Surgeons’ Hall

by E. S. Thomson

  ‘Dr Strangeway,’ said Dr Cruikshank. ‘If you would be so good as to make a sketch of the corpse so that we might show the authorities how she was found.’ There was a thump as something heavy, a clod of earth perhaps, was flung against the door, and I heard Clenchie Kate screaming out that it was Dr Crowe who had killed her sister, for she had seen him with her own eyes. We ducked as a stone smashed through the window, and Dr Cruikshank said, ‘Goodness knows when the constable might arrive. We cannot wait for him here or he will have six corpses rather than one to deal with. Come along, sir,’ he addressed Dr Strangeway. ‘Will you draw the scene?’

  But Dr Strangeway was overcome at the sight of the girl’s body, his hands shaking as he handled his pencil. He had a smear of blood on his cheek, and against the white of his skin it stood out like a wound. Dr Cruikshank noticed his pallor, and his discomfiture, and he took the drawing implements from him. ‘Never mind, sir,’ he said, his voice gentle. ‘Allardyce can do the job. He’s a passable artist.’

  I was glad to be given so important a task, and I speedily took the drawing materials. In a few strokes of the pencil I had captured the angle of the head and the clutching of the hands. The arms were awry, the skirts tumbled about the misshapen legs, a lace shawl knotted tightly about the throat. The dress was soaked in gore. The girl may once have flattered herself that she looked like Mrs Crowe, but there was no evidence of that similarity now. I noted the blood – the way it had pooled, the slippery mess of it against the bedding.

  Outside, Dr Wragg battered on the door with the head of his stick, and cried out, ‘Make haste, gentlemen, if you please!’ Another window pane shattered, the stone skimming past Dr Strangeway, who was standing with his back to us, as if unable to look at the scene. ‘Have you finished, Allardyce?’ said Dr Cruikshank.

  I said I had, though I had not been able to capture her face, for it was turned away from me and in the shadows. I asked if he would move it, so that I might make a quick sketch, but he shook his head. He stepped in front of me then, busying himself with poring over the corpse, looking, no doubt, for scraps of evidence as to who had done this and what had happened. At length he called Franklyn, who had idled away the time looking about the room, and the two of them began wrapping the dead girl in the bed sheet. But it was too bloody to act as a shroud, so Dr Cruikshank took off his coat and wrapped her in that too.

  As we appeared in the street, the crowd roared their disapproval. A cudgel wielded by an unseen assailant smashed Franklyn’s lantern. Hands tugged at our burden, and there was a cheer as the corpse was seized, borne aloft on a sea of shoulders and hands, the coat, and the bed sheet, unravelling as she went.

  When they saw what lay beneath, however, they released their prize onto the ground with a cry, and fell back. But we had a job to do that night, and Dr Wragg and Dr Cruikshank saw to it that it was done: Dr Wragg striking out at the mob with his stick and Dr Cruikshank springing forward to snatch up the corpse. Before the crowd could gather their wits we were gone.

  True in soul and conscience,

  [signed] Richard Allardyce

  I found Will in the attic above the anatomy museum. It was piled high with bottles and jars, hanging bladders of chemicals, waxes and resins for preserving specimens, lead for sealing jars, tanks of alcohol and other fluids. By the smell of the place I knew it was not far from the macerating room, where human specimens were soaked, and injected with preservatives, wax or alcohol. Its atmosphere was thick, gritty and unwholesome, the air motionless, despite the open window.

  He was sitting at a desk, a set of pens and a pot of ink before him, a ream of thick paper to one side. Beside him was a large brass microscope.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, noticing my appraising glance. ‘It is one of the very best. No, you may not look down it. It is for my private use – though I admit I am not using it now.’

  Before him on the bench was a skeleton hand, a man’s judging by its size. ‘I am to draw what I see,’ he said. ‘Nothing fancy and artistic; it is about accuracy of representation. Artistic training is no use – which is just as well as I have none. It seems my eye for structure and function are just what is required, for it must be shown as it is, the various parts outlined as clearly and practically as possible.’ He had drawn it already, and was sitting back admiring his handiwork. ‘What do you think? Lilith – Miss Crowe – said I might start with the bones and work my way out. It seems a sensible approach.’

