The Dress Lodger Read online

  They did what they could for the child with scarletina, who was delirious by the time they were called, and not likely to last the night. Henry ordered the new mother to drink beef tea and wrote her a prescription for tartar emetic that she could get free at the dispensary on Sans Street, knowing full well she would never go. When they finally left the sad, squalid house, Clanny suggested they treat themselves to a drink. A cheerfully painted sign for the public house next door invited them in, its emblem a shovel poised to dig up a smiling skull and above it, its moniker: the Labour in Vain. Henry thought the sentiment about summed up their evening, and in the course of the year he’s been in town, he’s realized the sentiment about sums up his life. Most nights find him here, at least for a pint, sometimes surrounded by his students, sometimes alone with a book. He often amuses Audrey with stories of the characters he meets at the Labour in Vain. She says she would love to come with him, but he’s not that depraved. He doesn’t need to sully the one pure thing in his life.

  “Another round, Doctor?” asks John Robinson, the flat-faced, shaggy-haired, hulking proprietor of the Labour in Vain, reaching for Henry’s glass.

  Henry passes him the empty and watches the publican fill it with suds. Henry’s bandaged hands, thick with cotton gauze, make it difficult for him to carry the full pint back to his table without spilling.

  On a typical night, John Robinson pulls drinks for every sort here. Early on, most of the tables are taken up by good-natured day labourers headed home from the docks. Later, a few butchers might drop by in their crimson aprons and pick the dried blood from under their fingernails while they toss back a couple with friends. The night will wear on, the air will get hotter and the boasting meaner. Just when you’ve decided the room is too full of men and it’s a sorry state of affairs for a Saturday night, a pair of pretty factory girls will switch in, or someone’s Catholic daughter will come to drag her old man home. Then the fun begins. Men who were about to come to blows only minutes before are now showing off, rolling back their cambric sleeves and arm-wrestling for love and honour. The factory girls applaud and are treated to gin and sugar water, while the old man talks his shy daughter into staying for just one more sip. On a typical night at the Labour in Vain, when the hilarity swells and the singing begins, the patrons never notice a couple creep in, install themselves in the corner, and quietly order some drinks. The woman is invariably pale with swollen eyes, gripping her glass of beer as if someone were about to pry it from her; the man rests his elbows on the table, and studies the round white water stains on the wood before him. They will have come in via the Church Walk, like so many other couples before them, leaving someone behind in Trinity’s overflowing graveyard. They will have a single beer and slip out as quietly as they slipped in. It is getting late and the Labour in Vain’s hardworking, hard-drinking patrons will be thinking it’s time to leave. But John Robinson knew what he was doing when he christened his pub. He knew there are no patrons so happy to sit and drink as patrons who are given something to gripe about. Inevitably, on their way out the door, they glance up at Robinson’s cheap wooden sign, the painted shovel and its grinning skull, realize that yes, dammit, they have been working their fingers to the bone, their palms are bloody, and for what, they ask, what? The sign works every time. They sit back down and order another round.

  Through their disgruntled midst carrying his sloshing beer goes Henry Chiver, tolerated if not exactly welcomed at the Labour in Vain. The men know he is a doctor, which makes them suspicious, and they see how the factory girls eye him—as if they were simply dying to run their fingers through the disheveled young man’s whorls of sable hair. What could they possibly see in him? Sure, he’s smart-looking, dressed in his London fashions with choking collar and cravat, sporting those tight trousers all the swells are so fond of, when corduroy knee breeches have always done a workingman fine. But they couldn’t say he is handsome inside those expensive clothes, for his nose is large and his dark eyes are set too wide apart and his overlapping teeth war each with the other for supremacy in his mouth. Worse than all of this, the doctor is possessed of a single trait that is almost unforgivable to the workingmen of the Labour in Vain: Henry is skinny. Everyone knows he could afford to walk into any restaurant in Sunderland and order the menu; yet he is thin by choice.

  “Make room, boys,” says Henry, and waits for his four students to adjust their chairs. He takes a seat himself and wipes his moist bandages off on his coat.

