Cannonbridge (12 page)

Then, before she can speak, the stranger is present, helped in by the two men of the family in the manner of a wounded general being helped from the battlefield by subordinates.

Even in his presently dilapidated state—wet, muddy, clothes a little ragged, unsteady on his feet and desperately short of breath—there is a presence to the man, Emily thinks, a sense of purpose and a kind of fierce dignity which does not somehow strike her as altogether benign. Above all, there is a wrongness, even an injustice, to his presence here, in their little parlour on this holiest of feast days, as though his likeness has been clipped from some unsuitable volume and pasted with slipshod malice upon a page of scripture. Her father and brother look surprised and out of sorts at his arrival.

When he speaks, the stranger’s voice is melodious and deep, with an undertow of something strange, less than orthodox. He stands free of his two rescuers.

“Ladies, I trust you will forgive me for my interrupting in so rough and vulgar a fashion...” He stumbles forwards, gasps. One hand darts towards his side. “I was lost, you see, and I had begun to fear the worst. I was lost upon the dreadful moor. You can scarcely imagine how grateful I was to spy your little dwelling-place and know that the promise of sanctuary lay within.”

“Enough, my boy.” Her father sounds, as he often does, kindly but abrupt. “You are quite exhausted and you must not excite yourself any further. Girls, girls, stand away from that young man.”

Charlotte and Anne who have clustered around the stranger cringe back at his command.

“Perhaps, father...” This is Branwell, already edging back towards the punch. “Perhaps a drink might revive our guest?”

“I wish to cause no trouble to you, friends,” says the stranger. “Only for a few moments respite. Then you have my word that I shall be on my way.” He sways, stumbles, gasps a little as if in pain. “You see...” His eyes dart towards the window and to the moor beyond. “I believe myself to be pursued.” He shudders, not theatrically, Emily thinks, but rather from some profound internal conflict. He smiles weakly and Emily sees that there is blood—there is blood in his mouth. “Yet I am forgetting my manners. I have yet to introduce myself. I am very pleased to make your acquaintance. My name—” He totters, rights himself, winces. “My name...”

No further words come. His hands drop by his side and without any sound at all, like a tree felled in the forest, the stranger falls forward upon the parlour floor, with a look of something close to agony on his face.

H
OURS HAVE PASSED
. That late luncheon has become early supper. A little singed and spoilt, perhaps, but it has been devoured with gratitude all the same. The family, sated and drowsy, have returned to the sitting room, the shutters of its windows closed now against the night and against the oppression of the moor. Branwell is already asleep, a half-empty glass in one hand, the remaining liquid tilted within. Charlotte and Anne sit beside one another, exchanging whispers. The word “Brussels” is regularly heard. Their father sits with his eyes closed and the top of his cravat loosened, whether in a posture of penitence or somnolence it is impossible to tell.

Emily sits apart from the rest. A book—the
Biographia Literaria
—lies open but unread upon her lap. Her lips are a little parted, her eyes are shining and she is listening. As for the parsonage’s unsolicited guest, he is upstairs in the room which had until less than two months before been occupied by the now-departed aunt. The men had laid him down in there as gently as they were able. The parson himself had spoken a prayer over his comatose form but it had been decided that he should be left to recuperate until the morning. They could not call out the doctor on so sacred an evening and, besides, they were not certain that they entirely trusted the new physician yet.

So there he is, thinks Emily, lying asleep in a dead woman’s bedroom. Emily knows it is most improper yet she feels drawn to the stranger as might a hare to a baited trap and so, having thought of little else, through the family’s repast and the homilies and speculations which have provided much of the surrounding conversation, she arrives at her decision.

Emily sets the book aside, rises to her feet, murmurs her excuses and leaves, ascending the stairs as gently as she can, her footfalls as soft as she can make them.

On the first floor, she steals along the hallway to the cramped bedroom at the end of it. The door is ajar, the chamber within shadowed and still. Suddenly a little doubtful but knowing that it is far too late to turn back, she steps inside.

