by Adam Roberts
‘They assured me that York would be captured ! But they have suffered unexpected military reverses, I suppose. Unexpected.’
There was a silence. Bates became more acutely aware of the rattle-chatter of the carriage’s wheels upon the road. Beneath that continually percussive noise he could make out a moaning sound, the creaking of the wooden axles distorting under their weight, flexing and giving the weight up again. More distantly audible was the thrum of the horse’s hoofs, and the chants and encouragements of the coachman, urging his team onwards.
‘We must mount upon a Pegasus of our own,’ said the Dean, in a newly sly voice. He leaned forward.
‘You refer,’ said Mrs Burton, ‘to the explosive cannon?’ This subject seemed to animate her.
‘Of course I do. Your own father’s gift to us.’
The fact that Bates remembered something was enough to spur him to speech. He was pleased merely by the fact of remembrance. ‘David of each,’ he said. ‘I remember, Dean, you telling me of your partnership with him.’
There was a silence. It was a moment before Bates realised it was an awkward silence.
‘Partnership,’ said the Dean. ‘Well, well, well. I was honoured, Mrs Burton, honoured to be able to assist your noble father in any respect at all.’
There was silence inside the carriage.
‘Mrs Burton,’ said Bates, after the silence had lengthened to a painful degree. ‘I must confess - Dean. Mrs Burton, Mr Oldenberg. Will you favour me with your attention? Your counsel?’
‘You mistake me, sir,’ retorted the Dean, sourly.
‘Mr Bates, please, please,’ said Eleanor, placatingly, with an amused glance at Oldenberg. ‘You’ll forgive Henry, of course. He has been ill at sorts for these last hours.’ The Dean harrumphed. ‘If,’ Mrs Burton continued, ‘there is any way in which we can help, you have only to name it.’
‘There are . . . intermittencies,’ Bates said, shortly. ‘In my memory. I cannot recall, for example, how I come to be in the carriage, at this moment.’
‘We are travelling north,’ said Eleanor.
‘Yes. And you . . . ?’
‘I was a poor exile, a Ruth amongst alien corn, and the Colonel has taken pity upon me. The Dean here very kindly intervened on my behalf. He convinced the Colonel that my facility with the language of France, and my relationship to the great Davidowic, meant that I should be accommodated. But the Colonel does not trust me, I fear. He suspects me of being a spy, perhaps.’
‘Spy,’ echoed Bates. ‘How absurd!’
‘Thank you, sir.’
The Dean fell into a slumber from which it did not seem possible to wake him. He snored like a gurgling drainhole. Sweat was on his brow, and his skin felt hot. He was clearly feverish. Perhaps, indeed, had passed into a form of trance. But Bates was more concerned by Eleanor. She sat forward on the bench, and then sat back; she sat forward and sat back. This repeated, almost automatic action, accompanied by the rustling of her dress as she moved, rasped on Bates’s consciousness. There were studs of perspiration on her face, a hectic flush in vertical blotches up both her cheeks. Her eyes were filmed over with moisture; they shone like fruit that is waxed, but they did not seem to focus.
‘Mrs Burton,’ Bates asked. ‘Are you quite well? Mrs Burton? Are you feeling in the least out of sorts?’
‘Abraham,’ she replied, in a choked voice. ‘I am ill. I am unwell. I confess it.’
‘My dear Mrs Burton,’ said Bates, sitting forward and catching up her hand. ‘Please be still a moment.’ But the rocking went on, pulling away from the hand clenched in Bates’s, heaving back in towards it again. The hand felt moist, as hot as lechery, and it slipped from Bates’s grip.
‘I am unwell, I am unwell,’ she said. Then she began moaning, a low noise. To his revulsion, his profound self-disgust, the noise agitated Bates’s sense of venery. His skin tingled. His body entered into those familiar and revolting physical alterations, those warm tightnesses underneath the grace of his clothing. How could he respond so at a time like this! To cover his despicable failure of character, he leaned out of the window and bellowed to the coachman to stop. He shouted the word in English. He yelled it in French.