  Little is known of the new Dr. Chiver beyond what the town gossips could collect, and we can tell you very little more. He studied at St. Thomas’s in London with one of the nation’s most acclaimed surgeons, Sir Astley Cooper. He graduated top in his class, and was handpicked by the even more famous Dr. Knox to teach anatomy at his extramural school at 10 Surgeons’ Square, Edinburgh. About two years ago, Henry left under a cloud, which for all the town’s expert seeding has not been made to precipitate the truth. Prominent wives have invited Henry’s uncle Clanny to dinner and hinted at all the usual doctor disgraces: back alley abortions, drug addiction, a rich man dead on the operating table; but he, discreet soul, has calmly chewed his mutton and kept his silence. So no one knows for sure why Henry left Edinburgh two years ago. Though it does seem odd his exit coincided exactly with his mentor Dr. Knox’s implication in the Burke and Hare murders.

  So here he sits on another Saturday night, leaning on a rickety table whose broken legs are trussed with string, sipping beer that tastes brewed from old rags and soda bread. He has lived almost a year in Sunderland, rescued from his mother’s house in London, where, for all of the previous year, from the time he left Edinburgh to the day his uncle called, he barely left his room. He is trying to start over in our town; his uncle found paying students for him and advanced him the money to convert his house. Audrey has been his saving grace, loving him so openly and unconditionally, he is almost embarrassed by it. It has been a healing year, a back-slapping-get-back-on-that-horse-my-boy year. He’s immersed himself in teaching, helped his uncle in these anxious cholera-expectant times, even found a moment to get engaged, and yet, the only thing true about this year, he thinks, the only times that he has been completely honest with himself are on the nights he’s spent here. Only among this crowd of the failed has he felt comfortable living inside his own defeat.

  Uncle Clanny might not see him as a failure. Audrey certainly doesn’t, but Henry’s four students—Bishopwearmouth boys who have met him here tonight, as they do at least once, sometimes twice a week, looking always out of place no matter what old, don’t-mind-if-it-gets-stolen jacket they’ve pulled out of the closet to wear—are, without a doubt, onto him. Oh, they pretend. Redheaded Bietler, mechanically reaching into his pocket and cracking sunflower seeds between his squared-off horsy teeth, pretends to read the Sunderland Herald, recently founded to champion Reform. Grose, the Tory, whose father is a vestryman, and who refuses to read such radical trash, subscribing instead to the musty Sunderland Gazette, where there is no talk of Reform except to bemoan it, pretends to read that. Short, bespectacled Coombs looks over Grose’s shoulder, catches perhaps two or three words a page. Even gentle Mazby, who with his girlish complexion and long lashes is perhaps the brightest of the bunch, distractedly thumbs a month-old copy of The Lancet. They are staring at the words but deep down each is waiting for Henry to speak. Will tonight at last be the night? Will Dr. Chiver finally make good on his promises? Henry looks from boy to boy, dreading having to tell them that once again he has nothing for them, but annoyed that they have begun to assume it. They brought newspapers instead of their kits; at least, up until now, they have made a pretense of bringing their dissection kits.

