The Stress of Her Regard (6 page)

Crawford had called for another pitcher, refilled his glass and then tried to explain.

"First off, Jack, they
haven't
been handling it 'just fine.' Most expectant mothers would be better off with no attendance at all than with a midwife. I'm generally called in only after the midwife has made some awful mistake, and some of the scenes I've walked in on would make you turn pale—yes, even you with your scars from Abukir and Trafalgar. And there's a difference when it's an infant, a person who . . . who you can't think up any
well-at-any-rates
for—you know, 'Well at any rate he knew what he was getting into when he signed on,' or 'Well at any rate if the man ever lived who deserved it, it was him,' or 'Well at any rate he had his faith to sustain him through this.' An infant is . . . what, innocent, but more than that, not only innocent but
aware
too. It's a person who hasn't seen or understood or agreed to anything, but will, if given time—and therefore you can't be satisfied with a merely good rate of survival for them, the way you can with . . . oh, tomato seedlings or pedigreed dog litters."

"Still," Boyd had said, "it'll no doubt be squared away and systematized before long. Is there really enough there to occupy your whole
life
?"

Crawford had paused to drain his glass and call for another pitcher. "Uh . . . yes. Yes. Plain old prudery is what has kept it so primitive—it's made a, a fenced off
jungle
of this area of medicine. Even now a male doctor can usually only assist at a delivery if they've got a sheet draped over the mother—he has to do his best with groping about blindly underneath, and so a lot of times he cuts the umbilical cord in the wrong place, and the mother or the child bleeds to death. And no one has
begun
to figure out what sorts of foods an expectant mother should eat or not eat in order to have a healthy child. And the goddamned 'literature' on the whole subject is just an accumulation of bad guesses and superstitions and misfiled veterinary notes."

The fresh pitcher arrived, and Boyd paid for it. Crawford, still absorbed in his subject, laughed then, though his frown didn't unkink.

"Hell, man," he went on, automatically refilling his glass, "only a few years ago I looked up in the Corporation of Surgeons' library a Swiss manuscript catalogued as being on the subject of caesarian birth, in a big portfolio known as
The Menotti Miscellany
. . . and I discovered that it wasn't about birth at all—the person who catalogued the manuscript had simply looked at the drawings in the wrong order."

Boyd frowned at that, then raised his eyebrows. "What, you mean it was a manuscript on how to
insert
a baby into a woman?"

"Nearly. It was a procedure to surgically implant a little statue into a human body." Crawford had had to raise his hand at that point to silence Boyd. "Let me finish. The manuscript was in a sort of abbreviated Latin, as if the surgeon who wrote it had just been making notes to himself and never expected them to be read by anyone else, and the drawings were crude, but I soon realized that it wasn't even a woman's body but a
man's
body the thing was being put into. And yet for hundreds of years this manuscript has been catalogued as a work on caesarian delivery!"

Through the inn's window he had seen the coach entering the yard then, and he drained his mug in several long swallows. "There's our transport to Warnham, where we meet Appleton. Anyway," he said as they got up and hefted their baggage, "you can see why I don't agree that childbirthing is likely to become an orderly art any time soon."

Crawford and Boyd had dragged their baggage out of the building and across the pavement to the coach. The horses were being changed and the driver was gone, presumably into the taproom they had just left.

"Well?"
said Boyd finally. When Crawford gave him a blank look, he went on almost angrily, "So why did this Macaroni person want to put a statue inside of somebody?"

"Oh! Oh, right, of course." Crawford had thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. "I don't know, Jack. It was seven or eight hundred years ago—probably nobody'll ever find out. But my
point
was—"

"I got your point," Boyd had assured him tiredly. "You like birthing children."

And here his new sister-in-law was messing up the traditional fertility rituals of his wedding. Crawford smiled as Julia broke away from her father and the minister, who were talking by the drawing room window, and crossed to where he and Boyd were standing.

