Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

‘It seemed to me,’ Alonso says, ‘that you were not overly fond of Eliza or of Chloe.’

  ‘I am,’ I say. ‘But there are some of the household I do not like. I would have you let that butler go, for instance. He stares. It is unnerving.’ I hold my breath. If it did not work, then I will never sleep sound.

  ‘Gilmore?’ Alonso is quiet a moment. ‘I fear he was not well, my Meg. They found him in his bed this morning. Heart, perhaps. I do not know …’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  My own heart performs a peculiar stutter – there is relief, and then the great black weight descends. I test it, the darkness. I let my guilt wrap about me. I settle it firmly on my shoulders. I must do so, for I will carry it to the end of my days.

  Alonso is saying, ‘I will go to tell his brother, who has Trubb’s farm over the way. He was a Devon man, for all his citified ways.’

  I recall dimly a Henry Gilmore, and a Charlotte Gilmore, seen and spoken to outside church. She cannot bear children. One of those shameful snippets you come by, if you are neighbours in the country. Did Robert come here to be near his family? I never asked why he took this remote post on Dartmoor. All these things I did not know. The dark weight hangs a little heavier. I am laden with sorrow and sudden fear. What have I become?

  There is always a high cost for strong witchery. Without doubt I will pay for Robert’s life in ways I cannot fathom. There is always high cost, there is always a hidden cost. It has begun already; I am blind. But Iris is hot and small on my neck. No, I would not change the bargain.

  I sway, suspended in air. The breeze combs through my hair. We go across the moor and all the way I have the image in my mind of a great summer tree, wreathed in flame.

  ‘Iris,’ I say. ‘Oh small person, oh light in the dark, oh little baby, will you not hush?’ She cries. Her screams go through my head like bolts slammed home. She is feverishly dull and fretful. She is perfection. Three weeks since we brought her home and each day she grows in beauty. I feel it in her flesh. She is strong and growing and mine.

  The red drawing room is filled with the August sun. I walk through the beams where the window throws them, straight paths of heady warmth. Iris weeps. Her face is tiny and wet on my shoulder. Sometimes I cannot accept that she lives outside me now. Her every breath draws my heart after it. Each one of her tears is like a blade.

  I speak to her, and she quiets. She speaks back to me in her strange wailing voice. I tell her stories of myself. I tell her about the Bantrys’ farm – the animals, not the people. I will not tell her tales of sorrow or of fear. I tell her about Peter the donkey, and his patient eyes and pot belly. I tell her about the golden hens and the dirty, spiny-backed pigs.

  We talk like this for some time. ‘They were my friends,’ I tell her. ‘Although I have had other friends, and good ones, since. I had a friend at Rawblood who is gone, now. A woman, pale and sorrowful …’

  I knew the moment I was carried across the threshold with Iris in my arms. She is gone. She was the cold core buried deep at the heart of the house. No longer. The very air in the halls and rooms is changed. Everything moves faster and rings brighter now. How weighty and thunderous it was – her presence. Now everything is duller and going on through the days is just that – going on. Her terrible dark glamour has been lifted from us and we are merely people. Irritable people, kind people, everyday people who darn shirt fronts and make jam and spill inkpots and tread mud into the house. And this is as it should be.

  Ours shall be all new beginnings, I promise Iris, as her cries become shorter and sweeter.

  ‘There was also a man called Robert,’ I say. ‘He was not handsome, but beautiful – as beautiful as a woman – and determined.’

  Iris answers me in a descant of bubbles and trills.

  ‘He had coppery hair, though darker than mine. We looked somewhat alike, perhaps like brother and sister. I had a brother, but he left me to a dark farm with Mr Bantry and belts and whips, and other things … No, hush, hush. We will not speak of it. Robert’s face was like … It was like music.’ Iris breathes deep. She’s going. I tell her softly, ‘He gave his life for us. Or – I took it from him, that you and I might live.’ I am shocked to find that I am weeping. I have grown soft indeed.

  The house creaks a little, a little eddy of air shivers through the room. I lift my head from her forehead where it has been resting gently. Iris breathes like factory machinery. She always sleeps as though it were hard work.

  I tip my face in the direction of the parlour door and say, ‘Come – sit with us, Alonso.’

