The Dress Lodger Read online

  “I did say that. But what do you care?”

  “I care because one day I may need you to be the best doctor you can possibly be.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with you?” he asks.

  “Why do you assume I need help for myself?”

  “Who then?”

  “I will get you this body, tonight,” Gustine says, ignoring his question, “if you promise that one day you will let me call on you for help. As soon as I saw you, down at the pump, I knew you were the only one I could trust. Now, how badly do you want to be a good doctor? How badly do you want that body?”

  How badly does he want that body? He didn’t realize how badly until he knew it was lost. Henry thinks of going home to face those four boys, waiting with their dissection kits on their laps like wide-jawed baby birds. His speech obviously impressed Gustine; so why does he find it so difficult to believe it himself?

  “We’ll try Mrs. Scurr’s. If he’s not there, that will be the end of it,” Henry says abruptly, and, taking a sharp left, heads for the wharves and timber cranes of the Low Quay. This is a mistake, he is thinking. Perhaps she is trying to blackmail me. Perhaps this is all a setup. So be it. I can go on no longer teaching solely from books.

  “Good,” says Gustine. “I hate to be wrong about people.”

  Margaret Scurr is Sunderland’s East End Renaissance woman. A philosopher in the higher math of pawnbroking, she is equally accomplished in the lesser known art of corpse display. Her shop off the Low Quay brings her myriad talents together under one roof: in front, her prosperous pawnshop is crammed with stale clothes, framed oil paintings of the Wearmouth Bridge, and, since the Quarantine, a wealth of tin compasses and barnacly purloined anchors left by desperate sailors; while in back, she keeps a single spotless room. Into Mag’s back room the constables of Sunderland bring all the bodies they fish from the River Wear, and while Mag gets nothing like the traffic of the famous Paris morgue, the lure of anonymous bodies in back does draw a bit more business in front. When the curious and bored come in to see what the tide has washed up, who is to say they won’t stay to browse a bit? And for her generous services rendered, services for which she is paid a paltry shilling per corpse by the vestry, which one of us would begrudge Mag Scurr the clothes off those bodies that remain unclaimed to sell out front?

  When the Wearmouth Bridge night toll taker on his way to work stumbled upon the same deceased male as Gustine and dutifully reported it to the constables, they brought the body, not even an hour ago, here to Mag Scurr’s. No, she said, she did not recognize him, but if she laid him out in the back, someone surely would. She had another body brought in last week. Once she’d picked the sea crabs off that one’s face, brushed what was left of his beard, and worked her magic, one of her regular customers had made a positive identification. The body belonged to a decrepit drunk called merely Old Fist, who had no one living to claim him. The constables came back and carted him off to the Trinity pit.

  The first thing Mag does when she receives a body is strip it and check for distinguishing marks. This man should be easy to place. He has a twisted left leg, shorter by about two inches than his right. On his right arm he sports a heavy tattoo of the hero of Camperdown, Sunderland native Jack Crawford, climbing the mast of the HMS Venerable to nail up the Admiral’s colors. He’s a sailor, certainly, with those bulging forearms and brown, muscular back. Mag dispatches her boy with a description to the Life Boat pub, where a good number of sailors spend their Saturday’s pay. With all these clues, it should be only a matter of hours before someone steps forward to identify this one.

  Her second order of business is to assist whichever physician the constables send over to rule out foul play. She likes to strip the body before the doctor arrives, just in case there is a bit of money about the pockets. No need to have rich, greedy doctors finding it when they have more than they know what to do with anyhow. She keeps a keen eye on the sawbones those constables send over—usually Dr. Haselwood, but sometimes kindly Dr. Clanny. She wouldn’t leave a corpse alone in a room with one of them any more than she’d leave her boy alone with a hungry wolf. Doctors are always waiting for you to turn your back or step out for a moment; looking always for a chance to disappear with a poor man’s remains and make their infamous experiments upon it. No, Margaret Scurr watches the doctors very closely; she waits in the room for them to write out the death certificate and assures them she’ll fill in the name as soon as it’s known. In the early days, before Dr. Haselwood knew what she was about, he on more than one occasion hinted that a clever morgue keeper might earn a pretty penny by not trying very hard to find the next of kin. Just write “Unclaimed” here on the death certificate, he said, and send for me. She gave him a piece of her mind that night, for sure, and the next time he was summoned by the police to Mag Scurr’s place, he claimed his wife was ill and suggested they tap Dr. Clanny.

