“Yes, Oi am, dearie.” He cracked his whip. “Otherwise wouldn’t Pegs ha’ gone to her grave believin’ it was my onforgiveness laid a spell on the tothers? That’s what womenkind be. Same as when the Faith Healers got hold of her. Arter you was oiled and prayed over, they said ’twas want o’ faith had killed all the tothers.”
“Was I oiled and prayed over?”
“Well, you see when you come, poor Emma felt elders and oils was all there was left to try—there’s a rare lot of you Peculiars down them parts and all the way to Southend, and they’d been gettin’ round her like gulls round the plough—so the instant you started barkin’——”
“Barking?” gasped the little girl.
“You had the croup—so she turned Peculiar,” he explained. “Like you,” he added reproachfully. “And a wery dangerous thing to do, bein’ as you might ha’ died like the tothers. Did, she’d ha’ been had up for child-murder—what she accused me of.”
“And why weren’t the doctors had up, that didn’t save all my little brothers and sisters?” asked Jinny.
“That’s just how your mother used to argufy,” he said angrily, flicking at poor Methusalem. “Turnin’ everything topsy-tivvy, Oi says. And what was the result? Two years arter you was prayed and oiled out o’ croup, she was took herself with smallpox and wouldn’t see a soul except elders and deacons and sich-like truck. Oi will say for your father though, that he was allus firm with her; naught she could say could turn him from his Wesleyan principles, and when he caught her smallpox he had the doctor in like blazes and took all the medicine he could lay hands on. But Emma would stick to her own way—though she died of it, poor thing.”
“But didn’t you tell me father died the same day as my angel mother?”
“Ain’t that why Oi come for you in my cart, bein’ as the creditors sold up everythin’ except the infected beddin’?”
“I know, Gran’fer,” she interrupted. “But then didn’t father die of his way just as much as mother of hers?”