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First appeared in History Is Dead

Permuted Press specializes in post-apocalyptic and zombie fiction.

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Ridley had never noticed it, but Corliss had broad shoulders. Sad to say, the gaps between the prison bars were only so big. “Tug, Ridley, tug,” Corliss begged, twisting her body in the narrow slot.

Ridley tugged until the girl’s face coursed with tears but, alas, shoulders will not bend iron.

“It’s no use,” Corliss said. “I’ll never fit through this window.”

When you’re a deaf man, it doesn’t do to turn your back on a person’s lips, but Ridley’s knees had begun to buckle. He slumped to the ground on his side of the wall, coming face to face with his reflection in a puddle of horse piss. Corliss was right. They were beating their fists on a prison tower that had known the beating of fists for five hundred years. He wondered that he ever thought he could save her.

Ridley beat anyway.

A handkerchief fluttered from the window. In the piss, the reflection of a man wearing a hanky on his head gazed up at Ridley. He drew the lace down over his eyelids and pressed it to his nose. Lemon balm. Pennyroyal. Lavender.

Ridley stood up.

“There’s someone screaming in the surgery,” the girl’s lips informed him. “You should go back to your uncle.”

Ridley’s uncle was the barber surgeon and Ridley was his helper. Recently gout had been swelling up ankles from Gloucestershire down to Chelsea.

“He’s cut off another,” Corliss said. “I suppose my last hours will be spent listening to this?”

Ridley dug a lump of talc from his pocket and scrawled his answer on the ragstone sill: SOMETIMES IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO SAVE THEM. No sooner had he scratched the words, when a plan to rescue Corliss sprang to mind.

Ridley woke in the dark on his back with a pounding head and something resting on his chest. The last thing he remembered was fetching the brand iron from the surgery. After that, the world went black. Scrabbling for answers, he examined the thing on top of him; tracing flaps of skin, the tip of a bone, and a crinkly thatch of hair before getting to the crux of the matter. When his fingers met up with fingers that did not belong to him, he knew he was in the Moribund Room and he knew who’d put him there.

At first light, Corliss Pracy was scheduled to lose her head. While Ridley wondered how much time had passed, the amputated arm sat on his stomach, behaving as though it possessed the muscle to pin him to the floor. He flung it so hard, it bounced back and he had to throw it again. Thanks to the bump on his head, his skull was ringing like high noon.

“Do you know what ‘moribund’ means?” his uncle had asked when he first showed Ridley the room. Uncle Ambrose was proud of his secret room, naming it as carefully as he would a son. “‘On the point of death,’ Ridley. That’s what it means. Everything in this room is dying or trying its damnedest to cause death and I want to know why. On the king’s map, it shows the room as destroyed, but I needed a place to store the half-dead and what’s left of the place suits me fine.”

Uncle Ambrose kept a lamp in the corner and Ridley had no choice but to squish about on hands and knees if he wanted to find it. Before he stumbled on the lamp, he found the ax. The handle was broken off and the blade was crusted with hair and filth. While he was stuffing it in his pocket, his toe brushed the lamp. Five scratches of flint later, Ridley had the thing lit.

Someone had written something in red ochre on the wall: I WILL LET YOU OUT WHEN THE EXECUTIONER’S WORK IS DONE

Ridley threw his fist at the door and blood from his knuckles dripped through a second set of red words: IT’S FOR YOUR OWN GOOD RIDLEY TOM

Ridley Tom was the nephew of Ambrose Pratt, barber surgeon to the king of England, and thus, his fate had become inexplicitly linked to the moldering of royal appendages.

The year before, when Ridley turned nineteen, there was an outbreak of sweating sickness. Uncle Ambrose needed a man with a strong stomach and tight lips. In a letter to Ridley’s home at Honey Acres, he wrote, “I require a helper who will not feel inclined to prattle on about my private medical experiments.”

Ridley was not a prattler and the Toms were dedicated Congregationalists of the highest accord. There was a sign hanging over their front door that read, “WHO TRAVELS FOR LOVE FINDS A THOUSAND MILES NOT LONGER THAN ONE.” The Toms lived by this belief; therefore the letter was folded and put next to his mother’s heart and the matter was settled as easy as that. Ridley would leave the sun-bleached brood boxes of his father’s apiary to help his uncle in the blood-stained salt house in Brick Tower used as the royal surgery. This was just as well, his father said, blinking back his tears. Bees, unlike barber surgeons, were known to thrive on gossip.

What Uncle Ambrose failed to mention was that a barber surgeon had not survived a winter at the Tower in three years. The same was true for helpers. Uncle Ambrose, it turned out, failed to mention a good many things. Consequently, Ridley was knee-deep in his uncle’s secrets when the king came to seek him out.

Because few people could carry on a conversation with a deaf man in writing, Ridley had learned to draw. Most days, he went about his business in silence, but upon occasion it served his purpose to sketch someone or something. Shortly after Ridley’s arrival, the king began to notice a flurry of little drawings tucked into servant’s waist bands and propped in the corners of dressing table mirrors.