  He comes without a word and sits with a great creak. The shape of him is mountainous, the ottoman suddenly a silly, fiddly thing. His hand lies on mine, his finger strokes Iris’s cheek.

  ‘You should not have survived,’ Alonso says. His breath on my face. The faintest trace of Spanish in his words. ‘Nor should you, little one. But you did. Your lives are rare gifts and I will always remember it.’ His caress.

  I want to ask, And how long did you stand there in the doorway, my love – what did you hear? But what good would it do – to know? We sit, Iris sleeps and I think how alike they are: the sensations of danger, and of love.

  The bark of the cedar tree beneath my fingers. Sun warmed. He says nothing but he’s here. He’s always here, in the summer, in the evening. Light on old bones. I feel his attention, where he sits, back against the vast cedar trunk. His skin. The scent is everywhere. Parchment, malice. Why must it have been he who helped me? Impossible to owe such a debt.

  ‘Come,’ I say. Still he says nothing. But he comes. I hear the creaks of his passage. I hear the summer grass beneath his uncertain steps. The knife slips across my fingertip like silk. I reach through the warm air. I put my blood on him where he stands before me. Trace the deep sockets of his eyes. I say the words and the tree and the earth shiver.

  ‘Have them, then,’ I say. ‘Have your sight, and my thanks.’

  His surprisingly long lashes are viscous with my blood. And tears, because Shakes weeps, then. Colour and light creep into him. I feel it. I yearn. His wonder fills the air. Silent, heavy.

  I may do this once, only. So I am the blind one, now.

  There is the soft sound of cloth on glass, and the reassuring bustle of a broom. Chloe and Eliza talk quietly as they clean. I have found that if I lie quiet they think that I am asleep and speak very freely – as if my bandaged eyes had stopped up all my senses, not just one. I have heard the talk of the autumn fair. I have heard of Chloe’s little brother Tom, whom she loved but who died as a child. Their lives are tantalising and bright, their likes and dislikes strong and fully formed. They have been masquerading as scenery but they are full of action.

  They are silent today, quick and full of intent. The air seethes with thought.

  Eliza murmurs, ‘Did you go to the brother?’

  Chloe does not speak. She makes a sound both sharp and wet.

  ‘Did you ask at Trubb’s Farm?’ says Eliza. I picture her – brackish eyes narrowed, eyebrows acrobatic with conviction. Cloth squeaks on the fire brasses.

  ‘Went yesterday.’ When Chloe speaks at last her scornful tones are unrecognisable. She is hesitant, as though each word were a step through a bog. The Devon is strong in her voice. I had not noticed it before. ‘He called me a whore and sent me off.’

  ‘You have a month before I can’t lace you up,’ says Eliza. ‘No more. You hear me? Go again. You make him hear.’

  ‘He won’t help. Not that one,’ says Chloe. ‘I am for the workhouse or the Home. They’re the same in the end. You go in those places, you don’t come out. And all I can think is that I hope it looks like him.’ There is a gentle thump, rustling. A seagull cries somewhere in the distance. I think, How like these strange times, a gull on Dartmoor. But the gull is Chloe, who is crying.

  ‘Come here,’ I say. There is a silence like death.

  ‘Ma’am,’ says Eliza, suddenly close. ‘Please.’ The red thread of p
anic in her voice.

  ‘The two of you,’ I say. ‘Come here.’

  The scent of Chloe’s tears. Salt, rain, clean skin.

  ‘It is Robert – Gilmore – the butler, who did this?’ I say. I recall the day Iris was born, when Chloe brushed my hair and I saw her secret. I knew it even before that, I think. I saw it in her sullen eyes that day in the kitchen.

  They say nothing. There are movements in the air. They are shivering like puppies.

  ‘And he is dead,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ says Chloe. Her voice is puzzled, as if she can’t quite recall. The many, the various hidden costs of my deed.

  ‘It is not Eliza’s fault, Ma’am, she warned me of the error of my ways and none of the blame for my sins should rest on her.’

  ‘Can you write,’ I say, ‘either of you?’ There is silence. ‘Speak up.’

  ‘I can write,’ says Chloe.

  ‘Bring paper. Fetch a pen. Then sit down by me.’

  I think the instructions are obeyed. At any rate there is bustling and the dry scratch of paper, and then there is quiet.

