The cough turned in the ninth week, as a fever turns, all at once and then all the way down.
Sella felt it go in the morning, before she had reached the first house in the lane. The wind had come round to the south in the night and brought a little warmth off the Sallow, and the flue in the eel-wives’ lane drew clean for the first time in a month, and when she put her ear to the nearest chest the wet catch in it had lost its edge. It was not gone. It would not be gone for weeks. But it had stopped climbing. It had begun, very slightly, to fall.
She went through the lanes with the bone-ledger in its oilskin and counted.
Forty-one had come back to their own beds. Forty-one women and men and children had coughed their way through the worst of the winter and out the other side, and some of them had even got up to stand at their doors and look at the river, which was running high and brown under the first spring rains. Sella marked each name in the ledger with a small clean tick, in the column for the living, and she did not study the faces. A bonesetter who looked at the faces of her recovered patients began to think she had done something clever.
