Chapter 20
Tom and Alice collided in the bedroom doorway.
“Who’s he?”
“Are you all right?”
“This is Cob. He’s sick. I’m okay, but I’ve been exposed.” I stopped for a moment, then decided in for a penny, in for a pound. “To plague.” At least they saw him; Cob wasn’t just a hallucination of mine. The knowledge didn’t necessarily help.
Doctor Freckles dragged a chair over to the bed. “Get her out of here,” she ordered Tom.
I shrugged off his attempt.
“What’s that smell?”
“Flea spray,” I explained. “He was covered with them.”
“Hmm.” Alice touched his forehead. “What have you done so far?”
“Aspirin, for the fever.”
She flicked the sheets away. Cob cringed.
“Let her see—she needs to examine you.”
He looked up to me in mute appeal, his eyes wide with fear. “She can make you better. She is a friend, a good one,” I promised him. At least I had sense enough not to say she wouldn’t hurt him. I’d already felt her probing hands when I was under her care. Alice tried to be gentle, but there was nothing that would get between Doctor Freckles and her understanding of her patient.
Alice picked up one of the black dots.
“A flea,” I supplied. Hundreds of tiny bug corpses now littered Cob and the sheets. A shudder ran through me. When I’d been in the past, I hadn’t noticed them.
“My friend killed them. She is a woman of power.”
“What did he say?” she asked.
I translated without thinking.
“What language is that?” Tom asked.
I shook my head.
Alice listened to his heart and lungs, probed the buboes under his arms and in his groin, while Cob suffered in abject passivity. When she tried to take his temperature with an electronic probe in his ear, he twisted his head away from her.
“We can do this rectally, if you don’t behave.” It dawned on me that he wouldn’t know what she meant.
“Show him, on me,” I suggested. “He doesn’t know what you mean.”
“Why not?” Alice asked. “I thought everyone understood that.”
“He’s—he’s not from around here.” I knelt by the bed. Tom hovered behind us, a presence that I needed, but wasn’t yet ready to deal with. Cob would need a lot of explaining. I pulled my hair out of the way. “Watch, Cob. It doesn’t hurt.”
Alice took my temperature in a few seconds. Cob’s eyes never left her hands.
“Now it’s your turn.”
He turned his head to allow Alice access. Although he trembled, he managed to hold still. When the probe came away, a brown residue of old ear wax clung to it. Alice wrinkled her nose. She tilted her head toward the living room, got up and exited.
“We’ll be right back,” I told Cob. “Stay put.”
Alice was waiting with Tom when I closed the door softly.
“First of all, he’s sick and ought to be in hospital, in isolation. It looks like plague—at least what I’ve read about it—but I can’t remember ever hearing about a case in England.”
“Can you save him?”
She nodded. “The drugs are streptomycin and tetracycline. They’re quite effective. You should take them, too, prophylactically. But where did he come from? How did he end up here?”
This was the part I’d been worried about.
“I don’t know.” I hugged the white robe around my shoulders. “I’m afraid it’s me. Can he be treated here? I don’t think he’ll take very well to a hospital.”
“I don’t have any choice. This is a public health matter.”
“He’s never seen one. It would frighten him. He might run away.”
Alice exploded. “Let me get this straight—he’s never seen a hospital; he’s absolutely filthy; he has a disease that hasn’t been seen on this island for hundreds of years. How am I doing so far?”
“And he doesn’t speak an English that I’ve ever heard,” Tom added. It was like being on trial.
There was nothing to do but tell them. Everything.
So I did.
When I finished, she looked from me to Tom, who had kept silent through my explanation, such as it was.
“I had thought you something of an American con artist,” Dr. Freckles said. “But you really believe that what you’ve written for the papers is true. Literally true.”
“I do,” I admitted. The heat of guilt clutched at me neck.
“Clio,” my Dr. Freckles said, breaking my heart, “I think you need a rest. An awful lot has happened to you since you got here.” I could stand her thinking me dishonest, but not crazy.
“Tom—” I looked for the understanding I wanted to find in his eyes, but they teared with his damned compassion instead. Or maybe it was my eyes that teared. Things got all blurry.
Dr. Freckles was on the phone, which was working again. Maybe it had always been working. How would I know? I wasn’t in my right mind—everyone said so.
“You saw him, didn’t you? I didn’t make him up?”
Tom folded me in his arms, which would have been a good place to be in other circumstances, but not when he thought I was out of my head.
“Yes, I saw him. He’s real.”
“Clio, I’ve sent for an ambulance to take your friend in there to the clinic.” Alice was all physician now. The human being had disappeared. “You can ride with him, if you want to.”
I had to. They would take him anyway, no matter what I did. At least if I went along, he would have someone familiar. I nodded, then took Tom by the hand and led him to the bedroom.
“This is Father Dorcas,” I told Cob. “You wanted a priest. He’s a good one. Father, this is Cob.”
“Why are you sad all of a sudden?”
“I’m not,” I answered. “You wanted a priest; I’ve got you one.”
Tom gave me a strange look, but sat by the boy on the bed. I left the two of them alone and returned to the living room.
“You don’t believe me,” I said to Alice.
“I can’t.”
“It’s all right,” I admitted. “I don’t believe me either, not really. Not any of it, since I got here.”
Ever since Alice and Tom arrived, I’d been trembling inside. Cob needed someone to depend on, and I’d tried to be that for him. He was too sick, too needy, for me to worry about my psychological state.
Which meant that I believed he was real, and so did Alice and Tom. And he undeniably had the plague. The facts were piling up on me.
Cob emerged from the bedroom on Tom’s arm, wrapped in one of Christina’s sheets.
“I can’t make out what he’s saying,” Tom said, “I hear some English words, but it’s as if he were a foreigner.”
“Never mind,” Alice ordered. “I don’t like his color.” She turned to me. “Tell him to sit down.”
