Death's Jest-Book (70 page)

'You don't know? Well, well. And
here's me thinking you were really brave! He's wandering around
looking for a way out.' Polchard glanced towards the stock-room door
and lowered his voice. I'd push off before he comes back if I were
you.'

'But who .. . ?'

'Go while you can!'

When Polchard spoke with that
degree of urgency, even the screws at Chapel Syke had jumped.

He went to Rosie and offered her
his hand. She stood up. Her mouth was stained with chocolate. The
serpent crown which was too big for her slim head slipped to one
side. She looked like a tipsy cupid.

'Your dad sent me’ he said.

She looked at him assessingly. He
had seen the same expression in her father's eyes. This time it was
followed by belief and acceptance, which had never happened with
Pascoe.

They walked
hand in hand to the door. He opened it slowly and stood there
a moment just to make sure the watchers on the far side of the
display area registered who it was.

It was a moment too long.

'Roote! It is you that Roote, you
fucking bastard! I've been waiting a long time for this! Bring the
kid back inside.'

Franny's brain, always
hyperactive behind that calm front, had already worked out who
Polchard had to be talking about. It wasn't hard. All he had to do
was run a finger down the list of people he'd met in the Syke,
looking for the kind of madman who'd disobey even the great Mate's
instructions and smuggle a gun on a job and use it.

He reached down and took the
serpent crown off the girl's head and said in a low voice, 'Rosie,
when I say run, run! But not straight. Run right. OK?'

'OK,' said the little girl,
deciding she'd been wrong and maybe he was fun after all.

Slowly Roote turned and faced the
man who stood in the stock-room doorway.

He was big, very big. He had a
black woolly hat like a funeral parlour tea-cosy pulled very low over
his brow. And he was holding a shotgun.

Seeing he had Franny's full
attention, he took one hand off the weapon and tore off the hat to
reveal a bald head tattooed with an eagle whose talons were poised
over his eyes.

Roote's face split in a broad
grin.

'No, Dendo, you didn't . . . it's
real, is it? You got yourself tattooed in loving memory of poor old
Brillo! Now that's really touching. You make a great tombstone!'

'Get inside! Brillo would want
this to be slow!'

'Of course he would,' said Franny
Roote, stepping forward so that his body was between the gunman and
the girl. 'He needed everything slow, didn't he, the poor bastard.
Run!'

Rosie set off right. Roote sent
the serpent crown spinning towards Bright then hurled himself left.
The first shot ripped along his shoulder but he kept running. Bright
came to the doorway, his face mottled with such rage it was hard to
see where the tattoo ended and unsullied flesh began. And then a
fusillade from the waiting marksmen punched a new and final pattern
into his body. But he still managed to get off one more shot.

Roote felt a blow in the middle
of his back. It didn't feel all that much, the kind of congratulatory
slap one overhearty sportsman might give another to acknowledge a
good move. But it switched off the connection between his brain and
his limbs and he went down like a pole-axed steer.

Men in police combat gear
carrying guns came running across the floor to the stock room. Rosie
Pascoe leapt into Ellie's arms with such force they both collapsed to
the ground and already, even as they lay there locked together, the
girl was describing her wonderful adventure. Dalziel took possession
of an unresisting Mate Polchard. Wield stepped over Dendo Bright's
body like it was a dog dropping and stooped to pick up the serpent
crown. He saw nothing of its beauty. To him it was a bit of bent
metal which wasn't worth the loss of a single second of Lee
Lubanski's life.

And Pascoe, after sinking his
face briefly in his daughter's hair, left her to her mother and went
straight to Franny Roote.

He put his arm round him to make
him more comfortable and felt the warm blood oozing between his
fingers.

"Medics!' he screamed. 'Get
some help here, for fuck's sake!'

'Made up your mind yet, Mr
Pascoe?' said the youth in a voice scarcely louder than a whisper.
'Going to put me on trial? No, of course you're not. It's not in you
. ..'

'Don't be too sure. I can be a
right bastard when I try’ said Pascoe with an effort at
lightness. 'We'll talk t about it when you're convalescing.'

'Convalescing? I don't think so.'

His eyes clouded for a moment
then cleared again and he seemed to take in his surroundings and
began to laugh, painfully.

'Remember that
inscription I told you about? Need a
change now. Franny Roote
. . . Born in Hope . . . Died in Ladies Underwear . . . even better,
eh?'

A paramedic arrived and knelt
down beside the wounded man. Pascoe tried to move aside but Roote's
fingers found strength from somewhere to hold him back.

'Know what the date is?' he said.
'January the twenty-sixth. Same day Beddoes died. Funny that.'

'Don't talk about dying,' said
Pascoe sharply. 'You can't die yet. It's not your time.'

'Want to keep me alive, Mr
Pascoe? It would be a good trick. For all his talk of death, I
sometimes think Beddoes would have liked to master it. But why should
you want me alive if you're not going to try me?'

'So I can thank you, Franny’
said Pascoe desperately. 'So you can't die.'

'You know me, Mr Pascoe . . .
always looking for someone who'd tell me what to do’ said Roote
smiling.

The paramedic was doing what he
could, all the while talking urgently into his lapel radio, demanding
to know where the hell the stretcher was and saying they needed a
chopper here, an ambulance would be too slow. Franny showed no
reaction to the sound of his voice or the touch of his hands or the
prick of his needle. Still he kept tight hold of Pascoe's hand and
never once took his eyes off his face, and Pascoe locked on to the
young man's gaze as if by sheer force of will he could hold it steady
and bright.

All around them was noise and
bustle, people moving swiftly, men shouting orders, radios crackling,
distant sirens wailing; but for all the heed either of them took of
this, they might have been a pair of still and isolated figures
sitting under the solitary moon in the hush'd Chorasmian waste where
the river Oxus flows on his long and winding journey to the Aral Sea.

