Henry quickly scrubs the dried blood from his face and hands, pulls on | the trousers he wore to the theatre, and opens the bedroom door to the hallway. Ugh! With the door closed, he had forgotten about the smell. | Ferment from the cadaver Liss wafts up from the second floor like ghoulish bread baking.
“Williams!” Henry calls, breathing through his mouth. “Bring a cold 1 supper to the library, will you?”j
The smell is even worse in the library, but Henry’s nose soon adjusts. It is one of the drawbacks of having a home practice, Dr. Knox had told J him years ago. The stench of death worms its way into your book bind-1 ings, your sock drawer, your bread larder. What’s worse, Knox told him, | is how quickly you get used to it. You learn to mind death in the room no more than you would a pesky housefly.
The converted operating theatre is not large, and he was forced to clear out the furniture to maximize space; only a glass-fronted cabinet, a long, waist-high trough with scale, and a teakwood lectern, holding his Albinus, remain. Recessed bookcases line the room, their shelves holding not books, but round jars sealed with pigs’ bladders and red wax. Before leaving Edinburgh, Henry had been a great collector, and his specimen collection would still rank among the best in the Northeast. Along his top shelves are
rows of pulpy brains, brains eaten away by syphilis, brains lacking frontal lobes, and a lengthy digression on the brains of dogs, cats, and squirrels. Next come four severed female breasts representing the lymph system, each having had mercury injected into the nipple. How sleek and modern they look, veined with silver, like automaton wet nurses built for suckling in this new Age of Machines. Eyes are nextfat human oculi, up to ten floating in the same tall jarthen livers, kidneys, and lungs. The cadaver Liss’s red heart sits on a bookshelf with others of its sort, the only muscle not bleached of its color by preservative. It makes a startling punctuation at the end of the row, but it will be only a matter of weeks before it becomes waxy and white like the others. Henry hasn’t had the leisure or the inclination to collect since he’s been in Sunder land. He’s felt that filling his shelves while his students went without teaching cadavers would be like satisfying a letch for hothouse peaches when his children were crying for bread.
Damn it, Henry swears. While he slept the day away, the ice in which the cadaver was originally packed melted, and now he floats in a long trough of lukewarm water, drowned all over again. Bietler made such a mangled mess of the abdomen trying to extract the intestines, flesh that might have kept for another two days billows uselessly in the water. It is the second betrayal of death, this rot, forcing medical science to hurry along at the speed of decomposing flesh. Well, the arms are still good. And the legs. With a sigh, Henry picks up his hacksaw and digs in at the shoulder joint. Swollen with water, but still completely distinguishable, a young Jack Crawford clings to his mast on cadaver Liss’s bicep. Henry hesitates with the saw, staring into the inky face of the man he’s just lost, a dead man tattooed on a dead man’s arm. He doesn’t have the heart for this right now.
“Your supper, sir,” Williams’s muffled voice comes through the closed door. His servant is not allowed in this roomnot that the stench does not warn him away.
“Leave it in the hall, please,” Henry says, setting aside the saw. “And Williams, bring up an old sheet and my shovel.”
When his servant is gone, Henry retrieves the tray of artichokes, cold chicken, and sherry he left, takes it to the hearth, and kindles a fire. He’s kept the room purposefully unheated since the cadaver’s arrival, but there seems little point in that now. Mr. Liss is useless; Henry will have to dispose of him before he decays further and alerts the neighbors. He drags an artichoke leaf over his teeth and flips it into the fireplace. Having devoted all his energies to securing this single corpse, he has given little thought to finding another. He could have had Jack Crawford’s if not for his friend’s obstinacy. What a coup to have made the first dissection of a cholera patient in England.
Henry plucks his artichoke leaves automatically, gnawing off the meat and listening to them sizzle in the fire. Perhaps he mightNo. He cuts off the thought before it has a chance to form. It was stupid. He was about to let himself consider the possibility of seeking out that girl Gustine. He has been blameless in the entire affairboth times they have met, she has sought him, he has never searched out her help. It’s just that, circulating through the city as she does, she’s sure to have heard of cases, if there are cases, and perhaps for a bit of money she might help himBut there he goes considering again. He couldn’t possibly turn to a woman for help in these matters; he’s thoroughly ashamed as it is of how he came by the cadaver Liss. It was bad enough in London and Edinburgh associating with the scum of the earth, the most depraved resurrection men, and then to have unknowingly consorted with Burke and Hare. He will not be responsible for drawing a womannot even a woman: a young girldown into that darkness.
