The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  Harry sat heavily on the bed. The cabin was scrubbed raw. He searched in vain for a single sign that Lizzie had ever been there, then lay down and stared at the ceiling. Had he imagined her? Had she been a dream? Had that night been no more than a nightmare, whose horror would fade from him, whose reek would soon be forgotten?

  No. The beam was rubbed into a deep groove by the action of the cello string with which she’d hanged herself. Harry remained on the bed, gazing upwards, and he shuddered with a terrible cold to think how the string had scored her throat. So Lizzie had been there, although now she was gone.

  And the cello leaned in the corner of the cabin, silent, sullen, warped by the damp after months of neglect. Harry left it there. He tore his eyes from the groove in the beam, lest it assume the focus of his attention. It mustn’t do that. He must be strong enough, stronger than Lizzie had been, to beat the onset of a fatal depression. He went on deck.

  The heat haze of an August afternoon. . . . The tide was right out of the estuary, and on the mud there were large numbers of feeding birds. As ever, he dashed below and returned to the deck with his binoculars. There was a furious commotion. The birds rose in a black and white cloud, squalling and screaming, and dropped again to the mud at the ebb of the tide. He cursed the condition of the binoculars, because he was intrigued to see what was causing such excitement at the water’s edge. He wondered what the birds had found, that they should squabble so violently. He wondered what the sea had fetched up.

  His spirits rising, his heart pounding, he leaped off the boat and onto the sea wall. As fast as he could, he slithered down the rungs of the iron ladder and dropped onto the foreshore. With a shout, he crunched across the shore, sprang over the grasses and branches and sun-dried vegetation that the tide had left behind, and he sprinted on the flat sands in the direction of the birds.

  He bellowed, he clapped his hands, he whirled his arms. He cackled a strange, mirthless laughter. The gulls and the crows beat away from him as he splashed knee-deep into the warm salt pool where the skeleton of the horse was lying.

  Bones . . . brown, riddled and rotten. . . . The ribcage, like the spars of a sunken boat. . . . The skull, stuffed with mud, burrowed by worms and crabs. . . . This was the wreckage of the horse. Harry rummaged inside it, giggling and shouting.

  The pool was squirming with hundreds of brittlestars. He scooped them up, a tangled, knotted handful of them, and felt their writhing on his fingers. The gulls had returned, screaming overhead, and he felt the rain of their soapy droppings on his back and in his hair. But he ignored them. He held the brittlestars in his hands and marvelled at them, thrilled that they’d come to this place, so near to the Ozymandias, where Lizzie had searched and searched for so long . . .

  Then he remembered the shooting star he’d seen, on the night of Lizzie’s death, the night of Zoë’s birth. He’d seen it fall into the sea. Here it was, cooled into fragments, the shards and smithereens of a meteorite.

  Standing up, grinning to himself at the fanciful notion, he let the brittlestars drop back into the water, where they sculled among the bones of the horse. He walked over the sands, towards the Ozymandias, keeping one of the brittlestars in his hand, and he carried it with him to the boat.

  As he’d done before, and as Lizzie had done, he put the brit­tlestar in a shallow tray of water, with a bed of sand. It squirmed and meshed and burrowed, disappearing from sight. Harry smiled, knowing that it was there.

  He spent the night on the deck of the Ozymandias, for it was too hot and stuffy inside the cabin; he dozed in the cooler air of the estuary, lying back with his binoculars trained on the sky. He cleaned the lenses with the red spotted neckerchief – a piece of his life before he’d come to the Ozymandias, before Lizzie had come to him there – and he gazed at the hazy summer constellations, dreaming of the difference that a telescope would make, remem­bering the hours that he and Lizzie had passed with the old binoc­ulars on the old boat.

  No more meteorites, no more showers of sparks into the sea. . . . He smiled to himself, running his fingers through his hair. It didn’t matter. Down in the cabin, the brittlestar was limber and lithe in shallow water. And, coming home soon, Zoë herself, as brilliant a silvery spark as any that had swept the sky on her birthday.

