothing."

Snow had examined the water from every single bottle on the shelf. There was never a difference between that from healthy households and the sick ones.

Maybe he was looking too hard, with too much intention. Maybe he expected something so specific that he was blinded to easier facts. Blinded like a cab horse, with every view but the one straight ahead shut out. Moving forward with brute purpose was useful enough in its place, but he needed to see sideways, up, down, he needed to look in some other direction.

"Caleb, here's what I want you to do. Go down to my storage room, to the big pile of notebooks, I showed it to you once." Snow saw Caleb's short flash of resentment and decided to ignore it. "Without looking at the covers, or anything like that, flip through the pile and pick up, say, twenty. From different points in the pile."

"You could do that just as well yourself!"

"I'm not so sure of that. I need someone to make a random choice. Please, just do as I say." Caleb was obviously not going to refuse at this point.

"I'll confuse your system. I know you had them ordered in a certain way.

"That's the point. My system has to go.

In a few minutes Caleb returned with the stack. He set them in front of Snow and waited calmly, looking a little detached from it all. In the meantime Snow had laid out several large sheets of paper and a stack of pens.

"Read them, please," he said.

"What! All these notes? In your terrible writing?"

"It won't be so bad. Just read them out loud, and I'll take new notes. But you listen too, to see if you notice the slightest detail, anything different about the cholera houses.

Caleb read through a hundred cholera cases, from dozens of different houses. The notes gave the numbers, deaths, average income, age, time from first symptom until death, proximity to the river, source of water for the house ranging from piped in water to straight from the river.

Snow drew orderly columns and separated everything out into categories.

After three hours they were finished and Caleb's voice was hoarse. They had produced a huge chart the size of a tabletop, covered in tiny but legible writing. It showed nothing, except that if you were poor your chances of dying were higher. As they had always been.

"Are you sure you've read everything out?" Snow felt powerless with frustration.

"No, I didn't read everything." Caleb sounded angry now. "You noted some pretty silly details, you know, like the color of their wallpaper and if they were cheerful or not. How long a girl's hair was. What kind of accent they had. We'd be sitting here until midnight if I read out all of it."

Something nagged at Snow's memory when Caleb mentioned wallpaper.

"I remember that house where I noted the paper." He said it almost to himself. "It was only one," he added accusingly. "The neighbors didn't have paper, none of the houses on that street did except... can you find it?"

"Good Lord, do you expect me to keep track of a hundred entries of someone else's notes!"

"No, no. Of course. Let's stop. I'm terribly hungry. Shall we see if Mrs. Jarrett can fix up something?"

"It's fine for you to sit around all day, but I have to get to my office." He took out his watch. "You can't expect me to always be available like this. Hire a lab assistant or something." Caleb looked directly at Snow. "And think about quitting. It might be the best solution. I don't say it just because of the letters."

2

Snow never did go out on his survey work that day. Minutes after Caleb's departure the bell rang again. It was with a sense of total disbelief that Snow saw Lillian Aynsworth enter the room.

Mrs. Jarrett held the door aside, her back rigid with disapproval.

"A lady to see you, sir." Her mouth pinched off the word "lady" in a way that made it clear what she thought of a woman coming to see a man in his house.

Snow couldn't take his eyes off her. Every fact from Caleb's reluctant list immediately went out of his head. She looked even more beautiful than she had at the ball; paler, in an ordinary gray walking dress, and the intensity of her personality shone out more distinctly now.

He finally realized he was expected to speak. "That will be all, Mrs. Jarrett — no, wait." He turned to Lillian. "Will you have some tea, Miss Aynsworth?"

Mrs. Jarrett gave a short snort. "The kitchen's being turned out for a scrub. Can't get no hot water for an hour."

"I don't really need any —" began Lillian.

But Mrs. Jarrett gave another snort, and she was out of the room. She slammed the door.

To Snow, the heat of the room suddenly seemed stifling. The grainy urine smell from the hedgehog cages rushed to Snow's senses, along with rotten egg from a recent experiment with sulphur, smells he had ignored for years. As much as he craved to be alone with Lillian, this room, stinking and layered with anxieties about his work and Caleb's hostility, was all wrong.

"I'm so glad you've come to see me," he said to her. "But it's awfully close in here. Shall we go out and walk toward Hyde Park?"

