‘Been fighting,’ I say. ‘What have you been at, Tom? Fighting, drinking …’ and then, inspired, ‘chasing girls.’
His look is very blue. ‘What of it?’ he says. ‘What do you care about it?’
‘You’re not much good,’ I say. ‘At fighting. From the looks of you.’
‘No, not much,’ he says. ‘Have to get better. When I go.’
‘Don’t, then,’ I say but he goes on.
‘I wanted to say, anyway.’ His hand quivers on the granite. ‘That I should’ve known, and not taken you out that night. I should’ve known you were ill. So, sorry.’ Having discharged his duty he nods and turns away, passing his hand across his eyes. His white wrist is linen-bound, unbearable. I think of how I made him ride behind me through Dartmeet. I recall what I said to him after the cave, years ago. My voice shrill through the fever. Too old to play with the stable boy. Something, some feeling, rises in me like water.
‘I treated you like a servant,’ I say, ‘just now in the village.’ I find the word, which is unfamiliar, exotic. ‘It was unforgivable.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘Hardly.’ He puts his head in his hands. ‘Chasing girls,’ he says, high-pitched. It’s a fair imitation. ‘Shakes’d die.’ His eyelids are large, dark-lashed, so white they’re nearly blue. Gleam of teeth through his fingers. He’s still angry.
‘And I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry that your father died. I should have told you that much sooner.’
He shakes like a dog that’s been told to stay. In his neck the blood courses, the tendons move delicately. Too close to the surface, too easily reached. He’s flesh, bone, breath, all held together with wishful thinking. I cannot stop imagining him bloody, blown apart.
I touch his cheekbone, and beneath it the elegant hollow which curves to his mouth. His breath is warm on my fingers. My knowledge of such things is imperfect. I’m carried along by some other means than myself.
He winces. ‘What are you doing?’ he says.
‘It will be all right,’ I say. ‘But if you leave,’ I hear myself say then, ‘it’ll not be right with me again, ever.’ I can’t find the words to tell him how awful it would be: how my heart would lie dead in my chest like a stone …
Tom puts my hand away from his face. ‘Get off,’ he says. ‘You daft?’ He is blank with dislike.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I mean—’
‘Barely a word to me for a year. Now this. Last thing you said to me was to leave you alone, that time, do you remember? Alone, I suppose that’s what it is, you’re too much alone – d’you see? That’s all. Who do you know? No one. Only me. He keeps you all alone out here, Iris. It’s not right. Makes you strange. Poor kid.’
It’s like a rapid series of blows to the face. I feel the wind behind each one. Colours are blurred with salt.
‘Oh, now,’ he says lightly. ‘Oh come off it.’
Things are happening very fast, or too slowly. I press my eyes hard into my hands. Lights bloom and contract against my lids. Sunlight smarts on my steaming cheeks.
I wait. I wait until the needling stops in my eyes and the breath doesn’t hitch in my throat. I wait.
When I’m calm I look up. Tom’s back is to me. It is rigid, expressive. I slap him hard. The flesh rings through his thin shirt.
He shouts, ‘Owyoubugger.’
‘Look at me,’ I say. ‘I’ve something to say.’
His shoulders drop. His entire being slumps. ‘Iris,’ he says to his knees.
‘Go on,’ I say.
He looks up. Before he can speak I feint another slap at his face, light and fast. He shouts, rocks back, eyes wide. My fingertips graze his chin.
He holds his hand to his cheek and stares. ‘Funny, I don’t think,’ he says. But it is. He is aghast, he should be clutching pearls at his neck. After a moment he laughs too, his high, rattling laugh.
‘Do you know,’ I say, ‘why I kept away from you?’ And I tell him. About the bargain. About the Villarcas, about her. Tom listens intently. The air and the sun seem to cleanse the words. The world changes as I speak. The fear goes out of it.
When I’m finished he says, ‘My dad told me something like it, you know, very like all that, before he died.’ His mouth narrows, a bitter line. ‘Those old men. Ghosts and curses and so on. Just an old-fashioned way of saying they didn’t get on. It’s all nonsense, you know that, don’t you, Iris?’
‘I do, really,’ I say.
