by Pat Murphy
The wind off the Thames blew through Kathleen’s wool shawl and made her hump ache. A burly Scot dressed in a fine wool coat passed her stall and glanced into the shadows where she sat.
“You there,” he said. “Have you seen the man with the dancing monkey? I’m looking for him.”
“I have not seen him this morning.” She studied the gentleman, wondering if she might earn a penny from him. It was bitter cold, and she had only told a single fortune that day. “I might see him later. I could give him a message.”
The Scot glanced at her, his expression cautious, but strangely greedy. “I hear his monkey died,” he said softly.
“I heard the same.” The animal had died of a chill and the man was grief stricken, mourning the loss of the income from the monkey’s dancing.
His voice dropped a little further. “I have a need for the animal’s body,” he said. “I will pay for it handsomely. Here.” He fumbled in his pocket. “A penny to tell the man that John Hunter has an offer for him.” He held out the coin.
John Hunter—she knew the name. Surgeon to the king, he was. And, from the stories that she had heard, an unnaturally curious man. When the tiger died at the Royal Zoo, he had anatomized the beast and mounted the skeleton.
When the Siamese twins in the Covent Garden freak show died, rumor had it that the manager had sold the body to Hunter for a tidy sum. People said he was a bodysnatcher and a resurrectionist.
“And what would you do with the body?” she asked him. “You’ll anatomize it, won’t you?” She hadn’t cared much for the monkey, a dirty, noisy animal that spent more time scratching for fleas than it did dancing. But it seemed unnatural to want to poke and pry into its innards.
“Why don’t you let the poor beast rest in peace?”
“Would you bury the beast so its body can rot, benefiting no one?” he asked angrily. “Why is it that people have no trouble eating the meat of a cow—but they consider it wrong to examine the dead animal too closely? Yes, I’ll anatomize the beast. I’ll examine the organs and see what killed it. I’ll study the muscles and mount the bones so that I can study them later. And when I’m done, I’ll add a few humble observations to our knowledge of natural philosophy.” His tone was bitter, and she had the feeling he was talking to himself, as much as to her. “A patient of mine, a young boy, died today of a coughing disease. When I wished to examine his lungs, to see how the disease had affected them, what influence my treatment had had, his father forbade it. The ignorant fool. What I learned from his son’s body might have helped me heal another child. But instead his son’s body must rot in peace and children must go on dying. How can I learn to cure what ails people, if I can’t observe the action of disease on the body? Would you have doctors continue in ignorance, peddling salves and tonics that work indifferently well? Little better than butchers, most of them.”
Kathleen stayed in the shadows, startled by his vehemence.
He held out the penny again, his face softening as if he repented his outburst. “Come on, lass, take the penny and tell the man if you see him.” He glanced at the sign that a clerk had sketched for Kathleen in exchange for his fortune: an open hand with the palm exposed, the life line marked in black ink. “I’ll give you another penny to tell my fortune.”
For two pennies, she left her stool and stepped from her stall. In the light of the sun, he saw her clearly for the first time. “Ah,” he said. His voice was that of a man discovering an unexpected treasure. He stared at her honestly, not troubling to hide his interest. “Your back—how long has it been like that?”
“Since I was a babe.” She pulled the shawl more tightly around her shoulders—distressed both by the cold and by the way he studied her. She was used to people who stared, but his interest was more intense than that of the casual passerby.
“Does it pain you?” he asked.
She nodded cautiously. “When the weather’s cold, it does.” She took the two coins and held his hand in hers, turning the palm up to the light so that she could study the lines. She stared for a moment, and the patterns emerged from the crisscrossing lines. “You will meet someone very important, very powerful. He has something you want very much. Some secret you are lacking.” She frowned at the lines. “You want something and you get it, but when you do, it will not be what you wanted.” She shook her head, staring at the lines. “There is something that you do not understand, something important.”
He laughed abruptly at this last. “That is not the future. That is now. There are many things I do not understand.”
