6 OCTOBER
There were trials today of both a practical and spiritual nature. We began the process of taking specimen slides from all the mucous membranes and affected organs of the immune, and of the diseased rabbits. It was long and full of suffering. We have cauterised the smaller incisions against infection and the stink got the better of me more than once. I am all but purblind. Hours of bending, and looking, and bending and looking. I begin to feel like an automaton.
‘How long will they endure like that?’ I asked, as Alonso laid by me the section of bowel, glistening and pale.
‘It is remarkable what the living frame can withstand,’ he said. He turned from me. ‘They will live,’ he said, ‘long enough.’
The rabbits’ cries were like wind whistling under a door.
‘I will sever the vocal cords,’ Alonso said. His back heaved like a bellows. It was somewhat better once they were silent. Eyes shone in the depths of the cages.
Later we sat on the step in the evening sun and shared a cigarillo, the oak vast at our backs. A welcome breeze played lightly with our coat-tails. The land was spread before us like warm toast.
‘Bernard’s wife left him,’ Alonso said, ‘on account of his forays into vivisection.’
‘Not before he spent her dowry on it,’ I said. I think I was doing an impression of cheer. ‘And we have no wives to object. We lucky fellows.’
He drew on the cigarillo, and held the smoke within. The day was merciless on his parchment face.
I laid my hand on his shoulder. ‘There is no other way,’ I said. ‘Do not feel it too deeply. It must be living tissue.’
Through the linen, the bones of his shoulder were sharp beneath my hand. Their proximity seemed for a moment unwholesome, as if the skin were reflected back, exposing the muscle and beneath it the gentle connection of scapula and humerus in the glenoid cavity. The white bones shifting in perfect precision. Bile rose and I was for some moments wholly occupied with that sensation.
I became aware at length that Alonso was speaking.
‘I am disgusted with myself,’ he said. ‘I cannot adhere to my principles, but am swayed by the maudlin, the easy sympathy which is the layman’s privilege. It argues a want of purpose in me. If one is to undertake such things, it must be done with gravity and steadiness. Not with sensibility.’
I thought of what lay in the chamber beneath our feet. ‘It is always the question,’ I said. ‘Can we believe that we are endowed with sufficient authority to take such actions – I will not say cruelties, for that argues an intent of which I think we are both absolved – such actions which are, by their nature, the cause of egregious suffering? But the furtherance of knowledge – I cannot think it comes cheap. We are in the ghastly kitchen, I acknowledge it.
‘And I will not say to you, think of the lives that will be improved, of the families who could be rid of congenital predispositions to disease. I will not say, think of the good we will do, in identifying particular immunities and isolating them. We do not know whether what we do will benefit any man or beast. It is the nature of medicine, of science. We proceed always through the fog of doubt, seeking the clear air which may not come.’
Alonso sighed and rubbed his hand across his nape. His hair stood up in quills. ‘And once again you prove your worth, Charles,’ he said. ‘For naturally you are right. No neat answers will be vouchsafed us.’ He threw the cigarillo hard into a gorse bush. ‘Foolish to look for them.’
I make no complaint here about the methods. I state fact, only.
Iris
AUTUMN 1913
I’m fourteen.
The churchyard’s quiet, sunlit. The ranks of stones leprous and upright. Beech leaves litter the turning grass, red, burnt orange. The summer’s been disappointing, grey and full of inconsequential showers. I saw it through window panes, running with endless rain. But today the sky is clear, the sun bright and low in the sky.
She’s under a long slab of white slate in the northwest corner. It gleams in the low light. My father’s hand, warm under my elbow. The pouch in his jacket pocket thumps gently against my waist as we go down the ranks towards her.
‘Good day, Mama,’ I say.
I put the rowan branch down. The berries are bloody red on the white. I broke it from a tree on a high tor above the Dart. My hands smart from the tussle. Thin red grazes cover them. My father puts his offering beside it. Long-stemmed bearded irises, unseasonably forced in some hothouse, somewhere. The delicate overlarge petals ripple in the breeze.
