The Quickening Maze Part 16

'How dare you!'

The rain drummed on the man's umbrella, formed a falling fringe of drops in front of his glaring red face. Dr Allen suffered a sudden lurch of panic: the man was a creditor.

'I'm terribly sorry,' he said. 'Please, come inside. We can't talk like this out in the rain. I can hardly hear you.'

'It takes you this long to invite me inside. Lead on, doctor, lead on.'

Whoever he was followed Matthew Allen into the vestibule, furled his umbrella and speared it into the stand.

'I knew,' he began, 'that you ran a lax establishment, but I thought that at least you would know who was and was not a patient of yours.'

'Many apologies for the confusion. Sincerely. If you would please follow me to my study. There we can talk.'

Allen set off swiftly towards his study, wanting to conceal whatever would follow, to bottle it. He opened the door and the man strode past him - past, frighteningly, the two sets of accounts laid side by side, but at which he did not glance.

'What's that?' the man asked, pointing.

'Oh, that. That's an orrery. It's the planets.'

'Yes, yes. I know what it is. I'd forgotten the name.'

'If I may explain,' Allen said. 'There have been difficulties, as I've acknowledged, of a mechanical nature, but as I have tried to make clear, the machine is now functioning perfectly . . .'

'Machine? What are you talking about?'

'The Pyroglyph. Excuse me, sir, you are . . .'

'Excuse me, "your lordship" is the appropriate form of address for a viscount.'

'For a viscount?'

'Indeed. A viscount.'

Allen began to wonder if this were not, in fact, a patient, one of the new ones his wife had been dealing with. 'I beg your pardon . . .'

'So you will when I've finished with you. Do you really have no idea what is going on?'

'I'm sorry. I'm a little unwell. The machine, the manufacture, the accounts take up a great deal of energy.'

'Will you stop talking about your b.l.o.o.d.y machine.'

'I'm sorry, I don't understand.'

'Don't understand. Don't know. My son is a patient, so to speak. Charles Seymour. His name is familiar, at least?'

'Oh. Oh. Of course. I do beg your pardon, your lordship.'

'As predicted. Would you summon him for me?'

'If you so wish.'

'I do wish it. I wish it very much, very much. But it can't be done.You can't do it. And once again I am appalled that you don't know that you can't.You can't because he is not here. He has done exactly what I have been paying you to avoid. He has run off with that atrocious little wh.o.r.e.'

Spring

Morning.The door open. Stepping out into light, into the world carefully, one step at a time so as not to fall. Inhaling her small requirement of the boundless air. Leaves on the trees, green growth in the vegetable garden where the people quietly worked. Nothing came at her, nothing attacked. There were flowers and clouds. The day was gentle.

Forgiveness.This was what forgiveness felt like - given back to the world, freed into it, whole and restored. Without words her being resonated thanks as she stood there, closing her eyes slowly in the breeze and opening them again to see the Creation, the play of the infant Christ's spirit in the subtle movement of life around her.

She saw the doctor's youngest child and called out to her. The child started, clutched its hands together. Perhaps she had frightened her during her task, after the angel, when she had been required to be fierce and incessant. She called again and smiled and the child approached her.

'Good day, Abigail. How are you?'

'Good day.'

The child shifted as it stood, wriggling, lifting its hands to its head, looking around. Margaret felt she could almost see its large, clear soul, too big for the compact body.

'It is lovely to see you.'

'Are you better?'

'The Lord protects, Abigail. The Lord protects. You can tell your father I forgive him. The Lord's compa.s.sion, ' she laughed, raising both hands, 'is astounding.'

'Don't cry.'

'I'm not crying. Am I? I won't.'

'Good.' Abigail reached up and held her thin hand with her small, warm hand. 'Will you do more sewing now?'

Matthew Allen struggled to detach her grip from his arm, but as he pulled she twisted her grip into his sleeve. It was the thundery weather that made them worse, the noise, the wind buffeting the windows and wrenching through the woods, all the trees flaring upright in weird light. She asked him, 'Is it true? You won't turn me out, will you?'

'No. Not at all.'

'Will you?'

