The Dress Lodger Page 5

  Knox holds the purse strings

  Chiver saws the bow

  With hearts as black as sin

  And hands as white as snow.…

  One of the many songs the balladeers wrote during the trial coupling his name with Knox’s is stuck in his head. He works quickly to refill the grave, sending shovelfuls of earth into darkness. His hands, he realizes, have become uncomfortably hot, and when he looks down, to his dismay, they are white as snow. Henry could shake himself for his stupidity. Even the most witless hireling would have thought to wear gloves before he dug around in a poison-laced graveyard. Henry wipes his raw, quicklime-corroded hands on his white powdered jacket. He tears open his contaminated frock coat, pushing against the cool white shirt, and leaves hot bloody handprints against his chest. He needs to wash this off fast; his hands—his surgeon’s hands will be eaten away. He frantically refills the grave, but there is no time. Flinging aside his shovel, Henry lunges for the bag of first cousin—they must get out of here. But when he lifts his hard-won prize, the burlap sack runs with clear yellow whiskey.

  No! Henry cries, flinging the bag back into the half-filled grave. He pushes hard against the chemical snowdrifts, stumbles and falls on a hard stone marker, cracking his lip, instinctively touching his searing hands to it and igniting his mouth. Stay away! Just behind him he hears a stampede of stumbling, heavy footsteps, he feels the heat of breath against the back of his neck, reeking of filthy rags, sweet drugged-gin, yellow-tongue, head-achy anger. It overpowers the putrescence of the graveyard, coming closer and closer, the fetid breath that hid in the mouths of all sixteen corpses delivered to Dr. Knox’s school. He scrambles up and over the high brick wall, leaving far behind cousin, crowbar, and bag. He looks back and finds himself face-to-face with whiskey-bloated Mary Paterson and the furious, limbless gang of sixteen.

  (They had followed me, you see, he will say to Gustine later at the Labour in Vain, watching pass over her thin intent face the masks of those beggars, all murdered over two years ago in that cheap Edinburgh boardinghouse, crept up upon and suffocated while passed out drunk, consigned not only to haunt the living forevermore, but to do it with crippling, bloody, eternal hangovers.

  How could I have not known they were murdered? he will ask her as if expecting an answer. When Burke and Hare brought bodies so fresh that blood still foamed at the mouth and dripped from the nose? Why didn’t I ask the question we all had on our lips when six-toed, cauliflower-eared Daft Jamie, beloved by all boys and organ grinder monkeys for his liberality with cashew nuts, went missing from the street, just at the time a headless, footless corpse appeared on Dr. Knox’s dissecting table? Or go to the police the night they arrived with a grandmother and a twelve-year-old boy folded into a pickle barrel, whose bodies had so obviously set into rigor mortis while inside that we had to smash the barrel before we could free them? Or cry out when they presented us with the naked body of a prostitute I’d been with only the night before—giddy and beautiful and very much alive—folded inside a tea chest, franked with threads of moldy black pekoe? She is almost too beautiful to cut, Dr. Knox had said, calling in an artist to paint her as a cadaver odalisque, preserving her in a trough of whiskey for three months so that his students might explore her perfect musculature. How could I deny Mary Paterson? Would you have kept silent, Justine?

  Gustine, she corrects.

  Would you?)

  Henry falls running from the wall and never looks back.

  It is at the town moor communal pump that Gustine finds him as she is heading home from a long night’s work. She stops by the pump as she does most nights to wash away an evening’s accumulation of gentleman callers and finds a man slumped over at the watering trough, running cold water over his hands and face. He is staring at her so strangely she thinks surely she must know him from somewhere. Henry sobs through the cascade of icy pump water when he sees the pale blue vision advancing on him. I didn’t know. Leave me alone.

