Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

  In the trap we’re quiet. My arm sings with the dark rich bruise left by the pony’s mouth. I open my mouth to the wind. It rushes in, cold and dry. It takes away the taste of the hot sickroom and Mr Gilmore’s words. Fear is all through me. Disease.

  ‘It will not harm you, Iris,’ Papa says. He sees my thoughts, as always. ‘It will not harm as long as you obey the Rules.’

  In the black, my feet find the narrow ledge beneath my window. Light snow patterns my hands and face. I crawl across the slate. In the stable block ahead, one window throws out a weak guiding light.

  Fingers dug into crevices, I move across. Below is the long drop and then the flagstones. It pulls at me like the tide. The world is peculiar, pitched at a slant.

  At the second gable I grasp the ridge and throw a leg over. Something skates away from my foot and I’m sliding at great speed towards the drop. The night land rushes up. Cold streams run down my spine.

  My boots meet a yielding surface. I come to rest. Needling pain in my fingertips which are rough, wet. The shaky gutter creaks. I’m ankle-deep in old mulch and the bones of dead birds.

  At the window his hands reach to catch me. I scrape over the sill, in. Something drums wetly in my ear. A heart.

  Tom says under his breath, ‘Made such a clatter, you did.’

  We are still. I think of Shakes, at the other end of the stables. I think of my father and the Rules. A board groans under my soaked feet. The stables sigh beneath. Warm movements in straw, patient horse breath. Mice rattle lightly in the eaves. A spiral of snow puffs gently through the window. No one comes.

  ‘Getting too big for that,’ says Tom at length.

  ‘No fear,’ I say. I am still loose, weak. ‘Fine talk from you, anyhow.’ Tom overtops me by a head, now. His wrists shoot out of his sleeves like vines.

  ‘Blood,’ he says, uneasy. ‘Smell it.’

  ‘The roof. Scraped a bit.’

  He takes my hands in his.

  ‘Just fingers,’ I say. ‘It’s—’ He pinches my arm for quiet, and I stop. He goes to the corner and does something. Soft sounds. Presently a cool sliding on my hands. His fingers slip around mine. The cut-grass smell of horse liniment.

  Tom lives above the stables at Rawblood. Our friendship has slipped from day into night. Crossing the roof is crossing into another country. I break the Rules every night, like this.

  I want to ask him, Does it make you sad? Do you wish you were at home still? But I don’t. What would be the use? Tom has no mother and I have no mother. Soon his father will be gone and he will have no one. I don’t know much about the world and so on but I do know this: that the scales are already heavily weighted in my favour and this will tip them further.

  Too much goes unspoken between us, lately. There’s too much untruth. My father, the disease … I am pulled in opposing directions. Strong, complex bonds. I don’t know what to do so I test them all. I defy my father. I lie to Tom. I flout the Rules and court the disease. One day something will give, but what?

  Tom says, ‘Stink.’

  I say, ‘What?’

  ‘Wait.’

  Now he’s said it I can smell it. The scent of decay. My boots are thick with mud and gutter rot.

  There’s rustling. He hands me straw in a musty clump, takes a rag. I stand like a heron, one-legged. He crouches at my feet. I bend and we scrub, wrinkling our noses. I sway, my hands clutch for balance. I seize Tom’s hair in fistfuls. ‘Let me, leave it, pest, we’ll both go down, leave it.’ We tip slowly to the floor in silent, shaky laughter. My fingers curl weakly through his hair.

  There’s no trouble on the way out. We move through the dark stable, into the open air. When we’re clear, at the foot of Sheepstor, we shout. Our voices are high and silly. The air is fine needles. The last of the cloud is clearing. The stars are out, the moon is up. It shows the bowl of white dusted land.

  ‘Trout?’ I say. ‘Be rising.’

  Tom says, ‘Didn’t bring the line.’ His chilly fingers find mine. They flutter then hold. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Show you something.’ We climb. Above us, the rocks are flat and black against the sky.

  ‘Here.’ Tom pulls me down into a shallow defile between the boulders. A narrow strip of turf snakes away, a path through the bulbous granite. The world is far overhead. It’s clammy, frozen, the rock closes in like teeth.

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘Down here,’ he says, and vanishes. I follow but he’s gone as if into air. My hand slides along the lines of the slick rock passage. I turn and stumble, crack my shin on hard cold stone. My breath hovers white before me. I think, I’m alone, he’s gone, my heart hammers, fit to burst.

