“What have you done to her?” she yelled at Dowd. “Undone, lovely, undone. Let her be. You can’t help her now.”
Clara’s body was light, but when her legs buckled she carried Jude down with her. Her moans had become howls now, as she reached up to her face as if to scratch out her eyes, for there the mites were at some agonizing work. In -desperation Jude tried to feel for the creatures in the darkness, but either they were too fast for her fingers or they’d gone where fingers couldn’t follow. All she could do was beg for a reprieve.
“Make them stop,” she said to Dowd. “Whatever you want, I’ll do, butplease make them stop.”
“They’re voracious little sods, aren’t they?” he said. He was crouching in front of the eye, the blue light illuminating his face, which wore a mask of chilling serenity. As she watched he picked mites from around his mouth and let them drop to the ground.
“I’m afraid they’ve got no ears, so I can’t call them back,” he said. “They only know how to unmake. And they’ll unmake anything but their maker. In this case, that’s me. So I’d leave her alone, if I were you. They’re indiscriminate.”
She turned her attention back to the woman in her arms. Clara had given up scratching at her eyes, and the tremors in her body were rapidly diminishing.
“Speak to me,” Jude said. She reached for Clara’s face, a little ashamed of how tentative Dowd’s warning had made her.
There was no answer from the body, unless there were words in Clara’s dying moans. Jude listened, hoping to find some vestigial sense there, but there was none. She felt a single spasm pass down Clara’s spine, as though something in her head had snapped, and then the whole system stopped dead. From the moment when Dowd had first appeared, perhaps ninety seconds had passed. In that time every hope that had gathered here had been undone. She wondered if Celestine had heard this tragedy unfold, another’s suffering adding to her own sum.
“Dead, then, lovey,” Dowd said.
Jude let Clara’s body slip from her arms into the grass.
“We should be going,” he went on, his tone so bland they might have been forsaking a picnic instead of a corpse. “Don’t worry about Clara. I’ll fetch what’s left of her later.”
She heard the sound of his feet behind her and stood up, rather than be touched by him. Overhead, another jet was roaring in the clouds. She looked towards the eye, but it too had been unmade.
“Destroyer,” she said.
28
Gentle had forgotten his short exchange with Aping about their shared enthusiasm for painting, but Aping had not. The morning after the wedding in Athanasius’ cell, the sergeant came to fetch Gentle and escorted him to a room at the other end of the building, which he had turned into a studio. It had plenty of windows, so the light was as good as this region was ever likely to supply, and he had gathered over the months of his posting here an enviable selection of materials. The products of this workplace were, however, those of the most uninspired dilettante. Designed without compositional skill and painted without sense of color, their only real point of interest lay in their obsessiveness. There were, Aping proudly told Gentle, one hundred and fifty-three pictures, and their subject was unchanging: his child, Huzzah, the merest mention of whom had caused the loving portraitist such unease. Now, in the privacy of his place of inspiration, he explained why. His daughter was young, he said, and her mother dead; he’d been obliged to bring her with him when orders from Iahmandhas moved him to the Cradle.
“I could have left her in L’Himby,” he told Gentle. “But who knows what kind of harm she’d have come to if I’d done that? She’s a child.”
“So she’s here on the island?”
“Yes, she is. But she won’t step out of her room in the daytime. She’s afraid of catching the madness, she says. I love her very much. And as you can see”—he indicated the paintings—“she’s very beautiful.”
Gentle was obliged to take the man’s word for it. “Where is she now?” he asked.