Rawblood Page 15

  He turned to flee, laying bare his other side, and showed me my mistake. I saw our handiwork full well. He is an anatomy lesson. Along his left flank the hide and flesh are neatly reflected back and excised. The anterior ribs are sawn away and blunt. Beyond them there is a warm cavity through which can be seen the pulsing, the inner workings. The gentle rise and fall of the exposed lungs. Pink they are, and pretty, looking like soft crepe for a party. The network of blue vessels runs through his exposed landscape. As he shifted there was a glimpse of the spleen, protruding deep red like the tip of a tongue. The blackened areas scattered here and there show where we have taken tissue, and have cauterised with the hot iron. A loose swag of purple bowel hung plump by his hind leg.

  All this I have seen before. And I had my own part in its doing. But in that moment … Well.

  As I wrapped him, taking care not to touch with my fingers the exposed parts, he began to make a sound, which I had not thought possible. It was very like a tin whistle, but mournful. I soon saw that it was merely my handling, which produced a compression of the lungs; sending air through the puncture in his throat, his larynx. The sound acted upon me however. It was ineffable and I cannot say I am yet recovered.

  Afterwards I went up to the kitchen and after some hunting found an onion which I brought down and left inside the door of his cage. He did not look at it, or me. I do not know if he will eat it, or if it will do him harm, or if rabbits are partial to such food. Now I am half inclined to go and take it away again. I do not know what to do. Oh, God – I am tired.

  12 OCTOBER

  We go on, we go on. The days are long, and the nights are wordless. Exhaustion takes us both to its bosom at dusk. There is no sound at the board but each man’s private consumption. Afterwards we slump in our dusty chairs and drink, deep and long; eventually I take myself to my rest, uncertain of my steps and with a thick head; only to rise the next morning, cursing, to begin it all over again.

  Alonso’s hair seems to be dark again. It is streaked now with black, creating a strangely pleasing effect, somewhat like a badger. Could he be dyeing it? I cannot summon the courage to ask. He looks perhaps fifty, now, rather than seventy. Rawblood improves him. I cannot say it does the same for me.

  My visit has stretched on, and on … it must end, now. I have said I will return here next month, in order to be present for the next stage, where we will introduce the contaminant into the healthy host. I cannot believe it will work. I begin to doubt our thesis most seriously. Truthfully, I do not think I will come back. I can concoct some excuse, when the time comes.

  It will be good to return to my life, spartan as it is. I think of my cheerless little room with some relief, and find myself dwelling on Mrs Healey’s unlovely physiognomy with something like longing. The doing of great things is all very well, but there is comfort in monotony, and the performance of one’s duty; my practice no doubt suffers in my absence – I do not like Babcock, much as I try – and I was loath to leave matters in his charge; truthfully I think him knuckleheaded; I believe he will inflict his antiquated notions on my patients, and perhaps even cup them – but enough! It does not bear thinking of. Suffice to say that I will be relieved to take up the reins again. I have told Alonso of my departure. He said little but made me a brandy flask, to take below.

  Drink has become necessary; for us to bear one another’s company, and for the continued performance of duty. The cellar begins to smell quite unwholesome.

  This unseasonable heat begins to wear on me – it is out of tune. There is still no rain. The countryside is restless – the autumn berries are full on the bramble, beside the trembling butterflies, and the bumbles; the flowers hang heavy in their strange bloom and the stale air is redolent of their perfume, and yet the trees are bare. The birds do not know what to do. Everywhere are swallows and geese who should have departed, weeks past, for sunnier climes; they circle in the air, silent, and attentive. There is a forced lushness, and fruitfulness on the land, as if it waited for a blight.

  13 OCTOBER

  I am dissatisfied. We do not progress. I have a little influenza at present, which gives me a thick head and a languor. Today I attempted to work, but found myself rapidly overcome. I was fervently grateful to walk away. My movements were clumsy. Our charges do not fare well. There is a raggedy quality to my samples which I cannot like. The air is redolent of singeing. I will not describe again their eyes. Everything begins to look like flesh and bone to me.

