Anyone noticing would have said the gesture was filled with goodwill and fellowship.
William was incensed.
&
There is a story much older than this one in which two ravens—ravens being large cousins to rooks—were companions and advisers to the great God of the north. One bird was called Huginn, which in that place and time meant Thought, the other Muninn, which meant Memory. They lived in a magic ash tree where the borders of many worlds came together, and from its branches they flew blithely between worlds, gathering information for Odin. Other creatures could not cross the borders from one world to another, but Thought and Memory flew where they pleased, and came back laughing.
Thought and Memory had a great many offspring, all of whom were gifted with great mental powers allowing them to accumulate and pass on a good deal of knowledge from their ancestors.
The rooks that lived in Will Bellman’s oak tree were descendants of Thought and Memory. The rook that fell was one of their many-times-great-grandchildren.
On the day that Will Bellman was ten years and four days old these rooks did what needed to be done to mark their loss. Then they departed from that dangerous place. They never returned.
The tree still stands. Even now you can go and see it—yes, right now, in your time—but you will not see a single rook alight in its branches. They still know what happened. Rooks are made of thought and memory. They know everything and they do not forget.
***
Since we are on the topic of ravens, a collective noun for ravens is an unkindness. This is somewhat puzzling to Thought and Memory.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Lovely!”
Bellman and the chief constructor and the engineer were standing together watching the diverted water fill the reservoir. Where it entered it splashed and frothed in surprise at its new direction. At the farther end it was more settled, still, and tame. It was a magnificent sight. Thousands of gallons of water stored up against future drought, enabling the mill to stay productive no matter what the water level. It insured profits against chance, hazard, uncertainty.
A boy came running from the mill, out of breath.
“It’ll have to wait,” Bellman told him, “I’m busy here.”
Twenty minutes later the boy was back, apologetic. “Mrs. Bellman insists that you come straight away. She has told me not to return without you.”
Bellman frowned. He wanted to stay and watch this more than anything in the world. It was a dream he had cherished for many years. He had stood and watched the mill wheel turn, the very first time he had met the millwright, and known then what was needed. And now it was here!
But Rose wanted him. Knowing what was happening today, she wouldn’t have sent for him for no reason.
***
The moment he walked into the hall, an acrid, scorched smell filled his nostrils, and he pulled a face.
Before he could go in search of the source, an entirely altered Rose ran down the stairs. Her hair had escaped from its pins and strayed wildly; her face was taut and white.
“Thank God you have come!” the strange Rose said, in a strange Rose voice. ‘Lucy has the fever.”
“Have you sent for the doctor?”
“He has just left. We are to isolate her,” Rose said, indignant. “We must keep the others apart from her.” So far she had mastered herself, but now, abruptly, tears sprang to her eyes. “Oh, William! We have cut her hair and put it on the fire!”
So that was the dreadful smell.
Rose wiped the tears away with an angry sleeve and he consoled her briefly. “It will grow again. Where is she?”
On being told that even he was not to have contact with his infant daughter, Bellman put the ladder up against the wall and climbed to the level of the nursery window. Inside, Mrs. Lane, who had offered to nurse so that Rose could look after the other children, was leaning over the cot.
He rapped his nails on the window, and Mrs. Lane turned.
The child in the bed was not the Lucy he knew. The whiteness of her skull took him by surprise, and she seemed thinner, but surely that was not possible: he had seen her only yesterday. Her willingness to take pleasure in the world was still strong enough to make her stare at her father in astounded delight, but when she realized he would not come in and the pain in her head reasserted itself, she screwed up her face and wailed again.
It was a good, loud wail. He and Rose had made robust children with strong hearts and big lungs. She would pull through. Good girl!
He took a step down the ladder, forced himself to take his eyes from her imploring face, and returned to the ground.
Rose shuddered. “I cannot bear her to suffer so. I must go to her.”
“Let us do just what the doctor said. Lucy is a strong little girl. Mrs. Lane is a good nurse. Everything will be all right.”
“Will it?”
He took Rose’s hands in his and looked—calm, steady—into her face until her trembling anxiety diminished.
“Yes,” she said, with a deep breath and a faint smile. “Of course it will.”
***
Doctor Sanderson returned that evening. He visited the patient and spoke to Mrs. Lane. He came to William and Rose in the drawing room.
“I have done everything possible. I am sorry I can do no more. There is still prayer.”
Now Rose would not be dissuaded and went to her child.
William was taken aback. He had always thought Sanderson a good doctor. He had the best reputation of all the Whittingford doctors. He immediately sent a messenger for one of the others, but a note came back: there were many in the town with fever, and the doctor would be busy with them all night long. He would not be able to attend Lucy before tomorrow morning.
While William was reading this, his housekeeper’s daughter came in. She had clearly been crying, though she was making efforts to contain her tears. “Mrs. Bellman says that it won’t be long now. It is time to pray.”
He nodded curtly and walked with her to the sickroom. “Why did not Susie or Meg come to tell me?”
