Ingenious pain Andrew Miller (smart ebook reader .TXT) 📖

as they may and lies there through the body of the night, picking over the details of his future joy. Towards dawn he rises and shuffles to the window. To the right, over Bishopsgate Street, over Half Moon Alley and the London Workhouse, the sky is streaked with pearl. He waits, hearing the flat tolling of the bell from the Dutch church, and the calling of birds, just a few at first, distant to each other, tentative, as though afraid that the dawn might be false, or else awed by the great hush over the London fields. Then hundreds are calling together, a great complexity of sound, the air quivering with the noise of them. It is as if he has never heard birds before, never seen the dawn. He has never wept like this. The world is good. It is astonishing.

The truth seeps out. In whispers, in rumours. In the underbelly of lies. How they took her to her cell; how she fought with them; how they overwhelmed her and chained her, hands and feet; then put a collar on her, a steel collar, and fixed it by a length of chain to the ring on the cell wall. How they left her, spitting at their backs; damning them and calling hell to be her witness.

In the morning they find her sat up against the wall, legs straight out in front of her, head twisted in the collar, eyes half open, her tongue showing past her teeth. They free her from the chains, knowing at the first cool touch of her that she is dead. One of the women in the gallery sees them lifting the body on to the pallet bed, and before they can reach her, silence her, she has screamed the news. The cry is taken up by others, travelling through bolted doors, past iron bars. The keepers, fearful for their safety, quit the wing, returning a half-hour later, a dozen of them with ropes and blackjacks. The Physician is with them, unshaven, striding at their head. He examines the body, pronounces her dead: a seizure. Common enough among the insane; to be expected with a violent creature like Dorothy Flyer. He issues orders: the cells are to be kept locked. They will bury her, as early as possible the following day. As he is leaving, word comes that O'Connor is being murdered by a lunatic in the men's wing.

O'Connor is sitting on the stairs. He cannot speak to them because his jaw is broken. There is blood on his neck and shoulder. The lobe of his left ear is bitten off. He shows it to them, a scrap of flesh in the palm of his hand; then he points to James Dyer's cell.

James is lying, apparently calm, on the floor of his cell. He asks the Physician if it is true. At first the Physician will not answer, keeps asking questions of his own, viz: What did he mean by attacking O'Connor? What was Dorothy Flyer to him? At length, thinking perhaps to end the interview and go in search of his morning comforts, he admits that it is true. She has suffered a fit in her brain. She is dead. Then, testily, he repeats the word, shouts it: 'Dead!'

At this second 'dead', the Physician observes a curious transformation in his patient, as if a delicate stem of glass inside him

has shattered. There is a small though profound exhalation, then an utter stillness, then a spasm in the muscles of the face such as accompanies certain kinds of poisoning. Wagner asks if he should chain the patient's hands. The Physician shakes his head and leaves, saying: 'I have subtler chains than yours, Mr Wagner.'

Next morning, Adam stands by James at the window of James's cell. They watch the funeral party: the chaplain, Dolly Kingdom, Passmore, and some men unknown, hired for the occasion, there to handle the coffin. A slovenly cortege, trailing from the hospital gates and turning towards the hospital burying ground beside New Broad Street, the coffin on a cart pulled by a single horse. It is not possible to see the interment. After half an hour they come back, the chaplain and the keepers. The hired men ride in the empty cart, smoking.

They reduce him with physic. Vomits and blisters, worse than when he first arrived. He cannot stomach his food. The keepers pour broth down his throat;

he brings it up, back into the vessel. They feed it to him a

second time.

She has left him nothing. No locket, no keepsake, no letter. No parting words. Nothing that might console him or sustain him. What is he to do with his love? Where is it to go? It is rotting inside of him. He is rotting.

He steals a razor from the hospital barber. The edge is rusty, but it will cut well enough. He treasures it. Hides it in his shoe.

If she were to be hid for twenty, thirty years, he could bear it. It is the never that is destroying him.

Flies settle on his face. He lets them crawl. Then the flies are gone. It is colder. The wind snags in the bars of his window. The visitors who stroll, squeamish and delighted past the cell doors, wear furs and warm cloaks. One morning there is snow on the grey straw of his bed. He looks out. The Moorfields are buried in a fall inches deep. A dozen children are snowballing beside a pond. Two men with packs on their backs trudge towards the town. They are black and stubborn as insects and leave behind them a tiny trail of footsteps. One stumbles; the other pauses, goes back, and lets the stumbler lean upon his arm. How slowly they go! What is in those packs which warrants such effort?

Then the memory, wholly unexpected, of watching another figure move slowly across the snow. The parson on his way to the forest by the monastery. The fat, good-natured parson, stopping