by Sarah Perry
George Spencer MD
Pentonville Road
London
29th August
Dear Mrs Seaborne
I hope you are well. I should tell you at once that Luke doesn’t know I’m writing: he’d be angry if I told him but I think you should know what he has suffered.
I know how he wrote to you. I saw your reply. I would never have thought you capable of such cruelty.
But I’m not writing to take you to task, only to tell you what has happened in the days since we went to Bethnal Green.
You must know by how we encountered there the man who stabbed Edward Burton, and how Luke intervened to protect me. The worst of it is that he grasped the knife by the blade, and so wounded his right hand. Those nearby were very kind: a girl tore the skirt from her dress to make a tourniquet under my instructions, and a door was brought so that we could carry him as if by stretcher out of the alleys to Commercial Street where we were able to hail a cab. Happily, we were very near the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, and a colleague there was able to attend to him at once. The wound was cleaned, since infection was our first concern. This caused him a great deal of pain, but he refused any anaesthetic, saying that he prized his mind above anything else and wouldn’t have it meddled with.
Perhaps I’d better tell you the nature of the injury. Can you bear it? You are content enough with buried bones but where do you stand on living ones?
The knife entered his palm near the base of his thumb and with a movement rather like lifting cooked flesh from the bones of a fish more or less flayed the palm clean off. The muscles were cut through, but what is worse is that two of the tendons which control the movement of his index and middle fingers have been severed. The damage was laid out plain to see: the wound was so clean a student might have looked at it and then passed his anatomy exam.
He asked me to operate. He again refused anaesthetic and spoke of the hypnosis techniques he had been studying, and how a doctor in Vienna had three wisdom teeth removed under hypnosis without flinching. He told me how he’d trained himself to enter a hypnotic trance so deep he once fell to the floor without waking. Then he said again that he did not believe pain to be any more intolerable than intense pleasure (a preoccupation of his which I have never understood), and extracted from me a promise that I would not put him under anaesthetic unless he begged. I recall his words precisely. He said, ‘I trust my mind more than I trust your hands.’
I couldn’t ask a nurse to attend. It would not have been fair. I believe he would have prepared the room in his usual fashion if he could, but he could do nothing but lie on his own operating table and give instruction: we were both to wear white cotton masks. I was to set up a mirror so that he could see the procedure if he roused from his trance.
He ought to have had the finest surgeon in Europe attending him, not me: my skills are modest at best (in fact, he has been in the habit of mocking them since we were students together). My hands shook each time I picked up the instruments; they rattled on the tray, and I knew he’d see I was afraid. He asked me to unbind the bandages so that he could examine the wound and issue instructions before entering hypnosis, and though I cannot imagine the suffering he endured as the cloth was drawn back from the flesh he did nothing more than bite down upon his lip and turn very white. I lifted back the flap of his palm and he surveyed the broken tendons as if they’d only been those of one of the cadavers we once cut and stitched. He told me which stitches I should use to bring the two ends of the tendons together, and ensure the sheath remained intact – how I must not cause the tension in the skin of his palm to strain once the wound was closed. Then he began to whisper beneath his breath to himself, which brought him comfort: he recited scraps of poetry, and the names of chemicals, and listed all the bones of the human body. Then at last his eyes rolled towards the door, and he smiled, as if he had seen an old friend come through, and he fell into a trance.
I betrayed him. I gave him my promise and knew that I would break it. I waited a few moments, and lightly touched the flesh of his hand, and satisfied that he was more or less insensate I summoned a nurse and we administered the anaesthetic.
I operated for more than two hours. I will not bore you with details of the surgery, only say with shame that I gave it my best, and it was not enough. No-one ever matched him for the minuteness of his skill, and for his courage: if he could only have attended to it himself I believe in a year’s time no-one would know how badly he’d been injured. I closed the wound, and he was brought round, and when he felt the soreness of the tube in his throat he knew at once what I had done, and I think he might have throttled me then, if he could.
He remained in hospital for two days, refusing all visitors. He insisted on having the dressings removed, so that he could examine my work. My stitching was no better than a blind child’s, he said, but at least I had kept the site clean, and there was no sign of infection. When he was well enough to go home I went with him to his rooms on Pentonville Road, and it was then that we found your letter on the doormat.
