The Corn

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  “My dearest,” his voice was fading again, “you have to leave me at dawn. My father rises early. You have to leave before he comes. I’m too weak to protect you.”

  “He won’t throw me out,” I said. “He won’t dare. I just don’t understand why he didn’t send for my mother when you first got ill.”

  “He did,” whispered Jak. “She didn’t come. I don’t blame her.”

  I stared open-mouthed. I didn’t believe it. She wouldn’t do that. “That’s not possible.” She couldn’t have been called, yet Lord Lydiard knew she was a fine herbalist and had saved Jak’s life when he was a baby. “But no one’s going to throw me out,” I hurried on. “I’m staying until you’re well.” He hadn’t the strength to argue. I gave him two more drops of medicine. He had nearly drunk halfway through the bottle. The rest of my work would be in nursing, but I was so frightened that my heartbeat pounded against my ribs and made me nauseous. Whatever I did might be too little. The medicine might have come too late. Something else was making me nauseous too. “When,” I asked shyly, “did someone last change the sheets on this bed?”

  He tried to clear his throat, shaping each word with effort. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t always been conscious. There were dreams – I didn’t always know what was real – and what was nightmare.”

  “I think,” I said carefully, “that everything needs changing.” I could smell it all, the terrible days of untreated pestilence, the filth and the heat and the pain. It was overpowering, and I was sure it must be holding the seeds of the sickness inside it.

  Jak sighed and clutched at my hand again as I started to pull down the covers. “No.”

  “I have to,” I said. “My mother says cleanliness is part of the cure. Old clothes, old bedding and dirt in the air – they make the contagion. And smells, the doctors say, carry the sickness. Anyway, you’ll feel fresher afterwards if I can make the bed all fresh and clean.”

  “I’ve pissed in this bed for the past three days, and diarrhoea too,” said Jak softly. “There’s vomit and blood and shit. Leave it be Freia. My father can get someone to clean it up tomorrow.”

  “I’ll do it now,” I said. I sat still a moment, looking at Jak’s beauty all turned into dark, filthy hollows and bloodshot eyelids. “It doesn’t matter to me, Jak, honestly it doesn’t.” I went to find clean sheets. The chest under the window was stacked with folded linens. I found sheets with embroidered monograms, a great fluffy quilt of duck down, a brocade bed cover, and pillowcases with ruffles. “Gracious, Jak,” I smiled. “You’ve enough stuff here to bed down the entire village.”

  He wasn’t listening. He was in more pain than I could imagine, and he didn’t want me up to my wrists in his shit. He grasped vainly at my hands again, trying to stop me, but I pulled gently from him. He had no strength to struggle and could not have forced away a feather. So he sighed, turning his head aside as I pulled the quilt down to his feet.

  It was an enormous surprise. Not having seen any man naked before, I wasn’t sure what was normal and what might be the effects of the pestilence, so I wished my mother had explained more. Even if I’d never had a father, she had nursed enough men through a hundred different diseases and had to know what they looked like and what to expect. I did not. Now I was aware of Jak’s eyes, unblinking, concerned for me, concentrated on my face. I knew my amazed confusion must have been obvious to him.

  “I’ll wash you first,” I said quickly to cover the shock, “and then I’ll change the bedding. Can you move at all, my love?”

  “Fray – it’s – not right –”

  I shook my head. “There’s no time for that,” I said, “and just for this once, I’m stronger than you. I’m going to make you well again, and this is an important part of it. So, do you think you could roll over – if I help?”

  “I’m not sure.” He saw my determination and surrendered to the inevitable, but his eyes were fever-bright with suffering and the misery of self-loathing. There was pity too, but that was all for me.

  All around Jak’s body, a mire of seeping filth, had collected. At its outer edges, cracked like chipped enamel, the muck covered all the lower bed. His legs, belly and groin were rubbed to raw meat by faecal sludge and acid urine. The stench was overpoweringly foul, but I tried not to let him see my disgust. I poured more warm water from the bucket into the bowl and used the softest of the cloths I had found.

