“The only person he terrorized was himself,” Miss Williams answered. “He realizes his error, and he is suffering now, through his deep regret.”
“Which is our—my—point,” Christopher Thorton rejoined. “He needs to go back to his family, or to hospital, where he can be cared for, professionally; where he can be cured, if possible.”
“He can go to the hospital, or to his family, or anywhere he desires, on his own initiative,” Miss Williams said. “He prefers to stay here.”
“Of course. Why not? Here he has everything he needs: food, shelter, your delightful companionship,” Christopher said, and Miss Williams wondered at the last surge in his voice, if this was simply jealousy, until Christopher continued, “And all at our—my father’s—expense. And once you, your time here is—once it has ended, he will be released, to prey upon a population of souls with which he is already familiar, to beg, to harass, and chase them from their peace of mind, their way of life. Since he has already demonstrated that preference, naturally.”
“Mr. Christopher,” Miss Williams said, and upon voicing this error in title, she heard how ridiculous it was, as if the man before her could be reduced to a mere boy who was only known by his familiar, first name. “He takes only what I give him,” she went on, “and I do not give much, considering what I earn, according to a contract signed by the dean of this college. I have done nothing to violate that contract, so I will continue giving what I want to him, because he is my guest. Finally,” she said, rising from the desk to move toward the window so that she could see Mr. Sheehan more clearly. “Mr. Sheehan is neither an unfortunate nor some lesser being, neither a bird nor a trophy animal. He is a human being.”
“But what do we—do you—know of his background?” Christopher ventured. “Do you know where he is from, how he was raised? Do we—do you—know if he has family; a woman from before the war, possibly? If they had reason to send him on his way, a very practical and understandable reason, which might quite possibly be beyond your . . . your comprehension?”
“I know that he is a human in need, as human as you, me, or even your father,” Miss Williams said. “And that is all I need to know. His humanity qualifies him for my care and sympathy. “And his humanity has been injured, gravely,” Miss Williams continued, although now she had to use her arms to support herself against the windowsill. Her weight seemed to have expanded in the heat and the closeness of the library, as if her mind and bile conspired to sabotage her throat. “Through that war of yours, probably, or some other imperial ridiculousness. He has served in some way, I am certain, and it has broken him. Why do you require more?”
“Because I require decency,” Lord Thorton said. Christopher turned on his heels, astonished as she was, if not at the entry of his father into the conversation, then the volume he applied to it. “I require it of you, of those most directly in my employ, of everyone in my family, of Christopher, here. This is not Paris where you can take up with whomever you please. This is the world my son will inherit, will steward through his generation. He was injured in the war, but we do not see him begging on street corners, horrifying his neighbors.”
“Yet still, Mr. Christopher does profit from your advantage,” Miss Williams said plainly. “That terrifies me, if not more than Mr. Sheehan. He is unable to speak, but your son is unable to speak for himself.”
“Now, Miss Williams,” Christopher began, but his father hushed him. Christopher tried a second time, with a gesture, the start of something, but Lord Thorton, through gestures of his own, put an end to it. Lord Thorton swallowed, as if whatever he had intended to say escaped from his lexicon. The earl of Bridgetonneshire removed his hat and raised a handkerchief from his pocket to his forehead. Upon removing it, he studied the sweat he had gathered in the cloth, as if he were expecting to find the same mud droplets that used to stain his wardrobe in South Africa.
“I have some experience in these matters which you do not,” Lord Thorton said.
“Which matters?” Miss Williams responded. “Turning people out when they’re down?”
“Helping those who cannot be helped,” he said.
“Mr. Sheehan has blossomed with my help,” Miss Williams declared. “I thought you would be grateful that he is no longer begging on street corners, which, for him, you obviously deem preferable.”
“I do not have time for a lecture,” Lord Thorton declared. “But other women, so much like yourself, have tried to rescue these irredeemables—”
“So much like myself how?” Miss Williams interrupted, because she knew how to make a man veer off from his case and into another topic for which he was not prepared.
