Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [176]
At this, Elizabeth Kemp began for the first time to weep. Between bouts of tears she spoke of an accident, a terrible misadventure, she did not know which way to turn, she was sorry it was so late, they were keeping him from bed and she knew he was a man with many calls upon him, but by the time they had got the coach out …
The doctor listened with sober patience, saying little, making no attempt to prompt her or check the weeping, evidently content to let her come to the business in her own time. But Erasmus could not contain himself. This foolish prevarication of his mother’s, this flattering of the doctor, seemed shameful to him. His father was lying there, dead and disgraced and staring in the dark while she wheedled and dabbed at her eyes. Even the tears … He had to take the initiative, speak for both of them.
‘My father has done a violence to himself,’ he said harshly. ‘By misadventure, of course, but it could be taken as design and it is that we want to avoid.’ He paused, clearing some obstacle in his throat. ‘We are come to ask if you will certify to natural causes.’
‘Natural causes?’ The doctor looked sharply and coldly at Erasmus. ‘He is dead, then? And in circumstances of violence? No, I do not wish to know the manner of it. You must save that for the proper authorities. There are people appointed to examine into such things. Did you seriously think I would compound a felony, a man in my position? You would have done better to leave things to your mother.’ He turned to the mother now and his expression softened. She had been coming to him with ailments largely imaginary for upwards of twenty years and he had grown fond of her. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I am deeply sorry to hear of this accident, but really cannot see, under the circumstances –’
‘My son is overwrought,’ she said quickly. ‘He does not know what he is saying. ’Twas he that discovered my poor husband. He is little more than a boy and has got the matter quite wrong. Please forgive him. We came only to seek your advice in this terrible pass we are brought to. I am a mere woman and have small knowledge of the world and my health is far from good, as none knows better then you …’
In fact she looked less sickly, more animated, at this moment than Erasmus could ever remember seeing her. The crisis of his intervention had driven away her tears, leaving her eyes brighter, and a glow had come to warm her cheeks. Sitting upright in her plain cambric dress and trimmed hood, her hands clasped together, she looked more than well, she looked handsome; and Erasmus sensed that Banks thought so too, for all the fellow’s grave airs.
She paused a moment now as if in reflection and when she spoke again it was in a different, more considering tone: ‘My husband, as you will recall, was a high-blooded man and rather short in the neck and suffered from dizzy fits sometimes and rushes to the head.’
Banks nodded slowly. ‘That is so,’ he said. ‘He had a sanguine constitution of body. I remember letting him blood on occasion.’
‘Well, it is my belief that he consulted another doctor for this condition at certain times, for example when you yourself were away from the town or otherwise not available to be visited.’
The doctor regarded her for a moment in silence. Then, still without speaking, he looked down thoughtfully at the signet ring on his right hand. Absently, he turned it this way and that for some little while. Erasmus glanced at his mother in surprise – he had not heard before of a second doctor and was about to say so when he was checked by her slight warning frown.
The doctor looked up. His face was quite without expression. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am sometimes away. To take a second opinion would have been quite a reasonable thing for Kemp to do under the circumstances.’
‘Well, now, the difficulty is,’ she said, ‘I am so silly and not used to remembering and I cannot for the life of me bring to mind this doctor’s name and I do not know how I can find it out on such short notice. I thought