An old woman cannot stay a half-blind child, much as she might like. But as brokenhearted as she was when the dress held out her only child, the Eye couldn’t help feel the tiniest pang of envy. You will never see an ugly world, child. You will never know a rat.
I’ve lost all my shin splints among the great stones!
Eye doesn’t believe these remedies are helping much. Her stomach thuds against the tight flannel cholera belt and the little potent packets have done nothing more than make her hands itch. It is late, and she is very tired. The heavy head upon her shoulders throbs rhythmically in time to the echo of the colliers singing down by the water. The Eye’s trail of blue which began at the gray-blue dent in the snow where she left the sailor after she stole his tied-up packet (the dent from where if she had tracked the hand-prints and knee-prints would ultimately have led to a door a few streets away, where he pounded to be let in, someone had knocked him cold and robbed him, woe was him, taking his captain’s clothes) has led her at last to a place she recognizes, where deep indigo letters proclaim their own inescapable truth: LABOUR IN VAIN, reads the hand-painted sign swinging in the wind. John Robinson’s skull smiles benevolently down upon her; his working shovel is raised in salute. When she pushes open the door and steps inside, she sees that the place is empty, except for a group of four strangers, sitting as if waiting expressly for her. Three men and a woman—players, maybe, from the way they are dressed, all in elaborate costumes of blue, with curling blue feathers, blue gloves, blue boots. They will soon be off to London, then Exeter, Oxford, and Hull. They will catch a boat for America; play Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Peru. Before they retire their show, there won’t be a country in the world that has escaped their little tragedy.
Mr. Eliot opens his arms to include their friend the Eye. Come join us, he says. Let us buy you a drink. How good it feels to lay down your burden. To close your eyes and listen to the colliers sing.
Oh! Marrow, Oh! Marrow, Oh!
What dost thou think?
I’ve broken my bottle and spilt all my drink
I’ve lost all my shin splints among the great stones. …
Draw me to the shaft, lad, it’s time to go home.
XVIII
LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
It is one of the strange properties of cholera morbus that when a patient is bled, the life force comes out in parallel streams: one thick, slow, and tenacious; the other swift and light. The phenomenon can be explained quite readily by medical science: acute dehydration causes the patient’s serum to separate out from his platelets, thus forming dual channels in the bloodstream; but to Gustine sitting at the old woman’s bedside, holding the cup while the doctor cuts, the Eye’s blood flows like a pact. We have given our lives to avenge my child, thinks the dress lodger. We will always be a pair. The girl and her shadow. The dress and the Eye.
“You should be in bed yourself,” Dr. Clanny says, as she catches the strange, double blood in her cup.
“I’m fine,” she assures him weakly. She had sent for the doctor after she discovered the old woman passed out, alone, at the Labour in Vain. John Robinson and she managed her back to Mill Street, where Pink had been left in charge, her Da off to Fawcett Street, she said, following up a mysterious tip. Gustine is feverish and queasy, really too sick to be out of bed, but Dr. Clanny is overworked and understaffed, so when she insisted, he reluctantly agreed.
No one believes it is in the cosmic order for the Eye to die—the other lodgers can just as easily imagine a comet sweeping away the house or the ghost of Napoleon dropping in for a plate of eels. They keep a respectful distance, huddled around the fire downstairs, trading rumours that after the third telling will pass into fact. Did you know the Eye was born not of a woman, but had been secretly manufactured in a laboratory? No, no, the Eye was the chance child of poor old King George in his madness and an asylum inmate. The Eye worked for Scotland Yard; the Eye had been fed arsenic because “she saw too much.” There are as many theories as ashes, yet all agree on one thing: that dress lodger—she is somehow responsible. Why else would the girl everyone knew abhorred the old woman volunteer her own pallet for a bed? Why, for hours, feed her ginger and calomel with a spoon? Why risk death herself to hold the old woman’s hand through the bone-breaking tetanus spasms if not out of murderous guilt? Downstairs, by the fire, the respectful fear that for years had been the Eye’s alone is slowly transferring over to the dress lodger.
I never knew you loved him too.