She shook her head and released his hand. “That is all I can tell you.” She started to turn away, but he called her back.
“Wait,” he said urgently. “I have a salve that might help your aches.” He wet his lips and his expression was that of a greedy child. “If you come to my examination room, I will give you some. My house is on Jermyn Street. Anyone nearby can tell you the way there.”
Kathleen studied his face. He did, in his own peculiar way, wish to give her relief from her pain. But he also had an unhealthy desire to know the twists of her bones. She did not trust him.
“I would like to examine you,” he said: “Perhaps I can help.”
“I’ll give some thought to it,” she said, and turned away from the eagerness in his eyes. She had lived in London long enough to be wary.
John Hunter was, without a doubt, a curious man. He started out as a curious boy, naturally enough.
When John was just eight, he found a burrow in the winter-blasted kitchen garden of his parents’ Scottish farm.
Curious about the animal inside, he dug beneath the frost into the cold soil, where he found a toad lying in a tunnel of its own making. The animal was cold and motionless—by all appearances, stone dead. But when he held it tightly, he thought he felt a stirring inside the cold body—the beating of its tiny heart. He slipped the animal into the pocket of his britches and smuggled it past his mother into the house.
He set the stiff creature just behind the coal scuttle, where it would be warmed by the heat of the fire and left it there during supper. When he checked on it just before bed, the creature had stirred to reluctant life. It blinked at him lazily and then slowly hopped across the hearth rug.
His mother caught him. “What have you there, Johnnie? Lord save me—where did you get that beast?”
Despite his protests, she cast the toad back into the garden. In the morning, he found the chilly corpse huddled beneath a clump of straw. He warmed it in his hands, but it did not move. He snuck it into the house and warmed it by the fire, but the beast did not return to life.
He puzzled over it: why had the beast perished when it was returned to the cold?
In the back of the chicken run, where his mother wouldn’t catch him, John anatomized the body with his pocketknife, delving into its innards to see if he could learn why the beast had died.
John Hunter grew up. As a boy of twelve, he loitered with his cousin by the churchyard. His parents were inside, christening his youngest sister. Bored with the proceedings and ignored by the adults, the boys had slipped from the church.
Late afternoon clouds hung low in the sky, as gray as the tombstones in the churchyard. John and his cousin leaned on the stone wall, idly chatting.
“The churchyard’s haunted,” John’s cousin said. “At night, the ghost of old man MacDonald wanders among the graves, looking for children who are out too late.”
MacDonald, an old man who had died a month before, had had a reputation for disliking small boys.
John looked doubtful.
“You don’t believe in ghosts?” His cousin’s tone was challenging.
John considered the question carefully. He was a methodical boy. “I’ve never seen one. Have you?”
His cousin hesitated, and then decided to stick to the truth. “No, but I’ve heard about them.” He wet his lips, studying John’s face. “If you don’t believe in ghosts, then I dare you to run around the old man’s grav
e. Three times. Counterclockwise.”
John thought about it. “If I run round it counterclockwise, that’ll bring bad luck,” he said. “I believe in bad luck.”
“Then just go out and touch the grave and come back. I dare you.”
John stared out into the graveyard. It seemed darker now—the low-hanging clouds stole the light from the day.
The old man’s grave was a long way off. He was afraid, but he was also curious, and the second emotion was the more powerful of the two. What would a ghost look like?
“Or else you have to say that you believe in ghosts,” his cousin went on.
In the end, it was John’s own curiosity, not his cousin’s taunting, that drove him on. John climbed the churchyard wall, scuffing the knee of his best pants against the damp stone. With a nonchalance he did not feel, he strolled toward the grave. The graveyard was very quiet.
In the hush, he listened to the tiny skittering sounds of birds in the trees, the whisper of his pantlegs brushing against the wet grass. Suddenly brave, he reached out and touched the wing of a stone angel. Cool stone, nothing more. The air smelled of dampness and freshturned soil, only that. He slowed his footsteps, waiting for something to happen in the stillness. He glanced back at his cousin and was startled by how far he had come: his cousin’s face was a spot of white against the darkness of the churchyard wall.