Let me tell you: where the knife failed, you have succeeded. He is shattered – you have turned out all his lights! You have broken all his windows!
Three weeks have passed and there has been no good news. The tendons that give movement to his index and middle fingers have shortened significantly, and they are crooked towards the palm, giving the appearance of a hook. Perhaps he might regain a greater scope of movement if he were prepared to do the exercises he ought, but he has lost hope. You cut something out of him. He is absent. He has no resolve. I’ve seen it before in the eyes of dogs whose masters broke their spirit young.
Your second letter was a kind one, certainly, but don’t you know him well enough to keep your pity to yourself?
I won’t write again unless he asks me.
He can’t write. He can’t hold a pen.
Yours sincerely,
GEORGE SPENCER
IV
THESE LAST TIMES OF REBELLION
SEPTEMBER
1
Autumn’s kind to Aldwinter: thick sun aslant on the common forgives a multitude of sins. The dog-roses have gone over to crimson hips, and children stain their hands green breaking walnuts open. Skeins of geese unravel over the estuary, and cobwebs dress the gorse in silk.
For all that, things aren’t as they ought to be. World’s End sinks into the marsh and there’s fungus growing in the empty grate. The quay is quiet: better to risk a lean winter than set sail on polluted waters. Rumours come from Point Clear and St Osyth, from Wivenhoe and Brightlingsea: the beast in the Blackwater was seen by a fisherman at tide’s turn one night and he went clean out of his wits; a child was found half-drowned with a grey-black mark on her belly; a dog’s been cast up on the saltings with its head all awry. Now and then a half-hearted watchman sets a fire by Leviathan and makes a mark in the logbook, but never lasts the night.
No sign yet of Naomi Banks. It’s never said that she must’ve gone down one night to the marsh and there encountered the serpent, but it’s generally assumed. Banks lets his fishing-nets tangle and his red sails moulder and is banned from the White Hare for putting the wind up his fellow drinkers. ‘Coming ready or not!’ he bellows from the doorstep, and keels into the street.
Up in his rooms on the Pentoville Road, Luke’s hand knits together well enough. Spencer winds and unwinds the dressing, and admires his own needlework, and sees the crooking inward of the fingers; meanwhile Luke looks placidly out over the wet street and says nothing. He has memorised Cora’s first letter from its first word to her signature: How could you – how could you? Her second goes unanswered for all her contrition.
Martha writes to Spencer. Edward Burton and his mother are to lose their home, she says – the rent has become intolerable. Not all the laundry and bright rag rugs in London will keep the wolf from the door. Has anything been done? Has Charles anything to report? When can she bring good news? Spencer detects an urgency there betwee
n the lines, and puts it down to her tender heart, her good hard conscience. But he has nothing to report, and cannot think how to reply.
In the high white Ambrose house the children have grown very nearly as plump as Charles. Joanna knows the periodic table and the remarkable thing about the hypotenuse and can spot a post hoc logical fallacy at a hundred yards. If on a Monday she resolves to enter Parliament, by Wednesday nothing but the law will do. Charles keeps from her the unlikelihood of either: she’ll grow out of hope, as everyone eventually does. Now and then she remembers casting her childish spells with Naomi Banks, and guilt sends her reeling: where is her red-haired companion now? Do her curls wave in the estuary tides full five fathoms down? She still has a drawing Naomi made of their two hands clasped, and she asks Katherine if she can put it in a frame.
Katherine wakes one night, hears weeping, and finds the brothers in their sister’s arms. They want their mother; they miss the village; it’s agreed they’ll go down to Essex by the end of the week. Besides, says Joanna, there’s Magog to think of, still tethered in the garden, missing her master. They’re consoled with a trip to Harrods and sufficient cake to sink a sailor.
Cora remains in her London hotel, despising the carpets, the curtains. She has in her pocket a letter from Spencer advising her not to visit and it’s so polite the paper is cold in her hands. Martha sees her walk from room to room and can find nothing to say that won’t receive a harsh reply. Cora has little interest in her books and bones – she’s bored and bad-tempered and there’s a new crease between her eyebrows. Spencer’s rebuke has lodged in her and she’s sulking. Her idea of herself has never included selfishness or cruelty – she has always been done to, and never doing. It’s quite an adjustment. She has gone blundering about, wishing no harm and causing much.