Gustine strokes the old woman’s matted hair. Her heaves have abated and the singultus that sometimes replaces vomiting set in. It is horrible to witness the unconscious hiccuping, like obscene drunken giggles, racking the old woman’s body. Earlier, her leg muscles contracted compulsively, but now the spasms have worked up to the muscles around her mouth, drawing her jawbone so relentlessly up and down that she who never spoke in life in death appears a chatterbox.
How did he do it? Gustine wonders. How was it possible an infant’s touch could quicken the thready mass of sinew and bone in the old woman’s chest, recall to life an organ so long still no one could remember the last time it stirred (though, it might interest Gustine to know, it was when she herself was born, a little girl small and vulnerable, herself kept from the Eye by her own mother, a worthless drunk of a whore who made everyone miserable until she mercifully died). This rebirth of her heart was as close to motherhood as the Eye was destined to come. Would that it had not been such a long gestation.
“I am losing her pulse,” announces Dr. Clanny. “Let’s inject her with three ss. of tobacco. Maybe it will stimulate her.”
Gustine sets down her cup and hands the doctor his syringe. “If this doesn’t work,” he says, “we’ll try an enema of oil of turpentine. If the body needs to purge, by God, we’ll help it purge.”
Unobserved by doctor or dress lodger, one member of the household remains upstairs, keeping to the shadows, trying not to get in the way. Nothing is as it should be, thinks Pink, watching her Da’s dress lodger drip tears over the creature she was never supposed to touch. Gustine has the old woman’s hands between her own, chafing them like she used to when her baby’s were cold. Everything is upside down since the cholera came to town, what with frogs inside the house and bodies disappearing, enemies weeping over each other, and Da not even celebrating Mike’s big night. She looks over at the Crown Prince, wearily sniffing the Eye’s clenched, dark blue toes, and wonders if he feels as lonely and left out as she.
“Here she goes again,” says Dr. Clanny, removing the syringe.
Gustine is helping the doctor hold Eye’s punching arms and straw-stiff kicking legs through another attack when unnoticed, Pink scoops up her father’s pet and creeps downstairs, past the gossiping lodgers with their theories of Eye’s generation, over to her Da’s stool where Mike’s shining silver regalia lies forgotten. A Crown Prince should have a crown, she thinks, and neither politics nor newspapers should come before such a triumph. Pink stretches the strap of India rubber under the ferret’s chin and affixes the crown in place. There. At least I haven’t forgotten you.
Wrapping Miss Audrey’s charity blanket around her shoulders like a shawl, Pink quietly lets herself and His Majesty out the door. Dawn is breaking, filling last night’s churned snow with rosy light, rousing the gulls from their perches over the lintel. There is only one person in all the world who can make her feel better, Pink thinks, but walking west with the tin-crowned ferret in her arms, she fears her single solace might be in jeopardy. Ever since her Da swept in last night, to deposit Mike and call out the other lodgers, shouting triumphantly about Fawcett Street, how he’d be damned if God didn’t love the poor man after all, she’s been troubled in her mind. She would much rather her Da have no business on a street so near to her own heart, for if there’s a way for him to destroy whatever happiness she could expect there, she knows he’s sure to find it.
She makes it only as far as High Street and the corner of Nile before she’s forced
to duck back from the road, hide herself and His Majesty behind a lamppost, and curiously peek around. Maybe God loves a poor girl, too, for her Da is not at Fawcett Street uprooting her happiness after all; he is turning onto Nile Street at the head of a grand procession. “Today, the poor man’s revenged!” shouts her Da.
Forty or more of her Da’s friends, brandishing newspapers and swinging axes, tramp down the street. Though Pink knows none of their names, we might recognize among them a fagged Student of Life, all but worn out from chronicling this mess and desiring nothing more than to find a cup of coffee; Robert Cooley, the almost-flayed, hungover and miserable from last night, squinting in the bright morning sun; and Mag Scurr, who has scavenged a few items to pawn from her night’s work. Behind Da, two strong keelmen drag a gentleman kicking and screaming, who to her amazement Pink recognizes as the doctor who marveled at Gustine’s baby. Behind the struggling doctor, two more men follow with a sedan chair. Pink can’t make out who is inside it; from behind, the only clue to the passenger’s identity is a stringy, golden braid spilling from the window.
