Rawblood Page 9

  I whisper, ‘How, Papa? How did you cheat her?’

  ‘I have paid a certain price.’ His trembling hand wanders to the pouch at his waist.

  ‘I could—’

  ‘No. Do you hear? It is like hell itself. I will not have you go near it.’

  ‘I could leave,’ I say. The road winds away over the moor, lovely in the late afternoon.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That is another choice. Leave Rawblood, leave Dartmoor. I have tried it, others have tried it. It does not go well, in the end. We may leave for months, even years at a time. But we sicken, in the end. Only returning to Rawblood heals us. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.’ He smiles. It’s thin. There’s none of him in it.

  Cold, cold.

  A lone white cloud scuds across the sky. The wind carries the rustle of leaves. The rusty scent of bracken. Far off, the sound of the cold brown Dart, running over stone. The moor spills out beneath us in green and grey and brown. The boulders pierce the earth. The air is sunlit. A swallow cuts across the sky.

  My father’s hand rests gently on my head. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You are a Villarca indeed. For this is also love. What we feel for this place, for Rawblood. Perhaps it will be enough.’ I nod. Surely no person could ever rouse in me this wild exultation. Could match the grandeur of the land.

  ‘What does she want?’ I say. ‘From us.’

  ‘It is so strange,’ he says. He’s thoughtful of a sudden, removed. It is at moments like this that I remember that my father was a doctor, once. ‘So inconstant, her wishes … they are crude like the desires of a child. She wants us close – she wants us here. But she does not like us to grow, to live. It is as if she would have Rawblood and all of us in it suspended for ever, unchanging … under glass, in a museum case. What for? Do we amuse her? Sometimes I have thought, over the years, that we are merely playthings of a kind. But she kills her toys, in the end.’ His face is worn and folded. Something has been leached from him. The sun is in the evening corner of the sky; the yellow light is fading on the gravestones.

  I understand. As I leave him, he’s taking the pouch from his pocket. I don’t look back, of course. I don’t watch.

  On the bank by the road, Nell and Soldier quarrel, snaking their heads around each other, nipping little bits of hide between yellow teeth. I stare at the mound that is my mother, the florid hump beside her, which is – my uncle? For a moment I see them, my family, laid out in time; a series of interconnecting rock pools, glassy under the sun. The sea washing in and out of us … I should be afraid. I am afraid.

  Papa’s hand on my shoulder is shocking.

  ‘Iris,’ he says. ‘I am not a pantomime villain. I do not wish to send young Gilmore away. Only tell me: can I trust you to act in your own best interests, and in his? It is not safe to be his friend, Iris, no matter what you think. For either of you.’

  All those hours spent staring at the ceiling, coughing into the basin, head hot on the pillow, all that time spent thinking of what to say to Tom. No need. Diseases or ghosts, it comes to the same thing in the end.

  Loneliness is not what people think it is. It is not a song. It’s a little bitter thing you keep close, like an egg under a hen. What happens when the shell cracks? What comes forth?

  The breeze has picked up. Before I can stop it I shiver. Papa sees.

  ‘It’s time to leave her,’ he says. In the sunlit corner of the churchyard my mother’s grave is a riot of purple, red, white.

  ‘I’ll stay.’ I don’t want walls around me yet.

  ‘You’re not a week out of bed,’ he says kindly, ‘and the air has a bite to it.’ I bow my head to his will.

  ‘If we trust to one another,’ Papa says, ‘there can be far greater freedoms. I do not wish to keep you from the world, you know, or keep the world from Rawblood. By the by, why a nurse?’

  ‘When I saw Mr Gilmore, and when I was so ill myself, it seemed to me that there was something worthy in healing people – it is so terrible, illness …’ My words trail off.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That is understood. I meant – why a nurse? A doctor, surely.’

  ‘That,’ I say, ‘is what I want above all things. I had not thought—’

  ‘Private study. And afterwards perhaps Paris? The Sorbonne awards degrees to women. Edinburgh? I will write. But it will not be possible if you cannot do as I say, if you cannot keep people at a remove, if you cannot be trusted to protect both yourself and them …’

  Keep him from me, then. Snuff out the light. ‘You can trust me, Papa. I will do as you say.’ Perhaps Papa is right: I am beginning to grow up.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, weary. ‘Thank you. You can be happy, Iris – and you can be significant.’ When will we cease to bargain with each other, my father and I? Over the wall, Soldier puffs a longing breath at Papa. He knows which one of us carries the sugar.

