What Happen Then, Mr Bones?, page 17
In the hiatus between the arousal of his anxiety and either its appeasement or the frank onset of pain, Harvey has time to rehearse his life’s regrets and is fleetingly pleased to note there are hardly any, before the chief amongst them jumps boldly out. It is the loss of enjoyment of London life, the end of his journeys through this splendid, buzzing, fascinating city of cities, that he most regrets. Never again will he walk in its pleasure gardens and fashionable squares, nor through its florid marketplaces and eccentric alleys, nor beside its ship-choked river lined with distilleries and breweries, nor through its feculent beds of industrial squalor. No, he is not sick of London, nor of life. It is life that is sick of him.
Every second or third evening his son James comes to visit, often quite late and rather drunk, but it pleases Harvey Montague to see his only son’s healthy cheeks and sparkling eyes. What does it matter to the dying that there is lipstick all over the white silk evening scarf? James sits by the bed and takes his father’s hand, and Harvey explains the treatments he has been receiving. ‘I have seen the physician,’ he labours. ‘I have had my pulse tested, my urine tasted, my body sniffed all over for the odours of putrefaction. They have taken their six porringers of useless blood and I have swallowed so many boluses I rattle. Regarding my growth, which they say is a cancer, some have told me to eat less, others have told me I should be more frequently on horseback. But most had no opinion, other than it ought to be off. They can take a man’s leg of at the thigh due to their fancy tourniquets, but they are not so excellent at amputations from the waist.’ Harvey emits a low dry cackle.
‘Not one of their nostrums worked,’ he continues, ‘although their deobstruents were explosively helpful for the bowels. We have now progressed to the oil of earthworms, and fantastical decoctions of vipers, woodlice and pearls.’ He pauses and wipes his webbed mouth. ‘Tomorrow I was to have the cunning woman with her book of Primitive Physic, but I begged off. The old crone stinks of bad blood and boiled onions, and I prefer my one true love, Mistress Laudanum.’
Harvey Montague settles on his pillow and closes his eyes. James allows his gaze to travel along the thin sheets to his father’s enlarged belly — he looks as if he is about to be delivered of twins. There’s no doubt this mass cannot be taken with the surgeon’s knife: they’d take more than half the man. Since his father appears to be sleeping, James leaves the room in search of his mother, but all he finds is a kitchen blowsabella whom he forcibly porks in the twilit scullery.
The next day James makes sure he himself is in attendance when the current physician visits his moribund father. The doctor is nervous under the stern gaze of the son and heir. He spills and slops his odious palliatives, and James takes it upon himself to direct the doctor’s ministrations. The poor man does it all without a murmur. That would not be his way in the hospitals of the poor — there he would practise the kind of authority commensurate with the authority he one day hopes to obtain — but even the poor go from the physicians to the apothecaries and herbalists, or straight down to the public scaffold if the itinerant quacksalvers have left them without a penny. Everyone knows that the touch of a dead man’s hand will heal them of everything. A little death prevents a whole lot.
By the next morning, Harvey has fallen into a kind of death-trance, and James has been denied any deathbed diamonds of paternal wisdom. Not that it would make any difference now. Over the course of his whole life the father has singularly failed to transmit his valued principles to his son — what change could a few minutes effect? And neither is this state of affairs necessarily to be blamed upon the older man. The younger was born a pleasure-seeker, that is, with that weak disposition that cannot make itself happy, that endlessly unsettles itself, rushes for remedy into the warm folds of frail woman. Never mind, the estate alone will have to suffice for patrimony.
James Montague fully expects that his father will never move unaided from his bed again, and the next morning he is astonished when the babbling servants surround him with the unwelcome news that the near-corpse has vanished. He strides to his father’s bedchamber and flings back the coverings as if the old man might be hiding. But no, James now sees the deserted bed with his own incredulous eyes. He orders a search of the entire house, right up to the attics and down to the cellars. When no tumour with limbs is discovered in a ball in any nook or cranny, he sends the male servants out into the snow-filled streets. They locate Harvey Montague fewer than five strides past the gate. He is frozen to the core — all the way through to the stilled beat of his heart.