  ‘Had you not better attempt an organ too? The skeleton is the easy part, in many ways. A heart, dissected to show its innards, is a different matter. Or what about a sphincter? Or some entrails? A length of duodenum, say—’

  ‘I am unsure what those things are, Jem, though I suspect you have chosen to mention them just to appal me.’

  ‘The sphincter is—’

  ‘Stop!’ He held up a hand. ‘That’s quite enough. I can’t say I’m looking forward to the organs, but Dr Crowe and Dr Cruikshank say they will give me what they wish me to draw, and draw it I shall.’

  ‘You have accepted the commission?’

  ‘I cannot see how I could refuse. But at least I will be inside during the winter months and who knows where it might lead. Scientific illustration is not something I’d ever considered as a career, but one must take opportunities as they present themselves.’ His drawing, pen and ink, was a perfect rendition of the bones set out before him. ‘Dr Crowe, or Dr Cruikshank, will annotate the structure as they see fit and add text. Dr Crowe says it is to be the most comprehensive book on practical anatomy ever attempted. Testimony to their knowledge and many years of teaching.’ Will sat back in his chair and stretched. ‘Miss Crowe said the specimens will be fresh, thank God.’ He shrugged. ‘I am not so bothered by the dead meat. It will be like illustrating the contents of a butcher’s window, and I must try to think of it as recording the miracle of life. It’s watching you – or anyone else – do the butchering that upsets me. But I have my salts in my pocket if I need them and I dare say I will get used to it eventually.’

  ‘Anatomists are often excellent artists,’ I said. ‘Though they rarely attain such professional standards as you.’

  ‘I don’t mind the job.’ He looked about the room, at the boxes and bottles, the jars of fluids and coloured resins and waxes. ‘But I don’t like this place.’ He frowned, and peered closely at the skeleton hand, and at the image he had drawn of it. ‘I have a few changes I’d like to make to my work. Will you wait for me?’

  I sat on a tea chest while Will turned back to his drawing. Despite the stink it was pleasingly quiet up there, away from everyone, though I could hear the faint sounds of activity far below. ‘Are you alone up here?’ I said, noting another desk against the far wall behind a stack of boxes.

  ‘Apparently that chap Halliday works up here too,’ said Will.

  ‘He must be a capable young man,’ I said. ‘It seems he is the assistant curator of the anatomy museum as well as helping the demonstrator, and yet I believe he is still a student.’ I went over to the desk, but it told me nothing, other than the fact that the man Halliday was scrupulously tidy and liked to keep his drawers locked.

  ‘Jem.’ Will shook his head. ‘Stop prying. Sit still, can’t you?’

  But I was unable to do either of those things. Corvus Hall unsettled me. There was something going on there, I was sure of it, though I had no idea what it might be. I tried to put it from my mind but I could not. A faceless corpse, a severed hand, both were objects of horror in any other location, but here? Here there was every likelihood they were completely innocent. And yet I was not persuaded. I thought of Sorrow and Silence Crowe, one wordless in the dark, the other squeezing a kidney to mush with her bare hand. The memory made me shiver.

  I jumped up and ranged about the room. I poked about in a dark corner, pulling out this and that to see what was there. I found only the lumber of previous years; things that had been put up there when Dr Magorian owned the place, perhaps even before that. On top of it D
r Crowe had added his own belongings – books, boxes, anatomical posters rolled into tubes, crates of bones and cases containing the skeletons of animals. Layer upon layer of medical knowledge was hidden up there, laid down like sediment on a river bed. If I dug down what pasts and histories would I find? A signature on the flyleaf of a book on materia medica belonged to Dr Bain, my old friend from St Saviour’s. A label on a bone showed it to have come from Edinburgh, though the collection it had once been a part of was long since lost. I rooted in a box. Letters, piles of them, all addressed to Dr Magorian of St Saviour’s Infirmary, spilled over my hands.

  And then I found something quite unexpected. It was under a box, against the dusty floor as if it had found its way there by accident. It was a letter, small and tightly folded, the wax that had sealed it like a clot of dried blood against the yellowing paper. It was addressed to Dr Bain. What caused me to snatch it up, what made my heart lurch in my chest when I saw it, was the hand it was written in. Without hesitation I stuffed the letter into my pocket. Were there more? I rooted about, suddenly feverish, anxious. But there was nothing. A box of bones that I had stacked carelessly on a chair crashed to the floor.

