The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  Startled, Harry sat up and peered into the firelit darkness to see what she was doing. ‘Don’t worry,’ she was saying, her face turned away from him. ‘I’m not going to play.’

  She wasn’t talking to Harry. She’d taken her cello out of its case, unwound the blue silk scarf from it, and now she was turning the machine heads to loosen the strings. She removed the bass string completely and dropped it, shining and sinewy, onto the cabin floor. It squirmed in the corner.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘That must be better for you. A bit late, I’m afraid, but better late than never. All these years you’ve been wound up tight, fit to burst. There, all that tension has gone now.’

  She leaned the cello against the bed and sat down, with her little white hands pressed to the bulge of her belly. Her smile was thin, like the smile of a lizard, and her eyes were cold, like the eyes of a gull.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said to Harry. ‘I didn’t want to wake you yet. It’s two o’clock. I was restless. Remember what it says in the book about the tremendous surges of energy I’m supposed to have when it all starts happening? Makes a change from my usual laziness! I found myself awake, realised it was starting, and I just couldn’t stay in bed. I suddenly thought of the cello, all wound up in its case, and had a terrific urge to unwind it. Daft, isn’t it? I don’t know why exactly,’ she added with a shrug of bony shoulders. ‘Just a whim, I suppose.’

  The boat stirred. It was a big tide that night, one of the highest of the summer. The timbers groaned against the sea wall; water and silt lapped in the bilges. Outside, on the estuary, all was still, as it had been throughout the hot, airless summer. There was hardly a cry from the distant dunes. Harry and Lizzie had been becalmed for weeks – hard weeks for her, who was so pale and frail. The lunging, the squirm of the baby had left her exhausted. Now she sat, clammy-cold with sweat, on the edge of the bed. She was out of Harry’s reach.

  He sat up and leaned over to touch her. ‘It’s so stuffy in here, Lizzie,’ he said. ‘Why on earth have you got the stove going like that?’

  She felt icy, although the cabin was ablaze with firelight.

  ‘We’re going to need hot water, aren’t we?’ she answered. ‘I stoked up the stove, trying not to wake you. I’ll put the kettle on it now.’

  But, as she stood up, small as a child except for the weight she was bearing before her, she gasped and clutched hard at her stomach. Harry sprang from the bed and quickly laid her down on the rumpled sheets where he’d been lying.

  Things were happening very fast. The chapters of the books he’d read for just this moment, describing what should be done at different stages, now flickered their densely worded pages through his mind. Socks? That was something he remembered: however hot a woman might feel in labour, her feet would be freezing, due to a diminishing circulation of blood. While Lizzie lay down and tried to relax, to calm herself and her breathing for another con­trac­tion, Harry found his thickest socks, and tugged them onto her feet. Tea? The kettle was on the stove, which was too hot to touch.

  ‘How long have you been up, Lizzie?’ he asked her. ‘You should have woken me!’

  When she had the breath, she said that she’d been up for an hour, refuelling the fire before turning her attention to the cello. She spoke to him from a distance, with a glitter on her. She was the centre of things, the focus of everything that was happening and about to happen. She eclipsed him. The smile she smiled, even as she gulped for air, seemed to drain him. The force with which she inhaled left little oxygen for him. All the firelight fell on her. When she said, with a quiver of excitement in her voice, that the waters had broken and then commanded him to bring her some towels, Harry was so grateful to be involved in what she was doing that his eyes stung with tears. And when she told him to call for an ambulance, he got straight into his clothes and onto the deck of the boat, fumbling to unlock his bicycle, accelerating as hard as he could into the darkness of the seashore track, in pursuit of the feeble, zigzagging beam from his lamp.

  The night was warm around his face and neck. He covered a mile in a blankness of oblivious exertion before he realised with a pang that he’d left without giving Lizzie a kiss or a word of encouragement, without even saying goodbye. He cycled steadily on, towards the lights of the town.