  Chapter Three

  Lizzie was buried in the cemetery of the little church nearby, no more than a hundred yards from the seashore and the mooring of the Ozymandias. The sycamores were in heavy leaf, the branches hardly stirring, coated in fine white dust after weeks without rain. The ancient headstones leaned askew; some of them had fallen to the long grass, swallowed by a tangle of nettles and dock. Lizzie had loved the cemetery. She’d browsed the epitaphs, felt at the cold slate with her fingers, reading the inscriptions on the children’s graves which she’d found so poignant. That winter, when the sycamores were stripped of their foliage, she’d brought Harry here. Now she’d come to stay.

  It was a glorious morning in August. A lark was spiralling in the tall, blue sky, no more than a speck, releasing a torrent of song. The trees sighed in a breath of breeze. The church basked in the sunshine, as still and hot as a boulder. Out at sea, there flickered the blue and white sails of yachts and windsurfers, like a flock of exotic wildfowl. A lovely morning and a lovely place: Harry and the minister; the sexton watching from a distance, leaning on his spade. . . .

  Harry stood over the damp pit into which the coffin had been lowered. There was a plain headstone, recording nothing more than the name of the person inside the coffin, among the older stones which were splashed with rust-red lichen and on which the gulls and the crows had dropped mussels to crack the shells, where the long grass was littered with feathers and bones.

  Bones, bones and more bones, Harry thought: the tiny white bones of Lizzie Clewe, his sister, his lover, the mother of his child. The earth and the gravel slid from the spade and clattered on the coffin, until it was quite covered and the pit was filled.

  Remaining there alone, at last he managed to weep. Kneeling on the wet earth, he wept so loudly that the cattle lifted their gormless heads to see him. The peewits somersaulted away. The lark abandoned its jigsaw-puzzle song. He wept until he thought he was too exhausted to weep any more. Then he continued to weep.

  A month had passed since Lizzie’s death and Zoë’s birth. Harry had at last achieved something of the catharsis afforded by tears. Moreover, he’d had time to organise the Ozymandias for the home­coming of his baby daughter. In the hospital, he’d been quizzed by representatives of the social services about the suitability of the boat as a home for a child, a disabled child, and about his com­petence as a father to cope with her on his own. While con­ceding that his incestuous union with the mother wasn’t necessarily a bar to his custody of the child, they’d stressed that Zoë’s interests were paramount, that they could order her into care if Harry’s custody were deemed inappropriate.

  He’d convinced them that all would be well. He had an income from his music teaching, work he could do at home while simultaneously taking care of Zoë. Since leaving the hospital, he’d had help in substantially refitting the boat, the most radical alteration being the connection of piped water from the nearest farmhouse; the cabin was warm and weatherproof. Harry made the point that, as far as the baby’s disability was concerned, there were no more difficulties, in the early months at least, in the care of a blind child than there would have been if she were sighted. He’d attended the usual post-natal classes, along with a number of similarly inexperienced single parents, and there was nothing to suggest that he couldn’t be just as efficient as they were in the care of a baby daughter. Of course, there would be regular inspections from social workers and health visitors. In the meantime, work was complete on the Ozymandias. Harry was ready to receive Zoë home.

  Lizzie was in a box, cold in the cold ground. No more lunging for her, no more writhing and squirming. It had murdered her. The baby bellowed in Harry’s arms when he picked her from her cot to take
her from the hospital. She kicked and raged against him. Her pale, empty eyes met his. There was something on her mouth like a smile, and a crowing in her voice.

  Chapter Four

  Zoë was asleep when they came to the boat. She slept throughout the journey in the ambulance, and she slept as Harry settled her into her home. Her face was wrinkled, like the kernel of a walnut; she was wrapped in the blue silk scarf which had enfolded the cello and had enshrouded Lizzie, and which Harry had especially reclaimed from the coroner’s office.

  The boat now swayed and soothed her, as it had swayed with the dangling of her mother. Harry ducked his head from the low beams, averting his eyes from the groove that the wire had made. He got busy, to avoid thinking too much. The baby continued to sleep for hours after the ambulance had gone and after the evening had turned to night. On the falling tide, the Ozymandias rocked gently. The night outside was hot, a soft summer’s night which held the boat warm and moved it so that the baby slept. Harry went up the steps and onto the deck.

