Human Traces

  ‘Doctor! He doesn’t need a doctor, he needs to be in prison. As for saying his prayers, it’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?’

  Jacques looked at his stepmother. For the first time in his life, he had the intoxicating certainty that he knew more than a superior.

  ‘Tante Mathilde, if I stay with Olivier, I can make sure he does no more damage. And if you go to the Curé, you’ll be safe. He’ll know what to do. He knows people, the kind of people we don’t. And my father would be pleased, would he not, that you had turned to the right person for help?’

  Grumbling, Tante Mathilde went to fetch her bonnet and coat.

  ‘Please tell him it’s urgent. Say I asked him to come as quickly as possible.’

  When Tante Mathilde had gone, Jacques took Olivier to the scullery, took the blade from him, pumped some water into a bucket and washed his arm over the stone sink. In the drawer of an old dresser, Jacques found a white cloth which he tore into pieces; he packed the wound with them and tied one strip tightly round the forearm. While he had him there, he took the opportunity to wash his brother’s filth-encrusted hands in the bucket.

  ‘Do you want to come up to your room? Would you like to sit on your old bed?’ It occurred to him that, until help came, his brother had a short spell of freedom that he might enjoy.

  Olivier made no reply; he had started the head-rolling with which Jacques had become anxiously familiar. Jacques led the way upstairs and Olivier, after hesitating for a moment, followed him along the landing.

  Jacques turned in horror to Olivier when he saw the inside of his room. The jars along the windowsill had been smashed on the floor, leaving their contents where the vinegar ate into the bare wood of the boards. His collection of moths and butterflies had been ripped from their mounts; his notes and exercise books were torn up or disfigured by Olivier’s scrawl, hastily done with the pen Jacques had left on the table. The pieces of machinery were scattered on the floor, while on the wall Olivier had written with his finger in black ink. The words were unfamiliar to Jacques, though the drag of flesh through ink on the white plaster gave them a fearful look, like the words at Belshazzar’s feast.

  ‘Come,’ said Jacques. He took Olivier’s arm awkwardly, a young man with no experience of tenderness towards another. ‘Come and sit here. Why don’t you lie down and rest if you’d like to? It’s your old bed.’ He swept some moth wings from the cover.

  Olivier perched on the edge of the mattress, rocked his head back and forth and scraped at the hair on his cheek.

  It was the first time Jacques had seen his face in full daylight for a year, and he was surprised by how much of the boy he remembered was still visible behind the matted beard. The blue eyes with their hazel flecks, the soft, unmarked skin beneath the eyes, with a handful of childish freckles. Was it possible that his invisible mouth was twitching into its old half-smile? What was missing, he thought, was Olivier. Some invader had taken control of his body and had assumed his voice; it was not an impersonation, it was an inhabitation. He was possessed. How fragile had he been, how slight his own character that it had been so utterly displaced?

  Jacques sat down next to Olivier and took his washed hands between his own. The surge of adult confidence he had felt with Tante Mathilde had now deserted him; he was like a child again.

  ‘I don’t mind about the room. I can do the drawings again.’

  Olivier began to moan and move his head up and down; his eyes moved rapidly from side to side.

  Jacques held his brother’s hands tight between his own. ‘Olivier, I will do everything I can for you. I will try to make you well. I swear to you.’

  ‘I forbid you,’ said Olivier.

  ‘I’ll ask the Curé if he knows where—’

  ‘The Curé does what I tell him.’

  Olivier stood up and pulled his hands away. He stood among the debris of his brother’s endeavours, bits of animal and glass about his feet.

  Jacques said, ‘If I can just get away from here, Olivier . . . Someone will help me. Perhaps the Curé. I will come for you. I will return.’

  He made his way across to Olivier and held out his hand. ‘I will make it the mission of my life,’ he said.

  He offered his hand again, palm up, to his brother. Very slowly, Olivier moved towards him, half a step at a time. When they were almost touching, Olivier looked straight past him and laughed.

  From downstairs, they heard voices.

  Old Rebière had returned from work to find the new Curé in his parlour and his wife in tears.