  By the by, the heat does not abate.

  In haste

  eyes like black and white wheels and a balding head. Get out get out

  Good God. I shall put this diary on the other side of the room at nights.

  14 OCTOBER

  Mr Wallace – that eminent, more sensible colleague of Mr Darwin – shows us the clear and logical conclusion: that while animals are manifestly subject to evolutionary processes, man cannot be at the mercy of these rules in the same way – man is God’s, and is touched by God. But it is hard – hard to descend into the cellar for those long hours, hard to remember that what we do with the creatures in our care is for a purpose higher than ourselves, and higher, even, than the science of life. That it is in the service of God.

  15 OCTOBER

  Do not look into her eyes. do not My God the eyes

  My diary was in the drawer, which was locked. The key was in my pocket, in my coat, hanging up on the other side of the room. Yet the book was open before me, ink and pen dragging great blots across the page.

  Perhaps I should tie my own hands.

  18 OCTOBER

  I write barricaded in my room. I have understood at last the nature of my visit here. It is vengeance. My life is in peril.

  I will lay out events as they happened, precisely.

  Yesterday, overcome with lassitude, I strolled onto the moor – I felt in need of air. The heat is relentless. As for the work, we have not succeeded in perfectly preserving the tissue without killing the infection, and so a transfer is as far away as ever. We proceed like insatiable butchers. The cellar air is thick with rot and pain. My limbs were glad to feel their length again; my heart lifted with each stride.

  When the house was well behind me I found myself a perch behind a tumble of great stones, and sat to feel the sun. It was a good thing to do. All around me was the moor, green and grey, and the little twisted rowan trees, which bend so obediently to the wind in these parts, their berries crimson darts against the dull land. It is a salutary thing, to sit and observe Nature, which cares nothing for my travails. I saw a sheep with a late lamb, newborn, I fancy, not an hour before – it made a charming picture, the lamb all disobedient legs and determined certainty, and the ewe encouraging it; I watched its trials, becoming engrossed in its efforts to stand, wincing at each tumble. When it achieved uprightness, and took its first unsteady steps, I found myself moved beyond reason, and had to turn away.

  It occurred to me that the lamb’s might be an enviable lot – to possess no intellect, or curiosity, or duty to God or to mankind; to have a purpose so simple and pure – to desire to stand, to puzzle at it, to strain, and so! – achieve it, and then walk away, into a sheep’s life, towards a sheep’s death. Alonso would say, and I can hear his tone, that this is, in short fact, exactly the manner in which the large part of human kind passes its existence.

  I was thus engaged on reflection, a frown on my face and a stick in my hand, slapping at the heather (men in idle moments, I find, will always seek a stick and something to hit) when I heard a sound like a saw drawn badly across the grain of the wood. Startled, I perceived then the crabbed figure of Shakes traversing the crest of the hill, silhouetted against the moor, making his way east.

  This would not have caught my attention in particular save that during the past weeks I have twice observed him from the parlour window, coming and going across this same hill, with the same air of purpose. Dartmeet lies not in that quarter, so he goes not to market. He sleeps above the stable at Rawblood, so he
goes not home; and I dismiss the notion of a sweetheart out of hand. He carries nothing with him on these forays which would suggest a household task (not for instance, my portmanteau, the buckle of which is loose and which I have asked him to mend). When he returns it is empty-handed, bearing none of the necessaries of which we are in acute need: sugar and shaving soap are uppermost in my mind.

  His back, turned towards me, shook, perhaps with the cough that racks his frame. He had not seen me – I was seized of a sudden with mischief. I rose from my seat and followed.

  It is wrong in me, perhaps, but I cannot like the man. He hangs on Alonso. Alonso will break his pen, and before he has done more than curse at it, Shakes will be at his side with a new one, or mending the old, standing very close, seeking to breathe, it seems to me, his master’s breath. No service for Alonso is too small; and yet the house is permitted to go to rack and ruin. Alonso’s coat is brushed and his boots shine like water every morning; there are dead mice beneath the cupboards in the yellow drawing room.