When he reached the old man’s grave, he laid his hand on the stone and waited. Nothing happened. He stood still, almost disappointed. He had, up to that moment, been willing to believe in the ghost, if the ghost had chosen to present himself. John lingered for a moment, studying the new stone marker, chose a single flower from the bouquet beside the grave, and then walked back.
From a distance, he could see his cousin’s pale face, his wide eyes. John handed his cousin the flower from the old man’s grave. “I guess I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said and realized it was true.
Years later, John climbed another graveyard wall—this one in London. The stones were slippery beneath his hands. It was a moonless night in early winter. John Hunter and a fellow student, bent on acquiring essential supplies for their anatomy classes, wore workmen’s clothing that was stained with clay from past excursions.
John ghosted along the paths of the deserted graveyard, sniffing the air for the scent of freshly dug earth. At the far corner of the yard, he found what he was looking for: the new grave of a young woman, dead of childbirth just one day past.
Thomas, his colleague, lifted the flowers that decorated the grave, setting them on a nearby grave. Working quickly, John started digging, using a wooden shovel to avoid the telltale rattle of metal on stones. Thomas spread a canvas sheet over the grass, and John heaped the loose soil on top of the cloth. The exertion of digging warmed him pleasantly. When he tired of digging, Thomas took over, digging silently while John kept watch.
“Is that a sound?” Thomas whispered, looking up from the grave and cocking his head in the direction of the church.
“Just the wind,” John muttered. “Nothing more,”
Thomas shivered, looking over his shoulder. “A nasty business, this,” he murmured. “I don’t like it,”
John glanced at his friend and shook his head. “Hush,” he said. “Too much talk.” John took another turn in the grave, digging quickly down to the coffin lid. He neatly slipped the broad iron hooks under the edges of the lid, up near the head of the coffin. He climbed from the grave and then he and Thomas hauled up on the rope. The lid cracked with a dull splintering sound, and John lowered himself into the grave to lift the broken wood out.
After that, it was easy enough to slide a rope around the shoulders of the corpse and pull her through the opening.
They stripped the body—stealing clothing carried a greater penalty than stealing a body alone—and slipped the naked cadaver into a canvas sack. They refilled the grave, leaving no evidence that they had passed that way.
John arranged the flowers tenderly on the grave, then slung the sack over his shoulder. The two men left the graveyard as silently as they had come.
After delivering their burden to their surgical school, they stopped in the tavern. John was cheerful, but he noticed that Thomas seemed morose. “What is it, Thomas, my lad? We did a fine job—the body’s in the school, ready for tomorrow’s lesson, and there’s no harm done.”
Thomas shook his head. “Doesn’t it bother you?” he asked softly.
John looked up from his beer. “What should be bothering me?”
“Creeping about in the churchyard at night,” Thomas murmured.
John took another swallow of beer. He did not understand Thomas’s need to chatter on about the matter. John was not fond of the late-night escapades, but he accepted them as necessary to his training as a surgeon and took them as a matter of course. He could not learn about human anatomy without dissecting cadavers.
“If we do not get the bodies, we cannot learn anatomy,” John said. “And if we do not learn anatomy, then how can we be surgeons?” It seemed obvious enough.
Thomas shrugged, staring into his beer. “It doesn’t sit right,” he said “That’s all.”
John studied his friend’s face, frowning. “What is it that bothers you, Thomas? The woman is dead and gone. We cannot hurt her by taking her body.”
Thomas was watching him with a peculiar expression. John shook his head, bewildered by his friend’s mood. It seemed to him sometimes that understanding human anatomy was simple compared to understanding the peculiarities of the human heart.
