Free Memory of Bones by Alex Connor Page B

himself. At any moment his brother would tell him about the Goya skull. Gabino would phone or visit. He
would
.
    He had to.
    Le Quinta del Sordo, Madrid, Spain, 1820
    Dr Arrieta was aware of flies buzzing around the bed, and flicked his hand in their direction. They scattered, settling on the nets over the window, then slowly began to creep across the ceiling, eyeing the two men below. Over the previous summer months yellow fever had crawled like a cripple over Madrid, eventually reaching the bridge over the Manzanares. But the water did not stop it. Instead the fever skimmed on the surface and hopped with the gadflies in the miasma of heat and emerald slime. Fish which had populated the river had now gone, finding the further reaches where the disease hadn’t polluted the flow. And around the Quinta del Sordo the dry earth gave up its ailing weeds to the city’s sickness
.
    Sweating, Dr Arrieta leaned over the bed and stared into the invalid’s waxy face. He was, he thought helplessly, already expecting to see a corpse. Surely Francisco Goya couldn’t survive another critical illness at his age? Arrieta had not been in attendance before, but had been told of his patient’s long illness in
1792. Some said it had been due to a fever, but although that was a possibility, Arrieta had his doubts. He wondered instead if Goya had a serious inflammation of the brain, his blood pressure rising high enough to cause a profound stroke. A stroke which might well have resulted in deafness, depression and even hallucinations
.
    But even after he recovered Goya had been – and remained – profoundly deaf. And after his first illness his whole life had changed, his court existence closed off, communication hobbled, music silenced. For a man with a great libido and prodigious energy, Goya had been cruelly cowed. In silence, he had gone back to painting; had grown older, more impatient, his deafness alienating him, driving him onwards
.
    And inwards
.
    Arrieta stared at his patient. He had a queasy feeling of dread that he might be watching a great man going slowly and irrevocably mad. The steaming, red heat of the Spanish summer clotted with the guttural, unintelligible sounds the painter made in his delirium and hung, clammily, about the plastered walls. Night shadows thick with the smell of drying paint and the stagnant water outside curdled around the high altar of the restless bed. At times Goya would reach out, grasping the air. But his eyes were never open, as though what he saw was not real, not of the world, but something inescapable, inside the ruin of his teeming brain
.
    Who would have believed that Spain’s finest painter would die as a recluse in a farmhouse apart – and yet within sight of Madrid? That this mumbling semi-corpse was Goya, sweating in grimy sheets with the flies buzzing around the white spittle at
the corners of his mouth? Goya, the man who had been the envy of Madrid, dying by a seeping river under a candle-coloured moon
.
    Unnerved, Arrieta glanced away. From the stable outside came the sound of a horse birthing a foal, its animal cries as wild and blinded as the crowding night
.

12
    Madrid
    The following evening, a bushy-haired man with a freckled complexion and weak, pale blue eyes walked into the Golding house, Leon hanging back in the doorway of his study as Gina greeted Frederick Lincoln with a kiss to the cheek and ushered him into the small morning room. He moved slowly, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief, sweating in the Madrid heat although all the windows were open. His hands were long and very pale, freckles marking the skin like a sprinkling of dun-coloured paint.
    ‘Leon,’ Gina called out, turning as her lover walked in. ‘Leon, this is Frederick Lincoln. He’s agreed to hold a seance for us. We’re very lucky – he doesn’t visit many people any more. Do you, Frederick?’
    He shrugged, but seemed fascinated by Leon as he walked into the room.
    ‘Gina is an old friend of