Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

  Rawblood reaches fantastic shapes against the sky. Chimneys are raised like signals in the coming light. A roof wide and white-lit under the dawn. The windows of the hall ascend, disorderly, in gleaming leaded panes. The great studded door is half in curving shadow. Something moves between me and the house, a tensing of ligaments and memory, a scent, desire. It is futile, it is redundant to describe a homecoming.

  Meg Villarca

  1899

  Rawblood

  I come into the kitchen and he’s there, cleaning the knives. Pink ointment and the long cloth flickering to and fro, the grey light touching his face, making it solemn and beautiful. The red velvet box with its serried ranks; gleaming metal, ivory handles the colour of butter. The shape of his legs in the rough stained apron, the grime caught under the nail of his forefinger, a swag of chestnut hair fallen across one lowered lid.

  ‘Robert,’ I say, and he turns. The knife flashes bright and flies to earth like a diving fish. The ring of it on the stone floor.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he says, cool, swooping low. ‘How may I be of service to you?’ He pincers the knife between two disdainful fingers. He is but a few years younger than me.

  ‘I would like some treacle,’ I say.

  He nods and goes to the larder. I eat it with a spoon from the tin, standing at the scrubbed table. He turns his back once more and the cloth flicks, the knives chink gentle against one another. We say nothing for a time. I watch his hair where it lies on his bent neck, where it curls over his collar. The treacle turns, warm and slow, on the spoon. It smoothes itself sweetly across my tongue.

  ‘Once, when I was young,’ I say, ‘I ate a piece of shoe leather. I chewed at it for hours, until it stained my mouth brown. It was not a good thing to do. I had pains and saw stars for days after. It was the dye, or something used in the curing – I was quite ill – I did not regret it but only wished for more. Also, I would sometimes lick the wool of the sheep – for the grease, you see. I would do anything, I was so hungry. There was never enough to eat.’

  His back is upright, but I feel him soften, feel the warmth come into him. I ache. The air is full of the waxy scent of knife polish.

  ‘It is all I can remember,’ I say, ‘hunger, pain. I felt nothing else until I came here. Where are they, Robert; the others?’

  He half turns to me and I see him bite his lip for a moment, just a moment. ‘Picking,’ he says. ‘I daresay.’

  ‘Gooseberries,’ I say. ‘In late summer, they would be picking gooseberries, I expect.’

  He shrugs a little. ‘Not that you would know it for summer.’ He pauses and says, ‘Rain’ll be coming. They will be in presently.’ Chink goes a knife, slotting into its velvet prison.

  ‘Not just yet,’ I say.

  I go to him then and touch the nape of his neck with the tip of my finger. For a moment he bends like a willow, as if I might push him over with only this touch. Then he turns and looks and – well, there we are.

  His mouth is sweet and clings to me like the treacle. Time goes sideways in a curve. It is like sunlight, like clutching fistfuls of mud; like a ball of string dropped from a high cliff, bouncing, unrolling. His fingers stroke across the swell of my belly. I lock my fingers about his neck. I take a sprig of his copper hair between my fingers and pluck. He grunts with the pain. I slip the bright pinch of hair into the pocket of my dress.

  When it is over he kisses me and kisses the taut barrel I carry beforehand. ‘You are like a plum,’ he says. ‘We belong together.’ He warms her with his palm, his hand lingers. ‘I wish it was mine,’ he says. ‘I wish you were both mine. Not his.’ He casts an amber eye towards the kitchen ceiling.

  I say, ‘Oh me too, my darling.’ Robert likes to be romantic, after.

  ‘Tonight,’ he says. ‘You’ll come.’ His collar is torn loose, his neck is cream. I nod. Outside the rain begins to pelt the ground.

  I wash in the grey light of the scullery. The cold gushes of the pump, icy water. My mind is clean. My shrill heart is silent as it is silent only in the wake, in the lee of the act.

  My skirts have that moment brushed the floor when Chloe bustles in loud. She holds her apron carefully before her. The folds of starchy linen are filled with green globes, pale and luminous. They nestle and bounce with her step. I give her a nod, and she stares around the quiet kitchen, at Robert and at me. I hold her large blue eyes. I hold her there like a snake until she shudders all through her frame. She drops her gaze and bobs; the gooseberries quiver in the apron. She says, ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘Mind yourself, Chloe,’ I say. I sweep past her, nearly colliding with Shakes, who does not lift his blinded eyes. His movements are as soft and careful as a cat’s paws. His stick taps. From within the kitchen comes the sawing of the bread knife. His gums mumble.