I obeyed. It was easier to do what she said. Cob eased into Christina’s good chair, moving as if his joints ached, which they probably did.
“You sit, too, Clio,” Alice ordered. She had her God voice going now, the voice physicians used when patients are irrational. Like me.
I obeyed again. I clutched the dressing gown around me, glad for Jane’s gift. The world was turning colder as Tom and Alice stared at me.
They could all see Cob, touch him, but only I understood what he was saying. We all four started when the ambulance arrived with a screech of brakes and a gravelly skid. Alice and Tom led Cob to the ambulance outside. I followed.
The driver stood by the fender, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Cob was weak, but not so far gone that he didn’t see the man spew smoke out of his mouth. He stiffened in fear. Alice kept him moving to the back of the vehicle.
Tom opened the door. Cob took one look inside, yelped, and broke free of the two of them. I ran to his side. They meant to help, but Cob didn’t know that, and the inside of an ambulance must have been completely alien to him.
“Hush, Cob—it’s OK.” I was being a fool. What did he know about “OK”? “It’s safe,” I tried again. I took his hands. They shook, with cold or fear or fever or all three. He was terrified, and I knew just how he felt. Everything he saw was strange and inexplicable; everything that had happened to me was strange and inexplicable, and now I wasn’t just writing about it, I was acting it out in front of two of the people who meant the most to me.
Once they understood, they’d have to lock me up.
“Come on,” Alice ordered. She wasn’t used to being ignored. Her own anxiety showed in the sweat on her upper lip. “He needs to be in hospital.”
“I’m working on it,” I snapped. Cob cringed, and I had to spend precious moments gentling him again. They didn’t understand that he didn’t know what was going on. They weren’t used to people from the past showing up in their living rooms. They didn’t know how to deal with him.
The driver came around to help. Cob pulled against my hands. The driver, a young man, fit and strong, lifted Cob up bodily. Cob struggled against him, without much effect.
“Here now, inside with you—no fighting.” He deposited Cob on the stretcher and pinioned him while Alice strapped him down.
Cob howled in terror. “Demons!”
“No, they want to help you!” I tried to get into the ambulance, but Tom held me back.
“Let them work, Clio. Alice knows what she’s doing.”
“No she doesn’t.” I shook loose from his grasp. “She doesn’t know—“
He gave me a look I never wanted to see again. “You called her.”
Cob shrieked. I pushed Tom aside with a strength I didn’t know I owned and climbed into the ambulance. It was a tight fit; I had to elbow the driver hard in the stomach.
“Alice, don’t—you’ll frighten him.”
“What has got into you?” Alice demanded. She had a hypo-dermic in her right hand and squirted a little spray into the air.
“He doesn’t understand.” I was desperate to stop her. “He thinks you’re going to hurt him.”
“Well, I won’t. I told him so.”
“He doesn’t understand!”
My cry set Cob off again. The driver looked from him to me to Alice, who shook her head slightly as she aimed the hypo at Cob. I grabbed her wrist.
“That’s it!” Alice said. “I’ve had enough.”
It was like a signal. The two men came at me. One grabbed each hand. I kicked at Alice, who was the easiest to hit, and the cause of all the trouble. She oofed and fell back, the hypo still upraised. The kick, obedient to Newton’s laws, threw me back outside. I hadn’t thought it through, didn’t know what I would have done if I’d won the fight. But I screamed like Cob and fought with everything in me.
Tom still had me. I attacked him as best as I could, with a kick to his balls, and connected.
“Jesus Christ, Clio!” he said. But he let go of me and doubled up on the gravel.
The driver grabbed my feet, upended me, and held me down. Stones pressed into my face. Cob cried in despair. I struggled against the weight of the driver, but even in my frenzy I was no match for him.
Alice poked me in the arm with her needle. “Stay on top of her. This’ll take a few minutes to work.” The driver was only too glad to oblige.
“Cob!” I shouted.
“Help me!” he answered. “The devil’s coming with her dagger.”
I could just see him. I tried to throw off the weight of the ambulance driver, but he was too much. I wept and wept for Cob, and for myself, too.
Just before the drug took me under, Tom looked down on me with hurt and pity in his eyes.
“You don’t understand,” I pleaded. “Saint Alban sent Cob. He’s a lesson to me, and I don’t get it. I have to protect him, but he needs help I can’t give him, and it’s all coming apart and what will I tell…” I kept trying to explain to Tom, so that he of all people would understand, but the words just ran together and came out in a rush that made no sense to anyone, least of all to me.
How disappointed everyone would be in the promising American historian. Too bad she had gone crazy, but that’s the thing about Americans, you know: you just can’t tell. And the canon had taken such a shine to her, too, which doesn’t speak well of him at all, now, does it.
I thought Alice was my friend, but maybe she wasn’t.
* * *
When I came to myself, I was in the snake pit. The snakes were all well-groomed and polite. They gleamed with cleanliness and good manners. The chief snake introduced himself: Doctor Rapp.
“Do you know where you are?”
I looked around. My eyes felt gritty, my mouth dry. The smell of insecticide—flea spray, a penetrating, petroleum derivative odor—overlaid the antiseptic stink of hospital and the hint of stale urine—not, I prayed, my own.
“This isn’t the clinic.” The colors were wrong. Wherever I was, it wasn’t the national health clinic where I’d been treated before. No institutional green here; the walls were painted a happy shade of yellow. A neutral, inoffensive painting hung on the wall across from my bed. To my right, a window, curtained in a bright, cheerful print, looked out over a sere lawn that stretched away in the distance.
“Good. Very good. What else?”
My throat grated. “Need a drink.”
Dr. Rapp poured water from a plastic yellow pitcher; ice tinkled into the plastic cup. He held it out. I tried to reach for it, but couldn’t. Gauze strips tied my hands to the bed rails. Dr. Rapp held the cup to my lips and I drank.