After his father’s funeral, James Montague sacks all the recalcitrant slatternly housemaids and replenishes his castle with scented virgins. We don’t wish to pass premature judgement and mutter that soon he’ll be getting what’s coming to him — God doesn’t usually work like this — but it’s interesting to note as an aside, quite free from any notions of divine retribution, that what goes around comes around. Between rounds of the town, the heir methodically spreads a putanistic blush from the coal cellars to the airless attics, whereupon, bored, he disappears to the unploughed countryside.
And we are bored too, with him, and will remain behind in town with the pregnant household help, but whether their wombs are filled with homunculi, as the preformatists allege, or with blobs soon to differentiate and then develop, as the epigeneticists avow, we do not scientifically know. And who anyway said that this is what life is about — the steady march of science, the male’s obscene drive for new sexual partners. Here in this relieved and quiet all-female household, the gauzy curtains flutter in a gentle summer breeze while the pretty pregnant girls settle down to fresh cake and tea and the lightest, most beguiling chit-chat. As for the risible paroxysm of the stallion, they can take it or leave it — would in truth much prefer the latter.
Years before the occurrence of the cancer that finally kills him, Harvey Montague joins the hangman’s procession. Not only to seek a cure for his aches and pains and boils and lumps, but also for the desperate gaiety and shameless emotion exhibited, and also for the sobering knowledge that he brings home afterwards: even a long life is short. For two hours, perhaps more, the cart and the raucous crowd wend their way along the streets from the prison to the gibbet, stopping for ale at every tavern. The condemned criminal is red-faced and blind drunk before halfway. If now he can see in the cart other poor sods about to dangle with him, it is but the drink inducing triple vision. ‘I’ll pay for me drink on me way back,’ he roars at every balloon-breasted barmaid, and the drunken crowd bays with pleasure.
The excitement builds as the procession nears the gallows. The crowd swells. The noise is deafening by the time the hangman fastens the rope to the gibbet’s crossbeam. The other end of the rope is already secured round the condemned man’s neck — indeed, he has worn this necklace into the last two taverns. One superabounding serving wench has had a playful tweak of it, and he in return has reached into her bodice and rolled a nipple like a plug of tobacco in his grave-close fingers. The executioner holds up his hand for silence, then cuts the horse’s gleaming rump with his whip. The horse bolts; the cart flies away from the victim’s feet, which are now treading air. To put him out of his misery, his relatives crowd around to pull down hard on his flailing legs.
Harvey has been present at other hangings where friends and relations have rushed forward to support the swinging body, hoping thus to preserve intact the victim’s neck — everyone knows somebody who has heard of a man being saved in this way. But the surgeons were incensed. Even then they were permitted ten bodies per annum for the purposes of dissection, and this particular year they hadn’t yet attained their allowance, although the first winter frosts were already hard upon the ground. Scuffles broke out between the frockcoats and the pilgarlics, the former determined to have their corpse, the latter equally determined to save their restored brother from the criminal saw. Harvey was firmly on the side of the relatives in these battles. Give the sawbones a privilege and they soon see it as a right. Before you know it they’ll want their allowance of corpses increased as a reward for all their fine discoveries. They’ll be flaying and dismembering the God-fearing upright just to reach their target.
He’s heard his friends laugh at this. Not because they find vivisection any less of a crime than the peasants do, but rather because they believe in the superior knowledge of the grume-boots who claim to know death when they see it: it generally lies flat on its back and doesn’t breathe. If it has suffered a putatively death-inducing wound, all the better. And there’s nothing like a rope around the neck to convince everyone a man ought to be dead, even if he isn’t. It’s not only the anatomists who have willed it. The law has willed it, God has willed it. It’s just that that drunken no-good cretin of a hangman hasn’t done his job.
