Bone China Page 16

  Pompey whined. Louise buried her face in his fur for comfort and walked away. In Creeda’s voice, the words did not sound like an innocent aspiration.

  More like a threat.

  *

  Louise trod the familiar path down to the beach where her father was already at work. Some of the men were out and about on this blustery morning, making the most of the sun as it flitted between fast-moving clouds. Old Seth sat on a rock, drinking milk from a pewter cup. Chao stood at the edge of the water, letting the surf play over his bare feet. One of the shirts Louise had sewn billowed around his wasted frame. The plan was to start the men on a regime of sea-bathing once they had rallied a little strength, but she could not envision the Chinaman taking part in this. He was so slight, the tide would carry him away.

  She approached the entrance to the cave. Some lamps hung suspended from nails driven into the rock. By their light, she saw her father, just inside the opening, listening to Harry’s chest.

  The young man offered a wan smile. Today his lips were crimson, flecked with blood.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling? I trust the camphor brought down your temperature?’

  He nodded, reluctant to speak while the doctor listened. She noticed the distinct three-sided bite on his wrist, which showed Papa had been removing his diseased blood with leeches.

  Harry reminded her of the apprentices who had trained under her father in Bristol: eager, polite young men with just that little spark in their eye to suggest they could misbehave, given the chance.

  It was a daily struggle for her to remember that all these men had been arraigned and incarcerated for crimes.

  Papa pulled away from Harry and appraised him. ‘Hmm. Have you drunk your milk today?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good man. I want you to go and walk slowly on the sand, take in some of that fine air.’

  ‘Glad to.’ Harry tugged his forelock. ‘Miss,’ he said to Louise as he passed her.

  A hardened criminal indeed.

  A cough echoed from the back of the cave, punctuated by a steady dripping. Papa rubbed the bridge of his nose, thinking.

  She felt awkward, a trespasser. It was always so in the morning. The men banded tightly together, as if something had taken place in the night that she could not understand. But she comprehended all too well: the nights were the worst for consumptives. The fever, the restlessness, the gasping for breath. She had seen it all and she should be down there, helping Papa to nurse them through it.

  ‘How do you progress?’ she ventured.

  He turned away, not meeting her eye. ‘It is too early to tell at present. I am sure the air will prove salutary, but I am not willing to trust to that alone.’ He began to pack the jar of leeches and the tongue depressor into his mahogany chest. ‘We both know the dangers of such complacency.’

  ‘Papa, you did everything you could—’

  ‘Not everything,’ he insisted, growing slightly hoarse. ‘I did not take them to a better climate. Italy has many advocates, but it was so difficult to travel with …’ The top of the box slammed shut. She saw him trying to form the F for Francis; he could not bring himself to do it.

  Her own chin trembled. Dear God, she thought, do not let him see me cry.

  Another cough rang out.

  ‘However,’ he added tightly. Both his hands remained flat on the top of the mahogany chest. ‘I begin to suspect it is the sea voyage, and not Italy itself, which offers relief to the phthisical patient. Look at the lower classes. Neither the sailor nor the fishwife suffer. We will find the cure in the ocean water … in the air. How your mother would have loved this air.’

  Louise swallowed and tried to turn the subject. ‘I did not see Michael or Tim outside. Do they keep to their beds?’

  ‘Yes.’ Still he did not look at her. ‘The moisture retained in the rock has done something to lower their fevers. The emetics are also jarring Tim’s humours back into balance, but Michael …’ He exhaled. ‘Michael stands in need of your nursing. Perhaps you could help him to drink his milk.’

  ‘I will do it directly, Papa.’

  She picked up a cup and made for Michael’s hut.

  The wooden door was damp and spongy to her touch. It creaked when she pushed it open. Michael made a confused noise that was not quite language.

  ‘Hush, now. It is Miss Pinecroft.’

  The atmosphere inside was oppressive. A natural, stony smell rose from the cave and mingled with the tang of wet wood. But these were the pleasant scents. She tried to focus upon them, rather than the effluvia and stale exhaled breath.

