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When Maxwell is little he loves all his brothers.
It is an impossibility as much as Zood is, because not all his brothers love him back. It is not something that can be explained to him. He occasionally presents one of his older siblings with crude little stick puppets or bowls of potions that are really just mud and rhododendron leaves, and when they inevitably say “no Maxwell, that’s filthy,” his throat burns and his eyes well up.
One memorable time, after offering to play three witches with Hatwell and getting a rough shove back, he coughs up a pink petal. He takes it to Wealwell, firstly because he’s terrified against all reason that he’s somehow shedding bits of his lungs, and Wealwell presses his hands so tightly and says he must never, ever, tell their father. Push it down, carry handkerchiefs, get food poisoning over the top of it if you must, but don’t tell father.
Maxwell doesn’t understand.
Maxwell is a very grown up four years old, and Wealwell at seven is his confidante and guide through all of life’s mysteries that are too immediate to bother Samwell with. It’s not an explanation, but he trusts him.
They spend the rest of the afternoon drawing crude dogs that look like alligators and trying to mimic the peacocks on the front lawn until Roywell snaps at them to shut up. Maxwell feels the familiar prickle of a tearful cough, but Wealwell succumbs to one of his usual bouts of sickness soon after and has to miss dinner, Maxwell doesn’t bother anyone about the cough in the face of his brother’s illness.
(Maxwell, innocently petty, slips the petal into Hatwell’s soup so that he can pretend they were playing after all. Hatwell is sick for two days and the cook is fired. The guilt burns almost worse than the heartburn.)
Maxwell doesn’t get better, even as he gets older. He’s an active, rambunctious little boy who likes to tear around the gravel drives and jump off the fountains. (Not into, even he isn’t quite so blind to propriety as that.)
It’s the only thing he can think to do that isn’t pestering his older brothers, because Wealwell has been shoved into boarding school to get his frivolities out of the house and hasn’t been invited back for the holiday, and Samwell is apprenticing to a rival financier so he can learn from them (steal their methods, Blanewell explains with a hearty laugh, even though Maxwell has been told that stealing is wrong).
Johnwell doesn’t want to play because he’s trying to learn long-division, Roywell doesn’t like getting his trouser cuffs wet, Blanewell is preening in his mirrors and trying to work out how to style his incoming moustache.
Hatwell will play with him, but he’s bad at hide and seek, and whenever Maxwell climbs a tree Hatwell gets dizzy and has to leave instead of helping him down, and when they wrestle Hatwell always accidentally ends up pinching him or grinding the sole of his shoes into Maxwell’s skin or pulling his hair.
Maxwell finds it harder and harder to entertain himself, to run his emotions into pleased weariness, when he is increasingly tired. Perhaps it’s the late-autumn air, making his throat raw and his eyes stream, perhaps it is that he is getting up too quickly after lunch that’s making his stomach tender.
He hides in the rhododendron bushes where their twisted hollows feel like a fantasy, lets the dew seep into his skin and watches a sharply-dressed leafhopper make its slow way down a stem until his vision blurs and the vibrant green and red fades into the larger wash of leaves and flowers.
When he thinks about it too long, moves from missing his grandfather and Samwell and Wealwell to missing people who haven’t gone anywhere, he feels the familiar itch start in his throat. Except this time it doesn’t stop at his throat. Instead it travels down, sticks in his oesophagus and prickles in his trachea. He starts coughing and can’t stop, but where before he might have coughed deeply and dislodged a petal, this time he can’t seem to get enough breath to dislodge anything.
It terrifies him.
He can feel his diaphragm straining, trying to force his lungs down into the vacuum. He has been looking at Roywell’s anatomy books, trying to understand what has his brother awake at all hours to leave him so irritable during the day. His lungs strain to expand but they only half-manage it.
Maxwell coughs and coughs, there under the rhododendron bushes, and eventually something does come out, trailing a long burn up his throat like irritant sap.
It gets stuck to the roof of his mouth and his tongue can’t seem to dislodge it, so he reaches in with shaking, saliva-spattered fingers to pry it out.
It’s a rhododendron flower.