She nodded, as if in relief. Despite the logic of it Snow felt a twinge of rebuff. How foolish of him to imagine she could be interested in his smelly work.

Once out on the street she seemed to relax. "I see I'm not the only one in London with servant problems," said Lillian with a short laugh. "I thought we could talk more easily out here, too. I came because — I wanted to ask you about cholera. I hope you'll forgive this intrusion on your work."

Disappointment hit Snow like a punch in the stomach. So it was a formal call. He had hoped that she, too, could not forget their dance. But after all, what lady would ever visit like this unless it were for a purely impersonal reason?

"What can I tell you?" he asked, his voice almost sullen. "Surely your friend Dr. Greeley is an easier person to ask."

She frowned. "But I don't agree with him. He says cholera can't be spread by water." Her voice had changed, softened, as if Snow's small jab about Greeley had launched them into intimacy. His hope returned and he slowed their steps, fearful of reaching some destination where they would have to sit on a bench and be proper again. As they crossed Bond Street he took her arm, and he didn't release it after they reached the curb. Even the rough linen of her sleeve was a delight to touch.

"He says it's spread by bad air, but that makes no sense to me. If it were true, why aren't more people sick? We all breathe the same air. I think your water idea makes so much more sense. Listen." She turned to him and stopped walking, her face earnest and almost beseeching. "After I heard what you were saying the other night I started to think about the cholera in India. The afternoon before my father died he drank water with his whiskey. I drank only tea, as well as my stepmother. With a little sherry, that is," she added in an undertone. "And the servants drink copious amounts of water all day, as they work. Only my stepmother and I survived. I thought you should know, it might help your proof."

Snow lost track of what she was saying for a moment as he was jostled from behind, only slightly, but enough to arouse his suspicions. He whipped around but saw no one behind him. The sidewalk crowd was as busy as ever. He had been a fool to go out with her like this, he thought. Even though Mango had abandoned his attacks for a week, that meant nothing. There was still a risk. He turned back to Lillian.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing, nothing. Please, go on. But let's head back to my house. I just remembered something I must finish." He looked ahead of them, unable to disguise his sense of caution.

She paused, stubborn, and obviously aware of his fear. "You act like a man who think's he's being followed. What —"

Snow never heard the rest of her sentence. From the shadows of an alley off Albemarle Street rushed the same white dog as before, who this time leaped at Snow's throat with the agility of a Spanish dancer. Luckily the dog's first snap missed, and its teeth closed around Snow's collarbone instead of his jugular. A frantic, high-pitched growl came from its throat, as if it were in pain. Its short legs scrabbled at Snow's coat, ripping the fabric.

Pedestrians backed off, shrieking. Snow grappled with the animal, trying to pull it off. Blood ran down his arm as the dog's teeth broke skin. Snow remembered the fight in the pit and closed his hands around the dog's throat. It weakened, and let go.

With a curse Snow flung the animal from him against a brick wall. It didn't pause, and within half a second it had thrown itself on Snow again, this time glancing its teeth off Snow's forehead and then dropping down, trying to tear a chunk out of Snow's right pectoral muscle, just below his armpit. Even in his panic, Snow searched the shadows for Mango. He was ready to bargain. He tried again to close his hands around the dog's throat. The dwarf's final method of self-protection was still too much for Snow. Blood dripping from his torn scalp began to blind him.

"He smells something," Snow heard Lillian shout, through the frantic growls. "Get your clothes off. Someone has smeared something on your jacket. I can see it."

She's still with me, he thought. Blind now with blood from his forehead, and with waves of cold sweat washing over him, he felt her hands grasp his jacket by the collar.

"Get your left arm out of the sleeve," she shouted. "Don't touch the outside." He pulled as best as he could, keeping up a one-handed throttling of the dog's thick neck. His left arm was useless now, anyway. She yanked at the rest of the garment. As before, the animal loosed his jaw's grip and fell to the ground, letting Lillian pull away the rest of the right sleeve.

She tossed the jacket away, and the dog leaped after it, pouncing on the ripped wool as if it were some prize rabbit. Its jaws were frothing now, its growls more like gasps. Snow was forgotten.

