by Kim Wilkins
“He shall bleed me to death,” Virgil said, his voice quavering.
“No, no, indeed I shall not,” Mr Edghill boomed. “I shall not even hurt you. Here, I have brought my little friends to meet you.” He withdrew from his case a small glass jar with four black leeches in it.
Virgil gasped and recoiled. “They are taken from the very swamp from whence my illness came. Put them away. Put them away.”
“No, I assure you they are friendly little Yorkshire leeches, from a clear pond near my house. Mrs Marley, could you help me with his clothes.”
I reached over and unbuttoned Virgil’s shirt. It stank with sweat and illness. Edward held one of Virgil’s arms and I held the other as the doctor unscrewed the lid, and turned the jar over on Virgil’s bare chest.
“Once they have tasted my blood, all the other creatures in the mud shall want some,” Virgil cried. He was weakened by illness, and could only struggle feebly.
“Hush, Virgil. You are delirious.” I watched with revulsion as the muscular little creatures moved across his white skin, expanding and contracting as they wriggled, until finally deciding to take purchase with their greedy suckers. Although leeches are supposed to be painless, Virgil howled.
“Stop them, stop them, they shall extract my very soul!”
“Quiet, old friend,” Edward said.
Virgil lay back and took refuge in a brief, welcome moment of unconsciousness.
“His brain is very addled,” Mr Edghill noted.
“Will he be better after this?” I asked.
“Oh yes, much better. Mr Snowe, keep giving him regular doses of cordial. He’ll be well again in only a week or so.”
A week! Already it had been three days, and Virgil had not been to work. I did not know how we would eat if he had to stay away from work for another week.
Finally the leeches were finished their work. Mr Edghill picked them from Virgil’s chest with a pair of tweezers and mopped up four tiny trickles of blood. I closed up his shirt and covered him in blankets. It seemed he had fallen asleep. He was paler than ever, but seemed at peace.
“Thank you, Mr Edghill,” Edward was saying. “I shall accompany you to the door.”
“Goodbye, Mrs Marley,” the surgeon said.
I nodded my farewell and turned back to Virgil. Only after a few moments did I realise that I had not paid the surgeon. I dashed from the room to catch him before he left, and was met at the door by Edward.
“Edward, I haven’t paid Mr Edghill!” I exclaimed, moving to push the door open.
Edward stopped my hand. “It is no matter. I have paid him.”
I became aware of two awkward facts. First, that we now owed Edward money. Second, that Edward had not taken his fingers from around my wrist, and now stood uncomfortably close.
“Edward,” I said, deciding that dealing with the first problem was infinitely easier than dealing with the second. “I cannot be in debt to you. I have a little money put aside for –”
“I won’t hear of it. Virgil is my oldest friend. I love him like a brother, and I will not see you starve. I may not earn much from my trade, but I earn enough to be able to help a friend in need.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Please, Gette, let me help.”
I carefully extracted my wrist from his fingers, and would not meet his eyes. “I thank you,” I said. “And hope one day to be able to repay your kindness.”
How am I to admit this? Virgil had been so detached towards me for such a long time that Edward’s intense interest, inappropriate though it may seem, filled me with guilty delight. And I did not move away from him. It seemed we stood like that for a century, the door on one side, my husband’s sickbed on the other. Finally, I lifted my head and looked into his face. He had been waiting.
“Gette, you deserve a different life from this.”
“I am happy with my life. I love my husband and we are good company for each other.”
“You have a child on the way.”
“And Virgil will be well by then. He looks forward to the birth.”
Edward shook his head, exasperated. “His job is killing him, Gette. Virgil is not like the rest of us, he cannot endure such ghastliness. He will not be able to stay in work much longer. Then what will you do for money?”
“Perhaps Aunt Hattie will help. Perhaps my parents…”
“You know they will not.”
“I will not allow hope to die within me. My parents love me. They would not see me starve.”
“Nor would I.” He made as though to reach out to touch me, then pulled his hand back. “Already I cannot bear to see your beauty clothed in rags.”