The visitor is almost too large for the bed and his position seems oddly precarious, as if he might at any moment vanish from their lives as swiftly as he has entered it. For a time she does no more than watch him sleep, sprawled out in that little space, his breathing feverish and irregular, his handsome face slick with perspiration.

Emily, sensing that she has intruded, wonders why she has come, marvelling at the way in which, even in so reduced a state as this, the man can exert so awful an fascination. Nonetheless, summoning all her powers of resistance, she turns her back upon him and is about to creep from his presence when she hears from behind her his soft voice. “Emily?”

Slowly, she turns to face him.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I had hoped it would be you.”

She feels hot and she is herself perspiring, as though she has stepped too close to a furnace. “Sir?”

“Will you sit beside me for a while? I’d like someone with me... at the end.”

She does as she has been asked, almost without thinking. There is a stool beside the bed upon which she sits, dragging it a little closer to the stranger so that she might take his hand in hers. His skin is clammy and febrile.

“Perhaps you have caught a chill, sir?” she says, although she fears that the man’s complaint may be rather more severe than that. “We shall call for the surgeon in the morning.”

He smiles strangely. “He is not for me. Nor I for him. And by the morning it shall certainly be too late.”

“Please, sir. Do not say such things.”

He breathes out. The process sounds as if it is a painful one. “You will die here,” he says matter-of-factly. “Here in this house.”

Emily thinks before she replies. “I believe... that I have always known that, sir.”

“Forgive me. I am on occasion granted glimpses of what is yet to come. Of late, such instances have been becoming more frequent.”

Emily could not explain her certainty but somehow she does not doubt him. Fearful, she asks: “What are you, sir?”

“For a long time I had but an imperfect notion. But now I believe that I am finally starting to understand. This is the year, you see—this is the year of foundation. And this very moment, somewhere in London, it is beginning. And the darkness is almost upon me. I am to be granted new purpose and I can hold out against it no longer.”

To her surprise, for she is far from unaccustomed to illness and suffering, Emily’s cheeks are wet with tears. “Please, sir. Please! You have to try.”

“I have done my best to be a good man, Emily. I fear I have succeeded only in proving ineffectual. All that is to be swept aside now.”

“You speak of sin, sir?”

“Yes. If you like. A great tide of sin that is to swallow me at any moment. And after that deluge I fear I shall not be the same man. I will be... grievously transformed.”

She feels such pity for him for she discerns within his words a terrible truth and so she holds his hand a little tighter and she squeezes, willing him to be wrong, urging, like Polidori and Maria before her, the good man to thwart the other.

“Do you sense it?” he asks now. “It approaches. The tide draws near. My transformation is at hand.”

She understands whereof he speaks. Do not the shadows of the place seem deeper now and darker? Is not the air charged and in a state of strange excitation as it is before the mightiest of thunderstorms? And is there not to be heard, faraway but growing swiftly closer, a sound like rushing water?

Unflinching, Emily clasps hold of his hand. “Be brave,” she murmurs. “Be brave.”

“Pity me now,” he hisses, his voice thick with sorrow. “But soon—very soon—I am afraid that you will only fear me.”

The darkness draws nearer, the sound grows louder and more terrible and, mere moments later, everything is lost.

D
OWNSTAIRS, THE REST
of the family are woken—for all four have now slipped into slumber—by the most extraordinary phenomena. The parsonage itself seems to be shaking as if it is being subjected to almost unbearable stress. In the kitchen, crockery is hurled to the ground. Glasses shatter in swift succession. A mirror falls violently to the floor and is broken. The shutters rattle wildly. Three windows crack in two. The very ground beneath their feet shudders and complains while from overhead they all hear quite distinctly a noise like rushing water.

“Father?” It is Branwell who speaks first. His words are slurred, filled with the childish fear of the toper.

The old man rises with terrific dignity to his feet. “My children...” he says and they all gather around him as the house shakes and shudders and complains, as all about them is cacophony and destruction. Set against it, his voice sounds wavering and paltry. He speaks the first words of scripture which come to mind:

“‘For my sighing cometh before I eat, and my roarings are poured out like the waters. For the thing which I greatly feared has come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet did—’”

He is interrupted from somewhere overhead by what sounds like a woman’s scream. The priest falls silent, the shaking stops, the noises subside and all that can be heard after that are heavy, deliberate footsteps upon the stairs.

