The background is dark, suggesting a long, bleak landscape, but there is a light in the sky, as if behind the hill, the sun was setting or a great fire burned. A cave draws the eye over her left shoulder, with a strange altar visible within and heathenish markings along its walls, which are obscured by blackening and charring. If there was a fire, the viewer knows that it happened long ago. In the foreground is the central figure, the subject of the portrait.
She is a woman entering the middle years, and no attempt has been made to hide the marks those years have placed on her. The skin is white and bears the pallor of invalidism. And yet there is a determination and vitality about her; she sits as if she had paused for one moment only in the frame, to indulge the painter. The hair is dressed in the absurd, flamboyant style of forty years ago, but it has luster and movement; a curl that lies on her shoulder looks as if it might be shaken any minute by a stray breeze. The eyes are blue and large and stare from the frame. A hand is raised, as if in admonition. A ring gleams there, red and white. It is the ring that now sits on Alonso’s little finger.
How odd that a series of marks on a canvas can, seen at a distance, convey so much character and feeling! I think her a fine figure, but I would not want her for my wife: she does not look like a biddable woman. I said so, and Alonso was amused.
I left him, as I do each night, sitting before the fire with a glass by him. I wonder, when does he take his rest? For he seems to be abroad at all times—I have seen him strolling on the lawn under the stars at ungodly hours; I have seen him coming out of the dawn, from the moor, when I am only yawning and rubbing the dust from my eye.
He renewed his offer of laudanum to aid my rest, but my day of exercise had tired me sufficiently for sleep of the soundest kind. I assured him somewhat testily that I would do well enough without it and was presently gratified by drifting comfortably into slumber, thinking of Mary Villarca’s pale skin.
My sleep was troubled, a little: I dreamt that Alonso leaned over me. He cradled my head and poured some liquid into my mouth—when I protested, he hushed me, fed me from the cup, and gazed on into the distance. I was swept into dark folds of cloth like swaddling and could not speak. Presently, his form receded through arches of blue light, thrown sharp and thin against the black night, and I saw, weeping, that he was gone into the cathedral without me. I was left outside, surrounded by a high and sonorous song, like the hum of tender bees.
In haste, late at night
There is someone here. They are behind the door. I hear them. Someone watches my sleep.
8 October
Nothing pleases me today. I have become a drunkard. I have no recollection, for instance, of that crazily scrawled line—I will not call it an entry—of last night. Who did I believe watched me? Anyhow, my mood is not aided by the communication received today via post.
The letter is short but to the point. In broad terms, it is laid out that my sister, Meg, is ungovernable and that Mr. Bantry will not keep her.
I do not understand women. How is it not borne upon this girl, my sister, that it is my sole support and the Christian spirit in these people, the Bantrys, that prevents her being indigent and thrust upon the world with nothing but what she stands up in? Mrs. Bantry suggests that I come to visit, that perhaps my influence will sway her. I am puzzled how to answer her. It is hard, she says, that the girl has no mother and no father. Her mind lacks firmness as a result. She is led easily astray. There are hints of moral turpitude. She would benefit from the guidance of a brother. I will never return to That Place save perhaps in my coffin, and I hope to avoid it even in that circumstance. Those terrible hills. Bury me anywhere, I say, but there.
My father hanged himself before Meg was born. My mother died as she came into the world—an unlucky, redheaded infant. I have said that I would keep her—and I do. I send money that she may live on eggs and cream and not trouble me. Yet trouble me she does.
In times past, Meg would write. She must have been small then. (How did she find the money for a frank? Did she steal it? I am in despair.) It was hard to know how to answer those childish scrawls. They were disturbing, to say the least. There was always some ludicrous grievance, some allegation of mistreatment, some fantasy of persecution… Hysterical, deserving no reply, and I have enough to do, God knows. At some juncture in the passing of the years, her letters stopped. Sadly, there seems to be no improvement in her conduct.
What can be done? Am I to bring Meg to share the hospitality of Mrs. Healey? Predisposed as she seems to be to vice, am I to leave her to her own devices, with the city of London at her feet? What will she do while I work? Perhaps darn my linen or polish my boots! No, I think not.
These are not matters to be addressed in a letter to a farmer and his wife. I need only think of them bringing the letter down to the curate to be read and dictating their reply to his curious ears… I think Meg must be married. It is much the best thing. I must put it aside for now. The money has been sent this month. Mrs. Bantry will not turn the girl out of doors.
I have put so many miles and years between myself and That Place. I wish it would not dog my footsteps.
“He that, being often reproved, hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.”
—PROVERBS 29:1
9 October
The fearful noise went on without respite—crack, crack! Part held by the dream, and with limbs too new to serve me, I shuddered under the sounds, which, with maddening slowness, became intelligible: I was awake and in Rawblood, and there was some person or other below, at the front door.
Some dreams act upon a man like excessive exercise: his body and his mind are cudgeled about by them, and he awakes to the day more exhausted than when he lay himself down. Such was my state.
So I took too long to descend. I paused for the things that one must do in the morning. I should not have. Sometime during my mindless ablutions, the incessant beating stopped—I was glad of it.
