What’s Bred in the Bone

The taxicab was yet to come, and people who needed a carriage for a funeral, or a visit to the hospital, rode in lurching vehicles like droshkys; for winter their wheels were removed and they were mounted on ru

There were a few horses of the better, proud sort, and of these the Senator’s were the best: a team of good bays, and a dancing pony or two to pull the governess-cart in which Marie-Louise and frequently Madame Thibodeau went shopping. Undertakers also had good horses, for that was part of the panoply of death, and of these Devi

Good horses need good keeping, and when Old Billy finally drank himself into the grave, the Senator made one of the loose arrangements that were common in Blairlogie to have Devi

Zadok Hoyle presented a fine figure on the box of carriage or hearse, for he was a large, muscular man of upright bearing, black-haired and dark-ski

He became Francis’s hero, second only to Grandfather. Zadok Hoyle was a Cornishman by birth, and had never lost his Cornish turn of speech; he usually called Francis “me little dear”, which did not sound odd from him, and sometimes he called him “poor worm”, which was meant in an affectionate and not a derogatory way. He spoke to the horses in the same terms, and they loved him, in so far as a horse can love anybody. Best of all, he had lived near to Chegwidden Hall in Cornwall when he was a boy, and did not have to be told how to pronounce the name in the proper style. When Francis confided to him the shame of being called Chicken, Zadok said: “Pity their ignorance, me liddle dear; pity their ignorance and despise ‘em.”

On November 11, not long after Francis’s ninth birthday, the First World War, which for so long was called the Great War, ended, but that did not mean that Major Cornish and Mary-Jacobine returned to Blairlogie. Everyone understands that when a war is over, the cleaning-up and the arranging, and the vengeance toward the vanquished, take just as much time and clashing of brains as the conflict itself. The Major had a very good war; he remained a major, because it gave him a certain protective colouring. There were plenty of majors, and the fact that this one was apparently an unusually clever major, attached to the Canadian forces but a familiar figure in the War Office in London, was better concealed from curious people. “High up in Intelligence” was the phrase people used about him, and that was much better than being a lieutenant-colonel, for instance. Such a man could not be spared when there was so much to do, and he and his wife, that popular beauty, had to go to London almost at once, and for an indefinite time.

The fighting had finished, but disease was busily at work. Spreading, unquestionably, from the putrefying dead lying on the battlefields—Blairlogie, knew this to be a fact—the Influenza walked the earth, and killed an additional twenty millions before it subsided. But in Blairlogie, as well as the influenza there was whooping-cough, and that had hardly subsided before there was a rush of what was then called infantile paralysis, the terrible inflammation of the spinal marrow that left so many children on crutches with legs cased in cruel cages, or confined to wheelchairs, if it did not kill them. But Francis, who was not an unusually robust or sickly child, somehow managed to avoid all of these epidemics. Indeed, his first encounter with a severe illness was with whooping cough four years later. At thirteen this encounter left him whooping, as Dr. J.A. put it, like an Indian on the warpath.

“No school for this young man at least until after Christmas, Mary-Ben,” he said to Aunt, who was of course the family nurse. “Perhaps not then. We’ll see. He’s badly run down and he’ll be marked for we-both-know-what if he goes among other children too soon. Keep him in bed as much as you can, and load him up with egg-nogs. Doesn’t matter if they come up when he whoops; quite a bit of it will stay.”

So Francis settled to a long, reflective holiday, as soon as Miss McGladdery had been convinced that there was no point in sending him sheets of arithmetic problems to be solved; she was determined that the sick body should not beget the idle mind, and arithmetic was just the thing for a boy who was too weak to sit up in bed. Francis was very ill, and the injections Dr. J.A. gave him every three days, just above the kidneys, did nothing to make him placid. Indeed, on one very bad day, Aunt got into a panic and sent for Father Devlin, who murmured and sprinkled some drops of water on him. Francis was in delirium, and did not understand what had happened, but Aunt was greatly comforted. When at last he seemed a little better, the Doctor said that he was greatly “run down”, and gentle steps must be taken to “build him up”.

I suppose that was your doing, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

–Certainly, said the Daimon Maimas, though of course I take no responsibility for the epidemics. It gave me a chance to put our young friend out of the world of action for a while and introduce him to the world of thought and feeling. He had been bullied too much for any good it might do, and the insults to his mother and nasty talk about his family were begi

–You are a fierce spirit, brother.

–So it may seem, if you take a purely human point of view.

Between bouts of whooping Francis had plenty of time to reflect. He was glad to be secure from the torments of Alexander Dagg, who was a psychological rather than a physical bully.

“D’you know what I’m goin’ to tell yuh?” he would demand. “There’s bad blood in your family. Your old aunt has a bidding head. Did yuh know that? My Maw says so. D’you know what that comes from? Rotting brains. You’ll likely end up with a bielding head yourself.”

A bielding head? It was a Blairlogie word, used not in the kindly Scots sense of sheltering, but meaning scabby, overgrown with suppurating outbreaks. Children often had bielding fingers, and displayed them with pride; they were neglected whitlows. But a bidding head? Aunt’s head was never discussed, and Francis had never seen her without one of her little caps. He loved Aunt, and hated such talk, but he could not escape it.

“D’you know what I’m goin’ to tell yuh? Yer Maw’s riding for a fall. My Maw says so. Pride riding for a fall. When she come here last time she was lallygagging around and piling on the agony as if she was better than anybody else. That’s what my Maw says: she piles on the agony!”