  Michael lay on a straw-stuffed mattress. He had sweated through the sheet and his clean shirt. A brimming pot at his side showed the purges had worked, at least.

  ‘Water,’ he panted.

  He looked haggard, the flesh hanging from his cheekbones. Droplets of blood and vomit were sprinkled in his beard.

  ‘We should prefer you to drink milk this morning.’ She took a rag from her apron and ran it over his brow. ‘It is most effectual at building up the strength.’

  He groaned.

  She imagined the disease sitting thick on his lungs, like tar. How could it waste a strong, tall man like Michael and leave her, a slender girl of barely twenty, untouched?

  Sitting Michael up, she leaned his weight against her shoulder and began to spoon the milk from a cup into his mouth. After only two swallows, he erupted into a coughing fit.

  She felt it spray her cheek and closed her eyes. Michael gripped her so tight that it hurt. She thought of the catch in a fisherman’s net, twitching and gasping on the deck.

  She opened her eyelids and saw why Michael had not been able to take in air. His lungs were brimming with something else.

  The blood spilled over, dribbling down his lips into the cup of milk. She watched red ribbons twist through the white liquid, and all at once she was holding a cup fit for the devil’s table.

  Hastily, she set it aside and tried to dab Michael’s mouth. When she brought the handkerchief away, all the red he possessed seemed to come with it. The hue of his lips now matched the pallor of his skin. Even his gums were anaemic, shrivelled.

  It took all her fortitude to keep her distress from showing on her face.

  ‘We will try again later,’ she said briskly, rising to her feet. ‘In the meantime I will obtain a feeder cup. Such a vessel will make the process easier.’

  He wheezed for a moment before replying. ‘A … pap boat. Like a … damned baby.’

  Little Francis flashed before her eyes.

  Turning on her heel, she left the hut.

  Papa was still standing in the same spot, his fingers at his lips. This was the way he would listen, intent, as a patient described their symptoms.

  Only no one was there.

  ‘Papa?’

  ‘Louise! Did you …’ Confusion suddenly clouded his brow. He glanced quickly behind him. ‘Did you just arrive?’

  ‘I have this moment come from Michael’s hut.’

  ‘Oh.’ He sounded disappointed. Again that furtive glimpse over his shoulder.

  She considered showing him the cup of blood, but his distraction was evident. She set it down on a rock, glad to have it out of her hands.

  ‘So you did not … Never mind.’

  ‘Is something amiss, Papa?’

  ‘Amiss? No, no.’ He ran a hand down the length of his face. ‘In fact, I have had an idea.’

  She nodded encouragingly.

  ‘You recall me saying that smoke inhalations have relieved the symptoms of asthma?’

  ‘I do, Papa.’

  ‘And this disease shares characteristics with the asthma: the difficulty breathing, the tightness of the chest. Surely strengthening the lungs in general will help fight against one aspect of the illness.’

  ‘So you propose to give the men pipes?’

  ‘I do.’ He drew back his shoulders, a touch more confident. ‘But smoke is not the only treatment t
hat has helped asthma sufferers. They have also derived benefits from stramonium and digitalis purpurea.’

  ‘Foxglove?’ The word popped from her; the cave took it up and bounced it back, mimicking her amazement.

  Papa waited until the echo faded away. ‘You are right to be surprised. Of course, the plant can prove poisonous. But in small doses, it will promote the absorption of air.’

  ‘And slow the pulse.’

  ‘Just so. We will regulate the hectic flow of the men’s blood. They have an overfullness of blood, at present.’

  His face had unfolded. The muscles of his jaw looked more relaxed; there was something of the old gentle set to his brow. Her parent returned to her.

  Surely she must encourage this, or anything that gave him purpose?

  ‘I will layer the tobacco with stramonium and digitalis,’ Papa decided. He seized her hand and pressed it in his own. ‘Then we will work to combat the fever and the wasting. It will be a cure, Louise. We will achieve it. These men shall live to enjoy their freedom.’

