‘Drink this.’
She uncurled, ever so slightly. She remembered holding a cup such as this for Michael, that day early on in the experiment. The way his blood had dripped into the milk and turned it red. A poisoned chalice.
‘No!’ A wave of dizziness went through her.
‘Easy! It’s only water. I cleaned it out.’
Reluctantly, she allowed him to coax the rim between her lips and tip the cup. The water tasted stale, but it did make her feel better.
She lifted her head.
‘Not so quick,’ Harry scolded. ‘An’t you ever dropped before?’
Louise blinked as the world before her undulated and finally settled. They were inside a hut. This one, though, was not piled with filth. Perhaps it was Harry’s own.
‘No, actually, I have not. I am not prone to fainting fits.’
She turned to him, expecting to see contempt in his face, but there was none. He looked as if he might pass out himself.
‘It’s enough to set anyone off,’ was all he said.
Barely knowing what she did, she reached out and took his hand. It felt warm, alive, responding to the pressure she applied.
‘The way Seth spoke … It reminded me of my sister. My sister went the hardest of them all. They say consumption is a kind and gradual death, romantic somehow. It was not so for Kitty.’ She should not be saying these things to someone with the disease, but she did not seem able to stop. ‘My little brother left softly enough. With Mama there were gasps. Her hands, clawing at the bedsheets as she fought for breath. But Kitty …’
Kneeling down beside her chair, Harry took her in his arms.
There was an instant when she stiffened, the respectable Miss Pinecroft still. But then she heard the men outside, their lungs working like bellows, and pressed her face deep into the linen of his shirt.
‘What am I going to do, Harry? What on earth am I going to do?’
Beneath all the terrible odours of the cave, she caught the essence of him, something musky and masculine and real.
‘Nothing to be done. We can’t save them.’
Four lives lost. The last dregs of Papa’s reputation would go with them. What then? Humiliation would kill him if the consumption did not. She was only twenty years old, but when she thought of her future it was like staring into a deeper darkness. This hated, diabolical disease. Why could it not just take her, along with everyone else?
Harry’s shoulder hitched against her cheek. ‘I thought I could tough it out, tried to make myself ready. But when I see what it’s doing to them …’ His voice cracked. ‘Maybe I’m white-livered after all.’
She tightened her grip on him, her fingers burrowing into his back. ‘You might not … Perhaps …’
‘Don’t,’ he whispered. ‘It’s useless. We both know it.’
Louise released him and sat back. He looked so young kneeling beside her. What a waste it was. Such meaningless, breathtaking waste! All these lives destroyed and nothing gained, no cure discovered, no cause furthered.
‘The thing is …’ He struggled. She saw his eyes filling with tears. Blue, today. A clear, flawless blue. ‘Now it comes to it … I don’t think I ever really lived.’
She leant forwards and pressed her lips to his.
It was a second before he responded. But then his mouth was moving, warm and soft, belonging a hundred miles away from this awful place.
Her heart began to throb, insistent. It was beating still. She was here, for now. Harry was here.
They clung to one another for dear life.
Chapter 36
A persistent drip awoke Louise from her sleep. Beneath her head was a hard, cold slab that sent twinges of discomfort down her neck.
She was in the cave.
She started up with a cry, groping for her spectacles. What time was it? Impossible to tell from the weak light in the hut. She might have been out for hours. She could not believe herself. Had she really slept while the men suffered outside?
That was not all that she had done.
She turned to look at Harry. He slumbered on, his back to her. She had a sudden memory of his skin moving against hers, and shivered.
A moment of madness. Desperation. Yet she felt more ashamed of deserting the men and Papa, even for a short time, than of taking comfort in his arms.
She thought that she would feel altered, afterwards, but there was no difference. No difference in the least. She brushed down her skirts and climbed to her feet with a wince. All the value that was put upon virtue and there was so little to the act. Now she knew.
