New Albion by Dwayne Brenna Page B

a study in austerity. It contained two spare rooms. There was a plain wooden table in one of them, with two wooden chairs beside it. This must be where Mr. Farquhar Pratt does most of his writing. At one end of the room were a pump and a sink. A few grimy dishes had their resting place in the sink, along with other culinary instruments. There was no sideboard, no other furniture in the main room. There were no pictures on the walls. Any objects of comfort had, I suspect, been sold off long ago.
    Mr. Farquhar Pratt’s wife, whom I’d never met before this day, was seated in one of the chairs by the table, her eyes fixed on the bare wall opposite. She too was in her sixties but not round and jolly like many of the matrons one encounters in the theatre. She was gaunt and sallow-looking, her eyes darkened by years of strug gle and pain. Her gray hair was fairly pasted to her head, as though she had not had occasion to bathe in a long while.
    The bedroom was perhaps six feet by nine feet. It contained a frameless bed with a sagging straw mattress, upon which Mr. Farquhar Pratt reposed. Beside the bed, there was a table of unfinished wood, upon which was situated a wash basin and Malthus’ book An Essay on the Principle of Population . At the foot of the bed, there was a rusty chamber pot. On the wall beside the bed, a curious engraving of what looked in the gloom to be a young girl.
    A gruff young surgeon from London Middlesex was bent over Mr. Farquhar Pratt’s prone body when I entered the bedroom. He had his white shirt-sleeves rolled up, and he was grasping Pratty’s wrist, groping intently for a pulse. “I’ve given him enough opium to kill a large barnyard animal,” he said, almost without looking at me. “He’ll sleep the rest of the day and some of the night, at least.” He shook his head as he surveyed the comatose man one last time. “God knows these laudanum addicts are hardest to treat. No drug seems to have any effect on them.” At last, he turned to me, staring blankly into my eyes for a moment. “Who the devil are you?” he asked.
    “His friend,” I mumbled. That was not exactly the truth; I’d had no particular friendship with the old man until then. I’d never been in his flat before. I had shared little more than words with him, usually mild chastisements for submitting a script too late to the Lord Chamberlain’s office. I was beginning to feel a kinship with Pratty now, however, beginning to see that he was not just living out his own old age but mine as well, and the old age of humankind. “What is the cause of Mr. Farquhar Pratt’s illness?”
    “Hard to tell,” said the young doctor as he began wrapping up his instruments and placing them in a black satchel. “ Ramollissement of the brain, perhaps, brought on by a life of laudanum use.”
    “Ramollissement?” I’d never heard the word before.
    “Softening,” the doctor said, snapping the satchel shut. “He’ll be in the ground before long.”
    “Is there no treatment?”
    The doctor cast me a withering look on his way to the bedroom door, in part to thank me for asking too many questions in the middle of his busy day. “If the behavior is erratic enough,” he said, “or if it persists over a long period, there is always Bedlam.”
    “The insane asylum?”
    “That is where many who find themselves in this man’s predicament are sent.” Without so much as a “good day,” he turned on his heels and was on his way. I heard him tell Mr. Farquhar Pratt’s wife, as he was leaving, to stay the course and to reach him by courier post should the patient’s condition worsen.
    There was time to say a sterile prayer while Pratty slept, the kind of prayer one reserves for a man one barely knows, the kind of prayer which says, “There but for the grace of God…” After listening to his gurgling breath, audible even over the caterwauling upstairs, I turned to leave. My shoes clacked across the floor in the main room.
    I passed