The Dress Lodger Page 16

  “You will kill him for sure if you move him!” Henry rushes the pair, but Robert Cooley throws out a fist that sends him sprawling.

  “C’mon, Jack,” he whispers to his friend. “We’ll get you to yer own bed, and get’cher wife t’fry up a chop or two. You’ll be better in no time.”

  “Mr. Cooley!” Clanny shouts, but the man has already dragged his friend through the door and halfway down the cold marble hallway. Clanny snatches up a lamp and runs after them. Henry grabs his bag and is fast on his uncle’s heels.

  The hallway is as cold as a tomb and smells of lemon oil and sawdust—and something else that bothers Robert Cooley as he rounds the corner and searches for the marble steps to the first floor: the fresh iron smell of blood. He knows the smell; his house overlooks the slaughterhouse on Queen Street where the still pumping hearts of cattle are cut from their chests and sold, wholesale, to the sugar refinery. Does blood fill every one of these rooms? he wonders, turning away from the dark lecture chambers that open off the main hallway and branch off into more raked amphitheatres. The evenly spaced wall sconces shine only enough light into the rooms to coax operating tables into the shapes of wild beasts whose hearts beat to the rhythm of Robert’s frantic footfall. Come on, Jack, he thinks. Help me. You are too heavy.

  But he knows it—even before he finds the steps and jolts his friend down to the first landing—he knows as the naked body slides from his arms, as white and languid as the snow settling on the windowpane beside him: the doctors have won. His friend hardens upon touching the ground, like a puddle of warm white spittle turned instantly to ice; his legs snap straight, his arms strain to break their bones, even his cock—Jesus Christ—stretches like a piece of India rubber, explodes onto his belly, and quivers back into place. The doctors have won.

  Clanny sets the lamp on the landing and both men fall to work on the old hero. Clanny is fumbling in a leather bag, pushing a set of bellows into Jack Crawford’s mouth and making his chest inflate and deflate, inflate and deflate like a jerky machine. Henry is listening. Listening. Goddamn it. The man probably would have died anyway, but at least he wouldn’t have to die naked in a stairwell like some raped and abandoned housemaid. After a few minutes more, Henry lifts his head from the old man’s straining chest.

  “He’s gone,” Henry says, kneeling helplessly back. Robert Cooley watches, also on his knees, his fists pressed against his mouth to keep back that low wail building up inside him.

  As for Jack Crawford, he’s had about as much playacting as he can stand. He’s sick to death of performing his part over and over for this meagre audience. Here he is again clinging to the mast while cannons fire all around him. The admiral’s blue flag snaps in his face, is nearly ripped from his hands by the fury of the wind. He doesn’t want to climb; his thighs cramp fiercely from grasping the pole, his arms are in knots from clutching the marling spike. All he wants is a pint. But Admiral Duncan’s second in command has a musket trained on him—They shot away our mast, lad. We mustn’t let the Dutchies think we’ve hauled down our colors. We are no cowards!

  We are no cowards, thinks brave Jack Crawford, trembling around the pole. He shimmies higher and higher, until he’s above the smoke and can see the enemy ship parallel to them. Dutchmen swab the mounted cannons and load them with heavy nicked balls. Officers raise their sabres and shout commands. Fire! Down below, the world seems so dark and confused, but up here above it all, the sky is an improbable brilliant blue. It is a crisp October afternoon, one that back home might have inspired a long walk to Fulwell’s Windmill and a lazy picnic beneath its white canvas wings. He should be lifting a bottle of beer to his lips right now, looking up through the slowly revolving panels at the empty sky, thinking about his next bottle of beer and the chuckball game on Sunday. If only the smoke would not obscure the blue, everyone might think of home, and point their cannonballs at the sea. But this flag is meant to replace the sky. It is what the men will see, when wearily they look up; the admiral’s colors instead of God’s blue heaven.

  What am I doing up here? Jack suddenly wonders. He looks down at the two doctors and his friend Bob kneeling on the deck of the HMS Venerable; then they are lost in the fog of cannon fire. Why am I still holding on? What’s to keep me from letting go—like this—and falling, falling through the sky, past my friend Bob and those two befuddled doctors? What’s to keep me from dropping—like this—into the comforting bosom of the blue sea below?

