Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea

Author:Gavin McCrea
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-936787-29-6
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2015-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

With the bad winds and the lack of cabs, I’ve a parch on me by the time I get to the Marxes, but I’m not offered anything to lift it, and I know by the hardship in Nim’s face not to ask.

“Are the Girls here?” I says.

“Gone to get new bonnets for France,” she says.

“So it’s definite? They’re going?”

She shrugs as if to say, “Don’t ask me, I only clean the pots.” She takes my coat and reticule. Tries to take the jar with the salve from me. I tell her I want to present that myself, and clutch it close. She frowns and leads me towards the kitchen, but there’s fluid on my knees and a pain in my lung, after all that walking against the gales, and I have to sit on the stairs to cough it out.

She slaps my back. “Here, give me that.”

“Nay, I’ll bring it up to him.”

“What can it be that you’re so close with it? Gold dust?”

I look at the face between the graying locks. It’s sincere. She knows naught about a salve. “I want to give it to him myself, that’s all.”

I take the teaspoon of sugar she brings and start up the stairs.

“Mrs. Burns, it has taken me all morning to get him onto his back. Please do not disturb him. I can give him the gift on your behalf later.”

“I won’t be a second, I promise. He’s gone and ordered it special.”

“What is it he has ordered?”

“A salve. Jenny says he’s been crying out for it, the relief it gives him.”

“A salve? Is that what she said?”

“It is and all.”

She lets out the quiet air of a body that’s making the best of things. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”

I find Karl wrapped in cataplasms and lying stiff as a stave across his divan. He’s reading from a book held out to one side. He strains his neck round. “Oh, Lizzie, it’s you!” He closes the book and wedges it into the space between himself and the cushions. Shifts as if to hide himself. Crosses his arms across his pot. “I cannot stand for you to see me like this. If I had known—”

“Please don’t move, Karl. Stay as you are. I’ll only be a moment.”

Groaning, he sits up. “No, no. Be as long as you like, my dear Lizzie, it is a tonic to see a different face.” It’s clear his new position pains him, and after only a moment of it, he collapses onto his side. “I would like best to hang on a tree in the air.”

I make my way through the heaps and stacks on the floor, and clear a space among the papers on his desk for the jar. Now I kneel on the carpet beside him, put a hand on his forehead.

“Touching anything is nasty for me,” he says. “But that feels wonderful.”

“I brought some of Mary’s salve. Maybe that’ll help you to get comfortable.”

“Ah, the old Irish salve! I’d clean forgotten about that. It used to help.

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