The Dead of Winter

by S. J. Parris

  He disappeared into the dark, until all I could see was the small spark of his lantern bobbing across the garden in the direction of the convent buildings. Silence fell around me, punctuated only by familiar night sounds: the snort and stamp of a sleeping horse, the drawn-out cry of an owl, the relentless, one-note song of the cicadas. Further off, a whoop, followed by a gale of raucous laughter from the streets beyond the wall. I pressed myself into the shadows of the outbuildings and waited. Where was this mysterious patient, then, if not in the servants’ quarters? I glanced across to the door Fra Gennaro had locked behind him. In the storehouse? Why could he not be treated in the infirmary, like any other …

  A sudden understanding flashed through me, flooding my veins with cold. This man must be an enemy of the state, someone it would not be politic for us to be seen helping. San Domenico had a reputation for fomenting resistance against the kingdom’s Spanish rulers; it was well known that the more rebellious among the Neapolitan barons met regularly in the convent’s great hall to discuss the form of that resistance, with the ready involvement of some eminent Dominicans. Perhaps this secret patient was a conspirator who had been wounded in the course of action against the Spanish. That would explain Fra Gennaro’s insistence that I ask no questions. Pleased by my own reasoning, I bunched my hands into fists beneath my robe and slid down against the wall of the storehouse to squat on my heels, bouncing with anticipation.

  I recited psalms and sonnets to measure the time; another twenty minutes passed before Gennaro returned, with a bundle tied over his shoulder and carrying the full pail of water, steam rising from the cracks in its lid. I leapt up and hurried to take it from him; he nodded and paused to check all around before fitting the key to the padlock. As soon as we were inside, he secured the door again behind us.

  He held up the lantern and turned slowly to reveal only an unremarkable room with stone walls and a paved floor. Wooden crates lined one wall; barrels were stacked against the back. A sound of scurrying overhead made me jump; I looked up and a fine dust filtered through between the planks that had been laid over the roof beams to partition the eaves into a loft space. A ladder led up to a closed hatch.

  ‘Only rats,’ Gennaro muttered. ‘Keep that light over here where I can see it.’

  He gestured towards the furthest end of the room. At first I could not make out what he meant to show me, but as I drew closer with the lantern, I saw a wooden hatch set into the floor, the stones at the edges scraped clean where the crates concealing it had been moved away. The hatch was also held fast with a padlock. Gennaro selected another key from his belt, knelt and unfastened it. He paused with one hand on the iron ring and looked up at me, his eyes large and earnest in the flickering light.

  ‘Your oath, Bruno, that whatever you witness here will remain sealed in your heart as long as you breathe.’

  I could have taken offence that my oath was not good enough the first time; instead I was too impatient to see what lay beneath the door. Goosebumps prickled along my arms. I swore again, on my life and all I held sacred, my right hand pressed over my heart. Fra Gennaro studied me for a long moment, then lifted the hatch and led the way down a flight of stone steps into an underground chamber.

  The air was cooler here, with a taint of damp. Though I could see little at first, on peering harder I made out an arched ceiling and walls lined with stone. No sound came from the dense shadows further in, none of the jagged breathing you would expect from an injured man. A cold dread touched me: suppose the patient had died while Gennaro was fetching his instruments and I was waiting uselessly outside? But the infirmarian showed no sign of panic. He closed the hatch and slid a bolt across so that we could not be disturbed. Next he unwrapped an oil lamp from the pack he had brought and lit it carefully from the lantern. In the brighter glow I saw that the chamber was dominated by a sturdy table draped with a thick shroud, under which was laid the unmistakable outline of a human figure.

  A strange fear took hold of me, somewhere under my ribs, constricting my breath. Gennaro removed his cloak and hung it on the back of the door, indicating that I should do the same. In its place he shrugged on a rough hessian smock, such as the servants wear, and over this a wide leather apron. Then he rolled up his sleeves, dipped his hands into the steaming water and rubbed them clean before opening the bag he had brought with him. In the lamplight I caught the flash of silver blades. The last item he extracted was a large hourglass, which he set upright on a box beside the table to allow the sand to settle. When he had assembled all the equipment to his satisfaction, he took one corner of the shroud in his hand and glanced at me.

