The Girl from Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

  To look into Alonso’s eyes, which I have loved, and see the malice that sits therein—I will never forget it. I am swept through with sadness, as if by a wind. What will happen to him? Assuredly, he must be dealt with. He cannot be allowed to go free.

  I see in Alonso a man who has allowed his past to rule him. He carries his parents’ demise with him always, as some carry a miniature of their beloved in a locket. He is in love with his tragedy. I will not become him. Alonso may be ruined. I need not be. I have been trying to forget, to obliterate; how foolish. Did I think perhaps that the Lord did not know of my mistakes? Assuredly, He does. I must face Him with an open heart. My secrets are manifold and sinful; I have kept them in a box in the depths of my soul. Now, I will try another way; I will acknowledge my wrongdoings. I will atone.

  Strangely, I am full of hope. I am resolved that this sad chapter shall not be without result.

  Upon my return to London, I shall take new lodgings. Farewell, Mrs. Healey! I only bear with her, after all, because she does not mind, too much, my nocturnal pursuits. Of course, by Koch’s definition, I, with my “moral aberrations and behaviors,” also fall into the category of psychopatische… But I will give all that up. That sordid toil is exhausting, in the end. I shall inquire for a country practice. I will tell Mrs. Bantry to prepare Meg to join me in a few months. I had not thought I should ever have her with me. I thought myself unfit for the young. But I believe…some form of peace is not beyond my grasp. Perhaps, perhaps I will go to Grimstock to fetch Meg myself. Perhaps I will look once more on those cold, gray hills where I was born. And perhaps it will not be as terrible as all that.

  Redemption… I am testing the word on my tongue. By the longest of paths, by trials of fire and long endurance—I have come closer to God.

  So, strange as it may seem, I owe Alonso thanks, in the end.

  “For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”

  —PROVERBS 14:2

  O, O God, preserve m[ ]eliver us from t[ ] evil y hand shakes so I fe r I canno wr te it O O I hav een such a thing.

  Still my limbs o still my beating heart. What to fix on, what to think, or be, my God, my dear God… And prayer is of no use, for did I not cry out the Lord’s prayer? And it went unanswered.

  I thought Alonso was the fearful thing. I was wrong. Oh, God, her eyes,

  her eyes

  What deep hole in th[ ]orld did that white thing crawl[ ]rom. The slender tips of ten white fingers reaching for my hear t

  She ha[ ]ite cur g rms. How c[ ] was put there. Wh[ ]ould be capable of su[ ]eed? And how could I not see? My merciful Lor[

  and the eyes

  Dawn

  Praise God. Praise God for the light, and for the day.

  I am on the hill in my nightshirt and overcoat. I am chilled to the bone—but I could not spend a moment more within the house. I would have fled from my room in the night, but the thought of encountering that monstrous thing in a dark corridor, seeing the guttering light fall upon that white form—it could not be borne. I did not sleep again but lit the candle and counted the hours until dawn.

  When blessed day became perceptible through the quarries, I rose from the bed. All was strange—shadows fell too short or too long, and the pale, gray light abused my aching eyes. I could not feel relief. It was gone, yes, but it had heard my feeble cry and responded. It had a mind and a will. I shiver now with dread, for it is filled with overwhelming and alien intent. I strenuously avoid naming it.

  But I am an observer and a man of science; let me not forget it. All must yield to reason. I will diagnose.

  Postulation the first:

  The severity of the situation can be assessed, to some degree, by establishing: What was the fate of the dog?

  The resolution that was needed to screw myself to the sticking place was almost beyond my power. I sat on the grass, stroking it as if it were alive, feeling its texture, and breathing in the air, my ears filled with the hilarity of an early-morning cuckoo. This did my heart good. What do the grass or the birds know of the treachery of man or the foulness of that thing within? I should have obeyed those notes from my drugged self. I told me to flee; that is what I should have done.

  When I was calm, I went in to that place quickly. It did not take long to find what I sought, and I came out again within a few minutes. Nothing occurred. But the very walls are loathsome to me now.

