Resurrectionists (46 page)

“The tools of my trade,” he said dourly, picking up the cart and pulling it behind us. In it were a mattock, a spade, rope and hooks, and some rolls of canvas. Upon viewing these tools I began to feel fully the enormity of our activity. It hardly seemed possible that such an atrocity as this should be so important a part of our lives. We eat only on condition that Virgil pulls bodies from their graves. It is as simple and as horrifying as that.

Still, we must eat. And the folk disinterred are already dead and their souls long since gone to whichever hereafter they have earned.

“How do you know which . . .?” I could not voice the entire question.

“Flood instructs me. If I am lucky it is very fresh or very old.”

“Why?”

He mumbled something I couldn’t quite

understand. Perhaps he said, “They are cleaner.” But perhaps, too, I did not want to know all the details, so I did not ask him to repeat himself.

We walked through the graveyard. Away from the shelter of the abbey, the sea breeze was fresh. The warmer summer weather had coaxed an awful stench from the poor’s hole, the open pit where those who could not afford a proper burial were cast. The fresh breeze carried the smell away from us a little, but I was glad when it seemed we were moving no closer to that side of the graveyard. We approached a certain grave – the ground was not yet overgrown with grass and so I deduced it must be quite fresh – and Virgil dropped the cart and reached for the blanket.

“Here, Gette, stay warm.”

I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and leaned nearer to the gravestone, trying to read the name engraved upon it.

“No!” Virgil exclaimed, stepping in front of me to block my view. “Do not seek to know who this is, Gette. Identity will work upon your conscience.” He took my hand and led me ten or twelve paces away from the grave, behind the shelter of a large tree. “I can give you a canvas sheet to sit upon if the grass is wet,” he said.

I eased myself to the ground, tested the grass with my fingers. “It is quite dry.”

“Turn the other way, Gette. Do not watch.”

I did as he said, turning my back to the grave and watching instead over the expanse of the cemetery, and out to sea. He knelt in front of me, touched my cheek with his left hand. “I am so sorry, my love.”

“I will be perfectly safe and happy sitting here,” I said, though I knew it was not necessarily true.

“I am sorry for more than this evening,” he added quietly. “This is not the life I wanted for you.”

“Virgil, as long as we are together, nothing else is terribly serious.” I thought about my parents – it has been two weeks and still I have not told him – and I felt the awful tug in my heart, but said nothing. He kissed me gently on the cheek and then went to his work.

I moved so that my back leaned against the rough bark of the tree trunk, then sat gazing over the shadows of headstones and out to sea for a long time. Behind me, I could hear the sounds of Virgil’s labour –

the mattock to break up the soil, the spade to remove it. Perhaps a few hours passed, and perhaps I drowsed a little. But after a time I felt restless, curious, and I shifted my angle so that I could see from a distance what Virgil was doing.

His work was illuminated by the lantern, which he had perched on top of the headstone. Around the grave he had laid the canvas sheets to catch the soil, which he threw from heaped spades. Virgil was only visible from his waist up, as he stood in the grave digging vigorously. He had stripped off his shirt, and it hung carelessly over the edge of the cart. I watched the muscles in his arms and back working, could see the gleam of sweat upon his skin and the dirt that stuck to him in sticky streaks. How unfair that he, of all people, should be employed in such a manner. Virgil is formed for finer things – for clean, warm places, for books and ink and quiet libraries. For a moment, watching him, it seemed so entirely out of possibility that he should have ended in such a task, that I almost laughed out loud. But Fate takes liberties with us in small steps: to go from writing poetry to unearthing graves happens quite easily by way of poverty, addiction, approaching parenthood. Circumstance and Opportunity are all that are required, and then any man can find himself a million miles from his heart’s desire, though it seems he walked but a few feet to get there.

I turned back to the sea and tried not to think about my parents. But Virgil’s task kept pulling my reflections back to that very topic. I did not know where they were buried, or even if they were buried. Such atrocities are daily committed in France, so it would not surprise me to learn they had received no honours for the passage of their souls at all. Perhaps one day I might return to France and try to find them, and I shall plant roses upon their graves. It cheers me a little to think of that, to imagine beautiful flowers springing from their bones. And this I was considering when Virgil appeared next to me, streaked with dirt.

“Gette, you are not too tired, are you?”

“No, Virgil. I slept an hour or two I think. Are you nearly finished?”

