The Dress Lodger Page 4

  Mazby spots her first and stands up respectfully.

  “Is this the gentle Miss Audrey Place we’ve heard so much about?” he asks gallantly.

  The other boys quickly fold their newspapers and rise. Everyone stands but Henry, whose face is crimson.

  “No,” he says tightly. “This is not Miss Place.”

  Mazby hurriedly sits back down, blushing brighter than his instructor. Of course this is not Henry’s fiancée. Why would she come to a place like this? On a wet night like this? Oh why doesn’t he think before he speaks? Why? Why?

  “Sir,” says she, barely glancing at the students, “step out with me?”

  Henry rises as if he had been waiting to do so all night long. Wordlessly, he follows her to the front door of the bar. The back of her expensive dress is wet and streaked with mud.

  The rain is falling in great torrents now and sheet lightning, far out to sea, leaches the eastern half of the black sky indigo. They stand on the single step elevated from the flooded lane, sheltered under John Robinson’s shovel and skull. Now that he looks at her sober, Henry realizes Gustine has much in common with her name. Except for a slight gutturalness in the first letter, her name would be almost musical, and if not for the unfortunate gutterishness that began her, she, the girl, might have grown up to be very pretty. The name suits her so well, he wonders if she made it up. Standing so close, he can smell butterscotch candy on her breath, mixed with the sickly scent of rotting teeth.

  “I found one,” she says. “Dead under the bridge.”

  “Gustine,” Henry starts. “Forget everything I said.”

  “Snub Irish nose. Bloody bully and a drunk, I’d say.”

  “I’ve decided to teach from plates. I will make models. I can’t do this.”

  “You told me to look for you.”

  “I know. I can’t.”

  “I’ve been looking. For weeks. Keeping my ears open like you said. Asking after the sick. I’ve been working for you.”

  Why does his temperature drop ten degrees when she stands near him? Why does he feel infected by her, fluish, why do his teeth chatter? It used to be when he was in love he felt this way. Then, when he stood before the uncharted universe of his first opened body. Inept, hopeful, terrified. Like he felt a month ago, in the Labour in Vain, when drunk and floating on laudanum he poured out his soul to this girl; confessed his needs, his fear, his failure at the Trinity graveyard. They must have bodies, he told her. My teachers—Sir Astley, Knox—they provided bodies. I am afraid. Did he say it out loud? I am afraid.

  “Who is Miss Place?” she asks.

  “Gustine, go home,” he says, a little sickened to hear his fiancée’s name in her mouth. He knows he shouldn’t be angry at her. She is only doing what he, in a moment of insane weakness, asked her to do. But he is embarrassed by her. She has no idea what it is she’s doing.

  “Dr. Chiver.”

  He hears her calling his name, but walks back inside. Did anyone overhear what they were saying? He looks around suspiciously, but the only person he sees regarding him is a hideous one-eyed woman standing by the bar. Someone did a bad job sewing that up, he thinks. Back at his table, four oblivious boys slouch in their chairs, their long legs imperiously stretched out before them. Four boys from among the best families in Sunderland, friends of his uncle Clanny’s, paying students. Here in this out-of-the-way town where he was to forget everything that happened in Edinburgh, where he was to begin again. With his own school. Under his own control. But he has taught them everything he can from charts. He has exhausted the illustrations from Albinus and Bichat. And he has seen firsthand the dangers of allowing a surgeon to operate when all he knows of the human body is the space it takes up in a book. Back in London his teacher’s nephew, Bransby Cooper, was admitted into the Royal College of Surgeons with no better qualification than a kinship to Sir Astley. Henry witnessed him perform what should have been a routine bladder stone removal on a middle-aged man, the father of six children—a procedure any trained surgeon could perform in under eight minutes. Bransby took an hour, digging with his knife, then his clamp, finally groping with his fingers like a grocer fishing for olives. The patient, fully awake the entire time, bound, and screaming in agony, was so exhausted he died twenty-four hours later. Six children. Could he live with himself if he graduated four more Bransby Coopers?

  Behind him, Gustine waits. She has someone for him. A drunk and a bully. Dead under a dark bridge. Who is to know? Burke is dead. Hare gave King’s evidence and was transported. It is not the same, he tells himself. We have murdered no one.

