T. Boyle - Water Music

“So where’ve you been today?”

“Out to Ancrum Moor,” Zander replies.

“Ancrum Moor? It must be fourteen miles there and back.”

“Seventeen.”

“And I suppose you talked of nothing but crocodiles and Mandingoes the whole way?”

Zander grins. The baby, who has been playing in the dirt, cries out in infantine rapture, and Mungo turns to look down at his son in an abstracted sort of way, as if he doesn’t recognize him. Thomas regards his father steadily, then sticks a bit of offal in his mouth. His chin is slick with a film of dirt and saliva.

There is a moment of silence, the men concentrating on their ale. Ailie picks up her knitting. “Father was out today,” she says.

No response.

“He told me of a place open at Peebles. A doctor’s place — and a fine old house with it. What do you think?”

Mungo looks up from his ale. “Peebles? But that’s a day’s ride from here.”

“It’d mean leaving our family and friends. But we can’t hang around here forever — waiting. Can we?”

Zander has been waiting all his life. He sets his tankard down. “I don’t see why not. Better to wait on the chance of going off on a new adventure than get mired down in the life of a country physician. Look what it’s done to the old man.”

Mungo gives her a doleful look. “I don’t know,” he says.

Suddenly Zander laughs out loud. “What is it they say about Peebles?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, that expression old man Ferguson used to come out with all the time—”

The explorer’s face lights with recognition. “Yes, yes — I remember. ‘It was an unco still night,’ he’d say, ‘quiet as the grave — or Peebles.’ “

♦ GRAVE BUSINESS ♦

The mourners lining the front steps are professionals, in black suits and scarves, their eyes fixed solemnly on the ground or gazing off into space with an expression of profound grief and bewilderment. Each stands rigidly at attention, holding a long ebony mourner’s pole at half-mast before him, the black-plumed tips crossed like swords. A fine doleful drizzle beads on their top hats and muttonchop whiskers. They are waiting patiently, professionally, for the funeral procession to begin, after which they look forward to falling on the remains of the funeral supper and drinking themselves into a stupor. The procession is scheduled for 9:00 p.m.

Throughout the afternoon, a succession of carriages has pulled up at the gate and discharged various groups of sober-faced men, stricken women and sniveling children. Relatives mostly, earning their inheritances. They are gathered in the house now, weeping and moaning. At quarter past eight a gleaming phaeton lurches up to the gate and a gentleman in black swings back the door and leaps into the street, too distraught to concern himself with ceremony. An instant later he is at the door, out of breath, his hair perfect, face radiant with tears.

The gentleman is Ned Rise. Dressed in a suit of black Genoan velvet, gloves and scarf dyed in printer’s ink, even the soles of his shoes blackened for the occasion. In his pocket, a black silk handkerchief soaked in vinegar. He presses it to his face as he enters the house.

A lugubrious old man with a pitted nose sits at the door passing out sprigs of rue and gold rings engraved with the deceased’s name and dates. Walls, windows and ceiling are draped in black crape and candles in sconces light the place like a chapel. From the room beyond, the sound of hushed voices and a steady sonorous undercurrent of mewling and nose blowing. Already in tears, Ned takes a fortifying whiff of his handkerchief and is about to plunge into the front room in a state of hyperaqueous hysteria, when he feels a hand on his arm. He turns round and finds himself staring at the trembling lower lip of a young woman — a girl, actually, no more than seventeen or eighteen. Her hair falls to her waist in two sheets, her eyes are like pools of oil, there is a mole on her left breast. “Claude?” she says.

Who in Christ’s name? Ned is thinking. The cousin? Yes, of course. Blinded by tears, he takes her hand and sniffs: “Cousin?”

She nods, her eyes filling.

May as well start here, he thinks, tucking the handkerchief away. “Oh cousin!” he cries, and buries his nose in her hair.

♦ ♦ ♦

Since that chaotic night in the Islington churchyard three and a half years ago, Ned’s life has followed as circumscribed a course as rainwater in a sluice — a sluice designed by Dr. Decius William Delp, man of science, husband, father, blackmailer, ghoul. . Delp, the eminently respectable professor-surgeon who takes a glass of Madeira with my lord or a hand at whist with my lady, and then sends his confederates round to rob their graves before the fluids have had a chance to settle.

Given the conditions, Ned had little choice. He was a survivor. He’d survived brutality, mutilation, drowning, the stink of fish, Newgate, the gallows. He looked back on it all as the pistol flashed in the utter desolation of the Islington churchyard and knew he could bloody well survive anything — the witches’ sabbath, an insurrection of the walking dead, the full onslaught of Delp, Banks, Mendoza and Napoleon himself. Besides, there was just a single shot fired and the ball missed him by a good two yards, striking Quiddle in the thigh and shattering the bone. The bullet hit with a dull slap, like the sound a good pig stunner makes when he brings his cudgel down in that clean, fluid, killing swipe that buckles the animal’s legs and pitches it limp to the ground — a sharp sound, almost immediately soaked up in the sponge of meat and gristle. There was a moment of surprised silence, as if no one had really meant to take things so far, and then the tattoo of Crump’s retreating footsteps and another outcry from Boyles. Quiddle said nothing.

Ned’s first impulse was to run. Shove the whole thing and run till his lungs burst — but then he remembered how Quiddle had stuck by him, nursing him, giving up his bed, defending him against Delp. “Horace,” he whispered. “You all right?” No answer. Blackness. Nothing. Ned began to feel his way round the open grave, fearing the worst. If Quiddle was dead, Delp would expect five bodies — and his former assistant would be cut up like the rest, so many feet of intestine, so many ounces of this organ or that, sausage, tripe, headcheese. The thought was so vivid and arresting that Ned nearly collapsed when Quiddle suddenly seized his hand.

Quiddle’s grip was a vise. His voice was hoarse. Between gasps he instructed Ned in the use of a tourniquet and emphasized the need for haste — both on his own account and because Crump’s indiscretion would bring the constables down on them. Ned understood perfectly. He bound the wound and dragged Quiddle to the base of the wall — but didn’t have the strength to get him over. “Hold on,” he whispered, and went off in search of Boyles.

Boyles was hunched behind a grave marker, gibbering and moaning to himself. He’d always had something of the Irish peasant’s fascination with elves and ogres and banshees — but this was the real thing. Not five minutes ago he’d come face to face with an impossibility. Call it specter, phantom, shade — it was real, a walking, talking dead man. He was shaken. Half-drunk, it’s true, but shaken nonetheless. Ned had to tackle him, pin him down, slap him forty or fifty times and twice run through the story of his escape from the hangman before he could convince Billy to get up and help him lift Quiddle over the wall.

Boyles sat up in the cart and sucked at Ned’s flask like a man in a dream. Quiddle bled and moaned. From time to time he would complain of the cold. Ned whipped the horse till his shoulder went numb in the socket, and back at St. Bartholomew’s Delp himself performed the operation, taking the leg off just below the hip and cauterizing the wound with the blade of a shovel held over the fire till it glowed.