Fludd: A Novel

he thought, that the transformative process is already underway? In these days, he no longer worked in metal, but practised on human nature; an art less predictable, more gratifying, more dangerous. The scientist burns up his experimental matter in the athenor, or furnace, but no scientist, however accomplished, can light that furnace himself. The spark must be set by a shaft of celestial light; and in waiting for that light, a man could waste his life. “It is warmer,” he said, aloud. “I dare say the wind has dropped.”

The girl stared out at it, riffling the twilit grass. Her cheeks glowed. She knew it was no use to look around her for the source of heat; it was inward. Since he came here, she thought, a match had been put to her future. She did not think she loved him, but still, something burned: a slow, white flicker of approaching change.

“Well, tell me,” she said. “What made you enter the priesthood, Father?”

“There are some men,” Fludd said, “who are driven to be surgeons. From an early age they have an appetite to slit up persons and look into their guts. Some men are so consumed by it, that if want of money or education impedes them from obtaining the qualifications they desire, they will simply impersonate surgeons. Many an appendix has been whipped out, in our major hospitals, by some fellow who’s walked in off the street.”

She was impressed. “Wouldn’t you ever think they’d be found out? Wouldn’t you ever think they’d kill somebody?”

“Sometimes they do. But not more than their quota.”

Jesus, she thought. In England they have a quota. “So they get away with it, you’re saying?”

“Sometimes for years. But then you know there are other men, the would-be priests, they have a complementary desire; they want to take a scalpel to the soul. Sin is their intestinal loops. You can see them drape it around their hands as they go probing into the depths.”

His language was not strange to her. Each morning as she ate her breakfast she regarded the neat antiseptic wounds of Christ. One of the soldiers with a spear opened his side, and immediately there came out blood and water. “But it’s not quite the same as doctors,” she said. “You can’t cure sin, can you?”

“The physicians can’t cure a half of the corporeal diseases that they go after. They only do it out of curiosity, and to keep the patients’ relatives satisfied, and to earn a crust.”

The temperature around her seemed to have increased now. Why did he not feel it? It was a Mediterranean frenzy of heat, a Sicilian afternoon. The wool of her undergarments fretted her skin, and she felt a heat-rash prickle between her shoulder-blades and along her forearms. She said, “Father Fludd, you’re not a real priest, are you? I thought it all along.”

Fludd didn’t answer. He might well not answer, she thought. But his features seemed less pinched now; the warmth had touched even his usual corpse-like pallor. “In my former trade,” he said, “a trade which I seem to have forgotten now, or at least I have lost my touch with it, there was a business which we called the nigredo, which is a process of blackening, of corruption, of mortification, of breakdown. Then there is a process we call the albedo, it is a whitening … Do you see?”

She seemed afraid; looking at him with her eyes large, her expression drawn. “What is that trade?”

“It was a deep science,” he said. “Releasing spirit from matter. It should be every man’s study.”

“A killer does it. When he kills. Is that a deep science?”

“There are things in one’s self one must kill.”

“Oh, I know,” she said wearily. “The flesh and its appetites. I have been hearing it since I was seven. I am sick of hearing it. Don’t you start.”

“I meant something else really. I meant that there are times in life when you must murder the past. Take a hatchet to what you used to be. Ax down the familiar world. It’s hard, very painful, but it is better to do it than to keep the soul trapped in circumstances it can no longer abide. It may be that we had a way of life that used to satisfy us, but it does so no more; or a dream which has soured by longkeeping, or a pleasure which has become a habit. Outworn expectations, Sister, are a cage in which the soul rots away, like a mangy beast in a menagerie. When the reality in our head and the reality in the world are at a disjunction, we feel pained, fretted—” He broke off and stared at her, at the crucifix on her chest, the serge and flannel behind it, the epidermis behind that; and she felt her skin crawl, itch, flame. “Fretted,” he said, sucking his lip. “Irritated. Itching. Flayed. Besides, I’m not sure about this killing the flesh. We have a saying, If it were not for the earth in our work, the air would fly away, neither would the fire have its nourishment, nor the water its vessel.”

“Those are lovely words,” she said. “Like a psalm. You weren’t some kind of Protestant, were you? A lay- preacher?”

“I think we must accommodate our bodies, you know. I think we must find some good in them. Otherwise, as you say, the most blessed men would be the executioners. Besides, grace perfects nature. It doesn’t destroy it.”

“Who says so?”

“Um,” Fludd said, unwilling to name-drop. “St. Thomas Aquinas.”

She put out a hand: that palm on which he had already seen the star of a happy destiny. “Oh, him,” she said. She smiled slowly. She reached out, touched his shoulder. “Him,” she said. “He was always a friend of mine.”

She hoped the warmth would follow them, out into the evening; but Fludd had become cold and silent, and the hand he offered to steady her over the rough ground hardly seemed to be the hand of a human being, so spare and chilly was the flesh. The wind rushed the clouds across the chimneys of Fetherhoughton, down below them; she looked up at the black wild jut of moorland, and felt suddenly sobered and afraid.

She let the priest—the man—tow her along; he seemed to know the way, although he was a stranger to the district, and if he had walked the allotments in the daylight it could not have been more than a half a dozen times. He turned without faltering on to the convent path. He must eat a lot of carrots, she thought; can see in the dark.

“The stile,” Fludd said. “Just ahead of us now. Can you manage?”

They reached it; he mounted first. Philomena was half over, putting out her long leg in its thick fuzzy stocking.