  ‘He tried to kill me!’ said Tante Mathilde. ‘He was waving his knife at me.’

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ Rebière gestured towards Abbé Henri.

  ‘Oh,’ said Tante Mathilde, ‘Jacques said I should go and get help. I don’t know why. I was just glad to be out of harm’s way.’

  ‘I am a friend of your son’s,’ said Abbé Henri. ‘It is natural that he should turn to me at a difficult moment.’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ said Rebière, as though remembering himself. ‘Where is the boy?’

  ‘Upstairs,’ said Jacques from the doorway. ‘He’s all right. He is quite calm.’

  Rebière went and stood with his back to the stone chimneypiece while the others waited for him to speak.

  ‘We shall have to get rid of him. There are places where they can be locked up. I know. He has been in one before.’

  ‘They are not the kind of thing you would want for your son,’ said Abbé Henri. ‘In the countryside we have always looked after our own. It is God’s way.’

  ‘And is it God’s choice that he should be a lunatic?’

  ‘All such afflictions are part of the divine plan. God in the end is merciful.’

  ‘And is it God’s way that he should live with the horse?’

  ‘No, Monsieur. I understand that was your decision.’

  Rebière snorted. ‘I shall see what I can arrange when I next go to Vannes. He can’t stay here any more.’

  Jacques said, ‘Father, couldn’t Olivier come and sleep in my room? Perhaps he would feel safer if he was back in the house.’

  Rebière shook his head. ‘He had his chance. You can all go about your business now. Leave this to me.’

  Olivier had silently descended the stairs and was now standing in the doorway next to Jacques.

  Abbé Henri took a step forward into the smoky gloom of old Rebière’s parlour. His hair, prematurely grey and worn long at the back, covered the square white collar and touched the shoulders of the soutane; his unbearded face appeared anxious in the candlelight.

  ‘Here is your son, Monsieur, a fine-looking young man who needs only a bath and visit to the barber. You cannot wish for him to live among the lunatics at the mad-hospital. I have visited such places and I would not send my dog there to die, Monsieur. I beg you to find some accommodation for the boy at home. One day such poor unfortunates will be cured, as modern medicine has cured so many illnesses that baffled our ancestors. It is Olivier’s misfortune to have been born too soon for our medical knowledge. Have pity on him, Monsieur. I beg you.’

  ‘Chains,’ said Rebière. ‘I suppose that might be an answer. If we kept him chained he couldn’t run out and attack my wife.’

  Everyone looked at Olivier, who was now still, almost serene, like a John the Baptist whose message had been delivered, waiting for another voice to call him in the wilderness.

  ‘Father,’ said Rebière. ‘You may go. Jacques, take Olivier to the stable and make sure the door is bolted. Mathilde, tell Grand-mère to put dinner on the table. Goodnight, Father. This way, please.’

  Rebière held the door open for the priest, who, with a glance back to Jacques and Olivier, stepped out reluctantly into the night.

  The blacksmith lived at the bottom of the main street in Sainte Agnès; the open top half of his door revealed a scruffy parlour through which his wife led Jacques out into a yard, on the other side of which was the forge.

  The blacksmith was
working a horseshoe on the anvil when Jacques, against his will, went and stood opposite him. When he had finished hammering the metal into shape, he tossed it casually into a stone water-trough where it hissed for a moment, then was still. Only then did he look up to Jacques.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Some chains, a ring that can be fixed and two . . . circular pieces that can be closed.’

  ‘Manacles?’ The blacksmith, a slight man with a greyish face, was known as someone who spoke little.

  ‘Well,’ said Jacques. ‘Like manacles, I suppose. That shape.’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘I don’t know. My father . . . Something for his employer. A tenant wanted them.’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘About . . . I suppose . . .’ Jacques made a circle with his hands, roughly wrist-sized.

  ‘How much chain?’

  Jacques spread both his arms out wide. ‘About twice that much.’

  ‘You can come tomorrow evening, at the same time.’