Faintly, from beyond the walls of the cave, came the slap of water against rock. It sounded playful, but that was a deceit. The cliff face suffered; that was why it looked so stern. Wave after wave, blow after blow, relentless, interminable. The sea gradually ate away at the cliff’s defences, the same way misfortune was chipping away at her own.
One of the men spluttered.
They needed help. She reached out to Harry, shook his shoulder to wake him.
Something was wrong.
She snatched back her fingers. Their sensations, their feel for temperature must be at fault. They must.
Holding her breath, she touched him again. He did not feel like flesh. His shoulder was icy and solid.
She pulled at him and he rolled over, a dead weight. Glazed blue eyes stared beyond her. The lips, which she had so lately kissed, were no longer red, but grey and lifeless.
It could not be. It could not possibly be.
‘Harry,’ she said.
She did not expect a reply. Yet still she kept shaking him, saying his name.
‘Harry!’
He was the one patient able to function. The healthiest. He had shown no signs of decline.
‘My God,’ she gasped, realising. ‘I killed you.’
Jerkily, she pulled on her cloak and stumbled towards the door. Her body felt numb, would not listen to her commands. What had she been thinking? In a moment of selfish weakness she had seen him as a man, not an invalid; she had overtaxed him and now …
The other men’s coughs hit her. She swayed slightly, watching them writhe and twist. All alive. How could they be alive when Harry …
She had not heard him die. She had been right there, and she had not even woken up. He must have passed without a sound. Not like Mama, not like Kitty …
‘Oh God.’ Her knees went slack again, as if someone had cut the tendons behind them, and this time there was no Harry to hold her up. She grabbed at the wall of the cave, scratching her hands. ‘Papa.’
Until that moment she had thought only of her own loss. But these men were dying. Harry was already dead. Her father’s experiment was utterly doomed and she would have to convey the message. He would hear the death sentence of his career from her own lips.
She must fetch help for the men.
Somehow she persuaded her legs to walk. She had lost her slippers. Scattered pebbles on the beach pressed into the soles of her feet, but that seemed too trivial a thing to concern her. Fresh air blew cold against her face and she realised it was damp with tears.
She had never been one to despair before, but as she reached Morvoren House, she was aware of being broken at last. There was no feeling of relief, even at the prospect of rest for her sore and aching body. For a moment she paused outside the door, trying to catch her breath.
It swung open.
Papa stood there in his nightshirt. He had pulled breeches over it without properly fastening the buttons. His legs were stockingless, his feet bare.
‘They kept me from my duties,’ he raved. ‘Drugged me with something … Where are the men, Louisa, where are the men?’
‘Louise.’ Her mouth could barely form the name. ‘I am Louise.’
When she left, he had been paddling in the waters of the fever. Now he was fully submerged.
He reached for her chin, pulled it up and stared into her face. His fingers gripped her with surprising strength. ‘Louise,’ h
e repeated. ‘Louise … But she did not …’
She must not let him push past her. If he reached the cave and saw Harry …
She had meant to tell him the truth, but she could not, not while he was like this. She must protect him from it. Even if she had to write to another physician for help with the men, she would spare him her own painful knowledge.
She put out an arm to block his passage. ‘Creeda!’ she shouted. ‘Gerren!’
They emerged from the west wing.
‘Why was he left unattended?’ Louise demanded.
‘I am well,’ Papa interjected, ‘I am perfectly well, I must just—’
‘Didn’t expect him to wake,’ Creeda confessed. ‘Gave him that much laudanum …’
Pompey hurtled down the stairs, attracted by the sound of voices. Papa recoiled.
‘Get him away. Get the cur away!’
Nothing born of delirium should surprise her, but this did. Papa adored Pompey. She had never thought to see him cringing from the dog’s advances.
‘Gerren, take Pompey to my room.’
‘But ee said—’
‘Do it, Gerren.’
Louise could feel them slipping: the men, Papa, the servants; each one a rock tumbling from the cliff. Why was everyone so useless? Why would no one help her?
