But as the royal line of Muir considered their magic divine, a blessing to set them above the commoners and their counterparts in other nations, Sibylla was still expected to embody those old legends. Even among the magically gifted noble houses, the royals alone had cathedrals built in their names. Unfortunately, she’d only ever cared for the family legend explaining the origins of their magic, especially when her father sat beside her bed at night with light in his veins and the candles blown out.
He’d begin: centuries ago, from the whirlpool off Fillsbirth’s coast, a fisherman caught a water sprite. In exchange for her freedom, she granted him three wishes. First, he asked to be king, second for a ladylove, and the final wish he saved. One morning, this fishermanturned-king met a beautiful woman on the strand and begged her to marry him. She would only say yes if every full moon he allowed her to leave him for one night. The king agreed and the royal couple had five princes, all blessed with magic. According to her father, this marked the founding of the royal Muir line, and Sibylla was a descendant of the eldest prince.
One might think with five princes, Myrcnia would have been overrun with magic by now, but that wasn’t the case. The gifts often died out after a few generations, and noble houses that lost their magic entirely would have their titles removed. However, the royal Muir line never wavered in its strength. The church called it divine, but perhaps pressuring granddaughters to marry their cousins, along with the careful culling of bastards, had something to do with the “miracle.”
The next part of the story was Sibylla’s favorite. A drunken knight visiting from a neighboring kingdom pointed out that trusting one’s wife with mysterious agreements was never a good idea. So on the next full moon, the king followed the queen to the shore where, as Sibylla’s father relished telling, he found his bathing wife splashing with the tail of a grayling fish. The sprite cried for the king to forgive her falsehood, but instead he used his last wish to curse his wife back to the whirlpool whence she came.
As stated in the church’s genealogical records, Sibylla was the descendant of a half-fish faerie who lived in a whirlpool and had blessed her descendants with magic. And so Sibylla had believed when she came of age, her legs would fuse together into a silver-red tail and she’d swim to the whirlpool to be reunited with the water sprite.
At age twelve, she’d been disappointed when her first gift manifested as the same translucent skin with glowing veins her father and grandmother displayed in country festivals. She and Roger had been hiding in a closet from the head steward, sitting with their knees touching. They’d snatched a jar of candied peach slices from the kitchen, and she divided them up, first popping one into her own mouth, then holding one out for him. He bit into the slice, then his lips closed around her sugarcoated fingers. She yelped in surprise, and a ripple of bluish light coursed through her veins, illuminating the dark closet in one bright flash. Roger shrieked. She revived him with a pinch on his neck.
For months afterward, she persuaded him to follow her whims by threatening to light up in the dark. It wasn’t her fault he was such a milksop. As teenagers, his eagerness to kiss her had eventually subsumed his fear of her gifts – she hadn’t been so reluctant herself.
The tip of her finger traced his signature. Was this letter really written by that same lad? She suspected years of reading dry books about anatomy had done him more harm than good.
Before she dealt with the younger brother, she had a few words for the older. With fresh paper in one hand, black ink bloomed beneath her fingernails. She’d covered two pages with complaints for Captain Harrod Starkley – beginning with his unsanctioned turn as postman and ending with his unbearable replacement, Lieutenant Calloway. Then she curled up on her side and pulled the blanket snug around her shoulders. Dame Angeline’s salon pin rested on the table beside her bed, and she still couldn’t imagine what had possessed Roger to send such an inappropriate memento. By the time Sibylla had conceived of a response to his letter, it was morning’s glow, not her own, lighting the paper.
5
The following afternoon, Roger scouted out the Tenderbone Internment Ground, a cemetery for paupers and prostitutes, intending to unearth another corpse later that night. He was still short on cash to pay for his rent, never mind a proper medical education.
He put on his worker’s cap, stuck a surveyor’s folding ruler in his pocket, and let himself in by the crooked lychgate. Scouting in the daylight made for easier hauls after dark.