The men stop before a house that has been through a storm, by the looks of it: its shutters list from their hinges, the panes they were to have protected punched out and left like broken teeth in the snow. Without bothering to turn the knob, Pink’s Da kicks open the unlocked front door. They march the doctor through his ruined parlour, sick and anemic in the dusty sunlight, with broken plaster chalking its Turkey rugs and shattered glass stuck between the keys of the pianoforte. Up the stairs, they push him to the second-floor landing, stepping over the broken banister and cracked posts, kicking in the door to his study. Oh Jesus, cry the men who joined the party late, instinctively crossing themselves if Catholic, spitting upon the ground to honor the Church of England. What sort of sick sod is this sawbones?
Mary, Mother of Christ, whistles Whilky Robinson, surveying the work his people did on the small anatomical study. All sorts of leathery, bladdery things in spirits swim about the room; who knows what they are, except that each one once belonged to a poor man—certainly there’s no blue-blooded pickled parts in here. Broken-spined books: Albinus, Vesalius—who the hell? The landlord picks up Henry’s costly leather-bound volumes and tosses them carelessly back on the floor. Laid out on the hearth in a respectful row are bodies they found in the study or dug up from the backyard: Whilky’s lodger Fos; Reg Smith, taken from Mag’s; Gustine’s brat; and a jumble of miscellaneous bones—most likely dogs and cats, but one can never be too careful. Their greatest piece of luck of the night came, however, when they had destroyed just about everything they could destroy and were preparing to take the bodies away. A lady’s maid came racing down Nile Street, screaming for Dr. Chiver—her mistress had been taken sick, please God come right away! She stopped in horror at the devastation all around her, babbling some story of a nighttime visitor in a blue dress and the news she brought along with the clothes of her mistress’s father. Whilky understood almost immediately that this had been his dress lodger’s doing, and offered to accompany the doctor to his fiancée’s house so they all might be of service.
“Put her over here, lads,” Whilky orders the men with the sedan chair.
And now, twelve hours later, they’ve all come back, conquering heroes leading their captives. Whilky left the vigil at Fawcett Street long enough to drop off his champion Mike, collect more men, and learn that both his dress lodger and her shadow were in the grip of what he’d just quit in Bishopwearmouth. He thought Gustine, no matter how sick, would rejoice to learn her child was avenged; but she didn’t even crack a smile, paradoxical girl that she is.
“Now there, Dr. Chiver,” larks Whilky, dancing Henry’s carefully appointed skeleton about the room and gesturing didactically. “Since you like so much to cut people up, how’s about getting started?”
“This is obscene,” Henry spits. “You have no power to make me do this.”
All jollity gone, Whilky leans in and slaps his newspaper, hard, in the doctor’s face.
“She wanted it. Says right here in the public paper. Now get to work, you infernal sawbones, or I’ll think nothing of taking this ax and striking that smug head right off your bony little shoulders.”
Downstairs, Pink and the Crown Prince have sneaked inside the house and creep up to the second-floor landing behind the crowd of her Da’s friends. Why were they dragging and shouting at Miss Audrey’s husband-to-be? Surely that would make her new friend horribly upset if she found out. Pink’s Da and his friends are crammed into a little room at the top of the stairs, she sees; some are turned away, holding their hands to their mouths. Others—grown men—cover their eyes and look ready to faint. Pink pushes through the press of fustian and corduroy breeches, clutching the Crown Prince for courage. What is her Da talking about in there?
“You thought nothing of taking our dead before they were even cold, as if the poor, along with being strangers to money, had no passing acquaintance with love,” she hears him say. “Well, how does it feel, sawbones, to slice into someone you cared about? Where is your rationality now? How does it feel to be a poor man?”
Henry stands over the body, numb with shock and grief. His once-beautiful girl, now an old hag, with a sharp blue nose and shriveled washer-woman’s fingers; his beloved, still spasming a good hour after her heart gave out, whose arms, in a cruel parody of life, contract across her chest as if in prayer.
“We want to learn too, sawbones,” says the infernal landlord, handing Henry his scalpel. “You taught your students on one of us. Now teach us on one of you.”