  Had we only chosen this night as the night of our beginning, we might even have ended our chapter conveniently here at the Labour in Vain, where Henry took Gustine once he realized that she was not Mary Paterson—how could she be—but in fact one of her kind, a creature who might, more than anything else, help him erase this awful night from his mind. Another girl already had a customer upstairs at John Robinson’s, so they waited at the burying table, and while they waited Henry found himself telling this strange blue girl everything about himself. He poured it all out to her: how he fled Edinburgh after Burke and Hare were arrested rather than face the public’s wrath, how doctors must constantly battle stupid, stupid superstition when people should just donate their bodies to Science damn it like he was going to do, like the valiant Jeremy Bentham had done, and how he was a goddamned failure, yes he was, having to face his students empty-handed, and all because he couldn’t secure them a body. A damned dead body. She listened carefully, barely sipping her gin, and when she finally spoke, she surprised him.

  Funny, she says through her sugar, I come across dead bodies all the time. Would you like it if I brought you to them?

  Says Henry, pausing long enough to make sure he understands her, You would do that?

  Yes, says Gustine, if it would help you. And in return, she continues, in return you will let me ask you a favor.

  Her tone of voice has changed. She is not the gentle listener of a moment before, but a flinty businesswoman. Over her shoulder, he sees the couple come downstairs from John Robinson’s upper room. The woman’s face is red and rough from the man’s two-day stubble and both look tired and drunk. Henry is gripping Gustine’s hand hard in his own. Her nails, in contrast to her dress, are ragged and grimed with red clay. At least he thinks it’s clay. The gin and the laudanum hit him the same time as the realization that he has confessed his deepest, most damning secrets to a total stranger. She is in a position to demand almost anything of him. And what does he know of her?

  Gustine cuts her eyes to the staircase. That’s us, she says.

  Henry swallows hard and tries not to be sick in the bar. For the first time he notices that this girl’s dress is the color of mercury against a syphilis sore.

  I think I should go home to bed, he says to Gustine. The bar has emptied out. Only an old one-eyed woman and John Robinson are left. Gustine looks crestfallen and a little reproachful.

  I lost money coming here with you, she says. My landlord is going to be mad.

  Oh, of course, says Henry, reaching into his pocket and finding a silver crown. Thank you for the company.

  Gustine’s eyes brighten at the sight of so much money.

  I’ll find a body for you, she says. Don’t worry.

  He rises and sees her out the door. The old woman trails out behind her and he wonders if Gustine notices. In another hour Henry is passed out in bed; in another day, he is forced to read about an aborted body-snatching at the Trinity graveyard and how the victim’s ghost terrified the thieves away.

  It’s strange with some stories that no matter where you begin, be it in the crowded marketplace or in the lonely graveyard, among the living or with the dead, you are fated to end up in the same place. If we lift our hands from the back corner séance table, and rub our eyes, behold—here we are, still at the Labour in Vain. So, it seems it made no difference, dear reader, where we cut into our story. Had we begun a month earlier instead of tonight, we might have taken a different path, but we still would have ended up here, in a lonely bar, watching John Robinson bolt the door behind us, and blow out the last remaining light.

  III

  THE MORGUE

  Sod me,” says Gustine, “it was right here.”

  The rain has stopped and the frogs, to whom any downpour is forty days and forty nights, have sent forth their raven and dove. The waters lie upon the land beneath the Wearmouth Bridge in great continental puddles of tidal flooding: a Deluge to the croaking population of Sunderland, a nuisance to Gustine, who must lift her skirts and wade to where she found
the body at what was then low tide. She splashes back and forth in the shadow of the bridge, churning up glassy silt dumped by Horn and Scott’s Bottle Works next door. She swears this is the spot. Could he have floated out with the tide? No, it is not that deep yet. Gustine retraces her steps up the steep bank and stomps angrily back down.

  “Just come down here a little farther,” Gustine commands. “It must have been under here.”