It is January 26th, 1849. In the
Town Hospital of Basel, Thomas Lovell Beddoes awakes. It is early.
The large garden overlooked from his window is still in darkness and
the birds that winter there have not yet unlocked the first notes of
their aubade.

He feels a stab of pain in his
right leg, just beneath the knee joint. He grimaces, then smiles as
the pain fades. The ghost of a poem in the comic macabre style flits
through his mind. In it the amputated limbs tossed into the furnace
of the hospital mortuary sing their resentment at this enforced exile
from their proper sphere and send farewell messages to the bodies
that have betrayed them.

He shifts in his bed and a book
falls to the floor. He shares his bed with numerous volumes which
range across all his interests, from medical treatises through modern
German novels and translations of the classics to a new collection of
Goethe's letters to Frau von Stein. Absent only are the radical
tracts of earlier days. He has said goodbye to all that.

He lies there with his eyes
staring into the dark until light begins to seep through the edges of
the heavy curtains, then he throws back the coverlet in a torrent of
books and rolls out of bed.

With the aid of a crutch he has
achieved an agility which is the wonder of Dr Ecklin and Dr Frey and
all the hospital attendants. His generally lively demeanour gives
them hope of a matching mental recovery and if his jokes have
something of a macabre cast, then they always did.

Later in the day, as he moves
rapidly out of the hospital grounds, he returns cheerful greetings to
those he encounters who often pause to watch his progress with
admiration.

On his way into town he passes
the house where Konrad Degen is lodged but he does not pause. That
too is over. Degen has been persuaded by mutual acquaintance to
return from Frankfurt to Basel to aid his old patron's recuperation.
But a true friend would have needed no persuasion. And a son would
have crawled over hot coals to comfort his stricken father.

In a quiet side street he pauses
a while to make sure he is unobserved by anyone of his acquaintance.
Then he enters an apothecary's shop where he is greeted deferentially
as Herr Doktor Beddoes and offered a chair in which he sits and chats
about his medical researches while his required prescriptions are
made up.

Back at the hospital, he tells
his attendant that his excursion, though enjoyable, has fatigued him
and he is now going to rest for a few hours.

Locking his door, he takes from
his pocket the drugs he has obtained. Only one of them does he have
any use for. He mixes it in a glass of heavy Rhenish wine, sips,
makes a wry face, adds a little more wine, sips again, then sits down
at the table which stands before the window and sharpens a pen. His
mind meanwhile is running through a list of possible correspondents.
His sense of drama, though it falls well short of that necessary to a
practical rather than a literary playwright, is refined enough to
know that more than one last letter is a profligacy which risks
touching the absurd.

His choice is made. Phillips, a
good and noble man, head of a happy family and a pattern for fathers
everywhere.

He scrawls
across the head of his paper
To Mr Revell Phillips, The Middle
Temple, London,
and begins to write, pausing from time to time to
sip his wine.

Outside the day is dying young.

My dear Phillips,

I am food for what I am good
for - worms.

Food for... good for ... I could
use that. Make a note? Hardly worth it! The echo of Hotspur's dying
speech makes him think of Konrad. He pushed the thought aside.

‘I
have
made a will here which I desire to be respected, and add the donation
of £20 to Dr Ecklin, my physician.

W. Beddoes must have a case
(50 bottles) of Champagne Moet 1847 to drink my

He pauses. My health? Hardly.
Then he smiles and starts writing again.

death in.

Thanks for all kindness.
Borrow the £200. You are a good & noble man & your
children must look sharp to be like you.

Yours,

if my own, ever,

T. L. B.

He throws down his pen.

It is over.

But the
retiring actor does not leave the stage without many a backward
glance and the retiring singer can never resist one last reprise, and
no real writer ever truly retires.

So he takes up his pen again and
scribbles a few more lines.

Love to Anna, Henry, the
Beddoes ofLongvill and Zoe and Emmeline King -

Anyone missed out? Of course, the
most important of them all.

also to Kelsall whom I beg to
look at my MSS and print or not as he thinks fit. I ought to have
been among other things a good poet. Life was too great a bore on one
peg and that a bad one.

Bit self-pitying that? Perhaps.
End on a jest, that's the true way of death! He winces as he feels a
spasm in his gut from the poison. Then he smiles again. A little
medical joke to finish with.

Buy for Dr Ecklin above
mentioned one ofReade's best stomach-pumps.

Perhaps he should elaborate on
this but now the pen feels heavy in his hand and his lids feel heavy
on his eyes.

He sets the pen down, takes up
the note and carefully pins it to his shirt. He drains the wineglass
and hops across to his bed across which he sprawls supine.

By now it is quite dark outside.
Or is the darkness his alone? He does not know. His mind ranges
across his life, his huge hopes - for himself, for mankind - and
their huge failure, which somehow at this moment of departure does
not seem quite so huge. Fantastic images spin across his brain and
instinctively he reaches out to them and tries to trap them in a net
of words. Now he is seeing death, not on the slab, not on the stage,
not on the printed page, but real and active and standing before him,
rendering all those thousand of words he has used to describe it
sadly inadequate - shards of a broken glass, ashes of an incinerated
painting, echoes of a distant music. If only he could raise his pen
now, he might after all be more than a good poet, he might be a great
one.

Is it too late? Who knows? Can
death take a joke as well as make one?

His lips part, his collapsing
lungs strive to uncrease thernselves and take in that rich and
healing air which he knows can revive him, but his strength has gone.
Death's jest is complete.

So Thomas Lovell Beddoes exhales
his last breath bearing his last words.

'Fetch the cow . . . fetch the
cow. ..'

The
End