Harvey knows better than his naïve friends, of course. He knows what happened to his grandmother Valentina. His father told him, and it’s all there too in the book — the antique peeling book hidden in his study, the book that his grandmother handed down to her first-born son, who in turn handed it down to his first born, the book that is nothing less than a true and verifiable account of the survival of death.
Now in this watershed year of 1752, the Company of Surgeons has been permitted the bodies of all executed criminals for their researches. No more arguing with the weeping relatives: it’s straight off to the anatomist’s slab, then off with the skin and out with the innards. The victim’s soul, if it was going, should have cleared off by now. Cleaving to the flesh is fatal once the butchers get their tackle out.
Not that many of these blood-aprons believe they’re chopping up souls. Man is a machine, they cry. Matter thinks. The body is no longer a vehicle for the soul. No longer is man built upright so that he might regard the heavens more comfortably. We are nothing but a fine balance of solids, blood and humours, and health is merely hydrostatic equilibrium.
The pious Germans disagree. They demand the existence of a God-given, immaterial, purposeful soul, a soul which makes use of disease to keep bodily order, to be rid of morbid matter. It’s a strange notion to the more enlightened amongst us — to us morbid matter is the disease — so the concepts keep moving round restlessly and won’t fall into place. And we can’t help but wonder why the soul doesn’t do the job thoroughly — rid itself of all morbidity and live for ever.
When there are no hangings or public beheadings to attend, Harvey Montague takes his pleasure at Newgate prison. That is, he goes to visit the poisoners and throat-cutters in the grimy courtyards where they are playing ball games and gambling. He plays a few rounds of tennis with a spry hunchback — the audience shouts encouragement or abuse depending on who they’ve got their money on. Of course there is no fully enclosed court properly marked out for the chases and the scoring is idiosyncratic: Peck, tovet, bushel, strike, the scorer bellows, and Egg, egg, egg, the crowd roars at the hapless player who fails to make even a single point in a chase. The cheating is prodigious and the fighting murderous. But there are smuggled French rackets and quality tennis balls. The more successful gamblers purchase the latter from the gentlemen who come to the gaoler’s wine club on Thursdays.
After these junkets at the prison and the gallows, Harvey Montague repairs to his house and partakes of sober family with his young wife and two-year-old son. James is a fine-looking and sturdy boy who has survived infancy without a hurt or an illness. He is the apple of his father’s eye, the rekindled flame in the cold hearth of his father’s fifth decade, his hope for the future. Since Harvey has received a good inheritance after the recent death of his aged mother, who died quietly and peacefully in her sleep as the beautiful and good should, James is to have the best of everything. He is to have the finest schools, the most excellent tutors of tennis and fencing, and later on, in the company of his devoted Papa, tours of the other great cities of culture, where he will be fattened on art and architecture, on music and philosophy.
Needless to say, Harvey Montague will not be taking his precious son to New England, New France or New Spain. The most dreadful shenanigans have been going on in them, and will continue to go on as his son grows. New England is a land of religious bigots, black slaves and exported British felons. What does it signify that the rich ladies are always decked out in more expensively imported fabric than the colony’s gold and silver can pay for. You don’t know who will be killing whom next.
In New France, the New Englanders and the French never stop fighting, while the wily Iroquois endlessly play the two off against each other. As for New Spain, my God! In Alta California the Spanish gente de razon are but very thinly spread among the Indian gente sin razon and the rabid Franciscan missionaries — what kind of savage outlaw frontier must that be? And further south the transplanted Spanish Inquisition are poaching Protestants from the coast and setting fire to them in public ceremonies so cruel and extravagant they nearly out-do the Aztecs.
