Kate Heathward

Extract from The Sleep of Reason

Cornwall, 1808.

Rose

How much time passes, Rose is not sure. Figures seem to step out of the corners of the room and stroll across the threadbare rug as if it were only natural, as if they were not long-since dead. Others waited in the square outside, their heads turned up towards her window, too far away for her to see their faces. She's dreaming – she is sick and this is the fever, she knows, but that awareness slips away with what is real and what is not. One dream melds into another. Her arms and her throat aches.

At one point she hears voices outside her room and the walls and door peel themselves open, bending back on themselves like the pages of a book. There are familiar silhouettes in the hallway. Her son and her doctor, staggered by candlelight.

“...and Eliza?”

“We – we sent her to Mrs Fran's until mama's recovered, like last time.”

“You did not go with her?”

“No, no, I can’t, not when she—”

That smell again, like spoiling meat. The tallow flame spits, struggling to stay alight, and Mr Hoskin’s hand reaches out of the dark to shelter it, pushing out of the shadows of the hall. Purpling skin, swollen fingers. The flesh falling away, as she remembers, his broken body sprawled in the wild grass.

She must make a sound, for they turn to look at her – the two of them, James and Luis. As the candle flickers she sees the empty hallway again, the dark stairwell, where the old wood drinks the light. Mr Hoskin is gone. There is no one else there, of course there isn’t. Mr Hoskin is buried at last, although his shape is still pressed into the dirt outside, between the houses, in broken nettles and dying grass. 

James takes a step towards her, hesitating with his hand on the doorframe. “Mama?”

She doesn’t answer. Her throat aches when she swallows. To find her voice is beyond her, and there is little he could do; she’s been visited by far worse ghosts.

More movement in the dark. Figures, waiting beyond the firelight of her room.

James moves towards her, but something holds him back. Luis. “The tea will be taking effect,” he says quietly, and the candles they are holding shimmer, as if the air around them is thickening, tightening. “Let her sleep.” He pulls the bedroom door closed, and the room folds back with it, the walls juddering as they settle back into place.

She does sleep, she thinks. It comes over her as a wave, thick and heavy, and her thoughts unravel until she no longer knows their meaning.

The next time she opens her eyes, she feels a little more herself, although she has a headache, a dry, dull ache that shifts like it is pacing the edges of some boundary. The day beyond the window is overcast, and a fog presses up against the pane, dampening the sill. The light that seeps through is almost blue. Luis sits by her bedside, wetting a cloth in a bowl of water on his knees. She can hear the water trickling back into the bowl.

“Luis,” she whispers eventually, and he looks up at her, surprised, before his smile comes, a ripple in a pool.

“You’re awake.” He puts the bowl down on the floor by his feet, careful not to spill, before he reaches towards her. “Please, here—”

He helps her sit up, propping her up with pillows, and then raises a cup of water for her to drink. She aches, and the movement makes it worse, but he keeps coaxing and so she does as he asks. To swallow hurts. She isn’t thirsty. When he is satisfied, he lets her sink back into the pillows again, and as she lies down there is a flicker at the corner of her eye, behind the door. A darting, spark-like movement, like swooping flies.

She flinches at a touch to her forehead, but it is only her doctor, placing the cloth over her forehead again. He’s fussing over her, his hands white and cool around the cloth.

He’s still here. He keeps coming back.

“…Don't you resent me?” she asks finally, dredging up her voice. 

Luis pauses, brow pinching in a look of confusion. “What do you mean?”

You should do, she wants to say. I've resented you. She's resented herself, for how she’d refused him, for wanting him in the first place in the wake of her husband’s death. Luis acts as if the past is behind them, as if this is all that matters, but it's not. She cannot forget. The truth is as real as he is, save he would live in a dream and she is haunted by them.

She’d seen her late husband earlier, in the same seat where Luis had sat. Isaac. When he’d opened his mouth to speak it was only water that bubbled out, hissing, slate blue like the ocean, spilling over his lips and his chin into the waiting basin of his hands.

Luis looks at her, and he understands what she means now, even if he might pretend that he doesn't. “It doesn't matter. Not now.”

She doesn’t believe that. “Answer me. Did you – did you resent—” She starts coughing and keeps coughing, and Luis helps her to lean forward, smoothing circles between her shoulder blades and over her back. She feels weaker when she's finished. It's all in the throat; she's torn it raw and open again, and there is a flared, sharp pain when she breathes. He offers her water and she turns her head away, breathing slowly until she can suppress the urge to cough again.

“Please, Rose. You need to rest.”