“Better?”
I managed to nod. “Why?” I held up one hand, the left, as far as I could.
“You were quite agitated.”
“Cob—where’s Cob?” I remembered, barely, getting into the ambulance with him and Doctor Freckles. He’d been afraid; I went along to show him it was safe. A mistake.
“Tell me about Cob. He’s a bit of a mystery to all of us.” He placed the cup on the bedside table and looked at his hand. A latex glove covered it. Whatever he saw must have satisfied him.
“Who are you?”
“A psychiatrist.”
Oh, shit. And I’d been agitated. “What did she give me?”
“Doctor Frickle? She acted quite well. She’s anxious about you, as is the canon. In fact, for someone relatively new to Saint Albans, you’ve had quite a number of people inquiring about you.”
I could imagine. “What did you tell them?” A cold, sinking feeling ran through me and settled in my stomach. I hoped he had lied.
“The truth, of course.”
Of course. “And that was?”
“That you’ve been exposed to a dangerous disease, through circumstances we didn’t understand, and would be isolated until all danger was past. That you required rest.”
“And that I was taken here.”
“Well, yes.”
“What is this place?”
He went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “We contacted your employer, of course. I must say that Lady Phelps was quite understanding. She asked that you be given everything you might need—”
Rapp kept talking. I only thought I’d had a sinking feeling before. The pit of my stomach felt even emptier.
Leslie could be damned for all I cared. I was independent of her, thanks to Christina. But Rapp got up and left me.
“What about Cob?” I called after his retreating back, but he kept going.
* * *
Days passed.
* * *
“I am a rationalist,” Rapp sat in the single chair next to my bed. “What you suffer from is not uncommon. It’s called the Jerusalem syndrome. I never expected to run across it in a London suburb.”
At least he didn’t have a Freudian beard. He looked like a corporate accountant, British style. Tweedy suit, old school tie, short brown hair, aviator-style glasses. He was as relentless as a tax man.
“When can I see Cob?” It had been ages since I’d seen anyone but Rapp and the odd nurse.
He didn’t answer.
A period of isolation, to make certain that I wouldn’t come down with the plague. An unknown period of time locked in with the unyielding psychiatrist.
“I’m not crazy.”
Who was feeding Amphibalus?
“No, you’re not.” Rapp sat in the only chair in the room. “But you admit you hear voices. And you say that some rather odd things have happened to you—that, for example, someone tried to force you off the road, that you were attacked by the sexton of the cathedral, that people were listening in to your telephone conversations. Let me tell you what happens in Jerusalem.”
As if I had a choice.
“The city has been the center of religious controversy since time before time. Visitors—perfectly ordinary individuals, with never a hint of psychological troubles—sometimes ‘lose it’ there. The stimuli of walking along the Via Dolorosa, of seeing and being in the places where Christ suffered—Golgotha, the garden of Gethsemane-—create an intensity of religious feeling. Sometimes the individual is overwhelmed, and believes himself to be partaking of Christ’s sufferings.”
I shifted on the bed. I didn’t much like having a stranger with me while I lay on the mattress, clothed only in a hospital gown. “What about Cob?”
“Let me finish, please.” Rapp tapped his silver pen on his notepad. He hadn’t written anything yet during this session. I turned away from him, to look out the window. “Not looking at me doesn’t change the truth, Clio.”
I tried to pray. I would have welcomed my voice, if it had come. I listened for the voice of God, I asked Christina’s velvet Jesus to answer me. All I heard was the rustle of sheets and the lonely throb of blood flooding mindlessly through my empty self. I begged God for an answer, but he gave none.
Jerusalem? Alban’s town was enough to set me off. But when I remembered slaughtering the martyr and his unknown partner, it was as if someone else told the tale.
My room wasn’t so high up as I thought, only on the ground floor. Outside the chain link and the wired glass, sunlight shone down on the beginning of green growth. The grounds of the hospital, if that’s what it was, stretched out across a broad lawn to a stone wall. Unkempt, winter-stricken grass had grown just enough that the mowers would be out soon. Daffodils spotted its base and grew in isolated little clumps at random. Maybe I’d been here longer than I thought. A breeze stirred their yellow blossoms. The sky glowed an aching, clear blue.
The screen of chain link was bolted to the wall, between me and the window. I wanted to breath the outside air, to smell the wind. How the hell was I going to get out of this place? The tile floor chilled my feet; I didn’t even have a bathrobe.
Alban? I whispered to the air outside. You were a prisoner once. Help me?
I stared out the window. No people moved on the sterile landscape. It was like Eden, before the sixth day of creation. Sun, sky, plants. Animals? I peered through the links of wire. A flicker of movement in the grass snatched at my gaze, something more than the subtle stirring of the breeze. I held my breath. Another hint of action, closer now, just a movement below the tops of the hesitant shoots of new growth.
Like a child at the zoo, I tapped softly on the glass, poking a single finger through the wire. My nail barely touched the pane.
A head, gray and alien, lifted into visibility, even with the grass. The snake’s tongue flickered, like distant, silent lightning, tasting the open air. Reptilian eyes blinked once, then the snake ducked its head back under cover. I followed the track in the moving grass until it disappeared.
I hung on the wire, fingers intertwined in the links, forehead pressed against the metal. Everyone I knew thought I was crazy, and now I was so starved for friendship—other than Rapp, who didn’t qualify—that I was silently begging the garter snake to return and keep me company.
The outside blurred. The wire liquefied with tears. I couldn’t think straight, only yearn to be outside, away from this place and everything that had brought me here. It was all a joke, all too much like my mother’s last years, when we’d locked her up in a nursing home, a prison without bars and wire like mine, but a prison, and I wept for her, knowing now how alone she’d been, confused, hurt, abandoned. It just came to me younger.