  Two days later Jacques was excused work by his father and sent to the stable. First, he took out the mare and tethered her outside; then he shovelled up the old straw and excrement and dumped them in the midden on the far side of the yard. Under Olivier’s uninterested gaze, he swept the stone floor with water, then took the hefty ring he had collected from the blacksmith and hammered it by its attached point through the back wall of the stable. The point had screw threads that went through a horizontal plate, so that when the nut was tightened, it was braced against the outside wall. Inside, Jacques ran the chain through the loop and attached it at each end, as instructed, to the manacles.

  He filled the stable with fresh straw and led the horse back into her stall. He looked at Olivier. Thus far, he had managed without difficulty: something about the large hammer, the weight and swing of it in his hand, the wood on the soft skin of his palm, was reassuringly mundane. It was like putting up a fence.

  When it came to asking Olivier to go back inside, however, he began to falter. His brother was so docile. In the morning, he had helped Olivier to wash beneath the pump and change his clothes; now when he put his arm round him, he felt his soft hair and it reminded him of when they had been children and had wrestled together on the floor: a memory from before he was even fully conscious, of a blessed time. Olivier sat on the fresh straw and allowed Jacques to close the manacles round his wrist and to lock them as the blacksmith had showed him.

  Olivier said nothing until it was done, then he looked up at Jacques with his eyes full of bewilderment, and Jacques knelt down beside him, sobbing, smelling Olivier’s special sweet smell, feeling his brother’s heart against his ribs.

  II

  IN ENGLAND, THE week before Christmas 1876 was cold, nowhere more so than in the wind-troubled flatlands whose coast lies between the Wash and the Humber estuary. In Torrington, a village twelve miles as the angels flew from the cathedral spire of Lincoln, the boys ran down to the frozen duck pond on the green. Those without skates slid back and forth in their boots, gathered snow from the light fall at the edge of the water and hurled it at one another. From her bedroom window in Torrington House, Sonia Midwinter watched enviously, wishing that the dignity of her eighteen years had not disqualified her from joining in. A low but unclouded sun struck crystals from the frozen water, from the white-dusted reeds at its edge and from the icy twigs on the boughs of oak that overhung the pond. Sonia shivered behind the leaded lights of her window; she was wearing only her underclothes, while on the bed behind her lay stockings, bodices and skirts from her still-unfinished dressing.

  She put a log on the small fire and wrapped a gown round her shoulders. She glanced out of the window. It was nearly noon, and already the sun seemed to be failing in its ascent of the sky, flattening into a tired ellipse that would see it subside before the day had really started. Sonia could make out her younger brother Thomas on the pond, a strong, mysterious boy who teased her more than his two years’ juniority should have allowed. She licked her lips and swallowed. In an hour or so she would be meeting Mr Prendergast and his family – honourable Nottingham people, her father had informed her, manufacturers of fine lace. Mr Richard Prendergast, their elder son, had been introduced to Sonia at her aunt’s house the previous Christmas; she had had at the time no idea that it was anything other than a chance meeting, though was later aware of murmured discussions in the drawing room of Torrington House from which she made out the words ‘wait a year’, and saw her father emerge with the look of purse-lipped satisfaction that she recognised as his ‘business done’ face.

  She sighed and picked a plum-coloured silk dress with a tight bodice and a full skirt that gave glimpses of her slender feet, which, her mother assured her, were her best feature. How plain must I be, thought Sonia at her dressing table, that my feet are prettier than my face? She rubbed a hint of red colouring into her lips and tied her hair back with a black ribbon. Her eyes were dark and rapid, her skin was pale and prone to flushing; at the top of her cheeks minute capillaries were visible where the translucent covering of babyhood had never fully thickened into adult skin. She powdered over them and smiled at herself in the glass. Her elder brother Edgar once told her, ‘You’re a pretty girl, Sonia’, though he had, sadly, never repeated the compliment; Thomas occasionally called her the Queen of Sheba, spoiling the exotic comparison with some qualification about ‘the half was not told unto me’. Her father appeared uneasy about Sonia’s presence in the house, embarrassed by her woman’s bust and dresses and ball invitations. Mrs Midwinter spoke to her with the firm encouragement she showed to Amelia, the more backward of her Dalmatian bitches.