Tenderbone had been a churchyard since ancient times, but its church had gone to ruin long ago. Now more potter’s field than cemetery, the dead were buried anonymously in trenches. Every new excavation churned up bone fragments and splinters of rotten coffinwood, to be picked over by the ragmen and sold for a few winkles a bucketful.
The most recent burial trench had been dug two weeks ago, which meant it would be almost full now. Bodies were placed in the trenches gradually, topped with layers of thick clay and cobbles to deter bodysnatchers. But diggers, eager to pack in as many layers as possible, often skimped on the topmost corpses, covering them with barely a foot of earth – easy pickings for a resurrectionist working alone.
Roger strode about with a bundle of flagged stakes under his arm, loudly counting his steps, meanwhile casing the area for newly disturbed earth. This proved difficult, as most of the churchyard had a wet, tilled look. If there had been a trench, it was filled in completely.
As expected, the sexton from the adjacent Chapel of St Celia the Devout – a wooden hut in the shadow of the church ruins – wandered over to chat.
“Where’s Mr Mortlocke?” asked the sexton. “Kicked the bucket at last?”
“Oh, I hope not sir.” Roger unfolded his ruler, pretending to measure the distance between his randomly placed stakes. “Last I heard he was in bed with the bottle-ache.”
“Well, one can hope. We could use an industrious lad like you to do the surveying. Usually by the time Mr Mortlocke pops by, our digger is jimmying the last few stiffs into the ground with a crowbar.” The sexton clapped Roger heartily on the shoulder. “You might want to move your stakes about ten paces left. We only dug here last month. Best to wait a few more weeks before digging again.”
“Very good sir, as you say,” Roger grinned.
After the sexton returned to his chapel, Roger hammered in a flagged stake where he stood so he could find the spot later that night. Gathering up his equipment, he made for home to catch a nap before the real work began. However, the clouds scudded west after sunset, and a full moon was forecast to rise by midnight – bad conditions for a resurrectionist. Perhaps a night off would be best, as the shock from his Greyanchor outing hadn’t yet worn off.
In the end, he enjoyed a supper of mutton pie and ale at the Fox & Weasel, and a hornpipe to impress the pubkeeper’s daughter. The girl had laughed at first, then told him to stop or he’d make himself ill. Blood seeped intermittently from his nose where Harrod had struck him. He begged off early at a quarter to midnight due to a splitting headache.
Roger awoke next morning in just his trousers and boots, with a wad of wet flannel pressed to his nose. Nail, the undertaker’s apprentice, stood over him. He was a tall, red-haired youth with a dour expression mimicked from a death mask.
“Mr Grausam has a job fer you,” said Nail, whisking the blanket off Roger’s cot.
Roger groaned. “I thought you were there to mix up Mr Grausam’s preserving fluids and upholster his coffins, not me. I don’t take no halfshelling for pallbearing neither. I’m a professional now. You tell him.” He grabbed at the blanket, but Nail flicked it out of his reach.
Nail wrinkled his nose. He eyed the pail near the door containing a dead cat – Roger had tried and failed to revive the poor thing after it ate a poisoned rat. He had intended to keep it for a practice dissection, but time had gotten away from him and now it stunk.
“Aye, you’ve really moved up in the world, Mr Weathersby, Esquire. Mr Grausam said your night-owling would g
et you retired to Ol’ Grim fer good.”
“And you woke me up for that?” Roger stood – a difficult business in his cramped garret with its angled ceiling – and cast about for a shirt less filthy than the one he’d worn the day before. His only shirt without bloodstains was rusty with cemetery clay. He had two shirts in total. This was a problem. “I don’t pinch Grausam’s stiffs no more, and he already fired me twice, but that’s water under the scaffold as it were. What does he care about how I spend my nights?” A thought crossed Roger’s mind. He frowned. “He’s not looking to buy my wares, is he?”
“I think not.” Nail tossed the blanket at Roger. “We’re a tad short on mutes. Funeral fer that actress, Lady Margalotte. Didn’t you hear?”
Mutes were professional mourners hired to attend funeral processions for stiffs who’d left enough coin behind to afford them. They wore swaths of black crape, trailing hatbands, and miserable expressions, due more to the grim weather than grief.