  She had read Pharmacopoeia Extemporanea more times than she could count. Without going back to consult the pages, she knew the composition it recommended for such inhalations: pistachio peels, hyssop, horehound, even orpiment. There was no mention of smoking the leaves of foxglove or stramonium – a plant the common folk called Devil’s Snare. This must all be her father’s own genius.

  ‘It is a bold plan, an admirable plan,’ she began carefully. ‘If we could only be certain …’

  ‘Courage, Louise! Trust me,’ he said.

  She did not realise, until that moment, that she had ever stopped.

  Chapter 22

  Ernest awoke at the first glimmer of dawn, when the gulls began to screech. He did not object. Sleep, when it came, was no relief. His wife flitted through his dreams. Not as she had been in life but radiant, transformed into an angel. A mirage he could not touch.

  That image remained in his mind as he returned to the house and spoke with his patient before she began her daily tasks. He realised that his own grief was giving him a unique insight into Creeda’s troubled world. He could comprehend, when others could not, how the demands of sensibility might have caused her to weave elaborate stories for comfort.

  Such as her tale of ‘changelings’.

  ‘Sometimes they swap,’ she had told him, as matter of fact as if she were asserting the time of day. ‘See, they get the sickly fairies, ones that are of no use, and they put a charm on them.’

  ‘What kind of charm?’

  ‘One to make them look like us. So you could be gone, taken away underground, but there’d be a fairy in your place, wearing your own face. No one would know,’ she added, her voice tight and afraid. ‘No one would even know to come and find you.’

  Swapping the sick for the healthy. An ingenious concept. He almost wished he could do the same.

  ‘And you believe that these sickly pixies—’

  ‘Fairies, sir.’

  ‘Pardon me, fairies. Do they die?’

  She shrugged. ‘I expect they would. They can’t stomach our human food.’

  He thought of his men on the beach, struggling to consume the milk and broth he had brought them. What would she make of his consumptives, if she ever braved the caves? ‘But in your mind, the person concerned is not actually deceased? Although their double expires, they remain … in fairyland?’

  She nodded. ‘Under the ground. Where I was.’

  A consolation. Almost a blasphemous, mangled concept of heaven: to believe that your loved one lived on in a world separate from your own. But the similarities with orthodox religion ended there. The differences were stark and decidedly lunatic.

  ‘There is no method, I suppose,’ he had asked almost jokingly, ‘of switching back?’

  ‘Water,’ she replied at once. ‘You banish the fairy with water or fire.’

  ‘You kill them,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  An altogether more pleasant exchange took place at the end of the interview. He left her with her daily ounce of distilled vinegar, and in return she handed him a small wooden casket. ‘Your order, sir.’

  He opened the lid. Inside were two small vases. Cobalt blue flowers surrounded the rims, but the curved bodies were a fretwork of strange vines, intricately twined.

  Mopsy would have adored them.

  And she would have been pleased too, he thought as he climbed the stairs, that he had procured another present for Louise. Towards the end, she had always been pestering him to leave her and tend to the children instead.

  ‘Louise has them in hand,’ he would say, loath to part from her.

  But she would lie back on her mountain of pillows and fix him with that infinitely wise look. ‘Do not neglect Louise. Intelligence is no guard against distress. She may be capable, but that does not mean she is coping.’

  A highly womanish thing to say, but he had heeded it nonetheless.

  He stopped outside Louise’s bedroom and was reaching for the door handle when it struck him that perhaps he should knock. She was a young lady now, after all … But he could not quite bring himself to swallow that, so he entered the room boldly as usual.

  The ash tree outside the window was bursting into leaf. Morning light filtered through the branches and gave everything a greenish underwater tint. Louise sat at her dressing table, wedging some extra hairpins through her cap.

  She did not pause in her toilette or show the least surprise at seeing him.