It’s a deep and striking pink, like a medical diagram of some private internal organ, with rusty spots on the underside of the petals and long pollen-covered stalks that stick together with mucus.
The rhododendrons stopped flowering months ago.
Maxwell sits in frozen fascination, the fear close behind it. He’s a bright boy, his grandfather tells him, and he is reading at a level far beyond his years. He knows that the pretty pictures of flowers in Roywell’s textbooks come with long captions that he struggles to understand, but he does know a few words.
Disease. Surgery. Complications. Fatal.
Maxwell chokes on a sob and buries the flower right there in the dry leaves, caking soil under his nails and scraping his knuckles on the hidden stones. Even with the leaves swept back over it looks too obvious, too much like him.
He chokes on another sob as he realises that that this is all the proof he needs that he really is going to die. In a house full of his family, why is the safest thing to hide?
He feels the burn start up again, and this time he coughs until he can’t even see, coughs until his nose bleeds from the force and his eyes roll back in his head and he passes out in the garden, hands covered in rhododendron flowers.
He comes to when Hatwell crushes his nose into smelling salts hard enough that the cartilage creaks.
Sneezing hurts. The inside of his nose is tender as the forming scabs pull at the skin there, and he can taste iron on his upper lip. Even in his yelp of pain he can hear the wheeze and it reminds him exactly what is wrong with him.
“Father—“ he starts, hoping to ask if there is a cure.
“What were you thinking Maxwell?” his father booms. Distantly he’s aware that this is a family meeting and that all of his brothers are crowded inside. Except, of course, the ones he wants most.
“The gardener brought you in, the gardener. Don’t you know the shame you bring to this family, grubbing around in the mud like a beggar-boy? You’re a Gotch. You will act like one.”
“‘m, I’m sorry,”
“Speak up.”
He straightens, tries to wipe down the creases in his jacket and realises his hands are still caked in soil. They sting as he hides them behind his back.
“I’m sorry, father, I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
In his head there is a buzzing, lackadaisical heat. He knows he is ill, surely they do too? Why are they shouting at him?
But Wealwell told him to hide it. Wealwell wouldn’t lie to him. He should suck it up and pretend it was his fault and then maybe they won’t question why he was asleep in the garden.
“And yet you insist on doing so, I mean really Maxwell, unrequited love? I’d never conceived of something so pathetic.”
He gestures and Maxwell sees that there is a soggy bundle of flowers tucked in a worn handkerchief smeared with soil. They look unopened, unfinished, weirdly newborn. They already know, the game is up, and they are still going to shout at him.
“Gotches do not hold to such things, it is unbecoming. Tell me who the foolish girl is and I’ll make sure your paths don’t cross again. If that doesn’t sort you out then we’ll have to make other arrangements.”
Girl?
He must say that out loud, because Hatwell sneers at him. “Yeah, Maxwell is too scaredy to talk to girls.”
“A boy then?” Blanewell says, and it almost feels understanding except Maxwell is confused and humiliated and this is still an interrogation. He doesn’t know anyone, girl or boy, outside his family.
He tries to say this and everyone gets colder, more distant, even though the hearth fire is blazing and no one has moved.
Because it’s true. They don’t employ stable boys and none of the cooks are allowed to bring their daughters because it would make the household rowdy. Maxwell has never left the grounds for long enough to meet children his own age.
“You mean to say this whole… debacle, this… farce is solely platonic? That you’re here having conniptions and swooning fits because you don’t think we love you enough?” His father sounds scandalised, angry and derisive. “I never— none of your brothers require this special treatment. This whole thing is a silly little cry for attention.”
Maxwell has never thought that. He doesn’t know why he’s coughing up flowers and passing out in the bushes. Perhaps it is his fault, perhaps he’s being greedy.
He tries to say as much, to apologise again, but the buds are crowding back into his throat and he tries to stuff the cough back down with no success. He doubles over in the office, smears mud around his mouth trying to keep the petals in. Hatwell raises a hand to thump him on the back and the threat of it sends him spiralling, shaking as he tries to flinch away. Hatwell catches him anyway, brings his hand down across Maxwell’s shoulder blades in a way that smarts but delivers no force to the mass clogging up his throat.
