Scadger clasped my arm. “I implore you not to advocate for me in this matter. Your good offices have been helpful to my family in the past, and for these ministrations, I’m most grateful. But there’s nothing that can be done here, and your auspices in this instance, however kind and wellintended, will only do harm.”
“Did he refuse to serve you?”
“Yes. But—”
“And was it because you live in the East End?”
Scadger nodded. “Because I now live in the East End like a pauper. And because I once lived beneath the apricot trees like an animal of the field.”
“And is there no chemist in the East End with whom you may trade?”
“There are no chemists in the East End.”
“Then you have no choice but to purchase your physics on this side of the river.”
“And yet—”
“One man’s money should be as good as any other’s, Scadger. Now you’ve told me that he wouldn’t sell you a syrup for your daughter. Is this also the reason that he ejected you from his establishment? I want to be clear on this, man. Did you do anything else to warrant this final indignity?”
“My presence within the shop was deemed an offence to two of his other customers — two women of breeding. They commented upon it both in word and gesture.” Here Scadger demonstrated “gesture” by pinching his nose. “I made haste to withdraw at that moment, but apparently I did not depart quickly enough to suit Skettles, and so he took it upon himself to have me removed by force of his own hand — and no doubt made the necessary show of it for his preferred customers. I will recover, Trimmers. It is my daughter Florence who sadly may not.”
“She has worsened?”
“Aye.”
“Then you must admit her to the Lung Hospital. Immediately.”
Scadger shook his head. “There’s nothing that can be done for her there. It is the place to which consumptives go to die. I would prefer to have my daughter at home when it is her time to leave us.”
I nodded. Scadger had spoken truthfully about that place. Rarely did one depart its wards in better condition than when he or she went in. And because it ministered to the most consumed amongst the consumptives of Dingley Dell, it was death that most often and most tragically emptied each of its thirty or so beds in turn.
“Scadger, my good man, at least suffer me to go inside and purchase a syrup for your daughter as your surrogate.”
“He will sell to you, I have no doubt,” said Harry Scadger with uncharacteristic rancor.
Skettles the apothecary allowed the purchase now that the presence of Scadger was no longer polluting his shop, but the merchant charged me twice the going price. William Skettles, like his brother-in-law Montague Pupker, was a man who did not permit compassion to dilute commerce, and often used the vehicle of retail trade to serve more selfish ends — such as, in this case, making a lesson of an East Ender who sought to sully his premises with the effrontery of his mere presence, and making an equal lesson of the man who sought to help said East Ender. It was odious in every facet, and I wasn’t sure at that moment which of the two hateful brothers-in-law I despised more.
Scadger and I were soon crossing on foot the Westminster Bridge, which connected the West End of Milltown to its bastard brother, the East End. The bridge wasn’t frequently traversed by West Enders of a certain elevated rank (most Milltowners of that caste preferring to cross the river, when their travels took them east, via the Waterloo Bridge (north of town) or the Victoria Bridge (south of town). Artisans and tradesmen of the working class used Westminster when necessary to ply their trade within the weazen, dilapidated neighbourhood that now included Scadger’s new domicile, and now and then lowly men in Scadger’s impoverished league were driven by necessity to venture in the opposite direction to bear the sort of cold reception that had come to Scadger in Skettles’ apothecary shop.
The bridge, in this sense, had become a loose link between two very different worlds, and a stark reminder of how distinct one Dinglian was from the next, even as we all had been forced by estrangement from the Beyonders to band together in a form of consolidation that should have been blind to all class and fortune. Here stood we all at one end of that other bridge — the metaphoric one that joined Dingley Dell to the Terra Incognita, and there on its opposite end stood every Outlander behind a thick, obscurant wall of fog and mystery. Though the irony of it was quite clear to me, it was now become even more illuminative on this particular day and in this particular way, the possibility now existing that the world beyond our valley could very well be everything utopian that we had ever dreamed of or everything nightmarish that a Dinglian had reason to fear. All of it promised to be of such transformational import as to make those differences between Scadgers and Pupkers, West Enders and East Enders, the high brow and the low class altogether petty and immaterial, and totally inconsequential.
Two women of class and breeding had pinched their noses to feign revulsion (for there was, in truth, no polluting stench emanating from Scadger despite his soiled garb) and a chemist had denied a sick young girl something to ease her destructive cough. Sir Dabber’s son Bevan, even having regained his sentience, had sat with three others in a dark and dismal hole beneath a hospital that executed refusals and disallowances as its wont and in the face of every appeal to clemency; pauperish Scadgers were being relegated to filthy mews, which still, I had no doubt, reeked of the equine manure that had marked their former employment, because it served their duplicitous owner’s feint to good civic stewardship. Whatever truth there was to there being something outside the valley to put an end to life as we knew it in this final season, Dingley Dell was fairly rotten at its core withal, and, one might argue, partially deserving of its impending demise.
Yet what of those who wept over the inequities, who ministered to the sick, who attempted to uplift the poor? What of those who followed in every way the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose life was paragon? Were these virtuous exceptions to the rule sadly noted above to receive some form of dispensation, some accommodation, some compensatory kindness?
My head continued to throb as I contemplated such onerous questions, and as Harry Scadger and I reached the eastern end of the bridge (this end left without whitewash as if impoverished East Enders were not even deserving of so much as bright paint and clean varnish upon their own side of a public construction). My meditations received an abrupt check by the sound of my name being called by someone to my rear. The voice belonged to my young friend Mulberry Timberry, who quickly overtook me and seised my right hand with both of his own to better execute a most violent shake.
“Thank you, sir, thank you, thank you, and again I say thank you.”
“And for what reason do I find my arm being nearly wrung from its socket, Timberry?”
Scadger had stopped a few steps ahead of me and now turned to behold what was transpiring behind him with a curious cock of the head, a tilt shared with brothers who perhaps learnt to display inquisitiveness by observing in their own puppyhood how curiosity was most often demonstrated by the many mongrels that survived in the apricot grove by means of scraps and vermin of the field and large doses of Scadger affection.
“I’ve just spoken with Sir Dabber. Oh, I beg your pardon, sir,” said Timberry to Scadger. “Your servant, sir: Mulberry Timberry. Although I must admit that I don’t know you.”
“Scadger, Governor. Harry Scadger.” Another hardy double-palmed pump of the hand, this time for Scadger.
“Ah yes, one of the apricot clan. I haven’t seen much of your people, but in my own defence, you have lived a rather isolated existence on the whole.”