Rawblood Read online

  At his window, in the poor, ill-lit room above the stables.

  Tom’s the same. The room is the same. The straw, the cloth we used to clean my boots; both lie in the corner by the door. Vague scents of gutter muck and a trace of liniment still touch the air. But nothing is as it was. The world is a slippery, raw place, stranger than I knew. No one’s laughing now.

  Tom’s puzzled. But he tries again. He trusts me. ‘Iris. You look bad. Let me …’

  He must be kept away. Even in my feverish state I know the thing to say. It’s been waiting to be said between us all these years. ‘You were right, before,’ I tell him. ‘I’m getting too big for this. Too old to play with the stable boy.’

  I don’t wait to see his face. I go back across the roof, head ringing.

  In my room I lock the door. I close the shutters. I lie in lavender-scented sheets and spin. I am cold, cold. Moonlight lies cold across the floor. The curtains are cold. The lines of the furniture are cold against the dark. Rawblood sighs around me.

  I think of Tom’s stutter, which comes when he’s unnerved. The dark line of his brow like a swallow in flight. These things are what they are but they are now also something else. Lightly I touch the notch of my collarbone – my flesh remembers his finger, resting there. Horror autotoxicus is woken by strong feeling. I hadn’t understood. I have broken the Rules. I have risked our lives.

  The fever is very high, now. The world whitens and broadens until everything is a flat white soup. White shapes dance before my eyes. I seem to hear a gong somewhere. The white is deep and welcoming and I sink in. By the time they break down the door I don’t know names or anything else. Cold, cold.

  Charles Danforth

  3 OCTOBER 1881

  I first laid eyes on Alonso the day we laid knife to our cadavers. Memory has played a curious trick in the intervening twenty years, for I recall it as if it were a tintype; the image is inert, and dull coloured – perhaps because the memory lives in my intellect, and understanding, rather than in my eyes.

  There was no horror in that room. I was put in mind of York Minster, which I have seen once, and the cool effigies that lie there in the sanctified air. The corpses were washed and bound in cheesecloth. There was little in the waxy figures before us to revolt. They lay like brides, each on their bier; the white forms barred by a little sunshine that strayed through the high windows of that echoing hall.

  It was a pioneer scheme, this allocation of one corpse to two students, counter to the accepted practice of lecturing from a platform, where we would stand around, craning our necks to see the quick and tiny movements of the knife. Instead we were to keep this person, or these remnants of a person, for our very own, throughout Anatomy. Month by month we would open them, piece by piece, organ by organ. It was the cause of great outrage in the newspapers, for there is need of thirty corpses now, not just one. I had read an article in the Penny Illustrated only the day before, telling how it would lead to an increase in grave robbing, that the bread would be torn from the mouths of hard-working men and their families as a result. How the one would affect the other remains a puzzle to me. Burke lay in a glass case in the Edinburgh medical college, reduced to flayed skin and skeleton; Hare was thirty years gone. These cadavers had been obtained by means which were perfectly proper and according to the letter of the Anatomy Act. But this made no odds to the general populace, who wrestled with the conundrum: doctors must be trained, but corpses must be buried.

  We set to work, with the stentorian tones of the lecturer in our ears. We began on a leg. The shape, the roundness of the calf, the muscles preserved so tight and solid beneath the waxy skin; there is a peculiar pleasure to it. The knife went in; the dermis and layers of muscle were revealed like a flower, petal by petal. There were such colours and shapes; I had not known. The muscle is a rich purpled red, encased in marbled flesh which is the colour of a baked salmon. The sinews and tendons have a white and yellowish tinge. The component parts lie tight together in symmetry, as if designed by a master craftsman, bound and run through by the lacework of corded vessels. The graceful long saphenous vein, from which other veins branch like winter trees against the sky. The rippling surface of the gastrocnemius muscle.

