The Music of Razors (5 page)

“Yeah, Leonard’s people are rich. School patrons.” Dorian kept laughing. “Athelstane, today’s been one of those days so bad it changes a person’s life and if you don’t shut up I’m going to change yours.”

The Englishman wound down, surveyed him, took a drag. “You’ve got a genuine passion for the work, I can tell.”

“Don’t patronize me. I’m only out here because I’ve been sitting in my goddamn room all day.”

Dorian took another pull on his cigarette, squinted through the smoke, gestured with the lambent end. “We could get you back in, you know.” Henry turned and looked him in the eye. He had a face that forecast the man he would grow into. His face was narrow and his eyes were caves.

“I would urge you to not go down this road.”

“I’m serious, chum. We perform a working, you get back to school, and we prove we’re not frauds. That is why you approached Finella today, isn’t it? Hoping to work out what, if anything, was real and what, if anything, was part of some plot against your liberty?”

Miss Riley had been quietly appalled—at least, that’s how she appeared—after Henry had hit Leonard; doubly mortified when all realized the professor had been standing in the doorway and had witnessed the entire thing. Henry had never been yelled at so politely in his entire life. A cat tripped out of the alley opposite, looked around, disappeared back in. “How is Miss Riley?”

“How does she feel about what you did? The feminine is charmed, while the firebrand is rankled.”

The thought of Finella thinking poorly of him undid something in Henry’s chest.

Henry sighed, and sucked a crackling breath from his smoke.

Finally Dorian flicked his stub into the street, an amber starburst off the cobbles. He checked his pocket watch and said: “I’m off to the pub. Will you be coming?”

Henry stared at his shoes and thought about tomorrow, and Finella. It seemed to him that life was a game he may have lost. Like it or not he had business to finish. No getting away from it.

He sighed again, ground the last of his smoke into the step, and fetched his hat from beside him.

“Let’s go.”

“I grew up in Vermont,” Henry told them. “Nothing special. My folks weren’t anyone that people such as yourselves would speak to. I’m an impostor, myself, sitting here among you like this. If it weren’t for my reading from a young age and studying an etiquette primer while hopping boxcars all the way down here I doubt you would have kept my company for this long.

“My name isn’t Lockrose, but I do want to be a surgeon. I don’t just want to mend bones, I want to understand how it all works, how it all fits, and how everything we are intersects with everything we aren’t. I want to know
us
so well that every other thing about the whole of Creation spells itself out.

“See, I kept my reading hidden, as a boy. Pretty sure Ma knew about it. Don’t think Pap really knew until a coupla years before I left for good. He got mad. Always knew it was coming. Knocked me around, took the few books I had in the house at the time and stepped them into the mud. Never did find the other stashes around the place.

“Pap had a son for a reason, and that was to work dirt.

“If I was ever gonna make good on getting out before I turned into the same beaten man my pappy was, living that same shitty life he had in mind for me, I needed an education. So. Money.

“Few years before I left the farm I started taking the money I didn’t have from those who did, little by little. Not enough to be noticed. I did the arithmetic, measured what I took, took it at the right time, and kept the whole lot buried deep down and far away.

“Wasn’t smart enough, though. After a time the thefts started to get noticed, but by then I’d squirreled away enough for a ticket to Boston through New York, and a few months’ worth of lectures here, but I needed more, and I needed it before someone knocked on Pap’s door. That happened, it’d all be over for me.

“So. Bernie Sumner. Wide-bodied fellow, bear of a man, served his time as a sergeant. He’d dipped his toes into the waters of the cotton industry in the South, people said, then sold up and left. No one talked about it. He lived well, had a nice place.

“Sumner banked all his cash, but I found a strongbox beneath a wide feather bed. Right below a latticed window that caught the first hours of moonlight. Everything smelled cold and wet the way it does in the first months of winter. He had a good wife, kept the insides smelling flowery despite the muskets and man-stuff all over the place. Made me kinda sad for the kinda home I never expect to have.
Home,
y’know? Nice.