The family watch as their guest—revivified and moving with new purpose—strides into the parlour. He has a dreadful kind of grace now and his eyes seem a shade darker than before. Emily is with him, bleeding from a savage-looking laceration, evidently newly inflicted, just below her right eye.

When the stranger speaks it is with a proud swagger, at once repulsive and beguiling. “It occurs to me,” he says, “that I have yet to introduce myself.” He smiles and he speaks his name and afterwards, as his unwitting hosts gaze at him in wonderment and fear, he says, in strange, cold triumph: “A very merry Christmas to you all.”

NOW

I
T IS MIDNIGHT
in Edinburgh but the city is far from asleep. The Festival is in full swing and the streets still throng with actors and comedians, touts and critics, party-goers, cynics, fans, seekers after laughter. Most pubs and clubs are still open. Rubbish is everywhere, the detritus of twenty hours a day of good times. Every litter bin filled with discarded fliers, crumpled reviews. Even this far into the night, there are still musicians abroad, mimes and performance artists, clowns and faded celebrities. The atmosphere is raucous and giddy, drink-sodden, oversexed. It is as if the place has been taken over by superannuated teenagers whilst all the real adults have stayed away.

Underneath the air of carnival, however, can still be sensed something else, in the itinerants who gaze suspiciously at the out-of-towners, in the locals who have not been able to flee the city for the Festival and who have stayed to resent the cosmopolitan influx, in those who, in this month-long party, have scented criminal opportunity and who are present to sell drugs or sex, colder, harder, more truthful experiences than those offered by the little theatres and concert halls and stand-up venues. This is the spirit of Old Edinburgh, the city of Hogg and Stevenson and Doyle, a quieter place of ill-lit alleys, of naked bodies illuminated by candlelight, of cries stifled brutally in the night. Tonight, beneath the party something simmers. Beyond the harlequinade, something darker is trying to break through.

Toby Judd, however, has noticed none of this yet. He has only lately arrived, after his long and gruelling coach ride. He is, at present, his sports bag nestled between his feet, slumped disconsolately at a corner table of a café, just off the Royal Mile, which has stayed open so late in an effort to catch those Festival-goers who wish to avoid the temptations of a pub. In this they were largely mistaken for the place, for all the revellers who surge by outside, is largely empty. Apart from Toby there are only two other customers—a middle-aged curly-haired man, bent over a copy of
The Scotsman
with the frowning self-importance of a friendless playwright, and a plump American woman, drawling into a mobile phone to the folks back home. At the front, behind the till, a bloodshot waitress sits, almost dozing, with a book held out in front of her by which she does not seem especially enthralled.

Dopily, Judd gets to his feet and shambles over to the counter.

“Excuse me?” Absurdly, he feels the urge to add the word “miss” to the end of the sentence, as if he’s an old man and this is the 1930s.

The woman looks up and manages a tired smile. She is striking, he sees now, a tall, thirty-something brunette with an air of quiet determination. Her eyes are a thoughtful shade of brown and her eyebrows elegant, quizzical lines. She is wearing a name badge which reads ‘GABRIELA’. Toby takes this all in, surprised that, despite his tiredness and creeping sense of despair, his heart gives a little lurch at the sight of her frazzled pulchritude. It lurches again, still more crazily, when he notices the title of the book that she is reading:
Cannonbridge: A Celebration of English Genius
by Dr J J Salazar.

“Yes, sir?” she says. Despite her evident fatigue, her voice is warm and sympathetic.

He blurts out the words without thinking: “What do you make of it?”

“Sir?”

“The book. That book. The Salazar book.”

“Oh. This?”

“Yes.”

“Honestly?”

“Please.”

“Facile and underwritten. Matthew Cannonbridge himself is oblique and underdescribed. Motiveless. The other players are merely ciphers. Caricature. To be absolutely frank with you—and why shouldn’t I be at this time of night?—I always found old Cannonbridge’s stuff kind of overrated. This book hasn’t done much to persuade me to revise my opinion.”