  He closed his eyes, tightened his jaw and said nothing while I cleansed him as best I could. In the sweat ravaged creases of his groin, the shit had collected and in parts, had hardened. Where it had also been bloody, so the dried remains were glued to his skin. Removing it carefully, I found open sores beneath.

  And I found the buboes. The signs I had most feared were there, nestled black in the sweat-damp hair Between his legs. I knew nothing of a man’s private places, but I knew about buboes. Jak had two on the right-hand crease of his inner thigh, and they were hard and livid purple like the dark eyes of Hell. I thanked the Lord they seemed still small, little larger than grapes or the first tiny apples in spring – not those of autumn ripeness. When I touched one, Jak shuddered, cringing, as he swung his head away and clenched his teeth.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “The pain must be truly terrible.”

  He didn’t answer. I bent again and continued washing each part of him, very gently, knowing I still hurt him, and unable to avoid his agony. As I touched and moved and washed the unexpected masculinity of him, the strange projections, the soft, curling bumps and swells, he groaned, but then clamped his jaw tight so as not to cry out or moan again. “It is a thing so awful,” my mother had told me, “that even those on their path to recovery may die suddenly from the pestilence. Their hearts burst, the pain being beyond their capacity to bear.” But Jak was strong and so brave. He was my Jak, my love, and I would help him live.

  I leaned him to the side a little, to wash behind. His skin was encrusted with excrement and each part of him fetid, but at least at the back, he was not so different from a woman, and I was less embarrassed to touch him. With a deep breath, and biting my lip in concentration, I smoothed the wet cloths across his body and eased away the filth. It took me a long time to remove the sheet, now slimy and sodden, from below him and replace it with another. I should have turned the mattress. Better, the mattress should have been burned and a new one put in its place. But all that was beyond me, so I folded pillow slips over the part of the bed most soiled and soaked, and laid a clean linen sheet across. Jak had to help a little by bending his legs, then rolling back. I knew this effort took the very last of his strength, though he made no complaint and very little sound. When I had finished, he looked close to death, the sweat poured across his body, and his face was violently flushed with a tinge of dirty saffron, turning green around his nostrils and mouth. His eyes closed as his breathing shallowed, gasping and rattling. I pulled the fresh feather quilt up to his shoulders and leaned forward, kissing his forehead. “Oh my beloved,” I whispered, “in just one more moment you can rest.”

  I thought he had fainted, but after a minute he opened his eyes. He tried to speak but could not. I propped him again with clean pillows and gave him first two more drops of the potion, and then cool water. He drank both. I wiped his mouth, then the perspiration from his brow. All his beautiful black hair was sweat-straggled and smelled sour. His breath was vile, but the ghastly stench of the soiled bedding still lay discarded at my feet, and that overpowered all the rest.

  He had now taken half the medicine, so I put the little bottle back into my purse and took out the salve my mother used. “There is one more thing I have to do now if you are calm,” I said. “I think it will hurt very much at first, but afterwards it will soothe and cure.” So I pulled back the covers again, ignoring Jak’s hopelessly flailing hands, and began to smear the ointment very gently over all places where his skin had burned away, rubbed, ruined and noxious, leaving the flesh red raw and weeping. Once all these were covered and
the soft healing grease had begun to be absorbed within, I started again, covering all Jak’s thighs and belly with a thick balm. I was a doctor, I told myself, and so could not be embarrassed. But I was careful and did not touch where I could avoid.

  Finally, I covered the buboes. Because these swelled from the soft wet curling hair at his groin, they were difficult to treat. Each time I touched them, Jak shuddered and the whites of his eyes, still striped in a maze of protruding veins, seemed to roll. I was soon breathless and miserable with the pain I knew I caused him. The black boils were solid but not smooth, as though just beneath the wafer thin skin something evil pulsed, ready to break out and contaminate with pus, bringing the final rancour of disease. But I continued until both buboes were hidden beneath a slick of thick cream. Jak sighed as I pulled the covers back up to his chin. He closed his eyes again, sinking down against the feather pillows as if he was shrinking into himself.

