The Dress Lodger (40 page)

Have you now guessed in whose hands you rest? Why, even here in our own backyard, we must make obvious introductions. We are the citizens of the Trinity pit, dear reader: the murderers and drunkards, the prostitutes and unbaptized babies of Sunderland; we are those you would not consecrate, those you buried at midnight, those you have forgotten. We are those who have been stolen as long as doctors have been questioning, and we have had enough. Look with us tonight, and let us show you the human face of resurrection.

Gustine does not realize anything is amiss until she is almost home. Has someone been murdered? she wonders, coming upon the tumult in the East End. Grim-faced men with spades run inside squares of lantern light; screaming women race ahead into darkness; and she finds her own feet naturally quicken to keep pace with the rest. Is it a riot for Reform? In her experience only politics or homicide could turn out such a crowd. Don’t you know? asks a middle-aged woman incredulously when Gustine puts out her hand to stay her. Someone’s been taken from Trinity Churchyard.

Word of the resurrection leaped like a spark between houses, smoking men and women from their beds, sending them out into the cold half-asleep and half-dressed, armed with shovels, axes, the poker from the hearth—anything they might use to dig. Mag Scurr, who had been braiding her hair and was preparing to snuggle down between quilts freshly placed in pawn, grabbed of all things a hammer in her rush out the door. She’d lost her twelve-year-old daughter three years before, you see, to an infection of the foot brought on by a rusty nail sticking up through the floorboards, and ever since has slept with a hammer by her bed. So the first thing she sees, she grabs up, and uses it to bang upon her neighbours’ doors. A resurrection! she shouts. A resurrection! Come see if your child has been taken. Come find your husband. Your mother-in-law. See who sleeps and whose slumber has been profaned. Awake Sunderland! Look after your dead!

They are all running toward us now: women and children, men and furiously barking dogs. Sunderland’s rat catcher, Franklin Hobbs, the man responsible for setting off the panic in the first place, stumbles in the middle of the pack. Having dropped off his cage of a hundred rats at the Labour in Vain, he was on his way to the workhouse to replenish his inventory when he saw a figure fall over the wall of Trinity Churchyard. It leapt up, flew across the town moor, and disappeared before Hobbs could even call out You there! which was in his mouth to say—only having once met the Cauld Lad of Hylton in the flesh, he was more terrified of addressing ghosts than were most men in Sunderland. His first instinct was to abandon the five rats he’d already caught along the Church Walk, and run directly home; but as the apparition had fled in the same direction as his house, he elected instead to collect his neighbours and see if anything had been disturbed inside. Now he runs along with the rest, hugging his rats, safe within the crowd. No ghost can touch him now that he has people to hide behind.

“Beware their knives!” cries drunken Robert Cooley. “They are desperate for your skin!”

Mag Scurr, that ferocious Jotun of a pawnbroker, runs with her hammer, knocking aside the slow and lame. Just look at this one, she snorts, as a wealthy young woman in a blue dress streaks past her, her yellow hair slipping its apollo, her face even more anguished and certain than all the others. Her grief is as ostentatious as her costume, for she runs with her eyes closed, her rich skirts gathered to the knee, oblivious to modesty or decorum. Shame on you, thinks the pawnbroker. What are you doing running among us anyway? Don’t you know only the poor get resurrected?

Yet something seems familiar about this wealthy woman. Mag swings her hammer and races forward, peering into die shut, frightened face. Why, she is no woman—she is barely more than a girl. Pale and freckled and not at all suited for the dress she wears. Of course! It comes back to Mag instantly. This was one of the two who claimed poor Reg Smith from her back room morgue. Why, just look there—his laundress wife, with her bovine stoop-backed shamble, lurches ahead toward what, Mag does not know; Reg has never turned up.

“You there!” Mag cries, as the girl in blue pulls ahead and disappears into the churchyard. “You have no right here!”

She would follow the girl and hammer her into the ground for the grief she has caused, but there is Ellen to attend to first. Her daughter taken by a common nail, like those they used to hammer down her lid. Mag sees again the hideously swollen foot and the red line that ran like the seam in a pair of woolen stockings up to her knee, still tumid when they wrapped her in her sheet and laid her in the ground. Ellen, only twelve years old, her eldest child, her only daughter. The snatcher’s punishment must wait, thinks Mag. I must first attend my Ellen.

