The Resurrectionist (3 page)

M
Y FATHER DIED
when I was twelve. We found him half a mile from the house, huddled in the wall’s low lee. His face turned away from the world, into the dark stones, his body half covered by the snow. The sky overhead as fragile as an egg.

It was our neighbour, Tobias, who first noticed he was gone. January, the new year scarcely begun. I saw Tobias coming, from where I sat in the window above the kitchen. As he climbed he stared ahead, his head held stiff and straight; only rounding the last bend did he seem to look up, his eyes passing over the ruin of the yard, the broken gig and abandoned furniture.

I had opened the door before he knocked, and he peered past me into the darkened room.

‘How long has he been gone?’ he asked. I bit my lip. For as long as I could remember I had been forbidden to tell any visitors who should come calling where my father was.

‘Three days,’ I said at last. Tobias nodded, looking me over,
no doubt considering whether he should take a starving boy with him on the hour’s walk into the town.

‘The dog is his?’

As if knowing it was she of whom we spoke she pressed her nose against my hand.

‘Bring her,’ he said.

Although the blizzard had passed, leaving the sky clear and empty, the air outside was cold, our breath rising in clouds. Tobias did not speak as we made our way down the high road, and so I was aware mostly of the silence that surrounded us, the way the lonely cries of the crows echoed out across the empty hills.

As we came about the bend in the road from which the town became visible, the dog lifted her head, her ears rising and tail quivering, as she would each time my father approached the house. Tobias glanced at her, perhaps thinking to tell me to catch hold of her, but she was too quick. For a hundred yards she hurried on, stopping at last before a low drift of snow which had gathered by the wall. For a few seconds she hesitated, emitting a plaintive, confused whine, then lifting her head she yapped twice. Tobias placed a hand upon my shoulder.

‘Wait here,’ he said, and still not altering his pace he continued on to where the dog stood, pawing at the snow. I watched him stop, and kneel. From the top of the drift a dark shape could be seen; reaching out a hand Tobias touched it, then he stood, and turned to me.

His body bore no sign of any violence. Indeed his face, rimed and blue with ice, seemed almost at peace. It is possible he was taken suddenly by a seizure of the brain or of the heart, but more likely he had grown tired and confused in the falling snow, and fuddled by the drink and the cold had decided to rest awhile. Save for where the dog had scratched at him, nuzzling his frozen flesh as if she
might warm it back into life, the snow was untouched, broken only by a long line of bird tracks, which ran across the road towards his form, then turned aside and ended, the bird having taken flight once more, lost to the air and the sky.

I remember my father as a restless, unpredictable force, a man possessed of a careless charm and great enthusiasms as well as fits of despondency and impotent rage. He was never violent with me, nor was the harm he did me done with any calculation, it was simply that he lived too much at the mercy of his own nature. Indeed, most often I seemed barely to exist to him, then, as if remembering me, he would seek to force upon me an intimacy we did not share. Had he lived even a few years longer I might have seen in him what I now guess he was, a man too fond of drink and cards, unhappy somewhere deep within himself, whether from some harm done him long before or by natural inclination, and possessed of the gambler’s temperament, with its wild vacillations and capacity for self-deception. Yet to me he was simply my father, a figure I desired to be close to but had learned through experience not to trust.

Even from this distance though I can see something of the man he was when young. Handsome, charming, filled with wild energy and a sense of his own possibility. His father managed the manor farm, and yet it was his father’s employer who took an interest in him and saw he got his letters, that his rough edges were smoothed away so he might find a place in the world. It was a fine figure he cut, I am sure, for he rode as if born to the saddle, and even near the end, when his looks had blurred and his clothes were ragged, he could still charm a maid or a passing lady with some show of gallantry.

Full of gin and regret, he would sometimes speak of those early years, not with the bitterness I might expect but with something like fondness. Disowned when he eloped with his benefactor’s daughter, then left a widower with a child to raise before six months were up, he soon found the manners and the charm that had sustained him wore thin under the weight of his gambling, and so began the long, slow slipping down that was to be our life together. From London to Bath, from Bath to Liverpool, from Liverpool to York and finally to the road where he died, high in the hills above the city, only a few miles from the town in which he was born.

I waited by my father’s corpse with the dog for company while Tobias walked the last mile or so into town. The day was still, and all about the snow glittered in the sunlight. I remember looking down at him, the dull presence of his silent form. No doubt it came as a shock, but I do not remember feeling surprise or even grief, only a kind of dullness, as if this discovery were somehow always waiting here to be made by me, in this moment. This is what the world is, I remember thinking, a place of absences, and leavings.