Lillian, breathless, said, "There was something smeared on your coat. It drove the dog mad. The man who jostled you must have done it."

Snow stumbled over to a wall, where he sank to the pavement, his head between his knees. He was afraid he would faint. He still could hardly see for the blood in his eyes. Speaking was beyond him. For a minute he wondered if Lillian had lost courage and left him, but then he heard her again.

"I've got some water from a street vendor." She sloshed a bucket beside him, and he reached for it with cupped hands, without thinking. Her strong hand grabbed his wrist. "Stop it!" she cried out. "Are you out of your senses?"

The realization of what he had nearly done made him almost as weak as his wounds. Within a day or two, he could have been one more cholera statistic for Caleb's lists. "Close your mouth," she said. As he obeyed, cold water splashed over his face and he could see again. But he kept his eyes closed, savoring the feel of her fingers, even the pain they caused, as she washed his various gashes. He finally opened them and looked at her crouching before him, her dress and face splattered with his blood.

Mango, he thought. "Did you see a dwarf?" he asked.

"Don't talk. Let me finish, and then we can get back to your house and send for the police."

"No. It's no use." The idea of explaining it all to her exhausted him. His dizziness returned.

"Do you think you can walk?" His protest against the police didn't seem to bother her. She stood beside him and held out a hand, which he used to pull himself up. Both eyed the dog, still slavering over Snow's coat.

A short wave of nausea, and then he was fine. "Yes. Did you see anyone who might have done it? A dwarf?"

She looked at him, frowning, and shook her head.

"Let's go, then."

They didn't exchange a word the entire way back to Sackville Street, but endured in shared silence the stares of passersby. At his door Mrs. Jarrett's shocked, hoarse scream got no reaction from either of them.

Snow dragged himself up the stairs. He shouted down, "A large can of boiled water, please, Mrs. Jarrett." Then he shut the door.

Lillian leaned against his desk, her hands behind her on his papers. Snow was stirred even by the way she touched his things. Against her fingers they seemed to take on a new, animate life of their own.

"Perhaps, Dr. Snow, you had better explain to me what this is all about."

3

It was dark outside before he finished his story. During her questions and his explanations, he had probed, cleaned, and bandaged the two main gashes on his collar bone and chest. The damage was far less than he thought. He wouldn't need stitches, and strength was coming back to his left arm.

They sat by candlelight and waited for Mrs. Jarrett to bring them supper. Lillian had sent a message to Olympia saying she was delayed.

"Someone is after you, that's certain," said Lillian. "But I still don't see why you are so sure Sir Philip is involved. It seems incredible."

She mentioned Sir Philip's name as if he were merely a social acquaintance. Snow hadn't yet had the nerve to ask her any questions about herself, especially about her scene with Constable at the party two nights ago.

"The salt on his shoes, don't you see? Like that man in the ditch. There has to be a connection, it's just too much of a coincidence. At first, as I said, I thought it was some fanatic religious group. But they would hardly be so —" Snow broke off, remembering that he had been vague about Mango, and hadn't said a word about Sophie. "They would hardly be so violent," he ended, knowing it sounded lame.

"And what about your friend, Mr. Beersdon? What does he think? Did he ever see the dwarf?" 

Snow sighed. "No. I hardly know about Caleb anymore. I used to think he was on my side, but this morning, just before you arrived..." It was then that Snow remembered Caleb's complaint about the wallpaper: a housewife in a house with fancy, colored wallpaper, where three children and the housemaid died of cholera, had proudly added the detail that their piped-in water came from the Southwark and Vauxhall Water Company.

"What is it?" asked Lillian.

Snow sat up straight, leafing, with one hand, through the notes he had been taking with Caleb. "I just remembered something that I almost figured out this morning, just before. . ." He found the list, and started searching. Then he stopped. "But this will bore you. I can wait." This was the moment he had dreaded ever since she arrived; there was no further excuse for her to stay. Her clothes were clean, his story was told. He braced himself for his final question of "When can I see you again?"

"No, no. I don't mind," she was saying. "But if I'd be in your way...

In his way! With her there he'd work even harder. He explained to her, quickly, what he was looking for, and then sat with the notebooks on his desk until he found the right entry. It was number 356. He then went to the shelf, found bottle number 356, and held it up to a candle. Of course it looked just like all the others. He decanted it into a clear test tube. "A proven example of water from the Southwark and Vauxhall Water Company."