“The truth,” she manages when she's caught her breath. She's bent forward over the covers, her hair slipping forward limp and cool over her cheeks. Luis’ hand is still on her back. Taking a deeper breath, she tries again. “Luis—”

“…I did,” he admits finally, his touch sliding away. “At first. After… After. But I don't, now. It was not your fault, but my own; I wanted… I overstepped, and I’ve wanted to apologise – to ask – for your forgiveness.”

But the fault was not entirely his. She was the one who’d reached for him, who’d asked him to stay. Her hands in his coat. His hair. That unbearable weight of grief, and the relief that she had at least not lost him, along with everything else. 

“I forgive you,” she says. I’ve already forgiven you.

“...Rose.” There is a stir of displaced air. Movement. The dip of the bed as Luis passes his hand over her brow, tenderly drawing back her hair. Her eyes close. His thumb brushes over the edge of her eyebrow, drawing over her temple.

But you didn’t come back, she wants to say, too tired to open her eyes again. His fingers trace her cheek, towards her jaw, leaving a tingling sensation in their wake. “Why didn’t you—?”

Luis’ touch drops away, and she hears him take a trembling breath.

“...I should fetch your tea. We will – we will talk of this when you are well again.”

He gets up to leave, the mattress lifting in his wake. Wait, she whispers, but if he hears her, he does not stop. Luis, she says, but he steps carefully across the room into the hall, mindful of the boards that creak, and pulls the door shut behind him.

As the door closes, Mr Hoskin stands in its shadow, the ruin of his face just visible in the firelight. The light from the window doesn't touch him. His coat hangs oddly from his shoulders, askew and sodden from the dew, and even from here she can hear the flies, buzzing as they dart and swoop around him like black sparks. He should scare her, she knows, but she finds that he doesn’t. Not really. He waits as she waits, and as her mind slips again towards sleep, she thinks she hears Mr Hoskin say something, more felt than heard.

#

That evening finds Luis once again in his uncle’s old study, hunched over his books searching for something, anything, that he might be able to use. By some divine providence his uncle kept a fastidious archive: Luis finds a series of regular letters sent by the Royal College of Physicians detailing the newest medicines. Among them is an entry on the extract of a rare bark. It is a miraculous medicine, if painfully difficult to secure. He will write to his contacts in Falmouth, in London. There may be no cure for Hydrophobia but there is a chance of recovery, slim as it is. He has to find something.

He’s seen a case of canine madness only once before, a stray dog taken to his uncle years ago, when Luis was visiting as a boy. It had been shot in the countryside after it savaged some sheep. It’s a terrible disease, his uncle had told him after he instructed the body to be burnt, it can only be suffered, not stopped. Luis and his sister were kept inside until all the town’s strays had been culled and his uncle was satisfied at last that the danger had passed.

His latest book yields nothing more than speculation on mental disturbances, and so Luis rises to hunt for another, plundering his uncle’s bookshelves. What measure of guilt he’d first felt has long since subsided to necessity. The library is his now, as much as it was his uncle's, and it bears both of their marks: the old recipe books, a few works of fiction. He finds a volume of William Cullen’s materia medica with a cracked cover but fumbles as he reaches for it, the book tumbling to the floor. When he crouches to pick it up, he remains there a moment, his eyes squeezing shut. He’s there again, in that small room, Rose’s head twisting towards him. Her matted hair across the pillow. How she'd looked at him, looked through him, but reached for him all the same. ‘Luis.’

He picks himself up and returns to his desk, opening the book. It’s a while before he can read the words he scans, but he keeps trying. He must keep trying.

His research is interrupted by a pounding at the front door. He hears the door open, a question met by a flood of words. “The doctor—” it's Rose’s charwoman, panting as if she has run the whole way from her mistress’ house. Luis' stomach drops, cold and sudden. “Missus Dyer, she needs the doctor, she’s not right—”

He rises swiftly enough his chair rocks backwards, threatening to fall. He’d suspected the news would come, but not so soon, surely not so soon. If she has progressed so far, already… When he descends into the entrance hall, the charwoman moves towards him from the doorway, her face flushed and panicked, worn hands wound in her apron.

“You have to come, sir, please!”

Bartolomeo brings him his coat and he puts it on. His hands are trembling. “She’s not been left alone?”

“No sir. Her boy stayed – he was the one who sent me to you, sir.”

“Tell him I will come directly.” He turns towards the back stair that leads down to the apothecary, a servant stair before the house was converted into the surgery practice. He will have to fetch stronger medicines from the stores below.

“I am not sure—” The charwoman reaches to stop him with a nervous gesture. “I should like – the vicar should be called, sir.”

“That will not be necessary.” She is not dying yet, only ill, if gravely so.

“Please do,” comes his aunt’s voice, and he looks up. The widow leans over the balcony from the second floor, holding his gaze only a moment before she focuses on the charwoman. “Please fetch him, Mrs Wilson.” 