There were tears in her eyes. He prised at her fingers. He felt another hand on him, on his shoulder, pulling. These hands he wrestled with, in his fatigue: he felt as though they might pull him open finally, spill him like a suitcase full of clothes. He shook himself like an animal and turned. It was John.

'What is it?'

'I must talk with you.'

'Must you? Now?'

'Yes.'

'Let go of me, then.'

'You won't turn me out?' she repeated.

'No, we will not,' Matthew almost shouted, removing her hand by the wrist. 'Come to my study,' he said to John. 'I need, I . . . Let's just go.' He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

John walked behind the doctor and stared at the back of his neck, the way it emerged, delicate and narrow, from the stiff ring of his collar. The furrow down the middle of it. The sparks of fair hair. The resistance in it, the effort of will.

Matthew Allen unlocked the door and ushered John into a private red gloom of papers and piled books. John watched as he opened the curtains.

The doctor sat heavily on a chair. 'So, what is it?' He rubbed his forehead with his fingertips and checked them for sweat, then wiped them on his trousers.

'It is my want of freedom,' John began, standing stout and justified in the middle of the rug. 'I must . . . you must . . . I must again be allowed beyond the confines of this place.'

'John, you understand . . .'

'Lord Radstock to you.'

'What?'

John saw the doctor checked in his response, looking weary and helpless, and felt his advantage.

'Well, there we are,' the doctor muttered. 'There we are.'

'Where are we? I'm here, stifled here. I need liberty. I demand liberty.'

'Do not shout. There's no need.'

'There is need. Look here, I had been intending not to tell you this, you little bottle imp, but if it comes to it, so be it.There are things happening here, violations . . .'

'I said there's no need to shout.' Matthew Allen surged to his feet. 'There is . . .' He started coughing and couldn't stop. John waited impatiently, but the fit took hold.The doctor's eyes thickened in their sockets, spit flew onto his purpling lips. He held up a hand to indicate that it would pa.s.s. Eventually, in a few sputtering jerks, it relented. Allen moaned, breathed in carefully.

'You are unwell.'

Allen laughed.'I fear you may be correct.'To himself, his voice sounded faint. Something had shifted inside his ears.

'And tired.'

'Oh, yes. And tired.'

'Then rest. Lie down. Lie down on your sofa.'

'Yes, yes, I will.'

Matthew accepted. Why not? Everyone pulling at him, requiring his decisions. Let them decide for a change. John stood over him as he subsided groaning down onto the cushions. John then took the blanket draped over the sofa's back rest and spread it as a coverlet over the doctor. Matthew Allen watched the broken poet's comfortable fat face as he tucked the blanket under his side so that he was snugly wrapped, and remembered that the poor man was a father like himself. He had tended fevered children with presumably that same look of abstract, practical care in his eyes. It made the doctor helpless for a moment, wanting to weep. John's short, dirty hands completed their task and he stood upright again.

'Thank you,' he said. He lay, exhausted and incapable of his own life, lying beneath it without the energy to continue. 'Thank you.'

'So, about my freedom.'

John turned his face towards the sun, the light split into beams by the branches. One of them, the size of an infant's vague kiss, played warmly on the corner of his eye and forehead. He squinted along it like a carpenter seeing if a plank was true. Soft with motes and pollen. A pair of circling transparent wings.

He walked over crackling dry twigs the storms had ripped out. Between oaks, occasional bluebells shivered together. Overhead, the weep of birds.The touch of the world. Glad of it. Yearning across it, for home. All the world was road until he was home.

At Buckhurst Hill church he emerged from the woods. The church with a face and aspect, there like a person, like a house. He walked through the stone gatehouse into its orderly garden of graves, the thickened silence where the dead lay.The yew with its dark, slow needles spread a decent gloom.

Inside the church he found the customary dry echoes, dark pews, figures frozen in the wildflowercoloured windows, and a woman sitting alone. He pa.s.sed her as he walked up the aisle to cross himself before the altar. Mary! No, not Mary, another of the patients, that woman he had . . . saved from Stockdale. She was staring up at the cross and smiling with tears on her face. She did not glance at him. He had done that. He had saved her. A rising wind hummed against the gla.s.s and its frozen saints. He crept outside.