"What can you do with it?" she asked.

"Well, it would be stupid to try once more to isolate organisms from the water. Those got me nowhere so far. In fact, a few years ago another doctor, Farr, tried to find a difference between the two water companies and found nothing. Or at least nothing to fit in with his theories, which are quite different from mine.

"Couldn't there be some test neither of you has tried yet? That's what I always imagined men doing in medical school; fiddling with vials and smoking tubes, testing things."

Snow laughed. "All right. There are tests I haven't done, and others I have done but perhaps didn't do perfectly last time. But I'll need a control, a normal sample."

Just then Mrs. Jarrett appeared with a steaming kettle and a tray full of sandwiches. Lillian gestured to the kettle. "What about your own water?" she asked. "Southwark and Vauxhall?"

"No, Lambeth." He had paid their bills often enough, but he still boiled it. "Just the thing. I didn't want any tea, anyway. It's too hot tonight." He poured half the kettle into a clean glass flask and placed it back on the tray.

"Waste of all that firewood," muttered Mrs. Jarrett. "You should ha' said something before I boiled it up." She swished out with a poisonous look at Lillian.

Lead content? Arsenic level? Alkalinity? Acidity? His mind ran through these and other tests, unsure of what he was even seeking. He knew of only one limitation; he had exactly four ounces of water to use. Any tests had to take less than that.

He took off one ounce and boiled it dry, scraped up the white residue and weighed it. He put it in a hand-wound centrifuge and spun it for twenty minutes, pulled out the sediment with a dropper, tried to burn it, dye it, melt it with phosphates. Nothing happened.

Lillian watched, not speaking.

With another ounce he gave one last try at the microscope and cursed the dead protozoa that floated across the visual field, and the antennae of a brown cockroach which must have been in the pipes. He filtered it and filtered it again, ran it through tubes, boiled more dry, shone candlelight through it, gaslight, light from burning sulphur. Foul smells rose into the air, but nothing happened.

Lillian watched.

With the third ounce he tried reactions with magnesium, sodium carbonate, crystals of naphtha, bile syrups. He even got out a magnet and examined any possible reaction with it.

Lillian watched, silent, breathing more heavily now.

There was one ounce left.

Snow wondered how long it would be before he was ready to take it into a church and have it exorcised. His arm and shoulder suddenly began throbbing. He knew he was getting close to being too tired to do any useful work. He was ready to weep with frustration. He paced the room and felt more irritated every minute. He wondered if he could think more clearly with Lillian gone.

She looked restless, and no longer stared at his experiments with such intensity. Instead she was looking around the room, perhaps musing on its owner, he liked to think. He, too, looked around, and his eyes fell on the wilted-looking dinner tray that Mrs. Jarrett had neglected to clear. Lately she had become more lax in her methods. The house seemed a mess. He couldn't remember when his sheets had last been changed, or when hot water had been delivered to his room. And the food had got less edible every day, tasteless, dull. Tonight he'd had to send her back for the salt.

"Salt," he said out loud, so unexpectedly that Lillian jumped. He picked up the salt cellar and held it in the palm of his hand, its absurd feet shaped like animal paws, the tiny spoon jutting out. Salt on a dead man's shoes. Sea salt. He raced to the bookshelf and pulled out his old chemistry text.

"What is it?" she asked. "What have you found?"

He shook his head for silence. He had to make an effort to keep his hands from shaking. He found the experiment he was looking for, and quickly scanned his shelves for the correct reagents. Thank God they were all there.

Lillian was standing now, leaning over him as he worked.

To the last ounce of water from the bottle he began to add a solution of silver nitrate. He sensed her impatience.

"You see," he explained, "this silver nitrate will cause any salt in the water to bind with the silver and form a heavy silver chloride. It should make a precipitate and form a deposit at the bottom of the tube."

"But if there were salt in the water wouldn't we taste it?"

"No, not in a trace amount."

He watched, holding his breath, as the silver solution went in by drops. The contents of the test tube became cloudy. He swirled it, and a light dust appeared on the bottom. In another minute the dust was half an inch deep.

