The Essex Serpent(77)
And she believed it, too. Even now, when she thought of that moment when everything had shifted, she saw the fault as hers, not his – she ought not to have looked at him the way she did, and she had no idea why she’d done it. Something in the hard flexing of his fingers against her flesh had struck something off in her, and he had seen it, and it had thrown him off-balance. Certainly his letters now were kind enough – but it seemed to her a kind of innocence was lost.
Then Luke’s letter had come, and it was she who was thrown off-balance. It was not that she’d been oblivious to his love, since he cheerfully declared it so often, but that it was no longer possible to laugh, and declare that she too loved her Imp: a kind of innocence was lost. Worse, it seemed an attempt to force her hand – all the years of what ought to have been her youth she’d been in someone’s possession, and now, with hardly a few months’ freedom to her name, someone wanted to put their mark on her again. I know you cannot return my love, he’d said, but no-one ever wrote such a letter without hope.
Crossing the Strand up by St Paul’s she found a letterbox and tossed in a letter addressed to Dr Garrett with a kind of contempt. From somewhere behind her there came the sound of music, and she saw on the cathedral steps a man in a torn soldier’s tunic turning the handle of a barrel organ. His left sleeve was empty, and the sun picked out the medal on his breast. The melody was a merry one, and it lifted her mood: she crossed to where he sat and dropped a few coins in his cap.
Cora Seaborne
c/o Midland Grand Hotel
London 20th August Luke – Your letter came. How could you – HOW COULD YOU?
Do you think I should pity you? I don’t. You pity yourself enough for the two of us.
You say you love me. Well, I knew that. And I love you – how could I not? – and you call it crumbs!
Friendship is not crumbs – you’re not grubbing around for scraps while someone else takes the whole loaf. It’s all I’ve got to give. All right, once I might have had more – but for now, it’s all I’ve got.
Well, let’s leave it there.
CORA
Cora Seaborne
C/o The Midland Grand Hotel
London 21st August Luke, my Imp, my dear, what have I done – I wrote without knowing what had happened – Martha told me what you did, and I am not surprised – you have always been the bravest man I know …
And I tried to lecture you on friendship when I have never done for anyone what you have done for him!
Tell me when I can come. Tell me where you are.
With my love, dear Luke – believe me
CORA
George Spencer MD
Pentonville Road
London
29th August
Dear Mrs Seaborne
I hope you are well. I should tell you at once that Luke doesn’t know I’m writing: he’d be angry if I told him but I think you should know what he has suffered.
I know how he wrote to you. I saw your reply. I would never have thought you capable of such cruelty.
But I’m not writing to take you to task, only to tell you what has happened in the days since we went to Bethnal Green.
You must know by how we encountered there the man who stabbed Edward Burton, and how Luke intervened to protect me. The worst of it is that he grasped the knife by the blade, and so wounded his right hand. Those nearby were very kind: a girl tore the skirt from her dress to make a tourniquet under my instructions, and a door was brought so that we could carry him as if by stretcher out of the alleys to Commercial Street where we were able to hail a cab. Happily, we were very near the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, and a colleague there was able to attend to him at once. The wound was cleaned, since infection was our first concern. This caused him a great deal of pain, but he refused any anaesthetic, saying that he prized his mind above anything else and wouldn’t have it meddled with.
Perhaps I’d better tell you the nature of the injury. Can you bear it? You are content enough with buried bones but where do you stand on living ones?
The knife entered his palm near the base of his thumb and with a movement rather like lifting cooked flesh from the bones of a fish more or less flayed the palm clean off. The muscles were cut through, but what is worse is that two of the tendons which control the movement of his index and middle fingers have been severed. The damage was laid out plain to see: the wound was so clean a student might have looked at it and then passed his anatomy exam.
He asked me to operate. He again refused anaesthetic and spoke of the hypnosis techniques he had been studying, and how a doctor in Vienna had three wisdom teeth removed under hypnosis without flinching. He told me how he’d trained himself to enter a hypnotic trance so deep he once fell to the floor without waking. Then he said again that he did not believe pain to be any more intolerable than intense pleasure (a preoccupation of his which I have never understood), and extracted from me a promise that I would not put him under anaesthetic unless he begged. I recall his words precisely. He said, ‘I trust my mind more than I trust your hands.’
I couldn’t ask a nurse to attend. It would not have been fair. I believe he would have prepared the room in his usual fashion if he could, but he could do nothing but lie on his own operating table and give instruction: we were both to wear white cotton masks. I was to set up a mirror so that he could see the procedure if he roused from his trance.