T. Boyle - Water Music

Ned sits up as if he’s been slapped. “How—?”

Delp is smiling — a cold merciless sort of smile that digs deep into his face, flattens his ears and reveals his ravaged teeth. “Suddenly recovered the use of your tongue, have you?. . Well, speak up, I can’t hear you — Ned. Ned Rise, isn’t it?”

Suddenly Ned is up and breaking for the door, but Delp takes hold of his arm and flings him back down as if he were a disobedient child. “I’m not finished yet, friend.” The doctor pauses to light his pipe, the smoke squinting his eyes and riding up over his head like a hood. “I’ve been on to you from the beginning, you know. I’m no pushover like that ass Quiddle and the rest — I know you for what you are: a con man and a murderer. My first impulse was to toss you back to the hangman after the novelty wore off, but then another alternative occurred to me. It occurred to me that you’ve eat pretty well here, that you might even want to stick around, take a new name, lie low for awhile. Soft living and anonymity, eh?” Delp is pacing now — striding up and down in front of the door, head bent, pipe streaming. He looks like a bear in the pit just before they throw the dogs in. “I really see no reason why people like Sir Joseph Banks should need to know about your ah, recovery, do you?”

Ned is slouched against the wall, knees cocked under him. For the first time his eyes make contact with Delp’s. His voice is weary with resignation.

“All right,” he says. “What do you want me to do?”

♦ THINGS THAT GO BUMP

IN THE NIGHT ♦

The lights have winked out in the last cottage along the New Road, the sky is moonless and cold as a stone roofs are white with frost, doors latched, the healthy, sane and wise snoring in their beds or nodding before the fire. Out on the highway the stillness is broken by the slow plod of a mare’s hoofs and the barely perceptible snick-snick-snick of a rusted wheel. Ned Rise hunches in the bed of the creeping cart, huddled, muffled, gloved and hatted, while up front Quiddle keeps a numbed grip on the reins. Trails of vapor stream from their nostrils and their eyes water with the cold. The smell of the horse mingles with the faint acrid aroma of woodsmoke and the clean antiseptic bite of the air. Overhead, leafless trees claw at the sky.

Suddenly Quiddle pulls back on the reins and clucks softly to the horse, the wheels grab with a screech and the cart jerks to a halt beside the road. “This is it,” he whispers, securing the reins and springing down from the cart.

Ned looks round him glumly. He can’t make out much, objects drifting in and out of focus, murky, phantasmagoric, identifiable only as dense clots of darkness against an impenetrable backdrop. No more than a yard away is the black slash of a stone wall, the gray or white of individual stones aligned in a shifting ghostly grid. And there, beyond the wall, the silhouette of an enormous crippled yew snaking out into the night. The church steeple is invisible, black on black, a massive erasure in the corner of the sky. “I don’t like it,” Ned says.

“Shhhhhh, keep it down.” Quiddle lifts a pair of shovels from the back of the cart and hoists himself to the top of the wall. “Come on,” he whispers, “follow me.”

♦ ♦ ♦

After Delp left him that night, Ned lit a pipe and lay back on his pallet to sort things out. He’d kept his ears open around the hospital and knew that Delp needed cadavers badly — desperately even. The new term was starting, the other hospitals were in competition with him, his former source — Crump — had proved unreliable. And furthermore, society was against him — dissection was verboten, taboo, as unthinkable as cannibalism. If the afterlife was seen as corporeal as well as spiritual, how could a man enjoy his eternal bliss or suffer the torments of his damnation if he were in sixty-eight pieces? Accordingly, the public coffers provided for the interment of all those who expired in a given parish — vagrants, paupers and half-wits included. The only legal means of obtaining specimens was to visit the hangman and hope that one of his victims would go unclaimed by friends or relatives. All this, Ned realized, made Delp a very dangerous antagonist indeed. He was desperate. Manipulative, unscrupulous — and he held a knife to Ned’s throat. All he need do was drop a word — a single word — and Ned would find himself back in prison, dangling from a rope, dead meat on the dissector’s table.

When Delp came for his answer the following morning, Ned managed a smile and held out his hand. “I’ll do your bodysnatching for three shillings a week,” he said. Delp slapped the hand aside and pointed an admonitory finger at him. “You’ll do it for two. Another word out of you and you’ll do my bidding gratis, understand?” Ned understood. Of course, what he neglected to tell Delp was that he had no intention of doing anything whatever for him. He was merely buying time. As soon as his leg could take the strain he’d slip out and go to Fanny. She’d have something. And if she didn’t he’d force it out of Brooks — God knows she had earned it. Then they’d disappear and Delp be hanged.

Unfortunately, there was a hitch in the plan.

Ned was up before dawn one morning, past the slumbering porter and out the door. Quiddle had given him a suit of ragged clothes, and the suppurating slash in his leg had transformed itself into a long thin scar the color of calfs liver. He made his way to Great George Street, slowly, painfully, the cold stiffening his leg, the thought of Fanny spurring him on. He pictured the expression on her face when she saw him there at the door, remembered the careful white precision of her teeth, the cool slip of her arms, the way she laughed and made it sound like a symphony. But as he turned into Great George Street, he felt that something was wrong. There was Brooks’ house, imposing with its portico, Palladian windows and steep-pitched roof, but it looked closed up— as if — as if the occupants had gone out of town.

It couldn’t be. Ned bolted across the street, the pain an irrelevance, clumsily leaped the palings and found himself in the still, leaf-spattered yard. There was no sound from the house, no sign of life. No servants, delivery boys, gardeners. Surreptitious, a shadow among shadows, he peered through the shutters and saw the furniture draped in cloth coverings, the dark squares on the walls where the pictures had once hung, the cold soot-blackened hearth. Later, out on the street, he made some casual inquiries. After a rebuff or two he came across a loquacious housemaid walking a pair of Gordon setters. “Oh yes,” she said, “bless me if I can say wot’s moved ‘im to it, but Mr. Brooks ‘as gone off to It’ly and Greece for a spell. At least that’s ‘ow the gossip ‘as it.”

Ned’s stomach contracted. Hope was out of reach, he knew it, felt it slipping away like a leaf in a windstorm. The question was on his lips — Fanny, what of Fanny? — but he didn’t know how to phrase it.

The maid was picking thoughtfully at a mole on her chin. “They say ‘ee’s took ‘is trollop with ‘im too. . Oh don’t look so mortified, goldilocks — it was common knowledge up and down the block. A scandal it was, a reg’lar scandal. Keepin’ a woman and ‘im a bachelor. Ha! I could tell you a thing or two about these society people, believe you me.”

The dogs were pissing, sniffing, nosing one another in the rear. Ned became aware of a sudden chill in the air. He shuddered along the length of his body, as if the cold had stabbed him in the base of the spine, then turned and wandered off, the woman shouting something at his back. Up the block he found a sheltered spot to sit down and think it out. Fanny was gone. Indefinitely. Delp suddenly loomed in his mind. If Ned wasn’t back at the hospital when the doctor walked through those doors there would be hell to pay. Literally. He’d turn the hounds loose in a second, the bastard. Then what?