  Close to him, on his left, the waters of the Menai Strait were soft and full and silent on the shore. The tide was so high that the swell moved in the grass at the edge of the track. On the gravel, where the wheels of the bicycle were evenly crunching, there glistened the heavy, wet clumps of seaweed which the waves had put down; as he rode over them, there was a tender yielding, the gentle explosions of rubbery bubbles. The night was very dark. Across the strait he could see the lights of a house, faint among the trees of Newborough Warren, and sometimes the headlamps of a car swung and scythed through the high-banked lanes which tunnelled in the fields of the island. The water was black as oil, and just as still; only the dimmest reflections of the stars were quivering there, like a powder of sugar spilled on a deep carpet.

  Harry peered above him. The constellations weren’t clear, because the summer heat had spread a haze across them. But, as he hurried on, as he felt his breath coming hard and a trickle of perspiration between his shoulder blades, he saw a meteorite flash across the sky: a blazing star which spent itself on the horizon of the Irish Sea . . . as though it had fallen and been quenched, extinguished, before sinking as cold, dead fragments to the darkness of the depths. The meteorite was gone in a second or two. Harry continued to cycle, having seen it appear and disappear.

  It was three o’clock in the morning.

  Caernarfon Castle loomed before him, its floodlighting switched off. Only then, as he came to the mouth of the river, he remembered with a shock like a punch to the stomach that the footbridge had been swung open hours before, at eleven o’clock, and would be left open all night so that the fishing fleet could come and go. He fought down a wave of panic. A hundred yards from him, brightly lit against the slabs of the castle, there was a telephone kiosk; but he couldn’t cross to it. He breathed deeply and cycled on until he reached the first bridge upstream, crossed the river and hurried through the sleeping outskirts of Caernarfon. The detour had cost him a quarter of an hour.

  His conversation with the maternity unit at St David’s Hospital, Bangor, lasted a minute and then Harry’s coins ran out. But in that time he’d informed them of Lizzie Clewe’s imminent delivery of a baby and they’d assured him of the immediate despatch of an ambulance, once he’d described the whereabouts of the Ozyman­dias. Slamming down the receiver, he remained inside the kiosk, sweating from the exertion of the dash into the town, from the stress of the hurried conversation. The square and the streets and the castle were in darkness. Harry hesitated, reluctant to step out of the comforting brightness. He braced himself against the cowardice that wanted him to pause, so that, by the time he returned to the boat, the ambulance might already be there.

  In the windows of the kiosk, he saw his own reflection, his pale face, the gingery, dishevelled hair, the puzzled, bespectacled eyes. How bewildered and inexperienced he looked! It suddenly seemed such a long way home, with the tide lapping close and black beside him: a burrowing journey into darkness. Something in Lizzie had chilled him. He shuddered with a spasm of cold, in spite of the warmth of the summer’s night. He shivered to feel so separate from her, excluded from what she was doing, from what she was going to do.

  For another moment, the glare of the telephone kiosk held him. He avoided his eyes in the mirrored glass, winced at the fear on his face. Then he spilled out, mounted the bicycle and bent to the business of returning to the Ozymandias.

  Soon, the lamplight beckoned from the cabin of the boat. A plume of smoke rose into a still sky. The sea was up, so calm that the reflection of the stars was steadier than the stars themselves. As Harry dismounted and threw the bicycle onto the sea wall, he felt that all must be well: this was their home, so quiet and cool, on such a lovely,
lovely night.

  He stepped onto the deck and set the whole cabin rocking. He went quickly down the steps, into the cabin.

  Lizzie was in front of him, upright, swaying, her head and face covered with the blue silk scarf she’d unwound from the cello. For a second, it looked as though she was dancing in the centre of the room, in her nightdress and socks . . . dancing, with her arms at her sides, her body moving in time with the flickering firelight.

  But she wasn’t dancing. She was hanging.

  ‘Lizzie? Lizzie, what are you . . . ?’ Harry took a step forward, unsure of what he was seeing.

  Lizzie was hanging from the ceiling of the cabin. The bass string of the cello was wound around the beam and around her throat. Her feet were swinging about six inches above the floorboards. Her hands clenched and unclenched. The front of her nightdress was red and wet with a gout of blood and there was blood on her legs. She turned and swayed before him, as though she was dreamily dancing . . . The blood hissed when her legs touched the stove.