  Four paltry students, Henry thinks with a sigh—and they are far more difficult to handle than the huge crowds that came to 10 Surgeons’ Square in Edinburgh. Before Burke and Hare, Dr. Knox was so popular he would draw on average five hundred students a session. His anatomy theatre held only two hundred, so he and his assistant,
Henry Chiver, taught in three shifts a day: morning, afternoon, and just past dinnertime. How many evenings did Henry choke down a capon and a mug of beer in Dr. Knox’s dining room, knowing their subject was laid out upon the table in the next room, just as Dr. Knox had left it at the end of the previous lecture; the abdomen opened first and viscera removed, as they decompose quickest; the torso opened next, the head removed and packed in ice for study the next day? How many evenings, as he ripped into his drumstick, would he imagine the ropy tendons of the body’s dissected hand left pinned in place with the point of a compass, so that two hundred students might shove past and make a quick sketch before heading off to their own dinners? Some afternoons when Knox and Henry ran late, they would eat their cold sandwiches over the opened corpse while they argued a point of procedure: what to dissect next? Knox always lobbied for the brain, Henry was obsessed with the heart. The room was kept purposefully cold during the Winter Session to preserve the bodies, and Henry would stomp his feet to warm them, listening with his hands pressed against his armpits as crotchety, atheistic Knox went on about the glories of that most perfect human organ, the unknowable brain. It is the seat of all reason, he would say, the true heart of man, far more so than that muscle in the chest. It is mysterious yet desirous to plumb its own mysteries; it is the Grand Usurper to the throne of impotent old King Soul and its reign defines our modern age! Yes, but, would say Henry. Yes, but—Henry cannot forget the painting of Christ’s Sacred Heart perpetually bursting into flame over his boyhood bed. Against a triumphant fire, bright, sentimental cherubim lifted high that red and blue holy pump; the aorta wide open like the mouthpiece of a trumpet, the four chambers shadowy beneath a venous pink pericardium. It was an anatomical heart, a scientist’s heart, enlisted in the aid of Christ. He knew he was meant to see his savior’s humanity in this isolated organ, and yet by the time he was old enough to enter medical school, the torso of Jesus that faith should have wrapped around it had never materialized; and Henry was left instead worshipping a deified heart. These students are not atheists like you, Henry would argue with Knox. What better way to demystify, what better way to put power into their hands and let them know they have a right to understand the human body, than to have them claim for their own the most ancient symbol of Man’s very Self, his passionate heart? It is easy to intellectualize the body when you are able to take it for granted, thinks Henry, watching his four students fidget over their newspapers here in the Labour in Vain. Since Burke and Hare, he will never again allow himself to take anything for granted.

  “Listen to this,” says Bietler, who has the annoying habit of reading aloud every manner of trivial news. “They opened an Asylum for Female Penitents in Newcastle last month. It’s already full.”

  Mazby glances at Henry to mirror his reaction, but their teacher is impassive.

  “I went to a whore in Newcastle once,” volunteers Coombs. “She was so grimed with coal she looked like a Negress.”

  No one encourages him to continue, but he does so just the same.

  “I also had a whore in Paris.”

  Grose has shouldered Coombs away and now he can no longer even pretend to read. The student looks around the pub and lights on the staircase leading up to John Robinson’s second story. A smirking keelman pulls a factory girl along by her wrist and disappears up the steps.

  “I wonder if she’s one,” he says.

  “Corn’s up because of the Quarantine,” reads Bietler.

  “Do you think the Quarantine is doing any good?” Mazby asks, hoping to draw Dr. Chiver into a conversation. He’s been so quiet tonight.

  Yesterday, at his house on Nile Street, Henry had his students inject a pregnant dog with blue prussiate of potash, then extract and study her organs. Though they had made only one injection, the pancreas, the salivary glands, the kidneys all had turned blue. The prussiate turned the placenta blue, too, and through it, the veins of the fetus had absorbed the color, tingeing the puppy inside a deep hairless sapphire. One small prick here, and an entire body is conquered. A city is like a body, my boys, thinks Henry. It circulates, it shares, it absorbs. Let cholera but prick our pathetic Quarantine and you will soon witness the miracle of circulation.

  “For what it’s costing my father,” sniffs Grose, “the Quarantine had better do the trick.”

  Have they learned anything? he wonders. They speak of holding back illness as if it were as simple as fencing out a curious pig. Did they give more than a passing glance to the shy girl who came in to retrieve her father tonight? Mark her too bright eyes, notice the dainty drops of blood blooming on the handkerchief she touched to her mouth? Over by the door, did they observe the once-handsome face craterous with smallpox, or his companion, the swine-eyed old man whose nose has been eaten down to a snout by syphilis? Disease is drinking in the bar with us. For all we know, Cholera Morbus is even now thumping the bar for a gin. I am wasting my time on these boys, Henry thinks. He looks down at his hands, wrapped in clean white bandages, the only thing about him that has remained clean. I nearly gave my hands in service to you, ungrateful boys. I am teaching you all the time and yet you have no eyes with which to see.