Eventually his father must ring for a maid, who bends him over a chair and delivers one sharp, businesslike strike to his spine that sends pink spattering across the upholstery.
His father flicks his fingers dismissively. “Clear that away, I won’t have it in the house.” From his gesture it’s not clear whether he’s talking about the petals or Maxwell himself. “This has gone on too long. They have corrective surgeries nowadays to deal with these fits. I won’t have any son of mine fainting in drawing rooms. You have school next year and I won’t have you creating a reputation for weakness before you can spell your own name.”
He cries and begs and tries to promise that he’ll be good, he’ll behave, he won’t bother them again. It’s hard to be persuasive when he is fever-red and babbling and incoherent with snot and tears.
He’s a bright boy, likes reading tales of Old Frumbia and piracy, and in all of those stories love is something good, something celebrated and reciprocated. And if people can fall in love with complete strangers, commit great deeds for their monarch or captain, then why can’t he love his own family in the right way?
Don’t they want him to love them? He can stop, he’s sure, if he just tries harder, but he thought you were supposed to love your family.
The answer that comes, not in so many words but apparent in the way they disperse and go back to their studies while his father sneers at him to pull himself together and rings for a doctor, is that his love is inconvenient to them.
He’s sent to his room without supper, and even though he puts on a brave face and washes the dirt off of himself, no one comes to check on him.
Sometime around five in the morning, Maxwell wakes with a ravenous hunger. His eyes are gritty and he has to blow blood-browned mucus out of his nose before he can breathe properly. Breakfast isn’t for another three hours but if his stomach growls at the table they’ll serve him last.
He sneaks down to the kitchens, hopeful that he might be able to take a knob of bread dough before it goes in the oven, or a teaspoon of jam. The cook greets him with narrow-eyed suspicion and he straightens his sleeves nervously, then remembers himself.
“I’m hungry, could I have a crumpet?”
Samwell tells him he must say please and thank you, but none of his other brothers do. He can’t afford to be unlike them.
She scowls at him, which he vaguely thinks isn’t allowed, and rummages in the bread bin for something. He doesn’t know how crumpets are made, but they’re often there at breakfast, and the thought of hot butter is enough to make his sleepless night feel a little less awful.
“You can have a griddle-cake,” she concedes, pulling out a pale lump studded with raisins. Maxwell hates raisins, but he is very hungry.
He assumes she’ll warm it through, but she just sets it down in front of him with a pat of butter and a knife. The butter is cold, and he can’t seem to scape it evenly so it’s all misshapen when he’s done with it. She scowls at that too, but doesn’t say anything, so Maxwell hops onto a bench and tucks in, even though it’s a bit too far for him to reach comfortably. If he were at the dining table someone would push his chair in, but he’s in the kitchen where he isn’t allowed, so he doesn’t make a fuss.
The raisins make his gums crawl, and ginger is an adult flavour that he doesn’t like that much yet, but the cake is soft and the granulated sugar is fun to chase around his plate.
“Thank you,” he whispers at the end.
She offers him something that might just be a smile, and it makes him brave.
“Why doesn’t my father love me?”
All at once her face shutters again. “Oh, I heard that the doctor had been called. Amos says you were playing in the rose bushes and caught a chill, but I guess he was lying.”
“I don’t want a doctor, I want my father to love me,” Maxwell admits. He can feel his lip wobbling and bites it.
She looks at him with a sort of distant, condescending sympathy.
“Unloved children die in other places. You’re lucky your father is rich enough to treat you.”
“Oh yes, of course. I didn’t think—“
“Yes well, rich people never think. Out you go master Gotch, otherwise you’ll spoil your appetite more than you’ve already done.”
Maxwell scrambles to obey, pauses at the threshold. “Unloved? Not unlovable?”
Her apron-strings hold no answers for him, and he makes himself scarce before he does something stupid like repeat his question. He might not like the answer.