  ‘Sorry, Papa, I fear I am running late. I meant to be at the caves an hour ago. Creeda did not wind my clock.’

  ‘It is of no matter. I wanted to speak with you.’

  ‘And I with you.’

  Her dressing table was very sparse, he noticed. None of the lotions and powders Kitty would have thought necessary. And then there was the room in general. It was neat as a pin. He thought with shame of the chaos that reigned inside his own chamber. How devilishly tricky it was without Mopsy to keep things in order.

  Louise reached for her spectacles. ‘What have you there in your hand?’

  ‘A gift.’ He smiled and laid the box down on the dressing table. ‘It occurred to me that my last was perhaps not fitted to our current circumstances. We are hardly likely to receive guests for tea! I hope you will like this better.’

  She opened the casket and withdrew one of the vases.

  Ernest had thought the vases were identical to the toile-de-Jouy in which he had decorated the rooms, but now he saw the paint was a darker blue, the colour the sea turned when you were beyond the shallows and venturing out of your depth.

  ‘How exquisite.’ He was disappointed to hear the detachment in her voice. Her smile did not reach her eyes. ‘I can pick the wildflowers that grow on the cliff and display them.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Louise looked at the base of the vase and saw the Nancarrow factory stamp. Her smile faltered. ‘Another from Creeda’s family?’

  ‘Yes. I asked Mr Nancarrow to send a pair that your maid had decorated herself.’

  She let out a slow sigh. Despite the cap she wore, he could see the worry bunching in her forehead.

  ‘You … do not care for them?’

  ‘Oh, Papa!’ she cried. ‘It is only … Forgive me, Papa, it is not the present that is at fault. It is … Creeda.’

  ‘I see.’

  Damn him for a blockhead, he should have foreseen this. How long did he think he could keep it secret from her? She had her mother’s penetrating eyes; they saw everything.

  ‘I do not mean,’ she explained haltingly, setting the vase down, ‘to question your judgement. Creeda is a very diligent worker. I can see how on first application, she might appear … However, I am sorry to tell you that I have observed the girl closely and reached the conclusion that she is not suitable to work inside our home.’

  His temples tightened. Why did he not plan for this eventuality? So many thoughts were blazing through his mind: the caves,
the smoke, the phthisis … He needed time to consider his words. But there Louise was, blinking up at him, expectant.

  ‘Would you care to explain your reasoning, my dear?’

  Louise wet her lips. ‘I did not wish to tell you. It seems unkind, akin to gossip, and yet … Well, I shall give you some examples. First, she collects animal bones from the clifftop and boils them clean. Not for soup. She just boils them, in our kitchen … And then, she is always trying to give me handfuls of ash. She says it will protect me from … something or other.’

  ‘That is certainly peculiar, but—’

  ‘You have not heard the worst of it. Last night, I happened to mention her heterochromia. I cannot even recall what I said, it was a careless remark about her eyes. But she told me that she was not born that way. That, if you can credit it, her aunt found her on the factory steps one day and her eye had turned from brown to blue.’

  He tried to chuckle. ‘Impossible, of course, but Creeda is not to know that. Perhaps it is merely an anecdote her family have passed on.’

  ‘I would agree with you, except for what she said next. Papa, she …’ Louise dropped into a whisper. ‘She thinks she uses her blue eye to see into fairyland. I am afraid that she is quite mad.’

  Bizarrely, he felt a spurt of irritation with his daughter. It passed; he held up his hands in surrender and sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘I know it, Louise. Her mind is not sound. That is why she is under my care.’

  ‘Papa!’ Just one word, but it made him wince. The reproach – no, worse than that. The disappointment in it. ‘She is a patient of yours? You did not tell me!’

  ‘I told you she came from the factory to be your maid, which is true. I exchanged correspondence with the Nancarrow family. They heard of my imminent arrival from their workers at the nearby clay setts. You see, Creeda’s behaviour had been causing difficulty at the porcelain manufactory. Her family wished for her to be watched by a professional. Away from wagging tongues.’