  The wintry waves take the old hero’s breath away as they break over his naked head. It’s colder than he thought, this sea, but it was good to let go. Who gives a bloody rat’s ass for some rich admiral’s colors, anyway? Left up to Jack Crawford, he’s just as happy to surrender.

  VII

  DUTIES

  It is dark again by the time Henry rolls over in his childhood bed on the third floor of his rented house on Nile Street. His grandmother’s cane rocking chair sits by the window, his mother’s chest-high chiffonier rests against the wall by the door. Besides an Austrian cuckoo clock (an engagement present from the Clannys), the only ornaments hung on the whitewashed walls are two framed engravings. A stern line drawing of reformer Jeremy Bentham, Henry’s hero, is fixed at eye level by the door, so that his might be the first face Henry sees upon waking; and above the bed, protecting him like the crucifix he discarded years ago, hangs his childhood Sacred Heart. He has grown so accustomed to that old picture that he scarcely sees it anymore. Certainly, when he’s married, he will have to stow it away with this single bed and the rest of his familiar boyhood things. Audrey will rock their first child in his grandmother’s chair, where he has spent hours by the window intently reading his medical journals. Won’t he resent her sitting in his seat by the window, sunlight falling upon an infant forehead rather than a clean white margin? Won’t he want to pick up a medical saw and grate her bowed head from her very shoulders?

  Jesus Christ! Henry starts awake to the mechanical bird ducking in and out of the cuckoo clock. Seven o’clock? He sits up confused. Seven o’clock at night? His valet must have come in, for the trousers he wore to the theatre a full twenty-four hours ago are neatly folded over his chair and his jacket hangs from a peg by his hat. He fell asleep in his stained shirt and tightly wound cravat, which would explain the fitful feeling of choking he had all night. He promised Audrey he would go see her charity family on Mill Street and instead he’s slept the entire day.

  The wood-plank floor is freezing cold when he sets his bare feet upon it and scurries over to the basin and jug of water his servant left on the dresser. Henry tries not to go to bed with other men’s blood on his body, but studying himself in the pier glass, he sees that his face and hands are streaked with Jack Crawford’s. As if losing him to that illness weren’t bad enough, they spent an even more harrowing time trying to persuade Robert Cooley to relinquish his friend’s body for autopsy. They scolded. They threatened. It is of the utmost scientific importance, they pleaded, tugging on the old hero like schoolchildren would a puppy. You saw how horrible the disease is—how are we to find a cure if we cannot learn how it attacks? But nothing would move red-faced, grief-stricken Bob. He clung to the corpse ferociously, shaking his head, sobbing more pitifully than Henry had ever seen a grown man. In the end, nothing they could say would persuade him. He threw the naked hero over his shoulder and ran screaming from the hospital like a madman.

  Henry quickly scrubs the dried blood from his face and hands, pulls on the trousers he wore to the theatre, and opens the bedroom door to the hallway. Ugh! With the door closed, he had forgotten about the smell. Ferment from the cadaver Liss wafts up from the second floor like ghoulish bread baking.

  “Williams!” Henry calls, breathing through his mouth. “Bring a cold supper to the library, will you?”

  The smell is even worse in the library, but Henry’s nose soon adjusts. It is one of the drawbacks of having a home practice, Dr. Knox had told him years ago. The stench of death worms its way into your book bindings, yo
ur sock drawer, your bread larder. What’s worse, Knox told him, is how quickly you get used to it. You learn to mind death in the room no more than you would a pesky housefly.

  The converted operating theatre is not large, and he was forced to clear out the furniture to maximize space; only a glass-fronted cabinet, a long, waist-high trough with scale, and a teakwood lectern, holding his Albinus, remain. Recessed bookcases line the room, their shelves holding not books, but round jars sealed with pigs’ bladders and red wax. Before leaving Edinburgh, Henry had been a great collector, and his specimen collection would still rank among the best in the Northeast. Along his top shelves are rows of pulpy brains, brains eaten away by syphilis, brains lacking frontal lobes, and a lengthy digression on the brains of dogs, cats, and squirrels. Next come four severed female breasts representing the lymph system, each having had mercury injected into the nipple. How sleek and modern they look, veined with silver, like automaton wet nurses built for suckling in this new Age of Machines. Eyes are next—fat human oculi, up to ten floating in the same tall jar—then livers, kidneys, and lungs. The cadaver Liss’s red heart sits on a bookshelf with others of its sort, the only muscle not bleached of its color by preservative. It makes a startling punctuation at the end of the row, but it will be only a matter of weeks before it becomes waxy and white like the others. Henry hasn’t had the leisure or the inclination to collect since he’s been in Sunderland. He’s felt that filling his shelves while his students went without teaching cadavers would be like satisfying a letch for hothouse peaches when his children were crying for bread.