“Abominable, is how—”
“Father, please,” Christopher intervened.
“No, please Mr. Thorton,” Miss Williams addressed the earl’s son. “Please, let the man say what he means.”
“And ignorant,” Lord Thorton picked up as though there had been no delay in his speech. “If you deign to familiarize yourself with the truth of situations like these, you may contact my secretary for a meeting. In the meantime, I trust you will inform Mr. Sheehan of this decision,” Lord Thorton said. “He is to be gone by tomorrow evening.”
“Why not inform him yourself?” Miss Williams said.
“Why—” Christopher began, but his father took him by the shoulder and turned him away from Miss Williams. Together they walked out of the cottage without a farewell. Miss Williams shut her eyes, tightly, to stop time until she could hear the slam of the front door and know that they had left, entirely.
In the library, the day had compressed into a burden and density more suited for the night. Miss Williams badly wanted to collapse. To cry, to cool off, to bathe, to lie naked beneath an open window within the fresh sheets of her bed. She did not know if she was shaking, but she knew her fever—if it was indeed a fever—had climbed to a new level. Now it was symmetrical, equally divided over the left and right of her back. She felt as though the pain tried to escape, just below her shoulders, and, once thwarted, it had begun to sprout flame through her skin. Her legs felt like stones, as one might find on the haunches of an animal. She tried to move away from the window, but found herself too heavy to carry on her feet. She bowed her head and forced her way, balancing the new weight on her back, with the fever spreading as it locked around her neck.
“Mr. Sheehan,” she called. Her voice was weak, and she could not be certain she could be heard. But she could see him. He was a flicker of a wavering candle in the air that melted and waved back at her. She stepped onto the grass, and she remembered walking through those waves, or so it seemed to her as their pull and power sealed her every movement. She fought against the air, she fought against water, she fought against the stones in her back, the flood in her lungs, and the drought in her limbs. He might have seen her falter. He might have rushed up to steady her by her arms, the small of her back. He might have seen her eyes widen in grief, narrow in listlessness.
He might have thought she had fainted from the heat. As he lifted her in his arms, he calculated what would be the easiest distance to carry her: up the stairs, to a doctor in the village, to the college from which she would be sacked soon enough, particularly if she was seen profiting from his assistance. Those minutes he stood there, studying the breathless, spiritless Miss Williams, they crested into hours, days, an entire existence. She lost all corporeality, and when she awoke, she was drowning in a pool of silence.
Eight
Before he came to Miss Williams, Sheehan had trouble, as it was, thinking of the war directly. He could only touch on the differences between what he knew before and what he had learned. What he knew best, of course, was his hands, the sonatas in which they excelled, the symphonies they could endure; he knew the temperature of water they favored, and the number of hours of practice they required. The rest of his body worked as servant to these appendages. And he knew, once he voluntee
red, that the war could change them irrevocably.
“You. Always with the hands,” the training officer, Everett, complained. Sheehan tried gloves—wool, silk, canvas, cotton, leather; the cotton and canvas provided no protection against the moisture, and the wool and leather caused too much friction. He thought he could treat his hands, and from the kitchens he might procure a lubricant to soothe the skin as it chafed and thickened. Butter might have worked best, but there was no butter to be had. Shortening and cooking oil would have to suffice, although they did not. They did nothing other than attract insects. From the infirmary he begged for tape, that he might wrap his fingers, but the infirmary was in the business of extending the lifespan of larger extremities: arms and legs. He spliced leaves for their oils and pounded bark for its powders, but, like everything in a soldier’s existence, they were too decimated to provide any comfort. On leave, his compatriots promised him a visit to a whorehouse. He agreed so that he might steal away a splash of rose water, a smear of cold cream, a sprinkle of talcum. He offered the woman additional money, if only to get at her potions, but she refused, and threw a chair at him so he would leave.
