Dr. North’s Wound
What he was about I could not say, but I felt greatly discomfited, my imagination placing images before me which I did not wish to examine too closely.
“Blocked fluids, that is all,” he said, smiling. “If love is an exchange of etheric fluid, or energy, which is what I am growing to believe, then procreation is merely an exchange of physical fluid, and fluids can be dammed or redirected at will.”
His bluntness often astonished me. I had watched fascinated a month previously as Dr. North made furious notes while observing a stallion impregnate a filly; the filly had been unable to bear the weight and the doctor had helped the farmer devise a harness which made the coupling possible and less painful for the poor female. Aversion filled me, not so much at the mechanistic means of achieving the desired result, but the dispassionate way that the doctor looked on as the poor filly whinnied in distress, and the stallion’s front hooves which dangled from the harness struck again and again at her haunches until the act was completed.
“I am… sorry that I was angry with you, Jerome.” His tone was soft and earnest and soothed me, the way it must soothe his patients in their distress. “I confess I am tired myself. We will feel the better for letting Morpheus do is work.”
And so we retired for the evening, though I wished the Lord of Dream would not visit me with further nightmares which had lately begun to plague me. A recurrent dream was of walking through a Classical archway, with Doric columns of white marble, Arabella by my side; and as we passed through her hand slipped out of mine and she fell over the edge of a precipice. I screamed her name and rushed to the edge, only to find it was not a cliff at all, but a river bank. And there, beneath the ice, lay my bride to be, in her lace wedding dress, her hands, her dear pale fingers, crossed over her breast, her lips as blue as her eyes, frozen and still, a petrified Ophelia. In the portion of the dream which woke me, I attacked the ice with a woodsman’s axe, but the blade skipped over the surface, as though my arms had turned to mist; and I wept as tears froze in crystal droplets on my cheeks.
Yellow broom plants around the cottage which was once mine and Arabellas’, coconut scented in the breeze: the perfume always takes me back to my wedding day, as I waited in the churchyard, Robert by my side trying to calm me while in the distance, Dr. North stood in the archway of the graveyard’s yew trees, threshold between this world and the next.
But I am ahead of the tale, my garden’s perfume through the window as I write drawing me aside from what I must set down that it may be read by others I am gone from this world. Though I write for myself primarly, in penance or in an attempt to understand, part of me hopes that another will read my text. Perhaps a scholar, or a merely curious individual may come upon my manuscript and through it come to better understand the nature of love, the only inheritance I leave.
The next morning I awoke refreshed, my nightmare having not returned: perhaps the good doctor had put a potion in my drink that I would rest easier, and if he did I mentally thanked him for it.
We chose to walk to the patients that day, for it was fine, blustery and with flashes of sunshine between scudding banks of cloud. We saw ten people in the morning and although it was not my custom to join the doctor on his visitations he felt it would be educational for me to witness how my pills and potions were put to use, and to understand that often they need not be used in any case.
“Illness is often merely a matter of willpower, Jerome,” he explained as we approached the house of the Allardyces, the infertile couple. “One may choose to be well or to be ill, I have found.”
“But surely there are infections over which willpower has no control?” I myself had seen many people overcome severe illness by sheer force of will, but I did not subscribe to the doctor’s over-generalisations, although I expect there were stated to provoke discussion rather than to be statements of fact.
“True, but how one deals with illness is a matter of choice. We can lie down and die or fight against inertia. A man who works in the fields all day expects his wife to cook his meals, wash his clothes and so on, and if he takes ill he expects her to nurse him. But in that nursing he will do nothing to help himself, but instead reverts to an infantile state. When my parents died—did I tell you they died in a fire when I was eight?—I had to master my grief, since I knew otherwise it would overwhelm me.”
I made no reply, sensitive to the delicacy of such a rare confidentiality though unsure what might have prompted it.