When the tears stopped, as tears do, I was still at the window, staring out. A pigeon pecked at the brick of the sill, then tilted its head to stare at me. It strutted back and forth—a male, then—its feathers puffed up and iridescent, a moiré of green, purple, and gray. He pecked once at the window, hard, and I heard the sharp tick of his beak against the safety glass.
Snakes and pigeons. He strutted back once more then leapt into flight and disappeared into the high blue. I strained to follow his course, but lost him in the light.
Serpent and dove.
Chapter 21
Rapp came for therapy twice a day.
“You’re a special project. Dr. Frickle asked me to watch over you.” He had changed his gray tweedy suit for a dark blue pinstripe. “How do you feel?”
“All right.” The therapy had to work—or seem to—if I ever wanted to get out. “Calmer.”
Rapp sat in the plastic chair. I had to lie in bed; there was no other place. Rapp got watchful if I moved around.
“Calmer than what?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Didn’t you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“You’re resisting.”
“Sorry.” I was still learning the rules of this game. Doves aren’t completely innocent. “Calmer than a few days ago. Calmer than I was when I came here.”
“Which is it?”
“Both. I think I’m letting go of a lot of tension,” I lied. “It’s safe here—I don’t have to watch my back.” Don’t overdo it, I thought.
But Rapp bought it. “The therapeutic environment is designed to give the patient a chance safely to rethink what brought him to the hospital. We restrict his contacts, take him out of the situation that precipitated the break.”
“Then what?”
He changed the subject, instead of answering.
“I’ve read your essays in the newspaper. They’re quite evocative. Almost as if you had lived through them.”
A surge of panic ran through me. I quelled it as well as I could.
“Does that make you anxious?”
I nodded. He could see me. Too clearly.
“Tell me how you wrote them. It’s almost as if you became those people. Tell me about that.”
The truth was out of the question. I’d never get out of here.
“Let me talk to Dorcas.”
Oh, shit. He thought I had multiple personalities. I couldn’t feed his fantasy. “Dorcas is dead.”
“Oh? What of Egwyn?”
“They’re all dead.”
“All of them?”
“Years ago. Centuries.”
What I had babbled—and to whom? It was true. Not gone—I would not let them go. But they were dead.
“Can I see Cob now?”
“You have an active imagination.” He liked to talk in non sequiturs. “Why don’t you trust me?”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Why do you ask?”
“If you don’t, then I can’t see how we can talk.”
He closed his notepad and put it in the pocket of his jacket. “What I believe doesn’t matter for your health.” He looked away, unwilling to meet my eyes.
“It does. If you don’t think that there’s more to living than what you can touch and taste, then you can’t begin to understand me.”
Rapp took a deep breath. His eyes met mine for a long moment. He nodded once, a short, quick movement. “Right.” He stood and peeled off his suit coat.
What the hell had I gotten myself into?
Rapp laid the jacket across the back of the plastic chair. “You think I’m a villain.”
He rolled up the sleeve on his left arm, each fold of the fabric even, precise. The white starched cotton revealed pale skin of almost the same shade. Rapp thrust his forearm in front of me.
He had grown since the numbers were tattooed into his skin. They were a pale blue, the strokes broken, faded by fifty years or more, but still legible. Still recognizable.
“You were only a child....”
“Yes.” He rolled the sleeve down and buttoned it with the same precision, picked up his jacket and slipped it back on. “Rational thought, Clio, is the only thing that protects us from that kind of madness. You’ve been swamped with emotion, self-pity, and religious mania. It’s a dangerous combination. What are you afraid of in the present? Why do you try to live in the past?”
Crap. His trick worked. Even my anger at being manipulated didn’t keep the tears from my eyes. Hurt opened like a flower to the sun.
“Mama . . . .” I sobbed the word. “I’ll be like her,” I wailed. Shame swept over me at my weakness, then passed away, and didn’t matter any more. “I look like her. I think like her. She went crazy, and so will I.” Another sob shook me. “It’s already started. I do hear voices. I have visions. I brought poor Cob from his time into ours.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“I try.” My voice felt very small, childish. I hiccuped. “I really do.”
* * *
“Visiting hours begin in twenty minutes.”
He hadn’t let me see anyone but himself and the nurses all this time. The bed stank of sweat and ill health. So did I, I was sure.
“I can take a shower?” I asked. “Who’s coming?
“Your priest friend.”
I nearly knocked Rapp to the floor in my hurry to the bathroom.
I scrubbed the hospital off my skin. Hot water, institutional soap and shampoo, and clouds of steam seemed to clear my head. When I emerged, a fresh pair of pajamas, a hair brush, and a white terry cloth bath robe—not as nice as Jane’s—waited for me. The bed had been stripped of sweaty sheets. The mattress lay open to the air.
I felt odd, disoriented. As much as I hated the room, I felt as if something were being taken from me. It was at least familiar.
“You’re going to move out into population,” the nurse said. “We might as well do it now as later.”
“Population?”
“With the others. Go brush your hair. Your visitor is already waiting.”
Tom.
Shame overtook me then, suffused me with its heat. I snatched at the gifts spread on the mattress and hid in the lavatory until the nurse called me out; there was no door, for the obvious reasons.
“Now that is an improvement.” She beamed a professional smile at me. “Come along.”
Tom was waiting in the lounge. In another time, another place, it might have been called the day room. The comfortable furniture might instead have been sturdy, functional, heavy and wooden or steel. Here, there were curtains in place of chain link, sofas, coffee tables, groups of soft chairs where two people might have a conversation with some sense of privacy. It wasn’t exactly home-like, but a long way from the places where I had visited Mama.
At first, we felt no awkwardness. Tom wrapped his powerful arms around me, and I wept soft tears of relief into his shoulder. He felt wonderful. I stood, wrapped in his strength, until he broke the embrace.
“You’re looking well.” His eyes questioned what his voice said.
“Not so bad,” I said, “considering.”
“I’m glad your quarantine is over.”
“Is that what it was?”