‘He must be lonely,’ says Tom.
I am shaking, released. I guessed right the first time, after all, on that day in the graveyard. She is just Papa’s fear. That I will leave him alone.
We sit. We watch the warm, humming land. I look at him; the line of his nose, his jaw. Memory drifts through, in no order. Feet in shallow streams. Long days and the taste of grass. Snow, shining horsehide. The pain of the tooth I lost in that tumble, the dungy stable yard, the pink ragged gap under my tongue. His eyebrow, the line of a swallow against the sky. He held the foal’s head, that summer. Its dark eyes, his careful hands. How violently, how ferociously he willed it to live. So much of my waking life has been spent in this way, being quiet with Tom.
‘I meant it all,’ I say to him. ‘What I said. I’ll never be all right without you.’ I’m not afraid. He turns a grim blue eye on me. Actually I am afraid. A feather floats through my chest. It sidles, drifts, settles.
Tom is suddenly white and awful. ‘Bugger,’ he says. He takes two handfuls of damp serge habit and unfolds them gently. He spreads the hem wide and pulls hard. Stone skids under me. My shoulder meets his collarbone with a thump. I say, ‘Watch it.’
He says, ‘Sorry.’
Close to, he’s strange. His eyelashes dark feathers. The vast shifting geometry of his face, the pink cavern of his ear. Breath in my hair, wind in long grass. The tiny sounds of his skin. Baffling, disconnected glimpses. Eyes opaque like panic.
I draw a finger along the dark swell of his brow. ‘It’s all right,’ I say.
His hands unfold, they make a flower in the small of my back. His breath fills my head like the ocean. We’re alive. The sky’s larger than it has ever been.
‘I’ll come,’ Tom says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘He’s to hear it from me.’ The light’s lazy on the drive. The scent of cut grass. Rawblood is long and quiet in the afternoon.
‘You’re a state,’ Tom says. I am. My skirts drenched again and heavy with mud. On the way back Tom pulled me onto Matilda mid-river. We let Nell make her own way. I sat before him all the way home, his heart against my back.
I put my tongue out, throw Nell’s reins at him. The soaked skirt heavy on my arm. The front door screeches but no one comes. I creep through the sunlit rooms. Across the great hall where the sun lies in warm bars on the flags, down the west corridor where it falls in great diamonds across the floor and walls. At the door of my father’s study I pause.
What to say? What has been decided? Marriage, I suppose, though we haven’t spoken of it. All I know is that there is no time. No time before Tom goes so it must be now. I wait for the doubt to catch up with me. It doesn’t come. I am warmed from within. The tor, the sunlight. I carry it before me in my mind’s eye. I have broken our bargain, but he will forgive me. My father has wanted my happiness, always.
The study door opens with a noise like a knife in the back. The room’s hot, suffocating. Stink of old sweat. The dark panelling is raked with scars as if by claws. Screws of paper litter the floor. Something small and dark scurries under a bookcase. A book flung face down in the bare grate. Shakes doesn’t clean in here. This is Papa’s place.
My father is dreaming. Half propped at the desk, glazed eyes under heavy lids. Leather wallet open on the shining walnut, the hint of shining metal within. His face is absent but his long, graceful hands are busy. The bunched-up shirtsleeve, the tourniquet. The needle, gleaming and ready.
I whirl about to go. This is most dreadful; this is a thing I must never do: watch while Papa uses his pou
ch.
My wet skirts make a grand sweeping noise across the floor.
‘Iris?’ His voice slow and muddy. Slack-tongued.
‘I am going, Papa. I am so sorry. Very sorry—’ I hear myself; high, rabbiting. A nervous child.
I stop with my hand on the doorknob. I think of the long years of solitude, the years of the disease. Those nights I feared I might not see the end of – that death would swoop down soft and take me up unknowing. The long days of loneliness. The shame, the guilt, deep-rooted. I am a pariah, infected. The tales of ghosts, of deaths and curses … I am an ignorant oddity, riddled with freaks. Nearly a grown woman, but I can’t put my hair up. And all so that Papa wouldn’t be troubled with people. So that he could take his morphine in peace. Suddenly I’m not sorry at all.