  With a wild cry, Harry lunged at her. Embracing her, holding her to him and trying to lift her with one arm, he reached to the ceiling and scrabbled at the knotted wire. Through the folds of the blue scarf, wrapped round and round her face, he could hear her gagging, gurgling whispers. Her hands felt into his hair, her freezing fingers were on his lips and in his mouth. He sawed at the string with a knife, and the room was filled with the jagged and violent resonance he’d once heard from Lizzie’s playing . . .

  But he couldn’t cut it. He couldn’t undo the string from around the beam.

  Exhausted, sobbing, he folded his arms around her body and cradled her. His face was buried in her breast. Her hands fell from him and swung. He sobbed and sobbed until her whispering stopped. Until at last he stepped away from her, releasing her gently when the string took all the strain. It hummed a deep, sonorous hum. She sighed a long, rattling sigh.

  Among the blankets of the bed there lay a child, very tiny, very grey. His mind completely blank, Harry bent to it and pressed the tip of his little finger into its mouth. The baby flinched and gave a mewing cry. Now that its mouth was clear, it continued to cry. Harry made sure that its face wasn’t covered, rearranging the blankets around its body, and he watched how the baby’s colouring changed quickly from grey to a suffusion of pink. It was a girl, with an angry face and a wisp of silvery hair.

  Lizzie had stopped the swaying dance with which she’d greeted Harry’s return to the boat. She was still. She was silent. Her socks were burned through and the soles of her feet were blistered black and stinking, because she’d stood on the stove before stepping into the air, as a means of driving herself to do it. Now, the shrouded, dangling figure slowly turned. The string buzzed. The cello leaned in the corner. In a spasm that set her dancing again and invoked a wail of horror from Harry, the afterbirth slithered down Lizzie’s legs and slopped onto the floor. It signalled that everything was done.

  Harry held the baby. She was hot, bawling lustily in a huddle of blankets. He lay with his daughter and hid his face, and they were crying together when the ambulance arrived.

  Part Three: Star-Splitter

  Chapter One

  In the hospital, Harry Clewe was taken to see Lizzie’s body.

  She’d been washed. Someone had brushed her hair. It was beautiful, gleaming red, falling smoothly from her forehead and her temples. Her face was no longer suffused with blood, but her lips were blue. Harry couldn’t see the damage that the cello string had done to her throat. Considering the trauma of her death, her expression was calm. But she was cold and broken. He looked at her face and her little hands, at her puffy, stupefied frown and the whiteness of her wrists and fingers. She was broken, like the things she’d found on the seashore, dead and bleached, scoured by the sand and the tumble of waves on barnacled boulders. She’d found things like this before, between the tidelines, on the foreshore where the boat was moored: things that had once been vital and vigorous, until they were quenched.

  The doctors covered the body with a sheet.

  Not far away, inside the same building, separated from the remains of her mother by a long corridor, the baby continued her lusty squalling. Her birth and her mother’s death had occurred within a matter of minutes: the life had passed from one to the other. The baby bellowed, newly created, her tiny limbs rowing and pumping in a flush of energy, as though the force was burning within her like a stoked-up boiler and driving her with a dynamic strength. Her silvery hair gleamed. Harry was taken to see mother and baby: the one used up and empty, no more than a husk; the other alight with a newly ignited fire of life, ruddy and hot and enflamed.

  But the baby wasn’t so perfectly whole as her vigorous crying suggested. She was as blind as a stone.

  The doctor explained this to Harry in the privacy of a reception room. He was the same young doctor whom Harry and Lizzie had consulted several months earlier. Called to the hospital especially to counsel Harry, to help him through the trauma of Lizzie’s death, he’d thought to do this by contrasting the stillness of the corpse with the vigour of the newborn child. Now he struggled to account for the baby’s blindness.