“Yes,” Tom said. “What did you think?”
I hadn’t thought. Rapp must have said something, but I didn’t remember. “I must have been pretty well out of it. I thought it was punishment.”
“For what?”
But I didn’t want to go into that. I sat in one of the chairs. Tom followed suit. The grouping of furniture in the large room created a sense of security, privacy. Maybe Rapp was a better psychiatrist than I gave him credit for.
“Are you still mad at me?” I asked.
“Why on earth should I be angry with you?”
“For not taking things seriously. For being flip and cocky about what’s happening. For trying to unman you.”
Tom leaned toward me, elbows on knees. “I don’t know, Clio, what I would have done if Cob had shown up on my doorstep. Where did he come from, anyway?”
“Where is he?”
“Gone. But you didn’t answer my question.”
“Gone?”
“Vanished. Into thin air.”
I digested this bit of news. Somehow, I didn’t think he had run away, but—
“Alice Frickle had the police out looking for him,” Tom went on. “She was more afraid that he couldn’t cope with the world than that he might spread plague. He was pretty well cured by the time he escaped.”
So Cob had got away. Back to his own time, I hoped, but I was still worried about him.
“I don’t know how he’ll do now.”
“What do you mean?” Tom asked.
This was it. This was the big test. Rapp maybe could write me off to religious mania. Tom couldn’t, I hoped.
“Cob is—was—it’s hard to get the tenses right—William Grindcob. He lived in the fourteenth century, the time of the Black Death, and was later a leader in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. And he appeared in my cottage as a teenaged boy, sick to death with the plague. I can’t explain it, I can’t tell you why, but that’s the truth, and I need to know how you’re going to react to it.”
Tom smacked his forehead. “Of course!” I had never seen anyone do that before. “That explains it!” He got an inward look on his face, as if he had an answer he didn’t like but couldn’t deny. I knew that feeling.
“Explains what?” I asked.
“Why I couldn’t understand him, and he couldn’t understand me. His language sounded familiar, but I didn’t get it until now—the last time I heard anyone speak in remotely the same way was during my course in Chaucer.” He scratched his head and grinned. “Though if Cob truly was from the fourteenth century, then we’d got the pronunciation rather wrong at Cambridge.”
I leaned across the space separating us and kissed him.
When I’d finished, he said, “I still don’t understand how that’s possible, but, as my bishop is wont to say, ‘Just because we don’t understand God’s ways doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist.’”
I kissed him again. Then, “I was so afraid to tell you all of this.”
“It is rather—strange.” Tom ran his hand through his hair again. “But strangeness has been following you around for some time now.”
“I remember when I first told you about—about all this. You went white with rage.” The memory was as fresh, as real as the room we were in.
“I didn’t know you, then. You might have been mistaken, or—“
“Or lying,” I finished for him.
He nodded. “You wouldn’t have been the first to trade in that kind of thing.”
“And now?” I asked.
Another voice intruded. “She sounds quite sane to me.” It was Rapp. He had sneaked up on us. “Honest, as well. To a fault, actually.”
Priest and psychiatrist shook hands. They knew each other, I realized, watching them, and had for some time. I wondered how much they had discussed me while I was locked up, if they had in tandem planned my treatment, but I did my best to suppress the suspicion.
“Clio, I want you to meet some people.”
I turned back to Tom, who met me with a chaste kiss on the forehead.
“I have to go,” he said. “A meeting with the bishop. I’ll be back.”
He left before I could say anything. Rapp took my arm.
“Be glad he cares for you, Clio.”
“Why?” As if I didn’t know already, but I wanted to hear what Rapp would say. And I didn’t want to give away too much to him.
But Rapp didn’t answer. Instead, he steered me to a pair of inmates who looked carefully chosen to make me feel better. Each sat on the edge of a wingback chair. Between them was a hassock with a chess board balanced on top.
“Clio, I’d like you to meet Marcie and Raoul.”
Marcie glanced up from the board. Her eyes were sunk deep in their orbits, shadowed by bruises that contrasted with her pale, freckled skin. Blonde hair sprang from her skull like fine wires, twisted and frayed. Her features were sharp, and once, long ago, had been fine. Now, malnutrition had chiseled them to bony prominence.
“Aw, look, Ruley, she’s shocked.”
“You’re a shocking gal, gal.” The black man who shared the chess board with her didn’t bother to look up. Compared to Marcie, he dripped with flesh, although he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and thirty pounds himself. His accent came from Jamaica; he sounded like Mama.
Raoul lifted a rook from the board, moved it eight squares forward, and placed it gently down. The board, balanced precariously on the hassock, tilted slightly. He cupped his hands at its edges, but it steadied. “Check, gal.” Only then did he lift his eyes from the game.
His face was a deep, rich brown, the color of Swiss chocolate. A sheen of sweat coated his forehead. “She always thinks she can win. The eternal optimism of white people. What about you?”
“I don’t play.” I knew the names of the pieces, but that was about all.
“You think not?” He turned back to Marcie. “Work on that for a while, gal.”
The blonde girl bent over the board, studying, her hair grazing the taller pieces.
“We have at least five minutes,” Raoul said.
I looked around. Rapp had vanished. Where was this taking me? I absently reached into the pocket of my bath robe for the brooch, to check on my reality, but it wasn’t there. I searched within, and found the memory of burying it in the abbey graveyard. How could I tell what was real, what was vision, without it? Where was it? I quelled the beginnings of panic and forced myself into the scene before me. It felt like one of Alban’s object lessons.
Maybe Rapp and Alban were in league with each other.
“Hey, where did you go?” Raoul had stood. Our eyes met at the same level. “What’s your diagnosis?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“How crazy are you?” Raoul settled back into his chair and pointed to the third one in the group. “What brings you to this nut house?”
“Situational stress,” I answered. “Panic attack.”
