“Her mother wrote to me, and I not getting the letter till this eve. She is dead, Thessaris, my Sophia. Not seventeen years, and dead.” After which he put down his head on his arms across the table and wept.
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He had pronounced her name an outlandish way, so for a minute I did not at all know who he meant. For as a rule it is spoken as if one said So Fire. But he had it So Fear.
“Your wife,” I tendered at last. He wept and nodded into the table’s wood. “How is this?” (I thought, Pray God she was not with child. For it might even be mine.)
Jem raised his head and wiped off his face on his sleeve.
“God knows how. But all my fault, as I must think,” he said. “Her mother believes so. For Sophia was returning to her mother’s house at Levishamm, but then the carriage comes very late, and when the door is undone, she does not step out and the servant gives up a howl. She is sat there, my wife, in the seat’s corner, and a trickle of red blood from her mouth and down her white throat. And still, as only the dead ever are, so she is. Since you and I, she’d have nothing to do with me. And I was ill-tempered with her, yet she said nothing but went to her mother. And then it seemed Sophia was to come into the town, and her mother thinks this was to call on me, but I swear it never was, and never did I see her. I have not seen her even as now she is. In Christ’s golden name, what shall I do, Irvin?”
I had no answer. And so for a long while after this we sat silent, drinking. And from somewhere then the clocks began to chime, all out of time and tune with each other as ever, and it was midnight.
A man came in presently to say the river had not frozen after all, and a great load of bets had been lost thereby. And that another great load, this of snow, had fallen from a roof at Covent Garden, and crushed two drunkards under it. Which caused much mirth.
Shortly after that a staid and sober servant entered, as they do in the play, and stealing over to Jem, plucked his sleeve, gave over something, and drew back. It was another letter. This Jem read, and his pale face turned from white to blue. I have seen that colour in life only once before, and that one was my father’s, after I had so sorely beaten him.
“Oh God, how am I to bear it?” Jem said, yet in the most ordinary and measured of tones.
“What?” I said. I braced myself to confront new dread, but was not braced enough.
“The physician has attended, and says my wife is poisoned. She had poisoned herself. The paste has been found in a little box among her skirts. He says he knows the venom, and that she has taken it by mouth. Invariably, though it acts only slowly, a slight taste does the business, and it is quite fatal. Doubtless she thought she would be home before it ended her. Or not, mayhap. Or not.” Then he got straight up. “I must go there,” he said, but not to me.
And turning, he walked from the tavern, with the servant following like his black shadow, out into the white nothingness beyond the door.
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At home, and a shoddy, ache-rattling carriage to be paid off, and then upstairs. No dog, no fire alight, a room like a grave. By now I was so ill I had called up the beggar from his bivouac along the track, and given him money to fetch the doctor. A good time next the beggar below the window shouts up the doctor will not turn out so late, but will attend me in the morning. At which he, and the doctor by proxy, are recommended to the most taxing pits of Hell.
I seek my bed and lie down in it, and so racked with torturer’s pains and fever by then, I soon lose all proper awareness. Yet in and out of my distemper moves little Sophia, and I feel her death always heavy on me like an icy rubble, like the snow that fell and killed the drunkards.
Of course the fault is mine that she died. Did she not tell me she would never see me more in life? What does a woman mean by that except she will throw life off, and leave it to lie down instead beside you, and rot there, as your punishment. But her punishment on me may be just, and I, now, too sick to care.
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About ten o’clock in the morning, the doctor arrived, having been shown up by the brown crone, or some other of the freak-show of the house.
He told me at once I was vastly ill, for which I did not thank him, being able to deduce as much for myself, nor wishing to charge myself any fee for so doing.
Then he came more near, examining me with his cold, gnarled and comfortless hands. Then, he seemed perplexed, and said he would bleed me, to see what mysteries he can uncork with my blood. This process, achieved with a knife not sharp enough, was terrible in my pain. But he seemed satisfied. He asked me next if I had eaten any strange thing, or been attacked in any fashion. I reminded him I was an actor, and often attacked on the stage, either by a fellow actor at the playwright’s instruction, or some unsatisfied person from the audience.
He laughed heartily at my wit. Then recalled for me
