Rawblood Read online

  And yet I was not satisfied. There was a quality in the air, not so definite as to be called a scent, yet for me an unequivocal confirmation that I had not been misled; someone had been here. I moved to the window, and looked. There I saw the sward, rising above the drive, still sunlit, where I stood moments ago. Under the cedar tree was something … a pile of earth, something …

  A crudely dug rectangle scarred the vivid green. A fresh grave, not large. Long enough to hold a small woman or an older child. The sight filled me with peculiar feeling, as if all the sadness in the world had been drawn down into that spot. Memory and longing were in me. I was on the verge of recalling some monstrous secret of existence. My insides were pulled about with sadness. There was something unpleasant about it, as if these feelings belonged to someone else entirely and I was merely a vessel for them.

  But it was impossible. I had walked on that spot beneath the cedar tree not ten minutes since. The turf was unbroken then. And yet there it lay below, before my very eyes. I caught the scent, or thought I did, of dark earth in the morning air … I bent and peered through the imperfections in the old glass. I thought I could perceive some mist there, as though it had been closely breathed upon. I thought: I am standing where she stood; thus she must have watched me. It was strongly borne upon my recollection in that moment that there were no servants in the house.

  A feeling of great cold descended upon me and I felt that the window receded, that I was being drawn back, far away from the room, from the light, and from the green world outside. I was in a tunnel, whose destination was somewhere cold, and black and deep. I gasped, and staggered, and fell. I wriggled blindly as a worm towards the door but was defeated and lay gutted upon the dusty boards.

  Slowly orientation returned. The physical symptoms dissipated. The walls righted themselves. I raised myself up but regretted it; my insides were being stirred with a pudding spoon. I was obliged to sit on the unmade bed to recover. Consumed by a great thirst, I drank water from the ewer, holding it as weakly as a kitten. I write this reclining against the pillows like any sickroom patient. These attacks have exhausting, tintinnabulous propensities; the pounding in my head is as of a gong.

  When I had recovered sufficiently I went to find Alonso. The windows by the front door were open, letting in sweet air, but also a draft. I shut them. I looked also towards the rise, where sat the tree, spreading its great limbs over the hill. The turf was smooth, unmarked. No grave, of course.

  I found Alonso still at the board; or rather a newspaper rustled in his place at table, the sides of which were grasped by his long hands. A spiral of cigarillo smoke rose from behind the print. Cold dishes sat on the soiled cloth.

  I sat, and the paper was lowered. His aspect does not improve, viewed under the morning light. We observed one another in turn, he kindly, and with his head on one side, and I through the fingers of one hand, in which rested the bulbous melon I must currently term my head. I do not doubt that I presented as sorry a spectacle as he.

  ‘You cannot complain that the swallows accept your invitation,’ I said, ‘if you leave your windows wide open.’

  ‘I did not leave them open,’ he said. He peered closer at me. ‘You have the black dog on you, I perceive.’ His use of our old name for the affliction was almost too much to bear; many were the times he sat by me in darkened rooms, as I lay insensible. ‘I have chlorodyne in the house,’ he said.

  ‘No doubt. It will not surprise you that I do not touch opiates. How can I say this to you?’ I raised my eyes to his. ‘I am deeply sorry for all that passed between us, then. How can you forgive? How?’

  ‘Ah, you mean Manning’s cure,’ he said.

  ‘How can you smile? How?’

  ‘Ah, tontería,’ he said. ‘We took our chances. Sólo el amor …’

  Alonso is rarely Spanish. Mine is but a smattering, so I may have this wrong. But I believe he said: It was only love.

  In the days when our friendship was in its infancy, and we were students, consumed with idealism and ideas, Alonso and I were bound together by our fascination with all things sanguinary. With the benefit of mature reflection I must concede that our preoccupation amounted almost to infatuation.

  We kept vials and pipettes of blood, and made experiments with it in the cold nights. We infected it with bacteria (we were great admirers of Pasteur, who was then only beginning to make his mark) and observed the differing effects of infection on a host, usually a cat, which after a period of observation we must then dispose of.