“I have dug down to the coffin. Do you know they favour shallower burials in Solgreve than anywhere in England?”

“Surely it’s not because of Doctor Flood?” I asked. He shook his head. “I shouldn’t imagine so. I’d hate to believe he had so wide an influence.” He looked down at his filthy hands. “I must now crack open the coffin and remove the occupant. There may be a . . . bad smell. Perhaps you would like to walk a little further out near the cliffs for a half hour or so.”

How awful, Diary. What a dreadful circumstance to find oneself in, so openly confronted by the progress of the flesh. And poor Virgil having to work amongst it after being so ill! I allowed him to help me to my feet and, with the blanket around my shoulders like a shawl, I walked through the cemetery towards the cliff. I found a soft patch of grass beyond the last row of gravestones, and sat there with my back to Virgil. Without the shelter from the tree I felt the breeze coax my skin into gooseflesh. I did not mind, for it seems the sea is such a cleansing force, liberated and evermoving, unlike the sickly cloying air of decay, which clings and settles.

I lay on my back to look at the stars, my hands over my belly. With a turn of my head to the right I could see the sea, with a turn to the left I could watch Virgil. I switched between them. The sea did the same thing it always did, advanced and retreated restfully. Virgil was involved in quite a different enterprise. He dropped a hook on a rope into the grave, braced it around the headstone and jerked it a few times. Stopped to rest. Did the same again. When the first shadow of the body emerged from the pit I turned away. When I next looked back he was folding the shroud and dropping it into the grave. The body was wrapped in a bag at the foot of the pit. He picked up the edges of the canvas sheets and tipped soil back on to the coffin. I watched him for a few minutes as he fetched his spade and began to work in earnest, refilling the grave.

It was then that something dark moved on the edge of my vision. I leaned my head back and peered into the gloom but saw nothing. I felt strangely disturbed, so I struggled to sit and searched the darkness again. My eyes were drawn to the tree where I had rested earlier. I had the distinct impression that something was slightly out of place, but I did not know why. I watched carefully, but could see nothing that could confirm my suspicion.

Once more I turned to Virgil, and it was only when my eyes left the area that something moved there. I gasped as I saw a figure, dressed in a dark cloak, forsake the shadows in which it was hidden and move into the pale moonlight.

“Virgil!” I called.

My husband turned to me and the figure disappeared back into darkness. I stood with some difficulty and moved towards Virgil. He saw me and dropped his spade, came to meet me between gravestones.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I saw someone near the tree,” I said, pointing.

“Gette, there is nobody out here but us.” Even as he said this, he began to look around nervously, his dark eyes round with fear. It was then that I remembered the encounter he spoke of the night before he became very ill. How he had seen a cloaked figure who moved unnaturally through the graveyard, which Virgil had believed to be the spectre of one of the bodies he had pulled from its grave.

“Oh!” I said feigning relief. “Virgil, look. It was merely the shadow of that branch. See how it shifts as the wind moves it.” I pointed to a low branch on the tree. It did, indeed, cast a shifting shadow on the ground, but nothing like the figure I had just seen. Virgil smiled fondly at me. “Gette, I should never have brought you out here. Graveyards at night always excite the darker criminals of the imagination.”

“Perhaps I shall sit close by while you finish your task,” I said. “But not under the tree. I’m afraid I’ve frightened myself too much for that.”

“I am only ten minutes away from finishing. You may stand near me as long as you promise not to peer too curiously at the grey canvas bag.”

“I shall stand with my back to you. Only let me stand with you.”

Indeed it was only a matter of minutes before he was finished. He put the body doubled over in the cart and we made our way back to the abbey. Virgil left the cart where he had found it and, with the body over his shoulder, approached the entrance to Flood’s rooms.

“I shall wait here,” I said.

“No. Come and wait inside. Flood insists that I bathe before I leave. I may be twenty minutes or more.”

“I don’t want to go down those stairs in the dark when I am so large with the child.” I could barely keep my eyes on Virgil’s face. Beneath the canvas, I believed I could make out the corner of an elbow, the curve of a thigh. Curiosity kept tempting my gaze to slip.

“Then sit upon the top stair. I shall hear you if you call me.”