  ‘Write what I say,’ I tell her. There are some false starts. I speak too quickly. Chloe falls behind, and I cannot then recall the rest of the sentence.

  I am as brief as may be in the letter. If Mr Gilmore will be so good … There are considerations … I rely on his charity, his Christian feeling. I trust he will not blame the innocent for the sins of the fathers. It being his own brother who has transgressed, he will feel a responsibility … Perhaps he also will recall my brother Charles, who did him a kindness once, when his brother was sick with a poison … Herewith enclosed is something towards …

  Then I dictate a reference for Chloe. It is firm and favourable and fairly honest.

  ‘I am not quite happy about it,’ I say. ‘It is in your own hand …’

  ‘I made the writing different.’ She is curt.

  At my direction Eliza goes to the escritoire. ‘Ma’am,’ she says delicately, ‘where …?’

  I have to laugh. ‘The key on the lavender ribbon,’ I say, ‘hanging from the back of the mirror. As you very likely know.’

  Eliza brings the money in a dirty copper-scented bundle. We are flustered by the great amounts of it. We divide it up and begin to count, but how am I to know what is there? It’s no matter anyway.

  ‘Take it,’ I say. ‘Go now to Henry Gilmore. Take him the letter and half the money. I will send him more in due course. The other half you take with you. Go to Exeter – or no, too close – to Bath. Take rooms. You are a widow. It may be they won’t like it, but you can pay, which means everything. Stay within doors. Eat well. Engage a physician. When the baby is born, you must come back. You must give it to them. To Mr Gilmore and his wife.’

  ‘Do I have to?’ Chloe says. It sounds like her old insouciance but the timbre is wrong and brittle. ‘May I not take the child …’

  I think about this for a time. ‘I don’t think you can,’ I say. She says nothing, but the money is lifted in its greasy leaves from my lap.

  ‘Will he take care of it?’ she says.

  ‘His wife cannot have children. He’ll be kind for that. He’s a farmer and not a successful one. He’ll be kind for the money. I will give him enough to be very kind. I’ll make sure of it.’ I wonder what I am promising. ‘You must,’ I say.

  Eliza, who has been very quiet, bursts out, sudden and shrill. ‘Must this, must that. Why should she? It’s a terrible thing you’re telling her to do.’

  I find her by her voice. The slap lands flush on her cheek with a crack.

  ‘I was left, and raised by others for money,’ I say. ‘I know well what it is I’m advising. It is better than the alternative. You may believe me.’ I think of the workhouse babies I have seen. I think of Iris’s tiny toenails, of her treble voice and her cheeks.

  I will watch Chloe’s child. I will cling to Charlotte Gilmore like a best friend. I will give Alonso’s money out like water.

  ‘It will be hard,’ Chloe says. The grey despair in her voice raises hairs on the back of my neck. I see her sunk, underwater, weeds waving by her face. I see her blue eyes fixed and staring. Hidden cost.

  I will not let it happen. I will ensure they do what I say. I will ensure that she can bear it.

  I reach. ‘Show me,’ I say. She takes my hand with her small rough one and guides it. The gentle, fragile swell.

  ‘It is a boy,’ I say. ‘You’ll name him after your brother. Young Tom. He will be strong, and handsome and very kind. Women will like him. These gifts are his already. Now give me an eyelash from your eye. And a hair from your head.’

  She puts the hairs on my open palm. Her thin fingers are cold. I close my fist about them. I say what I need to, quiet into our locked hands. Then I open up and blow them away. ‘Now you have given him your black hair. You have given him your blue eyes. So he will always be marked as yours. Wherever he goes in life, and whatever he does, your son will always be using the gifts you gave him.’

  Later that evening Alonso holds me, enclosing me in the scents of bay and leather. My blind eyes are stinging with tears. He murmurs and asks me things.

  ‘I find I have spent all the householding,’ I say. ‘Everything in the drawer. And Chloe was pert so I turned her off. I am ill-tempered, and blind, and worthless.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind,’ he says into my hair and asks nothing further.

  So I tell him what has passed with Chloe. ‘It is foolish,’ I say. ‘Is it atonement?’

  ‘For what?’ Alonso says, and the edge of his voice is delicate and sharp. I can hear him thinking.

