Stone Cradle by Louise Doughty Page A

warder up at Kirkdale where they had the biggest tread-wheel in the country and they used it to grind wheat and some others used theirs for weaving. But ours is used to turn water, he said, and that makes the steps a-slippery and accidents are not uncommon, I’m afraid.
    It was only later that I thought, I never asked him what the turning of water was for. I had these strange thoughts of rivers and streams being turned over and over, in the way you might air an eider, but for no good reason – and my Dei having been crippled on account of this turning of water for no good reason. And that, of course, was even worse than her being crippled for the milling of wheat.
    I think he must have realised what bad news this was for us, because he said then, ‘I’ll just leave you for a minute and go and see if the nurse will have you,’ and went outside.
    Dadus came and sat next to me and we couldn’t even look at each other. He put his hands over his face, and I knew he wasstruggling with himself for my sake. And I felt our lives fall away from us, like water through my fingers, for whatever happened after this we would never be the same as before.
    After a while, one of the ones with a top hat came back in. He took six of the beer jars down from the shelves, one by one, and stacked them by the door.
    Dadus said to him, lightly like, ‘So how do accidents happen on the tread-wheel, then?’
    ‘Folk slip, go under,’ was all his reply, then he started saying how we shouldn’t believe everything the first fella had said on account of him having once been a felon himself and that was how he thought himself an expert on the tread-wheel. He claimed to have been a warder elsewhere but it was well known that he had served three months for bastardy up at Kirkdale and only got out when he had paid the four pound fine to the workhouse for the upkeep of the child.
    This took my mind off our current anxiety, for a bit, as it astounded me to think that a man could go to prison for the getting of a child and I couldn’t help thinking how much I would have given all the gold in the world to have taken my Dei off that tread-wheel and put there a certain man who shall remain nameless.
    Top-hat fella went out again, with two of the jars of beer, and we sat some more for what seemed like a long while. Lijah was asleep the whole time. Eventually, Dadus got up and went over to the small, square window in the wall next to the shelves of jars. He stared out of it for a while, and the light on his face showed me how old he was, and I thought,
he looks an age older than he did this morning.
    The bearded fella never came back. A different one, one we hadn’t met before, came in and took us to the door of the sickroom, and I knew’d we were getting near it still some feet away from the stench that came from the open door. We knew the stink ofsewerage right enough, but this was something different, something deep and coloured. ‘What is that smell?’ I whispered to Dadus, as I tucked Lijah tighter into my shoulder.
    The warder accompanying us heard me and leaned towards me staying sternly, ‘It is the stink of corruption, young lady, and let that be a lesson to you.’
    As we reached the door, he said, more normal like, ‘Gangrene. We’ve a few cases at the moment.’
    The room was another high-ceilinged one but the windows were smaller and didn’t admit much in the way of light. There were about a dozen beds in there, made of boards. I looked quickly down one row. The two women in it nearest to me were both sitting up and knitting. They both had triangles of cloth over their noses, held around their ears with bits of ribbon. The rest of their faces was red and pockmarked and Dadus told me later they had an evil gorjer disease that was eating off their faces bit by bit.
    It was a soft sighing sound made me look the other way, and it was then I saw Dei. She was flat on her back, with her legs slightly raised. She was turned towards us – her