Up ahead, our churchyard burns with lanterns and smoking torches. The men who arrived first attack the cold, damp earth with picks and axes, with shovels and with knives; the women race to join them, crying out to God. As on laundry day, a hundred skirts are filled with air, puff out and up, as knees sink down and two hundred hands dig like hounds, prying back the earth. They must take care with their digging, for the headstones are packed so tightly together—the unearthing of one plot must half-refill another. The bewildered sexton of the graveyard can only lean against the church wall and shut his eyes against the desecration. Reverend Gray, when he comes back, will be furious, he knows, but how could one man hold out against a determined mob?

The landlord of Mill Street had nearly forgotten he had a wife, Pink’s mother, and a two-days son buried here until he ran past the tombstone Robinson, overgrown with weeds and streaked with sap from the overhanging maple. He falls upon the neglected plot with the frenzy of a zealot, snatching a stunned neighbour’s shovel and jarring the ferret in his coat pocket with each leap he makes upon the shovel’s blade. Surely the violation of his home was enough—Fate would not be so partisan as to strike him twice; but he digs faster nonetheless, determined that no body snatcher will have got the best of him. He did buy a cheap casket, he admits, digging down to the bowed and split lid, botulized from its base. And cheaper nails. Still, Fate would not be so cruel. Whilky does not want to look as he reaches in and lifts off the mouldering lid. No, Mike! he shouts when the ferret leaps from his pocket. No! he cries again, when he hears the chilling scratch of nails inside an empty box.

“When the trumpet sounds they will all rise up and shed their shrouds, with eyes upturned they will mount the Stair—” shouts Robert Cooley, drunkenly leaping upon Jane Ellman 1774—1801. His brush with the doctors has turned him Prophet; more than ever he awaits the Judgment Day. “—Unless they have been snatched, you see. Then the legless ones and the armless ones will roam the earth to seek their parts. Or spend Eternity crippled before their Maker!” From his vantage upon the tombstone, Robert can see who lost his and who lost hers and who lost none. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the thefts. Bodies buried thirty years before are gone while those barely a month old blissfully remain. Across the churchyard, plots have been stricken, like random days crossed out on a calendar.

So the citizens of Sunderland are learning horribly what we, your narrators, have known all along; that this yard is honeycombed with empty coffins, bags of sand, and rotted black sprigs of rosemary left where loved ones used to be. One day you too will cross over into the Great Narration, there will come a time when you will want to rest undisturbed and unmolested, and perhaps then you will thank us for our jealous guardianship. Turn to look with us now upon the fates of two women: one irreproachable toward us, the other who now understands she has made a grave mistake. First observe Mag Scurr, pawnbroker, morgue keeper, reuniter of the living with their dead; who with a hammer only has cleared four feet of earth, and at last has reached the lid to her daughter’s coffin. From far away she hears the shrieking of other women who have just discovered that for years they have been visiting empty graves and whispering endearments to hollow boxes. Mag digs the claw of her hammer beneath the lid, pries back with all her strength the heavy pine top. Oh, Ellen, she weeps, my daughter, my girl. The heady perfume of corruption and rot could not smell any sweeter to a mother as, sobbing, she climbs inside the box, to couple with her eldest child and kiss her worm-blessed hair.

Now turn your attention to the dark side of the church, to our side, where the pit spreads wide, and the poor dress lodger Gustine is chopping with her boot, feeling for the plank of wood through this eternity of grubs and roots. The skin of her hands blisters but she does not feel it, any more than the searing of her naked knees as she kneels in our cemetery snow. She has not long to dig before she reaches the tiny coffin planted only two days before, now upended and barely covered over with dirt. She drags it from the ground, pulling along the unpinned fleshless limbs of an old pauper from the workhouse. She was here only hours ago—what could have happened in so short a time? Yet even before she feels the prophetic lightness of the tiny box, she knows what she will find.

In this case, we are spared the trouble of a haunting; for Mag Scurr, crawling on her hands and knees across the open plots, is spectre enough. She has her eye fixed on the faithless thief in the blue dress, the pretender, she who consorted with anatomists. Her Ellen is safe, but Mag wants vengeance for the entire graveyard, for all her wailing, violated neighbours.

