The Pursuit of William Abbey

by Claire North

  Of Esther, her housegirl, whose mother was cruel and whose father was never very interested, but who will build a house far from this place as soon as she can, and raise children who are loved, and do better than her elders did, and find that spot of earth where every footprint is sacred, somewhere beyond the river.

  Of Baker Senior – spears, spears, spears, coming for him, coming for him, coming in the dark, and he can neither fight nor run away.

  Of Mpilo, his houseman, who was called a runt when he lived in the kraal and rejoices now in ratting on his fellow Zulu men, in the little slivers of power his position gives him, man-made god by drip-fed cruelty.

  Of Fanyana, who works in the fields, and who secretly fought at Isandlwana and gutted three redcoats and a man in a funny hat; but who, when retribution came, hid in the caves and pretended he’d never held a spear in his life, and resented the world that had given him so much honour when he was young, because now that honour was lost for ever and the only way to bear the grief was to pretend it had never mattered in the first place.

  Of Baker Junior, who dreams of going to England one day, and being considered a gentleman.

  Of his daughter, who dreams of Langa. Langa was his name, the boy who burnt – Langa with the laughing smile. For a little while they had been children together, in the earliest days of Baker. No one had told them that she was white and he was black, and that this law surpassed all others. When she had finally come to understand this, she had at first cast him away, haughty in her new-found greatness, but he had refused to hate her. Then she had been kind to him, as you might to a mewling kitten, but he had refused to accept her scraps. Then she had been wicked and brutal, but he’d simply walked away without looking back. Then she had been lonely, and when at last they had outgrown all the childish notions that their parents told them were grown-up truths, they had been friends together again, and kissed a little, and not really got into the mood of it, and been caught with him fumbling with her bonnet.

  Her father has locked her indoors now, and soon she shall be sent to a cousin in the Cape. When they took Langa away, she told him that they wouldn’t hurt him, that her family were good people; kind people. They haven’t yet told her what happened at the boab tree, but it won’t be a surprise. Sometimes she’ll wish that she died in the fire, and then she won’t, because she wasn’t prepared to die then and doesn’t want to die now. Sometimes she is ashamed of her own will to live, but the veld leaves little place for sentimentality of this kind.

  When she gets older, she will try to bring some sort of understanding between the Bantu peoples and the whites, and will be assaulted once by a white man, once by a white woman, and eventually stabbed to death for her purse by a wandering black man too hungry to talk about the harmony of mankind.

  That is her future, but for now she dreams of Langa, and the life they will live together, in another place.

  Then I opened my eyes, and Langa was at the end of my bed.

  He was barely perceptible against the thin dawn washing through the cracks in my wall. His face was an obscure medley of contours and depressions, washed away by flame, no colour to his eyes, nor lips, nor blood; merely shadow, shaped. His right arm was still broken, bone protruding, and when he moved it was not as if he stepped, but rather as if he were propelled forward across the earth upon a haze, left arm reaching out for me, fingers of popped bone and blistered flesh uncoiling for my eyes.

  I didn’t scream. Fear and the half-thought of dreaming held me prisoner, and perhaps I reasoned that if this was a nightmare, a guilt-induced fantasy, it was one I deserved. His shadow should come for me and claim its prize, and if I could do nothing for his life, at least in his death I could confess my sins to him.

  So I didn’t move, and his fingers closed around my face with the same frozen touch as his mother’s voice in my mind, and then passed inside me, so that greyness and ice filled my sight, and then he folded into me, becoming one with my body, and the darkness consumed me whole.

  When I woke again, he was gone.

  Eleven days later, I received the telegram informing me of my sister’s death.

  She had died instantly of an unknown condition, assumed to be her heart, at the precise moment that the shadow of Langa had entered my body.

  Chapter 9

  Abbey stopped speaking, and for a while stared into the fire-scalded sky. The rain had died down as he spoke, and I waited, not daring to move, thinking that the slightest tremor might break this moment. Inside, my sisters were sleeping, dead as the grave. I wondered what time it was, and how long he had been talking, but decided in the same moment that it didn’t matter.

  At last, with a sigh and a shifting of his weight, he creaked to his feet and said, “Tea, Sister?”

  I rose at once, feeling now how cold I was within my bundled shawl, and the dampness at my cuffs and feet. “Tea would be pleasant,” I replied, as prim and proper as Matron might ever have wished.

  We went into the house, and in the dining room I set some logs into the fireplace and a few handfuls of shattered kindling, and squatted, huffing and puffing over their infant glows as Abbey pumped water into the iron kettle and, grumbling a little, rifled through our cupboards in search of a proper brew.

  “Matron hides the good stuff,” I murmured, coming into the kitchen to find him sniffing jars and tins with an expression of distaste. “She hides the good tea, whisky, brandy, rubbing alcohol, and the good ink and paper. She shares them in the end, but waits until we’re all so pent up that the smallest kindness will make us love her. That way she can always be a hero when things are bad, having let them get bad in the first place. You fetch the cups; I’ll find the drink.”