He thought me beautiful! Clad like a pauper, as great as a house with pregnancy, he thought me beautiful. I was flattered, and I ached for more. To feel like a Woman again, and not an easily disregarded piece of furniture.
“I am not so beautiful,” I said. I cringe now for my coquetry!
“Oh, but you are,” Edward replied, this time his touch reached my cheek. His finger lingered a moment there, then dropped to my collarbone. A dark thrill surged through me. “I have always thought you so. More beautiful than Charlotte – compared to you she was a working ox.”
My skin tingled where he touched me, his fingertip pressing the skin lightly as he trailed it down to the very edge of my bodice, coming to rest on the upside swell of my breast. His head dropped to my shoulder, and I felt his lips pressed urgently against my neck, making my pulse thunder. A light stubble grazed my skin as those lips descended, making to follow his fingers. Though I felt he was attached to me as inexorably as the leech had been to Virgil’s skin, I gathered my wits and lifted his head away from me. My fingers lingered a moment in his hair – clean, fresh-smelling – but soon they too were reluctantly called home and I took a significant step away from him.
“Edward, we must not. My husband, your friend, is sick in the bedroom. I am too selfish accepting such flattery from you. We know it cannot lead any further.”
He nodded, began to speak in hurried, embarrassed tones. “Yes, I am very sorry. It will not happen again, forgive me, I shall go out for some fresh air.” He turned and opened the door, went outside and closed it behind him. I leaned against it, glad for the strong wood to support me, for my knees were like water and a guilty desire churned clumsy like molasses in the pit of my stomach.
Edward came back late that night and announced he had delayed his return to London so that he could help me to nurse Virgil back to health. No mention was made of that afternoon’s situation, and I made only scant eye contact with him while I fixed him supper. In fact, it was in the process of avoiding his eyes that I noticed the dark semi-circles under his fingernails, and I knew immediately he had spent the evening in the employ of Doctor Flood. I am no fool, and I realise he did this in Virgil’s stead, so that my husband’s salary might continue, and not because he had any need of the extra money. I did not speak of it, because I simply haven’t the vocabulary to express such gratitude. And I am afraid that the price Edward might ask for repayment would be too high.
Four days passed, and Virgil was delirious or barely conscious for most of that time. Every now and again he would squeeze my hand feebly and say my name, but other than that I might have believed his spirit resided in some other realm, and that I was to him as distant as the north star. I can write calmly now, but at the time I believed that it might all soon be over, that he would most certainly die. This conviction was accompanied by so many uncomfortable feelings I know not which was uppermost in my heart: grief, for I cannot imagine life without my husband, without his large warm hands, his melancholy eyes, his slow, unaffected movements; guilt, for I had only a few days before allowed Edward extreme liberty. And (I can barely admit this) relief: without Virgil, my child and I would be welcomed by my family, and I would no longer have to worry whether the poor infant would be able to eat enough to grow strong.
But on the morning of the fifth day, I rose from where I had slept next t
o the fire and entered our bedroom, and Virgil’s eyes fluttered open and focused upon me. Recognised me.
“Gette,” he said weakly. “I die of thirst. Will you not bring me some water?”
As it was the first coherent thing he had said in nearly a week, my soul began to rejoice. He was going to be well again! I raced from his room and fetched Edward, who looked over him while I filled a cup with water. He drank the water greedily, settled back among the pillows, and said he felt he needed to sleep. We stood by while he drifted off. Tears stood in my eyes, and Edward, too, was Exultant.
“He will live,” he said. “I would not have believed it just two days ago, but look at him. He will live.”
Edward had, of course, never disclosed to me his fears for Virgil’s life, but I knew he had felt such fears. It was the other unspoken topic which stood between us. Edward smiled at me and said, “I shall leave you alone with him. I need to walk up to the village.”