My father spreads his coat on the grass and we sit by her head. He turns the red and white ring on his finger, idle, absent. He has worn it as long as I can remember. It’s a ladies’ ring, I have come to realise in recent years. The thin gold band is absurd and elegant on his long hands.
Sometimes we speak; he tells me about her: stories of her childhood, about her eyes or what music she liked. Today we just sit.
There’s an old mound next to her grave. It’s misshapen, covered in viper’s bugloss and late foxgloves. I don’t know why it’s there but I like it. It’s a small blooming hill in all seasons. Bumblebees move through the undergrowth busily. Papa told me once that it was her brother’s grave. But there’s no headstone. He never said more about it.
I watch the red leaves fall, tossed on the breeze. I’m protective of him at these times. I have nothing to mourn; I never knew her. Papa loved her very much and she died and that makes him more important than me when we come here. But today – it must be different.
I shiver in the light wind. My body is still strange, too full of edges. This is the second day on which I have ventured from Rawblood since the illness took me.
The meningitis gnawed away time. There are great holes in my memory. I am grateful for them. I was ill for ever. I wish to remember less, not more. My father’s hand on my head. Papa, this is the disease … No. Hush. January and February passed, but I didn’t know. Spring is missing, a dark swathe of nothing. Summer faded back in softly, was warm light shining on glass bottles and teaspoons on windowsills, drawn curtains, my head hot and cold against the pillow.
Fever, long and deep, is like a journey. I saw things. I travelled. Sometimes I catch the tail end of the fever dream. Dark and moonlight shifting … But it always slips through my fingers and that’s better, I think. With autumn I am learning to slide myself back into the waking world.
If Henry Gilmore were buried here I would visit him. I know what I’d bring to his grave. It’s blooming now in the hills. Great spiked armfuls of golden gorse. But he’s buried away in the Methodist cemetery at Princetown.
I turn and face Papa squarely. I say, ‘I have made a decision.’
‘Yes?’
‘I will be a nurse,’ I say. ‘That is what I will do.’
‘There is time and to spare to think about that.’
My father’s ideas have such shape, such mass – I could hold them in my hands like stones. In his presence I become elusive. My thoughts and feelings dissipate in his strong opinion. I never speak to him as I am about to do.
‘Perhaps,’ I say. ‘But there is something we must resolve between us,’ I say. ‘If we are to go on.’
‘Indeed?’ he says, and the slight downward turn of his mouth nearly stops me, but I mustn’t, I mustn’t stop. I will not be lied to any longer.
‘I’ve had a great deal of time on my hands these last months,’ I say. ‘So. I thought I should start to learn. I should prepare myself to go on to nursing. And I live in a house full to the eaves of medical books. Very convenient. But where to begin? With such a vast topic before me, where was I to start? So I thought, I’ll begin with us. I will learn about what ails us, the Villarcas. The disease.’
His dark unreadable eyes. He says nothing.
‘I read everything,’ I say, ‘that I could find on families, on congenital diseases. Which pass down, generation to generation.’ Long hours propping the mouldering books open before me on the coverlet. My weak hands suffu
sed with the dry scent of spoiled paper, old ink.
‘And what was your conclusion?’ he says. He’s quiet.
‘Horror autotoxicus,’ I say. ‘The term coined by Ehrlich. It is a protective mechanism. It is how the immune system distinguishes between healthy tissue and disease. Horror autotoxicus is a good thing. Very dangerous not to have it.’
‘Very,’ he says.
‘So I would like to know,’ I say, despising the quiver in my voice, ‘why you have fed me this story. Why you have misled me since before I could speak, lied to me all my life.’
Papa’s finger is under my chin. He tips it up until we are face to face. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I thought, somehow, if it were a rational thing … that you would not be so afraid. I was wrong, I think.’