  Damn it, Henry swears. While he slept the day away, the ice in which the cadaver was originally packed melted, and now he floats in a long trough of lukewarm water, drowned all over again. Bietler made such a mangled mess of the abdomen trying to extract the intestines, flesh that might have kept for another two days billows uselessly in the water. It is the second betrayal of death, this rot, forcing medical science to hurry along at the speed of decomposing flesh. Well, the arms are still good. And the legs. With a sigh, Henry picks up his hacksaw and digs in at the shoulder joint. Swollen with water, but still completely distinguishable, a young Jack Crawford clings to his mast on cadaver Liss’s bicep. Henry hesitates with the saw, staring into the inky face of the man he’s just lost, a dead man tattooed on a dead man’s arm. He doesn’t have the heart for this right now.

  “Your supper, sir,” Williams’s muffled voice comes through the closed door. His servant is not allowed in this room—not that the stench does not warn him away.

  “Leave it in the hall, please,” Henry says, setting aside the saw. “And Williams, bring up an old sheet and my shovel.”

  When his servant is gone, Henry retrieves the tray of artichokes, cold chicken, and sherry he left, takes it to the hearth, and kindles a fire. He’s kept the room purposefully unheated since the cadaver’s arrival, but there seems little point in that now. Mr. Liss is useless; Henry will have to dispose of him before he decays further and alerts the neighbors. He drags an artichoke leaf over his teeth and flips it into the fireplace. Having devoted all his energies to securing this single corpse, he has given little thought to finding another. He could have had Jack Crawford’s if not for his friend’s obstinacy. What a coup to have made the first dissection of a cholera patient in England.

  Henry plucks his artichoke leaves automatically, gnawing off the meat and listening to them sizzle in the fire. Perhaps he might—No. He cuts off the thought before it has a chance to form. It was stupid. He was about to let himself consider the possibility of seeking out that girl Gustine. He has been blameless in the entire affair—both times they have met, she has sought him, he has never searched out her help. It’s just that, circulating through the city as she does, she’s sure to have heard of cases, if there are cases, and perhaps for a bit of money she might help him—But there he goes considering again. He couldn’t possibly turn to a woman for help in these matters; he’s thoroughly ashamed as it is of how he came by the cadaver Liss. It was bad enough in London and Edinburgh associating with the scum of the earth, the most depraved resurrection men, and then to have unknowingly consorted with Burke and Hare. He will not be responsible for drawing a woman—not even a woman: a young girl—down into that darkness.

  And yet. Did she not show her true colors last night outside of the theatre? Was she not perfectly comfortable with the vilest profanity, accepting embraces from the most abandoned of men? Henry has forgotten that he himself contemplated securing her services the night of his failure at the Trinity graveyard. Now he remembers only that she dared come near his Audrey, that she shamelessly placed herself in his fiancée’s line of vision, flaunting her wickedness for all of Sunderland to see. Is it even possible to further corrupt a girl like that?

  “Your shovel, sir,” Williams says through the door.

  Henry rouses himself, setting aside his untouched chicken and half-eaten artichoke. He is thinking craziness. Of course he cannot seek out Gustine. A man might easily become contaminated by the bad company he keeps, and he will not be the agent through which ugliness ever touches Audrey’s life again. He’ll find another way to secure bodies for his students; sooner or later, the family of a cholera victim will give in to reason. Now he needs to pay a visit to Audrey’s charity family as he promised, and see what service he can be to those in whom she’s taken an interest.