  A black slit hovers ahead, dark against the jumble. An arm emerges from the crevice. ‘That’s it,’ he says, guides me in.

  Inside the cave the match gutters far up above to where the walls taper to a point like a tiny steeple. The air smells of turned earth and the faint old tang of fox. The walls are bright green, covered in moss that shines and moves under the light as if under a caress. The chamber is wide enough for five men to lie full length on the pale floor. Near the back, in the shadows, a tall crooked stone like an altar. On the dark stone lies a small button, bright red. A child’s shoe worn thin. A wooden spoon. A horseshoe and something old and mouldy that may have been bread. Behind, something gleams in the slanting shadow, something white and misshapen. It shivers. My heart is cold.

  It’s a trick of the light, of course. A lump of old quartz bathed in candlelight. But for a moment it looks like bone and dead flesh. A corpse curled at the foot of the altar.

  Tom’s face is branded with shadow, dancing. He grins. The match fizzes. He says, ‘Listen.’

  Behind the walls, within the rock, shrill voices rage in unknown tongues, hammers ring on steel, the sound of distant slaughter. Thin sobbing; a whistling shriek then whispers soft as breath. The sounds enclose us.

  ‘It’s the river,’ Tom says, ‘running through the ground. It won’t harm.’ It sounds like all the harm in the world. The match flares and spits.

  ‘Don’t let it go out,’ I say. ‘Tom—’

  ‘Wait,’ he says. ‘I’ve a … wait.’ He fumbles in his pocket, and the little flame dances, dims. Shadows lick up, the dark is coming. What happens to the white stone in the dark? Perhaps it is not always a white stone.

  ‘Tom,’ I say, but flame rears up from the little candle stub, brave, scattering light. The walls leap into being, green and shining. He makes to put the candle on the altar.

  ‘No!’ I say, ‘not there.’ We sit side by side on the cave floor. It’s sandy, and friendlier than expected.

  ‘Who would make this?’ I ask.

  ‘No one made it – it’s here, that’s all.’

  ‘People come here,’ I say. The small shoe lies quiet on the stone beyond.

  ‘Old folk,’ Tom says. He rolls the vowels, lengthens the Devon in them. ‘Turn your coats inside out to keep Saint Nick away. Walk three times widdershins round Bexley Tor under moonlight.’ He sniffs, shrugs, draws his finger in a circle on the sandy floor around the candle. ‘Lo,’ he says, in a high pinching voice like Mrs Brewer who’s married to the butcher in Dartmeet. ‘For I have drawn the line in the sand, and no one shall touch this candle now, lest they die.’ He looks at me and grins. ‘No one can put it out, now. See, pest? Magic.’

  ‘What’s that noise?’ A scratching, a faint sound in the distance, like stone rubbing against stone.

  ‘The river,’ says Tom. ‘Told you already.’

  But it’s different. Stealthy. I look up, around. Shadows flicker. ‘What does it do?’ I say, looking at the crooked altar stone, the glistening quartz behind. I don’t like to take my eye from them, somehow.

  ‘Now, you may give gifts here, pest, that the one you love mayn’t ever die.’ Tom’s still in Mrs Brewer’s voice. He takes a brown glass bottle from his coat pocket and drinks, grimacing, then stands and goes to the altar. He puts something crumpled on it. We sit and l
ook at his father’s glove where it lies dirty, limp-fingered on the granite.

  Tom says, ‘Just in case.’ He rubs his face hard. His cheek flushes red under his palm. ‘It’s nonsense,’ he says, ‘like all those things.’ But he leaves the glove where it is.

  I say, ‘We go to see him once a fortnight.’

  ‘I know,’ says Tom. ‘Tom the stable boy harnesses the horses, shoves old Shakes up on the box of the trap. I know everything you do, pest.’

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ I say, automatic. There’s a strange thin bite to his words. The line between our day and night time selves blurs and wavers. I have the beginning of a headache. It’s so mournful, the sound. Stone grinding against stone.

  ‘What is it,’ Tom says, ‘between them? Between your father and mine?’ The bottle chinks on the floor.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘Bad blood,’ Tom says. ‘Mystery! Intrigue!’

  ‘Curses,’ I say, ‘Ancient Wrongs.’ Our hilarity is brittle and raucous, the joke a feather’s breadth from truth. It’s thrilling, like walking on the clear ice where it’s thinnest over the pond.