  There was a splendid summer sky. He lay back with his old binoculars and followed the constellations from one wonder to the next. The great triangle of Vega, Altair and Deneb was brilliant above him. Even through the gritty lenses, Vega was gorgeously blue, a sapphire directly overhead. Altair, high in the south, flanked by fainter stars, led him to the nearby cluster of the Wild Duck. Straining north, he came to Deneb, the first-magnitude star in the constellation of Cygnus; he moved on, using it as a pointer through the body of the Swan to the double star Albireo. . . .

  And there he settled himself with a sigh. Albireo: the loveliest double star in the sky, a primary of golden yellow with a turquoise companion. He gaped. He goggled. Had he ever seen anything so lovely?

  The lenses became misty, clouded by his own breath. Infuriated, he smeared them on his shirt, wiped them with his fingertips, but there remained a film between him and the perfect clarity of the sky. He closed his eyes. Still there was silence from below. He remembered how he and Lizzie had sat together on the deck, when he’d shown her the winter constellations. She’d smiled at the puniness of the binoculars against the vastness of the heavens, and they’d speculated about the telescope they might have one day on board the Ozymandias. What wonders would they see? In winter, how stupendous were the Hyades and the Pleiades and the great gaseous nebula of Orion’s sword? And in summer, if Albireo was so fine in the smears of the binoculars, what marvel would they see through the lenses of a powerful telescope?

  They? Harry opened his eyes. He’d thought: they. But Lizzie was gone. Below, in the cabin, there was his daughter, for whom a telescope would be a nonsense. Nevertheless, even without Lizzie to accompany him, even with Zoë, whose presence might prick him with guilt, he would see great things if. . . .

  Standing up, he turned from the sea and faced inland. The bulk of the mountains was lost on the black sky. But, in the direction of the town, there was an orange glow on the horizon, much brighter than the glow of the castle’s floodlights: another fire in Caernarfon, the third in the same week. The local newspaper had printed a letter from someone who claimed that the spate of fires was caused by the recent eclipse of the sun, quoting an account from the Gossiping Guide to Wales to the effect that ‘in the years 1542 and 1567, when the sun was eclipsed, the town suffered very much by fire; and after the latter eclipse of the two, the fire spread so far that two hundred houses in Caernarfon were consumed’.

  Harry trained his binoculars on the distant horizon, and there were flames in the warm darkness. Knowing that these fires were the natural and unfortunate result of a long, dry, hot summer, he smiled to think that the eclipse of the sun might be blamed for them. He smiled to think of his silvery spark of a daughter, asleep in the cabin, whose birth had been presaged by a shooting star and whose homecoming was now celebrated in solar eclipse and blazing fire. Wherever she’d come from, this meteoric child, and whatever she might turn out to be, her arrival had been marked by the sun and the stars. . . .

  He went downstairs, into the silence of the cabin. Zoë frowned up at him, surfacing slowly from sleep; she rowed her arms a little and held out a fist clenched into dimples. He prepared her feed, in anticipation of her waking. He pondered the dreams of a newborn baby, a baby who’d been born out of one tumbling darkness and straight into another, for whom, perhaps, the cabin of the Ozy­mandias was indistinguishable from the womb. He prepared for her waking.

  Still distracted by his star-gazing, he bent to inspect the brittle­star in its tray. He couldn’t see it.

  He put his face to the surface of the water and breathed on it, disturbing the mirror-stillness into ripples. There was no other movement. With his finger, he stirred softly in the bed of sand. But the brittlestar wasn’t there.

  Zoë was waking. He heard her spit and mew. Ignoring her, he peered into the tray. He noticed there was a splash of water on the chest of drawers, and a trail of water and sand on the polished wood. He followed it to the books, thinking to find the creature hidden among them, like a spider in a dark and dusty crevice. Zoë was squirming under her blankets. Still he left her.

  He picked out a book, having seen a tiny, bristle-covered tentacle protruding from its loose pages, and he sat with it on the bed. Bending forward to the heat of the stove, whose door was ajar so that the flames could light the cabin, he opened the book and found the brittlestar pressed wetly on the print. He tenderly took it out, holding the disc of its body between his fingertips, while the tendrils flexed and felt for a grip on the smoothness of his nails, and he replaced it in the tray. It sank to the sand. He sat with the book in the firelight. Zoë had started a keening wail.