“They have gone, sir. They are afraid of the fever.”
The moment he was in the room, William embarked upon an interrogation of Mrs. Lane. Had she done this, and had she done that, and how often and for how long . . . “I do not suggest that you have failed in anything,” he explained, “On the contrary, I am quite sure your care has been everything it needs to be. It is only so that I may know what the treatment has been.”
His questions were involved and Mrs. Lane was hard-pressed to answer them and see to the dying child.
“William,” Rose chided, in a murmur, and when this had no effect, “William!”
He looked at his wife in surprise.
“All we can do now is help her to pass. Stop distracting Mrs. Lane and kneel with me. Let us pray for her everlasting life.”
He had never heard his wife speak with such authority, and he knelt at her side, put his hands together, and joined her in prayer.
All the while he watched. It was scarcely his Lucy anymore. The fever had melted the flesh off her. What remained was a scrawny, pallid creature, with sunken eyes, that was racked with convulsions and knew nothing of their presence. He observed every detail.
His wife did not remove her eyes from their child either, he saw. But her gaze was doing something other than look. She barely blinked, and in her eyes was a power that went far beyond mere observation. He understood that something was happening in the intensity of that unwavering stare, but he did not know what it was.
The child died.
Rose bowed her head and her lips moved in silent prayer, otherwise she was still as an angel carved in stone on a tomb.
William—bewildered—rose and left the room. In the drawing room he paced. An unendurable restlessness possessed him. He could n
ot rid himself of the feeling that there was something he had to do. Lucy was gone, he kept thinking, and he must go and fetch her. She could not have gone far, she was only an hour away. He must saddle his horse immediately! A hundred times he suppressed the instinct to go to the stable, a hundred times it reasserted itself. And when it wasn’t the stable it was this: Lucy was broken. Some part of her had failed, wanted mending. He had tried the expert, and the man had been no good. He must do the job himself. When had he ever failed? Where were his tools? I will soon have her working again, good as new.
She is dead, he told himself over and over, but his brain persisted. Nothing is impossible. All things are retrievable. Broken things can be mended. If there is a way to make the sun shine all night, William Bellman will be the one to find it.
He paced and paced, looking for a solution. He did not find one, but he could not stop looking until it was morning—when there was a new problem. Paul and Phillip were sick.
Now he could be of use.
William rode to Oxford to consult the doctors there. When he came home he brought niter and borax and salts and acetate of ammonia and nitrate of silver with him. He unrolled camel hair brushes from a roll of paper. He had oil of lemon and oil of persimmon. He had a waxy balsam that made everything smell of cloves. He instructed Rose and Mrs. Lane in the mixing and measuring and application of these preparations.
“Shave the head entirely,” he instructed. “We did not shave the baby close enough. The head must be kept elevated, wrapped in silk that is first soaked in lemon oil. The feet are to be warmed by application of the clove pomade and covered in warm water cloths. No leaches, no bleeding. Feed them only on barley water and rice water for the first three days. After three days only meat broth and chicken, and the chicken to be sealed dry in a jar and boiled. Their bladders to be opened every six hours and the bowels every twenty-four. Every evening, nitrate of silver to be brushed onto the throat ulcers . . . “
He noted everything. He made lists and timetables in his calfskin notebook. He checked off every opening of bladder and bowel. Nothing happened in the sickroom without his making a record of it in his book.
At first the boys were puzzled by illness. They looked at their father from the other side of a wall of pain, bewildered that their father stood writing in his book, when he had only to reach over the division and lift them clear of it. They struggled, shrank, agonized.
William scrutinized his notes for patterns, indicators of improvement. Tentatively he altered timings, dosages. Was there an improvement now? Was it too soon to judge?
When he wasn’t in the sickroom he was in and out of every room in the house. What things had belonged to Lucy? What toys had she played with? What blankets had she used? What cushion had she rested on?
“Burn it!”
They lit a great bonfire in the garden that never went out, for there was always something remembered that had to be burned. The boys’ clothes. Their books. Their mattresses. And what had he worn, when he kissed and cuddled them? Burn it! And Rose, what had she worn? Every room in the house was gone through, every cupboard and every drawer examined; this doll and this hat and this ribbon, “Burn it! Burn it all!
In his sons’ bedroom he pulled boxes from under a bed. Buried beneath books and toys and balls, all the beloved junk of a boy’s life, a catapult. He hurled it from the bedroom window to the astounded gardener, stoking the flames outside.
“BURN IT!”
Shaking, he stood, hands on the window frame, getting his breath back. When he could breathe again, he went back to the sickroom, and took up his calfskin notebook.
First you had to watch. Only by watching could you understand. Only when you understood could you intervene. Sickness was a mechanism like any other. Close observation would always suffice to elucidate the workings. It was just a matter of time.
William went to bury Lucy. The service was short; it had to be: there were too many to be buried. The stranger in black bowed to him sympathetically, but William barely registered him. He went home to learn that his boys had died, within a few minutes of each other.