  ‘Ready?’

  I tried to swallow, but my throat had dried. I managed a nod, and he pulled back the sheet covering the body.

  In the stillness I heard myself gasp aloud, though I had the presence of mind not to cry out. Stretched out on the table was the body of a young woman, about my own age, unmoving as a marble tomb. Her flesh was so unblemished that it seemed at first she might be merely sleeping; indeed, I dared to hope as much for the space of a heartbeat, until I looked more closely and saw in her face the unmistakable contortions of strangulation. It was clear, despite the bulging eyes, the protruding tongue and the discolouration of the face, that she must have been unusually beautiful, not very long ago. Her skin was pale and smooth, her dark hair flowed around her shoulders and her waist was small and neat, her hips narrow and her breasts full. Ripe bruises like shadow fingers formed a ring around her white throat.

  ‘By my reckoning,’ Gennaro said, turning over the hourglass, now brusque and businesslike, ‘we have about two and a half hours until Matins. There is no time to waste.’

  So saying, he took a broad-bladed knife and slit the girl’s shift lengthways in one swift movement, from hem to neck, leaving the fabric to fall away either side. I tried to avert my eyes from the dark thatch of hair on her pubic mound, but it was difficult; I had not seen a woman’s body in three years. If Gennaro noticed my confusion and the colour rising to my cheeks, he was discreet enough not to mention it.

  ‘Who is she?’ I whispered, fixing my gaze on her feet. The soles were bare and dirty.

  ‘Beggar. Homeless. Come, hold that lantern closer.’ His reply came just a fraction too quick.

  ‘But – how does she come to be here?’ I blurted, forgetting my earlier promise.

  ‘She was found in the street by one of the night patrols and brought to me. They thought they might be in time to save her. Alas, they arrived too late.’

  He could see that I did not believe this version of events. I was not convinced that he did either. No Spanish soldier in the city would trouble himself to help a vagrant girl. They were more likely to be the ones who had abused and killed her. At least he had the grace to look away as he said it.

  ‘But she has clearly met with a violent death, and quite recently—’

  He laid the back of his fingers on the girl’s neck, his expression speculative. ‘An hour or so, I would say.’

  ‘Then surely we should report it?’

  ‘Fra Giordano, I thought we had agreed no questions?’

  I bit my lip. He paused and straightened, his hand hovering over a selection of knives. I could not miss the impatience in his face, though his voice was softer. ‘Listen. You told me you have read the work of Vesalius.’

  ‘I have, but—’

  ‘And how did Vesalius come by his knowledge of the human body? Where did he find his raw materials?’

  ‘He stole corpses from the gallows at night.’ I felt as if an invisible hand were squeezing my own throat.

  ‘Exactly. And you know he also robbed graves? In the pursuit of understanding, it is sometimes necessary to interpret the law in one’s own way.’

  ‘But this girl has been murdered! He may not have got far – someone might have seen something—’

  ‘That is not our concern, Brother.’ The sharpness in his tone took me by surprise. He sighed. ‘In the medical schools of Eur
ope, professors of anatomy are allocated the bodies of felons for public dissection under the law – as many as four a year in some places.’ His jaw tightened. ‘I will never be a professor of anatomy now. God in His wisdom saw fit to call me to His service in another way. But that does not mean my desire to learn is any the less.’ His tone suggested a degree of scepticism about the divine wisdom in this instance. He planted both hands flat on the table and leaned across the girl to nail me with a fierce stare. ‘Listen to me, Fra Giordano. I see in you the makings of a man of science. I mean it. For such as us, pushing the boundaries of what is known, shining the light of true learning into the dark corners of Creation – there can be no higher good. I know you agree.’ He jabbed a forefinger into the air between us. ‘And do not let anyone make you afraid of God’s judgement. All of Nature is a great book in which the Creator has written the secrets of the universe. Would He have given us the gifts of reason and enquiry if He did not wish us to read that book?’

