by Baird Wells
An Unspeakable Anguish
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An Unspeakable Anguish is a work of fiction.
The characters and events in this book are the author’s invention, without relation to any person, living or dead.
An Unspeakable Anguish copyright 2016
Cover art copyright J Caleb Design 2016
Story & Copy Editing by Carol Achterkirchen and Two Birds Ink
ISBN 978-0-9968957-3-6
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission is unlawful. Written permission can be obtained by emailing the author. [email protected]
Use without written permission will result in prosecution.
Follow Baird on Facebook, or Twitter: @BairdWells
www.bairdwells.com
First Printing: November 2016
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“I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy;
I should want someone who made it interesting.”
– Edith Wharton
To Wesley, for making life interesting.
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CHAPTER ONE
Village of Quarrendon
Buckinghamshire, England
August 4th, 1881
He should never have gone to Quarrendon.
He should never have left her.
James stared out the coach window into the night’s yawning blackness and hammered a fist against his thigh. He shouldn’t have gone, not so close to the end. But it was only an overnight trip, to go and treat Mrs. Healy who had always been generous to him, and come home to Meadowcroft again the next morning. He filled his lungs, hoping that extra weight might keep him from jumping out and running like a lunatic over the low hillocks towards home.
He wiped the sweat from his brow and a cold band of it from beneath his collar. When the knock had hammered at his rough wooden door on the smoky first floor of the public house, he’d come only half awake, dismissing the sound as meant for some other lodger. When it had come a second time, more urgently, each blow penetrated until he had jumped up in wild joy. He’d dashed across the room to throw back the latch, certain that the long wait was over. That it was time.
Edward Cobbler’s leathery brown potato face, dimpled into anxious pits, had dashed his hopes like a slap.
“Missus Grimshaw,” he’d finally stammered out, and with those two words James had known that his happiness lay on its deathbed. His tear around the room and out into a fevered August night to a waiting stage coach so rickety that its axle was too ashamed to bear it was a haze, now. And everything had got worse from there.
The night was condensed with steam, owing to three days of rain which had almost obliged him to come to Quarrendon on horseback due to near impassible roads, a danger which one afternoon of sun had not relieved. He’d chosen a carriage the day before, confident of having plenty of time in both directions. They were too far from the village now, when he appreciated that the roads were an obstacle, and they had navigated too much pitted mud to turn back and fetch another horse. All he could do was pound his fist and tap his foot, thoughts and worries dashing off the walls of his jostling prison like terrified wild birds.
Their baby wasn’t due for at least three more weeks, but Emily had started complaining about headaches, since Monday last. Paired with other symptoms, it might have been a dire sign, but she’d had none. As her husband and her doctor, he had declared her fit enough for him to make the trip to the next village over for a growing list of patients. So, when Edward Cobbler had sobbed that the baby was not coming, James grasped that what he had meant to say was that it could not come.
Guilt washed over him while the miles crawled by in agonizing slowness. He should have taken her to London, risked the trip to have her near a proper hospital, rather than chance leaving her at home alone. He should have apologized and called another physician to Quarrendon. He should have stayed.
He clutched his gut and rocked in his seat, out of time with the stage’s palsied sway. He grabbed the door handle, wiped his damp hand off on his coat and then grabbed the strap again, in preparation of running, or vomiting.
He felt that hours had passed, his watch left behind and the night giving no hints to mark the time, and still it seemed they had hours to go. He was so awfully certain of it that when the coach jerked to a halt, he expected a lame horse or a broken wheel. Instead he was paralyzed by the unexpected sight of his house’s lighted windows beyond his tiny, dusty porthole.
He tangled in his own feet, tearing from the carriage, and smacked deep into three days’ mud. Clawing for the walk, he was already moving before he’d got his breath back.
Stumbling up the porch steps under shouts from the driver for payment, he threw open the door, dashing in without closing it behind him. “What has happened?” he panted to no one, to everyone.
It was battlefield chaos; no one answered. James didn’t believe anyone had heard him. His man and housekeeper, posed at the kitchen steps, wrung their hands into tight knots. They were lost with too many masters barking orders. Emily’s father Charlton Lennox stood like a caber way back in the parlor, distance from the front hall making him look deceptively small to James, while he shouted at his wife. If Lady Harriette heard him, she didn’t comply, dashing like a banshee from room to room, wailing and sobbing, arms flailing at her face and narrow body. Her eyes fell on James without seeing when he stepped in front of her, wild howls punctuating her unintelligible hysteria. It faded off near the staircase and then beat at his ears when she came back into view, tearing at her bodice and moaning. A woman James didn’t know stomped behind Harriette now in a starched white nurse’s cap and apron. Its hem, like her gray wool skirt, was painted in swaths of crimson, piercing him. She snatched for Harriette’s thin arm and made demands for ‘sense’ and ‘reason’. All instructions were drowned in the tempest, and Harriette kept on. James shoved past her, wading into the madness.