  “Dr. Chiver.” Gustine comes up behind him. “I lost money coming to find you. My landlord is going to be mad.”

  And Gustine’s landlord is going to be mad if he doesn’t give her some money. There is no way around it. His students are slouching, again pretending to read their papers, but about to mutiny. Our teacher is afraid, he knows they are thinking. He is afraid to get us a body.

  “Did you hear me?” she asks.

  Henry strides to the table in the back and Coombs, who had taken his seat, jumps up. Henry knows they are wondering about the woman in the fancy blue dress. He can see the unasked question hovering on Coombs’s lips like a smirk. He won’t give him a chance to ask it.

  “Be at my house in two hours,” he says. “Sleep, eat, do whatever you need to do. Tonight, we will have a lesson.”

  It is midnight, and the Labour in Vain is closing up. John Robinson wipes the sticky beer from the tables with his fusty rag, sweeping the rain-soaked sawdust onto the street to clog up the gutters. He has blown out all the lamps but one to save on oil, leaving the public house shadowy and cold, robbed of the evening’s fire and body heat. As he sweeps, he reunites the chairs with their tables, turning them over and setting them on top to discourage the rats from climbing up.

  One by one, he wipes and sets the chairs. Here sat that shy consumptive young girl who came to drag her father home, waiting for Da to drink himself into a semblance of sobriety, or at least to get through hilarious and on to maudlin. She smiled at his jokes patiently, then with her soft gentle voice got him to crying with how he was breaking Ma’s heart, and from there it was easy enough to help him from this chair—which John Robinson now turns over—and out the door for home.

  Sweep, sweep. John Robinson moves on to the next table and collects the sugar-crusted gin glasses left by the factory girls. By the end of the evening each girl had a silk kerchief for her neck given to her by a keelman who had fallen madly in love. He’s seen it a hundred times before. Each will wear her man’s cloth like a lady wears an engagement ring, giving out the favors a hardworking fiancé has the right to expect. They will be madly in love until next Saturday night, when there is a row, and the next Saturday night, when perhaps there is a bruise, and then, John Robinson suspects, the smart factory girl will give her neck kerchief back, the stupid one will wear hers to the altar.

  The proprietor of the Labour in Vain puts their glasses to soak in cold soapy water and moves on to the larger table in the back. Chiver’s four students left their newspapers behind on the table; John Robinson collects them to read and to line the windows upstairs. They seemed more nervous than usual tonight, he thinks, sweeping up the hulls from the sunflower seeds Bietler obsessively fished out of his jacket pocket and ate. Usually, they swagger in with their teacher, act bluff and all hail-fellow-well-met like they belong in such a bar and not off sipping sherry at the Bridge Inn. When they think he’s not looking, they wipe the rims of their pint glasses with their shirtsleeves. Usually, they last an hour, maybe two. Tonight though, he couldn’t get them to leave. They switched from beer to rye and knocked back a bottle between them, looking grimmer and grimmer with each round.

  Their four chairs he wipes and turns over.

  Tired John Robinson leans against his broom and surveys his bar. Before he goes upstairs to bed, he must water the gin and correct the wine. He buys as cheaply as he can from a French sailor,
mostly vinegared old casks, sweetened with a little packet of grayish-red oxidized lead got off the chemist. He knows he stands a chance of poisoning half his clientele, but most drink beer, so he doesn’t sweat it.

  Saturday seems to be his only solid night since the Quarantine. There was a time, before this cholera business, when any night of the week his bar was packed to overflowing, when sailors who didn’t frequent the Life Boat or the Golden Anchor would walk the few blocks up to the Labour in Vain for a pint or six. Then the tap would flow, then the blood would fly! Most nights he’d have to toss out twenty brawny men instead of four sotted students. Ach, that it’s come to this. A few keelmen, four nervous rich kids, lost without their teacher, and him off to get a little piece of Gustine. The proprietor shakes his head. He wonders if Whilky would look kindly on his dress lodger spending so much time downstairs in his brother’s bar. She’s dressed for the Bridge Inn and the Majestic Theatre; she’s dressed to have a vestryman invite her up to his best friend’s dark flat—oh, no, he’s off on business just now, but he left the key under this mat. It’s dangerous for a working girl to keep too much company with one man. And she is smitten. John Robinson saw that the night they sat here in the corner.