  I felt both incredibly calm and strangely light as I burrowed into Matron’s secret supplies. I could drink Matron dry and she’d never be able to complain; not about someone stealing goods she herself stole. As I scrambled back to the dining room, clutching my prize, I wondered why I’d never done this before.

  Abbey was waiting by the fire, sitting on the floor with legs curled up beneath him, hands out to the flame. The kettle was on its rod above the blazing logs, not yet singing. Four metal mugs sat between us, one for tea, one for booze. I poured us each a finger of whisky, and, fetching a bundle of itchy cushion from the wooden bench by the door, made myself a little den of wool and fluff that I could curl into as sometimes I had with Matilda, in those days before.

  I wondered how long he’d waited to tell this story, if it had brought him to the Jardin. All of us here were just waiting: to live or die, powerless. Sisters waiting for another bed, another patient, another coffin, another fond farewell. Matron waiting for it all to end, every day building another wall between herself and tomorrow, in case she woke one day and discovered that it would never end at all. Abbey watching Charlwood, a story on the tip of his tongue, unspoken.

  Matilda waiting for me on the other side of the ocean.

  This was the grey place where the world was suspended, lost in rain.

  I waited, and he watched the fire, and for a while that was enough.

  Chapter 10

  I have six brothers and sisters, he said. The eldest, Carmine, died on 8 July 1884 at 11.23 p.m. She was a nurse, as you are, and I suppose the person I loved more than any other. That’s why the shadow killed her, of course. Her husband saw it slither from her body at the instant of her death, drag itself up by broken arm and blistered limb. He said it lurched, feet still buried in the heart of her, and looked around their parlour in Houndsditch for a moment as if trying to orientate itself, then put its gaze to the south and shuffled out of the room, right through the wall. It was fading from his sight before it left his house. You have to have the curse, or be present at the moment of dying, to ever see the shadow clearly.

  Langa. His name was Langa.

  I knew none of this until the telegram came. The message was delivered by a Xhosa man in a blue uniform on a dusty horse.

  Carmine dead STOP Died suddenly 8th
this month STOP Buried St Saviour’s STOP

  That was all.

  Forty-three days after that, the letter from her husband arrived, outlining the further details of my sister’s end, but by then I had already begun to suspect that it wasn’t a random act that had killed her, but me myself, and my shadow.

  I should tell you something of the place I grew up.

  I was raised on the outskirts of London, in Highgate. I say the outskirts – when I was born, it was still a leafy hill looking down to the city, but now these things are almost indistinguishable, city from town from village from field. My father, Clifton Abbey, was a banker with aspirations to being accepted among men too rich to ever have need of common sense. My mother, Eugenia, was a hypochondriac. These were their two defining characteristics.

  There was a time when my parents loved each other.

  I have sat with my mother when the shadow is near, and looked her in the eye and known the truth of it. She was not sure she would love him when they married, but resolved to love him nonetheless with such a strength of passion, duty and determination that his every fault vanished before her eyes, and his nobler qualities were built up to a tower of strength. Can it therefore be said that she didn’t love him, having shaped him to such a creature?

  Maybe the worst that can be said is that she loved the idea of her husband, and for a while that was enough. She aspired to be a good wife, but their mutual sense of what this meant was unconducive. A good wife is quiet in company. A good wife is dutiful in the bedroom but does not enjoy sex, because for a woman to enjoy copulation is to be in some profound way unclean. A good wife manages the household so that the man need not, without complaint and without question. A good wife ensures that the children’s governess is strict and honourable, and that the baby does not cry while the husband works. She has only a few female friends, who are as good as she, and no male ones whatsoever. She predicts her husband’s needs, and is grateful for the financial support he provides. All these things my mother aspired to be, above and beyond all else, and for a while it worked, until being all these things and nothing else, she became lonely, disturbed and a little mad.

  When her first child was born, Carmine, my father reported that she was a very beautiful baby, and that when she had a brother she would make the perfect companion for the little boy. And ten months later, my mother gave birth to Edward, and my father cried with joy – actually cried – and I would not have believed he was capable of such feelings if I had not heard my mother speak of it when the knowing was on me.

  But children often die when they are young, and the next child was born stillborn, and eleven months after that my brother Andrew came along, and a year and a half after that there was Ernestine, then a child whose name was never spoken who died three days into life, then Gregory, then me, and finally my youngest sister Anne. After Anne, there was one more child born prematurely and too weak to live. But by then it was clear that both Edward and Andrew were going to grow to be strong, healthy boys, and my parents did not attempt to have children again, and my mother retreated to her rooms upstairs, her duty done.

  My father, being a good husband, did not take a mistress.

  My mother, being a good wife, did not complain. She did not complain of loneliness, or of the hole in her body torn by childbirth that meant she was plagued by painful, persistent urinary incontinence. She did not complain that her children were all raised by other women, or that she had nothing to say, nothing to do, no learning or occupation. Instead, she acquired an endless succession of medical complications, which she also handled without complaint. Her belly swelled hugely, then contracted in a single night. Her skin broke out in violent red spots, and then faded to sallow grey. She lost her hair, then it re-grew, curly like fresh ferns. She lost her appetite, then gorged on nothing but potatoes for almost a month. She ballooned. She shrank. Her feet became purple, humongous, then her hands, then they reverted again to normal. The doctors announced that she had a woman’s hysteria. I would say that this war has given us enough men struck blind without ever bleeding, and more soldiers become cripples without a single blow being inflicted, that perhaps the time has come to alter the language of such things.

