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

to Christ on the cross; offered and refused. The recipe for the sponges came from a manuscript of the Conquerors' time: each sponge soused in a brew of opium, fresh hyoseyamine, unripened blackberries, lettuce seed, juice of hemlock, mandragora and ivy. Permeated with their precious cargo, they are dried in the sun, ready to be rehydrated upon use.

No one, other than Mary, knows the nature of these experiments. She discovered him with her nose, coming into his room one evening, sniffing the air and very slightly raising her eyebrows as if to say, 'Is this all you have learnt?' The Reverend and his sister are devilish curious but ask no questions. He is grateful to them.

From the glasshouse he goes to the barn. The doors of the barn are open. Urbane Davis is sitting on a log eating a fist of cheese. He has been threshing oats and the air is still mazy with the chaff.

'Morning, Davis.'

'Morn'n, Dr Dyer.' Davis raises his cheese in salute.

'I trust you have not been terrifying Sissy with your flail.'

'Nar. I 'ad a squinny at 'er jus' now. Very tranquil she were.'

'I am glad of it. I am on my way to pay her a visit.'

'Sissy? Sissy?' At the end of the gallery, a snug dry spot about the height of a man below the barn roof-beams, there is a movement in the shadows, a fragile mewing, half alarmed, half beseeching. The creature is used to him now, appreciates his footfall, and is anyway too weak to flee him.

She was found in the second week of September; a ginger female cat, panting in a kind of nest she had made for herself in the interior of the Reverend's honeysuckle bush. Sam spied her first and told James, who lay in the grass beside the bush until his arm was numb, talking sotto voce while the animal stared at him, steadily, wonderingly. It was a farm cat, a wary old pugilist, not used to petting. With patience and titbits from the kitchen he insinuated himself. After three days, he could lift it out, a surprisingly light parcel, as if it were a smaller cat crawled into the pelt of a greater one. He took it to the barn, laid it in a box of rags and straw and examined it by lantern. The examination had revealed a tumour about the liver. She was old and dying in pain.

What, then, to do? Only three alternatives: leave it die; kill it; treat it. Of these only the latter two struck him as acceptable. He had, after all, already interfered in the creature's existence and having done so had acquired a responsibility beyond merely abandoning the thing. As for killing it, a death swiftly dispensed was the surest relief, and George Pace was a very able killer of things, cosy with the dark gods. Good sharp blows were his stock-in-trade.

Yet should a cat's life be less sweet to it than a man's; sweet even in sickness, even in extremisnay, more sweet then than ever? And if the pain may be abated, sensibly abated, if he possessed the probable means, was it not the best way? Was he not required to do it? Or is the creature only the unwitting subject of his experimentation? He does not like that thought. He shies from it.

Slipping the sponge from his pocket, he tears a piece and dips it into the warm water of the teapot. 'Now then. Sissy, this is what you like.' The animal's suffering has instructed it, and when he places the swollen sponge to its face, it sniffs and chews at it, rubbing the juice on to the sensitive skin of nostrils and gums; pathetic, comical actions. The tumour eats the cat from inside. The dose is increased daily. Each time James comes to the barn now he anticipates finding her dead. It occurs to him that the cat may be willing itself alive principally to consume the drugs. He strokes the dull coat, watches her subside into placid imbecility.

Below, Urbane Davis has taken up his flail, rhythmically striking, humming to himself a hymn. What is it? 'Come O thou traveller unknown.' James takes up his things, descends the ladder, holds a glove across his face not to breathe in the dust.

The Reverend, his sister, Mr Astick and James eat dinner at a table in the parlour where tonight the Reverend w^ill entertain the gentlemen farmers. The others will eat in the kitchen, according to custom. The main dining room, unused since Michaelmas, needs a two-day fire in winter to heat it through and is unnecessarily large for the one party, inappropriately fine for the other.

'Another wedge of this good fat mutton, Mr Astick?' The Reverend has thrived on his morning's sport. It has brought him two large hares. James has seen their mauled corpses in the kitchen.

'Nell - that's the silver bitch. Doctor - was like a leopard today. Mad with it she was. Could hardly walk coming home. Trembling and lolling her tongue.'

'Let me charge your glass, Doctor,' says Dido, sitting at James's side.

'Now don't you disguise the doctor in drink. Dido,' says the Reverend, himself somewhat disguised from the punch before dinner. 'We are under his knife this afternoon.'

'I understand. Doctor,' says Mr Astick, 'that surgeons are like to drink as much as their patients before an operation. Equal courage being needed on both sides.'

'I have known it,' says James, pushing a piece of meat about his plate.

'Dr Dyer wasn't one of those,' says the Reverend.

'I meant', says Mr Astick, 'that it must take as much bottom to perform an operation as to undergo one. Is that not so?'

James says: 1 have witnessed a very reputable surgeon in a great hospital heave before going into the theatre. I have seen a thousand-pound-a-year man run out in the midst of operating.'

Tray you, gentlemen,' says Dido, tapping her fork on the table. *We have not ate our pudding yet.'

'Very true, my dear,' says the Reverend, and I have