  I say nothing. I give him a wide berth, my face twists into a silent snarl as I pass, lips pulled back from my teeth. He half turns his head, as if to catch an elusive perfume. He does not need his cankered eyes; he knows things about me.

  In the passage I lean against the wall, cool and clayey under my hands, against my back. I tip my face skywards. I am miserable.

  The cold breath when it comes is a bare touch on my throat. A freezing graze; then gone. In the corner of my eye is something white and monstrous, sliding, sliding. I whirl around. My wet skirts slap the wall.

  All is quiet. I am alone save for my breath. But my flesh remembers where she has been. It burns with the familiar cold kiss.

  ‘Come,’ I wheedle. ‘You know I am not afraid.’ But she’s gone, or I imagined it.

  *

  In the quiet bedroom, I take from my pocket the hair I plucked from Robert’s head. Bold red it is, very like my own. I chose well. I unlock the drawer with the little key about my neck. I put the necessary things in the necessary order on the marble dressing table. I touch them each with the word of power.

  The red strands are bright in the black dish, which is really a black stone with a hollow place in it. I add blood from my thumb and earth from the graveyard. I add a raven’s feather, and a scrap of cloth which is stained with older blood. Mine. The saddest blood. Birth-blood, with no child. That last one, I bled a great deal.

  It all goes up with a quick sizzle, leaving a touch of gummy ash in the saucer.

  I say the words I need to say, and then lick the stone dish clean. The blood and ash are cold in my mouth. I am tired, and full of doubt.

  I go to find my bear.

  I open the study door very quietly. My sad bear, my looming beast. He sits at the desk like a monument, his face bent to the page. A silver paperknife catches the light, gleams like a stiletto. His leather pouch lies on the desk, close to hand as always. The pen is a lovely sound, mice scratching in the skirting boards. It’s a fierce feeling, to watch him so – to catch the moment when he starts and turns – when his eyes fill with the sight of me, two pitchers filling with wine. I go to him and he touches us. The sleeper within rouses herself and touches him back through the wall of flesh. She has been much petted today. I feel her darting pleasure.

  ‘Each time,’ Alonso says. ‘Each time it is miraculous. That is why there is nothing new to say about such things.’ His hand warm on me. The scent of worn leather. I do not want to think about each time.

  ‘Always reading,’ I say. I am light and I keep the sabre sheathed, for now. ‘What?’ But of course I see it – the diary on the desk. That man. My brother – in name. Never gone, always lingering, a fly stuck in the corner of the eye. We touched one another in death. It is not enough to set against all the years he left me alone. Venom fills the back of my throat. Alonso sees my look.

  ‘It is the only reason I knew to come for you,’ he says. ‘To that farm. Because he wrote it. He asks it of me. So do not despise it too much.’

  ‘Oh, I know!’ I say. ‘You are very constant in your duty. And even to make me your wife! Painful devotion indeed.’ I mean to hurt. How have we come to this? Spite is in me like a blade. We were happy,
once.

  When first I came to Rawblood I was a child of fifteen. Alonso came to the Bantrys’ like a great hawk, lifted me from my old life into the new: it was a savage and sudden immersion. Rawblood was a dream; I had never before seen anything larger than the hovels of Grimstock. Its very existence was miraculous. All these high ceilings, room after room, running on and on from one another, seemingly in perpetuity. Profusions of passages and little doors. I was a slip of a thing, too slender, often lost. I slipped through the cracks in things. Now the house fits around me like a glove. I sit flush against this stone, this mortar. Rawblood, my house, my blood. My life began here. What came before cannot be called living.

  My brother died here. But what I felt, when I first looked down on the house from the crest of the hill, saw it grey and golden in the low light, was envy; that he saw it before I.

  I drew the servants back. I could not bear to think of Alonso all alone, while I was sent away to school. And to a hungry hedge-snipe from Grimstock it seemed a fine thing to have servants. A little chalk, a feather, a toad buried in the garden. Easy enough. People will forget bad things if you ask in the right way. They long to forget.