Virgil descended into the darkness with his awful load and I sat on the top step, from the waist up above the ground, from the waist down below. Not that I have any waist to speak of at the moment really. Now that the task was over, now that Virgil had returned successfully to work, I allowed myself to feel a little more positive. Only the thought of the figure I had seen near the tree troubled me, and still does. Was it a man? If so, where had it disappeared to when I had called out to Virgil? Was it a ghost? If so, could it cause any harm to my husband other than frightening him back into a long illness?

But I must remember that it was dark, that I had been dozing on and off, that the location and the task we were about might have suggested such an imagined spectre to me. I simply should not believe otherwise. One more thing happened last night on our way home, Virgil clean and in freshly laundered clothes (Flood, apparently, is quite obsessive about cleanliness). We walked up the path to our cottage and Virgil said this to me: “Gette, I want to tell you something, but you must promise me you will not think me raving or sick.”

I was surprised and a little afraid. “I will try to think the best of you always.”

“Because I am perfectly sober – and will continue in that manner – and yet I learned something tonight which seems rather to belong to the twilight world I inhabit when I am ill or dazed.”

“What is it?”

“Doctor Flood is over three hundred years old.”

“That cannot be.”

“And yet it is so.”

I thought about Flood, about the old skin, the unnaturally limber joints. And it did indeed seem possible. “How do you know?”

“He told me.”

“Perhaps he lied.”

“He told me how Cornelius Agrippa himself gave him the ruby ring he wears on his right hand. I said,

‘That is not possible. Agrippa died in fifteen thirtyfive.’ He replied, ‘And yet, he and I were born in the same year. Am I not rather more of a magician than he ever was?’”

“Virgil, it’s a lie. No man lives for such a long time.”

“What motive does Flood have to lie to me?”

“His own amusement. Virgil, do not think

upon it.”

He fell silent. We were now at the entrance to our cottage. Dawn was scarce an hour away. Already streaks of daylight glimmered near the horizon. Virgil opened the door and I went in ahead of him. We prepared ourselves for bed and soon lay in each other’s arms, our faded drapes drawn against the coming sunlight. I was very nearly asleep when Virgil said,

“Do you believe in redemption?”

“I do not know, Virgil.”

“Do you believe that God can forgive me?”

“A God who would not forgive you would not be good company for eternity.”

He turned on his side. “I have tried to believe in nothing, but I find myself always drawn back to the spirit.” He tapped his chest. “I believe it is in here.”

He touched my own chest. “And in here.”

When framed in such a way, I believed it too.

“Perhaps you are right, Virgil.”

“I hope that my spirit is worth saving,” he said.

“I know it would be. It is a beautiful spirit.”

“But a spirit can be eroded. Perhaps I need divine help.”

“Then call upon a guardian angel before you go to work.”

“Perhaps I shall,” he said yawning, settling once again beneath the covers. “Disbelief is a young man’s toy, whose power cannot last long when love and desire form his mind.”

“Sleep well, Virgil,” I said. And, for the first time in over a year, I prayed. It suddenly seemed like the right thing to do –

Virgil just returned and I can hear him now, whistling a melancholy tune in the front garden. All smiles now, Diary. I can’t let him see me worrying. It seems that Flood requires him to work

again tonight, and the next night, and the next, and so forth. He has been without specimens for

too long. I shall be surprised to find there are still bodies enough left in Solgreve cemetery, for all that it is the most enormous cemetery I have ever seen. I care not. We shall have money for the child, that is all it signifies.

Sunday, 13th July 1794

Another long silence from me, not that anyone other than myself is taking note. This time I have a joyous excuse – yes, my little boy Henri, now just over a week old and my one, true blessing in this awful life. I had heard such horrid tales about Childbirth, but Henri, perhaps sensing I was not equipped to deal with such trauma, appeared in an easy and straightforward manner only two hours after my first birth pang. Though the midwife did not greatly approve, Virgil was with me to welcome his son into this world, and feels such a connection with the tiny thing that I could almost grow jealous, were I not so tired all the time. No, it was rather the emotional pain than the physical pain for which I was unprepared. I could not have imagined the sea of feeling into which I have been plunged, where just the clutch of his little hand is enough to make me sob, just the texture of his milky skin causes a great weight of Fear to press upon my chest. I give him up to Virgil often, for I feel I have been flayed, and all my most delicate tissue is exposed to the stings and barbs of the world. Handing Henri over to my husband allows me to put my skin back on for a few moments, though my empty arms crave him while he is apart from me.