I was shuffling my way down the stairs when a sound rent the air like a knife. The howling of a broken-legged horse? The shriek of a steam engine? I could not say. My body was as weak as an Italian noodle.
In the dim hall, the front door was a flaming arch of daylight—against it stood two black figures. They wrestled strangely, swaying to and fro in a dance. One of them was a curious shape, misshapen like a snake that has eaten. This rotund figure shrieked, and the other raised its arms against the noise in defense or in supplication. I ran toward the light.
In his arms, Henry Gilmore bore a child, whose pale face was dominated by black, dilated eyes. The face was swollen, and the tongue rolled crazily from the lips. It took me some time to recognize the plump Robert; he now bore witness to some scene invisible to us and cried out at it. The source of that piercing note became apparent, emerging unreal from the small mouth. Alonso leaned against the jamb, his arms held stiff before him, warding himself from the small bundle.
Mr. Gilmore wept, his fine countenance outraged not by grief, but by anger. He thrust his burden at Alonso, who flinched and flung his arms before him once more in a violent, dumb show.
I grasped Mr. Gilmore by the shoulder and forced myself upon his notice. “Is there a belladonna plant on your grounds?”
He could not answer me but made shapes with his mouth. I took the child from him, a great, soft weight. Gilmore released his grasp, unwilling. As I turned to enter the house, Alonso barred my way.
“It may not come in.”
“You cannot be in earnest.”
He said, like a man in a dream, “I am.”
As I made to pass him, he thrust me back with a slow and lazy motion. It took an age to fall. I met the gravel drive, holding the child protected as best I could before me. My back and arms bore the blow. I was knocked breathless.
“Belladonna?” asked Henry Gilmore, suddenly roused to life. “It grows in the kitchen gard
en.”
“Very well,” I said to Alonso from where I lay on the drive. “He may die, as you know, without treatment. Do you still say me no?”
“I do.” Alonso went inside then, and to my disbelief, I saw the front door close; I heard the rattle of the bolts shot home. I lay in the sunshine, with the poisoned child in my arms. The world had become a strange place. Henry Gilmore took him from me as I got to my feet, and he wept again—the child wept also. There was nothing to do but what I did next.
“Lay him down on the bank, upon his side,” I said. “Do not let him move, or bite his tongue, or swallow it. Put your fingers in his mouth—so—but mind you do not prevent the passage of air. And have a care…” Even as I said this, he winced, for the child had bitten his hand. I showed him how to depress the tongue, and he did as I bid him, palely.
I left them and went around to the rear of the house. The dining parlor panes yielded easily enough to a stout piece of Dartmoor granite; fortunately, they were not latticed but had been replaced in some time past with a large bay window.
The house was quiet. I listened for any sign of opposition, but hearing nothing, went to the stairs and climbed. I did not trouble with stealth. When I reached Alonso’s chamber, it was empty. I went through his possessions carefully, knowing that it would be hidden but not too well. I found it wrapped in a handkerchief with his collars (which were all dirty). There was a stench in the room that teased my remembrance. I closed my eyes for an instant, but it was gone. The bottle was of cloudy green glass. It was oily, as if with the residue of much anxious handling. It bore a vaguely evil look. I hoped it would bring deliverance.
There was my bag to be fetched, and various articles from the kitchen that I thought would be of use; I moved about the house quickly. I did not hear or see a living soul.
When I reached the child once more, he was picking up objects from the grass—invisible to us—and describing them in a high, sharp voice. I took up the green vial and administered the solution of hydrochlorate of morphia: five minims, in a teaspoon, which he did not like. I did not like it either; I could not be sure how much of the drug had been ingested, the liquid collected so around his tongue and in the pockets of his cheeks. I thought he should be got out of the light but should not be taken far in his present state, and I directed Gilmore to move him under the shade of the cedar tree, where he lay, moaning, eyes rolling to the heavens.
He wore his night shift, for he had been wandering by Rawblood this morning, although perfectly lucid. There was something terrible and moving about the plump, bare legs. Gilmore, set to find him, had ridden all night. Finding Robert and taking him up in the saddle, he prepared to make his way home to relieve an anxious household, when Robert began to speak of the rats that raced up and down his body.
Some belladonna berries were clutched still in his hand, which he could not release due to the rictus and tried to eat. This we prevented, but the pulp of their flesh stained his palms as he kneaded them to liquid over the course of the afternoon.
I made my examination. A beautiful rash began to appear, vivid and red, over the surface of his body. It mottled the skin with scarlet, covering him like a creeping vine even as I watched. The pupils were fully dilated. The pulse was approaching one hundred and twenty. The tongue was thick and distended, with froth adhering to the sides. I judged it too late to evacuate the stomach. I believe he would have been asphyxiated by the procedure.
“He wandered the moor all the night through,” said Mr. Gilmore, his demeanor calmer now. Though his face bore deep marks of anxiety, these were softened as he looked on the child. “He seemed…as always, when I found him. How can it be? How can the poison take so long?”