  We wished to analyse blood, and to study it, to penetrate its secrets in the most scientific fashion; but our feeling for the stuff had a reverence in it too that bordered on the mystical. Alonso claimed he could determine the blood of a woman of the rookeries of St Giles from a Lord’s merely by working a splash of it between his fingers, and from its scent (I tested him thoroughly, using cat’s blood, chicken’s blood and that from the cadaver of a young boy found in the vicinity of Seven Dials with his arm missing. Alonso was wrong on every count, but this did not deter us one whit).

  We would be the first to read the properties of blood, and divine its influence on character. We were not acolytes of Blundell; we knew why his transfusions failed. He sought to replace the blood as though he were refilling a lamp. He did not treat it as part of the essence of the creature, which we knew it was.

  On that hot May morning when Alonso left the house in Brook Street for the last time and turned his back on medicine, I rose and went to that room at the back, which overlooked the mews.

  I lit an oil lamp and surveyed our domain. The curtains here were never parted to admit daylight. This room had been at one time, years ago, a breakfast parlour; people of that bygone age had urgent and puzzling need for an entire room to enclose each action – withdrawing and drinking and eating and writing and talking all required a separate place to do it in.

  The cornices were ornate and the walls were hung with silk the colour of robins’ eggs, shot with stripes of gold, now sadly faded by the years. There were patches of darker fabric where the glasses and pictures had been removed in some time past. Ladies sat there once, I conjecture. All this was as familiar as my own reflection but I looked on it with a strange eye.

  In the dim light the tables and racks sat quiet like a multitude awaiting my address. The saloon had been witness to our business for some time; the walls were stained black here and there; in the early stages we were unhandy at subduing live beasts and we had not such neat methods of sterile injections then as Limousin’s ampoule. There was a stench about the place. A female would not sit there now; in her proper wits she would rather turn at the door and run.

  I gathered everything. There were fifty odd specimens in an eccentric collection of containers. The snake blood I kept in an old-fashioned snuffbox; not properly sealed, it had coagulated and a large part of the unpleasant odour that filled the room could be attributed to it. There was blood from celebrated murderers, from live vivisection, from exotic beasts, from my own arm and his; all meticulously labelled in my writing, since Alonso’s is indecipherable.

  The vials were in some disarray; our examination had recently been subject to reverses. It would have been no great matter. In medicine there are a thousand little defeats and deaths a day, and few triumphs to leaven them. One accustoms oneself to this. But then there came the severing of our friendship.

  I threw our specimens into the river. The blood ran in; some eagerly, some with viscous reluctance. I was left with an assemblage of gory containers. The scene bore the appearance of a massacre in Mr Swift’s Lilliput. As I took up the stained vials and tubes I saw in them my failure; we had sought meaning, but the blood had resisted us. It was not a live thing but dark, and cloying.

  Though I prepared the journals of those early forays into blood and bacteria for publication – they were not contemptible, as research – I always refrained, dogged by a persistent hope that the matter was not done with; that we may yet bring that Work back to life
and make our names. But we never returned to one another, or to that subject which consumed so many waking hours of our youth, until now.

  The cellar looked inoffensive on this new day, and in the light of our renewed amity. All was neat, and orderly, and gleaming. I felt that excitement rise in me which precedes a day’s hard work, of judgement and interpretation, of recording and analysis, of straining the boundaries of our knowledge.

  When I looked to Alonso, I saw the same eagerness on his face. It is so when we work side by side – we attune ourselves to one another’s thoughts and moods. He grasped my arm, our pulses quickened.

  ‘We can control airflow, and temperature, to a fraction of a degree. If I had built this above we could not do this. And if the temperature at which these are stored, and at which we work is constant – why, then the results of our labours cannot be imputed to error, or to exterior forces, such as degradation. For if the environment remains a constant, the effect of exposure and temperature on the work will be calculable.’

