The Crimson Portrait

by Jody Shields

  Chapter Three

  AT THE CREST of the hill, McCleary leaned against a stone wall to rest. The hour was ill suited for walking, as the light had begun to shift and deepen, darkening the tall grass and his white jacket to bluish bronze, the color claimed by twilight. He gazed back at the enormous house, and only from this distance was it clear how the landscape had been designed around the structure at a later date, to provide a panoramic view from the windows. The road had been moved, the faint line of a sunk fence was still visible, and perhaps the clump of dark cedars were descendants of the original planting. During the following hundred-odd years, the landscape had exuberantly reverted, and now the grounds were marred by the tracks of vehicles and lights that bleached the fields.

  McCleary watched a young man make his way toward him, wearing a blue hospital suit loose as a child’s clothing, unshaped by masculine padding or a lining. He moved stiffly, holding his shoulder at a protective angle, as if his gait were affected by the thick bandage slanting across his face.

  Slightly breathless from the climb, Julian gave McCleary a lopsided grin of relief and eased himself against the wall next to the doctor. He had been injured by shrapnel, and layers of gauze hid the wrecked symmetry of his face as neatly as a cocoon. His right eye had been only slightly injured and was uncovered to aid healing. Julian was the sole patient who gave McCleary a degree of comfort, and they had occasionally explored the grounds together, companionable acquaintances.

  McCleary pointed out the anomaly of a curiously peaked gray roof, too small for a house, barely visible in the trees. “It must be an ornamental structure. A folly. A pleasure pavilion.”

  Julian followed the direction of his hand. “Pleasure? Imagine.”

  McCleary noticed that Julian scanned the landscape with a practiced eye, even with his limited vision. “You’re an artist, aren’t you? There was a sketch pad by your bed.”

  “An artist with limits. I’m a mapmaker. I calculate and record perspective from one point to another. I can’t draw a face or figure. Terra incognita.”

  On the horizon, ribbons of color—a secretive violet—had been arranged against a pale yellow background. McCleary hadn’t seen such a display in weeks. The burning circle of the silver lamp over the operating table marked his dawn and dusk, bestowing a sense of timelessness.

  “I always seek true north. For luck,” said Julian. “It’s the holy grail for mapmakers. Even if every landmark were obliterated, true north could still be found, since it’s unanchored to any physical object.”

  “Tell me how it works.”

  “I’ll demonstrate. First you must loan me your wristwatch. Now the hour hand of the watch is pointed at the sun. Imagine a line midway between the hour hand and twelve o’clock. It will point south. An imaginary line in the opposite direction from this point is north. See?” He stood a little straighter. “I always showed this to the new recruits. Some of them thought it was hocus-pocus.”

  “Some of my patients believe their treatment is hocus-pocus.”

  “That’s not quite true. Some believe it’s closer to black magic.”

  McCleary caught Julian’s smile, and the gathering of lines around his eye, the orbicularis oculi. With a shock of wonder, he realized he might not recognize Julian without his bandage. “I noticed a statue when I was here earlier. Just ahead. You might find it interesting.”

  The men walked at an angle across a cropped pasture, and two stone figures were gradually revealed against a background of trees. The flowering gentian around its base, barely visible in shadow, provided delicate support for the statue’s somber weight.

  A woman carved of marble, clad in a short draped tunic, held a bow in one hand, a triumphant, scornful expression still unmistakable on what remained of her white face, missing a crucial fraction of nose and cheekbone. Her eyes were directed down at a stooped man suffering a transformation, his mouth distorted in a howl of fear and astonishment, his lower body replaced by the legs and flanks of a stag. Snarling, fierce dogs crouched around him.

  “We’ve intruded on a tragic couple,” Julian said quietly.

  McCleary reverently touched the woman’s sandaled foot. “She’s Diana the huntress. The goddess has punished Actaeon by turning him into a stag. He had secretly watched her bathing. Actaeon’s hunting dogs didn’t recognize their master the stag and furiously tore him apart.” He walked around the statue, evaluating Diana’s anatomy. The curve of the superficial cervical plexus on the woman’s neck was correct. Accurate angle of jaw to ear. The risorius muscle lifted her lips into a sardonic grin. The sculptor had graced the goddess with a generous mouth.

