The doctor’s visit cost £1/6s. Hardly an exorbitant sum for someone of his means, yet William could not help but feel he was being wasteful. Why should he pay a physician to tell him what he already knew, what he had known for months? Still, he figured he might as well and have it over. After all, he would have to hear it some time: the death knell.
That afternoon, he sat on the edge of a parlor chair and meekly submitted to the doctor’s scrutiny: opening his mouth when he was told, coughing when he was told, breathing deeply just as the doctor said for him to—and answering all of his questions.
“Have that cough long?” The doctor’s breath was sour with the odor of cigar smoke, his whiskers stained yellow from the same source. William looked away before he answered.
“Some months. It comes and goes.”
“Productive?”
“Only very rarely.”
Dr. Long grunted. He was an older man, portly, with the well dressed and yet vaguely unkempt appearance of a gentleman alcoholic. William knew him only slightly. Their doctor in London had been William Gull, who had attended to none other than the Prince of Wales and had brought him back, so they said, from the very precipice of death. Dr. Gull was considerably more expensive than his Wiltshire counterpart and considerably more appealing. Yet his attempts at prolonging Anne Pratt’s life had been unsuccessful to say the least, and William did not feel he was worsening his own prospects any by engaging this new person. In terms of geographic proximity, Abel Long was certainly the most desirable physician to be found; he lived only a mile away, just outside the town of Westbury.
“Your mother died of the consumption, then?”
The question didn’t surprise William, although he had not mentioned his mother at all in his discourse with the doctor. Although he had purchased this property after Anne’s passing and rarely discussed her death with any of his neighbors, he knew there must have been gossip amongst them. There always was gossip with people like that.
He gave a silent nod of assent and the doctor pressed, “How long ago was that?”
William told him, bracing himself lest he be required to go into greater detail, but Dr. Long made no further inquiry into the matter. He asked about William’s appetite, instead, and did not seem shocked to learn it had been recently flagging. Nor was he surprised by his fatigue or the slight elevation in his temperature. In fact, only a few minutes later, the doctor sat back in his chair and told William he had seen and heard all he needed to, and the examination was complete.
“I’m sure you know that you are consumptive,” he said bluntly. “Likely you’ve been so for some time, and you’d know what it looks like, what with your mother and all. I can give you a compound that will suppress the cough and allow you to rest, but it will only treat the symptoms, not cure the illness.”
“And is there nothing you recommend to cure the illness?” But William’s voice was bland, full of neither hope nor despair. After all, this was nothing more or less than what he had expected.
“I recommend what I am sure your mother’s doctor recommended. Lot’s of air, full rest, a warmer climate—”
William looked away, irritated. Dr. Gull had suggested all that, certainly. He had obeyed every order and forced his mother to obey them as well, even when she would have preferred to not. And still—
“We spent half a year in Italy,” he said tersely, his voice trembling with anger—and something that was not anger. “It did not slow my mother’s decline in the slightest. In fact, I imagine she would have been far better served had I allowed her to stay in London and die in her own bed—”
For the first time during his visit, Dr. Long actually seemed taken aback. Perhaps he was not accustomed to seeing his consumptive patients show so much energy.
“Symptoms such as yours often wax and wane for some time,” he rejoined, after a moment of stunned silence, “and in a milder climate I can assure you recovery would not be outside the realm of possibility. Your mother was elderly and frail; you are not.”
“And if I choose to remain here—?” William asked stubbornly.
The doctor rolled his shoulders with poorly concealed impatience. Having diagnosed the ailment and dispensed his advice, he now seemed to be rapidly losing interest in the situation. He was packing his leather case, and he addressed his tools rather than his patient when he said, “Here is not London. The air is fresher, the spaces open. You might have years yet.”
Perhaps the doctor meant his words to offer reassurance, but William could not muster any feelings of gratitude for them. He could not muster any feelings at all. He watched the doctor make ready to leave, and he felt curiously numb, as if his heart and his brain and the queer, tight, aching spot in his lungs had all been temporarily frozen.
Years yet. He wasn’t at all sure he had the strength to face them.
The compound Dr. Long left him for his cough came in a brown glass bottle, rather flat, with a long neck and a yellow paper label inscribed in red ink. It read:
POISON
DIRECTIONS
Three months old: 2 drops
One year old: 4 drops
Four years old: 6 drops
10 years old: 14 drops
Twenty years old: 25 drops
Adults…30 drops
Nothing else, but that was to be expected. Only patent medicines bothered to list their indications. Nevertheless, he could not help but feel some surprise. Until she reached the point of coughing up blood, Dr. Gull had prescribed paregoric for his mother, and William did not feel he was ill enough yet to require anything stronger than that. Nor was he particularly eager to drink from a bottle marked “poison,” even if it was supposedly safe for infants. However, despite his concerns on the matter, he pocketed the laudanum with neither question nor comment. After all, one did not interrogate the physician about one’s cough remedy, particularly when one had been so previously argumentative about other suggested forms of treatment. It was not good manners.
It would have been good manners for him to walk Dr. Long to his buggy, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do so. Aside from the fact that the doctor seemed offended with him and most likely did not want his company, William also felt achy and feverish and not at all up to the task. He left it to the footman, instead, and kept to the relative comfort of the parlor. He was too tired now to climb the stairs to his study.
A June afternoon was really too warm to have a fire in the hearth, but he called a maid to build one anyway. Let the servants swelter, he decided. Let them be uncomfortable for a change. He was chilled with his fever, and he would have a fire if he wanted one. When she finished, he stretched his legs out toward it and closed his eyes.