  There are six cages, each containing two rabbits, and two tanks containing each four frogs. There are blood samples, too, which have been taken from their hosts, and contained in flasks. They are kept in a glass cabinet, with a lock and a key, which hangs around the neck of my friend. No snuffboxes here! They stand in a rank of eight, and as we work Alonso watches them anxiously, and touches them gently, holding the dark ruby liquid to the light.

  There is a stout wooden chest, bound with iron, the key to which is thick and has many wards, and which joins the first around Alonso’s neck. This chest contains flasks also, although we do not hold them up to the light and admire their colour.

  When Alonso had shown me all, I gave him the appreciation due to such an undertaking.

  ‘It is a labour which cannot fail to impress,’ I remarked. ‘All that remains to be shown me is our purpose.’

  He straightened his thin frame and glared at me. ‘Our purpose, dearest Charles? We must drag England into the nineteenth century. On the Continent, they are readying themselves for the twentieth! Virchow, Magendie, Bernard, Pasteur, Koch, Ehrlich! – these are the great men of our time. You say that this is fine –’ he waved an arm at the stone walls – ‘but it is not! We are not in a hospital – we do not occupy a laboratory in one of the great universities. No, we are working at my private expense, in my home. The frailty of English medicine is spelt out here, where we stand, in this – this cellar. This is where English medical research has come to live!

  ‘In Germany, in France, in Austria, men of science are encouraged to push back the limits of our knowledge – they are supported by the state and by private philanthropy, in practice and in principle, by which I mean financially and ethically.

  ‘In medicine, we are a nation of amateurs. And even the most gifted of those amateurs must plough through the obstructions of an insipid morality that claims itself religion. Vivisection, and the need for cadavers provokes an outrage in the English breast only equalled by its arrogance. But the outrage must be faced, and overcome. We will lose everywhere; in medicine, in battle, in governance of the empire itself, if we do not place the progress of science highest among our aims.’

  I regarded him with a little censure. It is an example of the licence I allow Alonso that I do not take to heart his diatribes against God, and the long disquisitions against that good and patient institution, the Church of England. It was not this which gave me pause. It is a strange thing – but I have not been accustomed to regard Alonso as English. I felt a little affront, which I tried to put down, for he has the right of birth, and of half his parentage, does he not? And yet.

  ‘We can attempt something here, certainly,’ I said. ‘But it is not true that there are no coming men among us. That new Fellow of the Royal Society, I cannot recall his name …’

  ‘The Royal Society is a gentleman’s club, a watering hole for old quacks.’

  ‘Linton? No, for it was more unfriendly to the tongue, Listen?’

  As we spoke Alonso reached into a dark cage, and produced a rabbit, hanging by its scruff.

  ‘This is Actaeon,’ he said. ‘He is the patriarch of this little family. Do you recall, Charles?’

  ‘The predisposition of certain families,’ I said. ‘Immunity, which travels in the blood.’

  With a syringe Alonso took blood from Actaeon, who scuffled his white and brown feet but appeared otherwise resigned. He made a careful screen, added a drop of amber stain from a dropper. I watched the pale long fingers, his lowered gaze. Intent, carven face. It seemed in that moment that all was right with the world again. The years fell away and everything was in its proper channel.

  Alonso said, ‘Six of these fellows are your run-of-the-mill rabbits. The others, however … Look.’ He placed the slide under the haemocytometer, and motioned me forward.

  I could not credit it. ‘Is it so with all six?’

  Alonso’s look was fatigued and wry both. ‘It was a great deal of trouble to find them,’ he said. ‘That six are of the same family, all immune to the pasteurella multocida.’

  ‘We began it …’ I said. Our study all those years ago. Alonso was a man possessed. But then we parted ways, and he abandoned science. And it was over, or so I thought.

  ‘We began it,’ Alonso said, ‘and we will finish it, now. Because we are armed with new knowledge. You have read Ehrlich? He has given us the key, in that little word, at the end of his treatise … the antikörper …’

  I squinted for a moment. German is such an effort. ‘The antibody.’

