Chapter 25
T
he students of Christ Church Anatomy School sat in silent respect on banked rows watching their tutor. As parishioners look to their priest during their act of worship, so did they regard Professor Hans Hascher. He now stood poised before them, no chalice but a knife in hand, like some hierophant about to perform the most invasive of rituals.
Entering almost unnoticed through the side door, Dr. Thomas Silkstone and Francis Crick took their places on the second row of the lecture theater.
The naked body of an elderly man lay on the table in the center. A sheet covered his nether regions. The grisly-haired professor paused for a moment, as if making some silent prayer, then brought his knife down, slicing a neat line into the lower abdomen.
“My purpose today, gentlemen, is to show you ze viscera contained within ze lower abdomen,” he said, still cutting through the silver-gray flesh of the corpse. He paused for a moment and looked up at his audience. “Pray, can anyone tell me what I might find?”
Two or three reluctant hands went into the air as the professor scanned the rows of students. Thomas knew he would be spotted. He had hoped to catch the old anatomist before the resumption of the afternoon session of the inquest. There were tests he needed to carry out in his laboratory. Now that he knew the professor was engaged in teaching, such investigations would be out of the question until the evening.
Thomas could see his elderly friend was in his element. There was a sense of theater in his gestures and his words. “What secrets lurk in zis abdomen, gentlemen?” He asked the question as much of himself as of his feeble-minded students. To him the human body was a cavern full of mysterious chemistries and inexplicable rituals, of turgid organs housed in damp, hot places.
Pointing out with boyish glee the bulwarks of the liver and spleen and the shriveled pouch of the stomach, it was a full five minutes before he finally noticed Thomas, who now braced himself for recognition.
“Dr. Silkstone!” exclaimed Hascher in surprise. “But what brings you here?” He set down his scalpel, as all eyes now fixed on Thomas. Turning his back on his students the professor took the young doctor aside. “You should be resting,” he scolded.
Thomas felt duly humbled and acknowledged his friend was right, but explained that he needed the use of his laboratory to conduct more tests that afternoon.
“On one condition,” replied the old professor, with a glint in his eye.
Thomas nodded. “Of course, Professor.”
“Zat you show zese young men how ze abdomen should be dissected.”
The old Saxon had raised his voice, so that the entire auditorium had heard the request. He made it impossible for Thomas to refuse.
“Please join me.” The old man motioned excitedly, beckoning Thomas to follow him onto the floor. The young doctor smiled awkwardly at Francis as all eyes turned on him and he descended the steep steps of the auditorium.
“May I introduce to you gentlemen one of the finest anatomists alive today, Dr. Thomas Silkstone,” gushed Professor Hascher.
“You flatter me, sir,” replied Thomas, feeling the color rise in his cheeks.
“Not at all,” enthused Professor Hascher and, as if to inadvertently compound Thomas’s embarrassment, he handed him his surgeon’s knife.
“Pray continue. Show us how a master practitioner performs such a complicated task.” The old man meant well, thought Thomas, but dissecting a cadaver for teaching purposes had not been a priority for him when he had entered the college. Nevertheless, he accepted the knife with good grace and, after a short pause to compose his thoughts, he continued making the deep incision.
Once he had finished cutting, he folded the large flap of skin back so that it lay like a square of crimson silk on the dead man’s chest.
“Now, gentlemen, we can see the full viscera exposed,” Thomas announced. There was the liver, dark and majestic, while above could be seen the loops of the bowel. In a slow and precise accent that most students could not quite pinpoint, Dr. Thomas Silkstone guided his spectators through the internal workings of the lower abdomen. Inserting his hand into the body cavity, he felt the lower intestines slide against his hand like indolent snakes. He explained to the students the mysteries of the spleen, the tracery of tubules and ducts worthy of a glassblower, and the eccentricities of the peritoneum.
As his explorations progressed, he was reminded of the last time he had probed the body of a dead man. He recalled Lord Crick’s putrefying body, the stench, the flies. This was altogether a better specimen, he thought to himself, although he could see no obvious cause of death.
When his gruesome tour came to an end twenty minutes later, the spellbound students rose to their feet and applauded this new and exciting lecturer, who had made the cadaver on the table in front of him come alive to the sound of his voice and the touch of his hands as they explored its inner geographies.
“You are a true artist,” complimented Professor Hascher, as Thomas washed in the ewer provided.
“I prefer to think of myself as a scientist,” smiled the young doctor.
“But is zere not art in science?” chided the professor.
Thomas knew this question was more rhetorical than real and he brushed it off politely, not wishing to enter into a philosophical discussion. What interested him more were the viscera he had just dissected.
“Professor, I could see no evidence of a cause of death,” he said, glancing at the corpse.
“Indeed not. Ze fellow suffered an infected leg wound that caused blood poisoning,” replied Hascher. “We shall amputate it zis afternoon.”
“I am sorry I will not be able to watch,” said Thomas.
The professor nodded. “Ah, ze inquest,” he said, as if he had forgotten the very reason for Thomas’s visit. “My laboratory is at your disposal,” smiled the old man, scratching his gray head. “You must get to the bottom of zis terrible mystery.”
Thomas took an instant dislike to the pompous prig who now took the witness stand in court. Dr. Felix Fairweather was the very epitome of everything that he hated about the medical profession. As an inadequately drained abscess discharges pus, so superciliousness seeped from every pore of this affected little man who was called to attend the young earl at Boughton Hall on that fateful morning.
“On examination I found him to have been dead for a short while,” he pronounced. His tongue, thought Thomas, was clearly too big for his mouth, and he slobbered as he delivered certain vowels.