  But first, he has an unpleasant task. Taking up the sheet Williams left in the hall, he fills it with the remains of cadaver Liss. Some of his colleagues, he knows, would toss the body in the fire when it was of no more use, or drive him out to the North Sea and fling him over a cliff; but Henry still has enough courtesy (he won’t call it superstition) to want to do right by the man. He takes up his shovel and his bottle of sherry and drags the bundle down the stairs, then out into the backyard.

  Brain-coral permafrost cracks underfoot as he makes his way to his neighbor’s fence, as far from his own back door as the diminutive yard allows. His neighbor’s hungry black mutt scratches the wooden wall furiously, barking his excitement, as he has every other time Henry has come out here to bury rabbits or cats or his canine compatriots, all the dumb vivisected beasts who have given their lives for the betterment of Science. I give you another one, dumber perhaps than all the rest, thinks Henry, leaping upon his shovel to cut through the sod and a trespassing root from his neighbor’s chestnut.

  Back in Edinburgh, Henry was the only instructor willing to dig a pit for the gristle and scraps of the school’s dissected corpses. By moonlight he dug in Surgeons’ Square’s courtyard, planting what was left of the pickled old woman and her grandson, of headless, footless Daft Jamie, of lovely Mary Paterson—though not so lovely when Knox was through. Henry pauses in his digging to take a swig of sherry. Of all their faces, hers alone he will never forget—shorn of her hair, jaundiced from months of floating in whiskey, her stained yellow eyes staring unblinkingly as he snuffed them with the first shovelful of dirt.

  There’s blood on yer sleeve, tight rounded Mary had slurred the night before she died, rolling up his cuff to uncover a brown stain. Which are you? A doctor or a killer? We’ve vowed not to go with doctors anymore, for we don’t want to end up on one of your tables. But if you’re only a killer, you’re all right by me. He had found Mary Paterson in Canongate with her friend (Janet Brown; he was later to learn her name when she testified at the murder trial), beyond jolly and well onto drunk. Janet cackled as Mary threw her strong arms around Henry’s neck and kissed him with a slick tongue of juniper. Maybe it was the stench of gin, maybe it was her friend’s airless laughter, but Henry felt himself suffocated by this woman’s flesh. Ach, yer no killer, disappointed Mary called as he disentangled himself and pulled away. You’ll slay no woman’s heart with that attitude.

  According to Janet at the trial, the next morning friendly William Burke invited the girls into his lodging house, where he introduced them to his friend, William Hare. Before ten o’clock, Mary had
made the acquaintance of two more bottles of gin and passed out drunk. Janet, who was lured outside for a walk by dour William Hare, never saw her friend again. Henry could pick up the story from there: by two o’clock, he and Dr. Knox were lifting Mary Paterson’s naked body from a tea chest at Surgeons’ Square and setting her to steep in a trough of whiskey. How did one so young and healthy come to die? he demanded of Burke, even as he handed over the money. I saw her only yesterday and she was fine. She died of the drink, sir, said the cagey Irishman, counting his coins. Truly, ’twas a tragedy. There could be no denying foul play this time. Only last night Henry had kissed the same lips he was now destined to dissect.

  Next door, the neighbor’s black dog won’t stop barking. Be quiet! Henry snaps, digging his shoulder into the shovel and thrusting deeper into his backyard. The hole he has roughed out is deep enough and he tumbles the cadaver Liss from his sheet into the earth. Dig them up. Put them back in. Dig them up. Put them back in. He didn’t go to medical school to become a grave digger. He stops and takes another long draw from his bottle, wipes his brow, and offers up a short prayer for the dead man. Lord, take this your son over to the Great Majority, he prays, while next door the neighbor’s dog barks loud enough to wake the whole block. And Lord, if Thou art merciful, go easier on the Earth’s future doctors.

  There is no number on the door, and with the windows boarded up, he’s unsure if he has the right address. But it’s nine houses in from High Street and the stoop is as slick with rotting vegetables as Audrey described it. A thin dusting of snow has melted into the runny whitewash left by the Board of Health, and someone has sunk one of the agency’s abandoned paint-brushes into a mound of hoary night soil, as a warning. This is not a house friendly to health, Henry decides, rapping gently on the door with his knuckles. No answer. He knocks louder, then gives the door a little push. It is unlocked.