Reginald Hill: Death

(revised, edited and completed by Francis Xavier Roote MA, PhD)

It is January 26th, 1849. In the Town Hospital of Basel, Thomas Lovell Beddoes awakes. It is early. The large garden overlooked from his window is still in darkness and the birds that winter there have not yet unlocked the first notes of their aubade.

He feels a stab of pain in his right leg, just beneath the knee joint. He grimaces, then smiles as the pain fades. The ghost of a poem in the comic macabre style flits through his mind. In it the amputated limbs tossed into the furnace of the hospital mortuary sing their resentment at this enforced exile from their proper sphere and send farewell messages to the bodies that have betrayed them.

He shifts in his bed and a book falls to the floor. He shares his bed with numerous volumes which range across all his interests, from medical treatises through modern German novels and translations of the classics to a new collection of Goethe's letters to Frau von Stein. Absent only are the radical tracts of earlier days. He has said goodbye to all that.

He lies there with his eyes staring into the dark until light begins to seep through the edges of the heavy curtains, then he throws back the coverlet in a torrent of books and rolls out of bed.

With the aid of a crutch he has achieved an agility which is the wonder of Dr Ecklin and Dr Frey and all the hospital attendants. His generally lively demeanour gives them hope of a matching mental recovery and if his jokes have something of a macabre cast, then they always did.

Later in the day, as he moves rapidly out of the hospital grounds, he returns cheerful greetings to those he encounters who often pause to watch his progress with admiration.

On his way into town he passes the house where Konrad Degen is lodged but he does not pause. That too is over. Degen has been persuaded by mutual acquaintance to return from Frankfurt to Basel to aid his old patron's recuperation. But a true friend would have needed no persuasion. And a son would have crawled over hot coals to comfort his stricken father.

In a quiet side street he pauses a while to make sure he is unobserved by anyone of his acquaintance. Then he enters an apothecary's shop where he is greeted deferentially as Herr Doktor Beddoes and offered a chair in which he sits and chats about his medical researches while his required prescriptions are made up.

Back at the hospital, he tells his attendant that his excursion, though enjoyable, has fatigued him and he is now going to rest for a few hours.

Locking his door, he takes from his pocket the drugs he has obtained. Only one of them does he have any use for. He mixes it in a glass of heavy Rhenish wine, sips, makes a wry face, adds a little more wine, sips again, then sits down at the table which stands before the window and sharpens a pen. His mind meanwhile is running through a list of possible correspondents. His sense of drama, though it falls well short of that necessary to a practical rather than a literary playwright, is refined enough to know that more than one last letter is a profligacy which risks touching the absurd.

His choice is made. Phillips, a good and noble man, head of a happy family and a pattern for fathers everywhere.

He scrawls across the head of his paper To Mr Revell Phillips, The Middle Temple, London, and begins to write, pausing from time to time to sip his wine.

Outside the day is dying young.

My dear Phillips,

I am food for what I am good for – worms.

Food for… good for… I could use that. Make a note? Hardly worth it! The echo of Hotspur's dying speech makes him think of Konrad. He pushed the thought aside.

‘I have made a will here which I desire to be respected, and add the donation of?20 to Dr Ecklin, my physician.

W. Beddoes must have a case (50 bottles) of Champagne Moet 1847 to drink my

He pauses. My health? Hardly. Then he smiles and starts writing again. death in.

Thanks for all kindness. Borrow the?200. You are a good amp; noble man amp; your children must look sharp to be like you.

Yours, if my own, ever,

T. L. B.

He throws down his pen.

It is over.

But the retiring actor does not leave the stage without many a backward glance and the retiring singer can never resist one last reprise, and no real writer ever truly retires.

So he takes up his pen again and scribbles a few more lines.

Love to Anna, Henry, the Beddoes ofLongvill and Zoe and Emmeline King -

Anyone missed out? Of course, the most important of them all. also to Kelsall whom I beg to look at my MSS and print or not as he thinks fit. I ought to have been among other things a good poet. Life was too great a bore on one peg and that a bad one.

Bit self-pitying that? Perhaps. End on a jest, that's the true way of death! He winces as he feels a spasm in his gut from the poison. Then he smiles again. A little medical joke to finish with.

Buy for Dr Ecklin above mentioned one ofReade's best stomach-pumps.

Perhaps he should elaborate on this but now the pen feels heavy in his hand and his lids feel heavy on his eyes.

He sets the pen down, takes up the note and carefully pins it to his shirt. He drains the wineglass and hops across to his bed across which he sprawls supine.

By now it is quite dark outside. Or is the darkness his alone? He does not know. His mind ranges across his life, his huge hopes – for himself, for mankind – and their huge failure, which somehow at this moment of departure does not seem quite so huge. Fantastic images spin across his brain and instinctively he reaches out to them and tries to trap them in a net of words. Now he is seeing death, not on the slab, not on the stage, not on the printed page, but real and active and standing before him, rendering all those thousand of words he has used to describe it sadly inadequate – shards of a broken glass, ashes of an incinerated painting, echoes of a distant music. If only he could raise his pen now, he might after all be more than a good poet, he might be a great one.

Is it too late? Who knows? Can death take a joke as well as make one?

His lips part, his collapsing lungs strive to uncrease thernselves and take in that rich and healing air which he knows can revive him, but his strength has gone. Death's jest is complete.

So Thomas Lovell Beddoes exhales his last breath bearing his last words.

'Fetch the cow… fetch the cow…'