I have no idea how germane this idea/comment is to the ballad, but 2 women living together have always been more acceptable to society than 2 men living together.....One of the women could be said to be chaperoning the other....and that could not be said of men.

A woman living alone with a cat would be more suspect that 2 women living together...especially without a cat.

From personal experience: I was a Ward Clerk in a New Mexico hospital when a young man with the Bubonic form of plague was admitted, about 1976/77. You would have thought the world was ending with all the precautions taken, but the buboes are not that infectious if you do not live with the rats/fleas that are infected.

It is difficult for a bubo infected human to infect another human, not so for a pnuemonic human. The pnuemonic form will spread like wildfire among humans.

I forget just what this has to do with Bessy Bell.....