  I was bemused by the vomiting and the distress that was engendered in my fellows. Unclothed, these forms retained their modesty. They were not awesome, but simply the carcase of man, sloughed away when need for it was done. The corpses were strongly preserved in formaldehyde; their flesh bore little relation to that of a living being. There could be no kinship to oneself: I could not think – there but for grace go I, or one day I shall lie thus. Perhaps I should have thought these things. Perhaps I was too sure and young to truly understand the condition of these cold figures, which submitted to the outrage of our knives.

  Afterwards we sought the Lamb and Flag like hounds. Those of our party were seized by hilarity, commensurate to their previous unease. These young men shed their fear and talked loud and brave. Beer went down and so did gin. Faces grew rosier, lips wetter, eyes brighter; their memories of the blood and the bones and the delicate layers of subcutaneous flesh were transmuted and the company waxed lewd.

  Presently we were increased by a party fresh released from their lectures at Pall Mall East, and there was further frantic passage to and fro between tables and bar; we were busy as rats in an old cheese loft. One Irish gentleman whose name I cannot now summon besought me in plaintive accents to lay bets for the bare-knuckle fight in the yard later.

  ‘For we have not enough entries, Danforth, for a book, and it is Murchison, you know, fighting against a Black, and the Black is sure enough to win.’

  I demurred, for I have always abhorred and avoided all forms of gaming and violence; here the two were promised to be mingled in fine anarchy. My finances were somewhat straitened, anyhow. I could not have paid my shot. He would not relent however, and shouted that not for nothing were we drinking in the ‘Buckets of Blood’ (for this was the casual name given to the establishment in which we sat). We were to see a little fisticuffs and make up a book, so that he may buy ribbons for his little sister after all! The mention of ribbons had the happy effect of diverting his talk and he began then to describe a house he had patronised the night before, with entertainments I would not believe, he assured me. He began to tell me a tale of a pair of little twins, as perfect as they could be, who would do something with a live snake, but as he went on his urgency and his consonants would not ally together with the drink he had taken. His breath carried an odour of halibut, and sorrow. It was no trouble to get away, now, and presently I saw him collapsed on a settle, mouth open, forelock damp, sleeping like a child.

  As the sun fell the light grew orange and straightened its beams through the casements. Without, ladies had begun to show themselves in the street, fresh from their couches, to take the evening air. Through the rippled glass there could be seen gloved hands and the pale silk of dresses. They did not linger by the house and I cannot blame them for it. I imagine our hullabaloo could be heard perfectly well as far as Covent Garden.

  One man alone I observed, who sat quiet and played with a penny on the rim of his glass, producing a tuneful sound, never loud enough to attract notice, but so that the gathering became accustomed to the gentle noise, running beneath the babble. I thought he had arrived with the others only that minute; then I thought I had seen him in the hall that morning.

  This man was sallow, and vast. His hair stood up at the back of his neck like the ruff of a bird. His linen was ragged at the collars and stained with ink, which also covered his hands like blemishes. He hunched in the settle chair like a crouching beast; he was fixed on his task, which he performed with movements that were precise, and small. The great fingers manipulated the penny with a dexterity that confounded the eye, ran supple and light around the dirty rim. An image, a memory perhaps, arose unbidden to the surface of my mind: of him holding a knife, face solemn in the dim air.

  No, I thought, he had not, after
all, been with us this morning, for I was sure I would have noted him. I shook my head to clear it of the heavy punch fumes and moved closer, under the cover of the shrieks. One bright spark had donned the tavern madam’s bonnet, and was discoursing in a theatrical voice on her ‘pullets’ and ‘spiced wares’ which were for sale. This was enough distraction for the company, who rocked with laughter.

  As I moved my stool I was clumsy, and made a business of it. The wooden legs screeched on the flags; the penny man lifted his eye to mine. It was that of a blackbird, bright, and deep. Like a glimpse of the bottom of a well. His finger sent the coin singing once more around the rim.

  ‘They hear it,’ he said, ‘but they do not mark it. It is a constant; they have accustomed themselves. But if I increase the pitch so,’ he poured ale into the glass, and it sang out higher, ‘and so on, eventually the glass will shatter. That, they will note. There will be a great fussing with cloths and restitution and a new glass, as if it were a surprise. But the warning has been sounding,’ he sang the glass again, ‘all along. Do you understand?’