‘Tell me, Papa,’ I say. ‘If I had not been interested in medicine, and found out that horror autotoxicus was a lie, would you have ever told me any different? Though when the disease was no longer any good, you came up with her … Reasons that I can never leave you. Diseases, ghosts: you liar, Papa. You’d have me for ever a child.’ His eyes, dark and steady on mine. ‘Do you know, I even convinced myself that I had seen her? I had a very high fever … I was so afraid. I have been afraid all my life. Enough.’
I go to where he’s slumped. I pluck the hypodermic needle from his nerveless hand. He reaches, vaguely, and I put it behind my back. ‘This is all you care about,’ I say. ‘I have long accepted it. I have looked up to you. I had hoped to be like you. Those were childish hopes. You are not to be emulated. You are a coward who’d have me shun the world as you do. You kept me here alone, under glass like a microscopic slide.
‘You made Tom a groom, threatened me with diseases and ghosts, hoping to end our friendship. You nearly succeeded … And then you tried to send him away. But, Papa, there are some things you cannot control. I have come to tell you that we are to be married.’
He says, in a thick, dreamy voice, ‘I see.’
‘Good,’ I say. ‘I hope that you will give me your blessing.’
He sighs. ‘I see,’ he says again. ‘Her.’ He looks up. Something empty and dead is using his eyes.
He stands. Is Papa so tall? A stench comes off his body.
‘Papa …’ But I don’t waste any more words. Because that is not my father.
The great walnut desk topples with a crash. I leap back, I say no but he’s fast. His fingers are around my neck; they press stars up into my eyes. He squeezes my throat with one hand, with powerful ease. Pain. Whirling white. Cracking like little bones breaking … His grip’s too low to break the hyoid, but I’m suffocating. Something like a rock smashes into my cheekbone; he hits me with a great, closed fist. Things burst and then there’s singing, singing in my ears, in my skull. The room blurs and fades. We’re deep in a cloud, now. Sound is muffled, far away. Through the misty streaks he reaches behind me, for the needle. As he does his grip loosens, just a little.
I break his nose with the heel of my hand. A quick red crack. Blood in the air, suspended droplets. He roars, the fingers are gone from my throat. I drag air in once like a bellows then I’m off.
Tom’s outside the study door, white and questioning. ‘–’ I say. I can’t see for tears. Tom looks at me for a heartbeat, then he takes my hand and we run. The quick heavy steps of the stranger behind us.
Running, running through Rawblood, Tom pulling me – my arm stretches like rubber about to break he’s pulling me so hard. Fingers squeak on doorknobs, panicked hands slap the corners, corridors seem to narrow as we go. The stranger just behind, breathing like a furnace.
We explode into the great sunlit hall. The riding habit falls through my treacherous fingers; I can’t catch it up again, it drags soggy behind me, catching in cracks, leaving a shining wake, slowing me. It is all the dreams I’ve ever had of being chased. I run from the darkness, it’s close on my heels. The stranger’s breath hacks and rattles, sounds like battlements, stone grinding against stone. A great shadow looms like a turret at my back.
My foot catches in my skirt. I fall. It’s endless. Something heavy hits me, knocks me into the earth with a cracking of ribs. I hit out wildly with both fists. I still hold the needle in one hand. I’d forgotten. It punctures something’s flesh somewhere with an abrupt sound. Somewhere glass splinters. There’s blood in many little streams all over my hands, running red in all directions into the dark.
Cool flags under my cheek. The hall is barred with sun. It falls everywhere in broken stripes. A messy, shining trail across the stone. Halfway across the hall the trail becomes mingled with glutinous red. It is obscene, like the path of a great, injured worm. I sit up.
By my feet the black shape. A pile of cloth and strange pale flesh. The blood runs everywhere, pools, shines in little runnels between the flagstones. It runs over the shattered glass that lies everywhere in the warm light. The broken hypodermic needle protrudes from Papa’s chest, moves gently with his shallow breath, shining. Air twitters through his punctured lung.
Tom’s small, curled in the corner by the fireplace, back turned. His head bobs. A grinding noise comes from him.
Papa puts forth a slippery red hand. ‘Iris,’ he says. ‘This.’ He twists the ring from his slick finger. Slow.
