The Gardener's Son

The talk lasted most of six days. It was not one talk, in the end. It was many, in many places — in the boathouse, at night, in low voices so as not to wake Nell — in the Mercy House, over the beds of the dying, where Mira had gone back to work on the first morning and where Teo went with her, because there was nothing else to do while they waited and a great deal of work that needed doing... in the frozen alleys of the Sump, walking between the pyres.

Teo had not known that you could argue with someone for six days and still be on the same side at the end of it.

"It worked," he said, on the first night. "That's the point. Jenner put the cow-blister into the boy, and then he put the red pox into him, and the boy lived. And because of that, the whole world learned how to do it. And then the red pox was gone. Forever. Every child who would have died of it for two hundred years... all of them lived. Because of what he did to one boy."

"I know," said Mira. "And it could have killed him."

"But it didn't."

"Jenner didn't know that. That's the whole point of a test, Teo. You don't know. That's why it's a test." Mira was sitting on the edge of a cot in the Mercy House, holding a cup of water to the lips of a woman whose face was so swollen with blisters that her eyes had closed. "He took a child who couldn't say no, the son of his own servant, a boy whose father depended on him for bread... and he put the deadliest disease in the world into him, on purpose, to see what would happen." She set the cup down. "Even if it worked, that doesn't make it right."

"Then what would have been right? Not to try? And let millions more die?"

"I don't know," said Mira, and her voice cracked. "I don't know. That's why we're talking about it."

Teo was silent.

He had read more of that chapter since. He had read it three times over, by candlelight, until he knew every word. And he had found, near the end, a part he had not wanted to find.

Jenner had not been the first. Long before him, people had known another way to stop the red pox... an older, rougher way, practised across half the world. They took the matter from a sick person's blister — a person with a mild case, if they could find one — and scratched it into the skin of someone healthy. Real pox, not cow-blister. The healthy person caught the disease through the scratch in their skin, and somehow, coming in that way, it was usually milder. Usually. Most of them lived and were protected forever. But some of them — one or two in every hundred — caught the pox in full, and died.

The Makers had called it variolation. A woman called Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had seen it done in a great city called Constantinople, and had it done to her own children, and brought it home to her country. A man called Onesimus, who had been taken from his home in Africa and enslaved in a Maker city across the sea, had told his master that it was done in the land he came from, and showed him how... and when the pox came to that city, the people who had been scratched died far less often than those who had not.

One or two in every hundred.

It was much better than one in three. It had saved a great many lives. And still, one or two in every hundred had died from the very thing that was meant to protect them... sometimes children, chosen by their parents, who had weighed the risk and chosen, and been wrong.

"There's no way to do this," Teo said at last, very quietly, "that doesn't put someone in danger."

"No," said Mira. "There isn't."

"So who?"

They looked at each other across the dying woman's bed.

The answer came to Teo on the fourth night, walking back to the boathouse through the frozen streets with the smoke of the pyres in his throat. It came to him so simply and so completely that he wondered why it had taken so long, and then knew exactly why, and was ashamed.

Hesk's second question. What would be true if you were wrong?

If he was wrong... if the cow-blister did not protect against the red pox... if the milkmaids of the Fens were simply lucky, or had caught a mild pox as children and forgotten it, or if this red pox was a different cousin that the cow-blister did not resemble... then the first person to be given it would not be protected. And then, when they were exposed to the real pox, they would catch it, and perhaps die.

And if he was wrong in some other way... if the stuff Bram brought back was rotten, or had the wrong small lives in it, or carried some other sickness from the cows... then the first person to be given it might fall ill from that, and perhaps die.

Either way, the first person was taking the greatest risk. And every person after them was taking less, because by then, there would be something to see. Something to count.

So who should be first?

Not a child. Not someone who could not say no. Not someone who did not understand what was being asked of them. Not someone whose bread depended on the person asking.

Someone who understood it better than anyone. Someone who had read every word. Someone who had decided it should be done, and so ought to be the one to pay for the deciding.

Teo stopped in the middle of Brine Lane, in the dark, with the ruin of the old chandlery black against the sky beside him.

'...Ah,' he thought. 'Of course.'

He told Mira the next morning.

She did not argue. That was the worst part. He had braced himself for a fight, and he had his reasons lined up in a row like soldiers, and she listened to all of them in silence, with her hands folded in her lap. When he was done, she sat for a long time without saying anything at all.

"I'll do it with you," she said at last.

"No."

"Teo..."

"No. Mira. Listen." He leaned forward. "If we both do it, and it goes wrong, then there's nobody left who knows how to do it right. Nobody who's read the book. Nobody to keep count." He tried to smile. "Somebody has to write it down. You know that. Somebody always has to write it down."

Mira looked at him for a long time. Her eyes were very bright.

"You're impossible," she said.

"I know."

"You're a stubborn, arrogant, impossible cart-man, and you think you're being brave, and you're just being clever, and I hate it." She stood up abruptly and walked to the window and stood there with her back to him. Her shoulders were shaking. "...And you're right," she said, very quietly. "Damn you. You're right."

Bram came back on the evening of the sixth day.

He came up the river through the sleet, poling the barge alone against the current, with his great shoulders hunched and his face grey with exhaustion. He had not slept, Teo learned later, for most of the journey. He tied the barge up at the boathouse and climbed out and walked in through the door, and without a word, he reached into his coat and drew out a small clay pot, sealed with wax, wrapped in layers of wet cloth.

"Cold," he said hoarsely. "Kept it cold. In the river water. All the way."

Teo took it from him with both hands.

Inside, when he broke the wax, there were threads. Dozens of short lengths of clean white cotton thread, lying in a little pool of clear fluid. Bram's cousin Hessa had pricked the cow-blisters on her own hands with a clean needle, Bram explained in his slow voice, one by one, and drawn the threads through the fluid inside them, the way the red book said. Over two days. From six different cows' worth of blisters.

"She says she hopes it helps," said Bram. "She says to tell you her hands hurt."

Teo laughed. It came out unsteady.

He sat down on a crate, by the small fire, and pushed back the sleeve of his left arm. He took out his knife... the one he had used to cut open the purple spur in Fell's granary, a lifetime ago... and Mira took it from him without a word and held its blade in the flame until it glowed, and let it cool, and washed it in boiled water. Then she washed his arm. Then she washed her own hands, twice.

Nell was sitting on the stairs with her chin on her knees, watching. Hesk was sitting in his chair by the fire with his blind face turned toward them. Bram stood by the door.

Nobody said anything.

Mira knelt down beside Teo, took his arm in her hand, and made two small, shallow scratches in the skin above his elbow, side by side. Not deep. Just enough to break the skin. Tiny beads of blood welled up along them.

Then she took one of the white threads out of the clay pot with a pair of clean tongs, and laid it across the scratches, and pressed it gently into them, and held it there.

"Well," said Hesk quietly, from his chair. "What do you see, boy?"

Teo looked down at his arm.

At the thread, and the blood, and Mira's fingers holding them both.

"Nothing yet," he said.

"Good," said Hesk. "Then we start there."