  “Here’s something,” Bietler offers, flipping back a page so that Henry knows he’s read the passage already but deliberately saved it. “Warburton has reintroduced the Anatomy Act. Soon we’ll have all the bodies we need, and we won’t have to wait for you to procure us one. Isn’t that fortunate, Dr. Chiver?”

  Poor Mazby looks woefully at his teacher. Oh, now I see, thinks Henry, looking from one young man to the next. They drew straws before they met me here, and Bietler won the privilege of reminding me that eight months into their training, I have once more failed to produce the bodies I promised for dissection.

  “Soon we will have our pick of the workhouse dead, won’t we, sir?” asks Grose, seconding Bietler. “We won’t need to wait until the moon is new or the ground is soft, or whatever it is you are waiting for.”

  “It must be better for us to get our bodies legally from the workhouse than worry someone has murdered to sell to us,” says Mazby softly, not looking at his teacher.

  No, we must be able to trust our suppliers of corpses, and what better pander, thinks Henry, than the British government? It will provide the bodies of the poor in heaps so that we may learn from them how to save the rich. God, it used to be so easy. A professional resurrectionist would appear at Sir Astley’s or Dr. Knox’s back door, negotiate a price, and without further ado, the students would have a body upon which to learn the art of kidney stone removal, of suturing, of speedy amputation, so that they might save lives. No one liked it, but the system had been in place for well over a hundred years. Then along came Burke and Hare and nothing would ever be the same again.

  “You told us Human Anatomy began in the winter. We are two months into it already,” says Coombs. “What is it you are waiting for?”

  What am I waiting for? Henry swirls his glass of flat mahogany beer and watches the sediment sink like grave dust. God damn Burke and Hare. He is waiting for absolution.

  Outside, the rain has picked up. The patrons of the Labour in Vain can hear it against the windows, and each new man who comes in is handed John Robinson’s towel with which to dry his hair. The bar has a little rush when the theatres let out. One or two had taken in the new play Cholera Morbus and declared it a right frightening little melodrama. By far the favorite, though, was Signior Capelli’s menagery, and all the men who saw it moan into their beers over their talentless cats back home, who if they only showed the least bit of initiative could make their fortunes.

  Into this crowd slips a little bit of blue. John Robinson automatically hands over the towel, and then he sees who it is. His wide, flat face lights up.

  “Gustine, my girl, what can I get you on this raw evening?” asks he.

  “Not a drop,” says she, frowning. “I’m working.”

  John Robinson reaches for his least dirty glass and pours into it a splash of gin
.

  “Just to take the chill off,” he says, holding it out to her.

  “No point in an expensive dress if I have liquor on my breath.” Gustine waves it away, and scans the crowd. She sees a hundred brown heads and a hundred beefy red faces. Could he not have come tonight?

  “Little hope anyone here could afford that dress,” laughs John Robinson, following her eyes around the crowded bar. “Except maybe the good doctor …”

  “Is he here?” asks Gustine.

  The proprietor of Labour in Vain smiles fondly at the overdressed girl. Everyone thinks it’s sweet that Gustine has a crush on Henry Chiver, and who knows—though he doesn’t strike John Robinson as the type, maybe he’ll keep her. With Clanny’s money, he could certainly afford a cheap little flat somewhere, she could quit the pottery, move out of Mill Street. That is, if Whilky would ever let her go. He nods toward the far corner.

  “Back there,” he says, but Gustine has already spotted him and is pushing her way through the crowd. She is all business, this Gustine.

  “It’s a shame to waste such fine gin,” John Robinson says to the counter, giving it a wipe with the hair-drying towel. “Madame Eyeball, won’t you taste it?”

  The old woman who followed in the slip of blue rolls her all-seeing eye toward the counter and spots a cloudy bit of juice. She smacks her lips and downs it in a gulp.

  Before she can find him, Henry spots the dress making its way through the crowd. It is unmistakable against the earthen browns and rust blacks, a dress fit only for the fanciest ball or for the stage. He has not seen that dress for a month, was beginning to think the girl who had worn it was nothing more than a diseased dream, a blue and white laudanum hallucination. God help him, he wishes she were.