It was Fleury who, remembering how he had made a visor for his smoking cap, found the solution by whipping his Bible out of his shirt and tearing the boards off. He gave one of these sacred boards to Harry and took the other one himself. Then, using the boards as if they were giant razor blades, he and Harry began to shave the black foam of insects off Lucy’s skin. It did not take them very long to get the hang of it, scraping carefully with the blade at an angle of forty-five degrees and pausing from time to time in order to wipe it clean. When they had done her back, they turned her over and set to work on her front.

Her body, both young men were interested to discover, was remarkably like the statues of young women they had seen … like, for instance, the Collector’s plaster cast of Andromeda Exposed to the Monster, though, of course, without any chains. Indeed, Fleury felt quite like a sculptor as he worked away and he thought that it must feel something like this to carve an object of beauty out of the primeval rock. He became quite carried away as with dexterous strokes he carved a particularly exquisite right breast and set to work on the delicate fluting of the ribs. The only significant difference between Lucy and a statue was that Lucy had pubic hair; this caused them a bit of a surprise at first. It was not something that had ever occurred to them as possible, likely, or even desirable.

“D’you think this is supposed to be here?” asked Harry, who had spent a moment or two scraping at it ineffectually with his board. Because the hair, too, was black it was hard to be sure that it was not simply matted and dried insects.

“That’s odd,” said Fleury, peering at it with interest; he had never seen anything like it on a statue. “Better leave it, anyway, for the time being. We can always come back to it later when we’ve done the rest.”

But at that moment there was a noise behind them and both young men turned at once. There stood Louise, Miriam, and the Padre, gazing at them with horror.

“Harry!”

“Dobbin!”

The Padre was unable to find any word at all; his eyes had come to rest on the golden letters “Holy Bible” on the back of Fleury’s razor blade.

“You couldn’t have come at a better time,” said Fleury cheerfully. “Harry and I were just wondering how we were going to get her clothes on again.”

23

“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his goodness to give you safe deliverance, and to preserve you in the great danger of childbirth; you shall therefore give hearty thanks unto God …”

At the beginning of August when the heat, humidity and despair reached their zenith in the Residency, when all eyes searched the Collector’s face for the signs of collapse which they knew to be imminent, two babies were born. One of them died almost immediately; its little body was dressed in a clean nightdress and linen cap and its arms were folded on its breast; then it was taken at night to be buried. Burial was a risky business now since the churchyard was constantly swept by fire, and for adults it had been abandoned. Mature Christians were dragged to the more distant of the two wells in the Residency yard and, without discrimination between the finer points of their creeds, thrown in. No doubt the infant would have followed the adults down the well, too, had not the Padre offered to take the risk of burying it. He could not bear the thought of it being thrown down the well, however dangerous the alternative. It was too like throwing rubbish away.

By some miracle the other infant, a girl born to Mrs Wright, the widow of a railway engineer who had been killed at the rampart some weeks earlier, survived. Mrs Wright was the sleepy young woman whom the Collector had found so desirable on the occasion of his visit to the billiard room. What was it that had attracted him? Perhaps it was her soft, drawling voice or the fact that, no matter how interesting the topic of your conversation, you would inevitably see her smothering amiable yawns as you talked; you would see the muscles of her jaw tighten and the tears start from her eyes as she tried to repress them. The Collector, for some reason, was attracted to ladies who were overpowered by the fumes of sleep in his presence, but not everybody enjoyed it as much as he did. The Magistrate, for example, when told that Mrs Wright had been taken ill, showed no interest whatsoever, and when further informed, a little later, that she had given birth, observed dryly: “I’m surprised that she had the energy.” This remark naturally made everyone furious. How typical of the Magistrate! The man was odious. No wonder he was so universally detested.

The garrison was extraordinarily affected by Mrs Wright’s baby. Even gentlemen who did not normally display interest in babies sent anxiously to enquire about its progress. And it seemed perfectly natural, given the circumstances, that the child should be named “Hope”, though nobody knew whose idea it had been originally… probably not Mrs Wright’s, however, for though in every respect resembling a Madonna, she was finding it more difficult than ever to stay alert. Only that drear atheist and free-thinker, the Magistrate, was seen raising a sardonic eyebrow at this name.

Now the time had come for Mrs Wright to be churched and the baby christened; every member of the garrison who was not occupied at the ramparts had assembled in the rubblestrewn yard of the Residency to hear the service, for it was no longer safe to hold a service in the ruined Church. A table which the Collector strongly suspected was his favourite Louis XVI had been brought out of the Residency drawing-room and covered with a clean white cloth to serve as an altar table.

“The snares of death compassed me round about, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me.” The Padre’s voice reading the 116th Psalm echoed between the walls of the hospital and those of the Residency. The Collector listened from the Residency verandah, his head uncovered, but seated because he still felt too weak to stand for long. Between the ranks of bared heads (one or another of which would occasionally turn to take a quick glance of inspection at his own face) he could just make out the graceful figure of Mrs Wright herself, kneeling on a hassock in front of the table. Beyond her, there were more ranks of bared heads, this time facing the Collector; their eyes, too, scanned him greedily, looking for fissures … and further away still, two or three faces of sick or wounded men watched from the open windows of the hospital. How haggard and bereft of hope they looked! The Collector shuddered at the thought that he might have had to endure his own illness within those walls.

‘The Lord preserveth the simple,” came the Padre’s voice, quite aptly, it seemed to the Collector for he considered himself to be a simple man. “I was in misery and he helped me.”

His eyes came to rest on the tear-stained face of Mrs Bennett, whose baby had so recently died, and he suffered a pang of pity for her. How terrible it must be for her to attend this service for Mrs Wright whose baby had survived … and while the Padre was speaking the Collector accompanied his words with a silent, sympathetic prayer for Mrs Bennett: “O God, whose ways are hidden and thy works most wonderful, who makest nothing in vain, and lovest all that thou hast made, Comfort this thy servant whose heart is sore smitten and oppressed …” but the rest of the prayer was no longer in his mind, stolen no doubt by the foxes of despair that continued to raid his beliefs … in any case, it faded into a mournful reverie in which he sought an explanation for the death of Mrs Bennett’s child. The Collector felt no confidence at all that her child had not been made in vain.

The lovely Mrs Wright, still on her knees, stirred sleepily and the Collector saw her profile mirrored in a pool of rainwater beside her.