  ‘You asked me, Mr Clewe,’ he stammered, ‘to explain any pos­sible problems associated with your union with your sister. Perhaps I should have mentioned that if the consanguinity were to throw up any . . . any, er . . . any kind of deformity or disability – and this is extremely rare – then the disability would most likely be of this sort. That is, a weakness in the eyes, or even, tragically, complete blindness. In this case there’s albinism too, an absence of pigmentation. That’s another unfortunate result of the inbreeding.’

  He cleared his throat, pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, and took a deep breath. His voice broke.

  ‘I’m really very sorry,’ he said, ‘for your sister’s death and your daughter’s disability. Of course, I’ll do everything possible to try and help you, and to see that the baby continues well.’

  Harry felt no grief at Lizzie’s death. He felt no joy at the birth of the baby. He felt no anger at the news of the baby’s blindness. Only, at that moment, he was tremendously sorry for the doctor. He reached out and touched him, folding his hands on the young man’s hands. Then his mind went blank.

  Seeing this nothingness in his eyes, the nurses put Harry to bed.

  The case was referred to the coroner, a kindly, twinkling, grey-haired man who came to Harry’s bedside a few days later. He made the procedure as painless as possible. Briefly, he explained that there was no suspicion of foul play: he was convinced that Lizzie had stepped from the stove into thin air. The scorching of her socks and feet was evidence of this. From his own examination of the body, from his study of the photographs and measurements that the police had taken on board the boat, he was satisfied that the two legal requirements for the recording of a suicide had been met: one, that the deceased had done the deed herself; two, that she’d meant to kill herself. There was no need to know why she’d done it. There would be no interrogation, no nightmarish cross-examination. All he wanted from Harry, who’d identified the deceased as his sister, Elizabeth Clewe, was her address and the date and place of her birth.

  Harry blinked up at the soft-spoken, avuncular gentleman who was sitting at the hospital bedside. Knowing why Lizzie had killed herself, that the guilt had gnawed at her like a worm inside a plum, he was tremendously relieved that he wouldn’t be asked to explain it.

  ‘These days,’ the coroner said, ‘we don’t even use the old chest­nut about ‘the balance of the mind being disturbed’. I’ve seen a lot of cases like this: believe it or not, nearly three hundred suicides during my thirty years as coroner, and a good number of them caused by the guilt engendered by the closeness of a union such as you had with your sister. It’s not uncommon. But it’s none of my business. No doubt it’s something you’ll think about, on your own.’ He patted Harry’s hand. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Clewe,’ he said. ‘No one’s going to
come prodding and prying. I’ll conduct an inquest, of course, but I won’t dwell on your relationship with the deceased. It won’t be reported in the press.’

  So the inquest was a formality. The coroner signed Lizzie’s death certificate, recording a verdict of suicide. For a while, the doctors insisted it was best for Harry to remain in hospital. When at last he was discharged, he committed himself to the years ahead, to the blind child he called Zoë.

  Chapter Two

  He returned to the Ozymandias. Helen Ince drove him from the hospital and out to the estuary. Lizzie hadn’t liked her, but Harry liked her, and now she was the only friend who’d come forward to offer support and consolation.

  ‘Will you be all right, Harry?’ she asked him as he climbed out of the silver Daimler. ‘Do you want me to come inside with you, to see if everything’s OK?’

  He shook his head. He managed to thank her, although he felt numb at the prospect of stepping aboard again. She leaned to him and brushed his cheek with her lips. Her scent made him feel a little giddy. She drove away.

  He went below, for the first time since he’d cycled breathlessly back from the town and found Lizzie. . . . Swallowing a bubble of nausea at the memory, he squeezed his eyes tightly shut to erase the image of the dancing, dangling, shrouded, blood-splashed figure. He stepped into the cabin.

  The environmental-health department had done a good job, as the kindly coroner had promised they would. More than that: not only had they removed all trace of the ghastly scene, but they’d restored the place to the bare emptiness of the days before Lizzie had moved in, to the days when Harry had been living on the boat on his own. By way of her spectacular death, Lizzie had brought blood and gagging and the stench of scorching flesh to the cabin; all of that was gone, dissolved in the ammoniac whiff of disinfectant. Prior to that, she’d brought laughter and warmth and the bright disarray of wild flowers; all of that was gone, too.