The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [65]
‘Away from there.’ A heavy slap on his back. ‘Drink, instead, old fellow me lad. Let’s all be jolly, eh. Who’s your money on tonight?’ He accepted the bottle. The servant’s friendly hand gripped the meat of his neck as he swallowed a long flame of liquor. ‘There’s a lad.’ He took another swig.
‘Flash company,’ said Lord Byron.
‘What’s that?’ The servant raised his voice over the shrieks and barks and pleadings of the other revellers.
‘Flash company. I used to gad about with in London. Glory days. My reputation then at its zenith.’
‘That so?’
‘You give your all.You sing and sing.You write your heart wide open and in the end the crowd turns, will insult you, will tread on that heart as they rush to a new amusement.’
The servant didn’t answer this. His head was turned away as he shouted, ‘Lay in!’
Byron wiped his eyes and watched the ruction of bodies. Servants pulled one man from another to restart the bout. Confused, seated heavily on his arse, piebald with blood on his face, the man was helped up onto his feet. A servant whispered into his ear as the man wiped the greasy blood onto his fingers and licked them. Whatever that servant said had a clear inspiriting effect. The fighter’s face fell open with grief and rage and he ran at his opponent. The fiddle played, a thin lonely thread curving among the claps and cheers and sobbing and shrieks. Two men were being unnatural in the shadows; he could see their stiff thrusts. Another suddenly screamed loudly enough to get everybody’s attention and fell into a fit, his rigid arms circling slowly in front of him, his eyes white, breath snoring and seething in his throat. An attendant stood over him and poured drink, or tried to, into his mouth.
John Byron looked away. This was not the proper thing, not the sport he loved. As the men tumbled he heard a head knock against the floorboards, clear and sharp as a stonemason’s hammer, and there was laughter. A full moon, he noticed, looking away. He saw that one of the small, high windows was crammed with its cold white. A doctor acquaintance of his had once told him that a full moon vexed the mad.They certainly seemed vexed. He passed the bottle to another. Drink was not having its enlivening effect this evening. He wasn’t feeling freer or warmer. Instead he was simply loosed into his melancholy, drifting down and down.
In the commotion it seemed possible that he could slip away, back to his room to rest and perhaps even regain himself with a little versing. Slowly, he abstracted himself from the bellowing crowd and crept back upstairs.
He passed a door that still juddered with the impacts of one angry to be pent inside, past one of soft moaning, and one that was ajar and that he knew immediately was wrong. He wouldn’t have been able to say how he knew, but those stifled voices . . . he just knew. Gently, with his fingertips, he pushed the door further open. Legs along the floor, a man shoving, another man standing, his face in shadow, a lamp by her head, and as she sensed him in the doorway, her head rolling slowly towards him. Mary! No, no, not Mary. Her eyes were dark and open and still. They fluttered slightly in the breath of the shoving man, but their gaze was so deep Byron felt himself almost falling towards them, as though the floor sloped down into a pit and she was at the bottom staring up. From deep inside herself she seemed to watch him and beg for his help. Below those eyes her mouth was moving. Go to . . . no. God is . . . something. God is . . . something. She looked like Mary, didn’t she, a bit? Byron felt his face crumpling as he started to cry.
Stockdale noticed her staring and turned, staring back over his shoulder. ‘You,’ he said.
‘No, no, no,’ Byron said. ‘I never. Just let me go back to my room.’
Stockdale was up and out of her, walking towards John, not bothering to cover himself, distended, wet and raw. Behind him,