Henry stands stupidly over the body of his dearest love, whose devotion to him put her in this place. The landlord commands him to teach. To teach! He almost laughs at the absurdity, when unbidden his words come back—the lesson he gave only the other day. Nature does not provide one nerve without pairing it to a second, he’d said. She invests us with two lungs, two kidneys, two eyes, two ears. The singular brain is divided into identical hemispheres; the heart has two corresponding auricles and ventricles. We are paired creatures, mourns Henry. He took the dress lodger’s baby. She took his beloved in return. He should have realized: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Even revenge is paired.
“Take up the knife, sawbones,” Whilky commands threateningly.
Only the hardest-hearted would not be moved to pity at the doctor’s deep unmanly sobs. There, there, Dr. Chiver. You can’t expect to find compassion in the lodging house keeper’s raw meaty face, nor forbearance in the quivering jowls of Mag Scurr, morgue keeper. But look about you—we know for a fact the crowd contains a few old friends. Don’t you see, peeping over the shoulder of the Student of Life, your grinning, daft-looking chum from Edinburgh, with his extra toes and cauliflower ears? And there, to your right, just past Robert Cooley, that poor pickled old woman with her twelve-year-old grandson? We’ve all of us turned out for the show: those you bought from Burke and Hare, friend Fos, cadaver Liss, and that beautiful naked whore, your reproach Mary Paterson, raining a pool of whiskey upon your wasted study as she leans in to observe you make the first cut. The horror we see spreading across your haggard face makes us believe you’ve learned the truth at last. Though she is stretched before you on the table, your dearest stands with us now, married to you in a far more final way. Look upon your eternal family, Henry Chiver, surgeon and body snatcher. We will be with you always.
Pink has pushed her way through the crowd of men and finally is able to see what all the fuss is about. The little girl finds herself in a room straight out of her nightmares, with a dancing skeleton in the corner and the floor roly-poly with eyes. She sees her Da, standing behind Miss Audrey’s fiancé, and the doctor himself, knife plunging in, sobbing like a man condemned. She sees a long yellow braid hanging over the side, she sees a limp hand, she sees … “Oh God!—Miss Audrey!”
Pink screams and screams until Mag Scurr, mercifully, leads her outside.
When Fos passed over, she consigned to the ages a few
coins, a ticket stub, a well-thumbed Bible: the remains of a quiet circumscribed life. Her possessions were meagre, but riches compared with what a shadow might leave behind. With no money of her own and only the filthy brown dress upon her back, what could the dying one-eyed woman possibly have to include in her Last Will and Testament?
But now that she and the girl have come to terms, now that she has been forgiven, it troubles the Eye not to have something to leave her. She has never had much in her life beyond tenacity and gravity and an uncommon sort of vigilance. But that is something, after all. Instead of money or goods, which have never been hers, she might in this, her final hour, turn her genius of vision upon Gustine, and will the girl a future.
Dr. Clanny leans back in the straw and removes the stethoscope from his ears. “I’ve lost a pulse.”
But Gustine, guarding the old woman as closely as she was once guarded herself, sees the twitch of a thick-padded finger. Come closer, the Eye motions weakly, but is it a genuine gesture or nothing more than the dumb show of cholera tetanus? Pay no attention, the doctor warns, as Gustine leans down and puts her ear to the dying woman’s lips. It’s a trick of the disease.
I am a genius of vision, the Eye seems to say. Look with me, girl, and know the future I see laid out for you. Eye hears her voice inside her head already part of our growing chorus, and for the first time in her life, it sounds rich and eloquent.
We have traveled only two weeks from this moment, the Eye hears herself say, and we find ourselves back here in this very house. My stool by the fire is empty, as is the straw you laid me on upstairs, unclaimed by you or anyone else after I added my old rusty voice to the Great Narration. Half the lodging house is gone—dead in the wave that followed my release, or fled as from a house of horrors, to take the cholera onto Gateshead and Newcastle and Hetton-le-Hole. Our landlord, Whilky Robinson, is no where to be seen, though someone heard he was headed down to the Low Quay and Mag Scurr’s pawnshop. Yes, there he is, standing before Mag (their camaraderie during the riot has not persuaded her to raise her prices; five shillings, not a penny more, will she give him for the ripped and stained blue dress he sets upon her counter).