  In the soft light, his face was avid as a boy’s. I hesitated. Fra Eugenio, my novice master, had taken great pains to impress upon his flock of intellectually ambitious youths that the first and greatest sin of our forefather Adam was the desire for forbidden knowledge. He held firmly to the view that the Almighty intended much of His creation to remain beyond our meagre human understanding. I was of Fra Gennaro’s mind, but I was still afraid.

  ‘You mean to anatomise her.’ My voice emerged as a croak. This time I did not frame it as a question.

  He picked up a long knife and studied the tip of its blade. ‘You know as well as I that this city is overrun with indigents.’ He gestured with the knife towards the figure on the table. ‘She was a street girl, a whore. No one will mourn her, poor creature. If she were not lying here now, she would be on a cart full of corpses heading for Fontanelle. At least this way some good will come of her sad existence before she ends up there. In life she gave her body up to rogues and lechers. In death, she will give it up to the service of anatomy.’ He fixed me with a long look, tilting his head to one side as he pressed the knife’s point into the pad of his finger. ‘You are not obliged to stay, if your conscience advises you otherwise. But think of the opportunity. You are the only one here I would trust to assist me.’

  I looked at him. How could I resist such flattery? Even so, in my gut I was deeply troubled by his proposition. In the first place, I did not believe his story about how he had come by the body. There could be no doubt that the girl had been murdered, barely an hour ago, and I feared that in disposing of her corpse – to say nothing of illegally dissecting it – we would be implicated in her death. More than this, though, it was the brutality of what he was proposing that disturbed me. I had read Vesalius’s work on anatomy and understood the value of practical experimentation. But this girl had already suffered violence at the hands of a man; whatever she may have been in life, our cutting and probing in the name of scientific enquiry seemed like a further violation. I did not voice any of this. Instead, I said:

  ‘Does the prior know?’

  He allowed a long pause. His gaze slid back to the girl on the table.

  ‘The prior has, on occasion, given me permission to examine corpses where it is clear that there would be some greater benefit in doing so. When old Fra Teofilo died last year in Holy Week – you recall? – I was permitted to cut him open in order to study the tumour in his gut. And what could be more beneficial than furthering our knowledge of the female form? You cannot know how rare it is to find such an ideal specimen.’

  The gleam in his eyes as he said this verged on lascivious, though not for the girl, or at least, not in the usual way. His desire was all for her interior, for the secrets she might yield up to his knife. From his studied evasion of my question, I took it that the answer was no. He tapped the hourglass with a fingernail. The sand was already piling into a small hill in the lower half.

  ‘Time will not wait for us, Bruno. Go or stay, but make your mind up now.’

  ‘I will stay,’ I said, sounding steadier than I felt.

  ‘Good.’ Relief rippled over his face. ‘And if you think you are going to faint or vomit, give me plenty of warning. We will have enough to clear up without that.’

  He dipped a cloth in the hot water and wiped it almost tenderly around the girl’s chest, along the declivities of her clavicle, the sharp ridges of her collarbones and into the valley between her breasts. ‘Note the fullness of the breasts,’ he observed, as if he were addressing students in an anatomy theatre, as he marked the place of the first incision in a Y-shape across each side of her breastbone, ‘and the enlargement of the areola. If I am right in my speculation, we may find something of unparalleled interest here.’

  I concentrated on holding the lantern steady over the table. As if I could have failed to notice the girl’s full breasts or large, dark nipples. Perhaps he had forgotten what it was to be eighteen. In his eyes she was simply a specimen, material for experimentation. To me she was too recently living, breathing, warm, with a head full of thoughts and dreams, for me to regard her as anything other than a young woman. I did not dare touch her skin; I almost believed it would still hold some pulse of life. Nor could I look at her face; the terror in those wild, staring eyes was too vivid. I had heard it said that, when a person was murdered, the image of the killer was fixed in their death stare. I did not mention this to Fra Gennaro; I did not want him to laugh at me or take me for a village simpleton.

