Chapter Eleven 1895 #2
By February the world was still frozen, and a storm blew in like nothing Theo had ever seen before.
She went to stand at the window. Thunder ricocheted from hill to hill like the echo of vast ordnance; lightning blanched the sky; and snow fell all the while, in violent flurries on a spiteful wind.
Theo’s breath clouded the freezing glass.
It was as though the heavens were raging.
The door creaked behind her and she startled, but it was only Audrey, wearing a woollen shawl and carrying a lamp even though it was nearing midday.
‘Miss, you shouldn’t be up! You’ll catch cold, and the doctor will be upset.’ Audrey still struggled to call her madam.
‘I’m fine, Audrey. Have you ever seen anything like this weather?’
‘Mrs Meredith says no one’s ever seen anything like it. She says it’s a sign.’ Audrey draped a jacket around Theo and tried to turn her towards the bed. ‘Thundersnow, the paper calls it.’
‘Thundersnow? Apt, I suppose; but not very imaginative.’
‘Dying weather’s what they ought to call it. Please come back and lie down; it’s too soon for you to be up and about. I’ll get some more coal brought up.’
‘It’s not too soon,’ Theo said. ‘I can’t stay cooped up much longer. The walls are beginning to close in on me.’
‘Well, it’s not like you could go outside, in any case. I’ll read to you, if you like. Then there’s chicken soup for lunch.’
‘All right. Has the Royal Geographical arrived yet? Uncle Crudge’s report on the supply of water to ancient Ephesus ought to be in it.’
‘Oh, yes.’
Audrey didn’t sound keen; she preferred novels. They’d been through most of Jane Austen during Theo’s first confinement, after Amelia died; then moved on to the Bronte sisters, and George Meredith. But Theo always preferred to hear about foreign places, and imagine herself there. Far away.
She climbed back into bed. Audrey poured her a glass of water to take her pills.
Ralph had prescribed them for her; Theo had no idea what was in them, or what they were supposed to do.
There were different ones for morning and evening, and neither had much effect other than to make her head heavy and give her indigestion.
She met Audrey’s gaze as she swallowed them, and for a brief, startled moment they acknowledged their unhappiness.
Then Audrey glanced around as the wind shook the window sashes and moaned in the chimney.
‘Is it really dying weather?’ Theo asked quietly.
Audrey frowned. ‘I shouldn’t have said. I’m not supposed to upset you with anything.’
‘Never mind that.’
‘Two yesterday,’ Audrey said. ‘An old lady slipped on the churchyard path and couldn’t get up.
She was perished by the frost before the verger found her.
And the other . . .’ Their eyes met again.
‘A little boy of six. His brothers took him skating on a dew pond out Motcombe way, and . . . he went through the ice.’
‘That’s terrible.’ Theo’s eyes burned.
‘See – I shouldn’t have said!’
‘Anyone would find it sad, Audrey. Now, run and fetch that journal.’
With Audrey gone, Theo could screw her eyes shut and wait for the disproportionate heave of sorrow to pass. The cutting short of another small life, far too soon.
After lunch, she began a letter to Timothy Crudge.
Ralph does not think I ought to have visitors, but I am much better and would so love to see you, and hear all your latest adventures.
In any case, it’s impossible in this terrible weather.
I hope you have plenty of coal. Theo longed for one of Crudge’s big, whiskery hugs.
The old-cloth smell of his jacket; the trace of bergamot from his shaving cream.
She knew it would do her far more good than any pills.
Do you realise it has been over a year? Since my birth, I think this is the longest I have gone without seeing you.
I miss you, Uncle. She didn’t write much of her grief, since it would only cause him pain.
I wish there could have been a funeral. My son lived, though it was only for a moment.
Ralph will not even have him named, but I have done so anyway. He is Timothy, after you.
She slept for a while in the afternoon, and Ralph woke her when he got home from the hospital, as the light was failing. She pushed herself straighter as he sat down beside her, taking her hand in one of his and pressing the other to her forehead.
‘How are you, my darling?’
‘Perfectly well. I should like to get up, in fact.’
‘I know it’s boring, but it’s necessary. You must give your organs time to recover fully.’
‘There was a woman called Mrs Brownlea over at Hallewell. She had one of her babies during the harvest – at the edge of the field. She put it in a sling and carried on with her scythe. It was a famous story—’
‘And one that has no doubt grown considerably in the retelling. I don’t believe a word of it. In any case, you are not some baggage of a farmer’s wife.’ He brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers. ‘You are my own dear girl.’
