The Angel of Highgate

18 LOST IN THE MIASMA

On the first week of October, a trough of stagnant air clamped a bowl of cold air over London so that the smoke belching from thousands of chimney stacks rose into the skies until it hit the tops of the clouds and could rise no further. In the days that followed the bowl filled with more and more smoke, until the fog and smoke coalesced into a choking gray shroud that smothered London from east to west, north to south. So thick was the fog that gas lights in the shops and streets had to be lit three hours earlier than usual. In the weird world of eternal twilight, the people of London carried on as best they could, although at times the fog thickened until it congealed into a sulfurous, gritty murk sometimes brown, sometimes reddish-yellow, at other times a sickly shade of green that dimmed the beams of coach lights and gas lamps and slowed traffic first to a walking pace, and then to a crawl as coaches and omnibuses had to be led by men carrying torches. Finally, everything stuttered to a halt as the fog tightened around the city’s throat like a silk scarf in a strangler’s hands.

Theaters closed. Railways stopped. Law courts recessed. Commerce ceased.

Shops remained dark because shop assistants could not get to work. The blind now led the sighted, for the only way to navigate the streets was by the tapping of a white cane, a hand fumbling along a cinderous brick wall.

On the worst day of the fog, Doctor Garrette left his office on Hogarth Road to walk to the home of Augustus Skinner on Holland Park Avenue. It was not an hour past noon and already it was dark. Fog seethed and boiled along the empty streets. A rain of soot sifted down from clouds too bloated to hold any more. Even indoors, with windows and doors shut tight, people wheezed and gagged. To filter the air, Doctor Garrette breathed through a white handkerchief folded over his mouth, held in place by a long silk scarf wound three times around his head. Along the route he tramped past horseless, abandoned omnibuses and carriages, through streets illuminated only vaguely by the feeble yellow flicker of streetlamps straining to push back the darkness.

Only seldom did he encounter other living beings. Crossing Cromwell Road, he passed a gang of Irish navvies: grubby-faced laborers in filthy work clothes. They shambled past in single file, each with a hand on the shoulder of the man in front, a pick or shovel thrown over the other. The fog here was so dense that neither the front of the line nor the end was visible. In the murk the men appeared like lost souls damned to the underworld, on their way to dig down to an even deeper level of hell.

On Wrights Lane, he collided with a tubercular street urchin, shoeless, feet bare to the ankles; the boy, scarcely nine years old, walked hunched over with pain, puffing on the dog-end of a cigarette filched from the gutter, the small body wracked now and then by a cough like broken glass shaken in a sack. “Spare a farthing, guvnor?”

Dr. Garrette eyed the boy critically: the bony cheeks, the haunted eyes staring from the dark caverns of his eye sockets. The street-Arab’s disease was far advanced; he would be dead within a few days. Money, succor, pity were all futile. With an unsentimentality learned in the hospital tents of Crimea, the doctor turned his face away and kept walking.

On he strode in a silence so uncanny it was hard to believe that an invisible metropolis sprawled for miles around him. As he turned onto Holland Park Avenue his foot skidded in a pile of something wet and soft and he nearly fell. He stopped, removed a soot-speckled white glove, wiped a finger along the side of his shoe and brought it up to his nose, sniffing: excrement, not horse manure, but human. He flicked the ordure from his finger and slipped the glove back on.

“Come!”

The bedroom door opened and Silas Garrette entered, a whiff of brimstone fog creeping in with him.

“Doctor… thank the Lord!”

He stepped to the bedside and stood looking down at Augustus Skinner through his rose-tinted pince-nez. The Blackwell’s critic lay in an untidy heap, the tangle of bedclothes flung aside, his face flushed and sweaty. On the bedside table an uncorked bottle of laudanum lay on its side like an expression of utter emptiness. “You are no better?”

“No. I am burning with fever and the pain… it throbs so. I have not slept in two days.”

“The laudanum did not help?”

“Yes, but it’s gone. I need more. I must have more laudanum. Quickly!”

Dr. Garrette settled his Gladstone bag on the bedside table and opened it. He reached in and took out a slender bottle of smoky glass stoppered with a cork, set it down on the table and then rummaged some more and produced its twin. “I have but two bottles left—”

“I’ll take them both!”

The doctor pondered deeply on this as he stroked the bottle with slender fingers that seemed long enough to sport a fourth joint. “A tincture of laudanum of this strength is difficult to procure, especially now with the fog. The trains do not run. Even horse-drawn carts make no deliveries to the apothecaries.”

“It’s about the money, is it? How much do you want?”

The doctor quickly muttered the price.

Augustus Skinner spluttered, choking on his indignation. “That’s triple what I paid you before!”

The doctor’s lips pursed as if he had just licked a rusty nail. He replaced the bottles in his bag and snapped it shut. “I have walked a quarter mile in the worst London fog,” he said. “If my professional services are no longer needed…”

And with that he turned to leave.

“NO! Wait. Please, please. I am not myself. The pain. My mind is clouded.” Skinner nodded at the chest of drawers. “There’s money in the top drawer.”

“Very good,” the doctor murmured. He opened the bag and set two bottles of laudanum atop the table then took out a leather holster of instruments. “If you would turn over.”

Augustus Skinner groaned then howled as Doctor Garrette drew the scalpel through the infection once again to lance it, only this time he removed his glove and probed the finger with which he had wiped the filth from his shoe into the wound, pushing it deep until it touched the pistol ball he claimed to have removed a week before. By the time he had finished redressing the wound, Skinner was shivering with agony. Garrette handed him the bottle of laudanum and Skinner gulped down several large draughts. Within minutes he was woozy and delirious as the laudanum took effect.

Dr. Garrette opened the drawer of the dresser. Inside he counted out forty pounds, a considerable sum.

As he stepped back out the front door, Silas Garrette found the fog’s clammy embrace cozy and soothing. He had taken but half the money in the top drawer — twenty pounds — folded the large notes in half and placed them in his Gladstone bag. Best not to be greedy. He had his children to consider, but he would have the rest and more in time. There would be more visits, many more. As a medical man it was his professional opinion that Mr. Skinner’s recovery would take a long time.

A very long time, indeed.