by Miles Gibson
‘Children don’t appear and disappear like toadstools in a lawn,’ he complained.
Mrs Clancy stared anxiously at her hands. She hadn’t slept and her eyes were aching from the glare of the lamp on the desk. ‘You were at the seance, doctor. What did you make of it?’ she asked softly.
The doctor took a deep breath and groped for compliments. ‘Well, there are things we can’t explain … you have a most mysterious gift …’ he managed to mumble.
But Mrs Clancy was shaking her head. ‘It was a disaster. Everything went wrong. They come to me for help but I can’t control what happens. They expect me to be able to snap my fingers and open graveyards. They think I can control the dead like a troupe of dancing monkeys.’
The doctor arched an eyebrow and leaned back comfortably in his chair. He hadn’t expected Mrs Clancy to suffer doubts of faith. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ he said kindly. ‘I think you helped Mrs Reynolds.’
‘I can’t help anyone. I’m the one who needs help,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m going mad.’
‘Nonsense,’ smiled the doctor. He picked a toast crumb from his waistcoat and rolled it gently between his fingers. He wanted to reach out and cradle her head in his arms, wiping the pain from her eyes with his thumbs.
‘Yes,’ she insisted. ‘Yes. In another time they would have burned me as a witch.’
‘Now what makes you say that?’ he scolded, leaning forward and folding his hands on the desk. She was wearing a loose cotton dress and glass earrings shaped like acorns. When she moved her head the acorns swung against her neck. He wanted to kick over the desk, scoop her into his arms and suck out all the guilt and misery with his mouth. Papers flying. Acorns rolling. Mrs Clancy, I love you.
‘I see things,’ whispered the clairvoyant. ‘Monsters. Demons. Disgusting, horrible things. They’re crawling around inside my head. I’m frightened to sleep.’
‘Do they talk to you?’
‘No, they laugh and whisper.’
‘Ah,’ said the doctor and nodded. Were they jealous devils? Would they attack him if he tried to touch that which they possessed?
‘You’re a medical man. I don’t expect you to believe in magic,’ said Mrs Clancy.
‘I believe in miracles. I’ve seen enough of those in hospitals. Torn limbs that heal themselves. Tumours that shrink and vanish overnight. Sick men who die and come back to life,’ confided the doctor.
‘Yes?’ said Mrs Clancy hopefully.
The doctor nodded.
‘I need a miracle,’ she whispered, playing nervously with the buttons on her dress.
‘Slip off your clothes and I’ll have a look at you,’ he said quickly, frowning, poking through the piles of paper on his desk.
‘It’s not a physical disorder, doctor,’ said Mrs Clancy doubtfully.
‘I’ve seen men driven mad by insomnia, attacks of migraine that led to suicide,’ he growled. ‘The brain is a delicate machine. The slightest disturbance can help to unbalance it.’
‘Yes, my head hurts,’ agreed Mrs Clancy, frowning as she fingered her temples.
‘And the head is connected to the spine. You’ll find a gown behind the screen. Slip off your clothes and I’ll have a look …’
Mrs Clancy stood up and walked slowly, very slowly, towards the screen. She peeked inside, drew back, hesitated, sniffed, cocked her head, stepped forward and finally disappeared from view.
The doctor held his breath and tried to listen for the soft fluttering fall of her clothes. He wiped his face with his hand. He felt hot and his ears smouldered. Somewhere a dog was barking.
‘Can you manage?’ he said after a few minutes.
‘Yes,’ she said. She stepped from the shelter of the screen spinning the gown around her like a sheet. The daylight barely touched her skin. But the doctor was watching, waiting, and for one tantalizing moment he caught her full, Victorian beauty, the voluptuous curve of her belly and the heavy swing of her breasts. He struck with the speed of a cobra but it was he who stood wounded, trembling, unable to move across the sun-drenched carpet to follow his prey. He had not been prepared for such size and grace, he had not expected such sensual power, he was slain by her beauty.
‘Lie down,’ he said, gesturing towards the thin, metal bed. Mrs Clancy gingerly clambered aboard and settled her head on the pillow. She stared quietly at the ceiling.
‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said as he knelt down and held her wrist. Her hand was small and plump, the knuckles dimpled and the fingers dainty.
‘Have you noticed anything lately?’ he said.
‘Noticed anything?’ she repeated. Was it not enough that a goblin menagerie fornicated on her eiderdown at night?
‘Loss of appetite? Difficulty breathing?’ he explained.
‘I don’t sleep.’
‘Well, let me look at you,’ said the doctor as he began his examination. Mrs Clancy modestly closed her eyes. Careful as a gigolo he opened the gown from shoulder to waist. Crafty as an exorcist he examined her skin for the marks of a witch. Everything about her was of imperial proportion, the gleaming cascade of chestnut hair, the shoulders mysteriously saturated with the smell of vanilla, the pope-purple nipples on those abundant breasts, and most especially the mighty pumpkin belly as it proudly pushed through the gown.
He passed his hands low over her body with the elaborate gestures of a demented somnambulist, his fingers not daring to touch her skin yet, so close, they absorbed something of its radiated heat.
‘Does it hurt when I touch you … here?’ he said, at last, his timid fingers tapping on the polished slope above her breasts.
‘No,’ she whispered.
‘Does it hurt when I touch you … there?’ he said and slipped his hand beneath the heavy, overhanging fruit to fondle her heart with the ball of his thumb.
‘No,’ she whispered.
‘And here,’ as his fingers reluctantly withdrew and continued across the broad sweep of her belly.
‘No,’ she whispered.
‘And here?’ he said. His hand strayed past her hips, down, down, far beyond the help of Hippocrates, the angels and God, towards the first stray brambles of hair that poked deliriously through the fold of the robe. ‘And here?’ He closed his eyes. He clenched his teeth. He tried to stop himself. But his hand continued to plunge forward on its devious errand. His fingers seized the plump pincushion of flesh and gave it a cruel squeeze.
‘Oh, yes!’ gasped Mrs Clancy. She winced with pain and surprise. ‘Yes, it hurts me there,’ she cried triumphantly.
The doctor sprang from the table and fell against the desk.
Mrs Clancy, blissfully ignorant of the violation she had so narrowly escaped at the hands of the madman, raised herself on her elbows and opened her eyes. ‘What’s wrong?’ she glanced at the doctor with a worried frown. He looked quite sick. He shivered. His eyes were delirious and shining. Had he discovered something so terrible that he dared not speak of it? Or was he suffering some malady of his own and bravely hoped to conceal the face from his patients?
‘Oh, I don’t think it’s anything serious. You mustn’t worry about it,’ he said, struggling to compose himself. His hands were shaking and his collar was damp. He staggered along the edge of the desk, picked up a pencil and dropped it. ‘But I’d like to see you again,’ he added casually.
‘When?’ asked Mrs Clancy, wrapping herself safely in the robe.
The doctor shrugged. ‘It’s not urgent. Whenever you have the time,’ he said, flicking through the pages of his empty diary. ‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Mrs Clancy. She was shocked. It was serious.
He nodded. ‘Fine. Now I wonder if you could manage a small urine sample? I’d like to make a few tests,’ he said and smiled with all the charm and cunning of the dangerously insane.
‘I’ll try.’
‘If you take this jug and go behind the screen …’ he explained, giving her a little plastic beaker wrapped in a paper sleeve.
/> Mrs Clancy took the beaker and obediently hid behind the screen.
The exhausted doctor collapsed in his chair. He stared at the screen with bulging, love-lorn eyes. He tried to imagine her squatting to piddle, feet spread, knees bent, hands held between her thighs, waiting for the hot squirt of water to rattle into his beaker.
When the clairvoyant returned she was dressed and holding a warm beaker of water.
‘Well done,’ he said, stepping forward and snatching the beaker from her outstretched hand.
‘What’s wrong with me?’ she asked again. He gave her little offering such a queer look that, she felt sure, it must betray symptoms of a ghastly disease.
‘There’s no cause for alarm,’ he said quietly.
‘Can you cure it?’
‘It’s complicated. It requires more investigation. I’d like to examine you again,’ he confessed. ‘Properly. A full examination.’
‘Yes?’