  At this last table. Far back in the dark corner. That night a month ago they sat at this same table for two bound by a broken chain of round, white water stains. Usually this table beckons those that come in via the Church Walk. Two came in tonight, a different two will come in tomorrow night. They can tell it’s a table for hiding, it’s a table where a glass can leave a stain from not being lifted and toasted of an evening. Back here it’s dark enough for those that have just buried a loved one to cry a little more, or to hide dry eyes if not crying is what they feel bad about. With the Church Walk only two narrow alleys away, the Labour in Vain sees its share of burying customers. John Robinson got the chills the night Gustine sat down with the wild-looking, mud-spattered doctor. He always thought it foreboded something ill if an unbereaved couple picked that table to sit at; it was like courting certain death in the family, or at best a crippling accident, and he didn’t like it. Of course, John Robinson couldn’t know that that night they’d had a right to the burying table.

  But back to work.

  He turns over the chair that held an eager, animated Gustine. Sweeps beneath it. He lifts the chair upon which sat Henry, whose heart that night raced with fear and laudanum. John Robinson remembers serving him gin after gin, with sugar cubes for Gustine. He can still see them clearly: Gustine leaning in, her small pink tongue playing around the edges of the sugar cube clamped between her teeth; Henry taking suicidal gulps of gin, talking crazier and crazier, looking over his shoulder as if pursued by the Devil. John Robinson remembers glancing around for the Eyeball, waiting to see if she would step in and steer Gustine toward more profitable customers; but the Eye merely watched from the corner, patient and implacable.

  The proprietor sets Henry’s chair and sweeps out a few stray frogs before heading downstairs to perform his nightly transubstantiation of vinegar and lead into wine.

  And now, dear readers, the Labour in Vain is quiet. We have it all to ourselves until John Robinson comes back to lock up and blow out the last light. Perhaps since we are finally alone, we should take this opportunity to make an apology. When the body of a story is stretched out before us, we who are new to the telling of tales sometimes don’t know where to make the first cut. Which is the best way to enter? Shall we plunge deep into the heart of the matter or begin systematically with the extremities? It is clear to us now that we have opened this particular story in the wrong place. We realize now that it would have been better to have begun a month earlier, not among the jostling wicker baskets of the marketplace, nor picking our way through an explosion of river frogs that provides the ribbiting backdrop to our narrative, nor even beneath the great Wearmouth Bridge where Gustine found the means of returning to Henry. No. How much wiser to have begun a month ago with their first encounter, on a night Henry wishes to push aside forever, but one Gustine cherishes like a pressed flower. Since it is impossible to take back a cut once given, let us then trick time. Let us use this back corner table that has absorbed so many sad cemetery tales as a talisman, and learn of it the story Henry told Gustine the night of his failure, the night he brought her here and changed both their lives irrevocably. Readers, touch your hands to it like a séance table and allow it to lead us back to a dark night in September. Slowly back. Go slowly back. Do you see yourself strolling along the Church Walk, through the acclivitous shadows of orphanage on our left and workhouse on our right, down to the inevitable caesar of this grim triumvirate, the Trinity graveyard? Are you prepared to begin again with the story our table has to tell?

  The moon shines eerily on a false chemical winter, the alternate night of our beginning. Emaciated box shrubs stand stiff and defiant against the white sky, the lead roof of Trinity Church gleams like quicksilver. All is cold and silent and dusted white. With the cholera scare, by order of the new Board of Health, the sexton must mix great shovelfuls of quicklime into the mounds of earth that partner all fresh six-foot troughs to corrode diseased bodies into instant bones. We may have watched him of an evening chop and turn, heave and pat, raising pure white drifts throughout the yard, and when he was done, drive the flat headstones into place like sledding accidents gone face-first into snowbanks.

  The sexton’s dog, who is usually left tied up to warn off intruders, who would at the skittering of a squirrel or the fluttering of a mourning dove bark until all the veins stood out on his muscular neck, died two weeks earlier from gnawing a brick of unbroken lime. The sexton himself is down with the ’flu he periodically picks up from the bodies he handles and is sleeping it off at his sister’s house. It has been two hysterical years since Burke and Hare were caught; the town has calmed down; the graveyard, no longer patrolled, is once more the exclusive domain of its tenants. On the alternate night of our beginning, as Henry creeps across the town moor, crunching through shimmering floes of broken glass, skirting the ghostly skeletons of dumped cattle given their last rites by rats, his is the only ghost that stirs.