On the day of the funeral Tobias walked with me into the town. He was a Methodist, as many were already in those parts, and so would not join me by the grave, but he stood close enough for me to see him, his hands crossed before him, his hat held in them. I do not doubt my father would have liked to have been remembered as a popular man, yet his passage that day was marked by his son, the priest and two men who would not again see the money they had lent him.

Once the ceremony was over the rector took me aside. He was a small man, running to fat, and though I did not know him I had heard from one of the children of the town
that he had had a son who died of a fever the summer past, a sickly child who had never prospered.

‘Tobias says you can read,’ he said.

I did not reply, just stood.

‘I could use a boy in the classroom,’ he said, ‘to help me with my teaching.’

Sometimes I wonder what would have come of me had he not spoken that day. An orphanage perhaps, maybe some farm if I were lucky. But instead I ate with him in the Rectory, and studied in the school he kept. But though he treated me as if I were his own I felt no love for him, only failure, as if some vital part had died in me that day.

B
Y
B
ARNARD’S
I
NN
I hear a shout, my name called loud amidst the racket of the street. Startled, I stop, and then it comes again, issuing from a coach on the road’s other side. Its window open, Charles within.

‘Is it not late for you to be about?’ he calls.

‘I have been with a friend of my guardian,’ I begin, but he cuts me off with a grin.

‘It was a joke, Gabriel,’ he says. ‘Where does this friend of yours reside?’

‘Camden –’ I begin again, only to be silenced by a shout from within the coach.

‘Boring!’

I hesitate, but Charles is not to be deterred.

‘And now where are you bound?’

‘Home,’ I say, then correct myself. ‘Back to the house.’

Inside the coach there is a groan, as if its utterer has been pushed beyond all endurance. Charles hesitates, glances over his shoulder, then with a look I do not fully understand turns back to me.

‘Come with us,’ he says.

I shake my head.

‘I do not think …’ I say, but Charles waves me down.

‘Why ever not? Your work is done for the week.’ He opens the door so I may climb up. ‘Do not fear,’ he says. ‘We will get you home again.’

The carriage is already full, Charles and another three I do not know seated two a side, so as I clamber in they must shift and squeeze to make room for me. The driver calls down a complaint that five is too many for his horses, but this only elicits a jeer from the one who sits opposite me. When the driver persists he rises to his feet and shouts a threat, and so the thing is ended and with a curse the driver cracks his whip. Falling back into his seat the man regards me scornfully.

‘What manner of bird is this?’ he asks of Charles, his face contemptuous. Though not tall he has a powerful frame and would be handsome, in a brutal sort of way, were it not for his nose, the line of which is broken, as if inexpertly set.

‘Gabriel Swift,’ I say, reaching out my hand. To my shame he does not do the same, just looks down at it incredulously. This insult seems to provoke his companion to great merriment, and all at once I realise that they are drunk.

‘His name is Chifley,’ Charles interrupts, ‘and he is an insolent cur for not taking your hand.’

At this Chifley bellows with laughter. ‘I’d not shake hands with you, de Mandeville, were you not paying for my drinks.’

Charles smiles at this, his eyes narrowing.

‘This is Caswell,’ he says, indicating the man who sits to Chifley’s left. Although he can be little older than Charles or Chifley his pale brown hair is already thinning. No doubt in an attempt to remedy this deficiency he has affected a style in which the sides are grown longer and swept across the crown. His face too is that of an older man, weak and plumpish, but kind enough. Unlike Chifley he extends a hand, which I take.

Finally Charles turns to the figure beside me, who sits in silence. ‘And this is May,’ he says. May reaches out and takes my hand, clasping it in his and shaking it rather too vigorously. His face is gaunt, and has a strange pallor about it, but he smiles readily enough.

‘Where was it you said you had been?’ Charles asks. I had thought him drunk a moment ago, as Chifley and Caswell plainly are, but now he seems his usual self.

‘The home of a friend of my guardian,’ I say. ‘Mr Wickham, who has the parish in Camden.’

‘You go there often?’

‘I have been his guest three times.’ Thinking of the stultifying evenings I have spent there, listening to the droning voice of Mr Wickham and the tuneless warbling of his daughter, Georgiana, I hesitate. ‘They have been most kind to me.’

Charles smiles gently. ‘It seems a poor way for a young man to spend his evening.’

This is a talent of Charles, I have learned, to make those with whom he speaks feel he has understood the true meaning of their words. ‘I have few alternatives,’ I say, grinning. ‘My friends in London are not numerous.’

