Pandora(37)

‘If you report me, Coombe, you face the noose yourself.’ Hezekiah has injected bravado into his voice, a confidence he does not feel, to disguise the sick twisting in his stomach, but Matthew only sneers in the face of it.

‘Do you think you scare me? Do you honestly think, after all I’ve seen and done, that the noose has any power over me?’

There is a wild desolateness that Hezekiah has never seen in Matthew Coombe before. He is reminded of a wolf he once saw in Italy, caught between the metal teeth of a hunter’s trap. It had stopped its struggles, it appeared, long before Hezekiah, Elijah and Helen had come across it. He remembers the look on its face before, at Helen’s plea, his brother put a bullet in its head – wide-eyed, fierce, yet subdued somehow, as if resigned to its fate. Matthew wears the very same expression.

‘Death surely has power over everyone,’ Hezekiah whispers, desperate.

Matthew barks out a laugh that is devoid of emotion. He rises from his seat. The chair legs drop back on the floor with a loud clatter. Slowly he begins to unwrap the bandage from his wrist and Hezekiah presses himself into the damp wall.

‘Aye, that it does.’ Matthew crosses the short space between them in seconds. ‘Do you think my death will come quick or slow?’

The bandages loosen. From within, the stench of rot. As the material unravels the colour changes from starch white to yellow, to green, and when the wrapping comes free completely it is all Hezekiah can do not to gag. The smell is a sharp, putrid tang on the tongue. It makes his eyes water. He clamps a hand tight across his nose and mouth.

Matthew’s wrist is an open sore, a ribbon of raw pustuled flesh. In the lowlight it shines wetly and just where the ragged wound opens, the flesh is patched purple.

‘You remember, don’t you, how I told you I’d retrieved your precious shipment? Had to go down with a lantern, kept it secure with twine wrapped round my wrist. A small wound, barely a scratch and yet …’ Matthew turns his wrist, looks at it almost as if he were examining something wholly disconnected from him. ‘Tell me, Mr Blake. Should this not have healed by now?’

Hezekiah cannot look at it. He cannot.

‘Please,’ he manages through his hand. He turns his head. ‘For God’s sake put it away!’

Matthew stares at him a few long seconds. Then he bends to retrieve the bandage, binds the wound, but the smell lingers.

‘There,’ he sneers. ‘You may look.’

With difficulty, Hezekiah uncovers his mouth. He watches the hulking man petulantly, and now that the horrific sight is gone Hezekiah wills some strength back into his voice.

‘You must fetch for a doctor,’ he says, but then is pulled up short when he remembers Dora’s same words from that morning, his own fierce rebuke of them.

Matthew lets out another shout of laugher. ‘If I had payment, I might! If I had payment, a doctor might make all the difference,’ he says, standing now near the sheet. ‘Would you like to see something else?’

Hezekiah does not want to see anything else. He wants to leave this filthy disease-ridden hovel and never return. But Matthew is beckoning, and he finds his feet moving over the creaking floorboards of their own accord, his chest constricting like a vice.

‘What is it?’ he asks, his voice a whisper again.

Matthew’s face twists. He says nothing, only fists the sheet. With a sharp movement of his arm he pulls the patched material aside.

On a bed lies one of the brothers – Samuel, Hezekiah thinks – and he swallows. Samuel’s eyes are clouded, his skin is yellowed, slick with sweat. A white crusting substance has gathered at the corners of his mouth. The other brother, Charles, sits on a chair next to the bed, staring, unseeing, at the wall.

‘What has happened here?’

‘Your vase happened.’

‘Don’t be absurd!’

‘Do not be naive!’ Matthew clamps a strong hand down on Hezekiah’s arm. ‘Sam came down with this fever two days after we delivered the shipment to you. Charlie –’ here he gestures to the brother sitting comatose on the chair – ‘has not spoken since the moment we brought the crate above surface. You tell me then, sir, if it is not your precious vase that has done this?’

The venom in his voice is frightening. Hezekiah stares in disbelief.

‘It is a piece of crockery,’ he sputters, but Matthew Coombe is having none of it and the hand on his arm tightens. Hezekiah yelps in pain.

‘Look at them! One is near death, the other struck with madness. You think if Sam dies I shall be lenient with you? You think if I lose my hand I will find easy work? How will I support us? How will I care for Charlie? Your vase did this.’

‘It did not do this.’

‘It did.’

‘You caught something,’ Hezekiah tries now. He pulls at his arm. Matthew releases it and Hezekiah takes an unsteady step back into the open space of the room. ‘Some sea-borne disease. Or perhaps you caught something at the laystall. Maybe it’s hereditary,’ he adds with a touch of spite. Now that he is free of Matthew’s punishing grip he finds his strength returning, the courage to scorn. ‘The Coombe family sickness. Or …’ Hezekiah flails, desperate now. ‘Look at the squalor you live in, after all. It’s no wonder you’re all unwell.’

Something dark shifts in Matthew’s face. Immediately Hezekiah’s bravado takes flight. He advances another step toward the open door and Matthew releases the makeshift curtain; it falls back into place, its tattered hem whispering the floorboards.