Chapter 2
3rd September, 1864
Influenza, is the doctor’s verdict, possibly brain fever. Malnutrition certainly. If he does not die, I am to give him laudanum. Beyond that, there is little I can do for him. Pray, of course. But who am I—a mere man, a servant of men—to intercede with the divine on behalf of a stranger whose name I do not know? Do I pray for his sake or for my own?
I have sat often at the bedside of the ill and the dying and felt the clutch of desperate hands on mine. I would so ease the terror of those final moments but I am a beast of duty, a poor bearer of grace. I should have been born a puritan. Perhaps that would have been a father’s love I could more easily have made manifest in the world.
I should not write these wild and wandering things. The thinking is itself a sin. How may I guide others, if I cannot control myself?
My guest is lost to fever, calling out for Isidore. I have tried to calm him, but without success. The doctor suggested I might speak to him. I tried that also, conscious of the absurdity in gravely introducing myself to an insensible man. I doubt he heard and my presence does little to soothe him. I know that suffering is not merely a consequence of but endemic to free will. I know that. But sometimes all I see is pain.
How helpless I am. Here is one man, and I can do nothing for him. I should—I must—trust in a power greater than my frail self, and I long to abandon myself to the promise of such comfort, but I am a creature ofreason. I was made so, presumably by His hands and His will. Faith must be more than a feeling, otherwise we believe in God only as children believe in bedtime stories. Perhaps that is sufficient for the field-hand, the factory worker or the chimney sweep but I do His work. I am, somehow, to bring His love to the field-hand, the factory worker and the chimney sweep. But how, how may I do that if I do not feel it?
This was, after all, an alliance of convenience.
I am the Lord’s reluctant wife. And, on nights like these, His widow.
Thomas Mandeville, or more properly the Reverend Thomas Edward Mandeville, wiped the sweat from his patient’s face with a cool, damp cloth. His movements were careful and efficient, but his touch was not naturally tender. He searched in vain for a sign he had brought some relief to the suffering man. Then he tried to make him take some water, again without success. Finally, he pulled a hard chair from the corner of the room, placed it next to the bed, and simply sat down to wait.
He was tired but it did not trouble him. He preferred action to idleness, but his profession had taught him patience. The silence of his father’s house dragged at him like manacles. In the hollow corridors and empty staterooms, dust hung in the air, heavy as jewels in a crown. It had been shut up for little more than a year, but it felt like a tomb. And, though the whole place should rightly have been George’s, his brother had kept to his bachelor’s rooms instead.
The man on the bed gave a sudden, convulsive movement. His eyes snapped open but they stared at nothing. “Isidore?”
Thomas hesitated, torn between mercy and truth.
“Isidore?”
“No.” Thomas tried to soften his tone. “My name is Thomas.”
“Don’t leave me.”
A clammy, fever-hot hand flailed for him, so he caught it and held it. “I’m here. I will not leave you.”
The stranger quieted a little and fell back against the pillows. He began to cough again, but brought up no more fluid. Thomas watched him anxiously and tried, once again, to make him drink. Finally he wet his fingers in the water and put them to the man’s pale, cracked lips. It was peculiar to feel the shape and texture of another man’s mouth. The damp heat of his breath. Drop by drop, he coaxed his patient to take nearly half a glass of water, and then sat back. His hand was still a prisoner.
“O, Father of mercies,” he whispered, “and God of all comfort, our only help in time of need. We ... I ... humbly beseech thee to behold, visit, and relieve thy sick servant—” He did not know the man’s name. Presumably God could work it out. “Look upon him with the eyes of thy mercy. Comfort him with a sense of thy goodness; preserve him from the temptations—”
He stuttered to a halt. There was nobody to watch him, except the one to whom his prayers were directed, but he felt self-conscious. His gaze was drawn afresh to the stranger in the bed.
Even sick, sweating, possibly dying, he was—Thomas hardly knew where that thought ended. His nature, he had always believed, was inclined to the ascetic. His education, first at the hands of tutors and then at Cambridge, had been exceptional, but no one had taught him about beauty, nor had his life disposed him to seek it. He was, partially by disposition and partially by expectation, quiet, grave, introspective, and dutiful, a pale shadow of the boisterous, reckless brother who had preceded him into the world by a mere handful of minutes. And so he had gone meekly enough into the church, as a third son ought to do.
His existence, he told himself, could not have been an accident. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. And so on and so forth.
But, perhaps, an afterthought? That felt so much easier to believe.
He tried again to pray, but the words were as ungainly as pebbles in his mouth.
As a youth of eighteen, he had readParadise Lost. He understood, with his rational mind, the wretchedness and iniquity of the fallen angel, the sheer folly of his rebellion and the hollow core of his disobedience. Even so, some wicked corner of his heart had entertained not only an appropriate Christian pity for he who was once Lucifer but secret admiration too. He had attributed this impulse to the power of literature, rather than personal corruption, but it had nevertheless stayed with him through the passing years.
And now he recognised the echo of his Satan in the stranger whose hand he held, while the prayers dried on his lips. Thomas did not know if the man was beautiful. If it was right to think another man was beautiful. But he was striking, somehow, gaunt and fierce, and as wary as a wild thing. His eyes were closed now but Thomas remembered them well enough, that hollow, burning gaze, dark as a starless night, to match the coarse black curls that clustered damply at his brow and clung to his neck. A gathering of hair roughened the line of his jaw, though, in repose, his mouth had a dreamy, incongruous tenderness to it. There had certainly been no trace of that when he had pushed Thomas away from him on Drury Lane. There had only been defiance, despair, and a terrible, terrible pride.
It suddenly became imperative to Thomas that he liberate his hand. His palm was sticky with the other man’s sweat, his fingers cramped from having been crushed. And the other man uttered the most piteous moan at parting.
“Perhaps,” Thomas said, a little desperately, “I should read to you.”
He looked about the room. Like the rest of the house, it had been designed to impress—or, possibly, oppress—but, being a guest chamber, it lacked even the most rudimentary of personal touches. The bed had been hastily made up, the furniture only partially unmuffled from the heavy sheeting that covered it. It was testament to the dedication of the housekeeper that the air was fresh and clean, untainted by dust.
There was probably something to be found in his father’s study, but he was reluctant to leave his patient. He was equally reluctant to disturb the servants any more than his unannounced arrival already had, but he realised he had little choice. He crossed the room, easing some of the stiffness from his joints, and rang the bell.
