Surgeons’ Hall

by E. S. Thomson

  ‘His corpse?’

  ‘You’ve seen his work, Will. His models are the dead. A great many cadavers are required to make those wax sculptures.’

  ‘Would he know how to dissect a face?’ said Will. ‘How to remove all outward traces of someone’s countenance?’

  I could see that even talking about it appalled him. The face was sacred. To violate it was to tear at the very essence of what it meant to be human, to be an individual.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Though he is not the only one here to possess such skills.’

  ‘We should tell the police.’

  ‘Tell the police what, Will? That I believe a man to have been murdered? I have no evidence for it, apart from a body that was unaccounted for, though according to Dr Cruikshank such administrative errors happen all the time. Yes, they might come and take a look, but they would stamp about making a fuss and alerting the perpetrator to my suspicions. The police would find nothing, Will. You would lose your commission, one of the most lucrative you have had for a while.’ I shook my head, and shoved the box of knives Silas Strangeway had abandoned into my satchel. ‘We cannot tell them. Not yet. Not until we are sure.’

  It was a decision I was to regret many times before the week was over.

  Heart

  The heart – is it not the most prized and revered organ in the body? A small fist of muscle, chambered, valved, taut with tendons as strong as harp strings, it gives us life with every rhythmic squeeze of its powerful walls. It is a lump of meat on my dissecting table – complex and vital, a technical anatomical masterpiece, but meat nonetheless. And yet what magical properties we give it! If we are wounded in love do we not experience a broken heart? If we follow our dreams are we not in pursuit of our heart’s desire? If we are cruel and wicked are we not heartless? It is the symbol of love, romantic and divine. We idealise the ‘pure at heart’. But for those whose hearts are impure? Those whose lives are marked by evil thoughts and actions are in possession of a heart of darkness.

  The ancient Egyptians believed the heart could speak, could testify against its owner after death. It was taken from the corpse and bound tightly to muffle its reproachful cries. What wickedness would mine shout about me? What bindings would keep it hushed? There are none that can silence it for it does not speak to man, and no mortal can hear the cries of the heart. Instead, it calls out to God, who knows and sees all, and who judges each one of us. ‘For the Lord seeth not as man seeth. For man looketh at the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart’ (Samuel 16:7).

  At night, alone in my bed, I listen for the beat of my heart. Sometimes it is silent. I press my fingers to my wrist, my throat, and there is nothing. I cannot hear it. I cannot feel it. At other times it is loud – a rhythmic beating in my ears, like the drumming of the hangman’s leather-gloved fingers against the gallows pole.

  I am not heartless, but when they cut it out, when I am anatomised, as all felons are, my heart will surely be as black as my deeds.

  Precognition for the murder of Mary Anderson,

  18th December 1830.

  Statement of JAMES FRANKLYN, apprentice surgeon-apothecary to Dr Alexander Crowe. Currently residing at 22 East Newington Street, Edinburgh. Aged twenty-one years.

  19th December 1830

  It is true that Dr Crowe developed a fascination for Mary Anderson. Initially, it was her spine that intrigued him. How could it not? The two women, Clenchie Kate and Thrawn-Leggit Mary, would draw the attention of any medical man worth his salt. Their vertebrae snake from side to side to a degree that is almost inconceivable. Even Dr Crowe, with his many years’ experience in matters of anatomy, said that he had never come across human spines that were so captivating in their abnormality. Dr Crowe has taught us to see beauty and grace in the human form, in the arrangement of the organs and the shape of the bones. Even when there is a disharmony – a morbidity, an absence of some essential part, or a deformity – there is wonder to be found in the way the human body adapts, the way its muscles, organs, nerves and sinews adjust. In this regard, Clenchie Kate and Thrawn-Leggit Mary were quite fascinating – how could such deformity exist, and yet life continue – and yet also macabre, especially in the way they moved, scuttling swiftly up the close from the Cowgate on their black crutches like a pair of grotesque spiders. They drew us in still further with the beauty of their singing, and their bewitching faces.

  I have always felt an affinity with Dr Crowe. At the time of the events described here, I was hoping to be awarded the post of demonstrator of anatomy – a prestigious appointment for one as young as I. I knew Allardyce thought the post was his for the taking – he is a gentleman’s son, whereas I, a mere ‘lad o’ pairts’, must make my way in the world without the help of fortune and connections. I had thought of making Dr Crowe a gift of the crippled girl’s skeleton, should I be able to gain it, for her death was inevitable, given her condition.

