Rawblood Read online

  Mr Gilmore wept, his fine countenance outraged not by grief, but by anger. He thrust his burden at Alonso, who flinched and flung his arms before him once more, in a violent dumb show. I grasped Mr Gilmore by the shoulder, and forced myself upon his notice. ‘Is there a Belladonna plant on your grounds?’

  He could not answer me, but made shapes with his mouth. I took the child from him, a great, soft weight. Gilmore released his grasp, unwilling. As I turned to enter the house, Alonso barred my way. ‘It may not come in.’

  ‘You cannot be in earnest.’

  He said like a man in a dream: ‘I am.’

  As I made to pass him he thrust me back with a slow and lazy motion. It took an age to fall. I met the gravel drive holding the child protected as best I could before me. My back and arms bore the blow. I was knocked breathless.

  ‘Belladonna?’ said Henry Gilmore, suddenly roused to life. ‘It grows in the kitchen garden.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said to Alonso from where I lay on the drive. ‘He may die, as you know, without treatment. Do you still say me no?’

  ‘I do.’ Alonso went inside then, and to my disbelief I saw the front door close; I heard the rattle of the bolts shot home. I lay in the sunshine, with the poisoned child in my arms. The world had become a strange place. Henry Gilmore took him from me as I got to my feet, and he wept again – the child wept also. There was nothing to do but what I did next.

  ‘Lay him down on the bank, upon his side,’ I said. ‘Do not let him move, or bite his tongue, or swallow it. Put your fingers in his mouth – so – but mind you do not prevent the passage of air. And have a care …’ Even as I said this he winced, for the child had bitten his hand. I showed him how to depress the tongue and he did as I bid him, palely.

  I left them and went around to the rear of the house. The dining parlour panes yielded easily enough to a stout piece of Dartmoor granite; fortunately they were not latticed, but had been replaced in some time past with a large bay window.

  The house was quiet. I listened for any sign of opposition, but hearing nothing, went to the stairs and climbed. I did not trouble with stealth. When I reached Alonso’s chamber it was empty. I went through his possessions carefully, knowing that it would be hidden, but not too well. I found it wrapped in a handkerchief with his collars (which were all dirty). There was a stench in the room that teased my remembrance. I closed my eyes for an instant but it was gone. The bottle was of cloudy green glass. It was oily, as if with the residue of much anxious handling. It bore a vaguely evil look. I hoped it would bring deliverance.

  There was my bag to be fetched, and various articles from the kitchen which I thought would be of use; I moved about the house quickly. I did not hear or see a living soul.

  When I reached the child once more he was picking up objects from the grass – invisible to us – and describing them in a high, sharp voice. I took up the green vial and administered the solution of hydrochlorate of morphia: five minims, in a teaspoon, which he did not like. I did not like it either; I could not be sure how much of the drug had been ingested, the liquid collected so around his tongue and in the pockets of his cheeks. I thought he should be got out of the light, but should not be taken far in his present state, and directed Gilmore to move him under the shade of the cedar tree, where he lay, moaning, eyes rolling to the heavens.

  He wore his night shift, for he had been wandering by Rawblood this morning, although perfectly lucid. There was something terrible and moving about the plump bare legs. Gilmore, set to find him, had ridden all night. Finding Robert and taking him up in the saddle he prepared to make his way home to relieve an anxious household, when Robert began to speak of the rats which raced up and down his body.

  Some belladonna berries were clutched still in his hand, which he could not release due to the rictus, and tried to eat. This we prevented but the pulp of their flesh stained his palms as he kneaded them to liquid over the course of the afternoon.

  I made my examination. A beautiful rash began to appear, vivid and red, over the surface of his body. It mottled the skin with scarlet, covering him like a creeping vine even as I watched. The pupils were fully dilated. The pulse was approaching one hundred and twenty. The tongue was thick, and distended, with froth adhering to the sides. I judged it too late to evacuate the stomach. I believe he would have been asphyxiated by the procedure.