‘Please, Creeda,’ she said desperately. ‘I must get him to his room. Help me move him.’
‘The men …’ Papa objected.
Little did he know that one of them lay dead, somewhere below his feet. Presumably, there would be no family to claim poor Harry’s body. The gaol would not pay the expense of burial.
What was she going to do?
Somehow, they heaved Papa up the stairs and back into bed. He was still talking, talking all the while about lights and trades, and heaven knew what else. Louise seized the laudanum bottle from the medicine chest and administered two more drops to his moving lips.
Gradually, his eyelids wavered and fell. The breath rumbled in his chest. She stood watching him, conscious of the time and of his life slipping away.
She wished it were her instead.
‘Creeda,’ she whispered, needing to say the words. ‘Creeda … Harry is dead.’
Papa’s face twitched. But surely he could not have heard her?
‘Dead,’ Creeda echoed. She sounded as if she did not quite believe it. ‘Is he, miss?’
‘It was me.’ She closed her eyes. ‘My fault. I made him … I pushed him too far. I killed him.’
Something warm settled on her shoulder. Creeda’s hand. ‘No, miss. That can’t be true. You said he was getting better.’
‘He was! I thought …’
Forgetting herself, she turned to the maid and sobbed into her arms.
‘Who do I report it to? What shall I do with the body? I do not—’
‘I’ll send Gerren to town,’ Creeda soothed. ‘The man was a convict, wasn’t he, miss? I’m sure they won’t take much bother about him. The number of poor folk who die every day …’
Creeda’s gown smelt of rosemary. There was something comforting in that herbal scent, something redolent of her mother. ‘But the body …’
Creeda drew a breath. ‘You leave that to me. I know what to do.’
The solace in those words. She hungered to believe them.
‘Only …’ Creeda’s fingers tightened on her back. ‘Miss, are you really sure he’s dead? The experiment has failed?’
Louise could not erase the image of Harry lying there on a cold slab of rock, his sightless eyes fixed beyond her. Blue eyes. Had they not once been green?
‘I am certain he is dead, Creeda.’
‘Not … changed?’
She did not know whether to laugh or cry. In the midst of all this disaster, Creeda was Creeda still.
‘No, Creeda.’ She withdrew herself from the maid’s arms. ‘You never saw Harry, did you? He was … just a man. A good man.’
Creeda pressed her lips together. ‘If the men die … you and the master will be leaving us. Going back to Bristol.’
Fresh tears slid down her cheeks. They could never return to Bristol. But how could they remain here, living in the grave of all their hopes? Seeing every day the places she had walked with Harry, the gap on the cliff where the rocks had fallen …
‘It is too early to consider that. I can plan nothing until Papa is well again.’
Creeda’s eyes ranged over Papa, tossing and turning in the bed. ‘The master isn’t himself. What if he decides to send me back to Plymouth?’
Louise lowered her head into her hands, trying to clutch everything together. She had always prided herself on her courage and sense. It was as though she had spent a lifetime being calm, just waiting for today. Knowing that nothing she endured would be truly worth panicking about, until this.
‘I told you, Creeda, I cannot think of it now. Leave us, please. Just leave us and … tell Gerren to set out at once. We need doctors. Anyone who can come. I cannot leave those men alone in the caves.’
Was that a tear Louise saw gleaming in Creeda’s brown eye? She did not look eerie now. Just a girl, petulant in her fear of being returned home to … whatever treatment Mr Nancarrow deemed necessary.
‘It’s the caves you should have left alone in the first place,’ Creeda muttered bitterly. She slammed the door behind her.
For the first time, Louise had to admit that Creeda was right.
Chapter 37
Sleep had restored him. Fully restored him – he felt like one of the actors at county fairs who dropped their crutches in miraculous recovery after taking a quack’s nostrum.
Ernest sat up in bed. His shirt was plastered to his skin, but his mind had never felt so clear. The fever had refined him. He had sweated out all of his impurities.