“Anyway, being a
smart
young man I arranged to be in Sumner’s house on a night I heard he’d be away. ’Course, ol’ Bernie walks through the door, into that flowery bedroom, just as I’m standing there. I’d found a pepperbox pistol in his sock drawer and was aiming it at the lock on the box. It was a big box, kinda like Bernie, old and sturdy and immense.

“Then everything fell into its place. Bernie bellowed; I almost embarrassed myself; Bernie lumbered at me; I shot him through the throat. One minute I was a thief, the next I was a murderer. Didn’t even know what I’d done. I just ran. All the way to Boston with Mr. Sumner’s money.”

Outside the room a distant pub was full of smoke and cheerful uproar. Dysart coughed quietly and reached for his brandy.

Henry looked at Finella, drank her in, taking a ghost’s liberty. “I did wrong, a lot of wrong, always intending to set the balance with good works. That seemed right to me.” He had about one sentence worth of breath left in him. “I need you to know I’m not a bad man.” His chest ached. “That’s all I can say.”

Dysart swallowed his small mouthful and snuffled softly to himself, eyes on the snifter resting on his belly. Jukes’s eyes wandered around the table. Even Dorian said nothing.

“Sir,” Finella said quietly, her voice like balm, and looked him in the eye. “We are extraordinary.”
Extra. Ordinary.

Henry looked about the table. All eyes were on him. No one said a word.

The extraordinary fell outside the ordinary.

Home.

“Thank you,” Henry said.

And Dorian raised his glass.

The group cleaved to one another in the days that followed. Their meetings became a nightly affair, giving Dorian and Dysart a chance to discuss and plan which working was to come next. While this went on Jukes listened attentively, while Finella went over the day’s notes from school. These she shared with Henry, taking him through what was covered that day, and in doing so she not only consolidated the lesson in her own head but imparted it to Henry as well. In this way Henry did not miss the school at all. Here he had not only the learning, but also the company of the one person he couldn’t put from his mind.

At school the lectures had shifted from diseases of the bone to injuries of them. Specifically compound fractures.

“What you did to young Leonard has made the rounds, I’m afraid. I suspect you may even have an admirer in the professor.”

“Leonard’s lack of popularity doesn’t make me anything special. Where were we?”

“Traumatic fractures. So…when force is transmitted to the seat of a fracture from a distance, the violence is said to be…”

“Indirect.”

“Correct. And the bone is broken by…”

“Torsion. The bone gives way at the weakest point, and the line of fracture will tend to be oblique.”

“Correct. Someone leaping from a great height, then, would…”

“Landing on his feet, the tibia would break in the lower third, while the fibula would break at a higher level.”

Finella went back over her notes and shrugged demurely. “I can only speculate, but I think that would be correct.”

“I think it is.”

“I see.” She smiled to herself, making a pretense of hunting for some fact among her pages. “Then I suppose you would also know the details of a compound clavicle fracture resulting from
direct
force.”

“Miss Riley, please…”

“Come on, come on.”

“Fracture by compression. The line of the fracture would be transverse,” he recited in a bored tone, waving a hand impatiently. “And the soft parts overlying the fracture would be damaged according to the weight and shape of the impinging body.”

“Give me an example of how someone might indirectly suffer a compound fracture of the clavicle.”

“This isn’t Sunday school, Miss Riley. We’re not going to—”

“Come on, come on.”

“Falling on an outstretched hand could result in a…fracture of the clavicle in the middle third…possibly also or instead resulting in a fracture of the radius at its lower end. If you would please hand those notes over, I think it’s time we moved on.”

Finella acquiesced, falling silent as Henry looked over her most recent notes. “If you were permitted to return to school, would you?” she said.

“I have to confess, I much prefer learning this way.” Henry smiled at the pages as he flipped them. “I trust that’s not too forward.”

“No. No, I must say I find this form of study far more invigorating than simply rehearsing the day’s lesson in my room. But what if you could return? There would be no reason for us to stop studying as we do.”

Henry kept himself from shrugging. “Life’s too short for maybes, Miss Riley. I would rather live with what I have than play house with what I don’t. No sense weighing ourselves down with ghosts and could-have-beens.”

Finella laughed politely, like a cough. “Yes, of course.”

“You don’t agree.”

