Will had to do was call it back to the rose thicket and it dutifully went. There was one last, exhausted sound from the man which might have been a word of protest. If it was, Will failed to catch it, and would not have acted upon the objection anyway. He was the master of this anatomy now: eyes, feet and all that lay between. He could do what he wished with it, and right now, he didn't want to run or eat or piss: he wanted to see. He commanded Steep's feet to move, and they carried him forward, until he had sight of what the thicket had concealed.
It was Thomas the painter, of course. Who else? He was lying face up in the wet grass, his sandals and his trousers and his stained shirt strewn about him, his corpse become a palette arrayed with colours of its own. Where the painter had exposed his skin to the sun over the years - his face and neck, his arms and feet - he was tanned a ruddy sienna. Where he had been covered, which was to say every other place, he was a sickly white. Here and there, in the bony clefts of his chest and the groove of his abdomen, and at his armpits, he had gingery hair. But there were upon him colours far more shocking than these. A patch of vivid scarlet on his groin where the fox had dined on his penis and testicles. And pooling in the paint-pots of his eyes the same bright hue, where birds had taken his tender sight. And along the flank of his body a flap of livid fat exposed by the teeth or beak of a creature wanting to partake of his liver and lights. It was a more radiant yellow than a buttercup. Happy now? Jacob murmured.
Whether this question was meant for his occupant or the corpse before them, Will did not dare enquire. He'd dragged Jacob to revisit this appalling vision against the man's wishes, and now he felt shame at what he'd done. Sickened too. Not at the sight of the body. That didn't bother him particularly; it was no more horrible than the meat hanging up in a butcher's window. What made him want to look away was the thought that this thing before him was probably the way Nathaniel had looked, give or take a wound. Will had always imagined Nathaniel somehow perfected in death; his injuries erased by kindly hands, so that his mother could remember him immaculate. Now he knew differently. Nathaniel had been thrown through a shoe-shop window. There was no concealing wounds so deep. No wonder Eleanor had wept for months and locked herself away; no wonder she'd taken to eating pills instead of bread and eggs. He hadn't understood how terrible it must have been for her, sitting beside Nathaniel's bed, while he slipped away. But he understood now. And understanding, he blushed with shame at his cruelty.
He'd had enough. It was time to do as Steep had wanted all along, and look away. But now the shoe was on the other foot, and Steep knew it.
Do you want to take a closer look? Will heard him say, and the next moment Steep was going down on his haunches beside Thomas's corpse, scrutinizing it wound by wound. It was Will who flinched now, his
curiosity more than sated. But Jacob would not give him release. Look at him, Steep murmured, his gaze going to Thomas' mutilated groin. That fox made a meal of him, eh? There was a phony jocularity in Steep's tone. He felt this as deeply as Will; perhaps more so. Serves him right. He should have got some pleasure from his prick while he still had it to wave around. Poor, pathetic Thomas. Rosa tried to seduce him more than once but he could never get it up. I told him: if you don't want Rosa, who has everything a man could want in a woman, then you can't want a woman at all. You're a sodomite, Thom. He said I was too simple.
Steep leaned over and peered more closely at the wound. The fox's needle teeth had done a neat job. If not for the blood and a few remnants of tissue, the man could have been born unsexed. 'Well, you look like the simple one now, Thomas,' Steep said, taking his gaze from gelded groin to blinded head.
There was another colour here, which Will had not noticed until now. On the inner surfaces of the painter's lips, and on his teeth and tongue, a bluish tinge.
'You poisoned yourself, didn't you?' Steep said. He leaned closer to Thomas's face. 'Why did you do a damn fool thing like that? Not because of Rukenau, surely. I would have protected you from him. Didn't I promise?' He reached out and brushed the back of his fingers across the man's cheek, the way he had as they parted the day before. 'Didn't I tell you you'd be safe with Rosa and me? Oh Lord, Thom. I would not have seen you suffer.' He leaned back from the body, and in a louder voice than he'd used hitherto, as though making a formal declaration, said, 'Rukenau's to blame. You gave him your genius; he paid you in lunacy. That makes him a thief, at very least. I won't serve him after this. And I will never forgive him. He can stay in his wretched house forever, but he won't have me for company. Nor Rosa, either.' He got to his feet. 'Goodbye, Thom,' he said, more softly. 'You would have liked the island.' Then he turned his back on the body, the way he'd turned his back on the living man the day before, and strode away.
As he did so, the scene began to flicker out, the pattering rain, the roses and the body that lay under both, dimming in a heartbeat. But as they went, Will caught a glimpse of the fox, standing at the limit of the trees, gazing back at him. A shaft of sun had pierced the rain clouds and found the animal, etching its lean flanks and keen head and flickering brush in gold. In the instant before his vision fled, Will met the beast's unblinking stare. There was nothing contrite in its look, no shame that it had fed on pudenda today. I'm a beast, its stare seemed to say, don't you dare judge me.
Then they were both gone - the fox and the sun that blessed it - and Will was back in the dark copse above Burnt Yarley. In front of him stood Jacob, his hand still caught in Will's grip.
'Had enough?' Steep said.
By way of reply, Will simply let go of the man's hand. Yes, it was enough. More than enough. He looked all around him, to be certain nothing of what he'd witnessed had lingered, reassured by what he saw. The trees were once again leafless, the ground frosted; and the only corpses upon it two birds, one broken, one stabbed. In fact, he was by no means certain that this was even the same wood.
'Did it ... happen here?' he asked, looking back at Jacob.
The man's tear-stained face was slack, his eyes glazed. It took a few moments for him to focus his attention upon the question. 'No,' he said, finally. 'Simeon lived in Oxfordshire that year-'
'Who's Simeon?'
'Thomas Simeon, the man you just met.'
Will tried the name for himself, 'Thomas Simeon...'
'It was the July of 1730. He was twenty-three years old. He poisoned himself with his pigments, which he mixed himself. Arsenic and sky-blue.'
'If it happened in some other place,' Will said, 'why did you remember it?'
'Because of you,' Jacob replied, softly. 'You brought him to mind, in more ways than one.' He looked away from Will, out through the trees towards the valley. 'I'd known him since he was about your age. He was like my own to me. Too gentle for this world of illusions. It made him mad, trying to find his way through this profligate Creation.' He glanced back at Will, his eyes as sharp as his blade. 'God's a coward and show-off, Will. You will come to understand this, as the years go by. He hides behind a gaudy show of forms, boasting how fine His workings are. But Thomas had it right. Even in his wretched state, he was wiser than God.' Jacob raised his hand palm up in front of his face, his little finger extended. The significance of the gesture was perfectly clear. All that was missing was the petal. 'If the world were a simpler place, we would not be lost in it,' he said. 'We wouldn't be greedy for novelty. We wouldn't always want something new, always something new! We'd live the way Thomas wanted to live, in awe of the mysteries of a petal.' Even as he spoke, Steep seemed to hear the yearning in his own voice, and turned it to ice. 'Yon made a mistake, boy,' he said, his hand closing into a fist. 'You drank where it wasn't wise to drink. My memories are in your head now. So's Thomas. And the fox. And the madness.'