The coach stopped and Bates struggled with the recalcitrant door, pushing and heaving until it gave way and he tumbled outside.
The air felt damp. The light was muted, sifted through several layers of white cloud.
The Colonel, leading the rear coach, was striding towards him. ‘What is passing? Why have you called stop? Monsieur, talk to me about this question.’
‘Mrs Burton is gravely ill,’ said Bates, pulling himself up to his full height.
‘Gravely ill?’
Bates nodded, tried to compose himself, and added: ‘She’s ill at any rate.’
‘You yourself were gravely ill. Did this stop the carriage? Mr Bates, do not call such words as stop except unless it is an emergency. Do you understand ?’
‘But we must stop. We must find shelter. Mrs Burton has need of medical expertise.’
Larroche walked briskly to the open door of the carriage and looked inside. He exchanged some words with Eleanor in French, and walked back to Bates. ‘She has a little sickness of the head. It is necessary that she remain in the carriage until we are to arrive at our destination. One further night, and one morning, and we will be to arrive at Scarborough. There is no possibility of any other thing.’ He hurried to his own carriage. ‘Inside, Monsieur, inside, and we must - go - on!’
Eleanor seemed to rally. She ceased her rocking, and sat instead wedged into the corner beside the door. Bates made his best effort to keep her spirits up with conversation, but her light was fading. There was a strange admixture of dread and excitement in Bates’s heart. He permitted himself the liberty of laying his hand upon her brow once every quarter of an hour. More frequently would have been improper, although more is what he wanted: he was shamefully aware of the urge to sit next to his patient, to press his hand to the skin of her forehead, to take her tapering fingers in his own, to crush her whole body to his chest-a wicked desire made more deplorable by the fact that it seemed quickened by her incapacity. Manly self-restraint was absolutely required. And yet, he told himself, he could not permit his own weakness to result in the omission of any attention at all to Mrs Burton. She would for instance require water (from his water bottle, pressed to the miniature plumped cushions of her lips) despite being too ill to fetch it for herself. And a duty devolved upon him, surely, to check her temperature - in a calm, disinterested manner. Four times an hour would suffice. Less would derogate from his duty; more would stray into - impropriety.
The Dean, dead to the world in the opposite corner, was also sweating. Indeed, an unpleasant smell rose from his body; not the smell of night soil, nor yet of ordinary filth, but nevertheless a reek of some unpleasant decaying savour, perhaps the sweat itself: an off-cabbagey, faintly nauseous odour. Bates checked the fellow’s temperature as well, making sure to do so four times an hour, as with Mrs Burton. Perhaps he did not loiter over this second patient quiet so much; but that (he told himself) was because the Dean, a man, could be expected to possess a constitution better able to resist the advance of the fever. Mrs Burton, on the other hand, was a woman. Frailer. Solicitude more needful in her case.
It grew dark. By intermittent moonlight through the broken carriage window Bates watched the progress of his patient. She moaned in her unconsciousness; occasionally she moved her hands, as if making the motions to fend off some too-intimate figure. Bates’s own throat was dry. He coughed. He was forced to lick his own lips.
She was, he decided, trying to say something; but her voice was so low, and so broken, that he could not make out the words. But what if it were important? What if this were some crucial communication? It was his duty to - rise, kneel upon the shaking floor of the carriage, place his head close to her mouth. It was his duty. Turning his head to present his left ear to her lips, so that his eyes came close to her
shoulder, to the line of her neck. Bates’s own throat was dry again.
The murmur of her voice, like doves.
Bates could not decipher the—
‘There is a pestilence!’ shrieked the Dean.