  Any unbidden lustful thoughts shrivelled in an instant as he pushed the blade into her flesh. He made two careful incisions along the breastbone and joined them in a vertical cut that ran the length of her torso to her pubic mound. The sound of the knife tearing through meat was unspeakable, the smell more so. I recoiled, shocked, at the amount of blood that pooled out. Gennaro calmly placed containers under the table at strategic points, and I saw that, like a butcher’s block, the surface had channels cut into it that diverted the blood into tidy streams of run-off that could be collected underneath. He folded back the skin on each side of the chest cavity, exposing the white bones of the ribcage. I clamped my teeth together, fighting the rising tide of bile churning in my stomach, reminding myself that I was a man of science. A wave of cold washed over my head and a sudden sunburst exploded in my vision; the cone of light from the lantern slid queasily up and down the wall. Gennaro stopped to look at me.

  ‘You’ve gone green.’ He didn’t sound greatly sympathetic. ‘Hang the lantern on that hook above me and sit down with your head between your knees. We can do without you passing out on her.’

  I did as I was told. I sank to the cold floor at the far end of the room with my back pressed against the wall, clasped my hands behind my head and buried my face in shame. The terrible slicing noises continued, the determined sawing through resistant muscle and tendon, the sucking sound of organs being displaced. I closed my eyes and bent the whole force of my will towards maintaining consciousness and keeping my supper down. I could not tell how much sand had slipped through the glass by the time I felt able to stand again, but when I opened my eyes and levered myself to my feet, Fra Gennaro was bending over the girl’s exposed abdomen with an ardent expression. His eyes flickered upwards to me.

  ‘You’re back with us, are you? Come and look at this.’ He prodded with the tip of his knife. He was indicating a swollen organ about the size of a small grapefruit, mottled crimson. ‘The greatest anatomy theatres in Europe would pay dearly to get their hands on this. It is an opportunity granted to very few anatomists. Providence has smiled on us tonight. Do you know what it is?’

  I considered replying that Providence had been less kind to the girl, but I merely shook my head.

  ‘This is the womb, Bruno. The cradle of life. Locus of the mystery of generation. The source, it is believed, of all female irrationality.’ He reached in with bloody fingers and tugged, frowning. ‘Hippocrates said it had the power to detach itself and wander about the body, but I do not see how that could occur.
This one seems firmly attached to the birth canal.’

  He parted the girl’s legs and quite perfunctorily inserted two fingers into her vagina, pushing up until he could feel the pressure with his other hand. ‘Interesting,’ he murmured. ‘It seems to me that Vesalius’s drawing of the female reproductive organs is seriously flawed …

  ‘And now,’ he continued, lifting the girl’s womb towards him as if he were a street conjuror about to reveal his greatest trick, ‘watch closely and learn. For if my guess is correct, you are about to witness a secret that some of the most renowned anatomists in Leiden or Paris have yet to see in the flesh.’

  He took a smaller knife and made a precise cut in the outer skin. As it ruptured, a clear, viscous fluid spilled out over his hands along with the blood. Gennaro peeled back the skin and extracted from within the womb a tiny homunculus, no bigger than the span of my hand, but already recognisably human. He laid it in his palm, his eyes bright with wonder.

  ‘Is it alive?’ I breathed.

  ‘Not now. You see this?’ He nudged with the knifepoint to the twisted white tube that still connected its abdomen with the interior of the womb. ‘It can’t live without the mother. This is very early gestation, see? A matter of weeks, I would say. But note how you can already make out the fingers and toes.’

  The creature had the translucent sheen of an amphibious animal, its half-formed limbs and curved spine so delicate as to seem insubstantial. Perhaps it was his casual use of the word ‘mother’, but I felt a sudden terrible emptiness, a hollowing-out, as if it were my insides that had been torn away. This homunculus would have grown into a child, if the girl’s life had not been cut short by those hands around her throat. I wished fervently that I had never followed Gennaro. I began to fear I lacked the detachment to make a man of science.

  Fra Gennaro carefully excised the womb and the tiny foetus, severed the cord that bound them, and placed each into a large glass jar he had brought in his bag. ‘But where does it come from?’ he muttered, as he sealed the jars.