  ‘He wandered the moor all the night through,’ said Mr Gilmore, his demeanour calmer now. Though his face bore deep marks of anxiety, these were softened as he looked on the child. ‘He seemed … as always, when I found him. How can it be? How can the poison take so long?’

  ‘It is often the case with the atropics – that they take up to eight hours to manifest themselves.’ The child’s wrist was plump. I turned it about, palpating it. ‘I will venture a theory,’ I said to Gilmore, gently: ‘that he had a substantial supper.’

  He laughed a little, at that. ‘Robert has the keenest hunger in our family,’ he said, ‘as you may see.’ The child shook.

  I laid my hand on his shoulder. ‘He is, what, ten years of age?’ Gilmore assented, and I turned my attention to holding the child still.

  ‘He would not allow me in, even to speak to you,’ he said, after some time. ‘The nearest doctor is in Moretonhampstead – more than an hour’s ride away! He knows it. I would not have believed that anyone could be so indifferent to the suffering of a child.’

  ‘My friend is no longer a practising doctor.’

  ‘Does that mean that he may let babies die on his doorstep?’

  I had no answer for him. I said Robert’s name, instead, but he did not know it.

  ‘He will desire, soon, I believe, to micturate, and will be unable to do so. The usual remedy is a catheter, but I doubt that I possess one of a suitable gauge. You must prepare yourself for his distress.’ Gilmore looked troubled.

  ‘Should we not make a push for Moretonhampstead?’

  ‘I would not advise it.’

  ‘I do not think that he will die,’ Gilmore said. ‘Not now, for you have taken him in charge.’ His face showed the pure vulnerability of hope. The loneliness of his trust descended upon my shoulders. The child began to cry again. Tears streamed from the swollen black eyes.

  As the day faded, the shadows lengthened along his body, and played with the lineaments of his face. Fear and fatigue will play tricks; these were strange ones. For it seemed to me then that beside us, in the dappled shade of the tree, was a grave new dug. The scent of fresh-turned earth was bitter. I chided myself. But I could not quite shake the fancy.

  Just after four o’clock in the afternoon the crisis came. Robert spoke to his absent dolly and held a lengthy conversation with it, in which the dolly was forbidden to go to the fair. The fair had many mans at it and the lights were too bright. I agreed that this was so, and without warning he shook in my arms and then it was a corpse I held. I regarded him carefully. The bloated face was white and still. All I could think of was Alonso and his madness. Henry Gilmore wept noisily and pressed his fists to his eyes.

  I grasped Robert’s cold plump wrists and raised them above his head, then brought them down to his chest with a thump, just above the heart.

  Gilmore cried out and clawed at me.

  ‘Be still,’ I said. ‘Be still or help me. Sixteen repetitions a minute. Get your watch.’

  I do not think I have ever applied the Silvester method with such violence. I worked the slack arms up, and down, and dealt his heart such a blow at each descent that I thought at one time I heard a rib crack. It mattered not.

  At length there was a great shuddering; the child’s breath whistled in with the sound of a squeaky door. The bruised eyes opened and he vomited.

  ‘That is well,’ I said. ‘That is very well.’ I think Henry Gilmore wept again but I sank into peace and thick exhaustion. Robert and I regarded one another. His gaze still held the light of some place beyond the grave.

  I went with them back to the farm. Mr Gilmore
put us all three up on Sadie – there are no more riding horses at Rawblood. We rode in the dark with the sleeping child between us. Sadie knew the way, which was as well. Henry Gilmore could not see through his relief and his weeping.

  Into his shoulder I said, ‘Do not tell them that Alonso would not help. I swear to you that there is nothing that he could have done, and that Robert was as well cared for under that tree as he would have been indoors. I swear it. If you have any thought for me, who kept him here – do not tell them.’

  He said nothing – not to me then, nor to his family later.