Will’s letters are prized, read often, unanswered. How can she respond? She buys a postcard from a stand at the station and writes I WISH YOU WERE HERE, but what good did it ever do, to speak one’s mind? In his absence – without the possibility of walking with him on the common, of finding on the threshold an envelope (in a neat hand in which she always thinks she can spot the schoolboy) – the world grows dull and blunted; there’s no longer anything in it to delight or surprise. Then she’s struck by her own folly – to feel so dreary because she can’t talk to some Essex parson with whom she has nothing in common! – it’s absurd; her pride revolts against it. In the end, it comes more or less down to this: she does not write, because she wants to.
She tries – as she has so often tried before – to turn all her unused affection on Francis. How can it be that a mother and son should take so little pleasure from each other? She pulls every trick in the book: conversations on subjects that please him, attempts at jokes and games; she tries her hand at baking, and buys him novels she’s certain he’ll like. Sometimes she catches him out looking anxious, or thinks she does, and tries to console; they make frequent journeys on the Underground to destinations of his choosing. He submits with few words and less affection, and sometimes she thinks he is sorry for her, or (much worse!) finds her amusing.
Martha loses her temper. ‘Did you really think you could carry on like that – you never wanted friends or lovers – you wanted courtiers! What you have on your hands is a peasants’ revolt. Frankie,’ she says, ‘we’re going for a walk.’
Will stands in the All Saints pulpit and looks out at his flock and finds himself lost for words. They are by turns mistrustful and eager: at times it seems they’re ready to run pell-mell into the everlasting arms, at others they eye him askance as if the Trouble has all been his doing. Someone somewhere has transgressed, that is the general consensus; and if the parson can’t be trusted to root out the wrongdoer things have come to a pretty pass.
All the while he finds himself wavering like a compass needle between the South Pole and the North: his wife whom he loves and is the sanctioned source of all his joys; and Cora Seaborne, who is not, and what’s more brought him nothing but trouble. News of Luke’s catastrophe has reached him via Charles. Other clergy might’ve imagined this swift end to the surgeon’s career to have been as divinely intended as if it had been the almighty hand wielding the knife, since it delivers Stella from the threat of the scalpel. Will, of course, is not so backward in his thinking, but all the same it’s difficult not to feel they’ve been extended a period of grace: the brutal treatment once offered by Garrett – the diseased lung collapsed in its cavity – is now impossible, since no other surgeon in England would consent to it.
Without Cora, he finds his thoughts lack direction. What, after all, is the point of observing this, of encountering that, if he cannot tell her, and watch her laugh or frown in response? He finds himself restless, uneasy; often he grows exasperated with them both, for having permitted only a lapse in good manners (this is how he frames it to himself) to cut the knot between them. Perhaps she finds herself too enraptured by her wounded friend to recall the country parson with his ailing wife – brings him rich food he ought not to eat, learns to dress the cut, to tug silk stitches from the skin. He clothes her in white and seats her at the doctor’s feet, her head bent over his ruined hand, and is appalled to find himself envious. All the same (he thinks): soon enough a letter will pass either this way or that between town and country – it only remains to be seen who’ll be first to unfold a sheet of paper, to lick the nib of their pen.
Behind Stella Ransome’s ribs, tubercles are forming. If Cora could’ve seen them, they’d have put her in mind of the toadstones she collects on her mantelpiece. They send out scavenger cells; infection’s setting in. The blood vessels of her lungs are beginning to disintegrate and show themselves in scarlet flecks on her blue handkerchiefs.
Of them all, only Stella is happy. It is the spes phthisica, which confers on the tubercular patient a light heart, a hopeful spirit. She brims with joy unspeakable and full of glory, beatified by suffering, devoutly occupied in her taxonomy of blue. Like a magpie decking its nest she gathers talismans around her, of gentian seed packets and sea-glass and spools of navy thread, and all throughout her eyes are fixed on heaven. She feels her feet have left the mud they once were mired in – she wakes in the night sweat-drenched in a light euphoric fever and has seen the face of blue-eyed Christ. Sometimes she hears the whisper of the serpent summoning and is not afraid. There was once another like it: she knows that enemy of old.
