Lavender and Grey Eyes

Agnes Moody had been born in the year 1684, in a room less than two hundred yards from the one in which she was dying. Eighty-one years separated those rooms — eighty-one years of marriages and childbirths and burials, of wars declared and treaties signed, of monarchs crowned and deposed and replaced, of ships launched and ships lost and ships broken up for timber in the same yards where they had been built. She had outlived Queen Anne, the first two Georges, and the better part of the third's reign. She had buried her first husband, a dockyard labourer named William Moody, in 1723, and her second, a fisherman named Thomas Garner, in 1749. She had borne eight children across both marriages. Three survived. The other five lay in St Thomas's churchyard beneath markers that the salt wind had worn to illegibility, their names preserved only in the parish register and in the memory of a woman whose capacity for memory was, even now, more reliable than any record Henry Coward maintained.

She had not attended church since 1753. The reasons were her own, and she had never offered them to anyone who asked, which few people did, because Agnes Moody's opinions on matters of faith and observance were understood by her neighbours to be settled, personal, and resistant to the persuasion of clergy who had not earned the authority they claimed. Father Harding had visited her twice a year until his death, drinking the tea she offered and accepting the silence she returned in place of the spiritual conversation he attempted. He had liked her. He had also understood that liking her and ministering to her were different activities, and that she would permit the first whilst declining the second with a courtesy that was more final than any rudeness could have been.

Her granddaughter Ruth kept her now. Ruth Garner, twenty-three years old, daughter of Agnes's youngest surviving child, Mary, who had married a caulker named Garner — no relation to Agnes's second husband, the name being common in Portsmouth — and who had died of childbed fever in 1747, leaving Ruth to be raised by the grandmother whose capacity for raising children had been tested so frequently that it had become less a skill than a reflex. Ruth worked as a seamstress for a tailor on the High Street, earning enough to pay the rent on the ground-floor room they shared and to feed them both if the portions were calculated with the precision that Agnes had spent eighty-one years perfecting.

The fever had taken Agnes on the twenty-sixth of January. Ruth had come home from the tailor's shop to find her grandmother on the floor between the bed and the hearth, conscious but unable to rise, her skin carrying the heat that every household on Butcher Row had learned to recognise over the preceding three weeks. The fall had opened a cut on Agnes's forehead that bled freely and would not be stitched because Ruth could not afford Creed's fee and because Agnes, when Ruth suggested sending for the physician, had produced a sound that was not quite a word but that communicated, with the eloquence of a woman who had outlived the need for complete sentences, that she considered medical intervention at eighty-one to be an impertinence.

Ruth had sent for the curate instead, not because Agnes had requested spiritual counsel but because Ruth did not know what else to do and because the parish church represented, in the absence of money for physicians or the presence of family members who might share the burden, the only institutional resource available to a young woman whose grandmother was dying and whose experience of death was limited to a childhood memory of being told that her mother had gone to heaven, an explanation that had satisfied her at five and that she had not revisited since.

Nathaniel arrived at the Moody room on the morning of the third of February. He had been awake since three. The pattern of sleeplessness that had established itself after Eleanor Simmonds's death had deepened in the ten days since Peter Aldridge's, compounded by something worse than exhaustion — a hollowness behind his sternum that accompanied him through every waking hour and that he had come to understand was not physical in origin but theological. The prayer book sat in his coat pocket with the weight of an object whose utility he could no longer confirm. He carried it because carrying it was what curates did. He opened it because opening it was what the rites required. The relationship between these mechanical actions and the faith they were supposed to express had become, since the afternoon on Oyster Street, a question he could identify but not answer.

He had continued his visits. Every day, sometimes twice, he walked the streets between the rectory and the dockside quarter, entering rooms that the fever had marked, sitting with families whose circumstances varied in their particulars but shared the same essential structure: too many people in too small a space, with too little money and too few options and a disease that exploited every insufficiency with an thoroughness that felt, if one allowed oneself the indulgence of attribution, deliberate. He read the prayers. He spoke the words. He performed the function that the parish expected and the bishop had authorised and that Nathaniel himself had once believed constituted meaningful service to God and neighbour.