  When the doctor finally goes and she is alone with the corpse, then Mag may put her true talents to use. She began this extra service several years ago when bodies were going unclaimed more often than not, due mostly to her neighbors’ lack of imagination. You see, it’s difficult sometimes for us to recall a face or a figure that we knew in the specificity of life after it has been claimed by that great leveler Death. Even bodies not bloated or in a state of decomposition or half-eaten by scavengers are difficult to peg, taken out of context. So Mag began studying each body long and hard, divining from subtle clues its former walk of life, its likes and dislikes, what it might have aspired to, had it only lived. Then, trusting her instincts entirely, she would walk to the front of her shop, rummage through her pawned items, and find a blazon or two for her anonymous guest. She had guessed the man last week might have been a drunk by the stippled, sanguine bulbosity of his nose, so she leaned him against the wall, shut his eyes, and put a dented flagon in his hand. That very day, a man who had already been in and felt certain he’d seen the pale, flaccid body somewhere before, just couldn’t for the life of him figure out where, burst into tears and knew immediately it was his drinking buddy Old Fist on Mag’s table. It’s the tankard, he cried. I’d never seen him before without a drink in his hand.

  She’s done the same for the sad, too frequent Wear suicides. Arranged a poor girl’s hair in a style a little unbecoming, as a distressed woman would have taken no great pains over it. From the victim’s hunched spine and the calluses on her fingers, Mag has known to lay a bit of lace-maker’s tatting in her lap. Nearly every one of these girls has been pregnant, according to the doctor’s death certificate, but it’s not often the boyfriends who step in to claim them, nor is it the father. It is usually a shagged-out, beat-up mother, or maybe a fallen friend who sidles through the front pawnshop, stopping to finger a shiny pink rag of dress hanging up, nodding slowly when shown the body. What the Wear has taken away, Mag gives back—an object, a look, the smallest aids to identity. She even takes a liberty or two with the remains made completely unrecognizable by the river. If she learns a distraught wife has been three months looking for her missing sailor husband, she’ll tuck a hank of knotted rope under a skeletal arm. If a lighterman has disappeared, she might lay a lump of flesh atop an oar. What’s the harm in reuniting lost and found? thinks Mag. The living have something to bury, the dead have someplace to go.

  No foul play, tonight’s doctor says, a heart attack, but he can’t be sure unless he performs an autopsy. No? Well, that’s your prerogative, but perhaps the next of kin will want—No? Mag speaks for the whole East End on this matter. Town’s in an uproar since the attempted body-snatching at Trinity last month, and even less likely to allow such a thing. She’s watching him fill out the death certificate when the front bell rings. Who would be ringing at this time of night? Unless it’s her boy back already with the next of kin.

  The bell jangles again.

  Mag fixes the doctor—at least it’s the kindly one—with a warning eye and makes her way through the dark pawnshop. She raises the latch and opens the
door on two rich people: a handsome man, if a bit skinny inside a sable-trimmed coat, and a young lady shivering inside a fantastic blue ball gown. He should give her that coat, Mag thinks.

  “Are you Margaret Scurr?” asks the man, gruffly.

  “I should say so,” answers Mag.

  “Do you have the body of a man, aged approximately forty-five, who was found beside the river tonight?”

  “Why do y’care t’know?”

  The young lady pushes into the store. Now that she sees her up close, Mag realizes she’s not quite as well-off as she first thought. Oh, she might fool some, but a pawnbroker can spot the difference. The flimsy tulle gathered up all around the wide skirt is patched in places with cheap white netting, and she can see that the gorgeous blue dress is not properly held up underneath. She hasn’t pawned twenty-five years’ worth of fashions not to know a thing or two about frames. You must build these dresses from the inside out, layering petticoats, cinching corsets, tying flaring wicker cages around the arm’s eye to support the gigot sleeve. The gros de Naples gown, though obviously of good quality, conceals a practically naked body underneath. You’re not fooling me, Mag thinks. Exactly what we can’t see is what gives you away.

