The House of Whispers

by Laura Purcell

  With a shy smile, she crept towards the china display and pointed out an unglazed vase shaped like a pagoda. ‘This here’s one of mine. Father sent it undecorated for me, but it never looks as good when you paint it after the firing.’

  He squinted at the design. It was a native flower. A familiar one.

  ‘Digitalis!’ he exclaimed happily. ‘Why, did you copy this from my supplies? I distil it in the alembic. Foxglove.’

  ‘Fairy bells,’ she corrected.

  Hell and damnation, did the child never relent?

  ‘Creeda,’ he remonstrated, as gently as he could manage. ‘You know this must stop. If I cannot show your father some improvement . . .’ He opened his hands, as if he could display the madhouse and all its horrors there. Then a thought struck him. ‘Tell me this: if you fear fairies so, why do you seek to keep them in your life? Why paint their flowers, read about them, if it gives you pain? Even supposing they did abduct you, which I am far from allowing . . . Would it not be better to forget?’

  She returned his look in that unnerving manner of hers. The expression of her blue eye was always different from the brown one. Harder. ‘Do you forget, sir?’

  For a second, he was speechless.

  ‘I see them everywhere now,’ she went on, ‘I can’t help it. They opened my eye.’ She laid a finger on her cheek under the cornflower iris. ‘It’s a new way of seeing. Of looking. Like those men you tell me discovered how the blood flows, or how miasma spreads. Please, sir. I know you understand. Don’t you see everything differently since they . . . went?’

  He should have been furious at such impertinence. He knew it, but did not feel it. She chilled the anger within him.

  ‘Papa?’

  The door squealed on its hinges.

  His daughter stood on the threshold. She had entered without knocking as he had done, so many times.

  Suddenly, he was conscious of how close he stood to Creeda, and how the china display resembled a strange sort of shrine.

  ‘Louise.’ He drove his hands inside his pockets to hide their fidgeting. He felt like a fool.

  How much had she heard?

  His daughter’s face betrayed little. It rarely did. Whether she was rolling pills or standing in the hell of a consumptive’s sickroom, her features remained faintly troubled. But there was that crease between her brows. Deeper, these days. Soon it would be there permanently.

  Her cool eyes moved behind her spectacles: from him to Creeda, to the china. Assessing. Silently condemning. It was a sickening sensation: to have his own child stand in judgement on him. For a moment he saw her as a woman, fully grown, beyond his recognition.

  ‘Papa,’ she said firmly. ‘It is time for you to go to the caves.’

  Chapter 33

  Louise hovered on the beach, a tureen of gruel growing steadily heavier in her arms. Surf licked at the heels of her boots as it rolled onto the sun-warmed sand. Standing here, the hole in the cliff face was nothing but a gaping void. It seemed absurd to imagine that people, living breathing people, would dwell within.

  She found herself wanting just one more minute. Another moment in the fresh air, where the waves masked the sound of retching and coughs. It was not like her to fall prey to such weakness. She was flustered, that was all. Hard work would set her right. Heaving up the tureen, she took a deep breath and marched across the sand.

  A volley of choking greeted her at the mouth of the cave. No men sat together swapping stories by the fire pit.

  Only old Seth limped up to her, bowl in hand. ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes.’ His voice was like gravel. ‘Starvin’, I am.’

  Hurriedly, she set the tureen down. ‘Please, help yourself. Where is Dr Pinecroft?’

  He shrugged, more interested in the gruel. She noticed the marked way in which he favoured his left leg as he moved. This was a new and alarming development. Could it be that the disorder had spread to his hip?

  ‘What of the other men? Do they keep to their beds? It sounds as if someone is very unwell.’

  Seth ignored her, lifted the lid from the tureen and scooped his bowl in. Tattoos marked his stringy arms, their ink faded and creased. It was as he removed a brimming bowl and began to rummage in his pocket for a spoon that Louise noticed something else winding between the black patterns.

  The same red mark she had seen upon Harry, weaving across the skin like crimson thread.

