Chapter 26 #3
“Mr. Tythe,” Rab went on, “has been in correspondence with a biologist in Saigon who has discovered that animals injected with small amounts of cobra venom, over time, develop some immunity to snakebites. That’s my best guess for how your medicine works.
I tried it with my own blood, with the blood of all the other boarders who would let me bleed them. But nothing happened. Nothing changed.
“I knew—I guessed, anyway—that your line was the first. The oldest. That wolfsbane, combined with your blood, would stop the pathogen from fully activating. Not without side effects, of course—anemia, lethargy—which seemed a small price to pay for freedom. Of course, there’s a very good chance that if I took a medicine made from your blood, it wouldn’t work for me.
Wouldn’t stop the change, the way it did for you.
Or maybe it only works for women; you and your mother, as far as we know, are the first infected females to have ever survived childhood. But I had to try.”
Weak of constitution and spasmodic of nerves, Dr. Hoffman had told her. Just like your mother.
All those years of illness. All those weeks spent in bed with a summer fever, a winter cold. She had thought she was frail. She had thought she was delicate as a rose. She knew, now, the depth of her strength.
What would her mother have been if her fierceness had not been fettered?
“But Charlie wouldn’t give me his blood,” Rab continued.
“He said the medicine made you weak, that it killed your mother. He wanted nothing to do with it. So, I got him drunk a few times. Tied a tourniquet around his arm and grabbed my knife. But he always pulled it off before I’d cut him, started swinging.
I got desperate. I saw my life passing before my eyes.
I thought I’d die having never seen anything of the world except the East End of London, chained to this disease.
Some of the other men travel, true, but they have families and servants who keep their secret.
They have rooms like ours, with restraints and steel bars and all the rest of it.
What if I got out, like John? What if I hurt someone? What if I made someone else like me?”
Rab’s eyes stared unfocused at the carpet. He blew a breath out through pursed lips. “Anyway. When Charlie met Mary Jane, he and I started fighting. I told him it was irresponsible. Did he really want to bring another poor bastard like us into the world? Or a whole string of stillborn girls?”
Jumped ship before she got too big. Must’ve known I’d be no good of a mother.
“I knew when she came into the chemistry that day, trying to make peace between me and Charlie. I knew she was pregnant. I could smell it. And I thought—God forgive me—I thought I could help. I thought if I could isolate the pathogen in the mother’s blood, test it with different antidotes, maybe I could re-create your medicine, stop the child from turning… ”
Charlie was waiting for me when I got home. Straightaway, he knew something was off. Saw the scratch on my arm, looked into my eyes.
Rage rose in Caroline, burning away the grief.
“You drugged her,” she said. “You drugged her and bled her. No wonder Charlie left the Full Moon. If it weren’t for you, Rab, they might both still be alive.”
These men were all the same. The world was their garden, to be picked and plotted and furrowed and burned.
“Do I not think that every single day?” Rab cut back. His voice had an edge to it, but when she examined his face, she saw the blade was turned upon himself. “I lie awake at night reliving each miserable moment of those last weeks. I hate myself for that, and a hundred other mistakes.”
Caroline’s rage flickered. He had suffered, too. For his mistake, he had suffered. She swallowed her anger and asked the final question. “What happened the last night you saw Charlie?”
Rab’s eyes were incandescent.
“He gave me his blood,” he whispered. “He told me that Mary Jane was expecting. That he wanted his child to have a choice.”
—
Amystery is a sweeping, twisting thing. But the truth fits like a key in a lock.
Caroline could see it as clear as a memory. Charlie, walking the night-clad streets of Whitechapel. Climbing the stairs to this room, knocking on this door.
She could see her brother’s peaked face as he told Rab what he already knew: that the woman he loved was pregnant.
She watched him sit, and roll up his shirtsleeve, and nod, once, when the tourniquet was tied.
She watched his scarlet blood spill into the little vial, watched Rab write the neat letters on the label. Charlie Foster.
She watched the two men, so alike, and so unalike, embrace, the first bricks removed from the wall that had risen between them.
She watched her brother reemerge into the dark streets, his long arms swinging, a smile on his face as he thought of Mary Jane, waiting for him with a hand on her belly in the humble flat in Miller’s Court.
Be happy, Cat, he said, whenever he bid her goodbye, when he swiped his thumb across her cheek to catch her tears. Be happy. You and I have so much more than most. We have each other.
And so, as Rab dropped his head and wept, Caroline’s broken heart began the process of stitching itself back together. She reached out and found his hand.