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

James says: 'It will outlast you, sir, by some considerable margin. You shall be outlived by your nose.'

Munro replies: 'Show much ish shertain. A vegy ig-genious construction. I ham grateful to you, sher.'

There is no irony. He reaches out and shakes James's hand.

For three months, while Munro's friends look on, the two surgeons act like an old married couple. It is not that anyone suspects James of making up to Munro. James Dyer continues to be precisely himself: hard, headstrong, ambitious; hugely efficient. And there is not the least evidence of any tenderness towards Munro, any remorse. Yet they are often seen walking together, sometimes in conversation, more often in silence. They walk at dusk, aimlessly about the city.

For a time, the sight of them hoving into view is enough to make people step out of a shop or coffee house to gawp at them, Munro's nose is discreetly pointed out to children and visitors. There is a great deal of speculation as to whether he wears it at home, or in bed, or ever mislays it, or if it ever falls off his face while he is adjusting the buckle on his shoe. Does it pain him? What if he takes a cold? Munro himself seems remarkably at ease with it, now and then reaching up to stroke it.

Agnes grows portly and faintly mad, hauling Chowder about, staring malevolently at strangers she suspects of uttering slights. The sight of her evokes some pity and some satisfaction. More than one preacher adumbrates her case from the pulpit. Leaning out, they slap the air with their Bibles. God's justice! God's wrath!

The hands of the congregation curl round stones of air.

And then the preachers have their feast. Candlemas, 1767. The streets perfumed with coal smoke and frost, the night sky richly hammered with stars. James has been at Grand Parade, trepanning a young man kicked in the head by a horse. The young man survives

the drill and is handed back to his friends, feeble, bewildered, but very much alive. A woman, immensely pretty, kisses James's hand, despite the spats of blood still on his fingers. James carries their money to his strong-box in the basement, dons his coat and sets off for the Orange Grove.

In the drawing room he finds Gummer by the fire, peeling a bun from the prongs of a toasting fork. They look at each other, say nothing. He rings for the servant. She is engaged now to a journeyman baker in Trim Street. James orders supper, eats it off a tray in the drawing room. Overhead he can hear Agnes mumbling, interrogating the emptiness of her room. Gummer goes out on some louche or venal assignation. Chowder curls before the fire, shivering and farting.

Towards midnight, James retires, goes up to his room, pulls on his nightgown and nightcap and lies between the sheets, waiting for sleep. But sleep does not come. He waits, impatient, unused to those phases of sleeplessness familiar to insomniacs; the sly hallucinations, the endless settling of the bones, the beating of his heart vibrating through the whole bed. He loses any sense of time, hears the watchman's voice but not the hour. Two o'clock, three?

He hears a noise. It is not loud. Somewhere on the ground floor. Something falling. Gummer perhaps, tripping over a table leg in the dark, or Dinah, full of noisy caution, sneaking in on her return from Trim Street. Yet some instinct warns him that the sound is less innocent, that it comes as the small report of calamity. He swings out of the bed, stands in the dark, listening.

He feels for the tinder box he keeps beside the bed, lights a candle, takes a cane for protection, and goes on to the landing. If there is some unlucky whoreson below filling his sack then he has picked the wrong house and the wrong night. But even as he descends the stairs, cane at the ready, he does not believe in it and is unsurprised to find the downstairs rooms cold, unmolested, empty. All except Munro's study, where a dim light ripples from beneath

the door. And there is a smell here, as if Munro - or someone -were burning cloth.

When James opens the door he sees two things: a fire, not yet serious, where a candle has been knocked on to the carpet; and Munro, stood in the air in a corner of the room, a chair on its side beneath his feet. Munro's coat is folded on the armchair by his desk. James throws it over the flames, stamps them out, opens the window. When the smoke has cleared he examines Munro and satisfies himself that the man is dead. Those stories of men reviving on the surgeon's slab after being hanged, how interesting that would be! Munro, however, will not be reviving this side of the Last Trump.

He considers cutting him down, but the man's girth is intimidating and the rope at his neck is taut as a ship's hawser. Munro is in no hurry. Morning will do. James takes up his candle and notices upon the desk, next to a half-dozen envelopes sealed with black wax, Munro's spectacles and ivory nose.

James does not attend the funeral. He is seeing a patient, a woman with puerperal fever. In James's world, people would be dropped into lime-pits or, like Grace Boylan, bundled through a gun-port with a shot at their feet. One moment here, the next invisible; nothing but sea. None of this dressing up, this lugubrious to-do.

Officially Munro has died of heart failure, but the truth leaches out and within a fortnight, from Taunton to Gloucester, the word is that Robert Munro has hanged himself, or some say shot himself or swallowed poison, and that it was his wife and that rogue Dyer who drove him to it. Everyone, it seems, had seen it coming.

Three days after the funeral Agnes is hissed at as she walks through the abbey courtyard with Dinah. She does not go