Theo smelled the phenol on his hands, and undertones of something stronger, well-scrubbed but not quite gone. Perhaps chloroform, or formaldehyde.
‘How was Mr Oadby today?’ she asked.
‘Better all the time.’ Ralph smiled.
He’d been treating Mr Oadby for several weeks.
Cancer had eaten away his jawbone; Ralph had operated three times to cut out all of the disease.
Since then, he’d been endeavouring to rebuild the left side of Oadby’s jaw using slivers of bone taken from his shin, and splints of prepared ivory.
It appeared to be working, though not all the grafts had survived.
The idea of it fascinated Theo. That bone was alive, and could be persuaded to grow in a new place.
Few had ever attempted the surgeries Ralph was performing; he had no map to follow.
Sometimes, when her husband listened to her chest or probed his fingers into various points of her abdomen, Theo felt like the drawings in the medical books at Hallewell: reduced to strips of muscle and sinew, and mysterious, seething organs.
She had to remind herself that it was only his way of caring for her.
Ralph’s face was still young, still handsome.
Eyes that lively blue; no grey in his tawny hair.
His shoulders were broad, and when he rolled up his shirt sleeves, the muscles of his forearms moved smoothly beneath the skin.
But it didn’t seem to matter; nothing could make her flesh crave his.
More than ever, she had to be careful not to pull away from him, involuntarily.
‘What weather,’ he muttered. ‘No horse or carriage could tackle the hill – it’s sheet ice. I all but slithered home to you on the seat of my breeches just now. And we’ll be inundated with broken legs and arms in the next few days, just you wait and see.’
He fetched a match from the mantelpiece and lit the bedside lamp, uniting them in an orb of warm light. The gas hissed steadily.
‘How are you in . . . in yourself?’ he asked.
Theo studied the twin bumps of her knees beneath the bedspread. It wouldn’t do to beseech.
‘I think it would do me good to get up, Ralph. I crave a change of scenery . . . a distraction. Life must go on.’
She echoed the words he had said to her himself, on the very day that Timothy died.
‘It must.’ He looked troubled. ‘Please understand that if I were to let you up too soon, and some damage occurred as a result . . . it would be my fault. If you were to persuade me against my better judgement.’
‘But I’m well; I know I am. Surely, nothing too serious could go on inside me without my being aware of it?’
‘My dear girl, a terrific number of things are going on inside you all the time, without you knowing the least thing about it.’
‘It is this forced confinement that brings me low. Not at the start, perhaps. But now.’
He frowned in thought. ‘Very well, tomorrow then—’
‘Oh, thank you, Ralph—’
‘But it must be for one hour only. And you must wear your stays properly laced. On this I must insist. Were it merely a question of fashion it wouldn’t matter at all, but your organs must be supported; it is critical to their recovery, and to your chances of a successful pregnancy in the future.’
‘Very well.’
He lifted her chin with two fingers. ‘I’m so glad at your recovery, Theo. I know it’s different for women – you are less resilient to adversity. But I do think sometimes we must just . . . try to be happy. And in the trying, make it so.’
Theo raised a smile, but said nothing.
She itched to go outside and feel the bite of the wind on her skin.
When she was sure Ralph had gone downstairs, she crossed to the window again and lifted the bottom sash.
The blast of freezing air snatched her breath away; flecks of gritty snow blew on to her eyelashes and melted on her lips.
The world was so deadened with ice it was impossible to imagine it green again.
Down below, carrying a shovel and thickly wrapped against the weather, Seth Litton trudged slowly along the path.
Theo had the sudden urge to climb down to him and run away barefoot through the snow.
Away from her bedroom, her home, her grief. Her husband.
The cold didn’t break for twelve weeks. Frost crept so deep into the ground that roads heaved and pipes burst. Water pumps froze solid, and people thawed icicles to drink.
Work on the land and in industry stopped, and soup kitchens opened to feed the unemployed.
Coal prices rose. Horses slipped on the roads, broke their knees and had to be shot.
The elderly and poor died in their beds, as night after night the mercury showed fifteen degrees below zero.
In London, the papers reported, men were riding their bicycles across the Thames, putting the ferrymen out of work.
Ralph’s prescription of solitary rest finally ended, and Hermione came to visit. She hugged Theo tight.