“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. And a ghostly him below, reflected in the shining, polished wood. I’d thought he’d be white, but he’s gray 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 colors. Skin like baked bread.
I am intent. The bones lie in beautiful order, each leading naturally to the next. His skull is 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-gray 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 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 that snakes up and away to the upper floors. He stares at the vast marble mantel that 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 parlor, shining and dark paneled and hung with velvet the color of fresh blood. I see the room for a moment as he sees it. Somber 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-colored cows through gates.
“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”—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 parlor. 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 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 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. 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.
• • •
Outside my bedroom window, the roof is white, marked only with the tracks of some night bird. The window in the stable block is dark. Some nights, there’s a little flickering light. Sometimes, the shape of a head. Faint halo of candlelight. Not tonight.
I sit on the satin stool before the mirror. The ivory comb drags through my mass of hair. The sensation is delicious, tortuous. My eyes half close in the rhythm of it. Behind me, in the glass, something moves.
I whirl about. Papa stands in the doorway, a vast black shadow. “Will you have a story tonight?”
When I have recovered my breath, I say, “Yes, Papa.” I pad across the cold boards on bare feet. Hurl myself into the bed linen.
“Hervor?” he asks.
“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. I suppose ot
her people pray before they sleep. We don’t pray at Rawblood.
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. It escapes me now. 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 neighboring 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 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 toward experimental medicine. 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 mustache 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.
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 long since exhausted 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, shouting, and doing violence upon one another as children are wont to do, under the auspices of play.
After making my purchases, I tucked the parcel under my arm and took my ease along the river and was pleased with the effect of the sunlight on the brown water, where speckled trout rose, and, in a quiet corner upriver from the dwellings, was privileged to witness a kingfisher taking refreshment from a pool. The path was lined with banks of bracken and yellow gorse in which, to judge from the scuffling and chirpings that emerged, the many urgent businesses of a country hedgerow in autumn were being conducted. Butterflies crossed my path, flashes of blue so small and quick as to tease the eye. They assert their presence in a trembling, diffident fashion, as if conscious of the brevity of their existence; indeed, it is only the unseasonable warmth that has drawn them out, and when the weather turns, as it will soon do, it will put a period to them. In the distance, the moor rose in smooth, long furrows, marching on as far as the eye could see beneath a clear sky.
As I dawdled on with my eye occupied with Nature, my mind set to work independently, with no great urgency, on a problem of calculation we had happened upon that morning. So engaged was I in rehearsing arguments that must make Alonso see that accepting an ordinary ratio of red to white corpuscles—rather than counting within each screen—would save days and hours, that I did not hear the hoofbeats on the narrow path, the approach being hidden by a bend in the river. The consequence was that, as I rounded the turn, so did the horse, and I was under the animal before I knew it.
There was the suspension of attention that occurs in moments of crisis, when all that was apparent in the world was shining legs and iron and hooves and a great deal of sturdy bone and equine muscle bearing down upon me. I threw the cabbages one way and myself the other.
Raising myself from a tangle of brush and bracken and finding good quantities of both these estimable plants about my person and in my mouth, I was engaged for some little time in ridding myself of them. When at length I was at liberty to take notice of such things, I perceived that the horse—which had borne all the appearance of a demonic thing, with flared nostrils and fearful strength, as well as the dimensions and speed of a steam engine—was in fact a small brown mare, now cropping the grass contentedly. Of her two riders, one sat stiffly atop her—a small, plump child with white skin and coppery hair. I stared, and he stared too and put his thumb in his mouth to suck.
I presently became aware that the other rider stood beside me, offering consolations of a heartfelt and sympathetic nature. This person held in his arms the string bag of cabbages, which had burst open, and was saying, “Dear God, I had not supposed that anyone would have been on the path! For in Dartmeet, they go by the high road, and I thought, if there should chance to be a traveler, that perhaps they would hear Sadie coming…”
“You thought, in fact, that I should get out of your way,” I retorted, for several bruises were making themselves felt. My assailant was a man, younger than myself, fair, with large blue eyes, dressed for riding, and who clutched his hat to him tightly, with entreaty in his face.
“Not at all! I cannot be profuse enough in my apologies. I am fond of this ride, and it being narrow, almost a sheep track, it is not used by carts or horses as a general rule. I was paying insufficient care and was thinking only of my own pleasure; you are quite right, sir…”
He went on in this fashion for some time, before I tired of the whole thing and said that it was no matter and that I had best get on. But this would not do at all for the gentleman, who hastened to introduce himself as Mr. Henry Gilmore. This was his brother, Robert—here, the small red-haired child plucked his thumb from his mouth in order to give me the full benefit of his stare—and they were of Trubb’s Farm, which lay—did I know?—to the east of Princetown. I said I hoped that he would ride there at once, as sedately as he knew how, at which he laughed. Nothing in my manner or my evident desire to be rid of him was of any avail, save to convince him that he must at all costs aid me and seek to repair the damage he had done. I suppose he is one of those men who places all their consequence on being liked. I could not oblige him in this, but nor could I fight him, and as it was less exertion to go along with his cajoling, I named myself to him and told him that my destination was Rawblood.
“I will put this up on Sadie,” he said decidedly, clutching the cabbages to him. “Rob, you will hold it there, and no nonsense from you—I do not believe they have more than one or two slugs on them, so you will not mind it—and we will go along together. If,” he said, for the seventh or eighth time, “you are quite sure you are not hurt, Mr. Danforth? And are fit to walk?”
“It is Dr. Danforth. And I am not made of porcelain, I assure you.” Here, my leg gave a twinge that confirmed this statement, b
ut I elected to keep it to myself. Here followed an encomium on doctors and his assurances to me that I must be a clever fellow indeed. For he himself could not keep to his books, which was a good thing, very likely, since he was to be a farmer, and farmers would do no good with that sort of stuff in their heads.
“I will be a butler,” said Robert with a plump frown. “Not a farmer. Farming is dirty.”
“Is it so, mischief?” Henry Gilmore said and reached up to clip him about the ear.
Mr. Gilmore was an entertaining companion, I suppose, to those who care for such things. His talk was light and full of interest in the doings of the world and those in it; however, it was impossible to keep him to one subject for longer than a moment, and his talk flowed freely, with the idle brightness of a stream, over innumerable topics: the slight indisposition of the queen, and the price of corn, and the wisdom of enclosures. To know just a little about so many things—it cannot make for resolute character. I prefer a mind more sober, of a more uniform hue; Mr. Gilmore is a motley piece. But he asks for one’s thoughts in so deferential a manner—with such an ingenuous air and such a cherubic countenance!—that I was led into feeling that my opinion held the gravest weight, and it would be churlish to refuse it in a quarter where it was esteemed so highly.
I found, as we went through Dartmeet and the outlying cottages, that he sacrificed all his acquaintance on the same altar as his unfortunate sisters: he was an incurable gossip. We could not pass one homestead set on a distant hill but he would point to it and inform me that the eldest girl was enamored of the blacksmith at Bovey Tracey, and her family did not look well on it, since he was a lad of the first kind… It was all harmless enough, and there was such a lively humor and lack of malice in his utterances that it seemed impossible to quell him. So it went on, until we passed a gate hung with late, fragrant roses, and here, he slowed to a halt.
“And here,” he said, looking at the gate, “here lives Mrs. Gowan…and Miss Charlotte Gowan.” And he paused in the lane with such an expression on his face that I paused too. Finding the sudden cessation of such a copious and generous outpouring of confidence as unnerving as I had done its beginning, I asked, what of the Gowans? He shrugged. The mother… She was well enough, although…
The Girl from Rawblood Page 9