‘You are a liar,’ I say.
‘If we are to speak of lying, I would have you explain how you broke the Rules each night, and lied to me each day. I thought to wait until you are stronger, but here we are.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I say.
‘Who roused the house in the middle of the night, Iris? Who told me to go to you, that you had fallen ill? The game is up.’
I didn’t know Tom had gone to Papa. ‘Don’t punish him,’ I say. ‘It was my fault. Don’t send him away.’
Papa says, ‘Well. We cannot go on as we are. I wish to trust you, but so far you have not been worthy of it. Duplicitous.’
‘I know where I learned it,’ I say, amazed at my daring.
‘But I have reason.’ Papa’s eyes are on my mother’s grave. And that other quiet shape beside her, which crawls with scent and life. ‘I am protecting your life.’
‘Why,’ I say, ‘should I not have a friend?’
‘When I have told you this,’ Papa says, ‘you will cease to be a child. I had hoped I could give you a very few more years of innocence. But if it is not to be … It is fitting that we do this here. Where she is buried. Where they let me bury him. It was not common practice. The vicar drew the line at a headstone. Very unforgiving, the Church. But they lie together, at least. Brother and sister. I gave them that.’
Something caws in the bare trees behind and I startle. ‘Papa …’ A shadow passes over us. A rook wide and beautiful overhead, the rough voice calling.
‘Look at me,’ Papa says. ‘If you are old enough to call me a liar, you are old enough to interpret the evidence. Come. Apply logic. What is it really, the disease?’
‘Perhaps it is merely your fear,’ I say. ‘That I will leave you alone.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘If only it were so.’
‘Tell me, Papa.’
‘You must come to this yourself,’ he says. ‘You must. I will not end your childhood for you.’
I take a shaking breath. ‘All right,’ I say. ‘I will take it that you have a good reason to keep us away from the world.’
‘I do.’
‘Because of danger to us, or … because we are dangerous?’
‘Both.’
‘We two are the only two left of our name. So the Villarcas are indeed predisposed to die young, as if from congenital disease?’
‘It is so.’
‘But it is not a congenital defect. Because those who marry into the Villarca family also die from the same cause.’
‘Yes.’
‘But it is not contagion.’
‘No.’
‘We do not die of natural causes. It follows then … that we are killed.’
‘Yes,’ he says, heavily. ‘Good.’
‘How may one be killed? In battle, at sea, falling from a horse … Any number of ways. But we all die of one cause?’
‘Yes.’
‘Murdered.’
‘Yes.’
‘It argues some kind of agency. Intent. Are we being hunted, Papa? Is it some sort of feud, an old enemy of the Villarcas …’
‘You are close, now,’ he says.
‘But this has plagued us for many lifetimes. Many, many years. So the feud is passed down through generations, father to son, perhaps …’
‘It is one person,’ he says. ‘One.’
‘Not possible,’ I say, and the hairs on my neck are upright and cold.
‘She is like a disease, in many ways,’ he says. ‘It was not all a lie. I believe she travels in our blood, passed down, that she is a biological inheritance, as much as a spiritual one … But she is like nothing on earth, really. She comes in the night. Sometimes in mist or fog. A woman, or once a woman. White, starved. She comes with the sound of grinding stone, and despair. She looks into your eyes, and then …’
‘A ghost.’ I am disappointed. I had thought, perhaps, that he might tell me the truth.
‘A ghost, a curse … Words, merely. What have they to do with her? She has taken us all,’ he says. ‘One by one. Given us death. She took at the last your mother and by doing so nearly killed me too. We are the last, you and I. Be assured that this is not a story in Blackwood’s Magazine. Do not make that mistake. This is no mournful lady, floating through deserted halls. She bears no message from beyond the grave. She has no desires save one, which is to end you, to take your life.’ His face is bleak. ‘Understand?’
I will not be taken in again, I will not.