Nail handed Roger two slips of paper. “The top one is a map to the home of the bereaved. Be there by noon tomorrow, and plan to stay till the funeral procession at dusk. That other paper there is yer laundry receipt fer the black togs. I’m to say you’ll be fully ree-imb-arsed.”
“A mute, hey?” Roger opted for his bloodstained shirt – less stiff than the clay-caked one. If he could remember to keep his coat buttoned until he had a new shirt, it would serve well enough. “That’s worse than a pallbearer. What’ll I get, five winkles? Four?”
Nail scratched an old smallpox scar on his cheekbone. “Beggars can’t be choosers, Mr Weathersby. But there might be hot punch if the air is chill. I hear there’ll be a right supply of fair women present, Angeline’s upper-class salon girls. Margalotte was one herself, they say, before the poor lamb was strangled.” The apprentice grinned. “You heard of her?”
“No.” Roger buttoned his shirt. “And tell Mr Grausam I’m doing him a favor by not tempting myself to bag your latest stiff.” In truth, he was sorely tempted. This fresh stiff would bring a good price at Eldridge’s. Still, he knew better than to admit his interest to an undertaker.
Nail shrugged and moved for the door. “When you change your mind, you know where to go.” He doffed his hat with a smirk. “I’ll see you tomorrow at noon. An’ don’t forget the mask. Your face has the look of a blueberry pie soakin’ through the top crust.”
After Nail had gone, Roger opened a leather-bound journal and flipped past dozens of drawings to the first blank page. While he found journaling a nuisance, he documented his practice dissections with diagrams and terms he wanted to remember. Most recently the butcher’s wife had given him a sheep’s heart, and he’d sketched it in charcoal, annotating the chambers and tubes.
He finally had time to get to the cat. At the top of his page he wrote “digestive system.” He set the journal on the bed and prepared his anatomy space. His table was made of stacked crates with a cupboard door laid across them, and on this he set a wooden tray, an old scalpel and other donated rusted instruments Dr Eldridge had spared from the rubbish heap. First he cut down the length of his specimen’s abdomen, and found the bony tube of the trachea with his fingers. Gently, he peeled the skin back, prying away thin webs of underlying tissue to reveal the viscera beneath. He traced the digestive system just as he had during the dissection at Eldridge’s. As he unraveled the intestines with his fingers, a creak on the stairs made him turn.
“Am I interrupting your breakfast, man of science?” Harrod, wearing a hooded oilskin raincoat, stood in the doorway with a letter in his gloved hand. “What a smell.”
“What do you want?” Roger stuffed the entrails back into the abdominal cavity and jabbed the scalpel into the dead cat’s thigh, where it stuck like a tiny harpoon. “Don’t you have better things to do?” He plunged his hands into a basin of rainwater and dried them on his only spare shirt – it was filthy anyway. If Harrod expected him to bow, he could break his back first.
Instead, Harrod handed him a letter. “Please limit your response to a page. I don’t have much time to spare.”
Roger tore the princess’ seal. The hatpin he’d sent fell from the letter. He skimmed the contents.
Dear Roger,
Since you have no fondness for childhood nicknames, I’ll reserve them for all those other boys whom I so cruelly abused with my kisses, as they might wish to hear from my lips more than you obviously do.
What I find truly remarkable, however, is your audacity in sending me a pin from Dame Angeline’s salon. If you meant to imply that I am at all like Dame Angeline, collecting the poor to pad my heart, then I’m sickened to think of the feelings I once expressed toward you, as they were shamefully genuine. The only thing more astonishing is how you might have come by such a trinket, having neither the title nor wealth her salon demands. But then I suppose you have experience in wearing down the fairer sex with your charms. In the future, perhaps you should avoid finely dressed women altogether.