  Punch was curled still under the window seat. He was quite cold and dead. I have brought him outside, not wishing to leave him in that place. He was a good little dog; he did well what dogs are meant to do. I became occupied at this juncture with the cramps, the dizziness, and the tremors that shook my frame.

  We were sitting thus when I heard the sound of someone approaching from the copse. I was not frightened; I think that I may never feel fear again, for something has been taken from me that will not be given back.

  I noted presently that Alonso was seated beside me.

  “You have seen her,” he said.

  I nodded my head.

  “You had locked your door, and I could not get in to you.” He spoke gently, as I have heard him do—oh, an age ago—to children and horses. “You are not well.” He slid his hand under my overcoat and laid it on my back, which was wet, as though I had been exposed to a sudden spring rain.

  He went to his pocket and brought forth the vial. I made to take it, but he produced a syringe case from his pocket and fitted the vial in; I saw it was an ampoule.

  “Do you want it?” he said.

  The itch on my flesh was too much to be believed. My very fingers curled with wanting it.

  He nodded and said, “Better this way.” He took my arm and found a vein, his fingers gentle, and it was in.

  I think he attended to himself after me. I do not recall, for the world was turned to butter. Presently, I felt that he lay along my side, both of us turned upward like daisies in the vertical sunlight, under the puzzling sky.

  “What is it? What manner of thing… What I saw in the night. My soul is riven by it. It is impossible that God and that thing both exist. One or the other is a fairy tale.”

  “Tell me what it is you saw,” he said.

  I told. I was mildly irritated to find that I trembled as I spoke. “Her wounds. She—it—bleeds. Her shoulder was dripping. She had a shorn head, and scars, like, I know not what. It was like the land, under the moon. There was a sound,” I said, “like creaking. Or of stone, rubbed upon stone. Very old machines, which ground together like death. There was smoke, which filled the air like brimstone. The room seemed…ablaze, though there was no heat. Flame licked up the walls as though we were trapped in some prison, in the depths of hell.” I felt once more the horror on me. “Is she a phantasmagoria couched in withdrawal from the morphia?”

  “Do you think it is?”

  “No,” I said. “She stood there, white and rotten…” Once again, the weakness came on me, and I was convulsed with fear. I grasped his arm. “And the dog,” I said. “It died of fear. How do you live? Knowing that such horror is in the house? Do you not see…”

  His hand trailed along the line of the collar of my nightshirt, leaving soft runnels in my flesh. “Strange to say,” Alonso said, “she does not trouble me; the fact being so plain, perhaps, that I am already damned. Other things haunt my dreams. A small blessing, given to a fiend. No, as you may have guessed, it is the laudanum that keeps her away. I always know when she is near… But it is as if a veil separates us, and she cannot get through.”

  Postulation the second:

  Opiates offer a degree of protection. The apparition can have no effect if the subject’s mind is so dulled. The residual laudanum in my system saved me from her.

  “It was her,” I said. “That you wished to study. Not congenital disease. We have no sway over that thing. Did you e
xpect that we would shake a microscope at it, and it would go away? Why did you think that she travels in the blood?”

  “Why is it so impossible that an intelligence, an agency such as her, should use a lineage, procreation, as a vehicle? Sometimes, Charles, I feel her. I feel her here.” He tapped a blue vein, bulging in his pale wrist. “Within. Coursing in my blood.” He shook himself. “You had no right to kill the rabbits. Once more, Charles, you have ruined me.”

  “You have used me abominably,” I said, abruptly furious. “You play the victim, but you have kept me here under the claim of friendship, lied to me, and imperiled my life.” I pointed toward Punch. “You have used me worse than that dog.”

  “I do not deny it.”

  I rose to go.

  Alonso reached up a long arm and grasped the collars of my nightshirt, pulling me to earth. He put his lips to my ear. “I do not understand God,” he said. “But believe me, I begin to understand hell. And if I am to go there, I will do something first, and that is finish the work! Give me your notes.”