  ‘I do not, I confess.’ I was held by the lights that moved in his eyes.

  ‘It is so that death sits beside us every day, until it is forced upon our notice. Until the vessel breaks open and life flows out we must be blind and deaf to its presence, or we could not conduct our carnival as we do.’

  He gestured at the youth who entertained the company. That individual was now bright red. The bonnet lay askew over one eye, and he had begun a series of high kicks, as the Parisian dancing girls do. The penny man regarded this with kindness; but absently, as if it were an effort by a child to imagine a giraffe when they have not seen one.

  He went on, ‘But there are some who choose to listen to the song of mortality, which underlies it; lies beneath everything; the long note beneath the cacophony. For those who can hear death, whistling always, underneath, who do not fear him, but see his part in the music –’ he grasped my arm as if in sympathy – ‘for them it is a vocation of the loneliest, and the highest order.’ We looked on one another. The finger turned and the glass whistled its distress. The pitch soared and enclosed us in its sphere.

  ‘It will break,’ I said.

  ‘Ah. Not it,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’

  I offered him my hand, then, and told him my name.

  The memories of one’s youth are potent. Twenty years – but our talk, the sensations are there, as fresh as if preserved in aspic. How will it be, when I am confronted with the man? I expect to find Alonso changed; I expect to find him the same.

  Somehow I think his years in Italy will not have altered him too much; he was always of a Mediterranean temperament. Ludicrous, but I am somewhat shy at the thought of our meeting. We meant so much to one another, then.

  Anyhow, I am eager for the journey to pass. Which it is doing very slowly. The rather circuitous and testing two thirty-five from Paddington!

  We emerge from the grey stone and smoky brick, over the dirty river. The colours of living things assault the eye: the turning leaves, the painful blue of the sky, the pastures a violent emerald.

  When I am wrested from the depths of the city I am always shocked by the space and the air that exists without it. The country through which we pass is in the best English style. Flocks of crows mark the sky above golden stubble. Shorthorns the colour of weak tea amble through gates. Here and there a rustic figure punctuates the landscape: a woman in a cap and apron with a large bucket; a man with a scythe. Were I a student of the picturesque, I would be well pleased.

  As it is, I cannot see the point of it. Stop start, stop start; and no one gets on or off for the best part of three hours. We call at station after station, vacant in the sunshine. Box. No living soul. Nailsea. Similarly deserted. And so on.

  There is great pleasure in a new diary (although this resembles more a ledger that clerks write in. I prefer it so; there is more space to a page). The paper is smooth and virgin. It smells unaccountably, but not unpleasantly, of turpentine. The cover has a soft shine and a pleasing stiffness to the boards. I purchased the journal for three shillings, which I could ill afford, but finding myself in the unaccustomed environs of Belgravia, and passing Mr Stokes’s shop, saw it in the window and yielded to temptation. Extravagant, but there we are.

  I am a great believer in clinical observation. I have a row of pleasing ledgers on the shelf by the window at Marylebone Lane, containing records of cases of particular interest, or anything I think may be suitable for publication. When they are set down, ideas and facts and occurrences begin to take on an elegance and an order that they do not have when thrown, as they often are, all hurly burly at your head in the course of the day. This pleasing effect can be achieved not only in the realms of science but also in one’s own little life. It aids the ordering of my mind, to set down my day in words. Now, I am no Pepys, but I believe that I have when moved a certain turn of phrase which is not contemptible.

  I keep a small brown moleskin notebook in which I jot down any little thing that occurs to me. However, in my haste this morning – for I did not rest well and rose late – I left my own, familiar diary on the nightstand. I can picture the book where it sits, the green cover worn soft and stained a little with bromide, propped in front of my Sunday collar studs, to the left of my tooth powder. Bereft! I had intended this ledger for proper observation and records, not for my own maunderings; it will have to serve for both.