Harvey Ivo Copernicus Montague comes into this world in the mid-summer of 1700, adding one more soul to the more than five hundred thousand already existing in the marvellous city of London. The only city said to be comparable in size and grandeur is Constantinople, but since we have never been there we will have to take the merchants’ word for it — and you know what merchants are like. He will say, This is the price I am offered in Constantinople, and you must pay up, for with a flick of the wrist and a faraway look in his eye he will have dismissed you as a country cousin. His caravan is leaving for the East immediately, and going with it will be your silk and cutlery. Actually, the gate to the East is currently Ragusa, but who knows where that Godforsaken place is — it is certainly somewhere beyond civilisation, beyond the primeval forest where griffins and warlocks howl at the madding moon.
Harvey Montague is born into a new century that, here at its beginning, right here and now when he is howling implacably in his cradle, will turn out to have some of the worst death rates since records began in the mid-sixteenth century. Of course we all know whose fault that is: it’s the dirty and infectious peasant migrants from the countryside; it’s the miasmata from the cesspits, and from the disgusting trades such as grease-making, tallow-making and bone-boiling that are now everywhere practised. And let us not forget to mention the foreign diseases sold from the loathsome person of the Jewish street seller. He wanders the streets with a dozen layers of clothing draped over his arms and a dozen hats piled on top of his greasy head. Who knows where those garments were last — probably in a Christian grave.
If you happen not to be a Jew-baiter, you can blame the deaths on the depraved Huguenots riddled with French pox and weird French Protestantism (no doubt only a cloak for popery) who stealthily weave silk in the East End to adorn the Potentate on his triumphant return. And if by a miracle you don’t hate the industries, the yokels, the Jews or the French, blame it all on the blacks and Lascars who have come from God only knows where on the trading ships.
But London is still the place to be, frightfully expensive though all things are, and how inflated the wages. And what does the rest of the country exist for but to supply London’s insatiable needs? The coaches rush back and forth from the countryside, taking and bringing mail and visitors. The latter come at the drop of a hat — any excuse will do; in contrast, it is alleged that the fearful bucolic French make their wills before going up to Paris. Not only letters and people, but food and other goods flood in as the city grows apace: Yarmouth herrings, Norfolk turkeys, Devonshire cider, Colchester oysters, Kentish apples, Cheddar cheese. On every street corner someone is selling something — pickles, gingerbread, wash-balls, coal — or performing some small service for money — sharpening your knives, fixing your frypans. The noise is incredible, as is the smog, which is the result of burning sea-coal, not just in the houses but also in the breweries and bakeries and blacksmiths. Out of the sooty air comes the cry, Fish, fruit, herbs, roots, news! and everywhere there is a flummox of truly filthy horses.
Harvey’s mother is thirty-five years old when he is born, and his father is approaching fifty. He has a fifteen-year-old half-brother from his mother’s earlier marriage who leaves home before Harvey is even fully aware of him. But unlike his poor grandson Josiah, Harvey does not grow up in a silent household where the decreasing powers of the aged blight the atmosphere, nor where a pall of sickness, infirmity and encroaching death causes hysterical fixation on the physic or the hereafter. Neither of Harvey’s parents wears a dead hare’s foot or bag containing a live toad’s leg around the neck, as so many are wont to do (we won’t here ponder how a leg remains alive when separated from the toad — we have abused such sickness preventatives for long enough). On the contrary, his parents are people to whom life is precious, and not to be sullied and wasted by exaggerated dwellings on life’s ever-tightening noose.
But is Harvey Montague’s life to be little more than his birth, which will of course come later, his sheer existence, the procreation and rearing of his several children, more sheer existence, his illness, his death? We’re afraid so, and we must be satisfied, for this is the life cycle of most of mankind, and if this seems morbid or stunted it behoves us all to think how the situation could be improved. Clearly the sheer existence portion is open to constant renovation, and indeed Harvey has tried his best to improve it. He has joined the Mathematical Society, has been inoculated against smallpox by the famous Suttons and has played many games of tennis. In short, he has succeeded better than his sexually incontinent son, even if the improvements could best be described as rather unemotional and pragmatic.
