The Girl from Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

  Shakes came to a halt ahead, and I saw that our little way had joined a larger road. The perfume reached me before I saw what it was we had sought, although these were southern blooms and not the red campion, cuckoo flower, and wild garlic of my childhood. The sickly meadowsweet clung to my nostrils; this at least I knew. My distress reached its summit. I made to turn, too late.

  Flowers, all together in sickening banks. It is only twice in every lifetime that so many are assembled. At weddings, and at death. I was young again; I walked once more toward that broken crossroads beyond the tumbled church wall. I caught once more the scent of my father’s grave and heard my mother weep.

  The blooms lay on parched earth; plucked strands of heather, and foxgloves, and briar flowers; eyebright, honeysuckle, gorse, yellow cinquefoil, and ox-eye daisies. A little stone lay at the head of the mound.

  It is with trepidation and grave conscience that the faithful man considers a roadside grave. The soul of a suicide is an abomination rightly excluded from the consecration of the churchyard.

  But this mound with its cloak of color did not rouse disgust. It bore an air of pilgrimage.

  I had forgotten Shakes. He stood like the stone beyond us, with his eyes on my face, and I perceived with horror that my efforts at concealment had been for nothing; there was no surprise in his look. But all the fine gullies and wrinkles of his visage were wrought with silver, as if a jeweler had been at work on him. The tears flowed steadily, never spilling and yet forming a mask of reproach.

  “You follow me, Dr. Danforth,” he said. “You think yourself so mighty that even this is your concern.”

  I smiled and stammered.

  He drew himself up, straighter and younger. He was tall and powerful, standing sentinel over the moor. “This is none of yours,” he said.

  “I do not know what to say,” I told him. “I am—well, I am mad, to have intruded on you so. I cannot excuse it. I wanted to feel the air and then—” I stopped. It was worse to give reasons; they were thin. I did not myself know my cause.

  “I look after him,” Shakes said. “I looked after her too.” His eyes were on the grave. “Mary Hopewell. Or she was. When I met her.” His wizened face softened; it was both grotesque and fascinating, a thousand tiny folds collapsing into one another. “I have been with them through all of it,” he said. “But you! You are nothing. You are like the leeches who fasten to the calf in the mire. You take blood to eat.”

  I thought to give the man answer, and angrily. But Shakes seemed suddenly to stand at a great distance from me. I turned and ran, making I know not what sounds, the sandy bottom of the road undulating before me, and I was fallen with a stinging blow, mouth filled with fine shale, before I realized that I too was blinded with weeping.

  I saw, in that moment, the true nature of my state. I was now very heavily under the influence of an opiate, which in all likelihood had been in the flask of brandy. Drugged.

  I thought to turn, to retrace my steps, but the path that had been so true beneath my feet turned into sedge that grasped at my ankles. I fell. When I opened my eyes, I could see the heather bells waving before my face, but I could no longer tell which was air or which the peaty earth. My tears ran upward along my face. Was it the springy turf that lay beneath me, or had I indeed dropped off the world… I was pressed against the cold, unyielding sky and could find no way to return to mortal ground.

  Death follows me here. Every place I turn, I am confronted with his silence. All my building of little walls and the strings that I use to bind together my life are for nothing; all are mown down and cut. I am collapsed like a puppet in a cheap vaudeville. I thought I was a man, but I am wooden, forgotten. I lie in a pile in a dark corner of a hideous theater. The monsters that move behind the wings are hungry. Their fetid breath reaches me like the touch of fever. There is no light, not here, save that cast by a hideous moon; it turns its blind gaze on me like a worm, searching and indifferent. Only the hungry maw awaits. When I felt it draw me in, I rejoiced.