A new dawn showed Louise asleep in the easy chair with her long legs curled beneath her. Her cap sat askew and her spectacles had slid to the end of her nose. Even in slumber, those lines of worry remained carved in her face.
His dearest child had endured so much. But she would not have to fret any longer.
Rising quietly, he pulled on his stockings, breeches and boots. Soon he would be dressing like a gentleman again: the powdered wigs, the shoes with buckles. He might even invest in a gold-topped cane. Anything was possible.
He could not wait to see them all bowing and scraping to him. Stuttering apologies in the wake of his great achievement. Imagine Lord Redfern’s chagrin! He almost laughed aloud.
Poor Louise was so exhausted that she failed to stir, even when he stroked her cheek. Only her eyelids flickered, as if she were avidly watching the outcome of some absorbing dream.
‘No more nightmares, my precious,’ he whispered. ‘Papa will put everything right.’
Only the small blue shepherds on the wallpaper watched him creep from the room and close the door.
No fires were lit. The shutters remained closed. But Ernest was unaffected by either the dark or the cold.
Pompey rose from where he was lying on the landing and sidled up to his master, sniffing at the dried sand on his boots. Of course, it was all falling out as it should: he must take Pompey with him. They did not like dogs.
Ernest wrinkled his nose as he considered the cur’s tangled fur, his wet, questing snout and the small tongue that darted out to lick his boots. Strangely, he did not seem to like Pompey that much himself.
‘Come,’ he whispered, and the dog obeyed, trotting with him down the stairs and into the hollow entrance hall. Stucco loomed from the walls, white as a consumptive’s calcified chest.
It all made sense now: each and every paradox the illness had presented. Why it touched rich and poor alike. The doctors had been looking at it with blinkered eyes. Searching for answers in wrong places. But Ernest was here, at the end of the world, and he could see it all.
Creeda had not locked the front door. He stepped out into a wakening day with Pompey at his heels. The salt air carried the freshness of potential. Here and there
a clump of gorse flared out from the clifftop, brimstone yellow. He began to walk.
The fine weather they had enjoyed since the end of February was turning into something colder and brighter. Every object presented sharp, clear lines. The shore was washed clean, the sky the vital blue of a vein. It was as though he was viewing the world through a microscope.
Sails bobbed on the distant horizon. Ships taking the clay, the tin and the copper to other shores. All the secret, hidden treasures of Cornwall. But he had found the rarest of them all.
The stones that grated beneath his boots finally gave way to sand. It yielded to his steps, taking every impression. Ernest glanced over his shoulder just the once, to see the prints he and Pompey had left.
The final leg of a long, arduous journey.
The cave rose up before them. The sea pulled at the shore, the glass armonica sang and Ernest smiled.
His family had not died in vain.
He had finally found a way to quash the blue devils, once and for all.
*
When they laid out the dead, they placed coins on their eyelids. Sometimes stones. Anything heavy that would keep their inanimate pupils from gazing into a world in which they no longer belonged. Perhaps it has happened to me, Louise thought. Perhaps I am dead.
It was not just her eyes that felt weighted. Every shred of her ached. But that obstinate flicker of life remained, the one that refused to let even consumption quench it.
A clock in the corner ticked by the seconds while her eyelids remained closed. Papa had been fretful at nightfall, but now he did not stir. No coughing, no mumbling, no tossing in his bed. She thought of Harry, passing noiselessly from the world while she lay beside him. Her stomach clenched.
She did not want to open her eyes. Did not know what she would find.
Another minute passed. She could not even hear Papa’s quiet breath. Pressure built behind her ribs, forced itself up her throat.
What if she just stayed there? What if she never let herself see?
Claws scratched at the closed door.
Her mind was racing with memories of Papa: his wise eyes, the reassuring smile, the comfort of his embrace. She must keep them. No matter what terrible grey version of him stretched out in the bed, she must hold onto him as he was. She was the only person left who could.
Bone China Page 24