“Liar, although modern life gives us much to suffer panic about.” He leaned forward and slid thumb and forefinger along an invisible crease in the leg of his unpressed trousers. “Now myself, I am here as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder, which exacerbates my tendency toward depression, which exists because I had the misfortune to leave the land of my fathers and come to live in the aboriginal home of the white Anglo-Saxon people. My disease has some class about it. Marcie’s just a junkie.”
“Check, yourself, Ruley.” Marcie tilted her head and smiled. The effect might have been angelic, except that her black eyes and starved look made her more than a little devilish. “Mate, actually.”
Raoul ignored her and focused on my eyes. “You are a half breed, Dr. Griffin with the blue eyes. I have read of you, and wonder why a woman of color, a woman of stature among her own, would come here, to this, the aboriginal home of white people, this sceptered isle, this England, to study them. Emulation? A cultivation of the part of you polluted with paleness? Why is that, doctor? Do you think you can muck about with their saint, their white saint? Even his name means white. I looked it up—don’t argue.”
He flung himself down into his chair.
“Checkmate, Ruley,” Marcie repeated. She must not have beaten him often; a grin split her face. Her teeth were rotten and discolored, her gums white.
“Sod your bloody checkmate!” Raoul kicked the board. Chess men flew through the air.
Marcie ducked. “Look out,” she shrieked, “or I’ll bleed bloody AIDS blood on you.”
“Get away from me, you white slut!” Raoul shouted back. He edged behind his chair, as frightened as I ever plan on seeing anyone. I looked around for an attendant, a nurse, a doctor—someone who would intervene. There were several in the room. They looked bored.
* * *
The next time I saw them, Raoul and Marcie were hand in hand, walking down the corridor together to the lounge. She leaned against his shoulder, her grasp on him possessive, her face quiet with sated delight. It came close to making her beautiful, and Raoul went up a notch in my estimation. Maybe two.
“I thought you were mad at each other.”
“We were,” Marcie said. “Now we’re not.”
“Speak for yourself, white girl,” Raoul said.
Marcie kicked him in the ankle, but never took her hand from his.
* * *
I never saw them together again.
Word got around the hospital what happened when Raoul got out on a pass. Word flashed through the patients like fire through kindling.
He stole a car, drove south of Saint Albans, along the track to London. He parked by a bridge over the railroad and waited. Soon, the train from the city came. He climbed over the railing and waited to be sure that the engineer would have no chance to stop. Then Raoul dropped to the tracks in front of the moving train.
The news devastated me. One moment Raoul was there. The next he was gone, cut to pieces by the train’s wheels. Marcie checked herself out—against medical advice—shortly thereafter. “Therapy didn’t do Ruley any good, now, did it?” she said, the night before she left.
The engineer who drove the train was brought in. I never saw him, but I heard him. He wept. A lot. Sometimes, I sat in the hall, as near as I could get to his room. Sometimes I wept with him.
Rapp kept talking with me. Tom came to visit, as did Jane Fern and Alice Frickle. Absent was Leslie Phelps, unsurprisingly.
Then, one night, I was alone in my room. It had come into my head to pray for Raoul and Marcie, Tom, Rapp, Alice—all the people who meant something to me here. I hadn’t heard Alban’s voice through my stay in the hospital, but I was basking in the warmth of those whose voices I could hear without supernatural intervention, and it was enough. I even managed a prayer for Leslie.
I still worried about Cob, though. As strange as his appearance into my life had been, I was more than ever convinced of its reality. If Rapp didn’t like it, that was too bad. He hadn’t been bitten by those fourteenth-century fleas.
I was lying in bed, halfway between awake and asleep, when it happened. Stars shone in the window, through the chain link covering. Cob sat on the edge of my bed.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Healed,” he answered with a grin, “thanks to you.” His hair tumbled over his forehead. I wanted to rub his head, but forbore. He was still a lad in his teens, I an older woman.
“Is everything OK?—I mean, all right?”
He nodded. He looked a little older, less childish.
“And the plague?”
“It has passed, for the time being. Some of the brothers have returned. It is a difficult time; so many died.”
“But not you.” I couldn’t help smiling.
“Not me, thanks to you.”
“How did you get back?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
I sat up and put my hand on his forehead, as if I were his mother. “And you’re all right now?”
“I am.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s good, then.” And I lay back down. It was all very like a dream, but one of my best. Whoever had taken care of Cob would take care of me, too.
Chapter 22
When I woke up, I’d had enough of hospitals.
“It’s time for me to go,” I old Rapp when I went to his office.
“You’re right. I’ll get the paperwork sorted out. By the time you’re ready, it’ll be done.”
He still had the capacity to surprise me. I said as much.
“Yes, you hear a voice and you see visions. What they are isn’t clear to me. But what they aren’t is clear—you know what goes on around you. You know the difference between what’s real and what’s—I don’t know—something else. You act purposefully. You have the resources to live on your own. If your mother suffered from a mental illness, you’re not fated to do the same. All that happened to you was too much imagination and too much stress. And you have people who care about you, God knows. Use them. Let them into your life. Enjoy them. They’re real. Now clean yourself up and get dressed. You’ll be out of here in an hour.”
I felt stupid. Rapp had more faith in me than I had in myself.
Rapp stood. “If you want to be crazy, feel free—but it’s not mandatory. The best thing you can do is go back out into the world.”
I had no answer to that. He left. This act, too, was part of the therapy.
Sickness gives one an excuse, legitimizes weakness. The hospital room felt suddenly confining.
Alban? I thought, but no reply came. I went up a step higher. Jesus? Are you there? God?
No answer, but that the birds still chirped outside, the world went on. The best comfort I could have, I did have—Cob was safe.
I hadn’t heard from my voice since coming into the hospital. I didn’t know whether that was good or not. Part of me missed the sense of being singled out. Part of me was relieved. I sat alone in my chair for a while, then went back to my room. One last institutional shower to clean the hospital smell off my skin, and to fix my stay in memory. I felt like a young bird being pushed from the nest.