The performance had become precisely that — a performance. The distinction between genuine ministry and its simulation was invisible from the outside. The families he visited could not tell that the curate who opened his prayer book at their bedsides was operating from a script rather than from conviction. The words were the same. The tone was the same. The gestures of compassion — the hand on the arm, the bowed head, the quiet assurance that the parish would provide — were the same. What had changed was interior, private, undetectable by anyone who was not Nathaniel Blackwood standing inside Nathaniel Blackwood's skin and feeling the absence where something had previously resided.

The Moody room was warmer than most. Ruth had maintained the fire with a diligence that reflected both her care for Agnes and her understanding that an eighty-one-year-old body fighting fever required external heat that a younger body might generate on its own. The coals glowed in the grate, casting an orange light that competed with the grey morning filtering through the window and won. The room smelled of wood smoke and lavender — Ruth had placed dried sprigs on the pillow, a folk remedy or a gesture of tenderness or both, the distinction being one that mattered to physicians and not at all to granddaughters.

Agnes lay on the bed with her eyes closed. Her face in repose was a landscape of accumulated time — lines carved by decades of squinting against harbour glare, hollows where the flesh had retreated from cheekbones that had once been prominent and were now merely sharp, a mouth whose lips had thinned to the point where the line between them was barely distinguishable from the creases surrounding them. Her hair, white and sparse, spread across the pillow in strands that the lavender sprigs held in place. Her hands rested on the blanket, crossed at the wrists, the fingers slightly curled — hands that had washed clothes and gutted fish and delivered children and laid out the dead and performed the thousand daily tasks that eighty-one years of working-class life in a naval port required.

Her breathing was slow but not laboured. This was the detail that Nathaniel noticed first, and it confused him, because the breathing of the dying had acquired, over three weeks of observation, a set of characteristics he had learned to read the way Creed read pulses and temperatures. The dying breathed with effort. Their inhalations carried friction — the rasp of fluid, the catch of muscles too exhausted to expand the chest fully, the irregular rhythm that preceded the final arrhythmia. Agnes breathed with the evenness of deep sleep, each breath arriving and departing without struggle, as though her body had reached an agreement with the process that was ending it and had decided to cooperate rather than resist.

Ruth sat in the room's single chair, pulled close to the bed, her sewing in her lap — not because she was working but because the needle and cloth provided her hands with something to hold that was not her grandmother's hand, which she had held through most of the night and which she had released only when the need to maintain the fire had drawn her away. She looked at Nathaniel with eyes that were red from sleeplessness and dry from the particular discipline of a woman who had decided that weeping would not help and had enforced the decision with the same practicality she applied to the household budget.

Nathaniel sat on the stool Ruth had placed beside the bed. He took the prayer book from his pocket, opened it to the page he had opened so many times that the binding fell to it naturally, and prepared to read the words that had become, since Aldridge's death, shapes on a page rather than vehicles of meaning.

Agnes opened her eyes.

The movement was sudden enough to arrest Nathaniel's hand mid-gesture, the prayer book half-raised, his mouth forming the first syllable of the commendation. Her eyes were clear. Not merely open — clear, focused, carrying an alertness that the fever should have precluded and that her condition over the preceding eight days had given no indication she possessed. They were pale grey, the colour leached by age from whatever darker shade they had held in youth, and they looked at Nathaniel with a directness that bypassed the social conventions governing interactions between elderly women and young clergymen and arrived at something more fundamental.

She was not looking at him. She was looking at something that occupied the same space he occupied, or the space immediately behind him, or a space that his presence had somehow made visible — the distinction was unclear because Agnes's gaze, whilst directed toward him, passed through him in a way that made Nathaniel feel, for a disorienting moment, that he was the less substantial presence in the room.

Ruth had risen from her chair. She stood beside the bed, her sewing fallen to the floor, her hand reaching for her grandmother's arm. Agnes did not acknowledge her. The old woman's attention was fixed on whatever she was seeing with an intensity that excluded everything else — the room, the fire, the granddaughter, the curate, the prayer book, the fever, the eighty-one years that had preceded this moment and that now seemed, in the quality of her gaze, to have been preparation for it.