  “So poor Actaeon experienced the same pain as the animals he hunted.”

  “Yes. But Diana’s enchantment was even more diabolically cruel. Actaeon’s body was transformed, but his mind was unchanged. He recognized his fate. He knew that he was a prisoner in his own body.” Too late, McCleary caught the significance of what he’d said. Grieving for his blunder, he wished his words could be transformed into stones and thrown away.

  “I thank the gods that I wasn’t pursued by a vengeful woman.”

  “Yes indeed.” Embarrassed, McCleary sat down in the grass and felt a hard small object beneath his palm. He turned it over in his fingers for a moment before he recognized it. “If I’m not mistaken, here is the missing bit of the goddess. Her profile.”

  “Your work has followed you here, Doctor. Even those who aren’t living require your skill.” Julian squatted down, careful not to lean too far forward, as his balance was unsteady, and gently parted the tangled grasses, searching for more fragments from the statue. “It’s a wonder I have any sensation left in my fingers. In the trenches, the steel knives and forks were so cold they burned bare skin. Many times I buttered bread wearing gloves.”

  McCleary was content to have the younger man conduct a search, as he was very careful with his own hands, convinced even after years of surgery that his sensitivity was a conditional gift.

  “Found something.” Julian extended his hand with a flourish that McCleary could only half appreciate in the dimming light. He delicately took the fragment, a bit of gravel, unshaped by a tool. He didn’t want to disappoint Julian, so he pocketed the stone and promised to examine it again under a lamp.

  McCleary began to stiffly clamber to his feet, but Julian was quicker and offered a hand of support.

  “After you, Doctor.”

  “Thank you. My old bones. I forget how easily the young can move. When I was your age, I was practicing the fine points of swordsmanship in Heidelberg. And studying medicine in my spare time.”

  “Heidelberg? I imagine you’ve lost touch with your fellow students over there.”

  “Yes. The war has seen to that. But this was forty-odd years ago. I was taught very little about facial surgery. It wasn’t considered important. I could recite everything I learned about faces over two pots of tea.”

  Lost in thought, McCleary veered slightly from the path. “Students fought with sabers in those days. It was a point of honor to have a slash on your face. There was even a special medical attendant, the Paudoktor, who attended the duelists. He reattached the students’ amputated noses and ears with applications of red wine, the yolk of a hen’s egg, balsam, and gauze. And some stitching. The procedure was occasionally successful. The Paudoktor claimed he attended ten thousand saber duels in twenty-four years and salvaged an uncounted number of noses.”

  “This piqued your interest in medicine?”

  “Actually, I found the duels more fascinating. It was a civilized ritual. Before the match, all the dogs would be chased out of the park.”

  After a moment, Julian chuckled. “Scavengers. Of course.”

  McCleary sensed the slope of the hill, but his mind focused on another image. Smooth snow and bare trees in a dim quadrangle, and two students struggling to walk with a figure slumped between them, his shirtfront darkened with a bloodstain, jagged and irregular as a broken stick.

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nbsp; MY GOOD SIR, regard the apparatus that removes the subtlety of consciousness.”

  McCleary smiled as the anesthetist, Brownlow, gestured at his battery of equipment arranged on the table. Glass beakers, transparent vessels marked with horizontal ribs of measurement. Gauze. Scissors. An efferent tube, a syringe, an eyedropper, a pipette, an inhaler. A Riva-Rocci sphygmomanometer with a stethoscope. A foot bellows that controlled anesthesia vapor. A thermos flask to warm the anesthesia gas. Gauze pads to place over the patients’ eyes, a mask to fit over the nose and mouth. Flannelette wrist and leg straps used for restraint.

  “This is the masterpiece.” Brownlow held an oval-shaped wire mesh contraption, constructed like a dog muzzle, over his face, and it fit like a mask. A “cage” over his mouth held a light blue feather.

  “Could there be a more primitive implement? A bird’s feather to monitor the patient’s breath?” Brownlow spoke from behind the mask, and the feather wavered with the hiss of his words. “Preposterous. Clumsy tools betray my skills. My equipment should be fine as the devices of jewelers.”