He turned between them at the foot of the stairs, still unacknowledged, and jumped the treads two at a time to the landing, where he could hear murmuring and occasionally Doctor Harter’s baritone demanding, “Someone shut her up!”
Harter. James hadn’t believed any of it could get worse, but the presence of that smelling-salt laden, liniment-touting shill proved him wrong.
James barreled through the bedroom door only to be caught soundly by Harter’s stout arm. “Out with you! Out!” he bellowed from the center of his walrus face, shoving.
“Move!” James pushed back, and then chopped Harter’s thick forearm with a rigid hand when the man didn’t relent. “I’m not a country bumpkin dirtying up your surgery,” he gasped, doubled over to rest hands on his knees. “You are in my house!”
Harter’s mustache drooped in a mournful frown. “Where you should have been, perhaps?” he suggested with no sympathy in his voice, only coarse judgment.
A searing across his knuckles brought James the first awareness that he’d swung his fist. Fire burned along his hand and Harter tumbled back onto the floor, finally giving him a view of the room.
“What have you done?” he wailed, staring at Emily’s pale lips, his hands trembling while he patted her over, trying and failing to convince himself it wasn’t too late.
“What have I done? All that I could,” grunted Harter as he lumbered up.
“No. No, no, no!” James wrenched up his shirt sleeves and raked his fingers at Harter. “Give me the scalpel at least. A towel and the clamps. We can get the baby out. We can at least get the baby out.” If he had to lose Emily, if he must suffer one terrible anguish, at least he could spare another.
He gripped the quilt and snatched it down.
“Hurry up!”
Harter’s meaty hand grabbed his waistcoat and jerked him around. “She has been gone since just after I arrived!”
His heart was stopping; he could feel it. Any moment it would seize up and refuse to beat. “When? Ten minutes, twenty?” he demanded, shrill. “When, goddamnit!”
“Two and a half hours since the midwife called for me.”
He couldn’t breathe. He wanted to run through the house screaming, like Emily’s mother, or curl up on the floor and sleep until it life had all passed by. Instead he buried his face in his hands and sobbed. “And you didn’t…it never occurred to you?”
“To hack her open?” Harter demanded. “With Lord Charlton and Lady Harriette in the very next room?” he sneered. “She was too weak to labor when Miss Gill arrived this morning. It was too late for anything I might have done. Too late for both.”
“Why?” James asked into his palms. “Why would you just stand here?” If only he’d left more quickly, taken his own horse or gone by the south road. “Why wouldn’t you send for me?”
Harter’s brow jumped, and he had the good sense to waddle back a pace. “Why would you up and leave her?”
A few footsteps penetrated the numb wall beyond which no rational thought could pass for James, Harter putting himself at a safer distance before he spoke again. “Emily complained of headaches to Miss Gill. Said she had told you about them, too.” A sniff. “A curious decision, to go off to Quarrendon.”
“You sonofabitch!” James threw everything he could reach and when Harter ducked and dashed into the hall, he picked them all up and threw them again. “You murdering, hackneyed fraud!” he screamed at the empty doorway.
Harter disappeared down the stairs, and took with him whatever fight James had left. His knees folded, and his body followed, lungs capable of drawing enough air to feed his sobs and nothing more. He heaved against the floorboards until tears and blood from his hand formed a slurry that painted his cheeks and lips.
Time passed. How long, he didn’t know and didn’t care. The voices stopped, Harriette’s piercing cries ceased, and the house was quiet save for his heart pouring out onto the floorboards. It grew dark beyond the window panes, and then cold, but still he couldn’t stand, couldn’t look.
He had left her. Doctor Harter or lazy, pinched-face Miss Gill would never have been sent for if he hadn’t left. Emily, who was too sweet to send a note and worry him, would have told him at the first sign of trouble if he’d been at her side. But he hadn’t been there. Harter was right; he had gone to Quarrendon, and he’d killed her.
She was dead, and so was he.
* * *
Village of Meadowcroft
August 6th, 1881
James raised both leaves on the little oak table so that its surface formed a long oval, and then he pushed it up beside the bed. He took his time on trips up and down stairs by the light of a single candle: from the linen closet with a stack of cloths; from the kitchen with a steaming kettle. In the table’s center, he arranged a small basin, white porcelain with pink and carmine roses painted inside the bowl. It had been one of the few items that Emily’s parents had allowed her to take when he’d married her. He filled it from the kettle and then unstopped a brown glass bottle and winced at the eucalyptus fumes. Along with a few drops of rose oil, he added some of the astringent. While the water cooled a little, he went to Emily’s vanity and gathered her boar’s hair brush and matching ivory comb. Collecting her chair, he brought it all to the table.
He rested a hand on the brush, but couldn’t wrap his fingers around it. They trembled from a lack of food and an abundance of rye, and a dim and fading protest that he not take one more step towards the inevitable. He steeled himself, gathering up the last of his crumbling resolve. He had a duty, as her husband and as a doctor, and he would see it through.