Her lips moved. The words that emerged were quiet, barely voiced, produced by a throat that had taken no water since the previous evening and that should not have been capable of sustained speech. Ruth leaned closer. Nathaniel leaned closer. The fire crackled in the grate and the wind moved against the window and somewhere on Butcher Row a door slammed and a child cried out and the ordinary sounds of a February morning in Portsmouth continued with the indifference that the ordinary maintained toward the extraordinary, even when the extraordinary was happening twelve feet away behind a closed door in a room that smelled of lavender and wood smoke.

Agnes spoke names. Not the names of people present. Not the names Ruth recognised from the family she knew. Names that belonged to the dead — her first husband William, gone forty-two years. Her children who had not survived: Edward, taken by smallpox at three. Sarah, dead in infancy before christening. The second Thomas, drowned at eleven in the harbour where his stepfather fished. Margaret, buried at seventeen after a pregnancy that killed both her and the child she carried. And others — names that Ruth had never heard, that belonged to no one in the parish register, that Agnes spoke with the familiarity of a woman addressing people she could see standing before her in a room that contained, by any objective measure, only three living occupants and the accumulated possessions of a life that was ending.

She was not delirious. Nathaniel had sat with delirious patients — had watched the fever carry them into landscapes of confusion where the living and the dead mingled without distinction, where the walls of the room dissolved into memories that surfaced and receded without logic or coherence. Delirium was disordered. What was happening to Agnes Moody was not disordered. Her speech followed a sequence. Her attention moved between the presences she was addressing with the purposefulness of a woman receiving visitors — acknowledging each in turn, responding to communications that only she could hear, conducting a conversation whose other participants existed beyond the threshold of what Nathaniel's senses could perceive.

Her face changed as she spoke. The lines softened. The tension that illness and age had written into her features eased, replaced by an expression that Nathaniel could not immediately identify because he had not seen it before on the face of a dying person. It was not peace — peace was passive, the absence of struggle, a settling. This was active. Her face carried the quality of recognition, of encounter, of a woman seeing something she had been expecting for a long time and finding that the reality of it exceeded whatever she had imagined during the decades of waiting.

She spoke to William Moody with the tone of a wife who had been interrupted mid-sentence forty-two years ago and was resuming the conversation as though the interruption had been minor. She spoke to the children she had buried with a tenderness that was unsentimental — not the idealised grief of a mother mourning perfect infants but the specific, practical love of a woman who remembered each child as they had actually been, flawed and difficult and particular, and who was glad to see them again in precisely that form.

Nathaniel did not move. The prayer book lay open in his hands, its pages carrying words that had been written to address this exact situation — the passage of a soul from life into whatever awaited — and the words had nothing to offer that was not already happening without them. The liturgy provided a framework for death. Agnes Moody did not require a framework. She was navigating her own passage with a competence that made the Church's prescribed assistance look like a stranger offering directions to a woman who had already arrived.

Ruth was weeping. The discipline she had maintained through the night had broken, not from grief but from something that did not have a name in the vocabulary available to a twenty-three-year-old seamstress who had been taught to believe in God and heaven in the general way that working-class Portsmouth believed in such things — as furniture in a room one had never entered, accepted on the authority of people who claimed to have seen it. What her grandmother's face and voice were showing her was not the general heaven of Sunday sermons. It was specific. It was populated. It was personal in a way that made the doctrinal assertions Ruth had absorbed since childhood feel like a rough sketch confronted by the thing it had been attempting to represent.

The room held its breath. The fire burned. The lavender on the pillow released its scent into air that was warm and still and charged with something that Nathaniel could not see but that he could feel against his skin the way a man standing on a hilltop feels the proximity of a storm that has not yet broken — a pressure, an electricity, a sense that the atmosphere itself had been altered by a presence that operated outside the range of his senses but not outside the range of his awareness.

He had read about such moments. The literature of the Church was full of accounts of holy deaths — saints and martyrs whose final hours had been attended by visions, by angelic presences, by signs and wonders that confirmed the faith of those who witnessed them and confounded the scepticism of those who did not. He had studied these accounts at Oxford with the scholarly detachment that his education required, categorising them as products of their historical context, analysing their rhetorical function within the hagiographic tradition, assessing their theological implications without ever confronting the question of whether they described events that had actually occurred.

