She greeted her, and after an exchange of necessary information regarding Enid, they both left to partake of the meal which had been set for them in the housekeeper's sitting room.

“The fever is definitely abating in Limehouse,” Hester said conversationally. “I only wish we could do something to prevent it coming back again.”

“What could anyone do?” Genevieve asked with a frown. “The way people live, it is bound to arise every so often.”

“Change the way they live,” Hester replied.

Genevieve smiled, bitterness and a kind of revulsion in it, not untouched by both anger and pity.

“You'd have more luck trying to stop the tide from turning.” She speared a piece of meat in her steak and kidney pudding and put it in her mouth, then spoke again the moment after she had swallowed it. “You can't change people. Oh, one or two, maybe, but never thousands. They've lived like that for generations, never enough to eat, the bread's full of alum, the milk's half water.” She gave a sharp laugh. “Even the tea is better for poisoning the rats than for humans drinking. Only working men get things like pigs' trotters or kippers, the rest of the family does without. Nobody has fruit or vegetables. Everybody in the street, in two streets, has to queue with pails for water from the wells, and half of them are contaminated by sewers, cesspits or middens. Even if they didn't use the one pail for everything!” Her voice was angry, bitter and racked with emotion. “They're born with disease, and they die with it. A few sewage pipes aren't going to change that!”

“Yes they can,” Hester said slowly, her mind dizzy with the force of Genevieve's passion, bewildered by its suddenness and ringing sincerity.

“It's the drains and the middens where the problem lies.”

Genevieve's lip curled. “It's the same thing!”

“No it isn't!” Hester argued, leaning forward across the table. “If there were proper water-carrying sewers built, then-”

“Water?” Genevieve looked amazed and horrified. “Then it would go everywhere!”

“No it wouldn't-”

“Yes it would! I've seen that, when the tide turns, or there's a heavy rain, it all backs up, the middens overflow, the gutters run sewage! Even when it goes down again what it leaves behind sits in piles on the pavements! You can shovel it off!”

“Where?” Hester said slowly, an incredible idea taking form in her mind, something so ludicrous it could even be true, wild and absurd as it seemed.

“What?” Genevieve's face colored painfully. She fumbled for words and found none. “Well-perhaps I haven't seen. I should have said I had heard . . . .”

She bent as if to resume eating her food, but only toyed with it, pushing it around with her fork.

“Caleb lives in Limehouse, doesn't he?” Rester remembered.