  ‘They say things in the village,’ Tom says. ‘About him, you. Rawblood.’

  ‘What?’ I say. The clear ice, and beneath – what? Cold, deep dark.

  ‘There’s a murdered girl buried at Rawblood.’ He runs light fingers up the back of my arm. It gives me shivers, not entirely unpleasant.

  I bat him off. ‘Stop. Where? It’s not true.’

  ‘Some say she’s under the cellar floor,’ Tom says. ‘Some say she’s in an attic, the pieces of her, anyhow, in a chest bound with iron … But most likely she’s under the cedar tree. Buried beneath. The roots feed on her corpse.’ The hairs on my arm rise to his light fingers. ‘It can be seen from a certain window of Rawblood. Her grave. It’s always freshly dug. Wet earth. You see it if you’re about to die.’

  ‘Ugh,’ I say. His fingers stroke; they raise delicate chills.

  ‘Yup, it’s all rubbish,’ says Tom. He shifts away a little on the sandy floor. I rub my prickling arms. ‘I know of someone who really—’ he says, stops and starts again. ‘My Uncle Rob was a butler. The butler at Rawblood, as it happens.’

  ‘We don’t have a butler,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ says Tom, with intonation I cannot place. ‘Not now. My dad was older than Rob, by nearly twenty years. He took care of him. More like a father than a brother, I suppose. He doesn’t talk to me much, Dad. But he’ll tell stories about Uncle Rob. Anyhow, one morning Rob’d not come down to servants’ breakfast. And when they went up into the eaves of Rawblood to look for him he was there, cold, dead in his bed. Eyes wide like pebbles, like he’d seen something. My dad sets a store of anger on it. Daft ideas. Says it was Rawblood that killed him. That Rob’s life was taken, because he did something, something to displease your father …’ Tom starts, recollects himself, looks at me wide-eyed. I shrug, my heart beating fast.

  Tom says, ‘I look like him. Like Uncle Rob.’ The drink’s in his voice, now, a little. ‘Apart from his red hair. And now you’re thinking, “Oh, that’s why they can’t get on: makes the old man sad to see his son look so like the brother, I understand, now.” But you’d be wrong, pest. That’s not why he hates me. It’s worse, because there’s no reason to it. “Rawblood’s ill luck for the Gilmores.” How many times have I heard it from him? But he sent me off there, all right.’ The bottle chinks soft in the sand. ‘Sold me like a pony.’

  I take his hand. The candle flickers. The shadows move. Tom’s words hang in the dark between us, mingling with others I have heard. He did something to displease your father. The devil in the night. I see him in my mind: Robert Gilmore, who I never set eyes on. Quick one moment and dead the next. Perhaps it was the disease. Perhaps it killed him. The ice is thin, thin …

  Tom clips me over the head. ‘Thought you might turn tail, pest,’ he says, ‘when you first came in here.’ He’s strained, light. ‘Eyes like a barn owl.’ His hand holds mine tight.

  ‘Didn’t though,’ I say, flooded with relief. The world shivers and rights itself. The dark tide retreats.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Too right. You didn’t. Here.’ The liquid catches in my throat. It’s like drinking gas lamps. I cough and drink again. Candlelight falls, beautiful and restless, on everything.

  ‘I like it,’ I say. I mean the cave, the drink, the moor outside, the light within. I mean the warmth at my side where he sits. His messy head haloed in the candlelight. I am giddy with the reprieve – from what? I play with Tom’s bootlace and imagine his foot within. Shapes dance on the shining green walls. The dim roof above is infinite.

  ‘What would it be,’ I say, ‘not to die, ever, anyhow? If by putting a glove on a stone, you could do it? Might be awful.’

  ‘People shouldn’t die,’ Tom says. ‘Just shouldn’t.’ When I look I see something is happening. He’s stiff, pale, arms locked around himself. He shakes with something violent. ‘Put out the light, Iris.’ The whites of his eyes gleam.

  ‘Magic,’ I say. ‘Remember? Can’t put it out.’ I don’t want the dark. I am strange of a sudden. As though my mind is growing, pushing gently at my skull. The sound. It’s like the earth is moving. Readying itself to bury us. Or as if the stone is breathing. I don’t like it.

  ‘Just – put it out.’ His voice thick and cottony, his mouth awry like a child’s. The candle hisses on my licked thumb. The dark drops down on us like a weight. He’s gone, the cave is gone, am I gone? Behind us, within the rock, the battle rages; gurgling voices speak long incantations. Beneath it Tom is crying, small sounds.