  School – a horror I had dreamt not of. I ran away from them all. Alonso pretended to mind, but he did not. He missed me. I was always asking him to marry me. It was many years before he would listen. It was on the night of the irises that he said yes.

  We were happy for a time. Then there came the other times: pain like knives, loss, and the white walls of a sickroom. All those sad small things. Lost before they drew breath. Grief is a strange beast. It lives in one like a worm, curls and uncurls at will. I take it everywhere I go. At the heart of it are my memories of those three small forms wrapped in linen. Each time I thought they were strong, each time they would not stay long enough within me. Small pale faces like wax, too perfect to live. Unnamed graves, all. Somewhere. We were happy once but now all I see in Alonso’s face are my dead children.

  Three times over Alonso held me through the days and nights after, plaited my hair when I could not, fed me broth spoonful by painful spoonful. I fought him and bit him, and sometimes I wept. I will never tell him how much I needed the great trees of his arms around me then, and his rough face against mine. I will never let him see that everything between us now is coloured by those times – a drop of black ink spiralling in clear water. If he knew this I would be a beached fish, belly up on the alien shore.

  Now I rest my hand on the great cartwheel of his shoulder, a peace offering. He plays with my little finger, the lamps of his eyes are lidded.

  He says, ‘Your skirts are wet, my love.’

  ‘I have been walking on the grass,’ I say, ‘in the rain.’ It is something I would do. I keep two secrets from my husband. Robert, and then of course there’s the other, which is her.

  I never know what Alonso knows, or does not know.

  ‘Do you remember,’ I say quickly and touch him with my lips, ‘that night? I had run away, once again, from that school …’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, dry. ‘I tried to do right. You would have none of it.’

  ‘I came to your club in St Martin’s Lane. I walked from Kent into London.’

  ‘I saw you from the window. It was very foggy,’ he says, and an old feeling passes across his features, wind in an oak tree. Alonso is afraid of mist and fog. ‘The porter would not let you in. I could have killed him. To leave you so.’

  ‘But I waited.’

  ‘You did. Barefoot under the gaslight.’

  ‘I brought you flowers. “The irises are blooming in Kent,” I said.’ We are dancing, now, to a familiar refrain. In this story we are lit by theatrical lights. The dark is held at bay.

  ‘They were no more than wet stalks,’ he says, prompting.

  ‘The blossoms wilted off as I walked,’ I say. ‘I walked all night, and part of a day.’

  ‘I had never laid eyes on anything as lovely as those bare stems,’ Alonso says. ‘I thought I might die then. It was beyond anything I had known, the sight of you.’ His long, beautiful hand is light on my face like a moth. I breathe his palm.

  ‘If I were allowed a choice of how I am to die,’ I say, sliding onto his knee, ‘I would wish for you to do it.’

  ‘Would you now?’

  ‘I would. Think: what perfect union.’

  He says, ‘I would do it quickly. It would be like this.’ The pen barks and splinters in his hands. The sound travels through me like shock.

  ‘But looking at me,’ I say. ‘Always into my eyes. It would be so mournful and classical, just like a Waterhouse painting.’

  There comes the rough cough of his laugh. ‘My Meg,’ he says. ‘You could not look like anything so vulgar.’

  ‘How could you?’ I say. ‘Waterhouse is risqué. It will be vulgar next year.’ I smile and slip my arms about his neck, and now we are contained within one another again.

  This is the choreography of our love. It is and is not the truth. But I never know what Alonso knows, or does not know.

  He breathes my neck. ‘Lilies,’ he says. ‘Everywhere you go the scent of lilies lingers after like a ghost.’

  What would he do, could he see my thoughts and my plan? Would he fix me with his mahogany stare and say something that would cleave to me all my days – before showing me the door? Would he seize the letter opener on the table, and slide it clinically, kindly past my sternum, into my heart? Would he shrug, and turn again to his book? The last would be the worst.

  It is past midnight when I leave Alonso sleeping, a peaceful dune in the dark bed. There’s a wind up. Outside, things shudder and whisper. In here it is still. The only sound is my bare feet on the great stairs, the stone flags. As I go I think, I’ll see her now. I look for her shocking white face in the shadows and behind doors. I stop for a moment as I cross the echoing hall. I stand, waiting for her kiss. But the house is inert, remote. The air is just night air. I am alone.