  ‘Come here—’ she began, but a cry cut her off.

  ‘They’ve got me! They got me!’

  She ran. It was not easy on the damp, stony surface. She tripped and stumbled, splashing through the shallow rock pool, but her urgency was not misplaced. As she drew nearer to Chao’s hut, she heard Papa’s voice.

  ‘Hold still, man!’

  The door stood ajar and both Chao and Michael were lying on their backs while her father knelt between them.

  He made no endeavour to conceal the anguish on his face. ‘Louise! Thank God that you are come. Something has happened, something strange, I cannot . . .’

  ‘They marked me!’ Chao choked. ‘I saw them come in the night and do it.’

  Papa extended a hand to restrain him. It was covered in dried blood.

  ‘Whatever does he mean?’ she asked.

  ‘This mark . . . It is on Michael too.’ Papa shook his head. His hair had come loose from its ribbon tie and fell chaotically about his face. ‘I changed his silk setons for ones of India rubber, and when it was done I saw . . . Well, come and see for yourself.’

  Releasing Chao, he crawled from the narrow space between the patients to the door of the hut. Louise helped him to stand.

  ‘I have never seen anything like it,’ he confided. ‘In all my years of physic, I never . . .’ He broke off, coughed.

  Her blood turned cold.

  ‘Sit there, Papa, on that rock there. You are exhausted. I should have been here with you, caring for them.’

  He let her push him down, but continued to gesture while he coughed. ‘The mark . . .’

  ‘Very well, I will go and look at it.’

  She had to hitch her skirts up and fight her way into the cramped hut. The smell was indescribable. Both men appeared to have soiled themselves. Scarlet trickled down the side of Chao’s face.

  ‘Miss!’ He tried to sit upright. ‘Miss, look what they did to me!’

  His shirt was unfastened at the neck. A mass of blotches were spread over the skin. Chao pulled the material up to show his stomach. It was covered in the same wild red scribble as Seth’s arm.

  ‘Their little feet,’ he gasped, rubies bubbling from his lips. ‘Like blades. They danced on me. Danced.’

  The image was appalling. She reached for a cloth and carefully wiped the blood from his mouth.

  ‘What do you mean, Chao?’

  ‘I saw them,’ he insisted.

  ‘Saw what?’

  His lips trembled beneath her cloth. ‘The things that live underground.’

  Next to her, Michael spluttered painfully. The man was in a terrible state. Papa had exchanged the silk setons under his ribs for bulky rubber ones that tortured the skin. Pus was draining down the tubes unchecked. She did her best to clear it, but it swelled up anew from underneath. At least there were no blotches or scrawls near the wound. Yet Papa said he had seen something . . .

  Awkwardly, she assessed the rest of his visible skin. There. That wobbling line, paler and pinkish, traced on his feet.

  ‘Things that live under the ground,’ she murmured as the realisation broke.

  Papa was wrong to say he had seen nothing like this. He had seen something exactly like it, although less severe.

  ‘Papa!’ She struggled up and through the narrow door. ‘Papa, I know what it is.’

  He was still sitting on the rock, elbows propped on his knees, eyes fixed on the ground.
r />   ‘Worms, Papa!’ she cried triumphantly. ‘It is just an infestation of worms.’

  He stared at her in astonishment. All at once, something seemed to break, and his mouth fell open.

  ‘Papa?’

  ‘Worms. My darling girl. Of course! Worms.’

  He began to laugh. There was something terrible in that laugh. Bitter.

  No matter how hard she attempted to smile, her cheeks would not obey.

  ‘Damp, moist conditions,’ she explained quietly. ‘The diarrhoea that accompanies the malady. It is an ideal environment for the hookworm to thrive.’

  He had taught her that himself.

  She remembered each and every lesson. A younger man, with no grey streaking his hair, sweeping her into his arms and sitting her upon his lap to explain what he was reading. The smell of him, sharp and clean, and the rumble of his voice as she laid her head against his chest.

  Papa had survived the consumption, yet somehow she was losing him all the same.