And yet. Did she not show her true colors last night outside of the theatre? Was she not perfectly comfortable with the vilest profanity, accepting embraces from the most abandoned of men? Henry has forgotten that he himself contemplated securing her services the night of his failure at the Trinity graveyard. Now he remembers only that she dared come near his Audrey, that she shamelessly placed herself in his fiancee’s line of vision, flaunting her wickedness for all of Sunderland to see. Is it even possible to further corrupt a girl like that?
“Your shovel, sir,” Williams says through the door.
Henry rouses himself, setting aside his untouched chicken and half-eaten artichoke. He is thinking craziness. Of course he cannot seek out Gustine. A man might easily become contaminated by the bad company he keeps, and he will not be the agent through which ugliness ever touches Audrey’s life again. He’ll find another way to secure bodies for his students; sooner 1 or later, the family of a cholera victim will give in to reason. Now he needs to pay a visit to Audrey’s charity family as he promised, and see what service he can be to those in whom she’s taken an interest.
But first, he has an unpleasant task. Taking up the sheet Williams left in the hall, he fills it with the remains of cadaver Liss. Some of his colleagues,
he knows, would toss the body in the fire when it was of no more use, or drive him out to the North Sea and fling him over a cliff; but Henry still has enough courtesy (he won’t call it superstition) to want to do right by the man. He takes up his shovel and his bottle of sherry and drags the bundle down the stairs, then out into the backyard.
Brain-coral permafrost cracks underfoot as he makes his way to his neighbor’s fence, as far from his own back door as the diminutive yard allows. His neighbor’s hungry black mutt scratches the wooden wall furiously, barking his excitement, as he has every other time Henry has come out here to bury rabbits or cats or his canine compatriots, all the dumb vivisected beasts who have given their lives for the betterment of Science. I give you another one, dumber perhaps than all the rest, thinks Henry, leaping upon his shovel to cut through the sod and a trespassing root from his neighbor’s chestnut.
Back in Edinburgh, Henry was the only instructor willing to dig a pit for the gristle and scraps of the school’s dissected corpses. By moonlight he dug in Surgeons’ Square’s courtyard, planting what was left of the pickled old woman and her grandson, of headless, footless Daft Jamie, of lovely Mary Patersonthough not so lovely when Knox was through. Henry pauses in his digging to take a swig of sherry. Of all their faces, hers alone he will never forgetshorn of her hair, jaundiced from months of floating in whiskey, her stained yellow eyes staring unblinkingly as he snuffed them with the first shovelful of dirt.
There’s blood onyer sleeve, tight rounded Mary had slurred the night before she died, rolling up his cuff to uncover a brown stain. Which are you? A doctor or a killer? We’ve vowed not to go with doctors anymore, Jor we don’t want to end up on one of your tables. But if you’re only a killer, you’re all right by me. He had found Mary Paterson in Canongate with her friend (Janet Brown; he was later to learn her name when she testified at the murder trial), beyond jolly and well onto drunk. Janet cackled as Mary threw her strong arms around Henry’s neck and kissed him with a slick tongue of juniper. Maybe it was the stench of gin, maybe it was her friend’s airless laughter, but Henry felt himself suffocated by this woman’ s flesh. Ach, yer no killer, disappointed Mary called as he disentangled himself and pulled away. You’ll slay no woman’s heart with that attitude.
According to Janet at the trial, the next morning friendly William Burke invited the girls into his lodging house, where he introduced them to his friend, William Hare. Before ten o’clock, Mary had made the acquaintance of two more bottles of gin and passed out drunk. Janet, who was lured outside for a walk by dour William Hare, never saw her friend again. Henry could pick up the story from there: by two o’clock, he and Dr. Knox were lifting Mary Paterson’s naked body from a tea chest at Surgeons’ Square and setting her to steep in a trough of whiskey. How did one so young and healthy come to die? he demanded of Burke, even as he handed over the money. / saw her only yesterday and she was fine. She died of the drink, sir, said the cagey Irishman, counting his coins. Truly, ‘twas a tragedy. There could be no denying foul play this time. Only last night Henry had kissed the same lips he was now destined to dissect.