  But while touching those terrible lumps, I had not entirely avoided touching other parts of him. Those strange and private parts, which I had never before known to exist, had been warm to my fingers. I was timid, sitting quietly for a moment afterwards, calming myself. I realised I was quivering like a plucked lute string. So I steadied my shoulders and leaned over, my ear to Jak’s mouth and then to his chest. His nostrils and gums had stopped bleeding, and although his swollen tongue was still thick and brown, his breath was now almost silent, his heartbeat was strong and rhythmic, and he no longer succumbed to convulsions or delirium. But he was deeply unconscious.

  I imagined his nakedness once clean and rich with energy and knew he would be even more beautiful than I had realised, but I still could not be sure if all men were the same. I could not understand why a man would grow outwards what a woman wore inwards. I could not be sure whether Jak’s appearance was due to his masculinity, or simply to his terrible illness.

  He was unconscious, so I could not ask him.

  Perhaps I would never have the courage to ask anyway. If we married, as he had originally promised, then I might ask. But marriage to the Eden-Lord, heir to Lydiard, seemed so unlikely for a witches’ brat, I could not believe in such a glorious future. Yet the witch herself, my amazing mother, would now bring the Lydiard heir himself back to life and save him from a hideous death. Would that, I wondered, appease the Eden-Lord sufficiently? Might he even give permission for his son to wed the daughter of the woman who had saved his life?

  I was washing my hands in the bucket when Lord Lydiard found me.

  Chapter Five

  It was a kindness, and I thanked whatever god had arranged it, that Jak was already fully covered and unconscious when his father marched into the chamber. I had been so frightened of hurting Jak, and it had all been too serious, too black and too miserable. There been little time for embarrassment. But I would have felt instantly shamed if Lord Lydiard had walked in some minutes earlier and found me with my fingers at his son’s crotch.

  He shouted, “What the devil?”

  He was a large man and angry-eyed, not tall but well fed and coarse with indulgence. You could see he had never been as beautiful as his son. Although I was shaking, I said, “Hush. He’s asleep. I’m a friend of Jak’s, and I’ve spent the night doctoring him. His fever is part broken, he’s already past the worst.”

  “I know exactly who the shit you are,” said his lordship, now sunk to whispering. “And why didn’t your bloody mother come two days past?”

  “I’ve come,” I said. “My mother never received any call.”

  He could see the pile of putrid sheeting on the floor and he could smell it. It permeated the room. He could see I’d been working to help and not to hinder. So he stood panting in the doorway, caught between anger and relief, only part dressed, having hurried from his bed to see how his son had passed the night and try to help him through the day. “Then thank our blessed gods,” he said. It didn’t seem he could summon up the humility to thank me, but he hurried quickly to the bed and lifted Jak’s limp hand.

  Jak opened his eyes reluctantly, just a flutter of lashes into a world he had no wish to re-join. He had started sweating again and where I had washed and dried, now shone gleaming in the sudden intrusion of daylight. He tossed aside his father’s grasp and tried to whisper something. His father did not at first understand what the son tried to say, but I did.

  “Don’t hurt her.”

  “What?” His lordship sat on the side of the bed, kicking away the piles of sodden linen on the floor. “No need to speak, my boy. The wench came to help? Yes, yes, I know. She’ll be given food and money. No need to worry about that now.”

  Jak had slumped again, and I thought him lost in a troubled murmur of delirium. I said, as firmly as my courage allowed, “I don’t want money, and I don’t need food. But I won’t be sent away.” I wasn’t used to talking to Lords, but I was prepared to blackmail this one if I had to.

  He didn’t even bother looking at me. “If your mother sent you, then you can stay,” he said over his shoulder, “though I’d have sooner she came herself.” The first stains of dawn had tinged the light pale rose, and the windows were suddenly dazzled in pink. I had thought Jak unaware of his surroundings, but now he wrenched his head away from the brilliance, squeezing his blood-striped eyes shut in pain.

  “The light hurts him,” I said. “I must close the bed curtains.” The fat lord watched me as I pulled the heavy drapes, dislodging dust and peeling flakes of faded paint and brocade. Jak’s face at once slumped into shadow, but he did not reopen his eyes. Although he had drunk all the medicine I had given him, and although at first, he had seemed stronger for it, now he seemed to have relapsed.