Neither of them spoke.

He repeated the experiment with water from his kettle. This time the deposit appeared again, but hardly a fraction the size of the first. He poured off the liquid, extracted the deposit, and weighed the two amounts.

The water from the sick household had twenty times as much deposit as the boiled water from his kettle.

"What does it mean?" she asked.

"The salt in the water? In this one bottle, nothing. If it's in all those bottles," he said, waving his arm at shelves of collections from all over the city, "it means that we can separate out one type of water from another. Perhaps Southwark and Vauxhall."

"But why would it be salty? I don't understand. And salt doesn't cause cholera, does it?"

"Wait, and you'll see." Snow took a deep breath. "Can you stay longer, and help me? It's very late."

Without a moment's thought, she said, "Yes, of course."

"We'll have to test every single one of those bottles."

4

It took the rest of the night. Once Snow showed her how, Lillian began measuring into empty vials the proper amounts of silver nitrate, and arranging them, ready for Snow to drip into the water samples. After each experiment, he read out the results while she noted them in a book.

By the end they both had bloodshot eyes and stiff backs. Snow's muscles were throbbing terribly with the trauma of the dog attack. The cut on his forehead started slowly bleeding again.

And they both were avoiding each other's glance, embarrassed beyond words by this incredible breach of propriety they were both committing.

Their time, though, hadn't been wasted. Seventy percent of the bottles with high salt content had come from a house with a cholera case. And when they studied the few records that Snow had on water companies, what they found didn't surprise him.

Each house with the modern, pure, filtered, guaranteed water piped by the Southwark and Vauxhall Company had produced a salty bottle.

Hardly able to speak, Lillian said, once more, "I still don't see it."

Feeling drunk with tiredness, triumph, and unspoken passion, Snow sat on his sofa and laughed. "It's easy. Listen. The Thames is an estuary. From the sea. The only source of salt in the water around London is the tidal flow of the Thames itself. That river receives all the sewage, the refuse, and pollution of two million inhabitants. If you pay for water from the Southwark and Vauxhall Company, that's what you get. They call it filtered, but it must be untreated, cholera-ridden water straight from the Thames."

"Now I understand. You were right all along." She sat next to him. After a long silence she let her head fall on his uninjured shoulder, and he realized she had fallen asleep.

He may have been right, he thought, but this discovery didn't get him that much farther along. Even if water from these bottles caused cholera, what about all the cholera in houses with no piped-in water, where the costermongers had lived, the workhouses, the households which took their water from the corner street pumps? And what about the thirty percent of bottles with salty water from houses whose residents had been perfectly healthy? There were still so many questions to answer,

Studying Lillian's sleeping face, though, he forgot his questions and his worry. Bliss washed over him. For a moment he was afraid to breathe and wake her up. Then he cautiously lifted his right hand and laid it on her hair. A childhood memory of a reverence for softness came back to him, almost a cult of worshipping the rich fluff on a cat's belly, the surface of whipped cream, new grass sprung up in the hay field, or the corner of his worn flannel blanket that he used to comfort himself to sleep. Lillian's hair, loose and falling from its pins, now joined the list.

He savored it for a full ten minutes. Then, hating to do it, he shook her gently. "Miss Aynsworth. Wake up."

She opened her eyes and sat up. She seemed suddenly apprehensive.

"It's all right. You fell asleep. It's very late, almost dawn. I must get you home."

She cleared her throat and smoothed her dress. "Of course. I'm terribly sorry."

"Do you live far from here? I'm afraid it will be difficult to find a cab. I can walk with you and see that you're safe."

"No, not at all. I can manage. It's you they want, not me." She was already gathering up her jacket, and the bag she had been carrying. She seemed brusque and tense. In a moment of wild fantasy, Snow wondered if she had expected him to try to seduce her. She was heading down the stairs.

"Of course not, Miss Aynsworth. I insist —"

By now she had reached the bottom of the stairs. Before opening the street door she turned back to him, suddenly pulled his head toward hers, and kissed him on the mouth. The smell of her breath and skin, still of strawberries as it had been at the dance, flooded over him. His knees felt weak.

Before he could stop her, she was down the front steps and gone. He thought of running after her, but changed his mind. The woman would be more than a match for anyone she happened to meet.