Hurdy Gurdy

by Christopher Wilson

  My darling Faith often remarks how closely he takes after me, both in his looks and his ways. Though, to most eyes, with his plump limbs, fat face, near-bald scalp, he most closely resembles any other baby.

  And, as for his manners, when he is not suckling – for which he has great appetite and prodigious talent – he sleeps. If he is not passing wind. When he is not crapping himself or pissing. Which he does more than you might think him capable, for such a small contraption with so few, small holes to let it all out.

  His was a slow and difficult birth, and he arrived early, seven months after our marriage and first consummation, although well developed and of a larger than usual size.

  This is a condition known to medicine as a precocious birth, consequent on accelerated incubation, when the father has galloping semen of exceptional speed and vigour. So hastening the course of the pregnancy.

  I would say Francis is a perfect child.

  Though some observe that he has a large nose and prominent ears that face to the front. But I would reply he is designed that way for a purpose. The Lord’s purpose. For he is God’s Own Creation, and shaped just the ways the Almighty intended.

  Oh, woe.

  I am reluctant to engage you any further in my sorrows.

  But there’s one final tragedy I have to report.

  It was James Langtree, the new vicar of Saint Alban’s, a man of some inexperience, being barely older than me, who first alerted me to the well-being of my dearest wife and helpmeet, Faith.

  He strolled up to me outside the inn. He wished me good-day. Then he asked me, with a look of some profound concern, if my wife was unwell.

  ‘Faith?’ I said. ‘She is in vigorous good health. I am a surgeon. I am expert in the maladies of women. I live with her. I lie with her. We talk almost every day. And, once a week, I taste her waters. If she were unwell, I would surely know it.’

  ‘It’s just I saw her a short time back …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She was eating in the grave-yard.’

  ‘Eating?’

  ‘Grass …’

  ‘Grass?’ I enquired, lest I’d misheard.

  ‘And dock leaves.’

  ‘Dock leaves?’

  ‘And nettles.’

  I creased my brow. I thought awhile. Then I spoke carefully, describing things simply, for a stranger to medicine. ‘The body is wise,’ I explained, ‘sometimes it craves what it lacks. But without knowing why. Dock leaves are a known medicament. And nettles are a proven acidic, that can offset a surfeit of bile.’

  ‘It’s just she was on all fours,’ the pastor went on, ‘grazing.’

  ‘Grazing, you say?’

  ‘Like a cow.’

  ‘Cow?’

  ‘When I spoke to her, she looked back at me in silence. Then she rolled her big, brown eyes. She was working her jaws from side to side, as if she was chewing the cud.’

  ‘Now, that,’ I exclaimed, ‘is unusual for Faith. And not in her true character. You can be sure I shall look into it.’

  ‘It would be best,’ the pastor agreed. ‘There may be some damage done to her mind. Or some malignant possession …’

  ‘Possession?’

  ‘Luke, chapter eight, verse two,’ he said. ‘“Certain women had been healed of evil spirits … Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils”.’

  ‘My wife is not possessed of anyone – save herself. She is a strong-willed woman,’ I explained, ‘she is known for it. She has always held her own opinions, and gone her own peculiar ways …’

  We wished each other good-day. But he’d set me thinking, and encouraged me to observe my wife with a refreshed interest.

  To be sure, it was not just grass and dock leaves. Once I’d started watching, I found that Faith had taken to consuming all manner of stuff folk do not normally enjoy eating, or have the juices to digest – leather, twigs, rose-buds, pieces of parchment, duck feathers, cloth, chalk, charcoal, or pieces of mortar she’d scratched out of the wall.

  She seemed insatiable, as if she must always have some unnatural matter in her mouth to chew over. The compulsion went so far as to quell her conversation. Hers was a condition of unnatural appetites, well known to science as sensualitis contra naturam.

  I cannot say Faith made a quick recovery. Rather, she seemed to slide into a slow decline.

  Soon, she had developed further foibles. She started smelling things that were not there. And hearing things that hadn’t sounded.

  ‘Have you spilled some vinegar?’ she’d say, sitting up in bed.

  ‘Why are they ringing the church bells,’ she’d demand, ‘in the middle of the night?’

  ‘What is burning?’ she’d ask. ‘Is it the bread?’

  ‘Who is that laughing, under the bed?’ And she demanded I get down on my knees to look beneath.

  ‘I think the cat has shat itself, Jack,’ she’d remark, sniffing the air. ‘You’d best go clean up the mess.’

  She would have been graced, had she been gifted some beautiful scents – perfumes, incense, rare aromatics, and floral blooms – and heard fine choral music. But mostly she detected loud noise, and sour, acrid stench.

  I gained a further concern. I began to worry if she was fit to take good care of our child, Francis. For I found she had taken to feeding him on boiled twigs, and washing him seven times a day, scouring his skin raw, to try to stop the smell he did not have. That only she imagined.

  Despite suffering this disorder, still she was blessed in another way, in compensation – being married to a man of medicine, who could decipher her illness and deliver sound treatments as remedy.

  For, by now, I had deduced the cause of the infirmity.