‘There’s nothing to it. But it takes time …’
‘I’m in your hands, doctor.’
‘Good. We’ll start your treatment tomorrow.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mrs Clancy, smiling bravely.
When she had gone he placed the beaker on his desk and sat to admire it, as a man might admire a glass of fine wine, placing it against the light to admire its colour and strength.
He remained at his desk for the rest of the day, plotting the conquest of Mrs Clancy, widow. After many hours of tortured argument, he thought he knew the answer. He would concoct a modern love potion, an aphrodisiac, a prescription strong enough to intoxicate her brain, bewilder her eyes and set her belly boiling. He blew the dust from his textbooks and began his search for the precious elixir among the foxed and curling pages. In the agony of love, among the dark, distorting mirrors in which he groped for comfort, the idea seemed so simple, so perfectly natural, that he laughed and clapped his hands with pleasure. He would lubricate her limbs and liberate her spirit. He would find the fuel to stoke her engine until she whistled and steamed with lust.
Tomorrow they would make the furniture dance and the air sing. They would terrify ghosts, corrupt demons and make skeletons clatter in coffins.
Chapter Thirty-Three
‘Fiddle Stick Stew, Fiddle Stick Stew,
Smack my arse and I’ll kiss you,
Fiddle me, diddle me, Fiddle Stick Stew.’
Vulgar Song
At the time Wilton Hunt was trying to dredge his fortune from the Sheep’s mud the women of Rams Horn made Fiddle Stick stew. They saved the bones of certain fish and boiled them down to a thin, grey glue. When the mixture had been cooking a week they added turnip and wild garlic, honey, beans and lobster meat.
It was said that a man who tasted the stew would fiddle a woman until she died of fright or sang with the sweetness of a violin. And once a man had swallowed but a spoon of it, nothing would persuade him against carnal pursuit.
The strength of this soup was so alarming that the women kept its knowledge a secret. But on every feast day morning the town was woken by the stink of fish glue. Then the youngest girls were locked in the bakery for safety while the oldest and most feeble women left their beds and displayed themselves from their bedroom windows, hanging their breasts from their nightgowns. The men would be fed on soup and bread until they grew so hot and wild that they overturned the tables and ran shouting through the street. No man under the influence of Fiddle Stick stew found his own wife and no woman expected it. New contracts were made and old debts paid on such occasions. The men rooted and looted until they injured themselves or fell from exhaustion.
The rich adventurers who came to wallow in Wilton Hunt’s pyramid were soon acquainted with the magic properties of the stew and more than one hungry young aristocrat fell prey to marauding fishwives. The reputation of Fiddle Stick stew spread across the country until the most notorious courtesans of London were making annual visits to the soup kitchens of Rams Horn to beg and steal the recipe.
At the height of its popularity a small measure of stew might exchange hands for ridiculous prices on the London black market and, such was the demand, gallons of sour but innocent broth were sold to unsuspecting women.
But what happened to the secret and why the women of Rams Horn have no memory of it remains a mystery.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The doctor locked the surgery and walked quickly across the yard. His search for a love potion had ended in failure. He had struggled for hours through anaemia, angina, asthma and athlete’s foot; arthritis, antacid, anticoagulant, apophlegmatic and apoplexy. But where were the aphrodisiacs? The text books failed to mention them. The best medical dictionaries refused to discuss them. All the drug manufacturers, so eager to brag of their success in manipulating every other human condition, ignored them. There seemed no power on earth that could open Mrs Clancy’s arms to him. And then he remembered Mrs Halibut. She claimed to sweeten dreams with comfrey leaves and repair broken hearts with onion paste. A simple love potion should tax her talents no more than a script for oatmeal soup. It was dangerous to approach the herbalist and he knew he risked the ridicule of every old woman in Rams Horn. But if she failed to possess the secret he had, at least, proved her wrong. And if she did have the knowledge of such an elixir – and could be persuaded to sell him a draught – he would have the power, at last, to conquer the woman who haunted him. He must consult Mrs Halibut. There was nothing else left to him. He slipped through the town and turned towards the Jamaica Road.