  “Aye, let it be done with,” I cried. The jaws took my feet lovingly, and the cool throat was like a haven as I slipped into it. I smelled the breath of a thousand dead men as the beast licked up my calves. I will let you have it all, I vowed. Take this awkward parcel of flesh and let me return to the dark. The stars that wheeled overhead formed shapes, lewd and grotesque. They dimmed and flared orange, dancing a dance that I knew, though I was shamed for all my knowledge. The stench of my own frailty was too much for me to bear. I kicked, to urge the swallowing on. The mouth was a vice; it threatened to crush my shins; I yearned for that deliverance. Break and scatter this ill-assorted assemblage, I prayed…

  I sank.

  The voices were old and slow. They discussed the binding of my hands. They spoke of one’s daughter, who had said last week that the marsh mallow lay thick in this spot.

  “It is a flag,” said the other. “You pay note to it. It turns you back from this country; well it should.”

  “Arr.”

  There was a little rustling and the creak of a board. The voices tutted over me like concerned mothers. These sounds were so homely that I wept. I knew nothing after that for some time.

  When next they spoke, it was through a purple light, so beautiful I could not bear it. My hands were bound above my head, and I shivered with the cold. A skin of cold water was tipped up to my lips. I was consumed with thirst. My all was directed at lapping the water from the bladder, but when it was in my mouth, it tasted of the brackish dark and of the monsters I had seen. I understood everything, in that moment—and with a cry, I let it flow from my mouth in the coming light of dawn like a child that cannot sup yet.

  19 October

  They brought me back to Rawblood on an old door, off its hinges. Alonso tried to put hot rum in me. I would take nothing from his hands. Shakes looked at me from a corner, eyes bright. I paid them no mind but went unsteady to the cellar.

  My shoulder was dislocated with the force of the winches used to draw me from the bog. It was my right, praise be—so the pain is not too bad to write or to wring a small neck.

  The fur and blood clings to my hands, under my fingernails. I feel very like the lady in the play. It will not come off. Most were dead already. When was the last time they were tended? Those that were not dead—I broke their necks. We have all suffered enough. I think I wept as I did it. I have closed my ears to the song of mortality and refuted my vocation as a keeper of reason and fact. My hand and mind protest even as I write the words. How much better for all mankind and creation that such things never were, and that such betrayals never came to pass.

  After it was done, I stood for a time. The candle guttered. The cellar walls glistened, peculiar. The corpses looked very small in the uncertain light. I went to the last cage and touched him on his stiff, thick-furred shoulder. I do not know what I thought would transpire. Absolution? From a rabbit? “Actaeon,” I told the dead thing. “I recall it, now. That was your name.”

  Presently, standing among the hutches with the doors swinging to and fro, I became prey to a strong sensation of being watched. As I turned and turned about, I caught always something at the corner of my eye. Some gangling thing. I was caught, held as if by mortar to the ground. My feet would not obey me but kept me in place as they do in dreams. I shrieked then, and the candle shuddered, threw glimpses of unknown things against my frenzied eye; a hideous long shape…an elongated shadow that danced at my feet, following me, as shadows do, across the floor…

  I turned and ran from that charnel house. How could I have thought it a place dedicated to knowledge and reason? They were rabbits only, true; that my actions were a deliverance to them, I know, so why does this act weigh so heavily upon me? Why does my conscience so protest?

  From the very first, I never judged Alonso by the standards I apply to other men: he has been for me a person apart from rules and even morals, a creature
of exotic charm, and instinct, and, I had thought, integrity. I did him grave wrong once. But I ask myself now if this was the greater one: to allow our friendship to proceed along such lines; to be restrained by undue deference to his mind and his character, so that we are brought to such a pass as this. He is gone; his scientific mind has gone… This has been a madman’s errand. I cannot credit that I was borne along by it… Such is the power of remembrance, of fondness. For a time, it may persuade the willing mind that black is, indeed, white. But I am no longer willing.

  I go now to beard the lion in his den. I do not know what will result. I will secrete the diary in a crack under the floorboards. If something happens to prevent my return, it will not be easily found.

  I waited for him in the study, in the gloaming. I did not hear him come. I looked up, and he was standing before me, a great shape against the dusk.