Before the war, he knew hands: bones, ligaments, and tendons, and the hard beginnings of new bone, burrs and swelling, that occurs between knuckles. But the war made him consider the rest of human anatomy. War made him consider the flaws beyond the reach of fingers: the weak points where the body separates, hips from the abdomen, the chest in several different directions. War made him consider colors when before he had only to worry over a spot of blood from a blister; now he saw the full spectrum, pink descending into the sickening yellow, and other liquids, clear, botched, speckled with infection. Finally, war made him consider what he must have known, what he must have felt, in theory: soreness, exhaustion, bruises. It turned these things into a rude blooming of the liver, the kidneys, the contents of the stomach, once they have been blown apart by mortar.
Now, when he thought of the war, he could see the battlefield, but only from above. He saw it rise up to him, as though he were coasting down toward it, as if he had always been a bird, The Hawkman, with his talons extended. He could spot the trenches as they replenished themselves with new soldiers; the last batch not having been removed, but carted to the side, denuded and dismembered. The trenches made mazes in the dirt, like webs ripped from their scaffoldings. That was his job, shaking the lines free and assaulting the men who held onto them, so they’d surrender their grip and plummet onto his bayonet, beneath the toe of his boot. With his arms and legs, he had killed or injured dozens of men; with his back, he had dug graves for his fellows. The war made him know those other parts of himself—those that filled shovels, hammered blanks, screwed nails, shot rifles—so that he might take something of nature and turn it into something unnatural. He had transformed men and their world into a mechanical rendering, a creation only recognizable as abominable.
The war was his creation, far more significant than any music he might compose or play. People closed their eyes when he played, as if to jot out the interferences, to get to the essence, the purity of a melody or a particular phrasing. They not only wanted to hear it, but to see it in a kind of approximation, in their imaginations. But people did not close their eyes to distill war. They insisted on keeping them wide open, to digest the newsprint, the lists of dead and injured; they kept their eyes open at the lectures in the prison camps and at home to hear the testimonials, speeches for and against. The war and its confusions were so much louder than any misplayed sharp or flat, louder than bassoons and percussion sections, or whole orchestras ill-supervised and lost in their own turbulence.
He heard it again, the war with its anarchic noise, as he carried Miss Williams from the cottage’s garden to the college in search of help.
Out in the broad sunlight, Sheehan’s head rattled with the sounds of the fields that separated the cottage from the college. The insects and grasses drummed on in an uneven, electric hum that strengthened when the sun glanced out from beyond a cloud. The college’s acreage stretched so far out that he found it disorienting; the grasses moved ahead of him as if affected by a rumbling underneath, sorting themselves out like an ocean not entirely under its own power. He scoured the fields for shadows or trees for shade; she was so hot, or she should have been. The sweat rose on her lip, her forehead, her throat—the emergence of each bead an agony like the birth of a tide, unwelcome but necessary.
“See here, fellow,” Sheehan heard from behind him. He swung around to find a short man outfitted as though a fisherman, Wellies beyond his knees and all types of gear hanging off his belt. “Just what are you up to?” the man asked and he continued talking, or his mouth was moving. Sheehan could not hear over the electric clamor seemingly at his feet.
“You did this to her now, did you?” the man asked, and Sheehan was grateful for that question, for he could answer it with a robust shake of his head. But afterward he was at a loss to explain the unearthly sheen and silence on Miss Williams’s face, and his carrying her around like a Bluebeard dumbfounded by his bride’s reaction to his wiles.
“Miss, Miss,” the groundskeeper said as he peered over Miss Williams, waving his hands, snapping his fingers, finally clapping his palms above her face. “Like a light out, she is, eh?” he asked, and Sheehan nodded. He tried to look beyond the man, a groundskeeper or perhaps a plumber or some other trade, but the man dashed about and kept up with the questions Sheehan couldn’t quite hear.