One day, while searching out the second cook, the king spied Ridley sitting atop a pile of green cup cabbage sketching one of the castle’s toilet courtiers on a piece of broken shoe sole. After learning that the barber’s helper could not hear or speak, the king had Ridley brought to his mural gallery.

As Hercules suffered to choose between Wisdom and Folly on the ceiling overhead, the king peered at Ridley over the rim of his goblet, gulped loudly, and wiped his lips on the back of his hand. “Thin as a starveling, aren’t you, boy? Still, I suppose you’ll do.”

Ridley read between the smacks as the man dug into lunch. “I am in need of a wedding present for my new wife-to-be and I would like you to draw her picture.”

Ridley glanced at the gods charioting up and down the walls in expert strokes of russet, cyan, and parrot green. Even a starveling knows that kings and queens are painted by court painters, not bee-keepers turned barbers. The king’s favorite at this time was a square-jawed fat man called Hans Holbein the Younger, who had painted a great many royal heads in his time. In contrast, Ridley was untrained, inexperienced, and still trying to come to grips with the work of a bone saw, but the king didn’t appear to care about that.

“The lady has an affinity for the unhearing,” he explained. “She’s always said as much.” With that, he called for his wife-to-be.

Not his first wife, whom he had divorced after she failed to give him an heir. Not his second or third wives either, for each of them had met with a miserable end.

“Ah, here she is,” the king said, gesturing with a chicken leg. “Mister Tom, meet my future queen, Corliss of Lenoncourt.”

On the day Ridley left home, his mother solemnly instructed, “Remember son – God loves a cheerful giver.”

Ridley was prepared to do whatever he was asked to do but his schedule was very busy. Afternoons, he buried the contagious in a dead garden behind the bell tower and covered the barrow tracks with a sweep of his boot on the way back. Come three o’clock, he prepared a second set of coffins to be handed off to the loved ones of the contaminated dead – six stout stones for a tall man, two for a child. Evenings he held down the maimed and fevered beneath his uncle’s knife. Outside of a few quick scribbles here and there, there was no time for drawing.

In the middle of it all, there were the experiments.

WHY KEEP A FINGER? Ridley once asked.

“Study, my boy! Cutting away disease can’t be the best way to save lives. I want to fix the disease.”

Ridley was a busy man. Indeed, he was living in the very hub of modern society.

“Did they slather your ears with fox grease and stuff them with hare gall?” Corliss wanted to know five minutes after making his acquaintance. The girl was only seventeen but she was not without experience when it came to the deaf. “My mother lost her hearing when she was a child and they made her sleep with sea shells under her pillow for a year. Didn’t work though.”

Seeing how Ridley had popped from the womb in his present state, he’d been put through a great number of “cures” in his time. “What’s the worst they did to you?” Corliss of Lenoncourt wanted to know.

Being a noble, it was a good bet Corliss could read in both English and French. In order to avoid telling a pretty girl something unpleasant, however, Ridley drew a picture of himself with a stick in his ear. In this way, Ridley Tom was spared the ordeal of writing about the urine mixed with garlic he’d once gulped down while standing on one foot. Better still, the stick made the pretty girl laugh so hard, he could almost hear it.

“I have an affinity for the unhearing, Mister Tom. I’ve always said as much.”

Ridley liked the girl right off but he got down to the job at hand and finished with her in a day.

“No! No!” the king said. “I want detail. I want color. This will take you weeks to complete.”

Ridley was not that sort of artist but the king was the king after all. Ridley asked for a supply of salmon-pink paper, four bottles of brown ink, and some red and black chalk, and made up his mind to be colorful.

Each day, Corliss was rustled from her bed at cockcrow to perch for long yawning hours on a cushion of pointy seed pearls. In the afternoon, Ridley continued in the surgery. “Bring me that arm from yesterday,” Uncle Ambrose would say, or else he might ask for a toe or a thumb.

Picking through parts in the Moribund Room, Ridley would often find himself wishing he was in the bedchamber of the king’s soon-to-be-wife, quill bobbing between fingers stained with equal parts old blood and ink as he worked to put the sparkle of a ruby to paper.

“Cut it open along the wrist,” his uncle was often inclined to instruct. “Let’s see what’s going on in there.”

It was a strange thing, digging under people’s skin.

Then came the day that Uncle Ambrose brought the boy back to life…

It was the celandine tincture that did it and it had worked two other times, as well. In the first instance, the woman lived. In the second, the woman lived but died again the next day. This time it was the son of the king’s deputy, a ten year old with a sluggish heart by the name of Phinneas Grey. Uncle Ambrose anointed the child’s head with the quintessence, and the boy perked up like a feather plume.

Like most barbers, Uncle Ambrose was not schooled in medicine. Rather, he was a Lullist, a self-proclaimed disciple of the great Doctor Illuminatus, Raimondo Lull. Tucked away in the dead mathematician’s teachings, Uncle Ambrose had stumbled upon a recipe. The Fifth Essence, he called it, for it stirred up something well beyond the four elements of fire, water, air, and earth found in all living things. Uncle Ambrose had copied the recipe word for word:

Roots of celandine flowers for man’s history
Cumin seeds for his ancestry
Saffron for the inner light found in all humble creatures
Shavings of box for the fragile perimeters of the human existence

Lullists, like Congregationionalists, it seemed, were constantly called to serve. Uncle Ambrose shook, bruised, and pestled the Fifth Essence as if he were a priest at holy sacraments.