  “Alonso,” I said. “To speak plainly: you are addled with opiates. Once, you were a clinician, a diagnostician of the first water and a man of medicine. But I was a fool to follow you in this. It will not work. We have tried. It will not! And as for the methods: nothing right or good would cost our souls so. I have been wrong about a great deal. I grant it. But I am right in this.” My eyes were clouded a little with tears. “For the opium has dulled the fine razor of your mind. If you cannot see this, then it is as I had suspected. In truth, you are no longer a doctor.”

  I removed his hand from me and went into my book. I tore the pages of our records from the spine—our tallies, our notes, our whole work. It was a cancer, I see it now. Remarkable that so much pain can be told in numerals, in India ink. I set a match to the sad scraps before me; they burned without a sound, blue and gray and orange. He cried out and reached for them. I believe he would have buried his hands in the fire. But a breeze came off the moor then. The pages went with it easily, out of reach, whirling into the sky. We watched the tiny points of flame rise in the early morning air.

  I said to him, “We must find our way to that lighted hall by other means than the kitchen.”

  His empty fingers trembled, held before him like a begging bowl. When he spoke, it was savage. “Two decades, I have wandered in the wasteland. My sole comfort was that you were ruined also.”

  “You may be assured on that point,” I said. “My life, since we parted, has been nothing but a long mourning.” I put an arm over his shoulder, which heaved and shook. The shape of him was familiar to my arms. I held for a moment the young Alonso. I did not know where I was; this time was overlaid by that, like magic lantern slides.

  I said, “In the end, I have protected you, though I did not mean to do it. She would have taken you all those years ago, had you not been addicted to laudanum.”

  “Does that comfort you?” he asked. His face shone with contempt. “It should not. Do not spout such drivel at me. This was thrust upon me, and I am a servant—no!—a slave to it. How it offends the mind!” His hand was tight on my jaw. “How my senses and my reason are revolted! Order, logic, science. These are the systems to which I was devoted. You took them from me, like a thief. You are in the right of it. I am no longer a doctor. For you took my profession. You owe me at the least your life! I am unhinged. I will suffer this until I die. I do not sleep; I do not eat. I am beset all around by this. There was no Manning’s cure, Charles, was there? It was no error of judgment. I know you better than any man alive. You were afraid of your God. You made me a slave to opium, to punish me for what you desired.”

  To give Alonso opium. A terrible lapse of judgment on my part, but a forgivable one. Sólo el amor. Etc. Etc. All this is acknowledged. It was an accident.

  Well. Here is the thing that I have never told, not to a soul. Our endeavor of fifty days was tainted from the start. He was everything that was bright, blinding, to my eyes. I have said we were degenerate together, and it is so, but it was more than that. Degeneracy alone would have been bearable. I had lived with my shame all my life. I think they might have put me in the pillory in Grimstock had I not left. I am hardened to the fact of my degeneracy.

  But love, I did not know. It is a terrible, terrible thing. I was unprepared for the great fall. I did not know, before Alonso, how it strikes you down like sickness, like madness. I was unprepared for the fear. I feared Alonso was not the true moral deviant that I was. I feared that he could not forever be satisfied with such a poor thing as me. I lay by him, wakeful in the night, thinking of the time when he would go from me. I thought God would take him to punish me.

  When Alonso said to me, that first night before the fire, “Do you know what it will be, that you intend to administer?” I said that I did not. It was a lie. I saw that the time had come to act, to bind him to me. I took his life as sure as a knife in the heart. And in the end, he went from me anyway, so I destroyed the thing I love, and all to no purpose.

  “You are right,” I said. “There was no Manning’s cure.”

  “Very well,” Alonso said. A tremor shook him. He sighed. “And I in turn will allow that I brought you here, willing to destroy you… I needed your eye for the work. And for you to be safe from her and fit to work, you needed opiates. I thought I did not care what happened to you. I thought it was justice. Your debt to me, as it were. But you came, and it did not feel like revenge. Strange to say, it was a great pleasure to be in your company.” He passed a hand across his brow and grimaced. “I have deceived myself, Charles. I brought you to Rawblood not for any purpose, save the simple one that I wished for you. I missed you. It was selfish and wrong.”

