DAVID ESDAILE
My earliest memories are from Montrose, where Jamie and I were born. It is a town by the sea, and my mother used to say that seawater flowed in our veins.
When we were old enough, we were sent to the new Montrose Academy, and it was there we caught the fever for learning. I turned to my father’s profession—the profession of the faith. For Jamie, it was the sciences. Every day we would see men who had fought Boney—the original one, not the current one. The lucky ones were hale, but many were not; they would walk with a limp or have a leg off or suffer the consumptive’s cough; he wanted to change all that, to heal the bodies as I wanted to heal their souls.
When I was fourteen, Father was granted a living at East Church in Perth. It was a great change for our family, as we left the town we had known all our lives to go to live in the house on Rose Terrace; but it represented a great gain in Father’s income—enough that both Jamie and I could enter University in Edinburgh. I had thought to read the law, but I think my head is too hard for that—but just hard enough for the Kirk. My brother never had trouble with any sort of learning, and by the time he was twenty-two had been awarded his degree in medicine, even though he had periods of ill health—but he was determined and stubborn. Yes, all Scotsmen are like that, but Esdailes most of all.
Yes, that’s right: it was not too long afterward that he married Mary Ann. She was beautiful—I think a poet might use the word “lissome”—and Jamie was smitten with her. Our father came down from Perth to perform the ceremony, and I—at nineteen—stood up with my brother and held his wedding band. It makes me smile all these years later to think of how happy they both were. How happy we all were.
The Lord giveth and taketh away, Reverend Davey. Establishing a medical practice was much harder than procuring the education for one—and it quickly became apparent to my brother that he would have to seek a better alternative than giving most of his earnings to a more senior surgeon just to have his name on an older man’s consulting-office door. Some time the following year—1831, I think it was—he told us that he had taken a position with the East India Company and that he and Mary Ann would be embarking for Calcutta.
I did not see him again for twenty years, and it was the last time I ever laid eyes upon Mary Ann. She was so beautiful, like a figure from a dream; we went to see them off when they took ship for India—and it seemed to me that she looked a little forlorn, as if she knew that she would never see her home again.
Jamie and I corresponded extensively. I have saved every letter, with fair copies of my replies. Neither he nor Mary Ann enjoyed good health in India or elsewhere. He had a breakdown and was granted leave to travel—they went to Egypt and the Holy Land. Ah, to be with them—he saw the Pyramids and the great Sphinx, and toured the Holy Land and walked in the steps of the Savior—I have a copy of his book: Letters From the Red Sea, Egypt and the Continent—all about his travels there.
Did he like the people he met? No, he did not; I should say that he disliked them very much. In Jamie’s world, there were Scotsmen, and then other Britons, and then other peoples—it is a wonder to me that he was willing to go to India at all. He particularly disliked Egyptians—the modern ones—which I daresay makes some of what I shall tell you a trifle ironic.
I received a letter from him in the summer of 1839. Here, let me show it to you: very clipped, very clinical, as if he were reporting a statistic at his hospital. My dear Mary Ann passed without pain this morning after a quiet night; I held her hand to the end.
That was all he had to say. My words of comfort were my best ones—I wrote and rewrote the letter a half-dozen times, showing it to my Mary each time—and it always sounded like no more than words from a dream, something that could mean nothing to him in the harsh daylight of tropical India. His dear wife, whom we had come to love so much, had departed this life like a whisper. Mary keeps her last letter, just as Jamie always kept Mary’s last letter to her, sealed in its envelope unread—as it arrived two weeks after her death.
Changed? Of course. It is hard to conceive otherwise. The very tenor of his letters became different—shorter, less substantial. He wrote about the weather and his work and his little expeditions with his friend Fergusson—
When did they meet, you say? Not long after he arrived. Two kindred souls, sons of Scotland thousands of miles from home. I think they were drawn to each other because they were so different: Mr. Fergusson was a prosperous farmer, of indigo I believe, who had come to India to make his fortune—and make it he did!—and because of his love of the culture and the monuments it had left behind. It was completely unlike my brother’s views. James Fergusson was a collector, Jamie told me, with shelves and shelves of these things, trinkets and keepsakes and mementoes. They used to sit up late at night and talk about ancient history, and what could be learned from it.
Now, as to my father and how he comes into this story. He was a tireless worker, Reverend Davey, and it caught up with him while I was still in Perth. I had obtained a position as his clerk, as there was no living available for me—and it was much to my liking: Perth was a pleasant burgh in those days; I worked with my father and tutored Latin and Greek at Perth Academy in the evenings, as I was not distracted by any love interests at the time.
And as was my custom, I always called upon my father before retiring. He usually burned the lamp late into the night, so it was not unusual for me to find him in his study, bent over a sermon or the translation of some passage in Greek or Latin.
I returned late one night and knocked on his study door. When he did not answer, I entered—something, I should say, that he had specifically ordered me never to do. I found him collapsed on the floor—he had suffered a fit of apoplexy, or—as Jamie termed it in a letter—a stroke.
I remember at the time that though he could hardly speak, he required of me to gather up all of the sheets of the manuscript on which he had been laboring, along with the little book that lay open on his desk. Keep these to yourself, Davie, he said to me. Let no man see them, and I will take them back when I recover.
All I had in mind was his recovery—and surely there were more valuable things in that study to be secured—but this was his primary concern. I did as I was bid, placing them under lock and key in my own little office after helping him to the hospital.