  Will swore. ‘For God’s sake, Jem, can you not sit still?’

  ‘Sorry.’ I sat down, and slid my hand into my pocket. I ran my fingers over the sharp corners and edges of the paper, felt the scab of sealing wax where Dr Bain had ripped it open. It was my mother’s writing, there was no doubt in my mind, for I knew the swoop of her ‘S’ and the generous curl of her ‘B’ as well as I knew my own. She had died as I was born. My father had refused to speak of her, and yet all at once here she was, a piece of her life found in a dusty corner of an old villa. I would open it later when I was on my own. Whatever it might contain, I wanted it to be for my eyes only.

  By the time Will had finished, the building had fallen silent. Once the day had faded the place was no use to anatomists and medical students, who needed strong clear light to do the best of their work. Lamps might serve, but they dazzled the eye, created shadows where none were wanted, and brought with them an unwelcome heat.

  Will stood up from his workbench, and pulled on his jacket. ‘Shall we go home, Jem? We might go via Sorley’s. I am ready for a plate of mutton stew. Or pheasant! I met Sorley in the street last week and he said he had pheasant. It’s sure to be in a pie by now—’

  ‘No,’ I said, though my own stomach ached for food. ‘I want to look downstairs again. I need to go to the dead house. We must wait until everyone has gone, perhaps until midnight? And then we will creep down. Something is not right here, Will. Where is Halliday? Where are Allardyce and Wilson? Where is Silas Strangeway? No one can even describe the fellow, so that I am beginning to wonder whether he even exists. Whose is that nameless corpse? Why has it been rendered faceless—?’ I stopped. Will was looking at me strangely.

  ‘A faceless corpse?’ he said.

  ‘Yes!’ I told him all that had happened after he had left with Miss Crowe. To my surprise he looked less perturbed than I had expected.

  He sighed. ‘You know, Jem, there may be nothing untoward about this place at all,’ he said. ‘It’s an anatomy school. There can hardly be much about it that is commonplace. Surely it is not unusual to dissect the face of a corpse? Halliday may well be sick. And Wilson too. Or perhaps he has gone to visit his mother with Allardyce!’

  ‘There is more to Corvus Hall than the usual eccentricities of anatomists,’ I said.

  ‘And because of this baseless conviction you want to go into a place you call “the dead house” in the middle of the night? Just the two of us?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and then added primly, ‘Though I will go alone if you would rather not accompany me.’

  ‘Of course I would rather not. But if you insist, I cannot in all conscience let you go alone. One thing is for certain, however: I am not waiting here till midnight.’

  ‘But the porters will lock the place up. We can hardly break in!’

  ‘Well, you might not be a trusted employee of Dr Crowe’s anatomy school, Jem Flockhart, but I most certainly am.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a key. ‘It opens the front door,’ he said. ‘After all, I must do my work whenever I can. As such I must be able to come and go as I please. I made that perfectly clear.’ He grinned, and slipped the key back out of sight. ‘And now, there is a slice of pheasant pie and a pint or two of ale awaiting us at Sorley’s Chop House, though if you would rather spend the next five hours sitting on that old box of bones in the dark you are more than welcome to.’

  Without the crowds of students we could see now how much the Hall had changed. Before Dr Crowe and his entourage had moved in, it had retained the air of a grand residence, forgotten, abandoned, but waiting in hope for air and light, for kind people who might turn it back into a home. What it had got was the noise and bustle of rowdy young medical men. The place had taken on a jaded institutional air; the magnificent mahogany banister with its smooth curved newel post was already scuffed by boots, bored students scraping their initials into its lustrous wood with blunt pen knives. The walls bore the marks of greasy shoulders, the floor was strewn with straw, with dirt traipsed in from the street, with scraps of paper, splatters of dried spit and the blackened plugs of spent tobacco gouged from pipes. The smell of urine hung in the air. A door opened and a porter emerged, pushing a brush before him in a desultory fashion. Behind him came a woman, fat and slatternly. She flailed a mop about the floor in a lazy figure of eight.