  “Please, we want him,” Gustine says.

  “Is that the next of kin, Mrs. Scurr?” the kindly one calls from the back. The sound of his rich Irish voice causes the gentleman in the doorway to step back in alarm.

  “Come along, darling,” the gentleman nervously commands the blue dress. “We obviously have the wrong place.”

  But Gustine shakes off his hand. She is looking around, trying to take a measure of the place: the racks of dirty clothes, the hodgepodge stacks of nicked china and stained bed linen, the rows of little children’s shoes lined up as if marching off to Sunday school. Mag’s shop, she sees, is a shrine to hope: hope that a family will be able to buy back their eldest child’s shoes before their youngest child has outgrown them, hope that sheets will once more be needed when the mattress is gotten out of hock. The pawned items have grown moldy with hope, Gustine can see; Mag’s stacks have grown higher and higher until hope leaves barely an inch of room left to walk to the back. He must be back there then, in that cold final room where, alone in the store, no money is required for a reclamation. She walks purposefully toward the lighted doorway at the back of the shop.

  “Darling,” says the gentleman angrily, backing out. “Let’s go.”

  Gustine pauses in the doorway. Mag’s back room is scrupulously clean, furnished with two wooden tables, the first sporting a blazing nickel candelabra. A middle-aged man—the doctor, he must be—stands over the second table, using what remains uncovered as an impromptu desk. He has his left hand resting paternally on the thigh of a corpse—her corpse—and with his right is filling out a form, dipping his expensive pen in a pot of cheap ink. Gustine had not counted on anyone else being here, had expected to lay quick claim to the body and be gone. Now if she is to get Dr. Chiver his body she must be careful. Who is this man? What will he want to hear?

  Though she has never been to school nor learned to read, those who know Gustine will tell you she possesses a certain uncanny intelligence, hard to quantify but not so unlike Mag Scurr’s. What Mag practices on the dead, Gustine applies to the living, and were the two to become friends they might trade any number of miraculous stories. Mag might tell Gustine of the time she placed a pawned trumpet in the hand of an unrecognizable corpse, only to discover when he was identified that the selfsame man had, amazingly enough, two years previously placed that very instrument with her. Gustine could appreciate that story, because Gustine too has a gift. She might lean in to pug-faced old Mag and whisper a little secret. She might tell her that she can see through clothes.

  It’s true. Before a man has opened his mouth, Gustine can tell what sort of poke he’ll be after. Just from the shape of his body she can tell whether he will strip down or unbutton only his trousers; whether he will take her in a dark alley or bed her in a brilliantly gaslit room. Well-made men, she knows, will fuck her slowly, watching themselves reflected in a darkened window or in the mirror over the bed at John Robinson’s; they will come with excruciating slowness, and then will be most miserly with their spunk as if unable to bear parting with it. Ugly men will fuck her slowly, too, but when they are about ready to ejaculate, will pull out and blast her in the face like an artist smearing the canvas with white paint to erase a hated subject. The key to some men, she has learned, lies buried under layers of jackets, shirts, and waistcoats. Let him walk with his hands in his pockets and she will know he’ll want to see those hidden hands on every part of her body. Let him wear his ascot wrapped too tightly and he will want to choke her. She knew a man once who constantly rubbed his sore elbow through his coat sleeve. She guessed he made it sore from obsessive frigging and sure enough, he could not finish except in that way.

  Now when a man approaches her, Gustine finds herself mentally undressing him, looking for the defect on his naked body that will make him vulnerable to her. If she finds it first, she wins: he is in her power, not she in his. If she does not find his one seat of shame, Gustine’s experience has told her, men’s little humiliations have a strange way of rebounding on the women around them. It is best to be prepared.

