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CHAPTER VII.

IN WHICH I MAKE A SHORT ASSESSMENT OF FEAR.

T hrough the school-room window, I observe the pretty housemaid with the apprentice gardener. In his presence she emits a short, tinkling laugh that reminds one of a teacup clinking on a saucer. I observe her with the apprentice gardener quite often throughout the day. Taking him a glass of water and an oyster left over from breakfast, emptying a slop bucket at the base of his hydrangea bush, their fingers brushing when he hands her a pink rose from the greenhouse.

One afternoon I see her crying outside as the apprentice gardener tries to silence her, looking around them as if for witnesses. I contort my face into an approximation of her wretchedness. The tears don’t come. They never have. Mother claimed she had a London doctor examine me as a babe. She worried I might not be breathing properly, worried I might be half-dead because I did not cry. But crying so often stems from fear.

I was sixteen years old when I realized I was unable to feel fear. At least, not in the way other people experience it – in that undignified, acutely desperate sort of way. Once I became aware of this immunity, and realized it had always been so, it felt so natural, so obvious, I assumed everyone had known but myself.

It was a man wandering off the moors who had made me aware of my lack. Of my advantage , as I would soon learn.

I was alone in the parsonage, the servant having departed on an errand. Mother was dead and buried, and the Reverend was ministering to a dying woman in a neighbouring hamlet. She had a vigorous cancer which villagers said had eaten a hole in her jaw so large one could see her teeth and gums when her mouth was closed.

The parsonage was still, the only sound the ticking of the longcase clock in the hall. No crackling fire, for at this time of year only the threat of acute pneumonia could justify the cost.

I waited in the foyer for his knock. He’d been peering through the parlour window all afternoon, his boots trampling the flower-border below. I had stared straight into his reddish-brown eyes but thought it best to wait until he knocked – the Reverend discouraged invitations – to greet him. So there I stood, motionless in the foyer, arms hanging at my sides, my pupils fixed on the front door. When the knock came, I opened.

At first his lolling tongue led me to assume that he was in dire need of a draught of water. ‘The parson,’ he croaked.

I blinked, checking with my fingers that my smile remained in place. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Does . . . the parson live here?’

‘Yes.’

He stepped into the house unheeded and loitered in the hall, peering up at the staircase behind me. His boots shed a trail of mud and one pink heather twig on the flagstones. ‘The parson,’ he repeated. He was cradling his arm, the fore of which had been mangled, most likely by a dog. The wound looked to be about a week old, and was inflamed, secreting pus the colour of butter. It occurred to me then that he may be seeking last rites from the Reverend. His eyes darted towards the empty parlour.

I told him the Reverend wouldn’t be back until late that evening, as he was visiting a dying woman in Bleakstershire. At this he set to banging his head against the walls.

Dry, hollow knocks became wet, bloody slaps. I consulted the clockface, where I confirmed that the peasant girl’s dress was not the same vivid red as his blood.

I observed the man closely as he trembled, twitched, and salivated on himself. Through a window, I spotted a sparrow preening on one of the churchyard tombstones.

A sudden pain directed my attention to my left arm. It took me some seconds to take in that he was biting me; his canine teeth, tinged copper with neglect, sinking into my forearm.

I reflected upon possible courses of action while the man shook my arm in his mouth with vigour and pissed himself, his dark urine puddling on the floor. Since Mother died the Reverend had kept a loaded pistol at his bedside, an antique which once belonged to his father. Presumably having it within reach made him feel safer, sleeping alone in the house with me. He had acquired the habit, however, of locking the bed-room door upon entering or leaving his apartment, the jangling of his keys waking me each morning and lulling me to sleep each night.

As the rabid man in the foyer chewed on my arm, a string of skin threading a gap between his rotted molars, I concluded that the pistol was not a practical option.

Backing me against the clock, the man began to grunt in a sexual manner, his frothing saliva running down my arm and into the webbing between my fingers. With my free hand I reached for the tasselled key, kept in the longcase lock for the Reverend’s nightly winding. I turned it and opened the mahogany door. The man released my arm, slipping off like a fish from a marble sink, and threw up on his lapels.

I unhooked one of the weights and bludgeoned him with fourteen pounds of lead. He collapsed onto the floor, his eyelashes wet. I raised the weight again, thinking I’d have to beat his skull until it was concave.

The weight was too heavy for me to lift again, however, and attempting to do so left me sliding to the floor in an exhausted heap. The man was off before I could regain my strength. Pushing himself off the floor, an eyelid twitching under a stream of blood, he stumbled out the open door and into the churchyard, swatting at the new wound on his temple.

I never saw the man again. He left evidence of himself – his blood, his piss, his ashy saliva – on the floor. I resolved to tell the servant and the Reverend that an old rabid dog had burst into the house. The Reverend would be thankful he’d had the foresight to remove all the carpets, fearing them fire hazards after Mother’s accident.

In the kitchen, I used a carving knife to pare the shredded flesh from my forearm – thickly at first, as if peeling the rind of an orange, and then, when blood spurted, thinly as one would an apple. I flicked the peel of pale, freckled skin into the stone slop sink atop some fish bones.

Folding a cloth around its handle, I grasped the smoothing iron, which had been left by the servant to heat on the range. My arm sore from wielding the clock weight, it quivered uncontrollably as I lifted the iron and pressed the hot surface against the open wound, which complained with a curt hiss. The pain took me by surprise, and I remember this most clearly, for it felt like a long-awaited relief: I laughed.

I spent the ensuing weeks awaiting with interest for the rabies to take hold. I hoped I would have enough time to bite another, hoped that I would possess the faculties to still find the whole thing amusing, otherwise how grim it would all be.

To this day I can’t help wondering what it is like, fear. Coursing through your blood like poison, eating away at your hopes, your ambitions, your self.

I think it has to be the worst thing in the world.