The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [55]
‘Now that you’ve seen it,’ Clara told her,‘the demon will have entered you.’
‘No demon can enter me. An angel told me so.’
‘What you invent is your own affair. Wait now and see.’
Mary shook her head. She felt nothing. Perhaps the exorcism had already been achieved. Clara was mistress of no devils. To be sure, though, Mary set her foot on the shape and dragged it across. Clara ran and knocked Mary onto her back and tore at her. Mary, in a moment of dreadful, unchristian weak-mindedness, put up her hands to defend herself. It pleased her then to have those hands bitten and stamped on. Clara spat finally on her and ran away. Mary felt burning trenches in her face. The trees swayed peacefully over. She stood up and cool blood poured down along her chin. She caught drops in both hands. She stood and held her hands out until they were bathed. She pressed her hands to her face, printing them scarlet, and walked triumphantly back to the madhouse.
There she met William Stockdale, who took a relishing look at her and said, ‘Oh dear, oh dear. I think the doctor will have to see about this. Time, I’m thinking, you spent some time at my pleasure in the Lodge.’
Autumn
‘Listen, listen, we’ll make a penny or two, what? Old days, nothing. I know the public’s taste as well as I ever did.’
He stared at him, stared into him, but he could see in John’s eyes that it wasn’t John looking out, or was only for fractions of moments, when he would sense himself seen and look quickly away. John was speaking very rapidly. In the middle of his fattened face, his mouth was dry and muscular, his breath unclean.
‘There’s a Doctor Bottle imp who deals in urine
A keeper of state prisons for the queen
As great a man as is the Doge of Turin
And save in London is but seldom seen
Ylcep’d old Allen - mad brained ladies curing
Some poxed like Flora and but seldom clean
The new road o’er the forest is the right one
To see red hell and further on the white one.’
He wanted to be out of that cell. It was a nightmare, simply a nightmare - his old friend mad and gabbling and laughing as he read from a greasy notebook. It was like a possession. And the air was rank. And there were noises from other chambers.
‘Earth hells or bugger shops or what you please
Where men close prisoners are and women ravished
I’ve often seen such dirty sights as these
I’ve often seen good money spent and lavished
To keep bad houses up for doctors fees
And I have known a bugger’s tally traversed
Till all his good intents begin to falter
- When death brought in his bill and left the halter.’
John Taylor walked back from Leopard’s Hill Lodge with Eliza Allen under the fragmenting trees. Thin puddles split beneath their feet. Leaves flowed down around them.
‘A sibyl’s prophecies,’ he said. He was upset by what he’d seen, by the dwindling lives of his friends. This classical thought now set a seal on his mood and slightly assuaged him.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘A sibyl, a prophetess,’ he explained. ‘She would write her prophecies on leaves and let the wind scatter them, read them who can. I spend my time now in ancient studies, mostly Egyptian, the pyramids and so forth.’
‘I see.You should tell my husband. I’m sure he would be interested. But how did you find Mr Clare?’ she asked.
‘Not well,’ he answered. ‘He was . . . agitated. He kept asking after his childhood sweetheart, Mary. I hadn’t the heart to tell him that she has died. Also - it would be amusing if it weren’t the index of quite appalling suffering - he seemed at times to be under the impression that he is Lord Nelson.’
‘Oh. Sometimes it is Byron, I am told.’
‘That makes more sense. He’s is rewriting one of Byron’s poems. He also spoke very violently, obscenely in fact, against