"Well, it was
mostly
traditional Scottish, dear," she said, bending down to pick up the biscuit Josephine had left on the floor. "And it wasn't actually an oatcake anyway—it was a Biddenden cake from just across the Weald in Kent." She handed it to Crawford.

"I remember those, Miss—uh, Mrs. Crawford," said Boyd, who had grown up in Sussex. "They used to be given out at Easter, didn't they?"

"That's right," Julia said. "Michael, oughtn't we to be getting aboard Mr.— aboard your carriage and leaving? It's getting dark, and Hastings
is
a few miles off."

"You're right." He dropped the biscuit into his coat pocket. "And we're supposed to be on the Calais boat by noon. I'll begin making our goodbyes."

Appleton and Boyd were staying on and taking separate coaches back to London tomorrow. He found them and shook their hands, smiling to conceal a sudden, momentary urge to go back with them, and to leave to braver souls the whole undertaking of marriage.

Julia had come up beside him and touched his shoulder. He nodded to his friends, then turned and took her arm and began leading her toward the front door.

The moon ducked in and out of muscular-looking clouds overhead as the landau rattled along the shore road, and a wind had sprung up that nearly drowned out the distant respiration of the waves. Crawford pulled the fur robe more tightly around Julia and himself, thankful that the carriage roof had been put up; and he was charitably hoping, as he watched the steam of his breath plume away, that the driver had had a lot of old Mr. Carmody's brandy before they'd left.

The wildness of the night seemed to have got into the horses, for they were nearly galloping in the harnesses, their ears laid back and sparks flying from their hooves even though the road wasn't particularly flinty—the carriage arrowed through the luckily empty streets of St. Leonards only about ten minutes after leaving Bexhill-on-Sea, and shortly after that Crawford could see the lights and buildings of Hastings ahead, and he heard the driver swearing at the horses as he worked at reining them in.

The carriage finally slowed to a stop in front of the Keller Inn, and Crawford helped Julia step down onto pavement that seemed, after the wild ride, to be rocking like the deck of a ship.

They were expected, and several young men in the inn's livery sprinted out of the building to haul the luggage down from the boot. Crawford tried to pay for the ride, but was told that Appleton had covered it, and so he made do with tipping the driver lavishly before the man got back up onto the seat to take the carriage back to Appleton's house in London.

Then, suddenly both impatient and self-conscious, Crawford took Julia's elbow and followed the baggage-laden servants into the building. Several minutes later an amber glow of lamplight flared to define an upstairs window, and presently it went out.

Morning sunlight, fragmented by the warped glass of the windowpane, was spattered and streaked like a frozen fountain across the wall when Crawford was awakened by the maid's knock. He was stiff and feverish, though he hadn't had an appreciable amount to drink the night before, and for the first few minutes, while he was facing the sunny wall, he thought he was still in Warnham, and that it was tonight that he was supposed to get married.

Brown stains on the quilt in front of his eyes seemed to confirm it. That's right, he thought blurrily, I went out barefoot into the muddy yard last night . . . and had some kind of drink-spawned hallucination, and failed to find the wedding ring. I'd better go look for it again this morning. Vaguely he wondered what the mud had consisted of—there was certainly a strange smell in the room, like the heavy odors of an operating theater.

And why were these bluish quartz crystals lying on the sheet? There must have been half a dozen of them, each as big as a sparrow's egg. He could understand having picked them up—they were eye-catching little pebbles, knobby but bright with an amethystine glitter—but why scatter them across the bed?

The maid knocked again. With a groan he rolled over—

—And then he screamed and convulsed right out of the bed and onto the floor, and he crawled backward across the polished wood, piling up carpets at his back, until the wall stopped him, and he was still screaming with every quick breath.

The brown stains had not been mud.

His lungs were heaving inside his ribs with the stress of his inhuman shrieking, but his mind was stopped, as static as a smashed clock; and though his eyes were clenched tightly shut now, all he could see was bones jutting terribly white from torn and crushed flesh, and blood everywhere. He wasn't Michael Crawford now, nor even a human—for an endless minute he was nothing but a crystallized knot of horror and profound denial.