  ‘The antibody. By examination of both infected and immune rabbits I believe we can isolate the antibodies that provide the protection from pasteurella multocida. We must duplicate that antibody, synthesise it and introduce it to other rabbits which lack immunity.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We wait. Rabbits will do what they do and breed. The next generation will prove it. If we are correct, if we have worked the trick, their descendants will be born with immunity to pasteurella multocida.’

  ‘And if it can be done with pasteurella multocida,’ I said, ‘why not with cholera? Why not with syphilis?’ We spoke quickly now, words running into each other.

  ‘Yes, Charles, yes! The transfer of immunity! Inoculations are one thing …’

  ‘… but to inoculate a family, for generations to come? Radical – revolutionary!’ I felt a little faint. ‘And the implications are … Alonso, if it is possible to engineer congenital immunity …’

  ‘It follows that it is possible to prevent congenital disease being passed down in families. Huntington’s disease, cancers, all hereditary afflictions.’

  ‘It is the first step towards eradicating disease altogether.’

  ‘Not in our lifetime. But yes, it is the first step.’

  ‘The transfer of hereditary immunity!’ I took him by the lapels and shook him. ‘Can it be done?’

  He grinned, and I glimpsed for a moment the young Alonso. ‘I do not know!’ he said. ‘Shall we see, Charles? Shall we make our names, after all?’ I laughed immoderately as he slapped my back.

  I am not blind to the connection, here, between Alonso’s situation and this line of scientific enquiry. He is dying of a disease passed down through the Villarca line. Perhaps there is something to be done … Foolish, no, cruel to speak of it at this juncture. The outcome is so uncertain. But I cannot deny that I have thought it. And I know it is in his mind, too. Strange that hope can so resemble pain.

  I will add one observation of this afternoon, which relates to the nature of my specialty. Microscopy is considered by most to be tedious work; it is a poor relation in the medical profession. The work will consist of examination of the blood and tissue of both groups of rabbits, the immune and the diseased; of counting the blood cells, red and white, one by one, and keeping scrupulous records. And it will take months to complete – it is plain as the nose on my face that Alonso is in need of assistance, and I shall arrange to return to him next month, for a longer
visit.

  That is all so. Microscopy is the purest of the scientific disciplines, because it deals in examination, only.

  None of these concerns were in my mind when I looked into that lens. How can I describe what I saw through the haemocytometer? It is a privilege, given to few, to glimpse the components of life itself. I am a God-fearing man, and I will not be ashamed to say that I feel as close to Him when I look through a microscope as I do in the church.

  ‘If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?’

  John, 3:12

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  5 OCTOBER

  It strikes me on rereading yesterday’s entry that I have quite put aside and forgotten the fear engendered in me by the mysterious face at my window, the crude grave beneath the cedar tree. I am forced to doubt that these phenomena occurred anywhere but in my own mind.

  I must ascribe more of my maunderings to the account of the neuralgia than I had thought (reading them, I am almost ashamed to own them, save that they may serve as a salutary account of the imaginative capacities of an excitable mind). It is of particular clinical interest, reading back over my tale, to note how the pain warps perception: my observations are careful, astute, ordered – and completely erroneous.

  Arriving at the untenanted house, in the dark, after the fatigues of the journey, I was in a perfect neurotic, suggestive state: exemplar, the ‘rat’ seen in my chamber. One could almost make a case for self-mesmerism. I had found it most chilling! – I could laugh aloud. Oh, no doubt, I saw everything through a veil of doubt and suspicion! And so in the morning, the pain reflects my sensibility as through a prism, diffusing it, and concentrating it – my mind reverts to the idée fixe of something in my room, choosing in its obsession to place the face I conjure at my own window. Well, this is quite an experience for a humble practitioner of medicine! A foray into the world of intrigue and apparitions, more usually to be found only between the pages of the popular novel! But I am content to depart now from the realm of the Gothick, and return to the bright landscape of science.