I’m going to die.
He waited a moment to see if the thought would distress him, but it did not. He really found himself not caring one bit. Far more troubling than death was the idea of a slow decline: years of wasting and suffering, as his mother had. Moreover, of being forced to do so alone. And he certainly would be alone now; that was all but guaranteed. No woman would ever want him in this condition.
Oh, but you’re fooling yourself there, he told himself with a bitter sigh. Being ill changes nothing in that respect, for no woman ever wanted you in the first place.
A rather disheartening thought, but he was finished lying to himself. He had spent his youth foolishly chasing after the unattainable, and he would not try to place the blame for his failure on anyone but himself.
He propped his chin on his hand and gazed across the room to the windows, mildly surprised to see how deep the shadows had grown. Had the doctor really stayed as long as that? The exam had felt so brief, Dr. Long’s demeanor harried and impatient; it was difficult for William to believe most of his day was already gone, spent in the morbid pursuit of a death warrant.
Still, he sat.
At five o’clock, the footman came to the parlor door, tentatively tapping on the edge of the frame, but William sent him away again.
No. I don’t want any tea.
Then again at seven o’clock: No, I don’t want any dinner.
The things he did want were things he did not know how to get. That was his problem.
As the evening faded into long summer twilight, he began to toy with the bottle the doctor had given him. Laudanum. Or, if you wanted to be very scientific about it: deodorized tincture of opium. Not so different from paregoric, really, although it was said to be quite a bit stronger. He remembered when his mother made the switch. Her discomfort had been terrible by that point, and laudanum was the only thing that allowed her to rest.
I could rest.
It was a tempting thought, for lately he had not been—at least not very well—in spite of his fatigue. The cough always seemed worse at night, and it often disturbed his sleep. But this—
William uncorked the bottle and peered into it. The contents were reddish brown and rather more turbid than he had expected. Dark bits like coffee grounds lay settled along the bottom of the glass. When he gently shook the bottle, they swirled through the liquid, clouding it, but they did not dissolve. The smell of the stuff was altogether vile, like some rancid, bastardized form of cherry liqueur. He almost decided against it.
Then a coughing fit seized him—and pain stabbed like dagger behind his right eye—and he could hear one of the maids giggling with a stable hand out on the lawn, flirting with him despite the fact it wasn’t allowed—and suddenly he felt so lonely he could not bear it any longer.
The doctor had neglected to give him a dropper, so he pressed his thumb over the mouth of the bottle to stem the flow of liquid and then carefully tilted it back, placing ten drops—one right after the other—upon his tongue. The directions called for three times that, of course, but somehow the idea of taking it all at once made him uneasy. He lowered the bottle and waited.
Truly, he never expected it to work so quickly, or so well. In just a moment, his cough faded and his lungs felt open in a way they had not in weeks. His entire body felt open: warm and fluid, so utterly relaxed it almost seemed as though his bones had left him entirely. He felt as if he could melt out of his chair and drip through the tiny cracks in the floorboards; he felt as if he could seep into the earth beneath them. He imagined with just a little effort he could disappear from the world altogether.
How strange he never knew just how much pain he was in until it left him. Was this how other people felt? Normal people, happy people? Was this what he had been missing all these years? This calm—this contentedness—this utterly improbable desire to laugh—it was—
Altogether glorious.
He lifted the bottle again, but his hands were clumsier this time and the drops came too fast—he lost count.
It’s all right, he thought serenely, where before he might have panicked. He calmly wiped a dribble of the sticky liquid from his chin and reassured himself: Nothing terrible could possibly come of something this pleasant.
Still, he did not feel he should sit any longer. To sit would be to drink, and already he could recognize the slippery slope on which he stood. He could imagine drinking again and again until he drowned himself in this feeling of euphoria, and he wasn’t nearly enough of a poet to commit suicide. He corked the bottle and placed it in the inner pocket of his jacket, then climbed to his feet.
The boneless feeling was still with him, and he was glad no one was around to bear witness to his trembling, knock-kneed walk over to the other side of the room.
My God, he thought, bracing himself on the glass of the French door. It’s like being in the hull of a ship.
And it was, for the room seemed to be tilting at regular intervals—back and forth, back and forth—and there was a dull rushing sound in his ears that might have been the surf. William pushed aside the velvet draperies—he pried open the latch—and then followed the tide out into the garden. Leagues of inky blackness lay before him, and he wasn’t afraid at all.
How lovely the night was! All day, he had felt so cold even when huddled near the fire. Yet now the early summer breeze felt as pleasant as bath water, and the stars seemed to be radiating a warmth he could feel in his toes. When he looked up at the moon, he saw it was throbbing gently, moving in perfect rhythm to his own heartbeat.
His legs were too unsteady to carry him very far, so William limited his voyage to the other end of the garden. He dropped to the ground at the base of a stone bench and closed his eyes. The damp grass was soothing against his feverish skin and the earth smelled rich and fresh.
I could die right at this moment, he thought dreamily, and it would not hurt at all.
But he did not die. In fact, as drowsy as he felt, he didn’t even fall asleep. He was too relaxed to sleep, too content. He didn’t want to drift away and end it, not just yet.
It was just as well. Only a minute later, a sudden dull thud startled him out of his daze, and he bolted upright in the grass, twisting his head from side to side, as he looked for the source of the sound.
It did not take him long to find it. After all, even in such an inebriated state as this, it was impossible to overlook something as large as a horse.