The doctor uses all sorts of long words that Maxwell vainly hopes means he’s trying to be caring, but might just be to sound clever. He uses words like decortication and lobectomy that Maxwell endeavours to remember so he can ask Roywell later, then remembers that Roywell won’t care to answer.
He fists his hands in the sheets beneath him, kicks his heels against the bed frame so he doesn’t grit his teeth. The mercury thermometer in his mouth still bobs ominously and the doctor snatches it out before he can break another one. They’re expensive to replace.
“It’s deeply unusual for a familial case to present like this,” the doctor explains, “and usually it only affects a single lung. Romantic love on the other hand—“
“Will not be a problem,” his father interjects. “I won’t be paying for this operation twice so you may as well deal with the root cause now.”
The doctor laughs flatteringly.
“It will still take two surgeries. One lung will compensate while the other is being operated on and healing, and then we will switch over in a few months as long as there are no complications. It might be that it is only around the one lung, though if it’s advanced enough we may have to perform a whole pneumonectomy — that’s removing the lung.”
He says this last to Maxwell, who flushes with nausea. He doesn’t want to be here.
But he tried telling the doctor that and he just laughed. Maxwell isn’t a baby, he’s five years old and he’s a Gotch, other people are supposed to listen to him.
Except, he supposes, they’re supposed to listen to his father first.
The doctor explains other parts of the procedure, sawing through one of Maxwell’s ribs and peeling his muscles back, while Maxwell grows steadily more frightened and his father grows steadily more bored.
“As for recovery,” the doctor concludes, “I would recommend physiotherapy after a few months. Light exercise with assistance, otherwise he might not be able to do regular sports or run for any distance.”
“He’s going into real estate,” his father says coldly. “He’ll have no cause to be running.”
Maxwell averts his eyes, and when he doctor brings out the laudanum he doesn’t fight it. What would be the point?
Maxwell suppresses most of the surgery from his mind, manages to forget the pain and panic of being restrained even as he doesn’t manage to repress the memory of the sound of his rib cracking. The laudanum puts him in a haze that the doctor calls euphoric and Maxwell would call… he doesn’t know. His head hurts.
Everything hurts.
He can’t lift his arm to look at the dark, ugly wound that seams along his pectoral muscle and disappears under his armpit. He can feel it itching on his back too, imagines that if he stretches it will lift up like a trout’s gills into layers and layers of red. The thought disgusts him.
He knows the name of the muscle because Roywell is sat by his bedside when he lifts from his slumber for a moment, muttering as he annotates his diagrams. Maxwell tries to shift and yelps at the pain through slack lips.
It is all-consuming, radiating up through his ribcage. It burns and crawls up his neck and across his stomach like hives.
Roywell is saying something, Maxwell strains to listen.
“Ah, I should have asked the doctor your dose. I’m sure I can figure it out.” He scribbles something in his book, tries to pry the dropper out of the bottle so he can fill a teaspoon, then rechecks his notes and gives Maxwell only two drops on his tongue instead.
Maxwell is dizzy, and he feels his breathing slow down without his input. It does ease the pressure on his chest.
“What exactly was it the sugary covered? I have a test on Monday on pneumothorax.”
Maxwell does know. He was sure he’d remembered the word, but his brain feels as slow as his tongue. Roywell clucks at him but it doesn’t hurt as much as it did before. The itch in his lungs remains dormant.
Roywell is tilting his book to show Maxwell something, but it isn’t at a good angle and Maxwell can’t lift his head to see. He catches a glimpse of pink, of a mass of white roots tangled into long cords like maggots. It’s been flattened into alien lifelessness but Maxwell recognises it: a bundle of rhododendron saplings. Distantly he feels disappointed, he was hoping to plant them in the garden.
“That was around your right lung, the thing giving you problems was the flowering spike. That pierced right through the upper lobe of your lung. The doctor says that it has spread a bit to the other one so you’ll have a second surgery in six months just to be sure.”
Maxwell can never be in this amount of pain again. He’ll die.
“Lobectomy,” he mumbles, speech several minutes delayed to his current train of thought.