  In the candlelight the faces of Mr and Mrs Gilmore were ghostly. I spoke my doctor’s piece. They wept and laughed and thanked me. I cannot remember my words; theirs I could not hear. There was a mist on me.

  At the end of my duty I walked out onto the moor again, into a night like coal. I hoped that I would be lost, but with the indifference of fate I saw the hills I knew within an hour, and Rawblood below, with every window glowing in its familiar pattern. I wondered briefly at the expense of light; but the thought and the answer exhausted me both. The house was lit to guide me home.

  I found Alonso in the parlour, where the night air whistled in through the broken window. With eyes half closed he gestured to the table where were set the glasses, and the port, and the gin, and the cider. There sat there also a profusion of those little green bottles.

  If I had been in any doubt as to whether Alonso was still addicted to laudanum, the matter is clear now. It is a subject we do not broach, imbued as it is with so much past pain, and so much intimacy. But I confess I had hoped he had thrown it off, these twenty years. It would seem he has done the opposite.

  I sat beside him in the seat that was pulled up close to him and made ready for me. Alonso’s head hung low on his chest.

  ‘I do not believe I need even frame the question, Alonso, which is in my mind. Why?’

  ‘It is bad,’ he murmured to his waistcoat, ‘to have others in the house.’

  ‘This is an obsession with you,’ I said. ‘Gossip, yes, should be discouraged. But to deny shelter to a dying child?’

  ‘You do not understand the dangers, Charles.’

  ‘Explain them.’

  Alonso reached a hand towards me. He raised his ravaged face to mine. ‘I had thought you had been caught in the mist,’ he said. ‘Oh, Charles, I was afraid you had been caught in it.’

  ‘Well, I have not,’ I replied. ‘I am here.’ There was no sense to be had from him that night. I took him to me.

  I have never seen him afraid of any natural or man-made thing, except one. He will never venture forth from the house when there is a mist. When he achieves his more acid heights I am tempted to point out that, for someone dogged by this persistent mania, he has chosen a peculiar climate and position in which to live.

  ‘Manning’s cure,’ he said to me. ‘Eh, Charles? Eh? Manning’s cure!’

  Here is how, twenty years ago, I accidentally caused Alonso to become an opium fiend.

  There is nothing I could have refused him in those days, or he me. It was a constant point with him: that the man and the work were one. It was a joy the like of which I have never known, before or since.

  I think that we were drunk again. I know we sat before the fire, in the dark. The house was in holland covers; we had no time for so petty a thing as housekeeping, and the furniture loomed pale in the firelight behind us like a choir. We settled, as was our habit, on the boards before the smouldering hearth.

  ‘We work with animals now,’ he said. (We did indeed. There were at that time several cages in the cellar, their occupants in varying stages of disrepair.) ‘What if we were to introduce the study of Man into our efforts? Do you not see that this is the logical end to our work?’

  ‘I understand the principle. The execution of it?’ I studied him. He was suffused with a spirit I had not seen before. The gin and the giddiness which had affected us all evening began to achieve its highest pitch. The scuffle of London at night seemed now to come from a long distance; as if we had already left the paltry mortal world behind, and ascended to a higher plane.

  ‘We will choose the test,’ Alonso said. ‘Each for the other. For fifty days you may do what you like with me. You may administer any medicament. I will take it without question. You will note the effects. And I will be unconscious of the treatment. I insist that I am given no hint of what is underway or what you are dosing me with. I cannot seek to countermand it, or to avoid it.’

  ‘It is a great exercise in faith.’

  ‘But of course,’ he said. ‘I will be doing the same to you.’

  The distance and the knowledge which had been building in me reached a height. I laughed. He did not, but looked at me kindly.

  ‘You will not kill me. Do you see? It is our absolute trust in one another which will guide us.’

  We spent some time devising the methods by which we would proceed. We must be sufficiently healthful to minister to one another, and for observation; the doses must be given in quantities which were moderate enough for the subject to maintain muscular control and a reasonable degree of mobility. We must always record. No matter what state of illness or fatigue we felt ourselves to be in, we must always note the results. And at the end of fifty days we would make sure that the process began its reversal.

