And Pascoe, after sinking his face briefly in his daughter's hair, left her to her mother and went straight to Franny Roote.
He put his arm round him to make him more comfortable and felt the warm blood oozing between his fingers.
"Medics!' he screamed. 'Get some help here, for fuck's sake!'
'Made up your mind yet, Mr Pascoe?' said the youth in a voice scarcely louder than a whisper. 'Going to put me on trial? No, of course you're not. It's not in you…'
'Don't be too sure. I can be a right bastard when I try’ said Pascoe with an effort at lightness. 'We'll talk t about it when you're convalescing.'
'Convalescing? I don't think so.'
His eyes clouded for a moment then cleared again and he seemed to take in his surroundings and began to laugh, painfully.
'Remember that inscription I told you about? Need a change now. Franny Roote… Born in Hope… Died in Ladies Underwear… even better, eh?'
A paramedic arrived and knelt down beside the wounded man. Pascoe tried to move aside but Roote's fingers found strength from somewhere to hold him back.
'Know what the date is?' he said. 'January the twenty-sixth. Same day Beddoes died. Funny that.'
'Don't talk about dying,' said Pascoe sharply. 'You can't die yet. It's not your time.'
'Want to keep me alive, Mr Pascoe? It would be a good trick. For all his talk of death, I sometimes think Beddoes would have liked to master it. But why should you want me alive if you're not going to try me?'
'So I can thank you, Franny’ said Pascoe desperately. 'So you can't die.'
'You know me, Mr Pascoe… always looking for someone who'd tell me what to do’ said Roote smiling.
The paramedic was doing what he could, all the while talking urgently into his lapel radio, demanding to know where the hell the stretcher was and saying they needed a chopper here, an ambulance would be too slow. Franny showed no reaction to the sound of his voice or the touch of his hands or the prick of his needle. Still he kept tight hold of Pascoe's hand and never once took his eyes off his face, and Pascoe locked on to the young man's gaze as if by sheer force of will he could hold it steady and bright.
All around them was noise and bustle, people moving swiftly, men shouting orders, radios crackling, distant sirens wailing; but for all the heed either of them took of this, they might have been a pair of still and isolated figures sitting under the solitary moon in the hush'd Chorasmian waste where the river Oxus flows on his long and winding journey to the Aral Sea.
Imagined Scenes from
AMONG OTHER THINGS: The Quest for Thomas Lovell Beddoes by Sam Johnson MA, PhD
(revised, edited and completed by Francis Xavier Roote MA, PhD)
It is January 26th, 1849. In the Town Hospital of Basel, Thomas Lovell Beddoes awakes. It is early. The large garden overlooked from his window is still in darkness and the birds that winter there have not yet unlocked the first notes of their aubade.
He feels a stab of pain in his right leg, just beneath the knee joint. He grimaces, then smiles as the pain fades. The ghost of a poem in the comic macabre style flits through his mind. In it the amputated limbs tossed into the furnace of the hospital mortuary sing their resentment at this enforced exile from their proper sphere and send farewell messages to the bodies that have betrayed them.
He shifts in his bed and a book falls to the floor. He shares his bed with numerous volumes which range across all his interests, from medical treatises through modern German novels and translations of the classics to a new collection of Goethe's letters to Frau von Stein. Absent only are the radical tracts of earlier days. He has said goodbye to all that.
He lies there with his eyes staring into the dark until light begins to seep through the edges of the heavy curtains, then he throws back the coverlet in a torrent of books and rolls out of bed.
With the aid of a crutch he has achieved an agility which is the wonder of Dr Ecklin and Dr Frey and all the hospital attendants. His generally lively demeanour gives them hope of a matching mental recovery and if his jokes have something of a macabre cast, then they always did.
Later in the day, as he moves rapidly out of the hospital grounds, he returns cheerful greetings to those he encounters who often pause to watch his progress with admiration.
On his way into town he passes the house where Konrad Degen is lodged but he does not pause. That too is over. Degen has been persuaded by mutual acquaintance to return from Frankfurt to Basel to aid his old patron's recuperation. But a true friend would have needed no persuasion. And a son would have crawled over hot coals to comfort his stricken father.
In a quiet side street he pauses a while to make sure he is unobserved by anyone of his acquaintance. Then he enters an apothecary's shop where he is greeted deferentially as Herr Doktor Beddoes and offered a chair in which he sits and chats about his medical researches while his required prescriptions are made up.
Back at the hospital, he tells his attendant that his excursion, though enjoyable, has fatigued him and he is now going to rest for a few hours.
Locking his door, he takes from his pocket the drugs he has obtained. Only one of them does he have any use for. He mixes it in a glass of heavy Rhenish wine, sips, makes a wry face, adds a little more wine, sips again, then sits down at the table which stands before the window and sharpens a pen. His mind meanwhile is running through a list of possible correspondents. His sense of drama, though it falls well short of that necessary to a practical rather than a literary playwright, is refined enough to know that more than one last letter is a profligacy which risks touching the absurd.
His choice is made. Phillips, a good and noble man, head of a happy family and a pattern for fathers everywhere.
He scrawls across the head of his paper To Mr Revell Phillips, The Middle Temple, London, and begins to write, pausing from time to time to sip his wine.
Outside the day is dying young.
My dear Phillips,
I am food for what I am good for – worms.
Food for… good for… I could use that. Make a note? Hardly worth it! The echo of Hotspur's dying speech makes him think of Konrad. He pushed the thought aside.
‘I have made a will here which I desire to be respected, and add the donation of?20 to Dr Ecklin, my physician.
W. Beddoes must have a case (50 bottles) of Champagne Moet 1847 to drink my
He pauses. My health? Hardly. Then he smiles and starts writing again. death in.
Thanks for all kindness. Borrow the?200. You are a good amp; noble man amp; your children must look sharp to be like you.
Yours, if my own, ever,
T. L. B.
He throws down his pen.
It is over.
But the retiring actor does not leave the stage without many a backward glance and the retiring singer can never resist one last reprise, and no real writer ever truly retires.
So he takes up his pen again and scribbles a few more lines.
Love to Anna, Henry, the Beddoes ofLongvill and Zoe and Emmeline King -
Anyone missed out? Of course, the most important of them all. also to Kelsall whom I beg to look at my MSS and print or not as he thinks fit. I ought to have been among other things a good poet. Life was too great a bore on one peg and that a bad one.
Bit self-pitying that? Perhaps. End on a jest, that's the true way of death! He winces as he feels a spasm in his gut from the poison. Then he smiles again. A little medical joke to finish with.
Buy for Dr Ecklin above mentioned one ofReade's best stomach-pumps.
Perhaps he should elaborate on this but now the pen feels heavy in his hand and his lids feel heavy on his eyes.
He sets the pen down, takes up the note and carefully pins it to his shirt. He drains the wineglass and hops across to his bed across which he sprawls supine.