I was livid all right—with rage. But I made myself sound calm: “The joke’s over. How much are you paying them for this little stunt, Crunch—?”
“The name’s Van Dyson, Sykes, and you damn well know it—”
Now he was turning red; he wasn’t as drunk as I thought, this time he’d caught my sarcasm.
“—and it’s no joke.”
In the flicker-glow of the carriage lantern his dark eyes met mine. For a second, I thought they were lit with greed—but it was a peculiar kind of avarice: it had nothing to do with money. He was after something and he wanted it badly, but I suddenly knew it wasn’t anything as unimportant as recompense or stipends—we really did come from different worlds. But I wouldn’t back down. “And I’m no fool,” I said. “The nearest outbreak’s in Provincetown—eighty miles from here.”
“Ever been in a pest house, Sykes? No, I didn’t think so.” He groped for the flask and drank, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “The one in Provincetown is fourteen by fourteen feet. Plenty of room for the stricken and the nurse—if they can get one.” He smirked.
“And your point is?”
“With less than a third of the population vaccinated, why do you think they build pest houses smaller than gazebos?”
“Well, I hardly—”
“You hardly what? You hardly know anything but what you’ve read in books or heard from fringe academics like Professor Perry.” He leaned forward. “Let me tell you something. People are so afraid of the pox—so afraid of being isolated like lepers and sent to pest houses to rot and die alone—that their fear helps spread the disease.”
“The bodies of the dead are supposed to be burned,” O’Rourke said. “Jesus and Saint Mary.” He crossed himself quickly.
“People have been put to death for burning bodies—except during plague times—but Brunetti of Padua is going to unveil a cremation chamber at the Vienna world exposition this summer, Sykes,” Cruncher said. “Not that you’ve seen the piece in the New York Times, I’m sure—considering the cost of the subscription these days.”
“Being poor doesn’t make people stupid, Van Dyson,” I said.
“No, but it can send them to a pest house.”
“Are you saying the rich don’t get reported?”
Cruncher threw back his head and laughed. “Not only do they fail to be reported when they’re alive and raging with smallpox and shedding scabs like noxious red confetti, when they’re dead their doctors put down the cause to ‘heart disease’ or ‘paralysis of the diaphragm’ or ‘puerperal—that is, childbed—fever.’ ” He nodded toward Winterbourne and O’Rourke. “Dirty, ugly way to die—but not as ugly or dirty as smallpox.”
“Of course,” Winterbourne said.
“Nor does the ego-bloated mayor of Provincetown want his wife burned like a Salem witch or buried in a common grave or consigned for eternity to Pox Acres—which during the winter is merely a hole in the ground in the pest house cellar and, during the rest of the year, some raggedy ground a few hundred yards north. No, the mayor wants to visit his wife’s tombstone after church on Sunday mornings wearing his top hat, and ready to shake the hands of the recently bereaved.”
“She died from small pox,” I said.
“Yes,” Cruncher said. “And as long as you brought up Provincetown, Sykes, you might as well know that only eight names out of twenty-seven of people who had small pox were reported in the newspaper—”
“Enough, Cruncher—”
“—and according to the 1870 census, the average income of those eight was $547.50; but the average income of the other nineteen was $2,300.”
“Christ, I said shut up!”
“All of the headstones in pox cemeteries face east. Isn’t that curious?”
I started to lunge for him, but O’Rourke threw his arm between us and Winterbourne hissed. “Stop it both of you, right now, we’re here.”
The landau slowed and out the window I saw the curved stony embrasure of the receiving vault.
Dr. Perry’s driver had hitched a small cart-like wagon—long enough to accommodate bodies—to the landau, and now he rolled back the canvas tarp and pulled out tools while the rest of us stood just outside the metal door. Winterbourne twirled a hooded lantern and its single ray sparkled against the gravel drive and played over gleaming saw blades and pry bars.
“Many medical men eschew protection,” Perry began while Winterbourne held the light and the driver worked at picking the lock. “In my day, surgeons operated in blood-stiffened frock coats—the stiffer the coat, the more it conveyed the expertise of the practitioner. Some still believe there’s no object in being clean, that cleanliness is out of place and they consider it finicky and affected—that pus is as inseparable from surgery as blood. An executioner might as well manicure his nails before chopping off a head,” he said. “But we’ve got gloves and armlets and heavy rubber aprons,” he glanced at Cruncher. “And we’re going to be very careful. We’re only going to take the bodies toward the back of the vault—no one’s going to miss them, because no one is going to check very closely. Not with a dozen pox victims stashed in the crypt, too.” He paused. The lock clattered onto the gravel and Perry’s driver stooped to retrieve it and loop it in the staple of the hasp. “All right, we’re in,” Perry said.
The Blue Haven receiving vault was built into the side of a steep hill. Its façade was typically ornamentaclass="underline" heavy bronze doors fancied with grille-work and set in bricks that rose above the rounded snow-covered hill like crenellated castle walls.
Inside, the ceiling was arched and the bricks were skim-coated with flaking whitewash, but moss grew on the damp walls and the air was dank. Even in this cold weather, you could detect the subtle scent of decay. Perry tied his handkerchief over his mouth and nose, and the others followed his lead. I was too embarrassed to fumble mine out—it was dotted with tiny holes and its edges were badly frayed.
“Let’s be quick, gents. Get the lids pried off and hustle the bodies out to the cart. My man will get the coffins nailed shut again.”
Either there’d been a hell of a lot of typical deaths that winter in Blue Haven or small pox was more rampant than anyone who lived in the area had been led to believe: There must have been a hundred caskets. Someone (probably the sexton from St. Bartholomew’s parish and his crew of gravediggers) had started off packing the coffins onto the heavy wooden shelves that lined three walls, then given up and crammed them in upright like matchsticks. Indeed, one shelf on the western side of the crypt had collapsed under the weight, and the coffins lay helter-skelter, tipped onto their sides and crowding the narrow space between them and their vertical neighbors.
“Standing room only, eh, Sykes?” Cruncher said.
I inserted my crowbar under the wooden lid of a cheap toe-pincher model and put my weight into it.
“C’mon, you’re not seriously mad at me, are you?”
The body fell out and smacked headfirst into the back of another coffin. It sounded like a frozen side of beef being hit with a cook’s rolling pin. Cruncher steadied the upright casket, so it wouldn’t domino the rest.
“I’ll help you carry her out to the wagon,” Cruncher said, taking the corpse by the shoulders.
I picked up her feet. She was face down and her long brown hair swung against Cruncher’s knees. “She must have been young,” I said.
Her skirt hung wire-straight and stiff. It creaked like a sail in an ice storm, and a pair of glass beads she’d been decorated with rattled against the brick floor. Her leather shoes chilled my hands even through my gloves.
“Yes, too young to pin up her hair,” Cruncher agreed, looking over his shoulder to navigate the maze of coffins and move us toward one of the lanterns resting on a casket near the door.