Bates was so terrified that he could not hold back an equivalent shriek, a seizure of his own body that lurched him forward, the (delicious horror!) collision of his chest against Eleanor’s as he tried, frantically, to stand up, to step away from her. The pressure of his own front against the yielding figure slumped on her seat. He almost leapt as he got to his feet, and he clacked his head against the roof of the carriage. That was a painful lump. ‘I stand in for medical assistance,’ he cried. ‘I seek only to alleviate her suffering - my designs were—’
But the Dean was not addressing him. Moonlight shuddered into the tiny space and Bates could see his eyes were shut. Icicle dribbles of foam were pendant upon his wobbling lower lip. Both his fists were clenched tightly.
‘Contagion!’ he said, in a smaller voice, and then muttered fiercely and incoherently for long seconds. ‘The bolts of Apollo upon the Greek forces at Troy!’ he exclaimed. ‘We are all suffering the contagion, for does the Bible! - the Bible! - does the Bible not say that contagion will destroy—’ mutter, mutter, silence.
Bates, gingerly, settled himself back into his own seat. His heart was rattling as fast as the horse’s hoofs striking the ground outside. His hands were trembling.
After a while he fell asleep himself; an uneasy slumber, the sort in which the sleeper is continually aware of the real world all about his sleeping form, like grit under the eyelid. The noises and movements of the waking world, even as he is immobilised by his own exhaustion. He woke with the window grey with dawn-light and feeling not in the least refreshed.
Matters inside the carriage were much worse. Mrs Burton, deeper in unconsciousness, had lost control of her own body. A stink, most rank and distressing, emanated from her side of the carriage. Bates found himself extraordinarily upset by this development. He was almost unmanned by how upset this simple fact made him. Clearly Mrs Burton was undergoing the same fever that had afflicted him, and was accordingly liable to the same physical lapses that he had experienced. But to think of her, so beautiful, so poised, suffering such disgrace touched on a monstrous injustice at the heart of things. Somebody would need to attend to her, clearly. Quite apart from the stench in the carriage there was the consideration of Mrs Burton’s own feelings. A nurse, a mercy-sister as the Germans styled it, or perhaps some nun or mother, ought to be called at once. Bates could pull the Dean from the carriage and leave this notional saintly female to perform the necessary hygienic ablutions upon poor Eleanor. Was there no village, no town at which Larroche could stop the convoy to recruit such an individual?
Bates stuck his head out of the window, pushing his shoulders out too, and registering at first only the relief from the odour inside. The dawn air was cool, dew-scented, and a brightness was gathering behind the grey eastern clouds, like the pull of a bowstring readying to unleash the first shafts of the day. Sticking his head out was like plunging it in cold water. The road was smooth, and the coach rattled along gently.
Bates rotated his body so as to be facing the rear coach: Larroche was there, all muffled up on the driver’s board; one of his men beside him made angler’s motions with the reins.
‘Colonel!’ Bates cried. ‘We have need of medical assistance! We must stop - we must find some sister of mercy to attend to Mrs Burton!’
There was no indication that Larroche had heard him. His body jiggled with the motion of the carriage but was otherwise unmoving. He might very well have been asleep behind his padded swathes of cloak and muffler.
Bates decided the matter must be decided at once. He started, awkwardly, rotating his body to bring his face a half-turn about, the better to be able to address the driver of his own coach. ‘Monsieur!’ he bellowed. ‘Monsieur! Attendez un moment—’
But no sooner had his face became aligned with the direction of travel than a branch from a roadside hedgerow struck him thouac! across his visage. He yelped as if scalded, tried to haul his head back inside the coach, but succeeded only in knocking the back of his skull fiercely against the frame of the window. A second sprig, heavy with dew and evergreen foliage, smote his cheek like a cat-o’-nine-tails. With a second effort he managed to pull himself inside the coach again.
His face sparkled with pain. He sat himself down, and began to explore the damage with his fingers’ ends. None of them came away bloody; but his cheeks, his nose and lips, throbbed savagely. There must be weals. He might very well be disfigured! O indignity!