Rose, praying at their bedside, looked up at him with overbright eyes, a flush on her throat.
“My love,” he told her, “you are sick.”
“You had better fetch the scissors, then.”
She unpinned her hair. She drew the scissors out of their leather sheath and cut her hair. She threw it on the fire and went to bed.
A day later William left Rose in the care of Mrs. Lane to attend the funeral of his sons. It was a strange funeral. There were many dead. The service was not only for Paul and Phillip, but for others too, people William knew of, had heard of. All must be buried today, for tomorrow there would be more. The mourners were sparse: people were sick themselves, or nursing the sick, or afraid of contamination. The men who stood and sat and prayed—there was no singing, for there was no choir and no heart for song—mourned separately and apart, this one for his wife, that one for his brother, this other for his child. They offered each other no comfort, each needed what little he had for himself. Someone will be making a fortune out of black crape, he reflected, dismally.
William lost himself in complicated calculations. What was the measurement for bereavement? How to count, weigh, evaluate grief? He had enjoyed good luck in the past, he was the first to admit it. He had not known it, but there was a price to pay. He was paying it now. Somewhere, he calculated, a fair-minded spirit of Justice, seeing that things were now—what? equal?—would start sending good luck again. A dark calculation worked itself out on the abacus in his heart: Lucy was lost, his two sons were lost. That made three. He still had a wife and a daughter. It did not seem unreasonable to expect to keep them. A sixty-forty split. It was a generous deal to the other party. Sixty-forty. Too good to refuse. There was a solace in numbers.
In the graveyard, William was not at all surprised to see the man in black. For all the curious depth of his funeral garb, he did not look like someone bereaved. He did not look as though his wife were agonizing at home. He lacked the haggard air of a man who has spent days at the bedside of a dying child. Why had he come, then? Was it for William he was there? The man met William’s eyes with the intimacy of the very well acquainted. It was too much for William, who today had no strength to resist the man’s certainty. He nodded at him. The fellow returned his acknowledgment with an expression of intently sad solicitude.
Sixty-forty?
Know your opponent, that is the secret of successful negotiation. What if his negotiations came to nought? William felt the ground suddenly unstable beneath his feet.
When one thing fails, try another. There is always a way.
He took a breath. Recovered himself.
He returned to the sickbed, to the wrapping of cool cloths around Rose’s skull, the application of nitrate of silver, the spooning of broth, the warming footbaths, the mixing of aloes and salts with treacle . . . He was learning his way around this sickness. Observe. Understand. Intervene. He would find the way.
***
William did not go to bed during these times and he did not properly sleep. But sometimes at Rose’s bedside, between one spell of convulsions and the next, William drowsed lightly in his chair. Something broke into his reverie and he looked about him for a clue. All was as it had been in the sickroom. There was no significant change.
Then he realized: the acrid smell was coming from the corridor. Elsewhere in the house someone was burning hair.
He rose in alarm and ran to Dora.
She stood in a white nightdress, by the fireside of her bedroom. A small, neat fire: she must have just lit it herself. She was slicing the blades through her long, dark hair and dropping the locks into the fire.
“Did it wake you?” she said. “It makes such a ghastly smell. Shall I lie down in my own room? Or would the boys’ room be more convenient? All the nursing t
hings are there.”
He took the scissors from her hand. Her pretty face looked peculiar. Shorn on one side only, a red flush over her throat and neck. “There’s no need to cut it,” he said. “I can’t see that it makes any difference.”
“Oh. Well, I’ve started now. I may as well go on.”
He cut it for her, dropping the locks into the fire and weeping. When he moved from the back to the side and was in front of her again, her gaze was steady. She smiled at him, a small, apologetic smile.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
On the day of Rose’s funeral, William’s state of mind was not improved by the presence of the stranger. He was annoyed when the man stepped back courteously as he approached the church, and again afterward, on finding him outside, by the graveside. He was looking around, with all the pleasure of a satisfied picnicker on a summer afternoon.
As the vicar spoke the words that laid his wife to rest, the fellow made himself scarce, which was a relief, but then, when William was handed the trowel to cast the first earth onto the coffin, he caught sight of him again. Blow me if he hadn’t sidled up, next to Ned on the opposite side of the grave. What nerve! There he stood, surveying the scene as if it were nothing but a play, put on for his own entertainment. Harassment, that’s what it was!
William would have liked to confront the man, have it out with him, but today was not the day. He resolved to ignore it. But as if he knew what was in William’s thoughts, the fellow turned to look directly at William. He even nodded, in a plain, how-d’you-do sort of way and with a jerk of the head toward the gate seemed to indicate that he’d like to catch William later, have a word. William lifted the trowel and prepared to hurl the earth straight over the mouth of the grave and into the despicably agreeable face of the man in black. But the man slipped swiftly sideways, ducked out of view, and there was only Ned, looking alarmed.
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