Did I examine them? I did not. Not until much later. I shall return to that subject when my story reaches it, Reverend; you must possess yourself in patience.
My father labored in his recovery just as he had done with everything else. He was alone in the world now, except for a few distant cousins and myself; our mother had died not long after Jamie took ship for India. He was nearly seventy, a well-respected minister and scholar, with one son following in his calling and another a successful doctor in India. He was proud—not as a besetting sin, but as a man grown long in years who could happily reflect upon a well-spent life. If the Lord had extended His hand and plucked him away, there is no one, not even me, who would have said that his time had been cruelly cut short.
After a month, he could walk again, more slowly than he had done, but steadily and firmly with the slightest aid of a cane. During his convalescence, he had resumed his reading, and as soon as he was able he returned to his study. I placed strict limits on his evening hours, packing him off to rest much earlier than he ever desired.
The manuscript? Why, I returned it to his care, of course. While he recovered, during which time I took up his responsibilities as minister in East Church, it was the object of his closest attention. He was copying it by hand; he refused to let me see it, much less assist him with the laborious task. When the task was complete, he spoke no more of it—and I never saw the original book again. His copy was placed in a locked drawer in his desk and he did not speak of it further.
My service in his stead was sufficient for my father to make an attempt to find me a living of my own. I think it is possible that his illness had caused a sort of sympathy for him among his colleagues and friends, but I should like to believe that I distinguished myself well enough to merit consideration.
In any case, it took almost eighteen months for his efforts to bear fruit. In the summer of 1844 this parish lost its minister, and Father made application for it on my behalf. There had been a great deal of turmoil in the Church: Father was a Free Churchman, as were most in this part of Scotland, and I was evidently chosen in preference to some patronage candidate. Whatever the case, I was installed here and soon I felt right at home.
My Mary was born and raised in Forfar, Reverend. And while she is nearly fifteen years my junior, she has been as good a wife and mother as anyone I could have imagined. My father was very fond of her, and she him—after the railway reached Perth he would take the cars and hire a carriage and come to visit; when he finally chose to retire in 1849, she welcomed him into our home. He sat up nights with little Mary when she had the colic—he knew as much about bairns as any man I know.
Father’s health had almost completely returned by the time he came here to Rescobie; when I broke an arm trying to fix the roof of the church, he stepped into my pulpit as readily as I had stepped into his. He went for walks in the country and spent time reading and writing.
I think I would have liked things to continue that way until Mary and I were old and gray, and the children all grown and gone on to their own lives. But it was not to be.
WILLIAM DAVEY
David Esdaile had a gift for storytelling, and as he warmed to his subject he became animated—he almost transformed into a different person, far removed from the bitterness and anger he had displayed when we first met.
As he began his tale, we had taken seats in the parlor, and Mary had kept the children at a polite distance all afternoon; the narrative had carried us halfway through the century, and was even more detailed than the summary I recount. It struck me as odd that he had chosen to pour it out to me—but upon reflection, I realized that David Esdaile had been waiting for years to tell some portion of this story; whatever he wanted to convey, whatever secrets he sought to reveal, he had been awaiting the proper ear. If I had possessed a more villainous appearance, I might not have been offered his account; or perhaps there was more to it than that.
Whatever the case, he chose to share it with me without pause until we could barely discern the outline of Turin Hill in the distance. Only when Mary entered the room to light the lamps did we realize that it had grown dark—not the sort that we know in great cities like London, but the dark of the country, bereft of streetlamps and the intrusions of civilization.
Esdaile excused himself from the room, leaving me sitting in an armchair as Mary moved about.
“Your husband has great skill as a storyteller,” I said.
She stopped, facing away from me. “You make it sound as if he is fashioning a tale for the children,” she answered, without turning.
“I mean nothing of the kind.”
“He has told me something about you,” she said, turning to face me. “And James told me too, years ago, when I suppose that I was too young to truly understand. When David received your letter a few weeks ago, I asked him why he should want to have someone like you in our house.”
“I did not expect to be received so courteously.”
“You do not know my husband,” she answered. She hesitated, then came and sat in the chair David Esdaile had so recently occupied. She folded her hands in her lap and looked directly at me, with the sort of focus I customarily expected from a practitioner of the Art; but there were no gestures or passes, merely the intensity of her gaze.
“I confess that I do not.”
“He quoted Scripture, Reverend Davey. ‘Love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.’”
“The Gospel of Luke,” I said.
“The doctor,” she agreed. “He told me that all of this tragedy was like a disease—all of the hatred, all of the anger. He wondered what you would have to say. And when it seemed that you had come not to say but to hear, he told me that he wanted to tell you his story.”
She clenched her hands, gathering up little handfuls of her apron and the skirt below it. “But it is no story, sir. It is something that tore apart two brothers and terrified me. I wanted it to remain as far from this house, from Rescobie, from my children, as possible. When James died, I thought it was gone for good.”
“I am not here to frighten you, Mrs. Esdaile,” I said. “And that which frightened you is no more. I shall not bring it back.”
“You have no idea what frightens me. You—you have no idea.”
At that moment, David Esdaile returned to the parlor. He looked at me, then a bit more curiously at his wife; some unspoken communication may have occurred between them. She stood and without a word made her way out of the room.
“We can continue this later,” he said. “It is time for tea.”