The Trespass Read Free

need to hurry home, although he could of course, even at this hour, talk to his daughter if he so desired. (But no, perhaps – not tonight.) He shifted uneasily inside the cab as a hundred visions kaleidoscoped across his mind: suddenly he abruptly knocked on the roof and told the driver to turn off and head for St Martin’s Lane. Mrs Ballantyre’s house, in a narrow street nearby, was free of cholera germs, he was sure of that, she had had the place cleaned and disinfected twice a day since the epidemic began; she had told him how she soaked her curtains in chloride of lime and her sanitary arrangements were better than many a finer house.
    A whisky, and a girl, before bed. He stretched his legs in a kind of dull, automatic, physical anticipation. Mrs Ballantyre’s girls were young. They knew the kind of thing that pleased him.
    But as the horse trotted up along one side of the new Trafalgar Square and turned past the church it had to stop. A crowd had gathered from a narrow street nearby, halting the traffic. Above all the other noises of the city night he could hear a woman screaming over and over but there was nothing unusual in that, in this area.
    ‘Pass on, pass on.’ Sir Charles bent his head out and upwards to shout at the driver.
    But the way was completely blocked and the driver was silent, staring at the commotion. A cart was collecting dead bodies. The woman who was screaming would not let the body of what seemed to be another, older, well-dressed woman go and her arms tried to hold the body back from the cart drivers; her skirt and the skirt of the dead woman were torn, dragged in the mud and the muck of the street. Through the gathered, murmuring people several other bodies were being carried from other doorways, wrapped in threadbare blankets or old pieces of clothing and passed up to the top of the cart and somewhere a child was crying as if its heart had broken.
    Suddenly one body began to slide off the top of the pile; the crowd watched fascinated as it slid slowly downwards. A hand emerged from a shirt and seemed to move and for a moment there was total, mesmerised silence. Then one of the drivers snorted angrily and swore, jumped up on to the cart with the falling body and with his feet pushed the pile of bodies down. And the woman in the mud-stained skirt, tussling with the other driver, screamed again: No, no, no! Finally the driver on the top of the cart jumped down and kicked her. She fell to the ground, across the body of the older woman.
    The Right Honourable Sir Charles Cooper pulled back into the darkness of the cab in shock. He had recognised the dead woman.
    ‘Leave them, leave them,’ shrieked another woman in the crowd whose shawl covered her nose and her face. ‘They’re only tarts.’
    Another woman shouted at her, ‘Could be you next, missus, whether y’re a tart or not!’
    As the last of the other corpses was piled on to the cart one of the nightmen pulled at the dead woman, the other pushed her screaming companion away from the body. With an impatient, upward heave they threw this last body on to the top of the pile, and the older driver kicked the other woman again for good measure as her cries became at last discordant and broken. Then he got on to the front of the cart with his companion and whipped his horses away through the milling, suddenly parting, people.
    Someone was weeping harshly, big, jagged sobs. ‘God have mercy,’ someone muttered. Other voices joined in, low and resigned, as people moved at last. ‘God have mercy on their souls.’
    But out of the darkness a man’s angry voice called, ‘There ain’t no God, you fools.’
    ‘Pass on, pass on,’ called Sir Charles Cooper hoarsely, once more directing the driver to the safety of Bryanston Square, and he found that he was sweating with fright. He passed his white handkerchief over his forehead several times in an effort to calm himself but he felt his heart beating too fast beneath his coat. He saw again,