  ‘For everything,’ I say. ‘For the woman I am, for the things I have done … For them. For my three lost ones.’ And for Robert. I have drawn too much blood. I have taken a man’s life. It weighs and weighs like darkness and will do all my days. Robert’s death will cover me always like sickness.

  And Iris’s little dead sisters … I recall them each day. Each day I must realise anew that what I have done will not bring them back.

  ‘I have been a fighting hedge-snipe all my life,’ I say.

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘I wish I could rest,’ I say. ‘I have fought long enough … I wish a different fate for my daughter. But she will be tried, too … Oh, it is all connected, Alonso, do not you forget it …’ My voice deepens, takes on the rough edge that means the Eye is on me.

  His hand on my back. ‘Meg?’

  ‘You look after him,’ I hear myself say. ‘Do you promise to do it? Take care of Tom Gilmore.’

  ‘We will,’ he says, frightened. ‘Together we will make sure the Gilmores do right.’

  ‘Promise,’ I say in the terrible voice. ‘He must dig the grave.’

  ‘I promise,’ he says. The Eye lifts, floats away as if it never was and we’re alone.

  I kiss his hand. I am swept with feeling. Alonso’s touch, the warmth of sunlight on my face, the scent of fresh washed cotton – everything cuts deeply, now, as it never did before. Love has finally settled into me. It has turned me belly up on the shore, just as I always feared it would.

  The air is filled with autumn. Dry leaves and the scent of dark berries and mould and hay. The morning air is wine. I make to rise quietly. Alonso’s cufflinks are chinking from the corner of the room, where his dressing table stands. The quiet harrumph as he clears his throat. I feel his attention, but I have urgent business. Iris will be awake – no doubt she is talking to the dawn. Before my feet meet the cold boards there is a flash of white deep in the centre of my skull.

  ‘Draw the curtains,’ I cry. ‘It hurts, it burns.’ There is a whirlpool of movement beside me and Alonso’s hands are on my lids, pulling them gently apart. I shriek and tell him no, no. It is an axe blade to my head, the light. My tears are hot. His fingers shake and he asks, what is it, what is it? My words are unwieldy. I cannot make him understand for some time. Through the lightning flashes are perceptible knots of oak on the boards, my pale toes, the rip
pling hem of my nightgown.

  I can see.

  There follows a time of anxious rest, of cold compresses bound across my eyes. Of smarting headaches. But the world bleeds in, day by day. The veils lift one by one. Objects take on shape and form, resolve themselves into distances.

  Bright light still causes me pain. I must cover my eyes until they are strong enough. Each day Alonso removes my blindfold for an hour – then two, then three. He oversees me with the exactitude of an experiment. He is impersonal, gentle. There is something unsettling in it. I long for his temper.

  Colours are blank and strange – for a time I see reds and pinks as blue, and vice versa. I lie cushioned in my downy bed and watch the window. Swallows cross the sky, which is the veined red of fresh butchered meat. Alonso brings me late summer poppies, a flower which I have loved always for its overblown fragility, its deep orange-red hues. But these are the blue of a drowned face. I cannot tell Alonso how sad they make me. They sit in the vase at my bedside. They lurk in the corner of my eye like unease.

  Most days there is some activity down the hall, sounds of heavy things moving and the scent of fresh paint. I ask Alonso, what is it? His answer is short and vague.

  Iris plays in my lap. She is heavy, now. Her desires are becoming sophisticated. Her understanding, her knowledge grow daily. She likes certain songs and cannot bear others. She has taken to punching me heavily when displeased. Hair covers her silken skull. Soon, I tell her. But when? I keep my eyes covered when she is with me. I am afraid to behold her for the first time. I fear my skewed sight.

  We go on quite well. October comes. As she tucks the bedclothes around me, Eliza says in hushed tones that Charlotte Gilmore has been blessed with a child – a boy. They have named him Tom. So that at any rate has been well managed. I give Eliza money for the Gilmores. For the little boy.

  The next day when I take off the compresses, there it is – through the window the grey sky, the precise hue of dirty silver.

  I inch further along the road to recovery. Alonso writes letters to men in big towns, who claim to know things about eyes. They make promises to visit. I don’t need them, I tell him – I am healing. He does it anyhow.