  ‘What would you recommend?’ She pressed him. ‘Rue and alum? Santonica clysters?’

  ‘Yes . . . all of that. We must endeavour to keep everything clean. Bring a jar of burnt alum and some rosemary, would you? I will . . .’ He waved one hand vacantly, ‘. . . fumigate.’

  ‘Yes, Papa.’

  He hung his rumpled head.

  A broken man. That was what one of the apothecaries back in Bristol had whispered, after it happened. She had never believed them until this moment, would not have dreamed Papa capable of making an error, let alone one so amateur. Every surety in her life seemed to be crumbling away.

  ‘They were right,’ he told the ground. ‘Even gouty old Redfern. They were right, and I was not. How blind I have been. How damnably proud.’

  ‘I do not understand—’

  ‘They said this disease was beyond my ability, and they were correct. I am a gentleman’s physician, no pioneer. I should have confined myself to leg ulcers, quinsy and gout.’

  ‘No. That is untrue. You have not slept—’

  ‘I doubt I will sleep again. God!’ He slapped his hand against the rock, making her jump. ‘It was to be our purpose, Louise! The one thing to make sense of it all. I was so sure . . .’ He stared towards the back of the cave. She saw the muscles in his jaw clenching and releasing. ‘We suffered, but I thought we were called . . . There was a reason . . .’

  He trailed off into silence. The wind whistled through the rocks.

  ‘Papa,’ she said urgently. ‘What are you staring at? Papa! Look at me!’

  He did. And now she wished he would not. Being held by his gaze was like being held in the grip of a fever.

  ‘Worms, Louise. I failed to detect something as simple as worms.’ He laughed again, a horrible, gasping sound. ‘When I think of your mother . . . of little Francis. What else might I have missed?’

  Chapter 34

  Harry was the last to be treated with her rue posset. He had not emerged from his hut the entire morning.

  Louise knocked upon the wooden door, nervous about what she might find inside. But Harry opened it straight away, upright and dressed. His eyes gleamed in the low light. Even now they were better acquainted, she could not be certain of the exact colour of his irises. They were changeable, like the ocean: mutable depths of green, blue or grey.

  ‘Louise.’

  ‘Miss Pinecroft,’ she corrected, less firmly than usual.

  ‘Please, come in.’

  Why did it feel different to be alone with him? She nursed the other men without a thought, only turning away when Papa was obliged to administer the clysters. But as she negotiated the step inside the hut, she felt self-conscious. Perhaps it was the similarity in their ages.

  ‘You need to drink this,’ she said, proffering the jug. ‘I have sweetened it with honey, so there is no need to pull that face.’

  ‘What’s it for, Louise?’

  She gritted her teeth. ‘That mark I saw on your hand. It is the worm. We need to purge you of it.’

  He held out both palms to her and turned them over. ‘Don’t trouble yourself. See? I don’t have it any more.’

  ‘Not on that hand, but what about the rest of your body?’

  He smirked. ‘Do you want to check?’

  ‘Why must you be so—’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he laughed, sitting down upon his cane chair. ‘There’s no sport in this place. Let me joke and look at a pretty girl for a minute, would you?’

  ‘I have not the time,’ she replied shortly.

  His smile faded, and his face became solemn once more. ‘You can sense him, can’t you?’

  ‘Whom?’

  ‘Death.’

  Louise swallowed. She did recognise this strange, charged atmosphere: she had felt it while watching Kitty sleep. A presence, where none was to be seen.

  But that was folly. They were all starting to sound like Creeda.

  ‘I’ve never been white-livered,’ Harry went on. ‘Death don’t scare me much. Things look brighter. Livelier. They do, when you know you’re going to lose them all.’ He shrugged. ‘But I’m stuck here in this hole. Time’s running out and the only beauty I get to look at is the ocean . . . and you.’

  She glanced away, touched in spite of herself. ‘This cave is better than a prison, Harry. You should count yourself lucky.’

  ‘I do,’ he said softly.

  His wooden cup lay in the corner on the floor. She bent and scooped it up, filling it with posset from the jug.