Her love for her husband and her children does not diminish, but grows distant: it is as if a fine blue veil has been drawn between them. Will is attentive in his loving – he hardly leaves her side – he sees the skin of her hands is dry and brings back from Colchester a bottle of Yardley’s lotion.
Sometimes she draws his head down to her shoulder and cradles it as though the disease were his. No more a fool now than she ever was, she’s seen his attachment to Cora grow knotted, and pities him. My beloved’s hers, and she is his, she writes in her blue book without rancour. ‘When is Cora coming back?’ she says that night, playing cat’s cradle with blue ribbon: ‘When does she leave London? I’ve missed hearing you talk together.’
At night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth I sought him and I found him not
Once we shared a pillow and he said Stella my star my breath is yours and yours is mine now it is fifteen steps from my door to his so he’s safe from the contagion that’s in me
Ah but he has a better helpmeet! Let him kiss her with the kisses of his mouth for his love is better than wine and she has the stomach for it!
I understand there’s a kind of blue paint they call ultramarine, because the stones they grind to make it are borne to us over the sea
2
A woman walked onstage alone at the Mile End Assembly Hall. Slight, dark-browed, darkly dressed, she surveyed her scant audience good-humouredly. Perhaps a hundred men and women waited whispering under the white vault: here then was Eleanor Marx Aveling, and more than her father’s daughter.
Among them – breathless from h
is walk – sat Edward Burton, feeling dwindled down to nothing inside his winter coat. Martha fidgeted beside him: ‘I met her once, you know,’ she said, glinting. ‘She said to call her Tussy, like her friends.’
Left to his own devices Burton may not have chosen to attend a public meeting of the Socialist League, but Martha had been impossible to resist. ‘No sense just listening to me,’ she’d said, pouring tea from the cooling pot. ‘No sense taking things secondhand. I’ll go with you – we’ll walk together – you can’t be forever cooped up in here with your plans.’
In the weeks of his convalescence the earth had leaned a little further from the sun; the air now was bright, gleaming, as though he viewed the world through a polished pane of glass. It had struck him lately that if his body these days was weary his mind – at last! – was not: Samuel Hall had roused him from a long slumber. It seemed impossible that there’d been years when he’d taken his allotted place without complaint, fitting neatly into the whole great grinding enterprise of London. What he saw about him now was a sick body convulsing as it shook off its fever – disease coursing in the arteries of its roads and canals, poison silting in the chambers of its halls and factories. He was awake – painfully, restlessly so: he ate his bread wondering what long hours the dying men worked in the flour-mills; he watched his mother stitching scraps and knew her worth to be less than that of the bricks in the street. The landlord raised their rent, and he saw it not as an act of personal greed, simply another symptom of the sickness. He thought of Samuel Hall’s cracked skull and his own guilt was overlaid with pity: Hall had been degraded by enslavement, as they all were.
This new fervour was indistinguishable from what he felt for Martha, and he made no attempt to set one aside from the other. He’d never been much in the company of women: they’d been prized objects to be bickered over, and rarely more than that. Now he sought no other company but hers, and could scarcely name the boys and men who’d once clustered round his Holborn desk. She seemed to him neither man nor woman, but some other sex entirely. How she stood in the window with a hand pressed to the scooped hollow of her back, how once between her shoulder-blades he’d seen sweat blot her dress: these gave him a thirst he was afraid he could never drink deep enough to sate. But she was also brisk, combative, indifferent to praise – would not give ground, moved him to laughter, never tried to please, played no tricks. Edward knew himself outwitted and outgunned. That she spoke so often of Cora Seaborne in a manner by turns fond and furious seemed wholly in keeping. She was a being like none he’d ever known and he accepted her completely. His mother was wary. ‘I’ve never known it!’ she’d said (put out that Martha always left their rooms a fraction neater than she found them). ‘A woman needs her own home and a man in it. A waste, I call it – and should she be here on her own?’