I had just finished dressing when a knock came at the door.
“It’s open.”
“Hi.” Tom stood in the opening. “How are you?”
“Better.”
“Good. I thought you might like a ride.”
Damp hair clung to my scalp and neck. “I must look a fright.” I’d never fished for a compliment, before.
“Just wet.” Tom smiled and moved closer. “It’s good to see you.”
I covered the rest of the distance without thinking. His arms went around me, and mine around him. My hands barely touched on his back, but I held on for all I was worth. “It’s all right,” Tom whispered, his breath warm on top of my wet head. The muscles in his arms bunched and he held me close. I thought I might cry, but didn’t.
“Ready to go?”
I nodded. “It’s scary. If I’m not nuts, then I have a lot of thinking to do.”
“I’ll help.”
“Let’s do it, then.” We separated, only to link arms and walk out of the sterile room.
We stopped at the nurses’ station. Rapp was there, writing in a chart. He fished a card from his pocket. “I’d like to see you again, once you’ve been out on your own for a while. Just a check, to see how you’re doing.” Another piece of paper appeared in his hand, from another pocket. “And here’s a prescription, just in case.”
I accepted both, but couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Good luck.” Rapp buried his face in the chart. Then, as an afterthought, he said, “If you’re still praying, pray for me.”
“You?” The word popped out of my mouth before thought could stop it.
Dr. Rapp blushed. “It can’t hurt, and might do some good.”
He turned away, ducking his head and smiling like a shy boy, and strode off down the hall.
“Ready?” Tom still waited.
We followed Rapp. At its far end of the hall sunshine infiltrated through two doors, a kind of airlock between inside and out. Rapp’s fist jingled with a big ring of keys. He selected one, still avoiding my eyes, and opened the first door. Tom led me past the psychiatrist, and Rapp finally looked up. His eyes were filled with a weariness I had been too blind to see, before. Fine lines netted the skin around his washed out blue eyes.
“You’re tired out,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t you—”
“I didn’t help.”
“On the contrary. That’s why I asked you to—”
“—to pray for you. You’re not the first.”
Tom watched us, an odd expression on his face. I didn’t so much look at him as know what was in his mind. He was willing me to agree. Why not? I thought. What harm could it do?
“Okay. Anything in particular you want me to—” The words felt strange, unfamiliar, discomforting, embarrassing, so that I stumbled over them. “—to pray for?”
“I don’t know what to ask for.” There was the shy child’s face again, overlaying that of the physician. Two Rapps stood before me in one body, both within a hand’s reach.
Part of me wanted to comfort him. Part wanted to flee. My hand, as if of its own volition, lifted halfway to his face, then stopped. “I will.”
Rapp nodded and slipped past me to the outer door, letting the inner fall shut. As the lock caught in the jam, a scream echoed from the hallway and we all three jerked. It was the engineer whose train had run over Raoul.
“He’s blood curdling,” Rapp said, sighing. “I keep trying, but I can’t get through.” Sadness colored his voice. “You were one of the easy ones.”
Then the final door opened.
“Call me,” Rapp said.
I caught a last glimpse of his face as he steeled himself and went back inside.
Then the sun touched me, for the first time in a long time, unfiltered, vernal, warm in spite of the rough breeze. Tom’s ancient Morris Minor waited at the end of a concrete walkway. Clouds, cumuli caught in mid-explosion, flew among the sunbeams. The air chilled my skin, raising goose bumps on my arms, but it was the air of spring now, smugly prosperous with moisture stolen from the ocean.
Once in the car, I said, “I once thought he was a villain.”
“Rapp? Hardly. He keeps the hospital going almost by sheer force of will.”
I flipped through my “outprocessing” paperwork until I found the bill. It was enormous. “What happened to National Health?”
“You were a private patient. He knows you can afford it, but he would have treated you anyway, just on Alice’s word.”
“You hardly ever came to see me.”
“At first.”
“At first.”
Tom started the engine and pushed on the gearshift. The car struggled into movement. He negotiated the parking lot before answering. The breeze rocked the tiny auto as we pulled out of the shelter of the building.
“At Rapp’s request. His theory was that you needed a chance to quiet down and come to terms with your—with whatever you had experienced. You were already angry with Alice and me, so what was the point? We’d only tick you off further.”
“And you believed this?”
“Listen to you—can you hear yourself?”
Something went click inside and I was looking out of Tom’s eyes, glancing back and forth between the road and me. Or myself—the pronouns get messy here. At the same time, I was looking out the window, from my—Clio’s—point of view, watching the country lane go by, trees, a golf course with manicured greens and “horsey” looking fences.
Confused by the double vision, I also felt a wave of angry hurt wash through me—through Tom—at what I’d said to him. And at how I’d said it. His clerical collar was too tight, as well.
The twinness only lasted for a moment, then I came back to myself. This was worse than visions of people in the past. At least then I knew who I was.
“Oh, God, Tom, I’m sorry. I didn’t know how it came across. I just felt so lonely in—in there, in the hospital. I was afraid, and—”
“Apology accepted.” He took his left hand from the wheel and patted my knee. I covered his hand with my own. He glanced over. “By the way—Rapp never thought you were bonkers. Nor did I.”
My incarceration, as benevolent as the intentions of those who locked me up were, had come about because I kept too many secrets.
“It’s not over,” I said.
He took his free hand back as a curve tightened.
I told him what had just happened, the sense of being inside his head, even about his collar.
Tom ran a finger under the stiff white fabric circling his neck. The upper edge, where it was folded over, was frayed at the back. “This is an old one. I forgot to get the others to the cleaners. I’m not as thin as I used to be.” He stared at the road, his expression thoughtful. “I’m grateful for it, then, if it helped you understand. I do love you.”
