Chapter 45
T
homas Silkstone sat alone in his laboratory, as he had done ever since his return from Oxford three days before, and pondered on the events of the past few weeks. He could not dispel his last image of Lydia in Merton Street. He had backed away from the front door and looked up at the drawing room window. There, standing gazing down, he saw her. Her face was expressionless and she did not try to speak. For a second or two he held her icy stare, hoping it might melt. He willed her to say something, to show some emotion, but she did not and he turned reluctantly to walk away.
Shunning the wit and conversations of the coffeehouse, the distractions of the theater, and the company of his students, he emerged only to take meals with Dr. Carruthers. His mentor always seemed eager to discourse and Thomas did not wish to disappoint. Perhaps he had been wrong, after all, to venture out of the confines of his own world. His fingers were more at ease exploring the moist, familiar landscapes of the human body than in the dry and combative environs of the courtroom. He was after all a surgeon, not an enforcer of the law. He was a man of science, not of letters. His mission was to wield a knife as an instrument of healing, not of torture.
Time and time again he asked how he had allowed himself to be lured away from all that he knew, all that he could be certain of, and into a world of duplicity and intrigue and mistrust, and time and time again, he came to the same conclusion. At first he had lied to himself. He had deluded himself about some higher cause: a search for truth and justice. But in the end he had to admit he had been guided by an undeniable, unquenchable, and forbidden love for Lady Lydia Farrell.
Poets talked of broken hearts, but at the moment he felt as though someone had wrenched out his own heart and pulverized it. Lydia had reciprocated his feelings for her, had she not? She was willing to give herself to him. He could not believe that her touch was not genuine, her kisses a sham. The recollection of her icy stare as she looked down at him from the window in Oxford was burned indelibly on his memory, as if it had been etched in acid. He wanted to forget it, but her face came back to haunt him time and again and on each occasion he found himself asking the question, “Why?”
When the captain was alive their love was forbidden. True, he had died in tragic and mysterious circumstances, and now a respectful period of mourning was in order. Thomas would have been discreet. Surely she knew that? Perhaps she was feeling guilty, he told himself, for her infidelity.
And what of James Lavington? Had not the captain nominated him as Lydia’s guardian should anything happen to him? He mixed in the same social circles. Moreover, he was not a foreigner. Lavington would be the logical successor to step into the captain’s shoes and he, Thomas, would be consigned to a mere memory.
After Lydia had dismissed him so summarily, Thomas had made his way back to Christ Church Anatomy School to see Professor Hascher. He had told him of events and asked him to see to it that Jacob Lovelock was summoned to try and identify the body of the battered woman. This, Hascher had duly done and earlier that morning Thomas had received word that the woman’s corpse was not that of Hannah Lovelock. He was relieved, of course, but the maidservant’s whereabouts still remained a mystery. Thomas was convinced that she held the key to at least some of what had happened in the past week and until she was found, he would not be able to move forward.
Since his return Thomas had tried to busy himself. There were new specimens to dissect and notate and medicaments to make up for aged ladies with nothing better to do than count their agues as they awaited death. He glanced toward his shelves and saw the neatly labeled jars that held Lord Crick’s stomach and other tissue samples. If only they could speak, he thought, their eloquence and insight would put an end to this charade immediately.
Dr. Carruthers had tried to persuade Thomas to accompany him to the coffeehouse, but he had declined. He did not feel that he would add anything to the gathering in his present state of mind. The only living thing whose company he could tolerate right now was Franklin’s. The rat suddenly appeared from a pile of papers on the floor and meandered over to his desk. Whiskers twitching, nose to the ground, he scurried intently past Thomas and headed for the young doctor’s coat, which hung on a peg adjacent to the desk. There the rodent stopped and began sniffing at the pocket, which was level with his nose. Next he sat on his hind legs, and with his front paws, he began clawing at the pocket, as if attracted by something inside.
“What is it, Franklin?” asked Thomas puzzled. “You’ll not find any scraps in there, boy.”
It was then that Thomas remembered what the rat would find. He rose and walked over to the coat. Thrusting his hand deep into his left pocket, he brought out the object of Franklin’s curiosity—the bloodstained silken cord, which Thomas had cut from the neck of Captain Michael Farrell.