  “In the dark, Charles?”

  His great presence is so striking; it is easy to overlook how deep, how musical is Alonso’s voice. He lit the lamps, and their warm, homely yellow cast the illusion of cheer on the room. I watched him. Yes, I was right. He has gained flesh; he looks young now, as if his time in Italy had drained his life and Rawblood restores him… His skin has regained its old warm luster. His eyes are luminous.

  “Charles,” he said. “The rabbits.”

  “I will not let you do it any longer, Alonso.”

  “You do not like it,” he said heavily. “Nor do I. But we could have consulted—”

  “I thought that I would die in that bog, and that moment brings realization to a man. I have understood everything.”

  “I doubt that,” he said.

  “Alonso. It is finished. Though no doubt of average talent, I am still a doctor. I do not have an ague or a cold; I am not a drunkard. It is very simple. You have been sedating me with an opiate since my arrival at Rawblood.”

  “True enough,” he said.

  “The laudanum is in the wine? In the food?”

  He said, “Both.”

  “What is my intake,” I asked, “by the minim?”

  He reached into his pocket, and I jumped, but it was only a pencil he sought. I shuffled for a scrap of paper—I found only a crumpled railway timetable. Alonso took it from me and scratched; he handed me the results.

  “It is an estimate only,” he said.

  ADMINISTERED

  13 minims in coffee or similar, 8 before noon

  12 minims in cider or food, 2 after noon

  14 minims in wine, brandy, or food, 8 after noon

  17 minims via pipette early morning while sleeping

  = 56 minims

  “You write like a dying spider,” I said, “crawling across wet sands. That is over five grains of morphia per twenty-four hours. So much…”

  “It must be high at night,” he said. He grimaced. “It must. Charles, you of all men know my intent—”

  “Your intent… I do not know. But I do know that you have become a fearful thing.”

  I was abruptly disgusted beyond measure—with myself, with my persuadable nature, and with him. I wished to punish us both: for his hubris and for my acceptance of it. I found him beyond all moral sense, but I found myself despicable, and it was worse. “Sit,” I said. “Please.”

  He did so and looked at me in surmise.

  “I have solved it, you know,” I said. “The mystery of the Rawblood ghost.”

  “Charles.” He started toward me, imploring, and for a moment I was moved by the distress in his great eyes. Before I recalled myself.

  “Do you recall Pinel?” I said. “A minor talent, but a solid one. He describes that particular state, manie sans délire… Shall I translate, or will you? It is madness without delirium. An intelligent madness, rational and by design. Moral insanity. And Koch—I cannot call psychiatry a science, but I do not despise his work—has diagnosed a state of mind he calls the psychopatische. The psychopath, I suppose you could say, in English.

  “What are the hallmarks of the psychopath? One: very likely it is hereditary. Some insanity in the lineage, passed down.”

  Alonso’s eyes were fixed on me. “Go on, Charles,” he said. “I begin to follow your thinking.”

  “Your mother murdered your father,” I said. “It was much reported. The Devon Demoness… You yourself have told me of it once. Only the once. I know that it was never proved in a court of law. And I know—we do not speak of it. But, Alonso, the time for tact and equivocation has passed. The history of the Villarca family is uniquely bloody.

  “The second distinguishing characteristic of the psychopatische is a moral blindness, amounting to an enjoyment of others’ pain. That ghostly figure that crept into your servants’ rooms, attempting to suffocate them in their sleep…that violated that girl in such a way that she could no longer hold to her sanity… It was a horror. But it all belongs to human action. I see before me the Rawblood ghost. For who could it have been, Alonso, but you? Similarly, I do not believe it an accident that the Gilmore child was taken deathly ill on your grounds. You are responsible for his suffering—you contrived his death. You refused him treatment but let him lie outside, where you could observe…”

  “I would not let any child enter this house,” he said. “If I keep people from me, it is much the better for them.”