I couldn’t think of a reply to that. We rode in silence.
“I asked some friends to look out for the place while you were gone,” Tom said as we pulled in. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, it was a good idea.”
We rounded the last curve. The Morris’s tires crunched on the gravel and the brakes gave a little squeal as we stopped. My Triumph, recently polished, sat off to one side.
Tom walked around the car and held the door open. “Aren’t you getting out?”
“Yes, of course.” I stood and caught a whiff of man scent, a mix of soap, aftershave and sweat, and my heart went out to this man who had stood by me all this time. “I haven’t treated you very well, have I?”
He wrapped me in his arms, but before I could get used to the sensation, the door of the cottage flew open. The bedraggled woman who’d spoken to me in the pub, with Alice, on the day of Christina’s funeral, stopped in mid-careen and shouted back inside. “It’s them—they’re here!”
“One of your friends?”
“That’s Meg.”
“I remember.”
Meg reappeared, with the second visitor from the pub in tow.
“Edgar,” Tom said.
“How many?”
My captive priest grinned and shrugged his broad shoulders. “As many as we need, I suppose, but for now, only the two.” He took my arm. We went to the unlikely pair.
Edgar, a thin, pale man in his late forties, stood slightly behind Meg, his shy smile beaming down toward the gravel. “We’ve prayed for you, and now, and now—”
“Now you’re here,” Meg finished.
Something in Edgar’s tone implied, or perhaps I inferred, that he meant that they’d been praying in my stead as much as on my behalf, but Meg didn’t give me much chance to collect my thoughts.
Meg was the kind of woman the British call sturdy. Fiftyish, she was strong from decades of physical labor. Her hair gray, her face lined, her hands rough, she dominated Edgar.
“Come in, come in.” Meg took me away from Tom and hustled me through the door. “We earn our daily bread by cleaning things up, usually after disasters of one sort or another—a broken water heater, a murder, a suicide, a fire—that sort of thing. So your place was nothing, no challenge at all. What do you think?”
The house glowed. My jaw dropped open. Every smooth surface bounced light that spilled through the newly washed windows. It was nearly brighter indoors than out. Meg grinned in pride.
“When a person lives in one place day by day, she doesn’t see the way the dirt piles up on things.” She was apologizing for Christina’s housekeeping. “And Chrissie was getting on, too, and perhaps had other things to think about.”
Tom had followed us in. I looked his way and shrugged.
A streak of orange flew between the others. Amphibalus slowed into visibility and dropped a newly dead garter snake at my feet. He meowed a welcome, then claws dug through my clothing and into my skin as he climbed up me.
“Here, now—what are you doing bringing that in here?” Meg demanded. “And after we’ve got everything all neat and clean.” She picked up the long, narrow corpse and pocketed it.
“Cheeky little devil, you are.” She chucked Amphibalus under the chin. He batted at her hand, missed, and purred in feline content.
“Me’n Edgar washed down all the walls and waxed the floors, so have a care how you walk.”
I knew my cue. I knelt down in the tiny hall and ran a palm over the glowing oak. It was as smooth as it was shiny, and smelled of wax. None of this work had been done the easy way. All the scuff marks were wiped away. The surface was as clean as new snow.
Meg stood aside by the bedroom door. I felt like a military officer conducting an inspection. Her eyes flickered as I moved around the bedroom. I slid one finger across the window sill and inspected the result. The tiny closet was spot- and dustless. I knelt again and lifted the bed spread to search for escaped dust bunnies. The dresser had been polished to a nearly metallic glow.
I nodded once to Meg. She returned my signal and led us to the spare room.
The computer was gone.
“That Lady Phelps, she sent her two lackeys over once she learned you were in hospital. They said as you’d been made redundant, you wouldn’t be in need of such things.” Meg sniffed in disdain. “Redundant was their word.”
From behind, Edgar piped up. “They left a mess, as well. We patched the plaster, where the telephone had been taken out.”
The patch was invisible, as if nothing had ever been there. “You painted, too?”
“Aye,” Meg said. “Edgar handles that sort of thing. We didn’t want you coming back to disorder. Prayer is all very good, but there’s nothing like a bit of the practical.”
We trooped to the last room, the kitchen. If anything, it was even cleaner than the rest of the house. I caught Tom’s eye. His smile could have lighted the room by itself, if it wasn’t for the sunshine pouring through the windows. The curtains had been washed and pressed. The wood floor glowed like all the others. The sink was blinding. Christina’s old tea pot sat on the stove, steam whisping from the spout. I moved the heavy pot. The grease shields were spotless, shining chrome.
“It’s wonderful.”
Meg and Edgar glowed under the praise.
“You don’t mind, then. We worried that you might feel—but these days, if you leave a house empty, someone will squat in it, and you can have the devil of a time getting them out.”
“You’ve done beautifully,” I said. “How much do I owe you?”
A look of alarm passed over Tom’s face. Meg’s eyes narrowed. Edgar turned away, his features clouded.
“It weren’t for money.” Meg’s voice had been open, friendly; now it tightened.
“It were a gift,” Edgar muttered to the wall.
“But surely you must need—”
“We make our living,” Meg said. “There’s few enough as will do this kind of work. It was something to do for you, and that’s an end to it.” They were offended.
“I didn’t understand—”
“Apparently not.”
I took a deep breath. “I just wanted to—” Tom’s hand touched my arm. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I meant no offense.”
“I’m sorry, too.” The sound of Dr. Freckle’s voice spun me around. Alice had come in silently and stood in the kitchen door. “Edgar, Meg—you’ll understand. Doctor Griffin has been under a strain.”
Meg blushed, a deep crimson. Edgar shuffled his feet and turned away.
“Apology accepted,” Meg said. The blush still colored her skin. “We shouldn’t have been so quick to take offense, what with your being in the hospital and all. We’ll be going, then. You’ll have a lot to talk about.”
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