‘I was a child when I saw her,’ he says. ‘It felt … as if the living marrow had been sucked from the world. I think I have spent the rest of my life recovering from the sight of her.’ He stops and presses his palm hard into the springy turf of the grave. There is an expression on his face which I never, ever want to see again. The sound of blood, rushing in my ears.
‘She has taken us all; I am determined that she will not take you, Iris. And if I am to keep you alive, keep you safe, you must obey me to the letter. For this is the heart of it: she comes to those of our family, comes sooner or later – when we love. Do you understand me?’ He takes my face in his hands and looks and this is more frightening than all the rest because he is sad, so sad. ‘Iris, do you understand what it means?’
‘That I must take the greatest of care,’ I say. ‘Not to …’ I stop, because actually I don’t understand. From somewhere deep there comes the thought: moonlight … Sickness runs through me, everywhere.
‘If you love,’ he says, ‘or if you marry, or if you continue the line, she comes. These things do not always go together – heavens, that is another conversation, for another day – but she will make no distinction. So you must not. Do not join anyone to our family. It is a death sentence for you, and for them. Those Villarcas who live long lives and die peacefully in their beds, live and die alone. And they leave no one after them. It is a risk to know others,’ he says. ‘Even to have servants in the house. To receive visitors … Living contact. For there are so many ways in which … So I have tried to seal myself up, to forbid strangers the house, to have no household …
‘It does not work. People are like water; they always find the cracks. The answer lies in a harder road. You must seal yourself up like a bastion. You must keep everyone at a remove. Always. Control your feelings towards others, immerse yourself in matters of the mind, work yourself to the bone, so all your impulses, all your energy, is diverted from the heart. Do you think, Iris, that I do not also live by strict Rules?’ He takes my hand. ‘It is a high price. In the past it was too high for me; I knew of her, and all she could do, and still I … But never again. I have paid enough.’
‘How can I believe you, Papa? Is it not just another horror autotoxicus?’ The air is full of his rich weight. I can’t breathe.
‘You know that she is there,’ he says. ‘Have you not felt her? Waiting in the shadowed places outside the lamplight, at the bottom of wells. Behind you, in long dark corridors … She has walked beside us, the Villarcas, for many years. She will have her eye on you already.’
‘Get off,’ I say, though he’s not touching me. I push him, run from his vast shadow, towards the lychgate. The horses back away to the full length of their ropes, dark eyes wide. The catch is slippery un
der my fingers. It won’t budge. Inside my heart is a new little cold place, where horror lives. Something, uncurling in the moonlight. I press my face to the weathered wood.
Papa’s hand on my shoulder is light. He doesn’t speak. His sad, lined face. He gives me a handkerchief.
‘You, Papa,’ I say. ‘How are you safe?’
‘I cheated her, Iris. Again, and again, I cheated her. I glimpsed her when I was a child – but she came for my mother, that time. Then for my father … She came for your uncle, and many years later for your mother … They were all taken, torn from my side, and I was left alone, and I could do nothing. Nothing.’ He points across the churchyard with a long finger. ‘That my Meg lies there,’ he says. ‘It is … unconscionable. I hardly believe it. Such wrong. Some days, even now, I wake from dreams that she is not dead.’ Papa takes my hand. His eyes are vast and glistening. ‘That waking is unbearable. She should not be in the earth. She should be here, in the day. I have had many chances to love in my life. More, some might say, than were my due. But I have paid for it with grief. To travel that long dark valley once is agony. I have done it many times. Were it not for you,’ he says, ‘I would have had no cause to remain. I would have died and her purpose would have been complete – were it not for you. You are the one thing that keeps me on this earth. So you see, Iris, I have learned from my mistakes and I will never, ever let her have you.’ His fury takes me with it. It courses through me like shock. The world is new-made; vivid, dangerous. We stand hand in hand in the sunlight and I feel what people must feel in church. The colours of the grass, the stone, the very sky are altered. And I am changed, for ever. He was right.
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