  “I’ll get a girl to get rid of this shit,” said his father, nodding at the discarded sheets. “If you want to stay, you can sleep there on the pallet. For now, go down to the kitchens and break fast. Send a laundry maid up.”

  It was midday when my mother arrived. She swept up to the room where I was once more washing Jak and applying a thin layer of her ointment to the weeping sores across his chest. He was asleep, murmuring and lost in a confusion of dreams, having spent much of the morning unconscious. Once convinced that I was efficient, his father had left us alone.

  She stood cloaked in the doorway, silhouetted, daylight behind her and deep shade before. “You seem to be managing very well without me,” said my mother.

  It was a soft green shadowed room where I worked and Jak lay, slipping between conscious agony and a daze of unreality. He could not bear the violence of light in his eyes or across his face, so now the window shutters remained tight closed, and the bed hangings were drawn into a canopied cave, enclosed in darkness and heaving suspense. I lit no candle, so in the depth of the looming gloom, I saw more by touch than by sight. Jak spoke little, but in his more lucid moments, he clutched at my hands and whispered to me of the threat of death and visions of punishment for his sins. “They are right about Hell,” he said once. “I saw them, all clouds of fire and demons of thunder. It waits for me.”

  “It is fever,” I whispered back, “not truth that inspires those dreams. I am staying Jak, you won’t frighten me away. Even your father says I may stay. Tomorrow I promise you’ll start to feel better.”

  Once my mother had arrived, I was able to believe it myself. She brought me more of everything, including even the precious medicine which she had intended just for us. She was calm and brisk, explaining to me as if I was already her assistant and experienced in doctoring. Jak, she said, being in the late stages of the sickness, should finish the whole bottle I had stolen for him, drop by drop, over the next two days. Of the other bottle she had brought, even though we were not yet ill, she and I must immediately drink half each. It was the only way to keep us safe. I sat, nodding, watching her.

  “Lord Lydiard called you,” I said dismally. “He called for you at once when Jak got sick. He sent messages twice. You didn’t come.”

  “Don’t be a fool Freia,” said my mother. “I even treate
d the fat priest who was a man I loathed. Why wouldn’t I come to your friend, whom you love?”

  I was talking as softly as I could, though Jak slept and could not hear. Besides, I had long ago learned that being angry with my mother never did me any good at all. “Jak thinks you didn’t come because you don’t approve of him.”

  “Godfrey told his wretched wife to send for me as soon as the boy became ill,” said my mother, sitting down beside me. She took the basin from my hands and began to wipe the trickles of green bile from Jak’s face. “It was the wife who decided not to pass on the request. Jak Lydiard’s step-mother would prefer he did not recover.”

  “If you knew that –” I began.

  “I didn’t,” said my mother, “not until an hour ago. I came back after watching another man die, to find your petals on my pillow. Of course, I knew where you had gone. I came here and questioned the servants. It is very easy to discover the truth when people are frightened of you. But indeed, I would have come anyway. As for not approving of him, he is mistaken. I approve. I approve more than he will ever know. Yesterday, as soon as I heard of young Jak being ill, I prepared more of our special medicine and planned to bring it to him this morning.”

  “The medicine you said was only for me and for you and no one else?”

  “Indeed. For you, for me, and also for him.

  “Thank you,” I whispered. “Now I can believe he won’t die.”

  My mother gazed at me very calmly for a few moments in silence. Then she said, “He never would have. Not from the pestilence. I ensured that, many years ago. I make few genuine charms, but when I do, they always work. Besides, I know something of this young man’s future, for I’ve seen it in dreams. I knew already he wouldn’t die.”

  “You told me he was dying,” I said, staring back. “That’s why I came.”

  My mother shook her head. “I told you he was facing death. But I did not say that death would take him.” She had raised both eyebrows at me, usually a sign of grave displeasure, but she wasn’t angry after all. “There was a risk of course, which is why I made more medicine,” she continued. “I do not believe in taking risks and have sometimes even been wrong with my foretelling. Not often, but sometimes. But Jak Lydiard will grow to be a great man. I have always known that.” Then she pointed to her own little trousseau broach that I wore. “You left me the petals of the briar rose, but I see you wear my pearls. That is a rose of infinitely more value.”