T. Boyle - Water Music

Gleg wasn’t so bad. He had his faults — he ate like a drayhorse and laughed like a hyena, his teeth were bad and his breath worse. . he was clumsy, long-nosed, ugly as a dog. . and yet his heart was good and he’d doubtless make something of himself in the world. .

Zander poured himself a whisky and ambled into the parlor, where Ailie was bent over her microscope and notepad. Gleg and the old man were out on a housecall, doing what they could to relieve old Malcolm McMurtry, who was dying of the bloody flux. Christmas was two weeks off. Wreaths of holly and groundpine hung in the windows. Outside the wind tore through the trees.

Zander sat on the edge of the table and studied his sister’s profile for a moment: the slope of the neck, the retrousse nose, the clipped black hair. “Ails,” he said finally, “I’ve been mulling it over, trying to be rational, and I don’t think — well, I don’t think you can count on Mungo coming back.” She didn’t look up from her work. “I mean — isn’t it about time we faced up to it and began to think of a future without him?” He took a sip of whisky; she was sketching something, going from microscope to notepad and back again. “I haven’t told you this. . but I’ll be leaving Selkirk before too much longer, you know — as soon as I can get myself together. I can’t stay here till the cows come home, mooching off the old man.” Still she didn’t respond. “And what about you? The old man isn’t going to live forever. Shouldn’t you be making plans?”

Ailie turned and looked up at him. “Et tu, Zander?”

He laughed. “Yes, me too. The old man wants you to marry Georgie. He asked me to talk to you. And you know, really, I don’t think it’s such a bad idea.”

“You don’t want me to be a spinster.”

“Something like that.”

“And Mungo?”

Zander left his drink and stirred up the coals m the hearth. Ailie’s doves started up a mournful duet, a sort of threnody, and then abruptly cut off in midnote. “We’ve got to face up to it, Ails,” he said, his back to her. “Two years and no word. What other conclusion is there?” When he turned round, she was peering into the microscope again. “Well?” His voice was gentle, a whisper. “Do you think there’s any hope?”

“I do not love Georgie Gleg,” she said.

♦ ♦ ♦

Two weeks later, on Christmas Day, after they’d drunk a toast and exchanged presents, there was dancing. (Ailie had been inundated with gifts from Gleg — a box of sweetmeats; three yards of green muslin store-bought in Edinburgh; the two volumes of Pierre Menard’s new study of protozoan life, Le Monde Secret ; a dipnet and half a dozen sketchpads; scented handkerchiefs; a bottle of lilac water. She gave him a pocketknife in return.) Neighbors and cousins tramped over the floorboards, Kathy Kelpie and uncle Darroch, Nell Gwynn, Robbie Campbell and all the Motherwell Andersons. Godfrey MacAlpin shrieked and moaned through his pipes. Zander struck in with a fife and old man Deans sawed away at a fiddle. There was milk punch and spiced whisky, a smell of goose and maukin roasting on the spit. Katlin Gibbie came in late, cheeks flushed, her new husband on her arm and a conspicuous bulge beneath her coat. Gleg asked Ailie for a dance.

Later, when everyone had settled down for the meal. Dr. Anderson raised his glass and shouted that Ailie had an announcement to make. She rose unsteadily from the table, Gleg beamed up at her, Zander looked puzzled. “You all know,” she began, “that I’ve lost my betrothed in the wilds of Africa. I have every hope that he will one day walk through that door. . every hope. . but the days and minutes and hours are like venom to me and I. .” she was sniffling. Old man Deans offered her his handkerchief. “Another man, kind and gentle, has been growing in my esteem. .” She fumbled for her glass, drained it in a gulp. “What I mean to say is this: if there has come no word from Mungo to stop it, I will give my hand to Georgie Gleg in this very room one year from today, so help me God.”

♦ HORRIPILATION ♦

Days became weeks, weeks months. Ned, miraculously recovered but with a tendency to fall asleep in midsentence, drank gill ale in his private cell and toasted kidneys over the grate. Outside it was snowing. He could see the hard white pellets swirling beyond the bars of his window like gravel in a stream.

Billy Boyles sat on a stool in the corner, a pot of ale in his hand. Visiting. He crossed his bony legs, took a long swallow and wiped his mouth.

“Gettin’ nervous, Neddy?”

“Nervous? Why should I? I’m innocent, ain’t I?”

“That’s right, Neddy. I was there.”

The court of assizes met in the Old Bailey (a courthouse conveniently adjoining the prison) eight times a year, or every six weeks or so. Ned had been arrested in early August, but his barrister, Neville Thorogood of the high-powered firm of Jaggers & Jaggers, had managed to procure three postponements on the grounds of ill health. Thorogood was one of the premiere criminal lawyers of his day, retained for Ned on the strength of Adonais Brooks’ bank account. But good as he was, he was no miracle worker. Ned Rise was to stand in the dock at ten o’clock the following morning.

♦ ♦ ♦

Fanny was so keyed up she couldn’t eat her dinner. “But Fanny,” Brooks protested, “you’ve got to keep your strength up. Have a bit of raw veal — or an onion and porridge at least.” No: she couldn’t touch a thing. Really. Brooks arched his eyebrows and gestured toward the bedroom. “A bit of a tumble, then? To take your mind off it?”

The months at Great George Street had been a trial. Not that Brooks hadn’t been kind — and more than generous. It was his sexual demands. They were implacable. Never-ceasing. Strange and bestial. He’d dismiss the servants and strap her to the bannister in the downstairs hallway, take her from the rear and use her upturned buttocks for an ashtray. Or he’d lash her to the cook’s worktable — spread-eagled — and probe her orifices with carrots, cucumbers, zucchini, sausages. Then scramble half a dozen eggs in her navel and lap them up raw, take impressions of her breasts for gelatin molds, bury her in cole slaw. One afternoon he pinned her down and branded his initials in her left buttock; another time he came home with a terrier and a box of rats, and made furious love to her while the dog scrambled about the room throttling rodents and growling like a two-man saw. Terrified rats sprang onto the bed, clicking and squealing, burrowing into the bedclothes, the mute insistent snap, snap, snap of their companions’ necks driving them like a whip. Fanny went into shock. Adonais never missed a stroke.

It was difficult. But it was either submit, or watch Ned die a lingering death in the muck of Newgate. The history of love was full of such sacrifices — Pyramus and Thisbe, Venus and Adonis, George and Martha Washington. If they could do it, so could she. As she lay in Ned’s arms behind the cold stone walls of Newgate, too sore and exhausted to move, her lips swollen and eyes wet with tears, she felt herself lifted into the airy solitudes of the Christian martyrs, into the realm of Ignatius, Polycarp, Joan of Arc — of Christ Himself. This was martyrdom. This was love.

Ned did his best to lighten the load. He soothed her, massaged her welts and bruises, tried to smooth away the calligraphic blot on her backside with creams and unguents — all the while swearing he’d get revenge, make it up to her, take her off to some island in the Mediterranean and raise an altar to her. She let him talk on, his voice an anodyne. The walls were of granite, the gate of cast iron. He was penniless, powerless, emasculated by a system that crushed the downtrodden and rewarded perjurers and thieves. She never reminded him. Never undermined his hopes, never burdened his flights with the ballast of reality, and above all, never alluded to the trial that hung over their heads like the wicked flashing blade of a guillotine.