  (Later, at the Labour in Vain, Henry will tell Gustine that the laudanum he took to calm him for the task had, in fact, the opposite effect. Once he had leapt the cemetery wall, he had the sensation of skiing wildly through the night, of trees and stones and shadows rushing too fast past him, of time itself speeding downhill. He carried a burlap sack, a shovel, and a crow-bar; he could feel the sweat running down the back of his neck and realized his arms were shaking from clenching the crowbar. Henry later told Gustine that he made an enormous effort to slow his racing heart.)

  Despite the frozen look of the land, it is not cold. The soil gives off a damp chill from the previous night’s rain but the warm air soups a lazy white fog in the hollows between mounds. Henry moves efficiently through the thicket of last century’s gravestones, barely glancing at the names. There had been no feared epidemic to frost these graves with lime, and Henry moves past them quickly. He needs to select his grave as he would a fresh fish, and he knows that a young woman, first cousin to the couple who took the back table at the Labour in Vain that night, was interred this morning. The couple looked so wretched he doubted they could have afforded a sturdy coffin. Probably the cheapest of nails and few enough of those. He wants only to finish this awful thing, to slap the wet body onto the slab and say to his students, Here, I have done it. That I may not ever again be accused of conspiring with murderers, I have dirtied my own hands with grave soil, I have carried the dead weight of a body on my own shoulders. That I may never again be accused.

  (Have you ever taken laudanum? he will ask Gustine later, sitting with his elbows on the same back corner burying table where earlier he had narrowed fragments of that grieving couple’s conversation into a point on the map of Trinity’s graveyard, a brilliant patch of earth buzzing as though freshly sifted with cocaine, underneath which sleeps a pale first cousin. No, she wil
l shake her head. I never have.)

  Henry is so dizzy he hardly knows how his shovel makes connection with the soil or how the first clod of earth comes to hit his boot. It rained the night before and the dirt is heavy, pregnant with earthworms and busy black pill bugs, but he digs and digs like a man possessed. At last, he is doing it. He is the teacher now; he is doing what Sir Astley Cooper never had the guts to do, what Knox would rather pay professional murderers to do. Time moves in fits and starts as he digs deeper and deeper, not the required six feet, barely four, when his shovel strikes home. He flings it aside, wedges the crowbar beneath the floor on which he stands, prying back the coffin’s lid with a loud crack of splintering wood. At last. At last, he kneels, looking upon his prize. Shrouded in a length of filmy linen from which a few strands of long brown hair escape over her shoulders, she sleeps on her right side, dreaming of angels and hot cups of tea and a comfy seat at the sandal of God, the usual poor person’s dream of Heaven. He can reach in and touch the rounded curve of her hip, embrace her narrow shoulders. He could climb in beside her and pull the dirt over them both like a blanket.

  He gently rolls the girl onto her back and reaches around her waist to draw her up. But barely has he gotten his arms around her when he feels this girl is spongy underneath, her winding sheet wet and reeking. Mary Paterson? he whispers, breathing in the unmistakable smell of cheap whiskey. I left you behind in Edinburgh.

  Henry drops the body sharply against the coffin and scrambles back to the surface. This isn’t happening. Calm down. Calm down, he tells himself. Men far less competent and careful than you have dug up bodies and not been driven mad by it. Reach in, feel under her armpits. Pull. Yes, this is not the smell of rye, but merely a ripening body not yet preserved in salt. This heaviness I understand; it is not a frantic pulling back to the grave but the purely scientific phenomenon of blood pooling in the extremities. He lies flat on his belly and tugs the young woman free of the earth. Now that he has her above ground, he sees she looks nothing like the one for whom he almost mistook her. By laudanum moonlight, the similarity in height and hair coloring had been uncanny, but it was a momentary terror; he has composed himself now. He eases his bag over this first cousin as gently as he might help a lady into her cloak. I have only to fold her gently into this sack, replace this earth, climb this wall, and fly across the town moor. I have only to secure seven more first cousins for my students before the school year is out.