  Added to this is his behaviour towards me: at table there have been on more than one occasion flies in my cup, but never in my host’s. And the man looks at me. This may not sound like provocation, but to be regarded in silence, from under craggy narrow brows, for minutes on end, quite puts me out.

  I believe Shakes was acquired from a debtors’ prison near Wales. Or perhaps I invented that. He is from Devon originally, there can be no doubt – his vowels proclaim it – but I’ll be bound some interesting passages occurred with him since he last saw Hay Tor. Shakes is butler, valet, cook, and groundsman … I think him overly and particularly attached to Alonso.

  I followed him across the moor, stumbling a little in my haste. He moves at a sharp clip! I kept low, behind stands of heather, and darting from the cover of boulder to gorse bush. I thought at one time he was sure to turn, and threw myself to the floor, anointing myself liberally with dusty cracked earth – but he did not, and after some time I felt it safe to stand and walk behind.

  I know not why it gave me such pleasure to follow him so – it was an action lacking in principle; I was invigorated; filled with a naughty spirit; seized with the sunshine and the breeze; and I thought to amuse myself for an hour or two only. As I drew closer to him, I heard that he spoke aloud. Whether to himself, or to the moor, or God; who can say? I do not know what serves as his conscience. It was easy to follow in the paths he chose; he went along the little ways, by tumbledown walls, by great banks of heather and through thick forests of gorse, avoiding the open places where the wind whistles and takes your ears off.

  Bracken and moor rose all around. The great barrow sat, amber with autumn, on its distant hill. We crossed a clearing in the brush, which was strewn with stones. My foot struck a flint, half buried in the earth, and I stumbled, and nearly brained myself on another. It struck me then that the stones were not scattered on the ground, but had a semblance of order: of a sudden I perceived, as though I had walked unawares into a funeral, that we were in the confines of one of those barbarous old Briton villages that litter the hillsides. My foot was on the great hearthstone, which glittered in the sunlight in that peculiar way that granite has. I stood within a house; a tiny dwelling place, smaller than my bedchamber at Rawblood. The floor was grass, and heather furnished the corners. The foundations only remained, cloaked in moss and amber lichen; the remains of the walls, and all else were scattered about in pieces of hewn rock. I was quite upset. No man had lived here for a thousand years. But it was still a house. I took care to make my way out of the dwelling through the door, and not by hopping over the walls.

  By lucky chance there was in my coat the flask which Alonso had filled again for me with brandy; it is a mighty remedy. My despond had quite lifted; I was in a holiday humour. And still I followed. I dearly wished to know what Shakes spoke; it had become something of a mania with me; I think that I have been down in the cellar for too long.

  We went a ways so, but I could catch nothing that fell from his lips but bright snatches of sound. After some time he stopped in the shadow of a great rock that reared itself from the hill. Settling himself beside this in the lee of the wind, he took forth a pasty and began to break it into pieces, lips still moving as if engaged in urgent conversation.

  The stone was surrounded by high banks of bracken. I looked out a cosy patch downwind and scuttled nearer still to listen.

  The man was singing, in a light baritone, unexpected and pleasing to the ear. I paused to note some of the words, for they caught my fancy. I attempt a transcription, below, from pencil notes:

  She spake, and ’neath the moon she took my heart away

  (And if I am, a hollow man, who art thou to know?)

  Broke and flung awry I was, a pale man at the break of day,

  An’ I’ll not sing for her no more, no more for her my woe.

  No more her brock bright eyes for me, no more her sateen lips,

  No more with her at moonlight, a-dancin’ heel-an’-toe,

  [unintelligible here] the night-tide dashin’,

  Last pleasure [Something here, tasted? wasted?] long ago.

  [something something] Devon lass, an’ all of Devon pleased,

  (And if I am, a white bone man, who art thou to know?)

  Laughing tho’ my death it fell, I went wi’ heart at ease,

  A-dreamin’ arl the time o’ cheeks like early snow.