Agnes Moody was not a saint. She had not attended church in twelve years. She had declined Father Harding's pastoral overtures with a courtesy that was indistinguishable from dismissal. She had lived her eighty-one years with a practical faith that owed more to the experience of survival than to the doctrines of the Church of England, a faith that expressed itself not in piety or observance but in the stubbornness with which she had continued to exist in circumstances that would have justified surrender at any of a dozen points across eight decades.

And yet.

The room contained something that had not been there when Nathaniel entered. The quality of the air had shifted in a way that his rational mind could not account for and that his body registered with a certainty that bypassed cognition entirely. The hairs on his forearms stood. His breathing had slowed to match Agnes's — a synchronisation he had not chosen and could not have produced deliberately. The prayer book in his hands had become irrelevant, not because its contents were false but because they were insufficient — a map drawn by men who had heard descriptions of a country they had never visited, offered to a woman who was walking through its gates.

Agnes's voice grew quieter. The names ceased. Her eyes remained open but their focus shifted — no longer directed at the presences she had been addressing but upward, toward the low ceiling of the room or toward whatever the ceiling represented from the vantage point she now occupied, a point that was still technically inside the room on Butcher Row but that had clearly moved beyond the boundaries that the room's walls and floor and ceiling were supposed to define.

Her breathing changed. Not the laboured deterioration that Nathaniel had witnessed in other deaths — the rattling, the gasping, the struggle of a body that did not want to relinquish the air it had been processing for a lifetime. Agnes's breathing simply became shallower, each breath requiring less effort, each exhalation carrying less of whatever the previous exhalation had carried, as though she were setting down a series of small weights, one by one, unburdening herself by increments until the final weight — the breath itself — could be released without resistance.

She died at eleven minutes past nine. The exact time was known because the church bell of St Thomas's struck the quarter hour four minutes later, and Ruth, who had been counting the seconds since her grandmother's last breath with the instinctive precision of a woman who sewed for a living and measured everything, calculated the interval without thinking.

The room was quiet. The fire had burned low. The lavender on the pillow continued to release its scent into air that was, by any objective measure, the same air that had been in the room before Agnes died and that would remain in the room after her body was removed — the same molecules of oxygen and nitrogen and wood smoke and lavender that had been circulating through this space since Ruth had opened the door that morning.

It did not feel like the same air. It felt emptied. Lighter. As though something with weight and volume and presence had occupied the room alongside its visible inhabitants and had departed with Agnes, leaving behind a space that was measurably identical to what had preceded it and experientially transformed.

Nathaniel sat on the stool beside the bed for a long time after Agnes Moody stopped breathing. The prayer book remained open in his hands. He did not read from it. The words on the page, which he had spoken over five bodies in the preceding two weeks and which had become, since Peter Aldridge's death, sounds emptied of meaning, looked different now. Not restored — that was too simple, too neat, too much like the reversal of a process that had in fact been a destruction. The words had not been returned to the state they had occupied before Aldridge's hand pushed the book away. They had been replaced by something else — the same words, in the same order, carrying a different weight.

The weight was not comfort. It was not assurance. It was not the confident, warm, sustaining faith that Nathaniel had carried out of Oxford and into the parish of St Thomas's three months and a lifetime ago. That faith was gone. Aldridge had killed it, and it deserved to die, because it had been a faith built for libraries and chapels and Sunday mornings in churches where no one was sick and no one was dying and the promises of the liturgy cost nothing to make and nothing to believe.

What remained was harder. Harder and stranger and less articulable than anything his Oxford education had equipped him to express. He had witnessed something in this room that he could not explain — not the fact of Agnes's death, which was explicable, expected, medically unremarkable — but the quality of it. The specificity of the names she had spoken. The purposefulness of her gaze. The alteration in the room's atmosphere that his body had registered and that his mind could not dismiss as the product of exhaustion or grief or the particular susceptibility to suggestion that sleepless weeks in the company of the dying might reasonably produce.

He did not know what he had witnessed. He knew only that the prayer book in his hands, which had been empty for ten days, was no longer empty. The words had not changed. Something behind the words had changed — or rather, something behind the words had revealed itself, briefly, in a room on Butcher Row where an eighty-one-year-old woman who had refused the Church's ministrations for twelve years had demonstrated, in her dying, a knowledge of what lay beyond the boundary of life that no sermon Nathaniel had ever heard or preached or studied had come close to conveying.