“Thanks Maxwell,” Roywell says, already getting up to consult his larger textbooks. He turns the gas lamp off as he leaves, even though Maxwell isn’t ready to sleep yet, and Maxwell sinks cautiously back down into his pillows.
It doesn’t make him cough. If it still hurts he can’t tell anymore. He waits for sleep or the doctor to come and doesn’t bother trying to dream.
He wakes one day, weeks later, to the sound of shouting.
He’s still in bed, the rubber hosing removed but everything inflamed and itchy. The doctor tells him he must breathe deeply but it hurts too much, and then the doctor gives him more laudanum and he can’t help but breathe shallowly. For all the trouble they gave him over coughing, they encourage him to cough now, but that jolts his ribcage.
There’s also air leaking into his chest from where he popped some stitches, and it makes a crackling sound under his skin when it’s pressed. It’s the only time Hatwell seeks him out, chasing the sound up his chest and into his neck while he squirms and tries to pull away.
He can’t lie still through it even if it isn’t painful in and of itself, but if he makes too much noise Hatwell brings out the laudanum and Maxwell doesn’t trust him as much as Roywell.
Without his stupid, blind affection it’s very easy to see that his brothers have never returned his love. He really isn’t very smart.
“He’s a little boy!” he hears, and he suddenly recognises his grandfather’s voice by sheer contrast to his father’s apathetic reply.
“He’s a Gotch, he should know better.”
Maxwell wants to hope, but hope got him into this and he’s not quite so stupid as to succumb to it again.
He tries not to listen but eventually his door opens and his grandfather pokes his head in.
“Ah Maxwell, you’re awake,” he says jovially like he wasn’t shouting a minute ago. “I brought you a present!”
“A present?” Maxwell slurs. He doesn’t want to, he knows it’s uncouth to mumble, but he can’t seem to stop it. His last dose was hours ago, he should be better than this.
“Exactly that. You’re a bright lad, I know how much you like to read so I got you something special. It hasn’t been published yet but I know the author, and some of the words might be a bit big for you but you can grow into them.”
Maxwell is trying to focus on the way his grandfather’s eyes crease, wonders why they look so large and shiny in the low light. Has he been crying? Is he ill? Is he in pain?
Maxwell is fixed with a sudden dread. He only got sick because he wasn’t being loved enough, is his grandfather suffering the same thing? His grandfather isn’t greedy like he is, but if they’ve cut out the bit of Maxwell that loves his father and brothers then has it cut out the bit that loves his grandfather too? Is he not able to love his grandfather correctly now?
“Easy now Maxwell, easy there my boy,” his grandfather is bending down to press a handkerchief to his eyes and Maxwell realises that he’s crying. His grandfather perches on the edge of the bed and it’s so huge that he still needs to reach to take Maxwell’s hand.
“You’ve had a hard run of it my boy, but you’ll get better soon. I know you’ll be up and about in no time, showing those doctors what-for!”
Maxwell wants his grandfather’s dreams to be true, he wants to run and jump and play. Perhaps with his inconvenient love gone his lungs will be able to fill to their full extent, and he can sprint from one end of the lawn to another without breaking a sweat.
He chances a glance at the book, semi-familiar faces he recognises from a business meeting and a shadowy mass behind them. He does want to read the book, making out the title and grateful for the rhyming that makes it easier to work out the last word. A Strange Foe at Oh-No Plateau.
He smiles at his grandfather, once again tired out by his own heartbeat, and feels his eyes slip shut. He wishes his grandfather would read him the first chapter, but he can’t quite make the words happen and his grandfather is a busy man. Maxwell will read it by himself and then he’ll be able to say he’s all grown up.
“Happy birthday Maxwell,” his grandfather whispers into his hair, then leaves to let him sleep.
Over the next few months Maxwell learns to read the book, about jungles and the sky and sailing, a dictionary open on his bedside table. Eventually it becomes easier to reach over and lift it up, easier to get up himself to go to the bathroom. He entertains a vague, cautious hope that he might be able to go downstairs and have buttered crumpets for breakfast.
The next day he wakes to a fierce ache in his side, with the familiar haze of laudanum and a matching scar on the left side of his chest.