The Girl from Rawblood Read online

  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 toward 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 the 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 then had to dispose of.

  We wished to analyze 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.

  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 each other or to that subject that 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, orderly, and gleaming. I felt that excitement rise in me that precedes a day’s hard work, of judgment 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 each other’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 labors 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 four frogs each. 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 the key hangs around my friend’s neck. 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 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 color.

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

  “It is a labor that 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 equaled 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 license 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 that 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.

&nbs
p; “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 hemacytometer 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, synthesize it, and introduce it to other rabbits that 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. Chorea, cancers, all hereditary afflictions.”

  “It is the first step toward 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 inquiry. 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 of 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 hemacytometer? 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

  [pages missing]

  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 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 Gothic and return to the bright landscape of science.

  6 October

  There were trials today of both a practical and spiritual nature. We began the process of taking specimen slides from all the mucous membranes and affected organs of the immune and of the diseased rabbits. It was long and full of suffering. We have cauterized the smaller incisions against infection, and the stink got the better of me more than once. I am all but purblind. Hours of bending and looking and bending and looking. I begin to feel like an automaton.

  “How long will they endure like that?” I asked as Alonso laid by me the section of bowel, glistening and pale.

  “It is remarkable what the living frame can withstand,” he said. He turned from me. “They will live,” he said, “long enough.”

  The rabbits’ cries were like wind whistling under a door.

  “I will sever the vocal cords,” Alonso said. His back heaved like a bellows. It was somewhat better once they were silent. Eyes shone in the depths of the cages.

  Later, we sat on the step in the evening sun and shared a cigarillo, the oak vast at our backs. A welcome breeze played lightly with our coattails. The land was spread before us like warm toast.

  “Bernard’s wife left him,” Alonso said, “on account of his forays into vivisection.”

  “Not before he spent her dowry on it,” I said. I think I was doing an impression of cheer. “And we have no wives to object. We lucky fellows.”

  He drew on the cigarillo and held the smoke within. The day was merciless on his parchment face.

  I laid my hand on his shoulder. “There is no other way,” I said. “Do not feel it too deeply. It must be living tissue.”

  Through the linen, the bones of his shoulder were sharp beneath my hand. Their proximity seemed for a moment unwholesome, as if the skin were reflected back, exposing the muscle and beneath it the gentle connection of scapula and humerus in the glenoid cavity. The white bones shifting in per
fect precision. Bile rose, and I was for some moments wholly occupied with that sensation.

  I became aware at length that Alonso was speaking.

  “I am disgusted with myself,” he said. “I cannot adhere to my principles but am swayed by the maudlin, the easy sympathy that is the layman’s privilege. It argues a want of purpose in me. If one is to undertake such things, it must be done with gravity and steadiness. Not with sensibility.”

  I thought of what lay in the chamber beneath our feet. “It is always the question,” I said. “Can we believe that we are endowed with sufficient authority to take such actions—I will not say cruelties, for that argues an intent of which I think we are both absolved—such actions that are, by their nature, the cause of egregious suffering? But the furtherance of knowledge—I cannot think it comes cheap. We are in the ghastly kitchen, I acknowledge it.

  “And I will not say to you think of the lives that will be improved, of the families who could be rid of congenital predispositions to disease. I will not say think of the good we will do in identifying particular immunities and isolating them. We do not know whether what we do will benefit any man or beast. It is the nature of medicine, of science. We proceed always through the fog of doubt, seeking the clear air that may not come.”

  Alonso sighed and rubbed his hand across his nape. His hair stood up in quills. “And once again, you prove your worth, Charles,” he said. “For naturally, you are right. No neat answers will be vouchsafed us.” He threw the cigarillo hard into a gorse bush. “Foolish to look for them.”

  I make no complaint here about the methods. I state fact only.

  IRIS

  Autumn 1913

  I’m fourteen.

  The churchyard is quiet, sunlit, the ranks of stones leprous and upright. Beech leaves litter the turning grass—red, burnt orange. The summer’s been disappointing, gray and full of inconsequential showers. I saw it through window panes running with endless rain. But today, the sky is clear, the sun bright and low in the sky.