“It is often the case with the atropics—that they take up to eight hours to manifest themselves.” The child’s wrist was plump. I turned it about, palpating it. “I will venture a theory,” I said to Gilmore gently, “that he had a substantial supper.”
He laughed a little at that. “Robert has the keenest hunger in our family,” he said, “as you may see.” The child shook.
I laid my hand on his shoulder. “He is, what, ten years of age?” Gilmore assented, and I turned my attention to holding the child still.
“He would not allow me in, even to speak to you,” he said after some time. “The nearest doctor is in Moretonhampstead—more than an hour’s ride away! He knows it. I would not have believed that anyone could be so indifferent to the suffering of a child.”
“My friend is no longer a practicing doctor.”
“Does that mean that he may let babies die on his doorstep?”
I had no answer for him. I said Robert’s name instead, but he did not know it.
“He will desire soon, I believe, to urinate and will be unable to do so. The usual remedy is a catheter, but I doubt that I possess one of a suitable gauge. You must prepare yourself for his distress.”
Gilmore looked troubled. “Should we not make a push for Moretonhampstead?”
“I would not advise it.”
“I do not think that he will die,” Gilmore said. “Not now, for you have taken him in charge.” His face showed the pure vulnerability of hope. The loneliness of his trust descended upon my shoulders. The child began to cry again. Tears streamed from the swollen black eyes.
As the day faded, the shadows lengthened along his body and played with the lineaments of his face. Fear and fatigue will play tricks; these were strange ones. For it seemed to me then that beside us, in the dappled shade of the tree, was a grave new dug. The scent of fresh-turned earth was bitter. I chided myself. But I could not quite shake the fancy.
Just after four o’clock in the afternoon, the crisis came. Robert spoke to his absent dolly and held a lengthy conversation with it, in which the dolly was forbidden to go to the fair. The fair had many mans at it, and the lights were too bright. I agreed that this was so, and without warning, he shook in my arms, and then it was a corpse I held. I regarded him carefully. The bloated face was white and still. All I could think of was Alonso and his madness. Henry Gilmore wept noisily and pressed his fists to his eyes.
I grasped Robert’s cold, plump wrists and raised them above his head, then brought them down to his chest with a thump, just above the heart.
Gilmore cried out and clawed at me.
“Be still,” I said. “Be still or help me. Sixteen repetitions a minute. Get your watch.”
I do not think I have ever applied the Silvester method with such violence. I worked the slack arms up and down and dealt his heart such a blow at each descent that I thought at one time I heard a rib crack. It mattered not.
At length, there was a great shuddering; the child’s breath whistled in with the sound of a squeaky door. The bruised eyes opened, and he vomited.
“That is well,” I said. “That is very well.” I think Henry Gilmore wept again, but I sank into peace and thick exhaustion. Robert and I regarded one another. His gaze still held the light of some place beyond the grave.
I went with them back to the farm. Mr. Gilmore put us all three up on Sadie—there are no more riding horses at Rawblood. We rode in the dark with the sleeping child between us. Sadie knew the way, which was as well. Henry Gilmore could not see through his relief and his weeping.
Into his shoulder, I said, “Do not tell them that Alonso would not help. I swear to you that there is nothing that he could have done and that Robert was as well cared for under that tree as he would have been indoors. I swear it. If you have any thought for me, who kept him here—do not tell them.”
He said nothing—not to me then, nor to his family later.
In the candlelight, the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Gilmore were ghostly. I spoke my doctor’s piece. They wept and laughed and thanked me. I cannot remember my words; theirs, I could not hear. There was a mist on me.
At the end of my duty, I walked out onto the moor again, into a nig
ht like coal. I hoped that I would be lost, but with the indifference of fate, I saw the hills I knew within an hour and Rawblood below, with every window glowing in its familiar pattern. I wondered briefly at the expense of light, but the thought and the answer exhausted me both. The house was lit to guide me home.
I found Alonso in the parlor, where the night air whistled in through the broken window. With eyes half closed, he gestured to the table where were set the glasses, and the port, and the gin, and the cider. There sat there also a profusion of those little green bottles.
If I had been in any doubt as to whether Alonso was still addicted to laudanum, the matter is clear now. It is a subject we do not broach, imbued as it is with so much past pain and so much intimacy. But I confess I had hoped he had thrown it off, these twenty years. It would seem he has done the opposite.
I sat beside him in the seat that was pulled up close to him and made ready for me. Alonso’s head hung low on his chest.
“I do not believe I need even frame the question, Alonso, that is in my mind. Why?”
“It is bad,” he murmured to his waistcoat, “to have others in the house.”
“This is an obsession with you,” I said. “Gossip, yes, should be discouraged. But to deny shelter to a dying child?”
“You do not understand the dangers, Charles.”
“Explain them.”
Alonso reached a hand toward me. He raised his ravaged face to mine. “I had thought you had been caught in the mist,” he said. “Oh, Charles, I was afraid you had been caught in it.”
“Well, I have not,” I replied. “I am here.” There was no sense to be had from him that night. I took him to me.
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