VII
Ralph was sure he would soon have won his argument. Even as he was helped from the west parlour, he felt a sense of exultation. He was sure, as he was peeled from his jacket and unwound from his tie and cummerbund, that he was entering a new and certain world. His ears were singing and his head was spinning, but he could almost smile up at the faces of his opponents in logic as they came and went around the huge green and gold fortress of his four-poster bed.
‘I always bring my bag with me, Mistress. A few potentially useful medicaments …’
‘Then get it.’ His mother’s voice was unusually harsh.
Time hung around him. He smelled the silk of his mother’s dress.
‘I’ll get you your painstones, darling.’
Ralph felt pleasantly lazy, lying here. Moving shadows and the voice of Doctor Foot returned. Rough, disconnected hands touched his face, then hooked into his mouth and opened his eyes. Then came the cold, familiar touch of a stethoscope on his chest, although this one seemed to be some innovative device, which was sucking out air. Bucking, coughing, he fought against it.
‘Definite signs of toxaemia, Greatgrandmistress. No, no. I wouldn’t use that painstone …’ He felt his palm being prised open. ‘… The spells might conflict.’
He smelled the doctor’s bag. He was falling towards its syrupy comforts as it opened. Endless bottles were nodding their tall cork heads and twisting their thin blueglass necks as they fluttered around him. Then something brimmed against his lips, and a sticky spillage spread dark roots across the snowfalls of his sheets.
‘It’s aethered?’ His mother’s voice. ‘A spell?’
‘I think that’s the minimum necessary.’ Doctor Foot cleared his throat. Brightness glowed into the twin moons of his eyeglasses. There was a faint rain of spittle, and Ralph felt some vapour stirring, roiling, climbing up his throat. His heart constricted. He had no energy to do so, but, once again, he was coughing. Then the spell was incanted again, and there came a kind of rest.
He found himself beached in daylight, half hanging out of his bed. His books were stepped and waiting on a bright square of carpet. Coughing, he urged his hand to reach towards the embossed leather cover at the top of the nearest pile. The book flipped and skidded. He had no idea of its contents, but he craved the cool bliss of its numbered, annotated plates. The thing was impossibly heavy. Perhaps this was the Book of Knowledge from which all others were mere extracts, its pages made from the pulped wood of that tree in the Garden of Eden. Perhaps he would soon see Eve.
Waiting for another wave of sick weariness to break and expend itself over him, Ralph finally lifted the book and prised open its cover. Then, pausing to regain his energies, he turned through pages of guild dedications and blank sheets towards the waiting truth. Insects? He smiled dizzyingly. Strange, really, that a book which encompassed everything should begin there. But every system of classification had its problems, as he knew only too well. So; Lepidoptera—butterflies. And why not? And, after all, and even in the book of everything, you had to start somewhere.
‘Ralph. You’re nearly falling out … And you shouldn’t be reading.’
He was surprised at how easily his mother could move his body back to the middle of his bed. Then there were all the other things she did for him. Summons and instructions issued by her cool fingers to which his unthinking flesh responded. Cold air and rubber and porcelain. The shock of a sponge. And new sheets, new pyjamas. All he needed was that cummerbund and tie again.
He croaked, ‘I’m sorry …’
Her lovely face loomed before him. She looked immaculate; clean and fresh. It was only the mess of the fever he could already feel leaking its way back into his body which spoiled everything.
‘You mean about the night before last’s dinner?’ Questioningly, lovingly, she tilted her head. Her cool fresh hand was stroking his cheek, and lingered there in a subtly different way. After all, he had shaved, and this sensation of touching was new and different for them both. ‘You were ill. People understand. In fact, Doctor Foot will be back here soon this morning. I know he’s a bit of a bumpkin, darling, but he seems to know his job at least as well as those expensive charlatans in Harley Street. And it’s important that we keep a proper watch over you.’ Her gaze roved his face. Those grey-blue eyes. Like diamonds. Underwater. At the ends of the earth.
He swallowed and worked drying sand back into his throat to speak, but her fingers sealed his mouth.
‘Sssh, darling.’ Her breath stirred his face. She was so close to him now that her features blurred. He felt her lips settle against his. Then she was gone.