He explained his calling like this: “Sometimes, when a person leaves the world, I see a sort of rope dangling along behind them and I know I must try and grab hold. For those precious few, I rub the Fifth Essence on the skull above the brain and let it abide for twenty-four hours. If nothing becomes of it, I know for certain that the rope was beyond my reach.”

Like most men, Uncle Ambrose grew more philosophical the more cider he drank. Uncle Ambrose, Ridley had learned, was philosophical most all the time.

Phinneas Grey had been dead an hour, his father still pacing the outer ward and awaiting news, when Uncle Ambrose decided the boy might yet be within reach. The way the child shot up seemed a promising sign.

WILL HE LIVE, UNCLE?

Uncle Ambrose gulped his tipple. “We best see that he does.”

It was an odd road Ridley traveled. Separated by but a few cobbles, there was the embroidered pillows and velvet counterpanes of Corliss Pracy’s bedchamber, immediately followed by the gray flesh, black boils, and purple swellings of the surgery. He might have liked the former better had the king ever seemed the least bit pleased with his efforts. As it happened, the man demanded numerous re-starts and threw regular tantrums. “Try it by the window. She looks too gloomy this way…. Tear it up! I want something more serious.”

Ridley ripped and balled-up and burned his work and the weeks turned into a month. As time rolled on, he found himself to be in the unlikely confidence of England’s future queen. Corliss told Ridley how the king had looked at dozens of portraits and bloodlines and political connections before deciding that marriage to the sister of a leader from the Schmalkaldic League offered the best possible chance for securing the neutrality of France. She explained coronations, the Ceremony of the Keys, and other monarch matters to Ridley. She spoke of her endless worries. “He nearly dropped dead on the boat docks when he saw me in person,” Corliss said. “He thinks I look too much like his daughter Mary.”

Ridley read her lips but did not answer. The day before she had confided that the king was concerned she would give him a deaf heir. Corliss Pracy’s greatest fear was that the king was disappointed in her.

“They say Mary and I might well be twins if not for the fact that she’s seven years older than me. But then, I suppose you’ve heard the gossip?”

Ridley replied in sanguine chalk: NOT A WORD

This made Corliss smile. “How is it that you know how to write, Mister Tom?”

Sometimes it was almost impossible to remember the simplicity of life in the valley of Buttermere. In those days, Ridley’s hands and thoughts were always clean. Life was golden. MY FATHER TRADED THREE BARRELS OF HEATH HONEY SO WE COULD GO TO PETTY SCHOOL.

“We?”

Ridley nodded. HE SAT IN A LITTLE CHAIR WITH HIS KNEES TO HIS CHIN LEARNING SENECA BESIDE LADS IN SKIRTS.

“Your father did this just for you?”

Ridley scratched his answer in chalk. WHO TRAVELS FOR LOVE FINDS A THOUSAND MILES NOT LONGER THAN ONE.

Her eyes got very dark. “My family is not like that. One mile would prove a thousand.”

Ridley couldn’t imagine coming from such people. His brothers and sisters had eaten once a day for four months so that Ridley could go to school and learn to converse through their father.

“It must be wonderful to be loved like that.”

Sometimes, Ridley pretended to contemplate Corliss for the purpose of a pen stroke when really he just enjoyed looking at her. Her fingers were constantly playing at threads or gold rings or lose strands of hair. Corliss was like the damselflies that fluttered round the horsemint back home, her hands a delicate whirlwind of wing beats.

“What’s your Christian name, Mister Tom?”

RIDLEY.

“R–id-ley.” He liked the way she said it – the “R,” a kiss; the “id,” a pink flicker against the roof of her mouth; the “ley,” a slow uncurling of her tongue. He could have watched her say his name all day.“Do you think I look like his daughter, R-id-ley?” she asked, fingers settling on a red-brown curl like a jewelwing on a marigold.

THERE’S ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN YOUR SMILE.

Corliss smiled and, with a kiss, a flick, and a curl of tongue, said his name in a way that made him stare too long, pen and breath suspended until the damselfly fluttered on to other things.

There didn’t seem to be much danger in loving someone who could not love you back. Ridley understood that he was more suited to the rough hands of the skinner’s widow whom he sometimes comforted out back against the slaughterhouse wall. That didn’t stop him from dreaming of Corliss Pracy’s soft hands. He’d felt them once when she slid a loose eye lash off his cheek. Her fingers were as soft as silk and they didn’t smell a bit like rabbit either. “Make a wish,” she’d commanded, presenting the lash before his lips on the tip of a silken finger.

Ridley could not have wished for one thing more at that moment so he moved the finger over to her own lips and gave her his wish.

Corliss closed her eyes. “I wish I were not sick with worry all the time.”

She blew the wish away.