“And can you tell us how Lord Crick appeared?” asked the coroner. Thomas knew that this was crucial.
Dr. Fairweather thought for a moment. “His face was contorted, as if he had died in considerable discomfort.”
When pressed if he noticed any other unusual features by Sir Theodisius, the little man paused thoughtfully. “I believe his skin was slightly yellow in color,” he reflected. “But I put this down to his ‘usual’ problem,” he said rather coyly.
The coroner nodded. “Thank you. That is all for the moment,” he said, dismissing the doctor.
Next came the turn of Jacob Lovelock to take the stand. He had greeted Lord Crick after his ride that morning.
“And was his lordship in good spirits?” asked Sir Theodisius.
“As good as ever they were,” replied Lovelock in a taciturn fashion.
“Had he been complaining of any ailments or agues to you?”
The servant paused. “ ’Course there’d been the sickness the week before.”
Sir Theodisius and Thomas leaned forward, almost in unison, to listen.
“Pray tell us about this sickness, Mr. Lovelock,” urged the coroner.
The servant shrugged his broad shoulders. “The week before, it were,” he recalled. “On the Friday. His lordship took to his bed, holding his belly.”
“And he vomited?” asked the coroner.
Lovelock frowned. “If you mean did he spew his guts out, he did, Your Honor,” he replied, much to the amusement of the gallery.
“And how long was your master stricken with this sickness?” pressed the coroner.
The servant thought for a moment. “For a day or two.”
“After which he seemed restored?”
“I know he stayed out the next night,” Lovelock replied, amusing the crowd yet again.
The gavel was brought down once more, but if Sir Theodisius ever imagined he could restore order to his courtroom, he was sorely mistaken, especially when he put his next question to the witness that was so necessary in light of his wife’s evidence.
“Was rat poison kept on the premises?” he quizzed.
An excited murmur rippled around the gallery. Lovelock looked up nervously at the eager faces.
“That it was, sir.”
A gasp came from the crowd, even though it was perfectly normal to keep rat poison on an estate.
“Where was it kept?” asked Sir Theodisius.
“In jars in the glasshouse.”
“And from whence did this poison come?”
Lovelock paused and glanced anxiously toward Farrell. “We made it ourselves,” he replied softly.
“And how did you make it?”
“Out of laurel cherries, sir. We made laurel water in a still.”
At this revelation the whole gallery erupted once more.
Thomas looked at the faces in the raucous crowd. For them it was now so blindingly obvious. The nobleman had died of rat poisoning. Someone had slipped it into his medicaments. There was a wonderful simplicity about the case. The reality, he knew, was not so straightforward, and there were those on the jury who would rather follow a soothsayer than a surgeon. He trusted Sir Theodisius could not be counted in that number and would steer them away from that course.
The coroner called for order once more. “Was there a great problem with rats?”
“No more than anywhere else,” replied Lovelock with a shrug of his shoulders. “But Captain Farrell thought ’twould be a good idea to have a retort so we could make our own poison.”
“And where is this retort, pray?” asked Sir Theodisius. Lovelock paused for a moment and looked at the captain, who simply stared straight ahead. Any trace of the smile that often played so arrogantly on his lips had disappeared.
“ ’Tis gone, sir,” he muttered.
“Speak up, man. Where is it?”
“ ’Tis gone. Destroyed, sir.”
“Destroyed?” repeated the coroner. “On whose orders?”
“On the captain’s orders, sir.”
A noose was being placed around Michael Farrell’s neck, thought Thomas, as many in the crowd leapt to their feet once more. With fists clenched they started shouting at the captain, who sat impassively below.
“Order. Order!” shouted Sir Theodisius several times, his face growing red with the exertion.
This inquest was beginning to show the hallmarks of summary justice. Sir Theodisius, too, perceived those in the gallery were baying for blood. He looked at the timepiece on the far wall of the courtroom. It was approaching five o’clock and the coroner felt it was high time to adjourn. Not only was there a danger of the hearing degenerating into a fracas, but he had also heard his stomach begin to rumble and decided he was in need of sustenance.
“The court will reconvene at ten o’clock on the morrow,” he pronounced before adjourning the highly charged session. Thomas breathed a sigh of relief.
The Saxon professor bent over the specimen and sniffed it eagerly as a grisly-haired wolfhound would a piece of meat.
“No distinctive smell,” he concluded, straightening his permanently arched back as best he could. “No discoloration.”
Thomas nodded. “We can safely rule out cyanide, can we not?”
“Zere is no question,” affirmed Hascher, his scalpel in his hand.
The two men stood in silence, staring at the curved, flaccid stomach that had once been housed inside a living, breathing being. Less than a month ago it was slung between the great bulwarks of the liver and spleen, its mouth open, receiving food like some great hairless beast within the abdomen. Now it lay motionless and unyielding, storing secrets within its voluminous antrum that it was so reluctant to reveal.
The old anatomist prodded the lumbering organ once more. It was badly decomposed, and gastric and hydrochloric acids had devoured much of its lining, but to the trained eye, there seemed nothing unusual about the inner machinations of this most workmanlike of organs. “Zere is no evidence of poisoning,” concluded the professor, giving the specimen a final, slightly contemptuous jab.
Thomas suddenly looked at him. “No evidence,” he repeated. Those were the precise words that he himself had used earlier on in the day when he had dissected the viscera of the corpse in front of the students. It suddenly occurred to him that whereas the dead man’s abdomen was perfectly healthy, he would only have discovered the cause of death had he opened up his diseased leg.