Slipping in and out of awareness. Concentrating. between wet spasms of coughing, on breathing. Conscious that words were being said. Pages in a play.
‘I don’t care right now what your worries are, Doctor Foot.’
‘Still, Greatgrandmistress. There’s a limit to the power of the spells which might help combat his fever and ease his breathing. It’s a question of the amount of aether of this strength of charm we can use.’
‘If you’re talking about caution, about money, about the regulations of your own guild—in fact, about anything—I’m sure that I can—’
‘No, no, Mistress. It’s not like that at all. If I were to use more aether than this in a potion, if I were to introduce the amount you’re suggesting into his body, it would take him over beyond the control of any guildsman. Your son would become a changeling.’
A long pause in the dialogue. Ralph, with an effort of mind, turned the white, empty pages.
‘Would that save him?’
‘It would just mean even more agony and uncertainty. Far more, in fact, than either of us dare imagine. We’d be treating a monster. And your son would then be beyond my help …’
The light was fading. He heard the bubble of a humidifier, and tasted its herbal breath on his lips. Pains flared and were gone. The fire in the grate had been replaced by a pug-nosed creature with a glowing mouth which squatted on the tiles as if it was preparing to jump. Its tweezering legs were crawling over him. Its arid grin was searing into the foul sump of his lungs. Then came a moment of clarity, with his mother lifting him and placing water to his lips, and the agony of swallowing.
The wings of a fan brushed over him. The fire still grinned and squatted on insect legs. His lungs and the humidifier bubbled. He felt his mother’s movement, her touches and sighs. The empty moments flapped by him one by one, pure and sharp as empty pages of his endless book. Then he sensed a presence behind him, and turned the next page and laughed out loud at what he found there. For he was up on the Kite Hills, and the bitter taste of the bathing pools were still in his mouth, but all fear had gone and London slouched grey below him as its sooty breezes bore up the many kites that sailor-suited lads, watched by their adoring mummies and nannies, were flying. Big and bright, huge butterflies caught in the warm hand of the wind. Yes, this was Butterfly Day, and Ralph laughed and ignored the rawness in his throat and let the slope take him as he ran. People smiled and waved. The fact that he was wearing sweat-soaked pyjamas didn’t seem to bother anyone. Then, as if the kites had shrunk or he had become a giant, their sails surrounded him. Ralph held out his amazed hand and felt one of them settle there. Paper-dry and light, it spread its wings to the sunlight, and the part of him which had studied the blissful pages of so many books recognised the creature instantly. Not a kite or even a butterfly, but a moth. Biston betularia, the peppered moth, which was small and unremarkable and common, although he remembered now, with a strange push of extra knowledge which seemed to ignite some new fire inside him, how there were often two illustrations of this creature in books on Lepidoptera; a darker, blackish variety, and one which was greyer-flecked and light. This moth, here at the smoke edges of London, was of the darker kind. Ralph studied it. A sense of power and knowledge was gaining on him.
He scanned the huge slope of dry summer grass which separated him from his mother as the moth twitched its near-black wings in his palm; an emissary from the world of science and certainty which he now so wanted to share with her. Carefully, cupping the tips of his fingers over it so it couldn’t escape, he began to ascend the slope. The distance was huge. The sunlight was blinding. Gasping, he looked along the shimmering benches, but the effort of climbing this burning space had left him confused. Smells of ice cream and tramped earth. A harsh metallic taste of dread. He coughed and tried to steady himself, cupped fingers still bearing the precious load of his peppered moth as the kites hung and the gritty sweat burned his eyes and the trees swayed. Bicycles and boaters and picnic baskets and the shouts of gimcrack sellers and all the empty faces along the benches were sinking into looming dark. But there she was! Sitting on the green wooden bench exactly where he’d left her, and wearing a silver-grey fur coat. He waved, shouted, ran, stumbling through the airless heat towards her. She was smiling. Her face was a cool flame, and the rest of the Kite Hills retreated as he approached, until her features suddenly changed, and what remained of Ralph’s rational mind saw another face—red-eyed, blue-lipped and gaunt—inside the blood-fogged glass visor of what was surely a diver’s brass helmet. The lost moment contracted. Something was wrong, and breathless fathoms of pain engulfed him until, just when he was sure that he could bear it no longer, there was no pain at all.