  “No,” I said. “It was not.”

  We looked at each other, and it was the bleakest of things.

  Alonso said, “Once, you had my trust and my love. But you thought God did not like it. Foolish, foolish. Why could you not make peace with it, your heart? Such utter waste,” he said. “Of our two lives.”

  “I know,” I said. “It is my fault. All mine. And I have seen today…her. I have seen that God is a farce. I have lived my life always half in shadow. And for what? To appease whom?”

  He soothed me with a strong white hand. His black hair fell across his brow.

  “You look so well now,” I said. “You are better, Alonso. Younger. I do not know how it is so, but…”

  “Yes,” he said, grim. “I think that is her doing. I think she likes us close. So what am I to do now, Charles? Trapped here at Rawblood, in this dim half death… What is my life to be?”

  “That, I do not know.” The world spun, liquid.

  Postulation the third:

  She is bound to the Villarcas, to Rawblood. And they to her: the Villarcas sicken when away from Rawblood.

  “We are a fine pair,” I said. “The sodomite opium-eaters.”

  He said wearily, “You wear and wear away at things, Charles, but never really face them.”

  “You have the right to use me any way you choose,” I said. “And I deserve to die.”

  “No,” he said. “That is precisely it. You do not. We must abandon grudges, revenge. Cease to quarrel over who wronged whom first and try to live. Let us try,” he said, “to live in the morning light.”

  I laughed a little. “I was recently thinking…something similar. You make it sound an easy thing.” I took him quickly to me; to feel the shape of his back, the line of his fierce head. I kissed him. Then I stood and went down the hill. I did not look back.

  “Come to the house,” I said without turning, “when you have buried the dog.”

  Conclusion:

  There can be none.

  I recall…oh, so many things. But in particular, one afternoon. We stood beside the river, drinking. We had been at the Inns with some legal fellow or other, who liked us, and then in rooms at the Tem
ple. Deep drinking in those deep stone arches—it gives a young man a sense of grandeur. The Thames was quiet in the afternoon. There seemed to be no living soul on this stretch. Everything was scented deeply with wisteria. We leaned over the river in the sunshine and saw ourselves in the swift brown water. Light played over Alonso’s face. He was lit through willow trees, golden, young. His cheek was full of the flush of pleasure. His eyes were wide, and the sun lay in them. He offered his hand to me. I took it. In the water, our reflections followed suit.

  “This is a state of grace,” he said.

  Nothing had yet occurred; none of those actions had yet been thought of that would bring us by slow degrees to this parlous state.

  I can see him now in my mind’s eye: he will bury Punch on the moor, and he will take trouble to find a place that is seemly, and high, and fit. He will handle the corpse gently and bury it deep. He will cover the earth with stones. The foxes will not get it. I know all this, because I know him as well as my own desires. Perhaps he will pray over the dog, as if it had a soul. He is utterly heathen.

  He will come soon, for all that. A dog takes but a little hole. Make haste.

  Forgive me, God, in whose existence I can no longer trust. Forgive me, Meg, whom I did not tend as I should have. Most of all, I ask forgiveness of you, Alonso, my friend. I did not understand then the quality of action, which is not like thought. It is final.

  I do not seek redemption, not for myself at least. I hope that you may find your way out of the tunnel I led you down all those years ago. Perhaps contrition, freely offered and without condition, has a merit of its own. I truly hope so. I hope that it can turn the course of events in ways we cannot fathom. Perhaps it will aid you.

  This poor book. The cover is marked with tiny burns and with sprays of rabbit blood. The pages hang drunken from the binding. There are great ragged edges where others were torn away. A poor legacy. But it is all I have to leave to you, Alonso. It is my full and last confession. I make one request only. That my sister, Meg, should not be left to starve. I have nothing to bequeath. I throw myself on your mercy, utterly.