  My father says, ‘I am sorry for my faults, of which there are many. As a father, as a man. But I will not fail you in this.’ He makes to hold me, tentative, wary of rebuff. He makes a little oof as I throw my arms around him. I hold tight. The world is strange. One doesn’t always understand. But there’s always this.

  ‘Tell me about our family,’ I say. ‘Everything, now.’

  We ride slowly with the sun at our backs.

  WINTER

  He lies on the mahogany table. A ghostly him hovers under, reflected in the shining polished wood. I’d thought he’d be white but he’s grey and yellowed at the edges.

  Martin gazes at the skeleton. ‘Tall,’ he says to himself, then rouses. ‘Iris, do you think you can?’ Martin Goodman is all warm colours. Skin like baked bread.

  I am intent. The bones lie in beautiful order, each leading naturally to the next. His skull a calcified apple. ‘Cranium,’ I say. ‘Mandible. Cervical vertebrae. Sternum …’ I touch each yellowed bone. My fingertip sings.

  This is my secret: when I touch the skeleton I become part of the dim air of the dining room, the shining mahogany, Martin’s tabby-cat hair, which hangs in a brilliantined strand over his warm forehead. I move through the granite walls of Rawblood like water. I reach out across the dark grey sky, the moor, the hills above, where snow is beginning to fall.

  ‘Fine,’ Martin says. ‘Good. Now do it again.’ He reaches out with two hands and sweeps the bones into a pile. It’s shocking, terrible. It was a person, and now suddenly it’s a jumble of bone. ‘Lay him out as he should be.’

  I show him the house before dinner. He peers into the galleried heights of the hall. He stares at the shining banister which snakes up and away to the upper floors. He stares at the vast marble mantle which flows down like lava around the cavernous hearth. Horses and vines and cherubs and men with horns dive and surface in the white fall of stone.

  ‘It’s from Italy,’ I say. ‘My grandpapa brought it. Carrara.’

  He starts. ‘Do you go there often?’ He’s polite.

  ‘Papa will take me when I’m older,’ I say. A short visit. I cannot be absent, long, from Rawblood.

  I show him the red parlour, shining and dark panelled and hung with velvet the colour of fresh blood. I see the room for a moment as he sees it. Sombre and rich and malevolent. It’s an unpleasant feeling, like putting on someone else’s still-warm shoes.

  ‘No pictures,’ he says.

  ‘There are.’ I point forcefully to the heavy oils that line the room. Herons, broken buildings, wild swamps. Men leading soft-coloured cows through gates.

  ‘Yes … Of people, I mean. Where are the pictures of your family? The Villarcas.’

  ‘I think they would remind Papa of Mama,’ I say. ‘It would be too sad.’ I am fairly proud of this prim answer. In truth I think Papa is afraid to be surrounded by so many, many dead.

  Martin touches his rare beef gently with the tip of his knife. He jumps when my father speaks to him, his sweet expression alert. My father tells him he’s a promising man. He nods thirty or forty times.

  The snow is heavier and heavier,
falling in silence onto the steps, onto Martin as he climbs into his trap, drifting on the velvet-lined skeleton box in the back. ‘Golly,’ he says and turns up his collar. White stars settle on his eyelashes, his cheeks, his hat. He lingers.

  I see his thoughts in his face. Why should he be turned out to drive for two hours in the snowy dusk when there is a great house, filled with empty rooms, to hand?

  ‘Safe travels, Goodman,’ my father says.

  He raises an ungloved hand, warm skin flushed against the white land. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘Iris, I will see you next week if –’ he puts out a hand and heavy flakes fall on it – ‘if this allows it!’

  I wave.

  ‘He doesn’t like us,’ I say to Papa, when we’re back before the fire in the red parlour. I mean that he doesn’t like Rawblood. ‘And he smells of lemons.’

  Firelight, the crack of the grate. We sit here most evenings. A gentle ritual. I look forward to this time most. The warm end of every day, Papa’s vast dark form at his desk, or in the armchair opposite mine. Half-moon spectacles on the tip of his nose, his black and white badger hair ruffled, crazy against the firelight.