It slides into my palm like a little stone.
‘Yours now,’ my father says. ‘Dear heart.’
‘Papa,’ I say. The dark clown mouth spreads outward on the grey of his waistcoat. ‘Papa,’ I say. ‘I understand, now. I did not believe … I am sorry, so sorry …’
My father says, ‘I know.’ Or perhaps it is, ‘No.’ He starts, staring at me or something behind me. A cold finger runs down my spine. I whip around. Prickles of fear run up and down. There’s nothing but Rawblood, warm in the afternoon. My father reaches for me. His eyes are fixed and wide. Brown pools. ‘I see,’ he says, ‘her.’ His bloodied hand is light on my head and then he goes. Cloth and cold flesh are left. Dead.
Sounds come as if through water. Wind whistling through a window somewhere. Blood hitting the floor sounds like tick, tick, tick. I press my face to the face that was his. It’s cool India rubber. The bright air turns, a carousel.
Tom stirs in the corner, white. I think about him, about what Shakes thinks of him, about what other people might think … I think of her and my being goes cold. I saw nothing, nothing but Papa’s dark shadow, his blood. But she was here. He saw her, she took his life. Where is she now? Anywhere …
‘Tom,’ I say. ‘Tom.’
He raises a grey face. Something clings to the corner of his mouth.
‘Take it,’ I say. The ring gleams white and red in Tom’s warm, trembling palm. ‘Take it. From me to you,’ I say. ‘Now leave. Go now. Run.’ When Tom doesn’t move I shout it over and over, over his protests. I slap his hands away as he tries to hold me. Go, I say. Go, go, go. Until he goes.
When he’s gone I sit. I am small and dry inside. The tears which stream down my face are nothing to do with me. My habit, wet again, this time with blood. The scent of it is heavy in the air. It seems an age since this morning, an age since the rock, the sunshine, the air. Did it happen? It’s impossible. Nothing has ever happened or will ever happen again; I have always sat here with the sticky wet red drying on me, clutching the cooling corpse.
Without doubt this is my doing. The great, great depths of my stupidity are revealed. My arrant carelessness, my arrogance. I’d thought the rules didn’t apply to me. Papa told me, he warned but I didn’t believe. I didn’t believe in her. I thought I could do what I wished, and the cost is beyond bearing.
I close the eyelids over his dull staring eyes. It’s not easy. They want to stay open. I sit. I move beyond feeling. Grief, loss – what do these strange weak words have to do with the jagged tear, the rent which goes right through the heart of me? My father is dead and I killed him. It should have been me. I should have known that it would come to this.
Perhaps I cannot see her, but I understand now, what Papa w
as trying to say. She’s in everything. The air, the road, the bad dark hedges. The stones which strike my flesh. She’s all the sickness of the world. But also our own particular plague, just for us, the Villarcas.
I speak to her in my mind. I ask her to come. I beg her to take me – I plead. I, who am now the last of us.
Too late. In the distance, the keening of oak. A door. Someone is coming, now.
Charles Danforth
11 OCTOBER 1881
More tissue samples, today. Alonso and I take it in turns, now. Why should we both suffer?
The cellar was quiet. I did not turn on that ghastly electric light, but carried my own lamp.
The rabbits lie, panting and still, bound tight about their midriffs with white linen. There is the smell, not unpleasant, of basilicum powder and carbolic. With their heads on their paws, in their human bandaging, they have the appearance of a conceit, dreamt of by some satirical illustrator. (The Field Hospital, perhaps.)
I did what was necessary. As I moved about the room their gaze followed me, bright, showing me back myself in each dark nut-like eye. I did not like the sounds they produced before – much like an eagle’s scream – but I am tempted to say that I like their silence less.
As I came to the end of the row I saw that the old buck – I forget the absurd name Alonso has bestowed upon him – had escaped his dressings. The rabbit had pressed himself into the corner of his box, small and furred and brown. At his throat the bandage hung slack from his neck where a neat rusty mark betrayed the tracheal incision. The mess of white linen and cheesecloth lay in the corner of the cage, brown and yellow stained, much clawed as if he had attempted to bury them. I opened the door and made to take him, forgetting in that instant.
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