Founders’ Hall was full. All 280 seats taken, with Miriam Aldbury’s 30 additional standing places occupied before seven fifteen. People stood in the corridor.

They had come to hear about letters.

Dr Emmeline Furness, lecturer in urban history at Bobington Polytechnic, opened the spring public lecture series on Tuesday evening with a presentation on the Meredith Letters — the forty-two personal letters of textile merchant Josiah Meredith, discovered behind a false wall panel in the old Meredith & Blackwell warehouse on Harker Street by demolition foreman Milo Garrett on 10 March.

Furness has assessed eighteen of the forty-two letters so far. What she presented on Tuesday was a careful, methodical account of what they contain: a businessman’s private view of Bobington in the late 1850s and 1860s. His anxieties about the harbour. His opinions on the price of cloth. His fondness for a particular type of cheese from Caldwell that he could no longer obtain.

And his terror, in the autumn of 1860, of the fever.

“Letter fourteen is dated November 1860,” Furness told the audience, reading from the original text projected on the hall’s new electric lantern slide. “‘The same affliction as last year’s visitation has returned. Four in the lower ward. Mrs Hewson is not expected to survive the week.’”

The significance is this: the 1859 Bobington fever is well documented. It killed an estimated 340 people over three months. It was understood as a single, catastrophic epidemic. What the Meredith Letters suggest — for the first time — is that the fever returned the following year. That it was endemic, not singular. That the city endured not one outbreak but two.

Furness was careful. “These letters are a single man’s correspondence,” she said. “They are not a medical record. But the language — ‘the same affliction’ — and the timing are significant. If there was a second outbreak, it changes our understanding of mid-century public health in Bobington.”

She also displayed, to considerable excitement in the hall, a pen-on-linen architectural drawing found folded inside letter sixteen: the original quay layout showing the location of the fever ward behind the easternmost grain shed, near the route of the Lower Conduit as mapped by Pella Strand earlier this year.

It was after the lecture, during the questions, that the most remarkable moment of the evening occurred.

A man at the back of the hall stood up. He was elderly, thin, and carried three manila folders.

“My name is Leonard Hewitt,” he said. “I am a retired mathematics teacher. I have been researching the 1859 fever for thirty years, using parish burial records from St Cuthbert’s and St Anne’s. I always suspected there was a second wave.”

The hall went quiet.

Hewitt, 74, approached the lectern after the session ended and offered the folders to Furness. They contained three decades of transcribed parish data — burial dates, ages, causes of death where recorded, addresses — compiled in meticulous handwriting from records that predated Bobington’s modern civil registration system.

Furness accepted them.

“I will read every page,” she said.

Twenty-two letters remain to be assessed. Furness expects to complete the full assessment within three weeks. She is presenting at the Polytechnic’s spring exhibition later this month. The Hewitt transcriptions may, she said, provide the statistical foundation that the Meredith Letters alone cannot.

Hewitt left the hall carrying a raincoat and an empty folder.