‘What of Robert?’

‘He is with his family tonight.’

Perhaps bored by our conversation Chifley begins to sing, and almost at once Caswell and May join him. Charles looks at them, then back to me.

‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

Charles leans back, a secret smile playing on his lips. ‘Does it matter?’

As the carriage jolts over the stones I look across at Charles. Three months I have worked alongside him and yet for all
his humour and warmth I feel I have little grasp on who he is. A parson’s son, he trained first with Sir Astley and later on the Continent, earning fame for the steadiness of his hand and the swiftness of his work. Robert says that Mr Poll believed no man his equal in the skills of their craft, until he met Charles. It was Mr Poll then who petitioned for Charles’s admission into the College of Surgeons.

Since then Charles’s reputation has grown to rival that of men twice his age, and his services are sought after by many of quality and influence. Yet a stranger might wonder at the closeness of the bond between Charles and Mr Poll, so different are their natures. Where Mr Poll holds himself always aloof, Charles has an ease which brings comfort to all he encounters, speaking not just as an equal but as a friend to those he treats, as at home in the rooms of the humblest as in the parlours of the powerful.

The carriage delivers us to a low-ceilinged tavern just off the Strand. Inside it is crowded with a great many men and women who sit pressed close one against the other or swirl between the tables. Everywhere is talking and laughter and hilarity. Charles and Chifley lead us to a table by the fire and, calling for the owner, order veal chops. I hear this nervously: my first months in London have been expensive ones, and have consumed almost all of the money my guardian provided me. Although I have written to him seeking an advance upon the money for the next half-year, I am worried I will be unable to pay, and even more alarmed that I may have to admit it. Charles though sees my discomfort, giving me a confidential look and telling me not to concern myself, I shall celebrate as they do tonight. Confused, I ask what the occasion is, which provokes great amusement, but
before I can get to the bottom of this, wine is brought, and glasses filled and raised.

As we drink I try to divine what I can of my new companions. Chifley buys and sells horses, I learn, although he seems to treat his business as little more than an excuse to ridicule those who would use his services. By contrast Caswell, though amiable enough, appears to have no profession. And May calls himself an artist, although it is difficult to imagine him at the canvas, for he talks almost without stopping, breaking in and interrupting himself as he goes, as if humming with some mad energy. The effect of this is almost endearing, for he is utterly without malice, and laughs constantly, but there is something uncomfortably vulnerable in his guilelessness. He drums his fingers on the table in a rapid tattoo, and though I cannot feel annoyed, the habit angers Chifley, who several times demands that he stop, but each time he starts again, until at last he excuses himself and vanishes to the room Chifley insists on calling the thunderbox.

The chops are very fine, and although I have dined already this evening I eat them hungrily. Chifley waves a hank of bread in my direction.

‘Do you starve this sparrow?’ he demands of Charles, who looks at me with a quizzical smile.

‘Do we starve you, Gabriel?’ he asks.

I shake my head, telling him no, although this is not entirely true. At Mr Poll’s ruling, Robert and I eat mostly tripe and gruel, our master holding excess of meat a source of melancholy. For a few moments Charles contemplates me, then he splashes more wine into my glass and bids me drink.

I am not sure when it dawns on me that I am drunk. Caswell is singing some song about a shepherd and a milkmaid, the
detail of which I am having difficulty following, although I find it quite hilarious. On the crown of his head, what remains of his sandy brown hair has stood up in a kind of tuft, and his scalp shines pinkly beneath. But he sings in a fine tenor, eyes closed as if he is lost in his own voice, the rich sound incongruous from such a foolish, nervous-looking man. Charles has one of the women on his lap; for some time they have been engaged in a conversation in which he whispers things to her and she giggles, then whispers back. Where May has got to I am not sure, but Chifley is beating on the table, urging Caswell to sing again. A waiter is filling my glass, and I join in the cry that has gone up for Caswell to sing again, stamping my feet on the flags and pounding the table. Then, we are in the street and someone else is singing, not Caswell now but Chifley, I think; a face is pressed at the carriage window, leering, someone shouting from above us to be quiet. Sometime in this there is a moment when my gorge rises and, flinging open the door, I fall into the street, my stomach spilling its contents onto the cobbles like an upended wineskin, burning my throat and nose. When I am done being sick I feel myself lifted from behind, and my feet begin to move beneath me, then all at once I am on the doorstep of the house, and Charles and Chifley are thrusting me through the open door.