I nodded and he left. I sank down onto the covers next to Virgil, and could no longer restrain myself from weeping. I wept and wept, a week’s worth of anxious tears, and when those tears were all shed, I rested my face on Virgil’s hand and dozed.
I awoke when I felt his fingers gently stroking my cheek. I sat up and Virgil smiled weakly at me.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“I feel as though I have been trampled by a herd of cattle. But I am no longer feverish. I slept, just now, peaceful as a babe. None of those appalling nightmares.”
“I’m glad.”
“Gette, how long have I been ill?”
“An entire week.”
“Only a week?”
“Yes, seven days. Why, my love?”
He shook his head slowly. “Gette, it seems I was away for seventy years.”
“Away? But you have been here all the time.”
“It seems I was elsewhere. Hellish places, Gette.”
“Don’t concern yourself,” I said, smoothing his hair.
He wriggled into a half-sitting position, and laid his long pale hands upon the covers. “At first I was at sea.” He frowned, as though trying to recall a time long past. “Yes, that’s right. I became aware that I was upon a boat, becalmed on a vast, endless sea. The sun was a distant glimmer, the cold sky grazing icy teeth against my skin. Not a thing moved, not a breath of wind came. The surface gleamed like a great mirror. I burned with thirst. Then I heard sounds – strange, hollow clangings like the workings of a great machine, and every sound was a blow to my brain, and every sound made the water crack and snap, surging into violent currents which pulled my boat downwards. This seemed to go on forever, and I froze under the pale sun and yet I could not die though I dearly wished it.”
“Don’t speak of dying, Virgil. You will be well very soon.” I did not want him to become excited, to overstimulate his imagination with these feverish memories. Virgil’s imagination is too closely linked to his ill health.
“But then, a moist heat began to crawl upon me, and somehow I had been delivered from my boat into the very heart of an Asian swamp. And upon my skin were the scratching, ghostly legs of a thousand insects. No part of my body was beyond their prying, they skittered across my throat, gathered at my nose and mouth, and one had worked its way into the space between my skull and my brain and was buzzing around and around, desperate to escape its new prison. Hot, hot, vertical sunlight bore down upon me and my body ran with perspiration. I tried to brush the insects off, but they stuck to my skin and mashed and crunched between my fingers leaving pale, viscid imprints on my knuckles.” He mimed the movements with his hands, and I attempted to pin them under my own, to calm them. “All around me were the hard, lean trees of those unforgiving climes, mute and inscrutable in their upright lines and horizontal shadows. The smells of the swamp were hot in my nostrils, half-rotted things, stagnant water, beasts and reptiles close, so close by.” He stopped and held his breath.
“Please, Virgil. Do not agitate yourself so. They were mere dreams. Mere phantoms of the imagination.”
He breathed out slowly, his eyes wide. “And in the water, amongst mud, debris, logs finally hollowed and fallen from millennia-old trees, were the unblinking eyes of the crocodile; he had been waiting for me since before history. Time slowed, the universe grew warm and hummed with waiting. When the beast moved it was too knowing, too deliberate. My limbs were paralysed, reptile skin dragged across my body. I tasted the slime of the swamp in my mouth. He pulled me under to suffocate in the mud.”
All was quiet for a moment, and then he turned his eyes back to mine. “And next I awoke, and you were there. My beautiful wife.”
“And here is where I shall always be. By you.”
Over the next twenty-four hours, Virgil grew strong enough to eat and to sit up properly in bed. But he was still very weak, and I suspect he may have a long recovery ahead of him. He began almost immediately to ask for laudanum, but Edward refused him, saying there was none in the house and that he would fetch some on the morrow. Of course, Virgil’s crystal phial was nearly full with the red-brown liquid, but I had carefully removed it from his room during his illness, and it now hid behind our tea-set on the sideboard. He did not question us, and seemed rather more concerned with sleeping on that first day, which was yesterday.
Then, late in the evening after supper, Edward came in to the bedroom to sit with me and look over Virgil. My husband was awake, but lying peacefully. I know not what possessed Edward to raise the topic of poetry again. Perhaps he had not guessed that Virgil had written nothing in months, and so was unaware that it may cause pain.
