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9th December 1783
There was a knock at the door. The Doctor brought in a tea tray.
‘Good morning, Dr Bloom,’ he said.
I didn’t answer, just stared out at the shore.
Eventually he spoke again. ‘I am sorry about your wife.’
‘And I am sorry I shot you.’
‘Well, there we are.’ The Doctor settled the tray down with a bang. ‘All friends, then. Let’s call it quits.’
This was the man who’d killed my wife. And he was sitting opposite me, smiling. I had killed him. I had made the decision. I’d pulled the trigger. I had decided to live with the consequences, and yet here he was.
The Doctor handed me something. It wasn’t tea.
‘You’re in shock,’ he said gently. ‘I think it’s brandy or sherry. Try it. It’s nice. Well, it’s brown.’
I tried to sip from the glass, but my hands were shaking. I put the glass down.
The Doctor was crouching in front of my chair, staring into my face. He wasn’t blinking at all. ‘I am so sorry. Look, I could say, “Prince Boris made me do it.” He manipulated us all. A brilliant strategist. But I thought I was doing the right thing. In a way…’
‘She was my wife.’
The Doctor shook his head, and repeated his lies. That she wasn’t. That she’d been in my life for a matter of months, an invention, a fiction. Something to control me, to make me trust the creature on the beach. All lies. I had known Perdita for… I had known Perdita… Perdita, the only woman who had ever trusted, believed or liked me.
And she wasn’t real.
‘Take your time,’ said the Doctor.
I realised the sun was setting. It does that ever so quickly in winter.
‘I know what you must think of me,’ he said, his voice so slow. It was like a voice designed for laughing that didn’t get to do it often. ‘I’m going to tell you a story about a man who travels, and everywhere he goes, he makes everyone’s lives better. I’m not that man. That man doesn’t exist. I wish he did.’ He smiled. ‘I’d believe in him.’
He tapped me on the knee.
‘I just try my best. I really do. Just like you – you are brilliant, you’re doing wonderful things. It’s people like you who will wipe out a terrible, terrible disease – but you’re not the man to do it. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. It will take time. A hundred years from now, places like this will be everywhere, and people will really understand the disease – but it takes a man like you to make that happen, to really sit down and have a think rather than telling people that they’re vampires, or should drink tar or…’ He stopped.
‘I was so close,’ I said. I noticed there wasn’t any expression in my voice. Just hope.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘But you weren’t, really. You’d just gone racing down a really fun-looking blind alley. Happens to us all. You thought you were curing a plague, but you were accidentally unleashing something much worse on the world… and for the best, the very best of reasons.’ He sighed. ‘I hate days like this.’
‘Could she have lived?’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘You were powering her. She was powering you.’
‘And my patients?’
He stood and stared out of the window. ‘Weather’s not too bad for winter, really, is it? Quite mild, all things considered.’
I knew then that was the best answer I’d get from this strange man.
He started absently fiddling with my desk, tidying it. He stopped suddenly, holding up a sheet of paper.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘What it looks like,’ I said.
He picked up sheet after sheet of paper, all from a neatly folded pile.
A pile of letters.
‘Maria?’ he smiled, flicking through them. ‘She’s been writing all this down? Oh, bless her. She’s got a lovely turn of phrase for an 11-year-old.’ He leafed on through the pile. ‘Although that’s not how that happened… and no, she’s wrong, bow ties are cool.’ He paused, and tutted at me. ‘You shouldn’t read other people’s letters, though,’ he admonished, before carrying on reading.
‘I haven’t been,’ I groaned. ‘I don’t read them any more.’
‘Then why have you been keeping her letters?’ He was cross. ‘Surely you post these on to her mother?’
I shook my head. ‘No, I am afraid we do not.’
The Doctor stopped, his hand shaking in mid air. ‘Why not?’
I chose my words carefully, like picking my way along an icy path. ‘The child’s mother does not wish any further contact with her.’
‘She’s abandoned her?’ The Doctor was outraged. ‘Just because she’s ill, her own mother’s disowned her? That’s inhuman. She’s a patient, not an orphan.’
‘She’s not the patient, Doctor.’ I paused. ‘Her mother was.’
The Doctor stopped. He picked up a letter and scanned through it, reading the words over and over. ‘ I am feeling better now… why am I here… when will I see you again? ’
I remembered that last day, the mother, packed and crying, waiting for the carriage, and Maria skipping about, all excited about going back to Paris.
Her mother looked at me, agonised. I stepped forward. ‘Maria, my dear, I am just the tiniest bit worried about your temperature.’ I laid a hand on the child’s forehead. ‘Yes. It’s a little high. I’m so sorry, but I cannot, I just cannot allow you to travel with your mother. For your own good. Not just yet.’
‘But Mother!’ protested Maria, not seeing the look on her mother’s face.
Maria started to cry. My dear Perdita hurried forward. ‘Now, now, Maria,’ she said. ‘We’re all worried about you – the filthy air of Paris… It’s no good, you know. It just won’t do. I really must insist. Just for a little while, until you are Quite Right.’ Maria looked up at her and, I genuinely think, started to hate her there and then.
‘Madame Bloom is right,’ Maria’s mother said to me, her eyes shining with tears. ‘Perhaps you might stay on.’ She paused, her face showing that she was in two minds. ‘I suppose… I suppose she must, mustn’t she, Dr Bloom?’ She faltered, indecision clear on her face.
My Perdita simply nodded, gripping hold of the girl by the shoulders as Maria’s mother climbed into that carriage and drove away.
Maria’s last words to her were, ‘I may write to you, Mother, mayn’t I?’
All this I remembered with sadness.
‘Her mother was one of my earliest patients, Doctor. When she got well… she left Maria behind. It was almost like she got well so as to get away from her, from the pain of seeing her again. It was too much for her.’
The Doctor’s voice was hollow and so sad. ‘Maria has no idea, does she?’
‘The poor woman fell ill soon after losing her daughter. The Sea was able to read her ever so well. It gave her back her daughter. Who healed her.’
The Doctor sat down on a chair, staring at me. Holding that last letter.
‘I’m sorry, Doctor. Maria is just a creature of The Sea. She’s not real.’
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