  I knew that Faith must have some malign growth in her head, some worm or canker in her brain, that was eating up her capacities. First it had taken many of her inhibitions. And some of the respect due to her husband. Then her sense of taste, and now her aptitudes for smell and hearing. Her brain was eating itself. Each day I saw her diminished, emptied a little more. Every time she woke, there was less of the Faith I married, and more of a void, in that vacant, silent, slack-eyed shell.

  So I knew I must find some curative treatments, before she was quite lost to us.

  It is difficult for medicine to reach through to the brain. It’s an inaccessible organ, imprisoned in that rock-hard cage we call the skull.

  So the best resource we have is to trepan.

  You must choose the exact spot on the scalp and saw out a circular hole in the bone below, so exposing the brain, throbbing grey, with a map of pink veins, beneath the thin cover of two membranes.

  Then you must take a silver spoon and scoop out the sick tissue, taking no more than you need to. Finally you must seal the hole in the skull by slotting a coin into the gap, and tapping it tight with a wooden mallet.

  It may sound simple enough. But it leaves a bald, metallic scar that will never heal. And there are risks – of a bleed on the brain, or a fester to the wound, or some unintended damage to the patient’s capacities.

  For the mind is a delicate organ. And much of it has a use. So you cannot just spoon it out, willy-nilly.

  But we must do what we are able to. We cannot just sit on our hands. We must try what we can.

  I wish I could say the first attempt was a triumph, but it transpired that Faith had a badly organised mind, with its functions scrambled, laid in all the wrong places. At least not where Doctor Aristotle had advised I should find them. Her reason was lodged where her smell should be, and her balance where her taste should reside, and her self-control was gone into hiding.

  So the first operation just ended in a loss of her steadiness, causing her to keep tumbling from the upright, without any due reason, but did nothing to return her to her full senses.

  Then the second operation made no discernible difference. For her malady had progressed very fast in the meantime. So she promptly fell into a deep sleep for three days, before she perished without givin
g us reason or warning.

  So, despite pledging all my skills to the task, and the finest crafts of medicine, and the wisdoms of Galen and Aristotle, I was, in the end, unable to save her.

  We are but feathers on the breath of God.

  XXVI. Fox’s Law

  Though I’ve had the good fortune to marry two good women, so far, the first of great beauty, and the second of conspicuous character, these unions have been blighted by brevity. For my first marriage lasted only three days, and my second only eighteen months. My mother and I were together in this world for no more than a blink of the eye before she passed on, and, being just born, I was too young and unworldly to take her in. So the women in my life have come and gone in such blurry haste that I cannot claim to have come to know any of them well.

  And every day I think of my dear departed wife, Faith, and thank God for all the good she did me. For, while she was harsh with her hands and wild with her tongue, and fierce with her throwings, still she did so much to establish me in life. For she helped me set myself up as a doctor, and provided me with my home, and gave me my precious son.

  She may yet help me to a happier future, and longer marriage, perhaps with her friend, the Widow Caroline. For I have cast my eye her way. And, if the widow winks a blue eye, and proves willing, the rest of me might promptly follow.

  Not all the news is dismal.

  The plague is more or less defeated.

  Yet at a terrible cost. Nearly half the folk of this nation are lost. So many high and mighty people were taken, replaced by no more than their offspring. Even the bishops and barons look like children these days.

  You must imagine our people as a book with half the words missing. We do not make sense any more. Much of our story is lost, rubbed out. We do not link or join together as we did. Our sense of connection is lost.

  We are so reduced in number, those who are left know their true worth. For there are not enough of us now. Doctors, priests, princes, labourers, husbands, wives, sons and daughters are all in short supply.

  There are still outbreaks of plague, here and there, now and then. But it does not spread like wild-fire, the way it did before. Nowadays, it mostly claims babes and toddlers, the very young.

  Perhaps it is God’s will. Perhaps He does not require those who suffered the plague before to suffer it once again.

  Or perhaps we have gained some defence, and carry some feeling in our hearts, knowledge in our minds, or belief in our bloods that protects us.

  Perhaps medicine has won the day.

  Now I am come eighteen years of age, and I am not without experience.

  I have lived apace, having been born, died, raised to Heaven then resurrected.

  But nothing happens for nothing. I believe I’ve been marked out as special. And several times saved from early death by Our Lord’s intervention. I believe the Lord has some special use for me which the future will shortly reveal.

  I know what to do. I must give my time and cleverness to the pursuit of truth. Through science. To play my part, helping folk to secure the sure cure for the pox, and for all manner of maladies, unveil the full mysteries of God’s Design of Man and Woman, and discover the truths all-chemical, revealing the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of Life, so we may convert dross into gold, and so give wealth to the world.

  The Almighty has made our minds brilliant, that we may understand the laws of His dominion, the physics of the heavens, and the beauty of His Creation.

  We know so much already. In a few generations, we may come to know it all.

  Now my studies are concerned with the computations of the flesh, examining the additions and subtractions involved in the world, and particularly those transactions of the body, concerning ourselves, both by taking the outside in, and giving back to the world, turning our insides out.