“So Virgil,” Edward said, “now you have a few weeks rest ahead of you, perhaps you can dash out a few poems for the new collection.”
“I…ah…I shall see. I’ve been rather involved in writing this long work: a great work, a masterpiece. I don’t want to pause in my thoughts of it, just to scratch out some petty lines for a collection.”
“Come, Virgil, we’ve had our best offer yet – why, it’s practically a guarantee of publication. Surely you must have a few morsels lying around, or some ideas that could be brought to fruition. Perhaps a segment of this epic you’re working on.” Edward grew excited. “Yes, why don’t you let me see it? I haven’t read anything new of yours for an age.”
“I’m tired,” Virgil snapped. “Leave me be.”
And now, realisation began to cross Edward’s countenance. He opened his mouth as if to say something, stopped himself, then started again. “Virgil, have you not written since last I was here?”
Virgil’s face lit up crimson with shame. “Get out of here,” he hissed. “My art does not have to answer to you.”
“It’s the laudanum, man. It has addled you. If you stay away from it, you will write again. My father told me-”
“Your father? Your father the apothecary dares to judge those of us who create? Why, what is that but the lowliest profession aspiring to clip the wings of the most elevated calling?”
“Now, Virgil, there’s no need to say such things,” Edward said. “Forget not your own origins. Forget not that I, too, write. That we have written together, and will again. And this time the collection will be published.”
Virgil’s hands shook with rage.
“Calm yourself, Virgil,” I said, but my words were lost, crushed to vapour in the thick atmosphere.
“The only reason the last collection failed was your miserable poetry,” he muttered darkly, twisting his hands on the bed covers. “I’d have been a bright star, only I was tarnished by your work.”
“Virgil, that is not true,” Edward said.
“It is true. I shall never write with you again.”
Edward snorted, Virgil’s insults coaxing his own temper out of hiding. “It seems you shall never write again anyway.”
“Leave me! Leave this house, leave this village. Return to your pills and your ointments and do not think to contact me again!”
I was horrified. “Virgil, no –�
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“Leave now!” he cried.
“And so I shall,” Edward replied, rising. “Goodbye, Virgil Marley. I have forgiven you once for this insult, but I shall not forgive you again.”
He stormed out of the room and I followed him.
“Gette, where are you going?” Virgil called, but I did not reply. I followed Edward around as he packed up his remaining things and made to leave.
“Don’t go, Edward. He’ll be calm soon. You struck a raw nerve. He is so distraught over not writing.”
“Georgette, while I have all respect and fondness for you, and would stay happily on your behalf, a man can only endure so much damage to his reputation.” As he said this, he folded his shirts haphazardly into his bag and snapped it shut.
“But Edward, he has been ill. Can you not forgive him?” Now I was following him to the kitchen, where he collected notepaper and a glass jar of ink.
“No. I cannot.”
“Please don’t go, for I know we cannot survive without you.”
At this he turned and set his mouth firmly. “You are not my wife.” He indicated my belly with a nod of his head. “That is not my child.”
Of course, he was right. I had already accepted much more generosity from him than was proper. I hung my head, ashamed.
“Oh, Gette,” he said, softer now, reaching out to lift my chin with his fingers. “I still care. But Virgil will be on his feet in a few days, and able to work again. Flood will always have him back. He has developed an attachment to Virgil. I promise you this, though: if things get too bad, really bad, write me a letter. I will race up here as quickly as I can and do whatever you wish me to in order to ease your burden.”
I nodded. “Farewell, then.”
He leaned close, and perhaps he was going to kiss me, but at that moment Virgil stumbled from his bedroom and leaned himself against the sideboard. The plates in it rattled against each other. “I thought I told you to go,” Virgil snarled.
I immediately stepped away from Edward, but I think Virgil knew he had captured us sharing a moment of tenderness, and it had made him doubly angry.
