Read Online The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Glen Duncan
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moon that turned out useful was that its Latin name,
luna
, gives us the word
lunatic
. Useful because by the middle of August 1842 I’d become one.
“This is death,” Arabella said, with what sounded like detachment. “To be with you and see you and feel you but not to be known by you. I can’t bear it.” We were in the study at Herne House, me in a low chair, her standing at the unlit hearth. The room’s closed French windows looked onto a stone terrace and flower-bedded lawn, summer colours by turns dulling and vivifying in the day’s flaring and subsiding light. “And yet here I am bearing it,” she said. I was staring at the faded Bengal rug. My grandfather had made the family fortune selling Indian opium to the Chinese. “Is this what it comes to?” she asked. “Bearing what one can’t bear?The melodramatist taught a lesson, passion’s rhetoric cut down to size? I suppose the word ‘unbearable’ is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.”
Since my return from Snowdonia she’d gone through phases of her own. Initially, innocent concern. The doctor had been called twice for my fever and cramps but on both occasions the symptoms had subsided. There were other symptoms—headaches, visual disturbances, nightmares, moments of objectless entrancement—but I’d hidden them as best I could. Concealment left me furtive and sullen, led Arabella into her next phase of less innocent concern, a question or two about “any amusing fellow ramblers” Charles and I might have met on our trip, a new investigative determination in bed, something searching and irritated that morphed into fear when time after time I tore myself from her as if in disgust or contempt. Lastly, in the face of my erratic moods and inexplicable actions (I’d grab her, lock the door against servants, work her clothes loose, feel her opening to me in relieved collusion—then again recoil, curse, beg forgiveness, leave her, ride out or walk the grounds for hours) came the current phase: an almost complete conviction that the things about her I once loved were the things I now despised.
“Can I really have been so mistaken?” she asked. I could feel her looking at me but fixed my eyes on the rug. The throb of its gold and maroon kept time with my blood. “Can I really have imagined your soul so much larger than it is?” Other women would have blamed themselves. Not her. She remained in magnificent self-certainty. From deep in my fugue I blessed her rarity. “I don’t believe I can have been so wrong,” she continued. “Yet perhaps I was. I’m an American. We’re a people diseased with progress. Jacob? Look at me.”
Irony big enough for a festival: She thought I was suffering a moral reversion. She thought this, my behaviour since coming home, was a resurgence of propriety: a woman to bed but never to marry, according to the local consensus. In our first conversation over a shared breakfast table at the Metropole her eyes had advertised frank enlightened fallenness.
In Eve’s place I’d have done the same and in Adam’s so would you. God put His money on shame and lost. Now it’s up to us to make the most of what we’ve won
—all while she buttered a slice of bread and we talkedof Geneva and her aunt prattled to Charles and the white tablecloth filled with sunlight and the silver winked. I knew from the first moment. So did Arabella. The knowledge was a perpetual latent mirth between us. She was a brunette, milk-white and supple, a little heavy in the hips. Her father had fought the British in the War of Independence. She’d been an actress, an artist’s model, once or twice a kept woman, through all a voracious reader. Eventually, penniless, she’d nearly died of pneumonia in Boston. Her only living relative, grandly dyspeptic Aunt Eliza, had swooped from Philadelphia and taken her on with the sole purpose of finding her a wealthy husband, preferably a European one, who would take her
luna
, gives us the word
lunatic
. Useful because by the middle of August 1842 I’d become one.
“This is death,” Arabella said, with what sounded like detachment. “To be with you and see you and feel you but not to be known by you. I can’t bear it.” We were in the study at Herne House, me in a low chair, her standing at the unlit hearth. The room’s closed French windows looked onto a stone terrace and flower-bedded lawn, summer colours by turns dulling and vivifying in the day’s flaring and subsiding light. “And yet here I am bearing it,” she said. I was staring at the faded Bengal rug. My grandfather had made the family fortune selling Indian opium to the Chinese. “Is this what it comes to?” she asked. “Bearing what one can’t bear?The melodramatist taught a lesson, passion’s rhetoric cut down to size? I suppose the word ‘unbearable’ is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.”
Since my return from Snowdonia she’d gone through phases of her own. Initially, innocent concern. The doctor had been called twice for my fever and cramps but on both occasions the symptoms had subsided. There were other symptoms—headaches, visual disturbances, nightmares, moments of objectless entrancement—but I’d hidden them as best I could. Concealment left me furtive and sullen, led Arabella into her next phase of less innocent concern, a question or two about “any amusing fellow ramblers” Charles and I might have met on our trip, a new investigative determination in bed, something searching and irritated that morphed into fear when time after time I tore myself from her as if in disgust or contempt. Lastly, in the face of my erratic moods and inexplicable actions (I’d grab her, lock the door against servants, work her clothes loose, feel her opening to me in relieved collusion—then again recoil, curse, beg forgiveness, leave her, ride out or walk the grounds for hours) came the current phase: an almost complete conviction that the things about her I once loved were the things I now despised.
“Can I really have been so mistaken?” she asked. I could feel her looking at me but fixed my eyes on the rug. The throb of its gold and maroon kept time with my blood. “Can I really have imagined your soul so much larger than it is?” Other women would have blamed themselves. Not her. She remained in magnificent self-certainty. From deep in my fugue I blessed her rarity. “I don’t believe I can have been so wrong,” she continued. “Yet perhaps I was. I’m an American. We’re a people diseased with progress. Jacob? Look at me.”
Irony big enough for a festival: She thought I was suffering a moral reversion. She thought this, my behaviour since coming home, was a resurgence of propriety: a woman to bed but never to marry, according to the local consensus. In our first conversation over a shared breakfast table at the Metropole her eyes had advertised frank enlightened fallenness.
In Eve’s place I’d have done the same and in Adam’s so would you. God put His money on shame and lost. Now it’s up to us to make the most of what we’ve won
—all while she buttered a slice of bread and we talkedof Geneva and her aunt prattled to Charles and the white tablecloth filled with sunlight and the silver winked. I knew from the first moment. So did Arabella. The knowledge was a perpetual latent mirth between us. She was a brunette, milk-white and supple, a little heavy in the hips. Her father had fought the British in the War of Independence. She’d been an actress, an artist’s model, once or twice a kept woman, through all a voracious reader. Eventually, penniless, she’d nearly died of pneumonia in Boston. Her only living relative, grandly dyspeptic Aunt Eliza, had swooped from Philadelphia and taken her on with the sole purpose of finding her a wealthy husband, preferably a European one, who would take her
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