  I have designed a series of weighing-scales which enable me to balance myself, and my smaller bodily incomes and expenditures, against a series of metal bars, ranging from large to some so tiny they are thin as a hair.

  By this methodology, a scholar is able to weigh himself, throughout each day, and all that enters his body, as food and drink, and whatever leaves it, by whatever route, including the smallest amounts of this. And that. Even the other. So far as including the dribbles of mucus that flee his nose, the clippings of his finger-and toe-nails, the stubble he shaves daily from his face, and the waxy smears that depart his ears. Which group together, in the language of higher science, by the term ‘returns’ or ‘outgoings’, to be offset against ‘incomings’.

  Outgoings Incomings

  Shit Food

  Piss Drink

  Snot Ointments

  Squirts, leaks and sundry juices Powders and potions

  Hair, nails et alia Divers herbs

  The soul (at death) The soul (at conception)

  3 parts by weight 8 parts by weight

  And from this calculation I have made the profound discovery – to be known to the world of scholarship as Fox’s Law – that, for every eight poundage a person puts in his body, only three poundage ever comes out. Yet a person stays much the same weight.

  It is this perplexing, miraculous loss that leads me to describe the human body as a dematerialising engine, for its mysterious and ingenious capacity to continuously turn something solid into less than nothing.

  And yet, I know that the missing matter must be passing somewhere, somehow.

  I have divined that this freight of weighty matter passes invisibly in the airs, through the bodily processes of expiration and oration, perspiration, respiration, expectoration, lubrication, vibration, relocation, excitation, suppuration, and transpiration, where its smell can still be detected, and its dampness still felt in the air.

  It is this that leads me to call the atmosphere that surrounds us solid air or immanent matter, meaning that, though transparent, it is full of stuff, that can suddenly manifest, passing back from the unseen state to the seen, and from the airy to the solid form through spontaneous re-materialisation, or precipitations, including the sudden appearance of new things never seen by man before, as well as the more common effects known as fog, clouds, rain, hail, drizzle, snow, and the downpour of small beasts, most commonly newts, frogs, and small fishes, such as frequently happens in Flanders.

  It is the sudden heavy traffic of matter through the air that causes the phenomenon of wind, bending the trees, tugging the hats from men’s heads, and pushing all things from its path, seen in extreme forms as hurricanes and storms, battering down houses, even, with the sheer force of weighty invisibilities.

  Likewise, it is the normal downward weight of this heavy saturated air, known as gravid-ity, pressing down upon us from above, that holds us trapped to the ground. Which, though a weighty burden upon us all, is not without its benefits. For though it holds us earth-bound, it gives us discipline and tenure upon terra firma, and prevents us from drifting up and away.

  Whereas Brother Fulco concerned himself with the allchemy of matter, turning base stuff into precious, I have found an issue yet more profound. For I am engaged with the all-chemy of life, by which dead, inert matter can be converted to the living.

  It is my quest to find the spark of life, and ignite dead matter into living, breathing stuff.

  To this end, I have been busy making a small being, a homunculus, or tiny man. For I came upon an arcane procedure in the text Secretum Secretorum – The Secret of Secrets –

  Let the sperm of a man be putrefied in a closed jar, then after sealed with horse dung for forty days in a horse’s womb. Then it will take the semblance of a tiny man, yet transparent, without a solid body. But if you then incubate it for forty weeks in a kettle, feeding it daily with fresh man’s blood, it will become a true and living infant. But tiny. Yet without a soul to call its own.

  I worry for my darling son Francis when I am called away to travel and learn, and perhaps become celebrated amongst the scholars of the world. The sorry child already lacks a mother. Then, when
fate or fame summons me away, the poor, pitiful orphan will lack a father too.

  And because I am away from our home too often already, travelling to care for the sick, I have entrusted Francis’s daily care to his mother’s father, Franklin.

  I intend for my son to have all the good fortunes I enjoyed. I want him to gain an education – to master Reading, Writing, Latin, French, Mathematics, Rhetoric, the Sciences, and grow up a man of conscience, and good character, in the fear of God, as a protector of children, and defender of women, dedicated to the welfare of all.

  So, when he comes of age, reaching seven, I will take him to the brothers of the Order of Odo, at the monastery of Whye, to become an oblate, a gift to the Church. So he may enjoy all the bounties I have received. For his own benefit and the Lord’s. That he may also learn charity, chastity, obedience, truth and faith, then proceed in my fortunate footsteps.

  Perhaps he will follow me into medicine, one day knowing more than I. For each generation sees further and clearer than the one before, as we progress towards the fullness of knowledge.

  For my part, I will continue as I have begun, as a student of nature and doctor of souls.

  Discovering the Almighty’s laws.

  Healing with herbs, saw or knife.

  Curing the sick.

  Mending women.

  God willing.

  But now I must go attend my new offspring, my three homunculi, those little see-through men, dancing their jigs, their heads jerking wildly, their tiny pin eyes watching me with wonder, as they simmer in their three separate kettles, in the different stages of their incubation.

  They emit a chorus of screechy, whistly sounds, like crayfish boiling in water.

  I have named them Thomas, Richard and Harold.