He feels himself frown, his jaw tightening. “It is too soon for that.”

“He should be sent for if only to guard against the worst, Luis.” For her firm words, her voice is not unkind.

There is a burning around his eyes, a simmering frustration he works to control. It was rare for her to ask, and to contradict him, so directly. The balance between them was a careful one: she arranged the household and he managed his inherited practice. His aunt would not interfere unless she believed she needed to, and it is that which deflates him, takes the bite from his anger. He feels colder without it. In its wake lies fear, whole and unrelenting.

“Alright,” he says, finally. He turns back to the charwoman. “Is that all?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you have the key? To the Dyer house?” Her eyes widen and her hands go to her skirts, soon producing a key on a cord. He takes it. “Thank you.”

He leaves them without a further word, taking a candle to descend into the store. There is a coolness to the dark room, musty and damp, the shutters over the windows shrouding the counter. In the back room, where he prepares the medicines, the candlelight hollows out the shelves of medicines, the thick glass of the jars glinting like animal eyes.

He collects his supplies, but even as he does so, he knows, with a terrible, awful certainty, that his aunt is right.

Rose will either survive this crisis, or she will succumb. There is little more he can do for her now. 

#

Luis does not register the walk across town. He remembers something of the cool humidity as he passed through the streets, the shifting light from the passing houses and how cold his fingers had become around the lantern handle by the time he’s reached the Dyer threshold. His hands are slow and clumsy as he works the key into the lock.

“James?” he calls as he forces the door open. Silence greets him. The doors to the other rooms are closed, the stairs empty. His lantern reveals little beyond the varnish of dark wood and the gleam of brass doorknobs. “James?” he calls again, apprehension prickling up the back of his neck, the heat from his race through town already fading. Something is wrong. Mrs Hoskin should be here, or James, at least. “James, are you—”

The sound of a thump answers him from upstairs, indistinct and heavy. Another sound, muffled, and Luis quietly closes the door behind him.  “Hello?” he calls, peering upwards, but the darkness beyond the staircase resists his gaze. It is thick and impenetrable. The edges undulate in the flickering of the candlelight. 

Rose, he reminds himself. Perhaps she has fallen, or needs help – and he musters his courage, palming his lancet. He steps forward to take the first of the stairs.

A sound behind him – a choked word – “Don’t—” and then a hand on his arm pulls him back, as cold and strong as worked iron.

He spins to find Rose in the open door to the kitchen, cold and trembling in only her shift, her feet bare. He had not heard the kitchen door open. He had not heard her step through, but she takes his arm again, pulling him towards her, and he yields like soft clay. Abandoning the lantern to the side table he takes her into his arms. Relief.  She’s alright. She is not yet too far gone, as he’d feared she would be. “Rose—”

There are marks on her face, her arms, bleeding through the shift. Scratches, one close to her eye, a line of blood dried down her cheek. Her lip is split and the blood has been smeared to the corner of her mouth, her jaw. “What happened?” he asks, pushing the hair back from her cheeks. Her eyes close at the touch. Her breath catches, and she turns into his palm, sagging against him. Was she attacked, or was this self-inflicted? The final convulsions of a terrible disease—

“A dream,” she murmurs. “I must – I’ve been dreaming.” She’s still delirious, trembling and unsteady in his arms. She tucks her head beneath his chin, her hands fastening on the lapels of his coat. Her hair is soft and cool against his throat, matted from her days of bed rest. As she exhales he feels her breath stir his hair. “I don’t know—”

“You’re alright,” he says, as she presses herself close. He smooths his palm over her back. She is cold, he realises, far too cold, when she should be recovering, and so he moves to shrug his coat from his shoulders, releasing her only to pull it free. “Just a moment,” he says, when she makes a wordless sound, reaching after him. He’s still holding the lancet. He tucks it into a pocket before he wraps the coat around her shoulders, drawing it closed around her, and then she subsides against him again with a sigh as gentle as a dreamer’s. Her arms wrap around him. She holds him in place with a strength he didn’t know she still had.

“Don’t leave,” she murmurs, so close that he can feel her breath on his neck.

This is dangerous, a small part of him reminds himself. She is sick, terribly so, and if she breaks the skin he will be subject to the same madness – but he ignores it, holding her back just as tightly. He will be careful. He will not leave her.

“What happened?” he asks again, keeping his voice low and calm. “Where is James? Mrs Hoskin?”

There is a draft easing from the open door to the kitchen, guttering the candle. He can feel the thick press of the night air, smell the green growth between the houses. The lick of the sea.

“I don’t know,” she whispers, and he feels something pass through her, a convulsion. The force of an emotion, or perhaps something more. “I was – it hurt, it hurt so much—”

Movement upstairs again. That dull, desperate thud. A voice, hoarse and muffled, crying please.