There was, perhaps, a bit of something missing in John Hunter, some bit of human sympathy, some bit of wonder, some bit of fear of the unknown. You might say he was a brave man, but it was not truly bravery, because he saw no reason to be afraid. You might say he was a devil, completely lacking in common human compassion, but you would be wrong there as well. He had compassion of a sort—he dearly desired to help those who were ailing and in pain.
But he lacked a sympathy with those who would leave the dead untouched. When life had fled, a body—be it mother or wife or beloved child—was dead meat. He did not understand those who saw it differently.
And so John Hunter became a surgeon. But he did not limit his investigations to the human body. He was a man of boundless curiosity, eager to investigate everything that nature had to offer. He concerned himself with the habits of hedgehogs, the animal heat of growing vegetables, the behavior of cuckoo birds, and the natural history of the viviparous lizard. He collected information like a jackdaw gathering shiny bits of metal. He discovered, by experiment, that the heart of a frog continued beating for hours after the animal’s spinal cord had been severed. He learned that eels could survive near-freezing temperatures. He developed a method for artificially stimulating the production of pearls by river mussels. In all his studies, he found human curiosities most interesting. By examining anomalies, he felt he could gain an understanding of the normal way of things.
Now of course Charlie Bryne and John Hunter must come together—you know that as well as I do. And so it was that on a sunny day, John Hunter went down to Covent Garden. He had stopped at the freak show to see if the showman had obtained any specimens for him.
Every now and again, the man picked up something that John found of interest: the tattooed forearm of a South Sea Islander, for example, preserved in brine by a seaman with a liking for oddities; or the skull of a pig that was born with a single eye.
That afternoon, the showman had nothing to offer, and John strolled through the market. As he walked past an aisle of vegetable stalls, he heard the sweet song of a greenfinch, sounding over the calls of the melon seller. He followed the birdsong to the end of the aisle. There a man stood beside a cage filled with songbirds that chirped and fluttered their wings against the rough wooden slats. In his hand, the bird seller held a smaller cage, in which a gaudily colored bird sat on a perch.
“It’s God’s truth,” the bird seller was saying to a young woman. “I bough
t this bird from a sailor who had just come from the West Indies. A bird like this—why it can be taught to talk just as clear as a person. Two shillings is an uncommonly low price for such a bird.”
John stepped closer, peering at the biro. Without a doubt, the bird was a greenfinch; the gaudy colors were painted on.
“That’s too dear for me,” the young woman said, stepping back from the cage. “Though I’m sure it’s a wonderful bird.”
The bird seller cast John a glance and decided he was the more likely prospect. “You look like a discerning gentleman, sir, one who would appreciate a rare bird. Very rare, indeed.”
John snorted. “You’re a fool, man, or you take me for one. The bird is a greenfinch that you’ve painted up like a Drury Lane tart.” John pursed his lips and whistled a credible imitation of the greenfinch’s song. The bird in the cage stirred in response, then returned the song, staring about as if searching for its rival.
“What a pretty song,” the bird seller exclaimed. “I’ve never heard a greenfinch sing like that in all my days.”
“Then you’ve never heard a greenfinch sing,” John said abruptly. The attempt at deception, however clumsy, annoyed him. “A greenfinch is worth three pence, but with a little paint, you’ve more than tripled the price. I’ve half a mind to—”
The bird seller’s eyes widened as he looked past John.
“You there,” he cried. John looked around in time to see finches and sparrows explode through an opening in their cage and make for the open sky. Beside the cage stood an enormous man. In one hand he held the wooden slat that he had ripped from the cage; in the other, a wooden staff decorated with hawthorn blossoms.
“God save us!” shouted the bird seller, running to the broken cage. The last of the sparrows flicked its tail and took flight, leaving the cage empty save for loose feathers and bird droppings. The bird seller began to shriek. “You blasted noddy-headed fool!” He turned on the big man, raising his hand as if to strike.
The man straightened to his full height and glared down at the bird seller. “They wanted to go free,” the big man said.