  ‘Take my bones to crossways! Hang ’em by the moor,

  [nonsense, unintelligible]

  Ware the white bone man, with the white bone hand,

  I’ll take you arl, as she took my heart, all them year ago.’

  There was more in this vein; many verses warning of the ‘white bone man’, and his particular modes of vengeance; but the wind took the words quickly from his lips, and my pencil refused to permit more lead. This is vexing indeed, as this instrument cost me the extravagant sum of two shillings, which I can ill afford. At the time of purchase I was given most convincing assurances of quality, which ought to have told me better, I suppose.

  We sat in this fashion for some time, the song hanging pleasantly on the air. I have thought, that should I have the leisure, when I have comfortably established my practice, and perhaps published sufficiently to feel entitlement to a degree of ease, that I should like to compile a collection of these charming ditties; the simple folk songs of the country people, the old lays; remnants of a charming, and truer England.

  Presently I found the ground to be a little damp, which I am sensitive to. Also some members of the genus Formicinae began to demonstrate their intrepid, exploratory character upon my person. I did not mind this at first – an ant is a genial creature – but as they grew insistent I began to wonder if in fact I should not turn for home. What, after all, had I learned by watching him?

  But then Shakes rolled the kerchief into his pocket, stood, and moved eastwards at a trot. Again his air of purpose drew me, irresistibly, as a child draws a wooden toy behind it on a string. I could not now relinquish my purpose. I disengaged myself from my companions as best I could, hauled myself aloft and we were off once more.

  I had not paid much attention to our route, but I now found that we were in a part of the moor that I did not know; we had in fact crossed Hamel Down by some circuitous means, and were coming to the old post road. This road follows in its turn the old Roman way, and is therefore straight, and well laid, though not often used. It is turned to turf and sand, and not well trod, and by hanging back I had no trouble concealing my footfall behind Shakes’s own wandering steps. I began to feel a kinship with him as we went, imagining a companionship existed between us, walking together so, as many must have done on that road before us. More brandy was taken by me.

  I saw a pony the colour of ripe conkers, and hiding by her side a late foal, russet and thick pelted. They are hardy, these little horses of the moor. I cannot imagine such a bumbling thing as that colt enduring the winter. And yet they do; the evidence of it covers the dun landsca
pe in the quiet dark shapes of the pony herds. It seems to me at times that all one’s effort in this long struggle of life is expended in preserving, and propagating that same life.

  Our passage sent plovers aloft, rising alarmed from the heather banks, and leading us with their furtive, futile darts, and much crying out, away from their homes. I saw our passage as like to the passage of giants, so we must seem to them. I have an imagination when I allow it to rove, and I was engaged in a fancy that I was to these little birds a Titan: the God of the Plovers. What should I command them this day?

  ‘Cast yourselves upon the sky,’ I told them silently and they did; I laughed to see them rise and rise.

  Shakes came to a halt ahead of me, and I saw that our little way had joined a larger road. The perfume reached me before I saw what it was we had sought, although these were southern blooms, and not the red campion, cuckoo flower and wild garlic of my childhood. The sickly meadowsweet clung to my nostrils; this at least I knew. My distress reached its summit.

  Flowers, all together in sickening banks. It is only twice in every lifetime that so many are assembled. I was young again; I walked once more towards that broken crossroads beyond the tumbled church wall, I caught once more the scent of my father’s grave and heard my mother weep.

  I made to turn but I was upon it. The blooms lay on parched earth; plucked strands of heather, and foxgloves, and briar flowers; eyebright, honeysuckle, gorse, yellow cinquefoil and ox-eye daisies. A little stone lay at the head of the mound.

  It is with trepidation and grave conscience that the faithful man considers a roadside grave. I am heartily relieved that in recent years the late prohibition has been abated. Those who take their own lives are to be pitied for that sin and should be allowed what little grace they can attain. An unmarked grave; the departed soul excluded from the consecration of the churchyard; it is an abomination at which compassion rightly revolts.