  What, then, is the key to this doctor? She checks his head. His white hair is brushed forward, with no attempt made to cover his scrubbed pink pate—no, he is not self-conscious about going bald. She glances at his face: a straight, unbroken Irish nose, clear brown eyes. Nothing there. But what is this? Ah, look how the fabric of his jacket throws a crooked shadow between the left sleeve and the lapel, mark how his Cross of India medal (which she recognizes because her landlord, too, wears one, though his was taken in exchange for a week’s rent from an erstwhile hero fallen into drink) hangs as if disturbed below by a knot of uneven skin. Why, this doctor has been wounded in the shoulder. She sees now how he favors his left arm, by resting it gently on her corpse. That must be it. He straightens at the sight of her in the doorway. Without a moment’s hesitation, Gustine walks forward and lays her head upon the crook of his shoulder.

  “Here. Here,” exclaims Clanny, taken aback by this unlooked-for display. “What’s this?”

  She is not yet sure what to say; it will come to her, just as whatever dirty words men want to hear bubble up out of instinct. Already she can feel his scarred flesh pulse around her face as if to enfold it. He has a daughter her age, she would lay money on it, and he blushes when she climbs up on his lap, too old for that sort of thing, and rests her cheek against the very same spot.

  “Miss. Please,” Dr. Clanny stammers, paralyzed with surprise and something like shyness.

  Gustine out of instinct remains quiet. She cuts her eyes to the naked body on the table. Her body, the one she found, lies just out of reach. That pug Irish nose, that twisted bullying leg. He would nail her standing up just to prove he was no damn cripple.

  “Are you related to this man?” asks Clanny, awkwardly patting her back with his free right arm. Damn if this girl is not fastened to him like a vine.

  Gustine looks up into his flushed face, barely lined, though she can tell he’s at least fifty. She puts her hand to the joint of his shoulder to keep her place there, and can feel his heart thump heavily like he’s been climbing stairs. Yes, he has a daughter her age—she can tell by the sad confusion in his caresses. Should he hug her like a child or pat her cautiously like a woman? Let him stay confused, she decides.

  “He was my father,” Gustine whispers.

  That labourer, father to this dress? Clanny finds it hard to believe, but no less than Mag Scurr, who has followed Gustine into the back room, certain, in her deepest bones, that this chit is up to no good.

  “Tha’ man’s no Da to the likes o’ you,” scoffs Mag openly.

  Gustine ignores her and places her head once more against the doctor’s chest. Gently she fingers his silver Cross of India medal. Her landlord has much to say on the
troops in India. He reads aloud from the newspaper every night, working himself into a rage over a government that cares to waste its money on curryfied brown gits when it might better feed starving Christians back home. This doctor’s medal shows not a breath of tarnish—it must be very important to him.

  “My father left for India in 1816, a month before I was born,” Gustine says. “His whole troop perished of cholera there. My mother to the day she died never gave up hope he survived and would return to us.”

  “And you believe this is he?” asks Clanny. “Without having ever seen him?”

  Gustine nods. “She said I might recognize him by …”

  The girl trails off, and Clanny can see she is overcome by emotion, running her eyes wistfully over the naked body of her own lost father. They come finally to rest on his monstrous tattoo.

  “She said, ‘You will know him by the tattoo on his right arm.’” Tears come unbidden to Gustine’s eyes. “Of his best mate Jack Crawford. Hero at Camperdown!”

  Among the less charitable of Sunderland, Mag Scurr’s flat round face has been compared to that of a palsied English bulldog. Now in her undisguised disbelief at Gustine’s story, her black eyes bulge, her jowls quiver, making her look, if possible, even more pugnacious.

  “If your Da was such great mates with old Jack Crawford,” says Mag, “enough to get him tattooed, let’s call Jack over to second the identification. He lives in a cheap lodging house down the street. I’ve got his Camperdown war medals in pawn for drink.”

  “How cruel you are, Mrs. Scurr,” Dr. Clanny chides. “Can’t you see this poor girl is dissolved in grief?”

  Gustine, certain now of victory, hides her smile against the doctor’s coat. I will have that body and I will give it to Dr. Chiver and he will become the best doctor he can possibly be. Clanny chucks Gustine under the chin, and she raises her tear-roughened face.