“Yes?” He half-turned, his face in shadow.
“Have you eaten in the past hour or two?” she asked.
Evidently she’d surprised him, for he shut the tap off and turned round, drying his hands on a towel. “What kind of question is that to be asking?” He cocked his head on one side, and something of the old Erasmus flickered into light.
“I’m asking if you’ve eaten,” she said impatiently, tapping her toe.
“Not recently, no.” He put the towel down and reached back into his pocket for his handkerchief.
“Okay.” She dug around in her bag. “I’ve got something for you. You’re certain what you’ve got is consumption?”
“Ahem—” He coughed, hacking repeatedly, into the handkerchief. “Yes, Miriam, it’s the white death.” He looked grim. “I’ve seen it take enough of my friends to know my number’s come up.”
“Okay.” She tipped two tablets out into the palm of her hand, held them out toward him: “I want you to take these right now. Wash them down with tea, and make sure you don’t eat anything for half an hour afterwards.”
He looked at her in confusion, not taking the tablets. After a moment he smiled. “More of your utopian nonsense and magic, Miriam? Think this’ll cure me and make me whole again?”
Miriam rolled her eyes. “Humor me. Please?”
“Ah, well. I suppose so.” He took the two tablets and swallowed them one at a time, looking slightly disgusted. “What are they meant to do? I’ve got no time for quack nostrums as a rule . . .” The kettle began to whistle, and he turned back to the stove to pour water into a tarnished metal teapot.
“Remember the DVD player I showed you? The movie?” Miriam asked his turned back.
He froze.
“It’s not magical,” she added. “You need to take two of these tablets at the same time, on an empty stomach, every day without fail, for six months. That should—I hope—stop the disease from progressing. It won’t make your lungs heal from the damage already done, and there’s a chance, about one in ten, that it won’t work, or that it’ll make you feel even more sick, in which case I’ll have to find some different medicine for you. But you should lose the coughing in a couple of weeks and begin to feel better in a month. Don’t stop taking them, though, until six months are up, or it may come back.” She paused. “It’s not a utopia I come from, and the drugs don’t always work. But they’re better than anything I’ve seen here.”
“Not a utopia.” He turned to face her, holding the teapot. “You’ve got some very strange notions, young lady.”
“I’m thirty-three, old man. You want to put that teapot down before you spill it? And no, it’s not a utopia. Thing is, the bac—germs—that cause consumption, they evolve over time to resist the drugs. If you stop taking the medicine before you’re completely cured, there’s a chance that you’ll develop a resistant strain of infection and these drugs will stop working. Too many homeless people where I come from stopped taking them when they felt better—result is, there are still people dying of tuberculosis in New York City.” He was halfway back to the living room as she followed him, lecturing his receding back. “That stuff is the cheap first-line treatment. And you’ll by god finish the bloody course, because I need you alive!”
He put the teapot down. When he turned round he was smiling broadly. “Hah! Now that’s a surprise, ma’am.”
“What?” Miriam, stopped in midstream, was perplexed.
He exhaled through a gap between his teeth. “You’ve shown no sign of needing anyone ever before, if I may be blunt. A veritable force of nature, that’s you.”
Miriam sat down heavily. “A force of nature with family problems. And a dilemma.”
“Ah. I see. And you want to tell me about it?”
“Well—” She paused. “Later. What brought the tuberculosis back? How long did they hold you for?” How have you been? she wanted to ask, but that might imply an intimacy in their relationship that had never been explicit in the past.
“Oh, questions, questions.” He poured tea into two china cups, neither of them chipped. “Always the questions.” He chuckled painfully. “The kind of questions that turn worlds upside down. One lump or two?”
“None, thank you.” Miriam accepted a cup. “Did they charge you?”
“No.” Burgeson looked unaccountably irritated, as if the Political Police’s failure to charge him reflected negatively on his revolutionary credentials. “They just banged me up and squatted in my shop.” He brightened: “Some party or parties unknown—and not related to my friends—did them an extreme mischief on the premises.” He cracked his knuckles. “And I was in custody! Clearly innocent! The best alibi!” He managed not to laugh. “They still charged me with possession—went through the bookshelves, seems I’d missed a tract or two—but the beak only gave me a month in the cells. Unfortunately that’s when the cough came back, so they kicked me out to die on the street.”
“Bastards,” Miriam said absently. Burgeson winced slightly at the unladylike language but held his tongue. “I’ve been seeing a lot of that.” She told him about the train journey, about Marissa and her mother who was afraid Miriam was an informer or police agent. “Is something happening?”
“Oh, you should know better than to ask me that.” He glanced at her speculatively. When she nodded slightly, he went on: “The economy.” He raised a finger. “It’s in the midden. Spinning its wheels fit to blow a boiler. We have plenty out of work, queues for broth around the street corners—bodies sleeping in the streets, dying in the gutter of starvation in some cases. Go walk around Whitechapel or Ontario if you don’t believe it. There’s a shortage of money, debtors are unable to pay their rack, and I am having to be very careful who I choose to give the ticket to. Nobody likes a pawnbroker, you know. And that’s just the top of it: I’ve heard rumors that in the camps they’re going through convicts’ teeth in search of gold, can you believe it? Claiming it as Crown property. Secundus.” He raised another finger. “The harvest is piss-poor. It’s been getting worse for a few years, this unseasonable strange weather and peculiar storms, but this year it hit the corn. And with a potato blight rotting the spuds in the field—” He shrugged. A third finger: “Finally, there is the game of thrones. Which heats up apace, as the dauphin casts a greedy eye at our beloved royal father’s dominions in the Persian Gulf. He’s an ambitious little swine, the dauphin, looking to shore up his claim to the iron throne of Caesar in St. Petersburg, and a short victorious war that would leave French boots a-cooling in the Indian ocean would line his broadcloth handsomely.” Erasmus smiled thinly. “Would you like me to elaborate?”
“Um, no.” Miriam shook her head. “Different players, but the game’s the same.” She sipped her tea. Global climate change? What is the world’s population here, anyway? Suddenly she had a strange vision, a billion coal-fired cooking stoves staining the sky with as bad a smog as a billion SUVs. Convergence . . .
“So times are bad and the Constabulary are getting heavyhanded. The Evil Empire is rattling its sabers and threatening to invade, just to add to the fun. And the economy is stuck in a liquidity trap that’s been getting worse for months, with deflation setting in . . . ?” She shook her head again. “And I thought things were bad back home.”
“So where have you been?” Erasmus asked, cocking his head to one side. There was something birdlike about his movements, but now Miriam could see that it was a side effect of the disease eating him from the inside out, leaving him gaunt and huge-eyed. “I thought you’d abandoned me.” He said it in such a self-consciously histrionic tone that she almost laughed.