  ‘He thinks we are immoral,’ my father says. ‘Or – no. He thinks I am immoral, and that I am raising you in the image of my turpitude.’

  I have only very recently discovered that my father is amusing. The light in the depths of his deep mahogany eyes. The slight twist of the mouth. I hadn’t known. He makes me laugh.

  We have achieved a new normality these last few months, which brooks no mention of white women or of death. We look forward, now.

  We do speak of disease, and of medicine most evenings. The words run like water, beautiful. Olecranal. Coronal. Iliac. Parietal, occipital. I had not dared imagine a future, before. I am beginning to see it.

  ‘You could teach me,’ I say to Papa. ‘We don’t need him.’

  ‘No,’ he says cheerfully. ‘I am utterly outmoded. I would not know how to begin. And it can only be a good thing – for you to be exposed to others’ opinions, to bring the world, a little, into this house. You have shown yourself most sensible, Iris, since I have told you how matters stand. So if you are sensible, it is good for you to be with people – however irksome they may be.’

  It was to be study in Paris. But next year there will probably be a war so – no. I may have to wait, Papa says. But we will contrive something. I believe it.

  ‘Such a stern young man,’ Papa says. ‘So sure. He has that glassy look – of implacable certainty, implacable morality. Does he have very firm opinions on young ladies and propriety and so on? I think he must. He reminds me very much of someone I knew once.’ A small private smile.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Oh, it was so long ago. Before you were born.’ The fire catches his eyes, lights them brown. He looks, for a moment, quite young.

  ‘Sounds like a pill,’ I say.

  ‘Goodman’s not the only one who deals in black and white. No, not at all a pill. I loved him very much.’

  ‘Pill,’ I say.

  He shouts with laughter. ‘Oh, well, a little, perhaps. Anyhow. Goodman is intelligent and a good teacher. He wishes to supplement his income, we wish you to be taught. Everyone is happy. So what do we care for his opinions?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  Martin Goodman thinks we scorn him. We do make light of him, a little. But he misunderstands. Papa would never ever permit anyone but us to sleep the night at Rawblood.

  I sit on the satin stool before the dresser looking glass, and steel myself for the ordeal. The room is dim and warm. The ivory comb drags through my mass of hair. The sensation is delicious, tortuous. Water streams from my eyes. I tug, I swear, I make sounds like a sheep. I peer at the page in the lamplight, but it’s clear. One hundred times. I throw the magazine across the room. I invent my own upbringing. Papa and I do. We neither of us know what ladies are like, really.

  In the glass something pale moves.

  I whirl about. My bed, warm and inviting. Lamplight low and golden, gleaming boards. The room is warm, familiar, empty. There is no one. But isn’t there something? A disturbance of the air, a scent, perhaps … I stare, my pulse pounds. I turn back to the glass. The mirror is tipped forward on its stand at a steep angle. Part of a young, pale face peers out, caught in the corner. My own face, which must be what I saw.

  Hair seems to take for ever, but at last it’s done. The comb clinks in the china dish. My room is quiet. Beyond the door, Rawblood settles. Kind sounds, wood, metal, speaking sleepily to one another.

  I go to the window. Through it the cold night. The roof is white, marked only with the tracks of some night bird. The window in the stable block is black. Some nights there’s a little flickering light. Sometimes the shape of a head. Faint halo of candlelight. Not tonight.

  I rest my finger gently in my jugular notch. The collarbone, the clavicle, the last bone in the body to fuse together. The final touch of adulthood. Years after everything else is finished, the clavicle will still be growing, forming, binding itself to the skeleton. Mine has only just begun. It won’t be complete for a decade or more. Perhaps not until I’m thirty. Impossibly distant. Clavicle from clavicula, meaning little key. The key to what? It takes so long to grow up.

  ‘Will you have a story, tonight?’ Papa stands in the door, a vast black shadow. I suppose other people pray before they sleep. We don’t pray at Rawblood. When I have recovered my breath I say, ‘Yes, Papa.’ I draw the curtain hastily, shut out the snowy night. I pad across the cold boards on bare feet. Hurl myself into the bed linen.