“Don't—” Her grip on him tightens as he tries to turn, to follow the sound. He looks back at her as she shakes her head, her eyes open again and bright in their intensity. That blood, smudged around her mouth. She slides her hand up to his neck, settling against the nape, and he inhales sharply at the touch. Her fingers are as cold as frosted glass. “It cannot touch him,” she is saying, “do you understand? It cannot –  it will not... Luis,” she says his name so freely:  “please, do not—”

He doesn’t understand her. He can’t sift truth from hysteria, save that it is probably James upstairs, locked in his room, and Rose was the one who confined him there. He shushes her, smoothing his hand over her matted hair until she settles again. He will take her back to bed. Upstairs the banging continues, James calling out again – mother, please –

“It’s alright,” Luis says, covering her hands with his to gently try to pry them away. Rose shakes her head again, looking up at him with her wide, amber eyes. Like a natural philosopher’s treasure; like blown glass, from the Venetian islands his sister visited and talked about once in a letter – it glowed, Luis, glowed like liquid fire, like life pulled from dust.

“Don’t, Luis,” Rose whispers, her voice cracking. “Please.” She takes a breath, and it shudders through her and into him. “Please, I—” She pulls him towards her again, ignoring his grip. When she next speaks, her voice is small. “Would you hold me?”

Whatever he was intending to say leaves him on a breath. He draws his arms around her cold, trembling shoulders, and folds her in his arms.

Something in her shudders and gives, her body softening. She turns into his neck, drawing her nose against his skin. She breathes him in, her mouth following, a dragging touch, and his knees weaken. A part of him, the part that is still sane, is disgusted at how he craves the touch. Another part, the larger, is already lost. She smells of old sweat, of sickness, her hair dark with grease. She is soft, for all that she is cold, and when her lips find his neck he cannot deny how his blood stirs, his arms tightening around her.

And when she bites—

He sees the candelabra, dark and empty, the burnished bronze dripped with old wax. Feels her lips on his neck, her teeth. A sensation between pleasure and pain. Both. The lamp light on the side table, bright, and brightening, as she presses closer, her fingers in his hair, pulling him towards her. There is a part of him that has wanted – that has wanted her to leave a mark, a bruise. Some sign of this hold she’s had on him, to be hidden beneath his collar and stock but there, nonetheless.

“Rose—”

His hands move to her shoulders, to push her away, or perhaps to simply hold her, he isn’t sure. There is a sound she makes, between the others, beneath his ragged breaths. Soft. Wounded.

And then another sound, a thud, and wood splintering. Another, louder and just as violent, and a snarl, and then Rose is releasing him, Rose’s hold is gone. He sags to his knees, no longer able to stand upright.

“Rose,” he manages, raising his hand to his neck. His skin is warm and wet, a sharp pain throbbing with his pulse. He covers it with his palm, pressing against it – against the bite – fool, fool, he is a fool—

He sees – movement, a shadow, dancing shadows, in the kitchen beyond. He hears, he sees, a struggle, someone crumpling, scrambling feet on tile, and then a figure in the doorway. A man, in an ill-fitting sailor's coat that glistens in the candlelight as he moves.

“Who are you?” Luis says, or he thinks he says.

His boots are choked with sand, dark and damp. Luis can't look away, a rushing pressure in his ears, his heartbeat too light and too fast. A tight breath escapes him as the man crouches before him, blotting out the light. Breathe – he needs –  he needs to breathe, to find— 

Dirtied knees. That torn coat, bloodstained and soaked at the cuffs, skin pale beneath. 

He says something, but Luis can't hear him, not at first. He grips Luis' chin, his fingers as cold as seawater and strong, irresistible, as he twists Luis head to the side, pulls his hand away from his neck. This close Luis smells the sea and something warmer, familiar, like summer hay. He glimpses green eyes in a hollowed face, so pale they might be blue.

“What – what have you—” Luis gasps, and he hears himself this time, if from across some great distance. There are other sounds too, a knocking at the door. The banging upstairs, shouting and shouting.

“Nothing,” the man says, Luis thinks he says, from that returning shore, “that has not already been done.”

The grip releases. The kitchen door creaks. For a time it is still. There are voices, calling his name, the charwoman and the priest on the other side of the front door. Eventually, Luis pulls himself upright, his vision shivering, darkening, steadying himself against the doorframe. He staggers towards the kitchen – more knocking – “Mr Rowe?” – and pushes forward through the door, smudging blood over the wood, his hand pressed again to his bleeding throat. Rose. He needs to find—

The kitchen is still. The side door is shattered, splinters kicked across the tiled floor. The thick, wet wind that enters smothers the hearth fire, stirring ash across the floor.

The room is empty.

Rose is gone.