  Ether could free the mind from all constraints, and it was never predictable which men would react to the anesthesia in the operating room, summon superhuman strength, and struggle with the doctors, believing they were still on the battlefield, pursued by the enemy or their own private demons. Some men had to be restrained with straps until the drug took effect. Even the most self-contained had been known to betray themselves and cry for a woman, gibber intimate detail. Rumor enriched the anesthetist with enough secrets to support himself with blackmail.

  Moody, often sullen, Brownlow seemed to welcome these violent encounters, as if they confirmed his power to subdue and control a body.

  “I covet each breath a man takes,” Brownlow had told McCleary. “No, I don’t covet the breath; I grant each breath. Like a god.”

  The patients feared Brownlow as a bitter reminder of their helplessness before pain, the ritual of anesthesia and the blank black passage that followed. Many were convinced that during surgery he somehow magically threaded his presence into their consciousness. If they displeased him, he might use his power over them, as a witch commands her familiars. Some patients compulsively fingered good-luck talismans—their gris-gris—when they saw the anesthetist approach, carrying the tools of his trade—a black rubber mask and a small glass bottle of ether—like a shaman.

  A gaunt figure, Brownlow stalked the corridors and the area around the operating theater, where the strong odor of ether lingered, his eyes unfocused like the numbed survivor of a catastrophe, his thin, lined face revealing little, as closed as the secretive nature of his equipment.

  A reckless young orderly had once dared to wrinkle his nose behind Browlow’s back, pretending to inhale the telltale odor. “Here’s the Grim Reaper,” he whispered as the patients watched, uneasy with his mockery. “Brownlow hates the sunlight for no good reason,” the patients gossiped, critical of the dark round spectacles that he sometimes wore indoors, reportedly stolen from a blinded officer.

  During surgery, Brownlow’s eyes were luminous, dark, and focused with concern, the tender gate that opened for each man before the spike of anesthesia took his ticking brain. He could put a man under ether in less than five minutes and suspend him there during surgery, hovering over the prone body, monitoring his blood pressure, timing the rise and fall of his chest, regular as music. An interruption in this pattern had terrible significance.

  McCleary was mildly jealous of Brownlow, who could leave after an operation or simply turn to the next patient. His work allowed him the luxury of distance from the wounded, and he rarely entered the wards.

  With his knowledge of the classics, McCleary identified Brownlow with an emissary from the underworld, Charon the ferryman, as he steered the feather weight of the men’s consciousness, a cargo more precarious than the balance of a vessel upon water.

  Brownlow was another vessel that he prayed would balance, stay afloat.

  THE DENSE SOUND of colliding ivory balls rose from the billiard table. Brownlow grimaced with satisfaction at the young redheaded medical officer’s clumsy shot and made a pretense of casually circling the billiard room, a cue stick swinging in his hand.

  The young officer avoided him and addressed McCleary. “So you’ve quarantined the mirrors in the house, Doctor?”

  “Yes, I did. Best for the patients to see themselves after their surgery is completed.” McCleary’s voice came from the deep shelter of an armchair by the fireplace.

  The young officer absently considered his next shot. “They’re hardly unprepared for a shock. They’ve been in battle. Men have died next to them. Let them get on with it.”

  His words made McCleary feel ill at ease, as the officer conducted himself with the self-confidence of a military man, not a fellow doctor. This young man is inexperienced and too literal, thought McCleary, needing to grasp something for comfort, a walking stick, a dog’s warm muzzle. He squinted at the billiard table, a brilliant green island. “I wonder at your quick judgment, sir.”

  Brownlow smacked the edge of the billiard table. “Some poor blighter will see his noseless reflection in a puddle and die of fright. Or he’ll shoot himself. Or shoot you. What about Ward, who talks constantly about his fiancée, wondering when they’ll marry? Let him look at his own face, see the hideous truth.”

  McCleary found his voice. “The patients’ lives will be worse when they leave here. Why rob them of their last illusion? Give them this frail time to mend.”

  “Yes, let the patients pass their time here in a delusional dream. It’s our duty to provide comfort,” said Brownlow, and it was unclear from his expression whether he was joking.