He consisted of an impulse to stop existing—but the very fact of breathing linked him to the world, and the world now began to intrude. Hugely against his will he became aware of sounds again.

The maid had fled, but now there were masculine voices outside the door, which shook with knockings loud enough to be heard over Crawford's continuing screams. Finally there was a heavy impact against the panels, and then another, and the third one splintered the door broadly enough so that an eye could peer in, and then a gnarled hand snaked through and pulled back the bolt. At last the door was swung open.

The first two men into the room rushed to the bed, but after a glance at the crushed, redly glistening ruin that had last night been Julia Crawford, they turned their stiff, pale faces toward Crawford, who had by now managed to stifle his screams by biting his fist very hard and staring at the floor.

Crawford was aware that the men had stumbled out of the room, and over the noise he himself was making he could hear shouting and a racket that might have been someone being devastatingly sick. After a while men—perhaps some of the same ones—came back in.

They hastily bundled up his clothes and shoes and helped him get dressed in the hall, and then they took him—carried him, practically—downstairs to the kitchen; and when exhaustion had stopped his ever hoarser screaming they gave him a cup of brandy.

"We've sent someone to fetch the sheriff," said one man shakily. "What in the name of Jesus
happened
?"

Crawford took a long sip of the liquor, and he found that he was able to think and speak. "I
don't know
!" he whispered. "How could that—have happened!—while I was
asleep
?"

The two men looked at each other, then left him alone there.

He had known at a glance that she was dead—he had seen too many violent fatalities in the Navy to entertain any doubt—but if a body in that condition had been brought to him after a sea battle, he would have assumed that a mast section had fallen across it, or that an unmoored cannon had recoiled and crushed it against a bulkhead. What had
happened
to her?

Crawford recalled that one of the men who broke into the room had glanced at the ceiling, apparently half expecting to see a great gap from which some titanic piece of masonry would have fallen, but the plaster was sound, with only a few spots of blood. And how had Crawford not only come through unscratched, but
slept right through it
? Could he have been drugged, or knocked unconscious? As a doctor, he was unable to discover in himself the after-effects of either one.

What kind of husband sleeps through the brutal murder—and rape, possibly, though there would be no way to derive a guess about that from the devastated body upstairs—of his own wife? Hadn't there been something about "protecting" in the vows he'd taken last night?

But how could a killer have got into the room? The door was bolted from the inside, and the window was at least a dozen feet above the pavement, and was in any case too small for even a child to crawl through . . . and this murder wasn't the work of any child—Crawford estimated that it would take a strong man, even with a sledgehammer, to crush a ribcage so totally.

And how in the name of God had he slept through it?

He was unable to stop seeing that smashed horror in the bed, and he knew that it completed a triumvirate, along with the burning house in which Caroline had died and the overturned boat in the surf that had drowned his younger brother. And he knew that these things would forever be obstacles to any other subject for his attention, like rough boulders blocking the doorways and corridors of an otherwise comfortable house.

He wondered, almost objectively, whether he would find a way to avoid dying by his own hand.

He had refilled his brandy cup at least once, but now he was nauseated by the sharp fumes of it, and out of consideration for their kitchen floor—
That's good
, interrupted his mind hysterically,
their kitchen floor! How about the floor upstairs, and the bed and the mattress!
—he decided to go outside into the garden.

The fresh sea breeze dispelled his nausea, and he walked aimlessly down the narrow, shaded lanes, trying to lose his abhorrent individuality in the vivid smells and colors of the flowers.

He put his hands into the pockets of his coat, and he felt something which, after a moment's puzzlement, he was able to identify as the Biddenden cake Josephine had failed to break at the wedding the night before. He took it out of the pocket. There was a raised pattern on the crumbly surface and, looking closely, he saw that it was a representation of two women physically joined at the hip. Crawford had read of twins who'd been born so, though he didn't know why the town of Biddenden should celebrate one such pair on their biscuits. He crumbled the thing up in his hands and scattered it over the path for the birds.