“Tiring, are you?” the man said, and he moved in closer, with his arms extended. The man was going to take Miss Williams from him, and Sheehan shook his head, stomped his feet. He stepped back; he was walking backward and surprised himself by coughing—the sound that came easiest to him, raking his throat of mire and panic. He pointed at his own chest as well as he could, still holding Miss Williams, and kept on coughing. He shut his eyes as tightly and breathed loudly through his mouth, to make a sound like wheezing.
“A fit?” the man asked, but Sheehan did not know how to respond. “An episode? Fainting spell?” Sheehan felt numb in his face. Whatever hope he wore, thinking he could find a doctor for Miss Williams, withdrew its encouragement. “Good Lord,” the man said, “something worse?”
The man turned away to march off somewhere, but he motioned with his arm. “This way, now.” And he checked back, after every third step, to see that Sheehan was following. “Not much farther now,” the man said; his Wellies kept him from running outright.
Once a building was in sight, Sheehan began to run toward it. “That’s it, that’s it, in there,” the man shouted after him, and he continued shouting directions, what to do once he was inside, but Sheehan could not make them out. He leaped up a set of steps and pushed through a door into a darkened hallway, and began coughing again, to herald his arrival.
His cough rankled the air and his throat, like membrane on metal, honed and serrated. He kicked at doors, coughed again, and the doors opened. The men and women who emerged from classrooms and offices were quick to recognize an unconscious Miss Williams, and quicker to be horrified by the man who held her in his arms. “Where are you taking her?” one shouted: a man in glasses and too much clothing for the summer. “Miss Williams, Miss Williams,” another voice said: a woman, perhaps a secretary, her fingers stained black from typewriter ink. She scampered like a duck so as not to trip over her skirt. Still others said nothing and put their hands to their mouths in shock and disdain. Voices and faces came at him as though he was running a gauntlet, a human equivalent of berms, craters, and fragments of barbed wire. Each time a door opened, it unleashed a torrent into the hallway that smeared his vision, like an attempted blinding.
Finally a pair of double doors were thrown open to reveal an infirmary. The beds, five of them, looked dispiritingly small. The man with the glasses, nowhere as tall as Sheehan, tried to wrest Miss Williams from his arms. Sheehan swung away, refusing to relinquish her. The groundskeeper appear
ed; more people followed, the swinging of the double doors like a valve in a church organ that could not hold a note consistently.
“Set her down, son, set her down,” the groundskeeper urged him, and the crowd of people rushed him toward the first bed, where he gently placed Miss Williams, her clothes now fouled and twisted as though she had been fighting a storm, a downpour unexpected.
“No air,” Sheehan scrawled with pencil and paper that was handed to him. He wanted to write more, or to have the option of writing, but the implements were quickly taken from him. Sheehan felt as though he had to shove through a crowd of swaying heads of barley, downed branches and weeds, to reach her bedside. They were hollering, fanning her with whatever they could find, but Miss Williams tossed her head back and forth, as if to avoid their calls or say no to their entreaties. Sheehan put his forearm and sleeve to her forehead to wipe away the sweat. He thought he saw her lips tremble, his name forming there; but then she swallowed, and sunk deeper into her exhaustion.
“Give her some air,” Sheehan heard a new voice, a woman’s, command the others. “Get her out of these clothes, they’re soaked,” the woman ordered. She might have been the headmistress or some other lofty figure. She appeared at the other side of the bed and pulled Miss Williams up to a sitting position; Miss Williams slumped. The woman pushed her up again. “You—all you men, out!” the woman said. The groundskeeper and the man with the glasses immediately complied.
“You need to go, sir,” the headmistress said to Sheehan, who shook his head as he grabbed at the bed’s metal frame above Miss Williams’s head. It felt greasy, resistant, like the mud of a trench wall.
“Is there something you don’t understand, sir?” the headmistress continued.
Sheehan did not know whether to shake his head no, because he understood everything or yes, to indicate how badly he needed to stay.
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