First, he sat and took a handful of her silky chestnut hair and ran his fingers through its thick strands. When that slow movement threatened his sanity, he grasped her hair and began to brush. He had loved to watch her brush her hair, would lie on their bed in the morning and peek at her while he pretended to sleep, studying her naked back and catching glimpses of her face in the glass while she pulled long strokes through her tresses. As he moved through the recollection, he worked with all he had left to burn it into his memory, dimly aware that he would need it later. All their memories had already been made, and like a man on a sinking ship, he hurled what few he could save into the lifeboat of his recollection.
When he’d finished, he replaced the brush and comb just so beside the basin, settled his supplies to his satisfaction, sighed, and got up.
He rested trembling fingers at her chest where the quilt turned down, its white eyelet raking his fingers in a warning. Mrs. Fane had made up the bed before he’d dismissed her, tending to her mistress one last time as much as he’d allowed. That hadn’t been much; he’d wanted the house as empty and silent as he’d felt inside. Steeling himself and clenching teeth until his jaw ached, he pulled sheet and quilt to her feet in one quick draw.
Blood stained her frilled white dressing gown in a vee, still scarlet at its center but dried to a deep brick along the edges. It formed into a hateful arrow that pointed in accusation up to the swell of her belly and its eternally peaceful inhabitant.
Something sparked in his chest for a moment. It might have been helpless frustration gilded at its edges by anguish; if he had paid more attention, listened to Emily. If he had not gone to Quarrendon overnight. It sparked, but didn’t flare; two days of repeated accusations had burned out his capacity for rational thought. He swallowed and pressed on.
He slipped each mother-of-pearl button through its hole in turn, until her dressing gown was undone, and then he drew back both sides. He undressed her slowly, cradled her arms and shoulders and ached that it was for the last time. His heart clenched, and on impulse he tugged the gown from beneath her, wadded it and hurled it across the room and into the cold fire box. Remorse and panic clawed at him the moment it was done, and he sprang up, snatched it back, and dusted at soot and bits of coal which clung to its damp stain. It could be washed, he argued; cleaned up. Why would he just throw her dress out as though it meant nothing? James shook out the white muslin and smoothed its lace, folding it just so, and gently set it on the hearth.
He needed to think, to take more care. A small voice dared that laundry wouldn’t be necessary and tried to say that her linens weren’t either, but he shut it up. He knew how much Emily liked to have the linens just so. Taking a cloth from the table, he dipped the flannel and wrung it out, wincing at the still-hot water.
Starting at her face, he feathered away blood from the corners of her mouth and full bottom lip, absent now the smiles that had charmed and on occasion seduced him. He wiped her gently, forehead to chin, the same way he touched her to wake her in the morning. One and then the other, he raised her arms and rested her limp fingers at his shoulder, heart ripping slowly in half when he grasped that she would never hold him again. He washed her in long strokes, tears spilling unchecked to cloud his efforts. In a cycle of rinsing and wringing he tended her, and with reverent passes of the cloth until he reached her belly. He rested a hand over her navel, his palm searing in contrast to cool flesh robbed of its lovely olive cast.
There was so much blood. It saturated the bedding beneath her, painted her knees and thighs and smeared the bottom of her belly. He’d only brought four cloths; that was hardly enough. And what would he do with the water, his mind demanded? He couldn’t simply toss it out the window. It was stained with Emily, the very last traces of her. He couldn’t just throw that away. What was wrong with him?
James sucked breaths through his nose and stared down at trembling hands. They were stained with Emily’s blood, too, and their baby’s blood, and he deserved it. And he was sorry, so sorry, and he couldn’t fix it.
James buried his face in his hands and wailed, and then draped his head upon Emily’s swollen belly, so
bbing, begging her to forgive him – for what he’d done, what he hadn’t. For letting her go.
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CHAPTER TWO
Emily Lennox Grimshaw
April 2nd, 1861 – August 4th, 1881
-And-
Baby Grimshaw, Unborn
James squinted at the inscription through drops of rain that fell from his hat brim. The dates were so close together; how could that be? A headstone should only be engraved when the second numeral had changed, or when the last two numbers had traveled decades. There was nothing on it about her gentleness, her light, how beloved and how necessary she had been to his happiness. By those four etched lines, no one would ever know the warmth of her smile when she spied him coming up the drive from seeing a patient, or how they’d whispered for hours after lovemaking, so close body and soul that there was nothing left but share their dreams.
There was nothing about her husband, mysterious Baby Grimshaw’s culpable father. Her family had found a last opportunity for blaming him by erasing him from Emily’s eternity; there was no space left on her pink granite headstone, framed by a pair of weeping angels, to etch anyone else’s name.
It didn’t matter now. They could throw him in a pasture ditch, for all he cared. Nothing mattered. Rain soaked into his hat and ran frigid down his neck into the collar of his black wool coat. It pooled in the soft, newly turned earth at his feet and leached into the seams of his shoes. A gust of sharp autumn wind spattered his face. Distantly, his body protested the abuse, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care. It didn’t matter; not to him, or Emily, or poor Baby Grimshaw, who was a question that would never be answered.