“I agree in principle. But I do believe that you should at least make some effort to be reinstated in the professor’s class. You have a natural way with the science of this, Henry. To waste that gift would be a sin.”

“I’m not wasting it.” He tapped the page. “This is as good as being there. Better, even.”

She sighed, unconvinced. “I’m no doctor. Not yet. You can’t ask me questions that the prof could answer. I’m just a student, like you. Go back, Henry. At worst the old fellow will just refuse you. But I don’t think he will.”

The evening concluded, a final toast made, and the group forwarded out of their little back room, talking among themselves. Dorian and Dysart had talked themselves out. A decision had been made as to the best way forward for the Voso ritual, and now all that remained was to prepare themselves over the coming weeks by way of abstinence and good works. Henry wasn’t exactly clear on how any of that was meant to work, but Dorian would explain it all the next time they met.

The main room of the Coat and Arms had emptied itself as men collected their hats and coats and made their way back out into the chill. Both Henry and Finella recognized one man in particular, and stopped in their tracks. The professor had seen their group, blanched at the sight of Finella in the company of four men, left his port where it was on the table, took his hat, and stood. Instinctively Henry threw himself into the breach.

“Professor! How do you do. Had I known you would be here I would have invited you to sit with us.”

The old man feigned surprise. “Oh, it’s Mr. Lockrose isn’t it? And Miss Riley.”

“Professor,” Finella demurred. “Were you passing the evening alone?”

“Yes, as it turns out. Forgive my rudeness, as I must be going. It’s late.”

Henry inclined his head. “Indeed. Good night, Professor.”

The old man doffed his hat and exited. The group watched him go.

“He was here on your account, Henry,” Dorian said. “I’d bet my life on it.”

“And yet he said nothing,” said Finella. “On mine.”

Henry couldn’t deny it: the professor finding Finella in the company of four men, in the back room of a pub at night…

He remembered then something that Leonard had said, in the moments before Henry had floored him.

Does anyone here not know where she spends her nights?

Henry knew exactly what he had meant at the time, but had thought little of it once the incident had resolved itself. However, he would bet a lot that it was Leonard who told the professor where to find him—if the old man had indeed come to have a word with him. Finella’s expression was a dark one. Her career was in jeopardy.

Dorian approached, laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “When I met you, you said that a moment like this was inevitable. That eventually people would begin to talk, and that it would make life at school difficult. I hope you don’t regret that decision now.”

Finella shook her head. “If you will excuse me, though, I think I would like some time alone.”

“Of course.”

“Good night, gentlemen.”

Henry stepped after her. “At least let us walk you to a cab.”

“Not necessary, but thank you.”

And Henry watched her go.

Finella did not attend the next night. Or the night after. The day after that Henry waited for her outside class, watching from a block away, and she did not appear.

“She’s been expelled,” he told Dorian that night. “I’m sure of it.”

“She can’t be expelled if no one enrolls,” Dorian said. “Anyone can turn up and pay by the lesson.”

“The professor can still choose to exclude someone from the class, if he thinks their attendance would tarnish the school’s reputation.”

“Good grief. This is ridiculous.”

“We have to find her.”

“She won’t have done anything stupid, if that’s what you’re thinking. Finella’s too proud for that.”

“She may have gone home,” Jukes said. “Back to Mother.”

“Too proud for that, too, I would have thought.”

Henry made for the door. “Tell me where she was staying.”

“Fine, I’ll come with you. Jukes, Dysart, amuse yourselves or come along if you’d like.”

Henry opened the door, onto an unreadable Finella, her hands clasped before her. “Gentlemen,” she said. “I have some things to say.”

It became apparent to Henry in the weeks leading up to the summoning that this meant more to Dorian than any simple bout of curiosity. And Dorian was more fluent with the language of hidden things than any man his age should have been.

Finella had been refused entry to the classroom for reasons the professor offered to keep between the two of them, in the hope that, perhaps, she would still be able to salvage some respectability. Finella had protested, had taken it to the school board, all to no avail. Having left the school, unable to stop angry tears from staining her face and refusing to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing her wipe them away, she had sat herself down by the least offensive part of the river that she could find and let her mind run riot.