  On the pages, the outline of the brittlestar was marked with sea water. It faded in the warmth of the stove, as he leaned even more closely to read what was written: one of their favourite poems, which he and Lizzie had read and reread together. This was what the brittlestar had marked for him: a message from Lizzie. Or a message from Zoë. . . ?

  It was a narrative poem by Robert Frost, the story of a man who ‘burned his house down for the fire insurance and spent the proceeds on a telescope, to satisfy a lifelong curiosity about our place among the infinities. . . .’ The man called the telescope the star-splitter, ‘because it didn’t do a thing but split a star in two or three, the way you split a globule of quicksilver in your hand with one stroke of your finger in the middle. . . .’

  Zoë was wide awake now. She wrestled under her blanket. Harry felt a sudden and familiar stillness fall the length of the boat, as the Ozymandias settled on the sands. Minutes must have passed, time for him to read the poem again. If this was a message from Lizzie, or from Zoë, or from mother and daughter in cahoots, then what should he do? What did they intend him to do?

  Harry ducked swiftly across the cabin and reached for the cello in the corner.

  Inside the case, with the cello itself, there was a sheaf of music, a bow and its rosin. He lifted the cello out. Very gently, he examined it in the lamplight and the firelight. Zoë had set up a caterwaul, which he hardly heard. He caressed the cello, running his hands sensually over its curved flanks; he turned its back and its belly this way and that, and the curl under the russet colours of the varnish rippled like flame. He ran his fingers up and down the neck, stroked the perfect black smoothness of the fingerboard and the simple machinery of the pegs; the tailpiece, in ebony like the fingerboard and the pegs, was quite uncluttered. By contrast, the scroll was bizarrely, beautifully carved in the shape of a human fist, as though it were clenching the strings tightly.

  The instrument was exquisite, lovingly made and lovingly used. But now it was a silent thing which Harry turned from hand to hand. The bass string was missing. The other strings flapped loosely. After a winter of neglect, the lower bouts were split and the neck was out of alignment.

  Among the sheet music, there was a Christie’s auction cata­logue. As Harry picked it up, it fell open at a page marked with some slips of paper. By now he was oblivious of
Zoë’s yelling: if she’d climbed out of her cot and seized his arm, he wouldn’t have noticed her. There was a colour photograph of Lizzie’s cello, and he read the accompanying description by holding the catalogue closer to the stove:

  Lot no. 243. An interesting Italian violoncello, labelled JO. BAP ROGERIUS BON NICOLAI AMATI DE CREMONA ALUMNUS BRIXAE ANNO DOMINI 1681. The two-piece back cut on a slab of poplar wood; the table of strong medium grain widen­ing to broad on the flanks; the varnish of a brown colour on a reddish ground. Uniquely, the scroll carved into a human fist, clenched. With certificate of Charles Booth, Nelson, Lancashire, dated April 1934, stating the instrument to be the work of a pupil of Nicholas Amati, one of the founders of the Cremona school.

  The slips of paper, which he now unfolded, were the verification of authenticity referred to in the catalogue, a receipt from Christie’s for a successful bid of £5,750, and the instrument’s current insurance certificate. As he read, his hands trembled. The bow itself, whose photograph he also found in the auctioneer’s catalogue, had been bought for £700: it was stamped with the maker’s name on the shaft, L. Tourte, and was insured on the same certificate as the cello.

  Harry stared long and hard into the fire. Behind him, in her cot, Zoë lunged and screamed. Her face was lined like an old glove, her sightless eyes squeezed shut, her hair a gleam of silver. Wrapped in the scarf in which the cello had been wrapped, she boiled with life . . . while Lizzie was dead and gone. In front of Harry was the cello whose bass string was missing; above him, the beam which had been scored by the missing string. He turned from Zoë again, back to the fire, to give it his full attention.

  The message was in the poem. He would interpret it literally.

  First, to fuel the flames, he fed the sheet music and the auction catalogue to the stove. Into the quickened heat he tossed the rosin, consumed in one explosive hiss that filled the cabin with a sweet and heady perfume. Then he laid the bow on the bed of fire. The horsehair vanished. The bow buckled and flared; its one straight grain, selected from tons of the knotty pernambuco, charred into the blaze. The tortoiseshell nut, the mother-of-pearl head, the silver mounting . . . the fire swallowed it all.