  The last time I had seen her she had been dozing in front of the stove on the top ward of the Blood – the Seaman’s Floating Hospital, an ex-man o’ war down on the waterfront where she had found work as Matron.

  ‘Mrs Speedicut,’ I cried. ‘What are you doing here—?’

  The woman looked up. ‘Mr Jem!’ She grinned. ‘I were going to come along to you after I’d finished. The Blood’s getting a refit and there ain’t no call for a matron when there ain’t no patients. So here I am. Pays better too. Plus it ain’t on the river – stinks something awful down there.’

  ‘And here?’ said Will, wrinkling his nose.

  ‘Nothing I ain’t smelled or seen before,’ she replied. ‘They took me on cause of what I know.’

  ‘They needed a specialist in gin and idleness?’ said Will. ‘You surprise me.’

  Mrs Speedicut assumed a wounded expression. ‘Housekeeper,’ she said. ‘Who else knows how to do that in a place like this?’

  I wondered whether I should invite her to Sorley’s. We had not seen her for a while and it would be interesting to discover what she thought of Corvus Hall and its residents. I looked at Will, but he shook his head. ‘Don’t,’ he said.

  ‘Come to the apothecary later, madam,’ I said instead. ‘Gabriel and Jenny will be glad to see you.’

  Mrs Speedicut frowned. ‘Got any pie?’ she said. ‘I’ll only come if there’s pie.’

  ‘Bring your own pie,’ said Will.

  ‘I’ll come, since you insist upon it, Mr Quartermain,’ she said. ‘But there better be pie. And ale.’ She threw Will a black look, and vanished back into the burrow from which she had come.

  We left then, the porter jangling his keys impatiently. Beneath his chair in the alcove behind the door Bullseye was gnawing on something which looked suspiciously like a human rib.

  We went round to the back of the building, intending to go through the gate in the wall that would take us into the physic garden, and from there directly down St Saviour’s Street to Sorley’s Chop House. But Corvus Hall had one last surprise for us that evening, for at the bottom of the garden behind the mortuary, a bonfire roared. Silhouetted against the blaze were three figures. Gloag the mortuary attendant stood leaning on a long rake, staring into the flames. Beside him, the flames reflected on his spectacles in two discs of orange flame, was Dr Crowe. Dr Cruikshank stood to one side. He had removed his neckerchief and his plush waistcoat and was standing in his shirtsleeves, his hands thrust into his
pockets. The fire was white hot at its core, far hotter than was required for the burning of leaves and twigs. But they were not burning garden refuse at the back of Corvus Hall, not that night. The faces of the three men, crimson in the firelight, were the faces of demons. Dr Cruikshank pointed into the flames and Gloag reached in with his rake. A pair of skulls burned black as coal, their eye sockets flaming with light, rolled in the heart of the furnace.

  I heard Will gasp. ‘Bones!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The bones of the unclaimed dead. What else might they do with them?’

  ‘Bury them?’

  ‘Possibly, but where? You remember St Saviour’s graveyard—’

  ‘How could I ever forget it?’ His voice was low. I knew the memory of that place haunted him still, though it had been some three years ago now since he had been employed to empty it.

  ‘You recall how many hundreds of bodies you had to disinter? How many coach loads were carried away?’ I said. ‘It is common practice for the sextons of the city’s graveyards to exhume bodies – often those that have hardly rotted away – and burn them. How else might more space be made? Those bones come from the dissecting room. Once they have been anatomised, what else might be done with them? The ground of London is thick with corpses already.’

  The smell on the air was thick and choking, the smell of hot, rotten flesh and scalded bones. Behind us the Hall was dark, though I knew there must be people about the place still. A movement drew my eyes to a window on the first floor, and for a moment I thought I saw a face – a pale oval looking out at the fire as it reared and danced. And yet it was barely a face at all, for it seemed to be completely devoid of features, without eyes or nose, the mouth no more than a ragged hole. I jumped as the fire gave a great sharp snap, as if something deep inside it had burst. Gloag leaned forward to jab at it with the end of his rake, shuffling the coals so that the flames leaped higher. The skulls rolled, their jaws yawning wide as they vanished into the flames. When I looked back, the face – if it had been a face – was gone.