  The red parlour is warm, the coals low and bright in the grate. Robert is crouched by it, feeding pinches of dry moss, twigs and kindling into the heart of the fire. He looks up and smiles, then returns intent to his task.

  I sit on the ottoman and watch. The fire lends him a glowing halo. Gradually the greenish brackish flame licks up, there comes spitting and the scent of apple logs.

  There’s a gentle easing beside me as he sits. His arm steals around my shoulders. The fire sings and cracks.

  He says, ‘I meant it, Meg. You’ll wither away, here.’ He hasn’t called me Ma’am, which is a blessing. ‘I know it. Believe me, I know.’

  I say, ‘I won’t.’ Rawblood doesn’t wither me. But Robert is earnest, pleading, alabaster in the firelight. ‘Think of this one,’ I say. I rest my hand on the taut mound of my belly. ‘Only think, what would we do?’

  ‘I would take care of you,’ he says. His gaze falters then meets mine square. ‘I would. Not like this, of course. Is it all these nice things that keep you here, maybe?’ He waves an angry arm at the room, where somewhere in the dark lurk ormolu, velvet, Aubusson carpets, gilt clocks. ‘Is it that you do not want to be a butler’s wife?’

  I cannot help but laugh. It has not been so very long since I ate shoe leather. ‘A butler’s mistress, perhaps,’ I say. ‘I am married; it’s done these sixteen years. And talk by night is very bold. The day brings other cares.’

  ‘I will say this, only, then,’ he says. ‘If you think the rest of your life is to be spent here, then go up to your bed. I will not speak of it again. I will go elsewhere for work. I am a valuable man.’ He stares at me, then shakes his head and makes a small sound like a click, looking sad.

  ‘Come,’ I say. I kneel and pull his stockings from his feet. I stroke his fine-boned instep, his heel. I warm him with my palm. I nibble a toe, playful. When he’s not looking I slip the thin crescent of toenail from my mouth to my pocket.

  ‘You should not be with him,’ Robert says. ‘He tried to kill me when I was a child.’

&nb
sp; I regard him. I am wary.

  ‘He refused to treat me,’ he says, ‘when I was poisoned. My brother Henry came and begged him. He turned us away. It was luck and your brother which saved me.’

  ‘We will not speak of Alonso so,’ I say.

  ‘You know that they were unnatural,’ Robert says. ‘The two of them.’

  I turn my witch-eye on him. You are not fit to lick his boots. He drops his gaze, stares at his lap like a frightened child.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I say quickly. ‘I am so frightened …’ I talk on in a useless, pretty way. I cannot lose him now. He recovers soon enough. He thinks he holds the advantage. He is very handsome. I have been careful to seem mad for him.

  When Robert leaves I burn the toenail with my blood and a sprig of rosemary which scents the air. I eat the ash. I sit in the lengthening shadows.

  I no sooner laid eyes on Alonso and on Rawblood than I loved them; both cavernous animals, grumbling, all their sounds and peculiarities, their good thick skins of stone. They were wreckage when I found them, and I was wreckage too. I made us all three whole and good.

  We lost one another somewhere along the way. But I can do it again. I will heal us: Alonso, Rawblood and I.

  It is some time before I notice the sound beyond the red parlour door. Soft, heavy, with a scratching in it. The image leaps easily to mind. Some weight, heavy skirts, perhaps, are being dragged through the great hall, catching on the rough flags. A murmur comes, like stone grating on stone but very far away. A moment of quiet, and then the approach. A creak, almost inaudible, of leather boots. She stops outside the parlour. I watch the door with fixed eyes. On the other side something brushes the panels lightly, there is a clicking, as of fingernails tapping the brass doorknob. The murmur comes again, suddenly loud and elongated, whistling into the room where I sit. She has her mouth at the keyhole. Come, I tell her silently. Her breath fills the room, light and cold. The sound of stone rubbing on stone. I feel her waiting, white and dead, on the other side of the oak. Come.

  The blow to the door is like thunder. The hinges rattle, the wood screeches with the force of it. Her voice fills my ear, vast and anguished, words spoken in the language of broken buildings, shattered bone, sorrow and loss. All her grief rolls through the air like mist, rolls over me, into my flesh. I am wild with it and shaking.