  ‘Here.’

  Harry grimaced but took the drink, their fingers touching briefly.

  ‘How are you so brave?’ he asked suddenly.

  She snatched her hand away. ‘What?’

  ‘For a maid. You . . .’ For the first time, he appeared unsure of himself. He lowered his eyes to the posset. ‘Down here, day after day. Don’t you fear you might . . . catch it?’

  ‘I am not sure that I can catch consumption, Harry,’ she sighed. ‘I was the only one of my siblings who did not sicken. Perhaps I have a resilience to it. And there are even physicians who say that consumption is not infectious at all, but a tendency we are born with.’

  He shook his head. ‘Hell of a risk to take.’

  ‘Well, I am not “white-livered” either.’

  Harry grinned. ‘No, you an’t.’

  Perhaps something of her disquiet showed on her face, for Harry became intensely interested in his drink. She watched him to make sure he swallowed it all.

  His forehead was still marked with bruises, and his nose crooked at an angle, but for all that he was peculiarly attractive, marked with the beauty of a dying thing. Sharp cheekbones, enhanced by the wasting. Wine-red lips and burning eyes.

  His throat bobbed as he downed the final drops of the medicine.

  ‘Not so bad for the rest of them, is it?’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘They’ve lived. Especially Seth. I would have liked to see battle. Had a wife. Maybe a brat to bounce too.’

  ‘There was little chance of you achieving any of those things in gaol,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Ah, but I wouldn’t have been in there forever. A brand and six years: that was my sentence.’

  ‘You might not be here forever, Harry.’ She took the cup gently from his hand. ‘I will admit the treatments have not progressed as we planned, but you are looking stronger than the other patients. If I had to place a wager on a man likely to survive . . . it would be you.’

  He did not smile. Did not even look at her. ‘That’s kind of you, Miss Pinecroft. But I know where I’m headed.’

  ‘None of us can presume to know—’

  ‘You think it’s deep underground here,’ he said bitterly. ‘But it an’t. There’s another space, even darker, six feet under the soil. Who’s going to keep
me safe from the worms then?’

  Fire and water. Ernest possessed them both now. Flames capering, malicious and gleeful in the stone circle; a tripod above them, supporting the bowl of water and rosemary. Fire and water to rid yourself of fairies, of worms.

  They were banishing nothing. Only bringing memories back.

  Rosemary had been the scent of their wedding day. Her clothes smelt of it, her hair. She carried sprigs in her bouquet. ‘Rosemary to bind us,’ she had said.

  And they were bound, still.

  The water started to bubble, tinkling against the bowl like a fall of rain.

  He tore leaves of rosemary between his fingers and threw more in. Thought of the rosemary and the lavender he had used to conserve the three bodies until their burial. He had seen them laid in that churchyard himself, but he knew his family were not truly there. That was mere bones and flesh.

  They had been taken from him and yet . . . He felt them. Always. They were not gone, so where were they? He considered the ring on his finger, the remnants of them trapped behind glass. Just as he was. Seeing them, hearing them everywhere, never able to reach . . .

  It seemed his blue devils had finally won.

  One by one, he took up the pamphlets and treatises on the ground and fed them to the flames. Stray words stood out. Phthisis . . . Balsamic . . . corrects acrid Ichor . . . stuffed Bronchia . . . dissipates crude Tubercles . . . lungs strengthened with cold . . .

  Everything he thought he had known. How quickly it curled and blackened.

  Ash left to the wind.

  His cheeks burned from the heat. The scent of rosemary soared, spiralling towards the back of the cave.

  Kneeling down, he took the last few scraps of paper, scrunched them into a ball and threw it into the heart of the flame. It uncurled, crackled.

  There was just one item left. A slim volume, bound in cloth. Ernest picked it up and brushed off the cover.

  Folklore.

  He had forgotten this. He must have gathered it in the great bundle from his desk.

  Another failure. Creeda was no better. She remained as convinced of the existence of fairies as ever. He envied her that certainty.