Lastly, as concerns your brother, you may wish to reconsider your opinion. Unless, judging by the blood upon your last letter, you simply enjoy a good beating. He’s one of the few men I’ve seen to land a blow over Cotton Mouth McCleary in the ring, and that is no small feat. He’s hardly some despicable lout. Harrod’s reasons for being long at sea are as pitiable as they are commendable, and one day I hope you discover how mistaken you’ve been in your pettifogging. Even when he has good cause to resent his position in life, he holds himself above reproach. He’s not the kind to force one into wearing despicable clothes or make one read insipid gardening books. His two years as my warden protector are the closest I’ll ever have to what you so abjectly take for granted.
Sincerely,
Sibylla
All Roger saw was one backhanded insult after another, reminding him of his place beneath her, Harrod, this high-class Angeline lady, and finely dressed people in general. He crumpled the letter in his fist.
“A gentleman always drafts his response before disposing of his correspondence,” said Harrod. “Not that you are one. Do you even have the means to respond?” His eyes swept the room as though paper couldn’t possibly exist there.
“I ain’t responding to that.”
“My mistake. The squalor of your abode is beyond the pale. Living alongside dead cats and disgusting jars of floating rubbish. How she ever looked your way, with her bearing and wits, is beyond my comprehension. But I suppose your third-rate letters provide her amusement. You’ve no idea how bored she is.”
Roger discreetly closed his journal and slid it under the cot. He returned the cat to its bucket, his concentration ruined. “Some of us do actual work for the betterment of society,” he spat. “You can go right back to the palace to tell her I’m too busy to write.”
“Princess Sibylla is not currently at the palace. She has been away these past two years, not that it is any concern of yours.”
“You’re right. It’s no concern of mine. And I’m no concern of hers.” To hell with the lot of them uppercrust pies. No matter how Harrod and Sibylla harassed him, Roger couldn’t care less what they thought. He didn’t regret making his first dissection, unearthing that first stiff, or leaving the palace. And certainly not changing his name to Weathersby.
“But you’re my concern.” When Roger didn’t respond, Harrod shrugged and inspected the slips of paper Nail had left. “At least you are not entirely devoid of worthy employment opportunities.”
“That mute job ain’t worth my time.”
“Your time? I could scrape two shellings together, and your time would be worth less than the metal shavings. As for my time, I’ve wasted enough.” He turned to leave.
“I changed my mind.” Roger retrieved his journal and tore out the last page. He scribbled a terse note with his stick of charcoal.
I thank your highness for putting me in my place. I will stay far from wellborn ladies since you say so. Now leave me alone.
Yr most hmbl & obt svt,
rxw
He folded the page into a tight square and thrust it at Harrod. “Be sure to give her a nice deep bow from me.”
“Ever the petulant child.” Harrod set a shelling on the table. “Go buy yourself a more palatable meal than whatever is in your bucket.”
Roger ran to the door and threw the coin down the stairs, but Harrod had already rounded the corner. It struck the wall and tinkled against the metal railings.
A door on the landing below opened with a creak, and Mrs Carver, the butcher’s wife, called up to him. “Who was that dapper naval man? Not your brother to visit you at last?”
“No, ma’am,” he called down in as calm a voice as he could manage. “Just a man to tell me my brother’s been lost at sea.” The force of Roger slamming the door shut sent Nail’s receipts fluttering to the floor. As Roger stared down at them, something Nail had said floated to the surface.
Angeline’s ladies even, as Margalotte was one herself, they say, before the poor lamb was strangled.
Another strangling.
He thought of the woman he had resurrected a few days ago. Could the two be connected? Seemed unlikely… but then again…
Curiosity got the best of him. He was a man of science after all. He could at least ensure Margalotte wasn’t buried alive. That settled it. He would take the mute job, and maybe discover clues to Claudine’s mysterious death. Perhaps he’d even figure out why the hatpin he’d found in her casket had offended the princess so.
Roger hid the deplorable state of his dissecting-room clothes under his greatcoat. He’d intended to buy new garments with his recent earnings, but first he’d paid Mrs Carver two months of back rent while promising this month’s payment within the week, bought a round for the regulars at the Fox & Weasel and acquired that flashy new hat to replace the one he’d lost. He figured he’d rather go about town without his trousers than without a hat.
The Resurrectionist of Caligo Page 5