  Reading this over the knowledge is forced upon me that I have left behind also the tooth powder. D--n.

  Once more we slow. Where in heavens do we halt now?

  Minety. Resembling somewhat the Marie Celeste.

  I neglected to bring reading matter. My wrinkled railway timetable invites me to purchase an ‘invisible peruke.’ I am asked to consider whether I would not like to acquire, for the sum of twenty shillings, an illustrated compendium of British moths. I am offered Parr’s Life Pills, which ‘clear from the body all hurtful impurities, promote appetite, aid digestion, purify the blood, and keep the bowels regular.’

  This is famous news. I can retire from my profession.

  We are now at Purton. This station has a sense of the aesthetic. Roses climb the walls. Two doves nestle in the signal box. A small white dog parades the platform, which is otherwise unpeopled.

  Upon my return I must put my mind to finding new lodgings. Mrs Healey’s conscience is as stiff and unworkable as her knees. I pay the woman thirty shillings a week for food and board; yet each evening I am presented with cold gruel and told I have missed supper. Likewise when I must leave in the early morning for theatre it is too early for decent folk to be bestirring themselves, and I must make do with the bread and hard cheese which has been left out on the cupboard for me all night. I live worse now than I did as a student. If I were sensible I would buy out some country practitioner, find a wife and spend the remainder of my years tending to small farmers, landed gentry and the cottage hospital.

  Shrivenham. At Shrivenham there is one round woman who wishes to embark. She carries a vinaigrette which she keeps before her nose, as if the scents of the station were poison, and she clutches her evil-looking pug. Four strong porters are required for her trunks and bandboxes.

  Thank the heavens for industry and advances in telegraphy, for the birth of the great railways and the dominion of the Empire; for we have built the railway terminus at Shrivenham!

  Yes, by rights I should go out of the town, be rural, and comfortable. And yet I know I will not, but will merely pass from one Mrs Healey to another. Why does London hold me so? Very well, let me diagnose.

  It is not a reasoned thing, but a series of impressions. The bite of the fog, the shout of the coster on an early January morning, the smell and bustle of the wharf; these things thrill my blood in the way that the first drink affects those addicted to spirituous liquors. The straining limbs of the thin mudlarks, the shouts of the Covent Garden sellers, the basso profundo calls of the bargemen to one another; it is el
ixir to me.

  Perhaps these sights and sounds have a greater value, in that they remind me how far I have come from my beginnings. If I could, I would excise Grimstock from the face of England, even from remembrance. I cannot put enough distance between myself and That Place. The place of my birth: a small village in Lancashire where folk still leave saucers of milk outside their doors on Samhain. Were He not everywhere, I would say that God does not know Grimstock. Bare living is scratched from the hard black land where the wind moans and cuts your face. The people die young and bitter. It is a place that chills the heart and mind.

  Not long. Two hours, a little more. I feel the beginning of an appetite. Travel is a great strain on the person. It produces fatigue, the migraine, or nausea; in me it also produces hunger. With Alonso I will have days of good wine and good food. For myself I am content with a simple life; but it does not mean that I hold such things in contempt. Yes, it will be a pleasant respite from Mrs Healey’s tender mercies. I recall some trick of Alonso’s cook, most successful, with juniper berries and a teal duck.

  I will try to compose myself for sleep now, so as to be alert for my arrival. If rest eludes me I shall watch the fields pass until dusk falls, and be content.

  LATER

  Rawblood

  I disembarked at Exeter in a state of confusion, having fallen into a deep sleep. My bewilderment drew comment from a robust country child who stood on the platform, throwing stones at the sky. I regret to say that his observations earned him a sharp clip on the ear. While taking careful inventory of my belongings I was tapped on the shoulder and saw that Shakes was there to greet me. I would not have thought he still lived; to me he looked old when I was young. But the eyes of youth see nothing as it is.

  Shakes has worked in Alonso’s service for so many years that some familiarity of manner is only to be expected, but he shook my hand like an acquaintance as he took my portmanteau. I hid my perturbation.