She reaches the thief in the blue dress, who sits like all the rest, with black f dirt under her fingernails and scratches across her cheeks, staring uncom-1 prehendingly into the empty box upon her lap.3

“You were in league with them,” Mag hisses into the mother’ s ear. “And 1 it didn’t save you. Well, how does it feel to have your own taken?”

Gustine turns to her in anguished disbelief, but Mag Scurr shows no mercy.

“How does it feel?”

Lonely. That’s how it feels.

Back in the second-story study at Nile Street, you’ve been relegated to a corner. Yours was not a face that drew men to it, not a body whose mysteries men wished to plumb. Never in your life had anyone lost sleep over you, or gone without eating because of you, or desired to know what you were like inside. Then he came along, and what he did seemed a small price to pay for such undivided attention. In the week since you were taken from Mill Street, you’ve almost forgotten the years spent alone and untouched in your back room match factory, you’ve been able to claim, at last, your rightful place at the centre of your own story. You have felt wanted, necessary—in a strange way, beautiful. But now he has found someone new, and what remains of you sags in the corner, ashamed of its own ripeness. No wonder he has moved on. Just take a whiff of you. You’ve turned.

The yellow light of the lamp falls upon his soft white hands (that were trembling so badly he burned himself three times before he got it lit) and over his troubled face—which for the last quarter of an hour, since he came in with his muddy boots and earth-stained shovel, has been fixed upon a small bundle placed upon your old table. Like you were, this bundle is wrapped so that only a white petal efface shows, his swaddled chin wreathed with four long spines of rosemary that peep out like piney whiskers. A gentle barber, the anatomist shears the child of its herbal beard, carefully unwraps the contaminated winding sheet, and feeds it into the fire. Poor creature, you think when the infant is exposed. His wasted torso and limbs, the uneven ratio of head to trunk puts you in mind of an unfledged baby bird, but the sad truth is, his cholera emaciation will make the anatomist’s job that much simpler. Without a lot of extra fat and fluid in the way, it will be easier for him to remove the unnecessary viscera and wash the veins clean with water. He unwraps the final layer, where the child’s tiny hands, crossed over his chest, even in death protect his precious secret.

It is wrong to be jealous of a child, you know that, but what are you supposed to feel when you see the divine hunger in his eyes—an appetite that a week ago craved only you—turned upon someone else? He made you sound so marvelous to his students; who would have guessed to look at your gray exterior that you were composed of such lovely-sounding words as tissue and tibia and trachea; or that the ancients once believed your veins carried blood while your arteries transported spirits? Now, you feel the anatomist’s absence when he goes downstairs to fetch a tub of water, and ache when he returns, pouring three bottles of hydrochloric acid into the bath, but does not glance over at you. He measures out and mixes into a separate earthen pot fifteen ounces of yellow beeswax, eight of white resin, turpentine varnish six ounces, then separately taps out three ounces of powdered vermilion, settling the whole upon a heated trivet to begin its gradual melting. From the drawers in his glass-fronted cabinet, he chooses the several sections of his brass syringe, screwing together the piston, its leather valves, and its barrel with his little key, then selects his finest-toothed saw and several scalpels. If only he would look upon you again with such intense fascination, tenderly run his soft white hands over jour hair; if only he would treat you as anything other than just another bad smell in the room, you could bear it. But he has eyes only for the new one.

You know what he has in store for the helpless child as he rolls up his shirtsleeves and wipes the rust from his saw. He shared his thoughts with you earlier tonight, muttering to himself after he came home frantic from Fawcett Street and before he left with the lantern and the shovel, while he bundled you up into an old sheet like a tramp’s belongings and set you in the corner. You know that the child who has taken your place upon the table will not be hacked up as you were—no, he is to be preserved in a manner to best set off his singularity. The process your anatomist ultimately favored is, in itself, not overly complex, though most are not gifted enough to undertake it successfully. He will perform a wax corrosion, by first injecting the infant’s circulatory system with melted vermilion beeswax, then over the next few weeks slowly macerating away the bones and flesh, to leave a skein of arteries and veins, aorta, and vena cava. By the time he is done, he will have created a perfectly whole heart baby, stripped of its corrupt flesh, pared down to the perfect eternal circle of circulation. Varnished and sealed in an airtight case, what mattered of the dress lodger’s child will survive as a testament to God’s strange powers and its preserver’s careful skill.