  That marvel of the modern world, our Iron Bridge, perched upon its two masonry abutments on either steep bank, looks cold and imperious and unforgiving at night. It arches high above, casting its austere shadow now upstream, now down, depending on which of its flanking glasswork furnaces are firing. Upstream it darkens the ballast mountains of sand used by the Sunderland Bottle Works; downstream, frowns upon a line of free-standing four-story warehouses and the muddy flats that lead to the Iron Foundry.

  Beneath the bridge, our black river lies fallow; flat-bottomed lighters that at high tide would have been moored in the middle of the channel waiting to ferry corn, timber, stone, and cloth are leashed loosely along the shore. When the rising tide knocks them together, they answer hollowly as if in sympathy with the empty bellies of their owners, men who have not earned a living wage in months. The barge drivers, too, are suffering. And the man who pilots the harbor’s single steam tug, a machine that could turn ships around in six days when before they might have dallied six weeks waiting for a good wind. All the river men sit idle now, playing cards in drafty rooms up and down the quay, cursing the Board of Health and laying bets on when they’ll pass an edict forbidding the very tides from turning. There is no one out to be happy he will not have to row in the rain, to pull no matter what the weather against the choppy Wear water and risk capsizing in the wake made by the churning, tireless steam tug. There is no one out at all.

  Henry follows Gustine deeper into the shadows, along the bank lam-bent with milky bits of buried glass from the bottle works. He hugs the masonry abutment of the Great Bridge, trying to keep above the tide. When he looks up, he is staring into the longest expansion carcass in the world. Bowed iron ribs are ball-and-socketed together by hollow joints of straining metal. Thermal expansion has warped the bridge’s sunniest side, creating a ferrous boil in the infrastructure that requires twelve horizontal splints to pull it back into shape. Underneath, the gulls of Sunderland have shat the bridge’s spandrels skeleton white.

  She is leading me to be murdered, Henry thinks grimly, inching around the abutment. Her pimp will come at me with one of those heavy-bottomed bottles. He will bring it crashing down upon my neck, rifle my pockets while Gustine keeps watch and his terrier sniffs my pant leg. Henry looks around for anyone who might hear if he calls out. Four powerful men on the opposite bank feed blocks of stone into the sparking open turret of the Sheepfold Lime Works. Roasting great hewn blocks from the Fulwell Quarry into quicklime for use as fertilizer and glassmaking flux and burning Board of Health cemetery snow, they couldn’t possibly hear him. No one could hear.

  “Maybe down here?” Gustine wades up to her ankles in black river mud and impatiently beckons him to follow.

  Beyond her, the glowing cones of the bottle-work furnaces strain at their seams, oozing orange threads of molten glass where the mortar is compromised. They sigh carbon dioxide and groan enough flame to throw crazy reflections onto the black surface of the river, scorching the patent slips where half-built schooners are mirrored mouldering crookedly on stilts; touching off the steep tiled rooftops peeping upside down from Bridge Crescent and Matlock Street; even playing the pyromaniac with the reflection of that great iron Narcissus arching above their heads. Gustine moves in and out of shadow, now lit by infernal light at the water’s edge, now swallowed by the moonless dark. Henry steps on something soft and leaps back. Beneath his shoe, a river rat, slick and silver and gaudy with glass dust, darts into the water and quickly furrows upstream.

  When he looks up again to find Gustine, a half-lit man is looming in front of him.

  “Jesus Christ,” Henry shouts.

  Gustine wheels around at the sound of his cry while Henry, in a single fleeting thought, wonders if he can reach the rig he left tethered up the bank before he bleeds to death.

  “Will you help us, please?” she pleads.

  The man steps out of the shadows and Henry, to his great relief, sees it is no pimp after all, but an old waterman with a wide triangular torso, bowed legs, and a face like a brown puckered apple. He is one of a dying breed of passenger ferrymen who thirty years ago was put out of business by the Great Bridge and has since then spent every night haunting his old competitor.

  The old man leans on his ferry pole and doffs his wool cap to Gustine.

  “What’s a nice young lady doin’ down a’ the stinky river a’ this hour?” he asks kindly, showing a mouthful of black teeth.