Next door, the neighbor’s black dog won’t stop barking. Be quiet! Henry snaps, digging his shoulder into the shovel and thrusting deeper into his backyard. The hole he has roughed out is deep enough and he tumbles the cadaver Liss from his sheet into the earth. Dig them up. Put them back in. Dig them up. Put them back in. He didn’t go to medical school to become a grave digger. He stops and takes another long draw from his bottle, wipes his brow, and offers up a short prayer for the dead man. Lord, take this your son over to the Great Majority, he prays, while next door the neighbor’s dog barks loud enough to wake the whole block. And Lord, if Thou art merciful, go easier on the Earth’sjuture doctors.
There is no number on the door, and with the windows boarded up, he’s unsure if he has the right address. But it’s nine houses in from High Street and the stoop is as slick with rotting vegetables as Audrey described it. A thin dusting of snow has melted into the runny whitewash left by the Board of Health, and someone has sunk one of the agency’s abandoned paintbrushes into a mound of hoary night soil, as a warning. This is not a house friendly to health, Henry decides, rapping gently on the door with his knuckles. No answer. He knocks louder, then gives the door a little push. It is unlocked.
No lamps are lit, and it is dark inside except for a low fire in the grate. In the half-light, he sees bundles of dirty laundry sagging against a long wooden table, abandoned in the corners, and strewn along the floor before the hearth. Near the stairs leading up to the second floor, a box is balanced on two split cane chairs. It is close in the room and stifling hot, and Henry detects the familiar odor even before the pile of laundry on the floor jumps up and scampers over to him.
“We have a death in the house, so please be respectful,” it says in a whisper.
Henry looks down on a little girl in an oversized pink dress. Conjunctivitis is ruining her eyes and her neck seems too stingy to support her large head. In her spindly arms she carries another smaller bundle, wrapped in a blanket. This must be the little girl Audrey told him about.
“Is your name Pink?” Henry asks gently.
The pile of dirty laundry leaning against the table looks up. It speaks with a slurred husky voice.
“Doan’t speak t’him, lass,” the pile says. “Yer Da won’t like it.”
“Yes, my name is Pink,” the little girl answers hesitantly. “Do you want a room for the night?”
“I’m the doctor sent by the Indigent Sick Society.” He squats to equalize their heights and sees the bundle in her arms wriggle. “There is a woman here who is sick?”
“Fat lot o’ good you do ‘er now,” says a feminine pile in the corner. She is haunched by two smaller heaps of rags, sacked out from hawking fish all day to the poor Irish.
“We expected you yesterday,” Pink says. “She was sick yesterday.”
“I’m sorry, I was unable to make it yesterday,” he says. “May I see her now?”
Pink walks with her bundle over to the foot of the stairs and stops before the plain wooden box. “Here she is.”
The box, stenciled “Property of Sunderland Parish,” is a rented coffin with a trapdoor that will be leased by the town’s poor until it has worn down to splinters. Inside, a shriveled woman is wrapped head to foot in white cambric, with only the pinched oval of her face showing. A cambric chin strap keeps her jaw from dropping, a sprig of rosemary has been tucked inside as an age-old token of remembrance, and two copper pennies have been placed on her eyelids. This must have been the woman with phosphorus poisoning, Henry thinks. But that is besides the point now. Jesus. Beneath the pennies, her skin is a deep indigo.
“How long ago did this woman die?” Henry demands of the room.
“Last night,” answers the pile that leans against the table.
“We must get her out of the house as soon as possible.” Henry slides the wooden lid over the woman’s face. “I’ll send someone around for her.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” counters Pile. “She’s being waked.”
“She has died of cholera morbus,” Henry says imperiously. “Her clothes and bedding must be burnt and she must be buried immediately. She will | infect you if you keep her here.”
“Fos had the Fossy Jaw,” says Pink. “There’s no such thing as cholera morbus.”
“I’m afraid there is, sweetheart. And it’s here in town,” Henry says. “Don’t go near that coffin until I can get her out of here, do you understand? And keep this baby far, far away from it.”
Henry lifts the baby out of Pink’s hands before she knows what he’s about. The baby, like the woman in the coffin, is wrapped so that nothing j but its face shows. What did Audrey say about this child? Only that it had ‘ an extraordinary heart. Henry takes the baby to the hearth, where there is I light enough to examine it.