T. Boyle - Water Music

Quiddle sets the tray down with a quick athletic motion and springs back a step or two, keeping his distance, wary, light on his feet. He folds his hands behind his back. “Heh-heh,” he says. And then: “Listen, you do know where you are and all that, don’t you? I mean, this isn’t heaven or anything. You’ve been saved — you’ve lived through it. The hanging I mean.” Quiddle looks down at his shoes. “What I mean is you’re alive, man — alive as the King himself!” He ends with a burst of nervous laughter, as if he’s just told a joke in a tavern.

Ned says nothing. He knows perfectly well what’s happened. He’s had nearly a day and a half to sort it out, savor it, run the emotional gamut from initial bewilderment to religious ecstasy to pure animal joy. Besides, he’s been eavesdropping on the conversation in the hallway.

“Well, listen — if you don’t feel like talking just yet. .”

Ned’s eyes are fixed on Quiddle’s perspiring face. He has made an effort to keep from blinking since his benefactor stepped into the room. And it is an effort. Especially since he’s starving. The smell of the beef broth or oxtail soup or whatever it is has been setting off a whole battery of involuntary responses: a hollow thumping in the pit of the stomach, pursing of the lips, a clenching of the salivary glands. But he’s got to play this for all it’s worth.

“I can understand,” Quiddle says, backing toward the door. “It must be very hard for you. Just rest. You’re all right now. We’ll have you on your feet in a day or two and you can start life over, put it all behind you, make new associations, new—” His voice has become a whisper, soothing, motherly.

An instant later the door pulls shut and Ned falls on the tray like a pack of wolves.

♦ ♦ ♦

For the next several days Ned is led round the hospital in a white smock, nodding at the sick and dying, laying hands on crippled children, patiently exposing himself to the astonished probing fingers of surgeons, physicians and students. His leg hurts like a son of a bitch and his neck feels twisted out of joint, but Quiddle has found him a bottle of laudanum and the barber has been in to scrape his cheeks and powder his hair. Ned knows what’s expected of him. He limps round the corridors like a wounded seraph, the rope burn artfully concealed beneath a white cravat, a fervent messianic look in his eye. Whenever he’s addressed he turns round and raises a sorrowful finger to his throat.

Quiddle’s opinion is that the larynx has been crushed, while Delp insists that there is no evidence of physical damage whatever. After a painstaking examination of Ned’s vocal apparatus, Abernathy is forced to concur with Delp, but suggests that the crux of the problem may be mental rather than physical. In support of his diagnosis he adduces the case of Lucy Minor. Some years back she had been brought to the hospital after an accident in which she was run down by a drunken coachman. The horses bore down on her; she stumbled. When the coach had passed, bystanders rushed to her aid and were astonished to see that she had escaped injury — miraculously the flying hoofs and churning wheels had run wide of her. She was helped to her feet, someone dusted her dress, she was given a glass of brandy — but when she turned to thank the man who’d helped her up, she found that she couldn’t speak. Doctors were baffled. Abernathy himself tried every remedy he could think of, from leeches to hot poultices to binding the throat. He bled her until she blanched. Nothing. Now, twelve years later, Lucy Minor devotes most of her time to charity work with the deaf and dumb. No sound has passed her lips in all that time.

Dr. Maitland, who has been practicing at St. Bartholomew’s for nearly half a century, admits Abernathy’s point, but cites a glaring disparity between the two cases: the fact of constriction. “It’s a simple question of blockage,” he insists, “plain as the nose on your face. Purgatives is what the man needs. Give him a dose or two of croton oil, bleed him twice, and follow it up with an enema of antimony and foxglove.” Runder, a strict Brunonian, has his own theory. “Clearly it’s an asthenic disorder — treat the fellow with alcohol and he’ll be jabbering like a myna inside of a week.” Delp demurs. “He’s a fraud I tell you. I say we let the other patients have a look at him and then boot him out in the street. Or better yet, send him back to the hangman.” Finally, after a debate that consumes two dinner hours, three ribs of beef, eight capons, half a wheel of cheese and fifteen bottles of port, it is decided that Ned Rise’s initial week will be extended to two, and that Abernathy will contact Mrs. Minor in order to have her instruct the patient in the science of communicating by signs. At the end of the two-week period, the patient will be removed from the premises.

Ned’s reaction to all this is elemental. He sleeps in Quiddle’s bed, eats Quiddle’s food, drinks Quiddle’s laudanum. He pours Maitland’s croton oil down the hole in the outhouse, quaffs Runder’s alcohol, spends two hours a day waving his fingers at an earnest Mrs. Minor, and scrupulously avoids Delp. He continues to wander about the halls, his eyes stricken, hair tastefully arranged, lips sealed. Of all the theories put forward to account for his affliction, he privately concurs with only one: Dr. Delp’s.

Oh, he was hoarse for a day or two — who wouldn’t be? He lay there in the dark, grinning, the words dropping off his tongue like bits of solder as he rehearsed the miracle of his resurrection and the fevered ecstatic version he would deliver to Fanny. In person. He would stride up the steps at Brooks’ house, shove his way past the astonished butler and burst into the parlor, a ragged noose dangling from his neck. “I’ve come back from the grave to exact my vengeance, you pervert!” he’d shout, and bring Brooks to his knees with a single blow. Then he’d take Fanny in his arms, whisper that she shouldn’t be frightened and then reveal the whole story. Brooks would be moved, write them a check, call a carriage, and off they’d go. Or something like that.

But for now Ned is lying low. Licking his wounds, getting his strength back, trying to grapple with the horror he’s been through. Every time he closes his eyes it’s there, pitiless, unrelenting — the gallows looming over him like some gigantic carnivorous insect, the snow sifting down like ash, the dead cold gaze of the hangman and the inescapable sense that the black hood conceals some nameless inhuman terror. Awake or asleep, it haunts him. He shudders and writhes on Quiddle’s narrow pallet, the nightmare descending, noose poised, and then he starts up in a sweat thinking, What if they come for me again? What if Banks or Mendoza or Twit’s sister gets word of it? Sinking, he can feel the whole nasty cycle beginning again, the wheel creeping round on him, exquisite torture, slow and redundant. He wants to shout out, screech till the walls shatter — but he doesn’t. Silence is the key. Keep them guessing. Just a day or two more and the leg will be healed, a day or two more and—

The door cracks open. Quiddle. Sidling in with a tray: cold chicken, kidney pie, a mug of ale. But wait: this isn’t Quiddle. It’s someone taller, broader — who?

Decius William Delp stands over the bed, tray in hand. As he bends to set it down, Ned instinctively draws back. For a long moment the tray sits there between them, steam feebly rising from the meat pie. Delp’s eyes are locked on Ned’s. Ned looks away.

“Feeling better, I take it — huh, Sleeping Beauty?” Delp says finally. He is a big-boned man, very pale, with black hairs on the back of his hands. “Well — aren’t you going to sample the offering for the day. . Ned?”