His pain transmuted, following the natural logic of these things, into rage at the coachman for driving the carriage so close to the hedgerow; and then, less obviously, rage at Mrs Burton herself for allowing her own disgrace and so precipitating the entire episode. Bates bethought himself that he had at least managed to hold his soil until he could exit the carriage. Why could she not? It was a typical woman’s weakness, and he, in a gentlemanly desire to help without disgracing her, had received this punishment for his pains! Well, he concluded, folding his arms and pressing himself into the corner of his seat, she could arrange for her own lavation. He would try no more foolish schemes of that sort. He had learned his lesson.
After a while, however, his rage abated. It was, he found himself thinking, ungentlemanly of him to blame Mrs Burton for something quite outside her power to control - something of which, when she awoke, she would most certainly be mortified and ashamed. He must do something before she awoke. There would be no shame in his helping a lady in such a manner; he would not take any prurient interest in her private corporeality; he would adopt a disinterested and medical frame of mind. And yet, at the mere thought of his intervention, a cockstand manifested itself, and he was aware again of that roiling in his lower gut - not nausea, but excitement; the twinkling and buzzing in his own torso. He was gripped in between the congress of good and evil - the aspirations of his own little soul were continually being defiled by his rattish and verminous body with its revolting folds of pink flesh. The cankerous and grasping flesh. He despised himself.
‘The doves of Apollo!’ the Dean shouted suddenly. Once again it made Bates twitch. He wished the old fool would stop doing that, yelling suddenly out of the blue. Bates went over to him.
Foam was bubbling in the corner of the Dean’s mouth, and the lips were working as if to say something more. There was a series of moans, then some inaudible mutterings, then another cry: ‘They spread the poison, the pestilence, the pestipoison!’ Here - most startlingly of all - the Dean opened his eyes, looked straight ahead, sneezed, and then went back to sleep. Or back into his coma.
‘Dean?’ Bates asked, tentative. But the man was once again dead to the world.
Bates half-dozed, his head jogging to the rhythm of the carriage’s movement. Half-dozed. Three-quarters-dozed. He felt his eyelids rolling down, felt the miniature pressure of their motion upon his eyeball. Eleven-twelfths-dozed.
He woke with a jolt and sat straight up. They were no longer in motion. Larroche must be resting his horses.
Bates tumbled from the carriage and found the first man he could, asking him in poor French for water - a bowl - a towel. He tried to explain Mrs Burton’s situation, but the expression was beyond him.
They had stopped in a village, beside a post-house on the high road. The horses were unharnessed: four of them were drinking at a long stone trough and the other two waited, shivering their flanks and fidgeting their heads up and down. Sweat stood up in bands along the creatures’ flanks, like strands of tinsel in the morning light. Larroche was there, producing, like a conjuror, enormous balls of smoke from the tiny bowl of his pipe.
‘Colonel! I must request from you the implements of washing. Mrs Burton has - suffered an unfortunate consequence of her sickness. There has been a soiling. There is night-soil within the coach.’
Larroche took his p
ipe from his mouth. ‘Indeed?’ he asked, with a puzzled expression.
‘It is hard to convey to you,’ said Bates, feeling his frustration keenly, ‘the precise nature of Mrs Burton’s accident without bringing obloquy upon her name. I beg you to remember that she is a gentlewoman. I would ask you not to press me on this matter. Can you find a nurse, or some other woman in this village who could be pressed to perform a merciful service for Mrs Burton? Before, I mean to say, she wakes up? She must be washed; preferably washed such that she never discover her physical lapse.’
‘A woman?’ asked Larroche, still looking puzzled. ‘A nurse?’
‘Dammit man,’ said Bates, boiling over suddenly (for he was not given to swearing), ‘can you not understand the delicate situation I am in? It should not be too hard a matter to find some woman in this village capable of performing acts of hygiene for a sister in need!’
‘Look about this town, Monsieur,’ said Larroche, replacing his pipe.