In the churchyard was a boy, resting apparently, dressed like a ploughboy in a smock. He looked about nine years old and neither smiled nor made a greeting. He looked as serious and tired as any working man and resembled, John realised, one of his own sons at that age: the same stout build, the same heavy, clean flesh of the face and eyelashes long against his cheek.

'I haven't a halfpenny,' John said and the boy met his eye finally, but did not reply. The breeze lifted the long hair from his forehead and he narrowed his eyes and that gave the effect of an answer. 'I would give you one otherwise.'

The boy looked at him, eventually raised a hand to thank John for the thought, then folded his arms.

John rambled back into the woods, the musky spring odour and wheeling light. He saw a tree lying on its side, barkless, stripped white, ghost-glimmering through the others. Strange for it to have been felled at this time of year, with the sap rising, making the trees strong and wilful and difficult. Perhaps it was diseased. And every shred of bark taken for the tanning trade. He pitied it, felt suddenly that he was it, lying there undefended, its grain tightening in the breeze. He hurried on.

They had moved. It took him some time to find them. When he did he was thirsty and tired. There were fewer of them, fewer horses, only two vardas. But the crone, Judith, was still there by the yog, staring into it, her face a mask painted with its light. She flinched at his approach; raising a shoulder, she made to get up. 'No,' he said. 'Judith, it's me.'

She squinted at him and relaxed with recognition. 'You've come among us again, John Clare. Sit. Are you well?'

'I am,' he said. But he wasn't. The day's warmth faded out of him suddenly. Each day different. Each day perishing. His life at an end.

Cliffs of stained brick on either side as the train rambled out through the slums. Filth in the gutters, running children, worn laundry restless in the wind, wretched lives packed behind windows. The world was in poor repair. Dr Allen knew that there was much he could do, if given the chance, if only he were listened to, looked up to and asked. But he wasn't. People would stop asking him anything when he was bankrupt, the asylum sold, rotting in gaol.

Beyond the city came the relief of countryside, standing cattle and wet lanes and carts and clouds. Usually, Matthew enjoyed travelling by train, travelling triumphantly at speed across a superseded world, the frightened labourers in the fields staring back at him, but he hadn't that ease today as he travelled towards Oswald and humiliation.

If Oswald did grant him a loan, then surely all would be well. The machine was now, more or less, working as it should. It had been a delay only; his inspiration, his enterprise was sound. More than that, it was brilliant. He knew he was brilliant. And his brother knew it too.

He looked at the wooden fittings of the carriage's interior. How were those contracts secured? Who was a wealthy man because of them? He should approach the rail companies himself. Just think of it: ticket offices, waiting rooms, lavatories - the railways teemed with places his wood carving could adorn. Oswald should be told that. Oswald was a fool. He too could be wealthy if only he could bring himself to admit his younger brother's brilliance.

'If you wouldn't mind. Your leg.'

A lady in the carriage, reading trash, had found the fidgeting of Dr Allen's leg irksome.

'I do beg your pardon.' He would have liked to treat her to a few days in the dark room, an ice bath, a clyster. b.l.o.o.d.y hussy!

He would arrive at his brother's shop unannounced, just as his brother had arrived at High Beach. This avoided being told by letter in advance that the journey was useless and accorded Matthew the advantage of a personal appeal.

By the time the train had stumbled into York, Matthew was tired, his mood had so quickly and so violently varied from the exultant to the enraged. And the sight of York made him feel sick, a town in which he had not distinguished himself, had made no reputation, had been imprisoned, and where people might remember him.

He smoothed his beard, his clothes, clasped his leather portfolio, and thrust himself out into its streets, walking quickly. As he lunged towards his target, he recited to himself the things that he should say, impressing himself once more with his commercial insight, his fragile but arguably quite real success.

Was that? No. He hurried past the man and turned into the street of his brother's shop.Through the reflections on the gla.s.s, behind the ranked jars of pastilles, the bottles of Oswald's useless tonics that compromised the prestige of Allen's name, he glimpsed his brother's bald head moving. He wiped his palms on his trousers, grasped the door k.n.o.b, and woke the shop's hysterical little bell with his entrance.