The Pesthouse

The father, though, was keen to preserve at least a little of his dignity. He was not prepared, he said, to lose the short sword that he had hidden among his blankets, which was discovered by the sorters with a look of disapproval and triumph. Losing it and any ability to defend his family in the future was too great a price to pay, he argued. It was wrong of them to insist, even though the family would have winter food and accommodation as recompense. “We’ve already given up our few valuables. Enough’s enough.”

“It’s your decision,” he was told. “If you don’t like us, you can go.”

“I like you well enough. But you’re robbing us. What you’re doing isn’t much different from stopping us on the road and holding knives to our throats.”

“We never have knives.”

“I know that, yes.” The father was getting exasperated. “A wooden stick, then, if you held that to our throats,” he added hastily, trying to be sarcastic, and then realized how foolish he must sound. “Well, something sharp at least, for heck’s sake!” He glanced at his short sword, still lying on the table and within easy reach. His wife put her hand on his arm, a gesture of both solidarity and restraint. She could see how tempted he was — and not for the first time — to support his indignation with a blade. She could also see that these Baptists were fit young men who seemed ready to defend their high principles with their fists and feet.

The white-taped man who had been walking up the line listing forbidden objects and giving instructions to the applicants and who had seemed to be the most senior of the devotees now approached the family at the table, clapping his hands for silence. “Enough’s enough, indeed,” he said, spreading his arms to show that the way ahead was now barred to them. “Please gather your possessions and leave. We have no place for you.”

“Who’ll sew the buckles back? You’ve damaged everything. Who’ll mend the shoes?” the father asked.

The man shook his head, entirely calm. “No one,” he said, making his meaning very clear. Their metal already in the baskets would not be returned.

“Hand me back my mother’s bracelet, then.” The emigrant’s wife hoped to salvage what she could. “And let us have the silver spoon. That’s all the currency we have.”

“And give me back my sword.”

The calm man shook his head again. “Metals equal weapons equal death,” he said.

Now the wife was heated, too. “Then you’re thieves, for all your piety.”

“We don’t steal from anyone. We put the metal back into the soil. We bury it. That’s not theft. That’s restitution. We require our winter residents to observe our practices. Neither your broad sword nor your arguments are welcome in the Ark.” He took the father’s sword from the table and dropped it into a basket with as much ceremony and measured finality as he could. “You should leave now. The i

The next family was careful to cooperate and not argue. A much-loved, battered cooking pot and their leather-working needles plus their wrap of bone-handled tools — scissors, cutters, blades — which might have provided them with a livelihood on the far side of the ocean, all ended up among “the stones of hell” in the wastebaskets, with every other scrap of pewter, copper, battered steel or rusty iron, gold or silver, lead or tin. They had made up their minds swiftly. On the whole their sacrifice was worth it. They’d not survive the winter on the cold side of the palisades. They could survive without their tools.

Margaret offered Franklin’s bag. She could not think that there was any metal inside. Her comb and hairbrush passed inspection. They were wood and bone. They checked the pot of died-back mint for staples, too, but found none, though for a moment Margaret feared that they intended to tip out the earth and check for hidden scraps, but clearly soil was something that these devotees approved of. Nothing grew in metal, but any soil was natural and sanctified.

Perhaps it was just as well that the Boses had stolen Franklin’s knife and that she had lost or left her cedar box in Ferrytown. It would have been heartbreaking for her to see two of her lucky things, the coins and the necklace, flicked away as if they were as worthless and unpleasant as ticks. Now the devotees checked her body and the clothes she was wearing, her hems, her seams, her tucks, her folds. It was a humiliation that was only partly eased by the fact that the checker closed his eyes while doing so and repeated his apologies. He felt her head through her blue scarf but did not require her to remove it, nor did he seem to detect the shortness of her hair. He then examined Bella, though he smiled and stood back as soon as she grasped his little finger in her wet fist.

“These two are untarnished,” he said finally.

Margaret, then, had nothing to declare, not even a brass button. She was, they let her understand, the perfect applicant for entry to the Ark. She and “her son, Jackson,” registered their names and birthplace (Ferrytown) and were allocated lodgings in the Kindred Barn for Women and given a wooden token to exchange for food.

Now they were free to go ahead as residents through a second wooden gate into the i

Margaret was too exhausted to inquire further. Her daily tasks? The Helpless Gentlemen? The Finger Baptists? She would find out in due course. At least, for the first time since the onset of her flux, she was not even vaguely fearful. You will be safe, the man had said. And she believed that to be true. Here was an odd but organized community. She could smell roasting meat. She could not see anybody ru

Margaret walked across the great paved courtyard, soothing the now fretful and always hungry Bella, toward the place where they would spend the winter. Now that she could see the Ark’s i