T. Boyle - Water Music

Fanny did not attend the party. She lay in bed, the child at her side, counting out drops of laudanum. It was now nearly four years since she’d stepped through the gates at Geesthacht, four years that had accumulated all her loneliness, despair and self-contempt until the combined force of it lashed her like a whip day and night, four years that constituted her season in hell. She was a prisoner. Her future had been throttled on the gallows, her present was a blight.

At first, the child had revitalized her. She came out of her haze, made demands of Brooks and von Pölkler, tried to cut back her intake of medicine. Her keepers acceded to her demands — she was given a degree of autonomy and left alone much of the time — but the laudanum had a hold over her that struck far deeper than any influence either of them could assert. Without it, her dreams turned sour. She saw Ned in his grave, the cerements creeping with worms and insects; she saw her boy, son of a whore, grown into a beast under von Pölkler’s tutelage; she watched herself writhing in the cold dark muck of a riverbed, the current swirling over her like a stormy sky. She started up in bed, wet with perspiration, and was immediately racked with shivers. Her throat was dry, a thousand bright-eyed rodents dug at her insides with quick sharp movements of tooth and claw. She reached for the blue bottle.

Now it was a matter of course. She took seven thousand drops a day, and her dreams were easier. The child slept better for it too. When she first took him off the breast he couldn’t keep his food down and would toss in his cradle, colicky and restless. Frau Grunewald, the ancient midwife who had tended von Pölkler in his infancy, suggested a drop or two of medicine in the boy’s porridge. It worked. And now the medicine was as much a part of the child’s life as it was of Fanny’s own. She didn’t like it. She sensed that the child was starting out at a disadvantage, a cripple, saddled with a special need and a special craving to satisfy it. But then what did it matter? Von Pölkler would take her son away and indoctrinate him until he became a stranger to her. She was powerless to stop him.

As she lay there brooding over it, the laudanum stroking her abdomen with firm hot fingers, the door swung back, and Brooks staggered into the room. His clothes were torn, his face smeared, the eyes drilled into his head. He lurched for the bed, missed his mark and fell headlong into the corner. A moment later there was the sound of gagging — and then he was still.

Fanny cautiously lifted herself from the bed and bent over him. He did not seem to be breathing. She turned him over and listened for a heartbeat. There was none. She crawled back into bed and took a spoonful of medicine to clear her head. Very gradually, something began to bloom there, something compounded equally of fear and exhilaration. Two hours later, when Brooks had grown cold and a faint gray light had begun to peer in at the windows, Fanny lifted a fistful of currency from his waistcoat pocket, dressed the child and crept out into the hallway.

The place was silent. Stone corridors stretched off into darkness, arrases shadowed the walls. She tiptoed down the steps and into the main hall, afraid that von Pölkler might still be at it, red-eyed from debauch — he would stop her for certain, mother of his child. She’d have to reach Cuxhaven — no, be aboard a smack in the North Sea — before she’d be clear of him. But for the moment, all was well: there was no sign of him.

The main hall was a shambles. Littered with smashed furniture, overturned tables, scraps of food, the shards of bottles. There was a sound of snoring. Somewhere, someone was groaning. To her left, propped up against the wall, was Herr Meinfuss, the stablekeeper. Another man was asleep in his lap. Beyond them a dark shadow lay frozen against the floor. It was Bruno, von Pölkler’s Alsatian. The dog had been eviscerated, its intestines trailing from the rictus of the body cavity like rotten sausage. Fanny led her son around the carcass and out into the gray light of morning.

Her Hertfordshire upbringing served her in good stead when she reached the stables. It was nothing to saddle the Margrave’s finest horse — an Arabian gray — seat the boy across the pommel and head out over the fields for the Hamburg road. At a gallop. In Hamburg she was able to dispose of the horse to a suspicious but profit-loving dealer after she explained in her rudimentary German that her husband had been injured in Oldenburg, and that she needed to raise money so she could rush to his aid. The horse trader flashed a complicitous, full-toothed grin, gave her a fifth the animal’s worth and wished her husband well.

By nightfall she was at Cuxhaven. A boat was leaving for London, via The Hague, at six the following morning. She had just enough to cover her fare after purchasing two bottles of laudanum from the chemist and some milk and groats for her son. All night she sat huddled on the dock, jumping at every sound, expecting von Pölkler to swoop down on them at any moment. Finally, at dawn, the passengers were taken aboard, the captain weighed anchor and the schooner moved out into the bay. Fanny stood at the rail and watched the shore recede as a tall, mustachioed figure on horseback thundered out onto the dock, fist raised in anger. The commotion was sudden and violent. There was the sound of a gunshot, voices carrying across the water like the cries of the damned. But just then the wind came up and took hold of the sails like a great gloved hand, and the shore was lost in the gray wash of the waves.

♦ ♦ ♦

If there was triumph in that escape, a feeling that she had been able to react in a crisis and marshal her inner resources to outmaneuver a vastly superior force, the grimness of her homecoming all but annihilated it. There was no one to meet her, no one who cared whether she was alive or dead, returned safe to England or forever trapped in exile. Ned was gone, her parents would bolt the door and latch the windows against a fallen woman. Cook, Bount and the Bankses would sooner run naked through the streets than look at her. She was even cheated of the little patriotic jump of the heart that a first glimpse of the Tower or the spires of St. Paul’s might have given her — the German vessel put in at Gravesend, and she had no money even to hire a fisherman’s smack to take her up the river. As it was, she had to beg a ride with a man hauling a cartload of chickens to market. The cart jostled, a cold rain fell, the child cried, the chickens stank of scale and excrement, the man put a hand on her thigh.

They wound their way into London through the stinking slums of the East End. Soot hung in the air. Children were begging on the streetcorners, women lay drunk in the alleys. Two pigs gorged on the offal in the gutter, a madman was selling invisible Bibles, a woman with cancer of the throat offered to drink a gallon of water and vomit it up for a penny. After the carter let her down in Poultry Lane, Fanny wandered the streets for hours, aimless, the child tugging at her arm. She had nothing but a few worthless pfennigs in her pocket, no place to stay, nothing to eat, and what was worse, she was down to her last few drops of laudanum. She’d been pacing herself, trying to make it last, but already her stomach was beginning to crawl. The rain fell like fire and brimstone.

Sometime that night or the next, she found herself on Monmouth Street, grimly plodding through the rain, looking for medicine, food, shelter, warmth, medicine, medicine, medicine. The child had been crying steadily for hours, pulling back at her hand, tugging at her skirts, whining that he wanted to lie down and sleep. Her own legs felt like lead and her back ached as if she’d been hauling pails of milk all night or laboring over the butter churn. She had the dry heaves. Her throat burned with a raw desperate thirst that no amount of water could quell.