  By the time Carmine was fifteen, she was already running much of the house, as my mother waxed and waned in her upstairs room. My father’s prophecy had been made truth – my eldest sister was nurse, teacher, sometimes even maid to my brothers, charged with constantly watching over them and ensuring that they did not bump their knees or eat boiled sweets. At the end of the day she would present herself with the whole clan in my father’s study and deliver a report on our well-being. Edward and Andrew are doing well with letters. Ernestine has been attending to her singing. Gregory continues to improve his handwriting. William and Anne have been diligent in their prayers.

  When Edward and Andrew were shipped off to boarding school, with Gregory and me put under the more formal supervision of a tutor for most of the day – a butcher of Latin, bleeder of pious proverbs – it was naturally assumed that Carmine would marry. She had been such a dutiful child that there could be no question of her refusing a suitable match if one were found, so when she was discovered kissing Ivor, the watchmaker’s boy, the shock was so great that my mother went blind for two days.

  The whole business was hushed up, and Carmine sent to live with my uncle in Kettering. If anything could purge a girl of reckless ideas, it was Kettering.

  Unfortunately, my uncle had a wife with some distinctly modern notions. Despite having declared sympathies for Chartists, suffragists and other agitators, no one really paid her much attention, and she was tolerated as a good Christian woman, visiting the sick, poor and needy on a regular basis and generally showing a vigour that induced in my mother one of the few scowls of hatred she ever showed in all her long years of confinement. Had my parents realised that my aunt actually went so far as to tend the sick and talk to the needy, they might have forbid Carmine from going north at all.

  As it was, they didn’t. They assumed my aunt’s goodness was nothing more than the standard once-monthly disposing of meagre charity to the grateful unwashed. So when Carmine wrote home saying that she had been visiting the infirmary, they thought nothing of it, and were frankly astonished when she declared her intention to abandon Kettering, marriage and conventional wisdom and enrol with the Nightingale School for Nurses.

  Furious letters and telegrams flew, but by the time my father realised how earnest Carmine was and got on a train to put things straight, he was too late. She was already on her way, and the mistress of the school declared in a letter written in a tiny, stiff hand that Carmine demonstrated precisely the kind of character the Nightingale sisters looked for.

  My father abandoned the chase, his pride and his daughter.

  Though not ostracised in the way Gregory would later be, she was rarely spoken of, almost never welcomed at family functions, and her picture was removed from the staircase wall.

  I was twelve when my sister qualified as a nurse, and she was invited to the house of Florence Nightingale herself to be blessed by the lady of the lamp. My brothers were all off at boarding school, and my father had long since lost interest in his younger offspring. I was an underfoot annoyance, left in the care of governesses and tutors who cared as little for me as I did for them. I read alone, played alone, and dreamt of breaking free and exploring the world. And Carmine, my rebellious, dangerous oldest sister was my hero.

  When I was finally sent to boarding school, I was informed I should regularly write to my family; any boy who didn’t fulfil this ritual requirement would go without supper, or receive a few swipes of the cane for repeated offences. I naturally wished to eat and avoid pain, so would write to my father and mother, who almost never replied, or to Edward or Andrew, who absolutely never replied. As other boys received correspondence from home and I did not, I became even more isolated in my eccentric little world, and in this way and without any particular fanfare, I wrote one day to Ca
rmine. She was, after all, family, and my teachers had no knowledge of the shame that was attached to her name. It wasn’t a very good letter: a general well-wishing upon her birthday, which I got wrong by several days, and a hope that she was enjoying being a nurse – something of that sort.

  Four days later, what a reply I received! As warm and lively a rush of words as I had ever dreamt of, a cascade of affection and enquiry for my well-being, my hopes and my education; exhortations to look after myself and, of course, take more walks and breathe more fresh air (nursing felt much as physicians did on this topic – if walking and fresh air couldn’t cure your malady, you were in considerable difficulty) – and to write regularly.

  So began a correspondence. In Carmine I found all the warmth and joy I had lacked at home, and in me I think Carmine found a connection with the family that had forsaken her, however feeble it might be through the pen of a fourteen-year-old boy.

  Sometimes, when I returned to London, I would sneak away to see her, and we would have tea and cake and I would feel marvellously mature and responsible, and she would tell me about nursing and her secret fiancé, who felt that more votes for men, and eventually even votes for women, was both a social necessity and an inevitability, and my head swam and my heart soared and I loved her.

  I loved her, and it is testimony to her excellence that growing up did not diminish my affection, but if anything made it stronger. When boyish illusions were swept away and I began to perceive the real Carmine beneath the sisterly care, I saw that she was more herself, more whole in her heart and her stories, than anyone else I had ever known. I was a spider’s web of humanity, blown and torn in the slightest of breezes, and longed to be as solid and majestic as she.