  Gustine puts her hand on his arm.

  “Oh, sir! My husband and I have had terrible news. Someone claimed he saw my brother’s body down by the riverbank. My husband bade me stay at home, but I insisted on coming. Please, have you seen him?”

  There’s that voice again. Where on earth did she learn to speak this way? From penny novels? Henry doubts she can even read. From the theatre? Her accent, gone. Her cadence, articulation perfect. In that dress, with that pure, distraught voice, she could have stepped out of the finest house on Fawcett Street. She could be Audrey’s next-door neighbor.

  “Y’should’ve made ’er stay in, sir,” the waterman scolds Henry. “’Tis a dangerous place for a lady.”

  “I know,” says Henry, awkwardly. “She insisted.”

  The waterman nods to Gustine and draws Henry aside.

  “I did see some lanterns round here ’bout an hour ago,” says he. “You might try Mag Scurr’s down the Quay. But take this lady home first.”

  “I will,” says Henry.

  “It’s no place for her.”

  “I know,” fumes Henry, annoyed to have this water person think him capable of bringing a real lady to the stinking river bottom at night.

  “God bless you,” calls Gustine in her Fawcett Street voice as Henry tugs at her.

  He can’t get away from this dark, lonely place fast enough. On the road above, he sees his team’s impatient breath curl against the fog, hears the creak of the carriage settling in the damp cold. This is ridiculous. He is chasing a corpse that he does not even know exists. His students are probably even now at his house, being offered sherry by his befuddled valet, wondering where the hell he can be. He will just have to face them. He will refund their tuition and apologize to his uncle Clanny. He and Audrey will be married quietly and he will move her as far away from Edinburgh and London and this awful town as he can get. To America, where a man might start over and make money with no honest profession whatsoever. Climbing into the carriage, he is so full of dull disappointment that he barely realizes Gustine has hopped in beside him.

  “Gustine.” He turns to the eager girl settling the lap robe over her dress. “I will drive you wherever you would like, but I am going home now.”

  “The old man told us to try Mag Scurr’s. I know where that is.”

  “We don’t know that the body was taken there,” Henry says. “Even if it was, how on earth are we supposed to get it now?”

  The horses stamp testily, churning the fog with their tails. Gustine sits in silence, picking at a loose thread on her tartan lap robe.

  “I am going to drive you home now,” he repeats. “Please tell me where.”

  “Mill Street,” replies Gustine tersely.

  Henry turns his horses toward the East End and gives them a sharp switch. The oil lanterns swinging from each side of the rig light a thick wall of fog, punctuated every few blocks by the misty blue halo of a street lamp. It is getting darker and darker the farther he pushes east; the streets begin to spiral back on themselves like a knot of baby snakes. Next to him, Gustine sits with her eyes straight ahead, her lips pressed into a tight suture.
r />   “Why are you angry?” he asks roughly. “We spent a few hours together over a month ago. I forgot all about it. Why have you been looking all this time?”

  “You asked me to,” she says.

  “Do you do everything someone asks you to?” he snaps.

  “Mostly.”

  He urges the horses faster. From the moment she came into the bar, he’d felt a thin sheen of sweat break out upon his brow, as if she were calling some fever out in him. Down at the river bottom that same oily contamination spread over his chest, down his shirt, and between his legs; now he can hardly wait to get home, draw a hot bath, and wash this whole evening away. But of course, he can’t go home and take a bath—his students will be there.

  “There is practical anatomy and contemplative anatomy,” she quotes his own words back to him, singsongily, as if had she memorized without fully understanding them. “The first we learn by experience, the second we learn from the teacher. The first looks at structure, the second at cause. How is a teacher to teach the cause when there is no body from which to learn the structure?”

  “You remember that? From a month ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are far ahead of my students, then,” says Henry, subdued.

  “You said it was impossible to become a doctor without the study of the human body and that every body you examined made you a far better doctor,” Gustine reminds him.