Resurrectionists (28 page)

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 to 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 –”

“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.

“I’m leaving now,” Edward replied.

Virgil made to take a step towards him and slipped, once more having to grab the sideboard for support. I went to him.

“Virgil, back to bed. Edward is leaving. Do not become agitated.”

At that instant he looked down and spied his laudanum. He snatched it up with a pale hand and walked unevenly back to his bedroom. “I am not agitated,” he said. I heard the covers being adjusted and knew he was back in bed. Drinking the awful substance.

“I’m sorry,” Edward said.

I shook my head. “He was bound to find it soon. It brings him such relief, I cannot bear to take it from him.”

“I shall spend the night in the public house in the village, and head to London with the morning’s mail.”

“Thank you for all you have done.”

And so, this morning, I listened for the mail-coach, but I heard nothing over the sound of rain dripping from our eaves. Virgil is looking much better, and the laudanum has lifted his spirits. He seems quite calm and content this morning. Neither of us has raised the topic of when he will return to work. (I wish I was not so heavily pregnant, or I would go and offer my services to some wealthy local family). But return to work he must, and soon. We have very little to keep us going. Thursday, 3rd April 1794

I have been so busy nursing Virgil that I have scarce had time to think. However, I write today because I have received news which has unsettled me. This morning, I had a letter from Aunt Hattie. She is to remarry. She will wed a German baron and will soon be removing herself from London. He has a home in Württemberg, but they will first be travelling throughout warmer climes on some kind of business. In other words, I have lost the last relative I have in this country. I feel so alone.