Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
I find it hard to convey the extravagant sense of freedom that informed me during those early days at Bramley Hall.
There was no Captain Farnam to obey. No show times to meet.
No marks whose stares of abhorrence pierced as cruelly as the pins that fixed an exotic insect to an entomologist’s specimen board.
The burdensome aspects of life rested so lightly on my small shoulders that at times I felt as if I were floating through the rooms and hallways of the house and along the garden paths, my feet not quite making contact with the surfaces over which I crossed.
Never having needed more than three hours of sleep, I had a few times awakened in my dark bedroom with the conviction that I was liberated from my body and from all concerns, a mind within a soul, neither in this world nor the next, but adrift in a dimension between lives.
That illusion lasted less than a minute, until I could not deny that a mattress and bedclothes cocooned me, and although this experience was both disquieting and delightful, it was always much more the latter than the former.
On the afternoon of Thanksgiving eve, under an overcast sky, I set out to explore the gardens.
Even by then I knew those acres and all their attractions as though I had been born within the estate walls.
Nonetheless, when alone I toured the gardens at a leisurely pace, for every enclave was no less beautiful for being familiar, and always some small details, if not new to me, seemed new and charming on rediscovery.
In the gray light of the cloaked sun, the last roses of the season flourished, all petals intact, some blooms red, others coral pink, still others as pale orange as peaches.
In spite of my intention not to hurry, I found myself moving past the roses without pausing to admire them.
I took a fork in the path that led beyond the pavilion to a one-acre lawn groomed for games and dog play.
In memory, I heard Harmony’s voice, Stay alert, Alida.
Life is a great gift, love and mercy are the promise of it, but stay alert.
Beyond the deep lawn stood a grove of five large well-sculpted Metrosideros excelsa, which Mr. Reinhardt said were more commonly known as New Zealand Christmas trees.
Showy tufts of crimson flowers crowned their branches, an arresting spectacle even now and more so when bathed in sunlight.
Stay alert. I did not know what to be alert for, but I felt that I should not delay out of excess caution.
The lawn was due for mowing after the holiday.
Trembling in the breeze, the grass lapped at my feet as if I were walking on water.
The trees were broadly crowned, the branches densely leafed, so the floor of the woodlet was for the most part carpeted in darkness.
What little ashen light sifted between the big trees did not diffuse beyond the natural mulch on which it settled.
Letting my eyes adjust to the gloom, I eased forward.
Dead leaves crunched underfoot, and the breeze soughed softly through the highest branches.
I did not know what had drawn me here, but I knew I had come with a purpose.
Sometimes in dreams, without knowing why, we’re compelled to proceed through a maze of unfamiliar rooms or wend deeper into an ominous landscape until a sudden encounter shocks us awake, some threat we cannot remember when we sit up in bed, sheathed in sweat.
This felt like a waking version of that experience.
I stopped tramping through the leaves, and the breeze seemed to subside.
In the hush, I scanned the murk, my head cocked to the left, to the right.
The faint sound was detectable less because of the volume than because of the quick rhythm.
Even so, I can’t rightly say my ear led me to the source.
Strange as it might seem, I felt that my heart led me, for I was overcome by a sudden sense of impending loss, by pity and sorrow, that reeled me urgently through the gloom until I saw a shape of lesser darkness lying on the black ground.
As I knelt, I recognized the rhythmic sound as the panting of a dog.
When I put my hand on his side, I knew that he was our Rafael.
His heart raced, and his breaths were shallow whiffs.
At my touch he issued a thin whimper, leaving no room for doubt that he was in great distress.
Gentle Rafael, sweet Rafael, only two years old, always an eager companion on midnight adventures, member in good standing of the Clyde Tombaugh Club, known to have been frightened by a long-legged leaping hare—if he were to die, the children would be devastated.
And they would not be alone in their grief.
I’d known him only nine weeks or so, yet I found myself insisting, “No, no, no, no, no,” each repetition as much a sob as it was a word.
If I’d obeyed my first impulse, I would have run to the house for help.
However, intuition argued that he would be dead by the time I brought help back here.
“He’s been poisoned,” I heard myself say, though there was no way I could have known that to be true.
My second impulse was to comfort him, to hold him so that he would not die alone.
Or at least that’s what I thought I meant to do, for I was not capable of conceiving what in fact happened.
I settled behind him, on my left side, and pulled him against me with one arm.
I told him he was a good boy, gentle and beautiful and much loved, that this was only his first life and that the next would be in Heaven.
“There must be dogs in Heaven,” I assured him, “because they’re better than people.
They deserve Heaven more than we do.” Violent tremors shuddered through him.
I held him tighter, whereupon his tremors passed into me.
I do not mean either that I felt them more profoundly than before or that I developed sympathetic tremors of my own.
His body stiffened and his legs kicked. Each time that he convulsed, a simultaneous volcanic concussion originated in the very core of me and sent shock waves to my extremities.
I was not merely feeling his convulsions through bodily contact; I was experiencing them as I would a lethal current if I grasped the bare wires of a frayed lamp cord.
They became our convulsions. My thin cries and his pained whimpers were synchronized.
My legs scissored like those of a hound fleeing a threat in its dreams. A smell similar to that of potent onions overwhelmed me, and with it came a flavor that was far too sweet to be pleasant.
I knew, without knowing how I knew, that I was drawing from Rafael the poison he had consumed, and not only the poison but also the dire effects of it, the damage that it had done to his organs and tissues.
He was being made right and whole again.
The astringent scent swelled into a repulsive malodor.
The sugary flavor became cloying. Scent and taste intensified, forming a dark cyclonic mass that turned slowly but relentlessly through my mind, pulling me down into its funnel, as if I were the sailor narrator of Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom.” A roaring blackness took me.
I could not have been unconscious more than a minute or two.
Rafael awakened me by snuffling loudly and licking my face.
When I sat up, he backed off and stood panting, not with canine anxiety, but with the note of eagerness that expressed his happiness when he was in the thick of a late-night adventure with the children.
I was not even briefly confused about what had happened.
I had brought the dog back from the edge of death to full health.
The what of it could not be denied, but the how beggared explanation.
I was not blessed with the power to heal.
If I were so gifted, surely the power would have manifested years before this when I held a bird with a broken wing as it died, when I had sat bedside as another human oddity in the Museum of the Strange succumbed to heart failure.
When holding Rafael against me, I thought I had felt his convulsions becoming mine instead of his, the poison migrating from him into me.
If anything like that had really occurred, I should be dying now—or dead.
However, I felt in the best of health, perhaps even better than I’d felt when I set out to tour the gardens.
Although Rafael rarely barked, when I got to my feet, he issued one loud yawp, as though in approval or celebration.
A meager wintry gray light sifted through the interlaced trees.
It wasn’t sufficient to relieve the murkiness, but it was enough to find the reflective layer of his eyes and foster the animal eyeshine that allowed him to see in the dark better than I ever could.
I met his steady stare, and he met mine.
I wondered if he might understand what had occurred better than I did.
That wasn’t a far-fetched notion, considering that I didn’t understand it at all.