  He says, ‘I should be minding the farm.’ He doesn’t say home. ‘I should have been there, these years, learning to mind it. But I wasn’t and now all I know is horses, so I’m no good.’

  I put my hand into the dark. It comes to rest on his face which is hot and wet. Shifting closer I find odd bits of him to hold – a collar, an elbow – and take them tightly.

  Sadness comes from him like breath.

  Tom folds his arms around me. He breathes by my ear. He smells of drink, thick and acid, filled with juniper. His hand on my back is large and flat, then small and insistent. ‘No point in it, he’s done,’ Tom says into my hair. ‘It’s as good as finished.’

  I think of Henry Gilmore’s drawn, translucent face. The afternoon light on his dying skin. ‘I know,’ I say. I cannot say, it will be all right.

  His heart thumps hot against my collarbone. I want to climb inside his flesh and pluck the suffering from him. I fumble for his hand. His warm palm closes on mine. Around us the river rises in a torrent, burbling mad. Voices like stone grinding on stone. I don’t mind it now. Something good moves between us like a living thing. Tom starts. He says, ‘Look, look.’

  The cave is full of moonlight. Juddering, shivering. Bars of silver scatter as if we’re underwater – across the cave entrance, Tom’s spiky head; his face, his ear, his shoulder, caught in moments of clarity. Light glances off the corner of the altar, chases across the walls. Shadows of far-above clouds scud across the white floor. ‘Oh,’ I say. It is insane, it is beautiful.

  Slippery light plays about the altar stone. I squint. The white stone at the base, half in shadow. I edge closer to Tom. His cheek on mine. His voice warms the air. ‘Iris? You could tell me your secrets. They’d be safe. I wouldn’t ever, ever tell.’

  ‘What a shame,’ I say with sympathy. ‘He’s touched in the head.’ I punch him. To break the strangeness. He punches me back, hard.

  ‘All right, I suppose you won’t.’ Tom’s finger slides light on my throat; it comes to rest in the notch of my collarbone. That punch didn’t work, the strangeness is everywhere. He says, ‘I do feel a bit … touched.’ We shake, laughing, gripped tight to one another. I breathe the soft place under his ear.

  The moonlight plays about the cave. It glances over the pale stone at the foot of the altar. In the shifting light and dark it could almost, almost be a very thin p
ale person, curled on the floor. Glimpses of things that could be bony fingers, spread wide; a bare skull peeping through baby-fine hair. The blink of a black mad eye. The white stone uncurls. The white thing stands slowly upright. The cave goes dark.

  It’s all right, Tom is saying. The moon went in. Iris, it’s all right. But he’s wrong. The rock and the river, high and terrible. Beneath, stealthy sounds of someone coming. Padding soft across the sand, across the cave floor, coming closer in the dark. Desire.

  I seize Tom’s calloused, puzzled hand in mine; I drag him roughly up and go, bent double, stumbling. Something groans like stone collapsing. The cave shudders. Something cracks and bursts underfoot – the bottle? A white bone? – and flattens into crushed shards. The sound of the river rises, harsh and rusted. Tom calls out and I pull him faster, we’re clattering and slipping in the dark. Something grazes my back. Light and thin like a finger. Traces the length of my spine. We’re out. Behind, in the cave, something moves.

  On the hill I haul the clear night into my lungs and vomit. Tom is anxious, fond. I can’t answer him. His hand is on my brow; I shiver at his touch. The warmth that suffused our bones and flesh, which drew us together, is gone. What is he to me, anyhow? I see with dreary clarity that everything lovely has been stripped from the world.

  ‘There was someone,’ I say. ‘In there.’ My breath is still too fast. The world tilts.

  ‘Iris,’ he says. ‘I don’t think there was. My fault, I was telling tales. Trying to frighten you.’ But he’s frightened now. I hear it. His hand is on my brow. ‘You’re very hot,’ he says. ‘You’re ill … Iris …’

  Diseased.

  ‘Keep away,’ I say. ‘You’ll die.’

  ‘Don’t shout,’ Tom says. ‘And I doubt it.’

  ‘Don’t touch me.’ I’m hot and cold by turns. The fever dream is all around. White shapes drift across the gauzy sky. I thought something horrible was in the cave. But the horrible thing is inside me. Here it is at last. Horror autotoxicus. The disease.