It was a warm evening. The sky was empty and the road obscured with a billowing shroud of pollen and dust. Along the hedgerows the honeysuckle had collapsed beneath the weight of its own perfume. The thistles had flowered and a few early blackberries hung like clots of blood on the barbed wire bushes. He walked blindly, lurching towards the sheltering twilight until at a bend a shout startled him.
The landlord and the butcher were standing in a ditch, beating at nettles with long sticks. They stood, waistdeep in undergrowth, grinning at him.
‘Any sign of them?’ called Big Lily White.
‘Who?’ asked the doctor.
‘The little ones,’ said Oswald Murdoch.
‘No,’ said the doctor. He pushed his hands into his pockets and strolled innocently to the side of the ditch. ‘Have you found anything?’
‘No,’ growled the landlord and thrashed at the nettles. He was sweating. Horse-flies, fat as grapes, whistled around his ears.
‘They drowned in the mud at the top of the Sheep,’ said Oswald Murdoch, shaking his head.
‘Or that big blackie stole ’em,’ said the landlord. He scratched his stomach and sniffed his fingers suspiciously. He had once fought a Nigerian wrestler called the Lagos Lion and had his legs broken.
‘Old Percy Wright went down in the Sheep. Years ago. I was a boy at the time,’ said the butcher, leaning on his stick. ‘He went looking for his porker. When we found him, after the war, he’d been preserved like a pickle. We fished him out of the mud and he stared at us with a horrible expression on his big, ugly face. He was a bag of wrinkles. But there was nothing wrong with him. Except he was dead.’
‘What happened to the pig?’ asked Big Lily White, stroking his moustache.
‘We found it running down the high street a couple of weeks after Percy disappeared,’ said Oswald. ‘So we ate it.’
‘That big blackie stole ’em,’ grumbled the landlord and gave the doctor a narrow stare.
The doctor glanced at his wristwatch and frowned. ‘I’m late,’ he said, returning quickly to the crown of the road.
‘Do you want ’em?’ shouted the landlord.
‘What?’ called the doctor as he hurried away.
‘The bodies,’ bawled the butcher. ‘If we find the bodies we’ll bring them to the surgery.’ An owl floated from a tree and sailed silently over the road.
It was almost dark when the doctor reached the herbalist’s cottage. He crept up the garden path and tapped on the door. How w
ould he explain himself? How could he hope to make the woman understand the delicate nature of his errand? He was a lecher, a bandit, a common thief in search of a key. His courage evaporated. How would he escape if the herbalist proved hostile or, worse, chose to laugh in his face. He brushed the hair from his eyes and tugged at his sleeves. He was busy trying to wipe his shoes against the backs of his legs when he noticed Mrs Halibut standing, watching him from the shrubbery.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded. She was wearing a long, linen apron and held a basket full of some unspeakable hairy root in her arms.
‘I’d like to talk to you,’ he began nervously.
She scowled, walked to the door and turned the key in the lock. ‘I don’t know anything. I haven’t seen them,’ she said and slipped past him, into the safety of the cottage.
‘No, it has nothing to do with the search,’ he said quickly rushing forward.
She paused and waited for him to explain.
‘It’s a rather delicate problem,’ he said. ‘Perhaps …’
Mrs Halibut shrugged and led him into the chintz parlour. She took the basket away to the kitchen and removed her apron. When she returned she gestured him to sit down, settled herself in a chair, a little apart from him, and buried her hands in her lap. Had he come to accuse her of trading in poison? Had he come to try and make an arrest?
‘One of my patients needs help,’ the doctor said with an anxious glance around the room.
Mrs Halibut blinked her green eyes and pouted at him. She was wearing some sort of rustic nightdress with little puffed sleeves and a band of antique lace at the waist. He squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. She looked absurdly young and he felt immensely old.
‘I can’t give you her name – breach of confidence – you understand – but she needs help. Urgently. It’s true that I can draw upon the full resources of modern medical science – no doubt about it – yet there are certain difficulties …’
‘It’s very hard to draw conclusions without knowing the patient,’ said the herbalist. ‘Can you tell me something of her symptoms?’ It couldn’t be Mrs Reynolds unless, of course, she had been stupid enough to eat the angel in mistake for a mushroom.