  “On that last point, I must concur,” I said. “I do not know what happened to you, Alonso, in the years since I saw you. I do not know what evil has touched you. But you have acquired a need to inflict pain on others. Human subjects not being always readily available, you devised the experiment with the rabbits. Under cover of science, you could indulge with impunity the impulses that are necessary to your character.” I paused here, for there was something rising in my gullet. I thought of Actaeon, and I tasted bile. “I am nauseated to have participated in this ghoulish theater.

  “Third”—here I faltered a little, for I knew myself to be culpable in making Alonso what he was—“an early degenerate influence or way of life can set the mechanism of the mania in motion. And that is my responsibility also. For we were morally degenerate, you and I, when we were young.”

  “It beggars belief,” he said, and his tone was acid, “that you have found a way to place this at the door of our degeneracy—if that is what you insist passed between us then.” In the low golden lamplight, his face was wrathful. I shuddered.

  I said, “I am sorry, so sorry for my part in it. I fear what passed between us in that fashion may have contributed to your madness. Also, I caused your opium addiction—I am immeasurably sorry. I must remind you: it was through error, not through design…”

  Here, Alonso stirred. “So you have always said. Manning’s cure. Is that the end?”

  I thought of all the evenings we had sat exactly thus, in two armchairs, arguing, debating. That was a simpler world. “Yes,” I said, exhausted.

  “Charles. You cannot, cannot believe this. You are spinning wild falsehood and convincing yourself in the process.” He was imploring. His face was open. I steeled myself against the feelings that rose in me. He is not the man I knew. It is but a cunning semblance, put on to keep me in check.

  “I do not think you have killed yet,” I said. “I think you will though. I do not, for instance, know—what was your plan for me, for your revenge? Bring me thoroughly under the influence of the drug, and then?” My throat was dry. “I also believe that behind your madness, my friend remains. So I appeal to him. I ask him to think. Think what you do, Alonso.” I rose. “I go tomorrow. At first light. If you think to intrude on me in the meantime, be aware: I have my pistol handy.” I turned on my heel and went to my chamber.

  It is so hot. Where is the rain? I have flung open the windows to the night. There is a scent of smoke, a bonfire perhaps, which pervades the air.

  I have also brought the little dog, Punch, into my room. He is accustome
d to sleep in the old stable, but I think he will not mind the change of accommodation. Punch is a small, hairy terrier of the best kind, full of grumbling and sudden thoughts. He is good proof against vermin, of which I have a horror. Last night, as I was getting into bed, a mouse ran clear across my foot. A truly unsavory experience, and I think it will not happen with Punch in the room, for he has an admirable, bloodthirsty nature. The only part of his character that does not please is his firm belief that I deserve and desire his trophies to be brought to me; he will not take them away again. The dog will sleep at the foot of my bed, which will be a nice, cozy thing. I have need of another creature near me as I sleep tonight; of the presence, in the room, of another living heart that beats.

  Alonso has knocked at the door. I think I jumped a foot in the air. My entire nervous system is singing and prickly with fear.

  “I have my pistol trained upon the door,” I said. I took up the poker from the fireplace.

  His voice came muffled through the panels. “Charles, you do not understand. The laudanum. I have it here. You must take it. Or it will be the worse for you…”

  I said, “Do not threaten me.”

  “That is not what I mean,” he said. “It offers protection—”

  “Enough,” I said. “I have heard enough.”

  “Damn your eyes,” he said. “I have borne patiently with your insults to me under my own roof. I have endured your crude conspiracies and aspersions on my character. I have allowed your self-deception to pass unchallenged. If you do not take it, Charles, you will regret it.”

  “You are a monster,” I said. “I do not know you.”

  There was only silence then, so I suppose he went away.

  I turned the key in the lock twice. Punch and I will sleep in princely state tonight, behind good solid oak. I will keep some vestige of my damned pride. I know that it will be a testing night. I am prepared for the worst. Narcotic withdrawal is not a pretty thing.