Ingenious pain, Andrew Miller [little red riding hood ebook .txt] 📗

Mr Porter James says: 'If this witch is to stay she is to keep her mouth shut.'

He leans over Mrs Porter. Their eyes briefly connect, hers looking up from the well of suffering, his responsive as moons. He gets his hands on to her belly. She flinches at the coldness of his fingers. It is her first child. She whispers: 'Do not kill it, sir.' James throws back the blankets, prods, squeezes, reaches his decision. He goes to Mr Porter, says: 'Her pelvis is narrow and the child has not turned. There is a way to save her and to save the child. But I must cut her.'

'Cut her?'

'As Caesar's mother was cut. An incision of the abdomen.'

'Cut?'

'Ay, sir, cut. We cut her belly to let the child out. It must be now. If not I shall have to leave you to Mrs Allen's spells. There is a calling-out fee, of course.'

'And if you cut her, you can save her, and the child?'

James shrugs. He wants the operation, believes he can pull it off, though he has never done one before, nor seen one performed other than on Mr Smellie's leather woman during an obstetrics lecture in London six years since. He also knows that his profession universally condemns it as being little better than an assassination of the mother. He has heard of no instances where it has been performed successfully.

'I have your permission?'

Porter's eyes film with tears. 'There is nothing else?'

James looks at Mrs Allen, looks back, raises his eyebrows. Porter gives his permission.

*Get these women out,' says James. 'No, leave this one.' He points to one of the younger women. She has a strong, calm look to her. Not a flincher.

'And bring me some water, warm water, and wine and fresh linen.'

James strips off his coat, opens his bag, selects a knife, examines briefly the rosy skin, then cuts, fast, a vertical incision from belly button to pubic hair. Mrs Porter roars, swings a small white fist with considerable power against his left ear. He laughs, does not look up. He says: 'A good sign, I think. Now hold her still. I have some delicate work here. Jog my knife, Mrs Porter, and you shall bleed to death.'

He cuts through the muscles of the abdominal wall, opens the abdominal cavity, then makes a transverse incision, right to left across the lower part of the uterus. Behind him there is a crash as Mr Porter succumbs to the sight of a stranger's hands lodged in the slashed belly of his wife. The infant seems determined to resist, to fight off this terrible invasion. Feebly it kicks at James, plucks at his hands with its daisy-stalk fingers, cHngs to the bloody gubbins of the womb. It comes at last in a drench of its mother's fluids. James passes it to his assistant, ties the cord, cuts it, delivers the placenta and drops it on to the boards, where a dog, hiding under the bed, stretches out and takes it tentatively in its teeth. James seals up the mother, those stitches Miss Lucket so commended. Rather surprisingly, Mrs Porter is still alive.

The young woman is binding the child in a shawl. She asks: 'What shall I do with it? Give it a posset?'

He says: 'Do whatsoever you like.' He looks around the room. The father groaning on the floor, the mother in a swoon in the

bed, the infant mewing in the young woman's uncertain grip. He wraps his knives.

'Tell him I expect my bills paid promptly.'

She starts to say something, but he has gone.

Robert Munro is a man coming slowly from a long sleep. Or, as he sometimes thinks of it, a man on the trail of himself in the midst of a sunless forest. He does not hurry. He is afraid of what must come; afraid that he will not have the strength.

Towards his wife he has never felt a greater tenderness. Certainly he does not condemn her. She has conceived a passion. Her slender sense of duty could have been no match for it. He himself is to blame. Who but he brought them together? Brimstone and tinder. There is a justice to it, a considerable justice. And if he believed James Dyer loved his wife, that it was truly love, then they may indeed have reached an arrangement. But Dyer does not love her; he wears her like a coat, puts her on or off at will. And that is monstrous, worse than the betrayal of friendship - for in fairness there was no friendship on Dyer's part - worse even than the visions that haunt him of their couplings, the sounds of which sometimes wake him, an awful noise, not at all suggestive of pleasure, more like the muffled distress of a child.

What must be done, then? Kill James? Kill them both? He would swing for it but hanging does not signify. He is more afraid that he will fail in this supreme test of his life. Fail himself. Fail Agnes. Fail everyone. Voices whisper - Take up your sword, Munro!' - but his limbs are heavy and the blood ticks so slowly

in his veins. How good just to go on sleeping in his favourite chair in his study, shutters drawn, a single candle for company. Distant bells, distant footsteps. Just to sleep, past morning, past all mornings. Endless sleep.

The door slams; he rouses himself, goes to the window and sees their backs departing. What is it tonight? Another ball, a charity concert, a trip on the river? He goes up to his room, stands there vacantly a while, then carefully selects a suit of clothes, changes, and goes back to his study. His watch says half past eight. Chowder is squatting on the floor, staring up at him, black, beseeching eyes. 'Good dog,' he says, then pours himself one last drink, hearing in his head, again and again, until they are like nonsense, the words he will have to speak.

James and Agnes are