“Clever boy,” said Thomas, looking at the thin rope. He had put it in his pocket almost immediately at the jail. In all the subsequent drama it was something that had completely slipped his mind. He unraveled the cord and laid it out on his desk. It was around seven feet long and at one end it was stained with what appeared to be blood. Thomas assumed that this was where it had sliced through the epidermis at the neck as the body hung. A section of about three inches was stained, but one small patch was darker than the rest.
Holding the silken cord in his hand, his mind suddenly flashed back to his penultimate visit to Lydia’s lodgings at Merton Street. Eliza had been fumbling with the curtains as Lavington came downstairs. Why? Could it have been that the pull cord had disappeared so that she had to draw the drapes by hand?
Thomas reached for his microscope. He then took a glass slide from one of the small drawers on his desk and positioned it. Next he secured the cord onto the slide and peered through the lens. What he saw, magnified one hundred times, confirmed his analysis. The cells that lay before him, like so many brown roof tiles, were those of blood, but their density varied. Where the stain was darkest, there were more of them, indicating the possibility of a much deeper wound. It was something that puzzled Thomas and unless he could gain access to the captain’s corpse, it would forever remain a mystery. Each day that the decay spread was a day the truth rotted, too.
Lydia bent down, took a handful of loose earth, and threw it on top of the simple pine coffin that held the body of her late husband. There was a tragic finality about this act, as if she had just closed a book or drawn a curtain. James Lavington stood at her side, supporting her throughout. He nodded to Lovelock and Kidd to proceed shoveling in the dirt.
The burial was a private affair. No pastor was there to lead prayers; no friends to eulogize. Lady Crick was attending an imaginary bridge party and only the servants had shown their loyalty by paying their respects. Lydia had bid a dutiful farewell and Lavington, too, had said a few well-chosen words, designed to ease her burden of guilt.
Lydia had selected a place for the burial just a few yards away from the pavilion at the top of the hill, so that when she came to visit the grave, she could look out at the rolling vista and remember the times they had shared up there. A simple wooden cross rested at the head of the grave that gave no hint of the tragic circumstances that lay behind this shocking death. No future generations would know the true facts of this tragedy if Lydia had her way. But as she watched Kidd and Lovelock shovel the earth back over the coffin, it occurred to her that there might not even be another generation. With Michael’s death, she might never bear a child to carry on the line at Boughton. The thought of it was too much for her and she broke down in tears, so that Lavington had to help her onto the dogcart and drive her down the hill and back to the hall.
“My dear Lydia, please calm yourself,” he urged her. They were sitting in the darkened drawing room later that afternoon. She had asked him to leave her alone earlier, and he had respected her wishes, but she remained inconsolable and he was becoming increasingly concerned, showing her slow gestures of care. Easing himself down on the settee beside her, he put a comforting arm around her. She pulled away at his touch, but he persisted. “Do not fear,” he told her. “This is what Michael wanted. You know he asked me to look after you, if anything happened to him.”
Lydia looked up at him suddenly, shocked at the impropriety of this last statement. Lavington reached out for her hand and kissed it, allowing his lips to linger on her wrist, but she withdrew it quickly.
“Come, come, Lydia. Why do you shun my concern?” he asked her.
Lydia’s back stiffened. “You speak to me in terms which are not seemly, sir,” she scolded gently.
But instead of feeling duly humbled by this chastisement, Lavington simply smiled in the half light, the hideous part of his face hidden in shadow, so that he looked strong and handsome. He pulled her gently toward him and said sweetly: “That is where you are wrong, Lydia. I have every right.”
Unable to bear his touch, she leapt up from the sofa and hugged herself, as if she felt a chill. “I am in mourning, sir. Please respect that,” she rebuked him, more sternly this time. “I would ask you to leave now.”
Lavington looked at her contemptuously. “I doubt if you would treat Dr. Silkstone the same way,” he ventured, his lip curving in a sneer. She resented the remark, but said nothing. Now she knew how her dead husband must have felt—alone and in a prison of his own making.
Chapter 46
W
ith the twenty guineas James Lavington had paid for her silence, Hannah Lovelock caught a coach to London and took rooms in a lodging house for gentlewomen in Bedford Lane. She had bought herself a dress of printed calico and a thick woolen cape and passed herself off as a married woman come to London to visit her ailing father in hospital. The rules of her boardinghouse dictated no visitors, and lodgers were to be in by dusk, but that suited Hannah’s purpose very well.