  Sonia went along the landing to her mother’s bedroom on the south side of the house, pausing on the polished boards to knock. Mrs Midwinter was also at her toilet, seated on an upholstered stool that her flesh overflowed in downward-pouring, silk-covered waves.

  ‘What have you got on your lips?’

  ‘Just the smallest touch of—’

  ‘Take it off, for heaven’s sake. What would Mr Prendergast think?’

  ‘What are you going to wear, Mama?’

  ‘I shall wear my black dress with the white lace at the cuff. You should go and see how Miss Brigstocke’s getting along in the kitchen.’

  Sonia grimaced. ‘What is she preparing?’

  ‘Sole, if the fishmonger remembered to get any. Then some consommé. I asked her for a saddle of mutton, but you know what she’s like. Some fowl to follow, I think. Your father will have found her something in the game larder, if Amelia hasn’t had it.’

  ‘I hope the Prendergasts are good eaters,’ said Sonia.

  ‘They will need something after that long journey.’ Mrs Midwinter rose from her stool and moved slowly over to the oak wardrobe, taking a sugar-dusted bon-bon from a saucer on the way. ‘Don’t forget what a favour they are doing us.’

  ‘I shan’t forget, Mama.’

  Sonia ran along the cold landing to her room, reluctantly removed the colour from her lips, and went down the narrow back staircase, with its powerful 100-year-old scent of lime wood, into the servants’ hall. She hurried over the patterned tiles, past the butler’s pantry (they had not had a butler for years) and into the cave-like kitchen, where Miss Brigstocke, angular and flushed, was leaning over a two-gallon boiling pot, prodding the contents with a long-handled spoon.

  ‘Hello, May,’ Sonia said to the kitchen maid, who looked up from her potato peeling and smiled apprehensively. ‘What’s in your cauldron, Miss Brigstocke? What does it look like?’

  ‘It looks like what it ought to look like,’ said Miss Brigstocke, neither smiling nor apprehensive. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so.’

  Like Mr Midwinter, she had difficulty in adjusting to Sonia’s almost-adulthood; after ten years of shooing her and spanking her and telling her to mind her p’s and q’s, she had not found an idiom in which to defer to the young mistress.

  ‘Is there anything I can—’
>
  ‘We’re doing very well, thank you, Miss. Aren’t we, May? It would be different if we was at Torrington Manor, I dare say, Miss, where, as you know—’

  ‘Indeed, I do, Miss Brigstocke. Where you worked as a scullery maid for ten years and then for five as—’

  ‘Be that as it may, Miss—’

  ‘Before you took the position in our poor house without so much as an under-footman to—’

  ‘Be that as it may, Miss,’ said Miss Brigstocke a little more firmly. ‘I shouldn’t have to pluck and clean the birds myself as well as light the range if I was at the Manor, should I? Do you imagine Mrs Turney ever dirtied her hands with making a sheep’s pluck or a proper pig’s fry, with all liver, lights and chitterlings like what I have to when Mrs Midwinter’s having one of her – what do you call ’em?’

  ‘Thrift weeks?’ said Sonia.

  ‘Offal weeks, I call ’em. I’m up to my elbows in the cavity of the pig, even if Jenkins has made the cut. Well, you don’t have to do that sort of thing at the Manor. They get all their pies and that sent from Lincoln, from Trubshawe’s, ready-made.’

  ‘Ah, the Manor, the Manor,’ laughed Sonia. ‘Wouldn’t it be splendid if we lived at the Manor instead of the Laceys! Papa would be the Member of Parliament and Mama would be a shadow of herself and wear those pastel satins that are all the fashion in London. And I should be Miss Jane. And Edgar would inherit the village. Wouldn’t we all be happy? And you, Miss Brigstocke, should have all the help you wanted. Instead of which we’re stuck in the rotten old House!’

  ‘And what about Master Thomas? What would he be at the Manor?’ said May.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Sonia. ‘I’d forgotten Master Thomas. There’s no equivalent of him, is there? Why do you ask, May?’

  May looked back quickly to her potatoes.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder,’ said Sonia, standing on tiptoe and leaning over Miss Brigstocke’s shoulder to look into the pot, ‘what world Thomas does belong to.’