  The young officer took his time lighting a cigar, its smoke magically blue where it strayed under the light from the lamp shade. “We’ll take your decision, Dr. McCleary. But we can’t be sentimental and mollycoddle the patients.”

  “No danger of that,” muttered Brownlow.

  “Gentlemen, if the practice of medicine has one certainty, it is that nothing concerning the body is permanent.” McCleary took the last sentence for himself, for the sake of the men he would heal.

  THERE WAS SHOUTING outside, and as the admitting clerk raced across the room, the doors slammed open for four bellowing orderlies with a shaking, blanketed figure on a stretcher. The clerk’s frantic gesture directed them down the corridor. The stretcher tilted dangerously around the corners, the nurses stepping back against the walls, eyes on their clipboards, barely taking notice as they already anticipated the next crisis, the next arrival.

  An orderly stumbled, losing his grip on the stretcher, and at McCleary’s warning cry, a boy darted forward and grabbed its edge as the helpless patient rolled to one side.

  McCleary and an orderly gently lifted the patient to the examining table, keeping him upright, for his mandible was fractured and edema of the palate was so severe that he was unable to close his mouth. The patient’s eyes were pinched red folds lost in his swollen, contorted face, making it impossible to guess his age.

  “Easy there.” McCleary held the patient’s thin arm, stroking his hand until he was calm and his forehead relaxed. The comfort of skin on skin. After a brief examination, McCleary was saddened to realize that the patient was perhaps seventeen years old. Must have lied about his age to enlist.

  “You’re very young, soldier. Good for you,” McCleary managed to say. The patient’s eyes flickered briefly, registering his pride, and then he noticed Brownlow dangling the black rubber mask.

  The alarmed patient pushed McCleary aside, scrambling to jump from the table. Brownlow gripped the patient’s gown, trying to hold him down, and they struggled.

  “Damned fool.” McCleary shoved their flailing bodies apart. Brownlow was needlessly aggressive.

  The young patient clung to McCleary as Brownlow stealthily edged around them, then swiftly pressed the mask packed with ethyl chloride-saturated gauze over the patient’s nose, holding it ther
e as the young soldier jerked and went limp. There was a loud wail, and McCleary turned to see the boy who had held the stretcher clapping his hand over his mouth.

  “He’ll be well looked after,” he said kindly, addressing the dismayed boy.

  During the operation, McCleary remained tight with anger as Brownlow hovered over the young man, lavishing him with a tenderness he would never show while a patient was conscious. He minded his every breath, as two lovers will wait face-to-face with lips parted, the teasing delay of a kiss.

  Suddenly, quicker than a brushstroke, the young man’s lips turned lilac, his respiration became shallow, and he went into shock on the operating table. Brownlow’s hands shook; he glared at the fractional slip of the colorless ether in the jar as the patient’s breath grew softer and his blood pressure dropped. Then the liquid was still.

  After all hope of recovery was abandoned, Brownlow swiftly left the room.

  Outside, dew had turned the grass into unmarked silver, and in his white uniform, Brownlow seemed barely to touch the ground as he strode away. McCleary shouted his name. Brownlow whirled around and lifted his arms in utter defeat, then his faint figure was lost in the landscape.

  LATER, MCCLEARY SOUGHT out the boy who had helped with the patient and found him cautiously drying a syringe in the pantry. When he noticed McCleary observing him, the boy started but didn’t drop the syringe.

  “I won’t break it, sir. Doctor. The assistant matron asked me to clean the syringe.”

  McCleary introduced himself and asked the boy about his background.

  The boy, Artis, and his father had both been born on the estate. When the house steward went to war, Artis had taken over some of his duties. As the hospital staff had filled the house, he had lost certain places that had been his alone—the oriel window at the top of the front staircase, a stool next to a cupboard in the larder, a low shelf in the storeroom where he kept a few prized possessions: books, a brass spyglass, a pipette, a wooden box with a broken lock. He was seventeen, tall for his age, distinguishable from the youngest orderlies by his shabby jacket and long hair, infrequently trimmed by a scullery maid. Catherine still paid his wages, although he spent all his time in the patients’ wards. He was no longer beholden to her, could walk away without waiting for orders. Because of the war.