  ‘Hervor?’ he says.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Something else.’ I no longer like Hervor, and The Waking of Angantyr. I didn’t pay enough attention, when I was younger, to the end of the story.

  Papa sits by me and tells me tales of us. The Villarcas. My family.

  When he’s gone I lie, waking. The lamp burns down. As a rule, sleep comes easily these days. Wraps about me like wet silk. Not tonight. After some time I rise and drape my petticoat over the looking glass.

  Hervor becomes a queen. She has two sons, Heidrek and Hegel. Hegel is kind and good. Heidrek is murderous, jealous, cruel. Hervor is forced to banish Heidrek from her kingdom, even though she loves him. Hegel offers to go with his brother, out of love. Hervor gives Heidrek Tyrfing, the sword, to protect them both in exile. She sees herself in Heidrek and loves him, with all his flaws.

  As soon as they are out of the kingdom, Heidrek draws the sword Tyrfing and murders his brother. He crosses to a neighbouring kingdom. Heidrek is charming, and he is taken in by the kind king. Heidrek then kills the king and his infant son. He takes the kingdom from the kind king.

  But seeing that Heidrek is not bound by fellowship or loyalty, his own subjects decide that they need not be, either. They kill him in the night and take the sword. Heidrek dies alone and unloved, a murderer of his own family.

  Hervor was brave, but wrong. She shouldn’t have gone into the underworld and woken her father. She should have listened when he told her not to take Tyrfing. She should have left well enough alone.

  Charles Danforth

  7 OCTOBER 1881

  We are a true bachelor establishment at Rawblood. As I have said, aside from Shakes there are no servants. I assume they could not stomach Alonso’s pursuits. It explains his strong feeling regarding the common attitudes towards experimental medicine. His servants have left him and no one in the village will come to make up the lack. The dinner that was served to me the first night was the result of unusual effort, which with two of us to buttle, valet and cook for, Shakes cannot reproduce. Or so I take his comments to me to mean. We dine off an eccentric array of cheeses, jellies, and pigs’ faces, whatever thing Shakes can salvage from the diminished larder, augmented by river fish and small moor rabbits, full of buckshot. This last I find I cannot touch. I have lost my taste for rabbit.

  Our beds are roughly made – last night my foot was rudely greeted by the sharp prongs of my moustache
comb, which had tucked itself into a fold in a sheet – and our linen unlaundered. Piles of unwashed crockery tower in the kitchen, and Alonso has acquired a terrier, called Punch, who is to dispatch the insalubrious invaders who have seen fit to take advantage of the state of martial law that now prevails there.

  The house shows the effects of neglect – dust lies thick in the more unfrequented rooms, and yesterday I found a spider’s web spun across a doorway, shining in the sun. I had not the heart to remove it. It seemed to me a simple and fine product of the Hand of the Creator. There is divinity in a spider’s web. My reverence for it was in no way decreased when I entered that room unthinkingly in the dusk, and found it clinging to my face like tiny hands.

  No doubt it would be tiresome to continue in this way for long. But I cannot deny the exhilaration of it. We live unhindered, unchecked and unobserved. I take pleasure in breakfasting, standing, on jelly eaten from the pot with a spoon, talking all the while with Alonso of what interests us most, without being obliged to think of the shudders of the maidservant, or a housekeeper who bustles in and out with sugar bowls.

  But I digress. I visited the village yesterday, to purchase cabbages. Our charges must be fed; they consume a great deal of vegetable matter and have put paid long since to the kitchen garden at Rawblood. I was much surprised by a meeting I had there.

  Dartmeet lies on both sides of the river, as its name suggests. The village is linked by two great bridges, formed by slabs of stone laid across the river – Dartmoor’s famous ‘clapper’ bridges. The people bustle back and forth across them, or shoot across the water in skiffs, and the river is often full of children, swimming like fishes and shouting, and doing violence upon one another as children are wont to do, under the auspices of play.

  There being no tin in this part of the moor, the villagers are peat diggers, and cattle drovers, and fishermen; they go on much as they have done for generations past, taking their living from the land, and making excellent cider. Yes, altogether the place has a pleasant aspect, full of bustle and neatly thatched roofs, of plump babies and impertinent children, and the rhythms of its own busy industries. Dartmeet inspires yearning in me. I would that I had been born here, not in That Place.