London, to her, was a frightening and strange place, far removed from Brandwick, or even Oxford. From her upstairs room, all Covent Garden lay before her in all its squalid, frantic, and colorful glory. Strolling performers beat their salt boxes, making music with rolling pins; crows fired cannons with their beaks; and she had even seen a pig arrange lettered blocks with its snout. Quacks called out their cures for the French pox and merchants with baskets on their heads hawked live mackerel, lemons, and fine Seville oranges.
This was a world where Hannah Lovelock most definitely did not feel she belonged, but she had come here on a mission. She needed to find the man who had wanted to take her to her death. Thomas Silkstone had uncovered her darkest secret. He had made her stare into the cold, unforgiving eyes of reality. He had made her confess. But despite the fact that she had faced the gallows, and still did for all she knew, she was grateful to him. She could not have lived with herself with the young lord’s death staining her soul and she was glad that her misdeeds had been uncovered.
It mattered not that Dr. Silkstone thought he was driving her to her trial and ultimate execution. She would have died for a noble cause. As the hangman placed the noose around her neck, she would have cried out the name of her dead child and died for her. What really mattered now was that she had escaped from the clutches of a man whom she thought she could trust, but who had threatened to make the rest of her family suffer if she had not left the courtroom that day, vowing never to return. That man was James Lavington and now she sought to expose him to the only man she felt could help her.
She walked the one and a half miles from her lodgings in Covent Garden to the sprawling mass of St. George’s Hospital, just beyond the western gates of the city. This is where she told her landlady her stricken father lay and the woman had obligingly given her directions, but now that she had arrived at the forbidding building, she had no idea which way to turn. It was her hope that someone, somewhere in this vast edifice might have heard of Dr. Thomas Silkstone, so they could tell her where she might find his rooms.
As she walked through the giant portico, the porters bustling around her helping patients with bloodied bandages walk along its vast corridors, Hannah Lovelock felt alone and very frightened. The sickly sweet smell of vinegar that washed the walls and floors assailed her nostrils and the distant groans of patients in distress droned in her ears.
“Oi, you. Nurse. Give us a ’and,” commanded a gruff voice nearby. Hannah turned to see a porter trying to lift an elderly woman who had fainted. “Come on, then,” urged the man, struggling with the limp patient. Hannah looked nervously around, hoping he was addressing someone else. But no, his eyes were firmly fixed on her and she walked over to him and took some of the woman’s weight, while the porter eased her onto a bench. “Don’t just stand there. Go fetch a physician,” he barked.
Hannah felt helpless. She began walking, frantically searching for anyone with an air of authority. A few yards down the corridor, she spotted a white-haired man with a kindly face who was carrying a black bag.
“Doctor?” she said tentatively.
“What is it, Nurse?”
“I am no nurse, sir,” she replied timidly.
He looked at her incredulously. “Then who are you, pray?”
“I am but a visitor, sir,” Hannah replied.
“Then, my dear lady, I suggest you report to the reception,” he said, pointing to a large sign over a door on the opposite side of the corridor.
To a woman who could not read, such a sign was of little relevance, but at least she now knew where to seek help.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, curtsying.
The hall was lofty, with a large table on the left, behind a wooden screen, behind which lay wooden cubbyholes that bulged with packets and documents. Young men swarmed about them, like drones on a honeycomb, filling and emptying the spaces, opening packages or thrusting in documents.
As Hannah approached the desk, she could see a bewigged porter seated behind it, only the top of his head and his eyes visible from where she was standing.
“Yes,” came a voice from above, as the porter looked down on her.
“Please, sir, I am looking for a Dr. Thomas Silkstone,” she said in a thin voice.
The porter consulted some sort of ledger that lay open on the desk, tracing the names on it with his quill.
“Silkstone, you say. What department?”
Hannah looked puzzled. She had no idea what the word meant.
“I do not know,” she replied.
“Um,” said the porter unhelpfully. “Silkstone.”
Nearby, one of the young men at the cubbyholes turned ’round as soon as he heard the name.
“No. No Dr. Silkstone here,” said the porter.
Crestfallen, Hannah thanked the gentleman for his pains and slowly turned away, bumping into a young man as she did so.
“Hannah?”
She looked up.
“Hannah, what on earth ... ?”
The face of Francis Crick stared down at her and she could have almost fainted with relief.
“Please, sir. I can’t talk here,” she said self-consciously. “I need to see Dr. Silkstone.”
Francis looked puzzled but nodded. “Very well, then I shall take you to him.”