  We made preparations for isolation. No one knew of our intention. Now, when I look back on that time, I think: perhaps we should have consulted with someone or other. We arranged for other men to attend our patients. We sealed the house in certain ways and gave out that we would be away from town. We did all to ensure that we would have the leisure to conduct our research undisturbed. In our usual fashion, chaos reigned jointly with order in these preparations. We arranged an ingenious method of goods delivery through the coal chute – but I discovered at the end of our experiment that the street door had been left unlocked throughout.

  We began. It was commonplace. He gave me a piece of bread every morning. I took it without reservation. And I gave him a thimble of brandy five times a day. Other than these small practicalities we did not discuss the matter, but went about our business as usual; indeed much more pleasantly for we had not the bother of social obligations or duty. For a month and a half we were a contented little island.

  On the last day he handed me his book that I might see the progress of his research.

  The first note in that book was an extract copied from Chambers’ journal. When I read it I laughed. I noted it:

  ‘Lastly, let me urge upon all who adopt the Styrian system to make some written memorandum that they have done so, lest, in case of accident, some of their friends may be hanged in mistake.’

  It became a something of a settled joke between us: ‘Do not be hanged in mistake!’

  I was most interested in the record of Alonso’s work, as I had read of the Styrian system, the practice of eating arsenic to give stamina and wind for hard work. It is common among certain tribes in Europe; immunity builds progressively and cumulatively as the dosage increases.

  I remained in perfect health throughout. He attributed a certain fatigue to me, but I was not conscious of it. I can in honesty say that I suffered no serious ill effects. My skin had a pallor, and my hair acquired a new sheen, but these were nothing. The treatment was a pleasant suspension of the humdrum. I spent most of it consolidating my reading on bowel disorders. When I was weaned off it I felt the effects of poison for a day or two, but mildly, and was not incapacitated. His notes were thorough. The dosage increased in perfect increments. He was never in danger of being hanged.

  And what of me? How did I use that licence we had extended to one another? I chose a true poison. If I have railed against that person I saw before me today I have no right to do so; for I made him. I gave Alonso opium. I began him on this path. It was a terrible error on my part. I had heard of Manning’s new cure for opiate addiction. It consisted of a cordial of chlorate of gold every few hours, with daily hypodermic i
njections of strychnine and atropine. I thought it would work.

  It did not. When the time came to ease him off the opium Alonso reacted most violently to the cordial; he was delirious, and enraged. I believe all the injections accomplished was to give him the idea to inject the morphia intravenously. Thirty days beyond the end of our trial his lust for the drug was greater than ever.

  Alonso must have known that I was giving him laudanum. He must have. He was a doctor, and not of my average talent – very gifted. But he did not turn from our purpose for he trusted me. And then it was too late.

  I must plead a certain licence, and draw a veil; I find, after all, that I cannot speak of those times. There ensued secrecy and pain and various other things. The other things being predictable, common to many other tales, easily imagined. I need not repeat them here. Alonso became a travesty of a man. When he retired to the country, and then to Italy, to pursue opium eating in peace; when he became the shadow he is today; it was relief I felt.

  Late, by night

  By stealth or by force I must get out of here, I must.

  My dreaming self, my night self, is a most alarmist person. What possesses me to write these things? The hand is surely mine, and fairly neat. As it should be. I was not so very far gone last night. Sleepwriting – a new phenomenon?

  Iris

  SUMMER 1914

  I’m fifteen.

  I am half buried in straw in the depths of Nell’s stall, watching the gentle shift of her elegant legs. Her tail swoops and flicks, black and yellow and steel grey. I’m not in trouble yet but I will be when they find the broken vase in the dining room. Best to sit it out. The straw is warm and prickly. The stable is quiet. I slip in and out, treading the edge, the abyss of sleep.