  I was in the lecture theatre when Mary attacked Dr Crowe. Allardyce jumped up and would have dragged the girl out had we not held him back. I saw her look to him in the crowd and curl her lip, so that at first I thought it was he she had come to indict. But instead she turned to Dr Crowe. Afterwards the place was in uproar. It was apparent straight away that Dr Crowe was largely unharmed. The knife had pierced his waistcoat, but the woman had lacked the strength and stature to do any real damage. The blood we saw was from the cut to his thumb, sustained as he instinctively put up a hand to deflect the blade. Gloag finally broke the door open, and in he came with the terrier at his heels, two of the porters from Surgeons’ Hall behind him. The three of them wrestled the girl out of the lecture theatre, though at the sight of three burly men manhandling a heavily pregnant crippled girl, Dr Strangeway sprang to his feet. ‘Gentlemen, please,’ he cried. ‘Have a care!’ The girl had fallen limp in their arms and they dragged her out the way a washerwoman might haul a bag of laundry towards the copper. Dr Strangeway took up her fallen crutches and followed them out. I looked to Miss Crowe. She had not moved a muscle.

  ‘Well, well, gentlemen,’ Dr Crowe said as the door banged closed and the place fell silent. ‘Had she had a little more strength and a great deal more height you might have been anatomising me tomorrow morning to check the veracity of Dr Strangeway’s models!’ We all laughed, as we were supposed to, but I could see how discomfited he was. Miss Crowe too, who had neither laughed nor spoken, but merely sat still and silent, her cheek pale, her fingers gripping her pen tightly, so that I saw the ink had covered her fingers the way blood covered her father’s.

  After that he dismissed us. As we filed out, Dr Crowe called Allardyce and me to his side, for we were both his apprentices and were there to do whatever he asked of us. He told me to find Thrawn-Leggit Mary, said that he did not wish to bring her actions to the attention of the police, and bade me take her home to the Cowgate. He asked Allardyce to call a hansom, so that he and Miss Crowe might go home. He looked down at his waistcoat and put his fingers to the blood stain and the slit in the silk the knife had made. He slid his hand into his inside breast pocket and drew out a large locket, the size of a pocket watch. Inside was a painted likeness of his wife – the only image he had of her. The glass that had covered it was shattered, the gold casing punctured and dented from where Mary’s blade had struck home. The miniature within was quite spoiled. Miss Crowe saw it too, and she let out a sob. Dr Crowe looked at the ruined locket for a long while. There were tears in his eyes as he took his daughter’s hand. He nodded to me, and said, ‘Thank you, Mr Franklyn. I know I can rely on you to do what’s right.’

  Gloag had sent for the constable, but I told him that this was against Dr Crowe’s express wishes, and that he had asked me to take Mary Anderson home. After some considerable negotiation he allowed me to put the girl into a hansom and take her away. Her lodgings are not far, but due to the narrowness of the close I was obliged to take her home the long way – along the South Bridge, past the Tron Kirk and down Blair Street to the Cowgate. Sh
e sat in silence for the whole journey, her face streaked with tears. I made sure to take the girl into her lodgings – as vile and wretched a place as one might hope never to find – and was glad to leave her there, alone, though I was sure her sister would be along soon enough. I returned to Surgeons’ Square to find that Allardyce and Dr Strangeway had gone back to East Newington Street with the doctor and Miss Crowe. As it was clear I was no longer required, I went, as I usually did on a Wednesday evening, to visit my mother out at Duddingston.

  On the evening of the 18th inst. at around nine in the evening I left my mother’s house and went back up to Surgeons’ Square. I had agreed to help with the preparations for the following morning’s class, though the corpse we were working on was hardly fit for anything. I was to meet Allardyce and Dr Cruikshank. Neither of them was there when I arrived, though Dr Cruikshank appeared some five minutes later. I hoped to impress him, and Dr Crowe, who had asked me to show some of the first-year students how to remove the skin of a corpse so that the musculature and membranes beneath remain intact. I am proficient at this, though I was not prepared to leave anything to chance and hoped to secure a few hours, practice on our cadaver before the night was out.

  We had hardly rolled up our sleeves before Allardyce appeared. He said he had just met the boy Davie Knox, and that it appeared Thrawn-Leggit Mary was dead. I was surprised, for she had been alive when I had left her, and I could not think what might have befallen her in the meantime. We went down to the Cowgate – Dr Cruikshank, Dr Wragg, Dr Strangeway, Allardyce and I. Dr Cruikshank led the way, Allardyce close at his heels for his lantern was out and he could not see his way otherwise. I followed with Dr Strangeway, who was also without a lantern, and Dr Wragg took up the rear. A great crowd awaited us and my heart quailed within me. We had all seen the mob at the execution of William Burke. We had seen the way they had filed past his anatomised corpse in their thousands the week after; the way they had smashed every window in Dr Knox’s house and carried his effigy through the streets before hanging it from a lamp-post, and I could not help but feel afraid. As soon as they saw us a great cry went up and they surged forward. I could tell at a glance that it would not take much for them to string us up from the South Bridge by our heels – or our necks – and I must admit that I was relieved when Dr Cruikshank took all of us but Dr Wragg into Tanner’s Lodgings.

  I have seen many corpses, those that are fresh from the earth and those that are long dead. For all that I am aware of the dealings that have taken place at Dr Knox’s medical school across the square from our own I had never to my knowledge seen a body that had been murdered – until that night. Mary Anderson was lying on the bed where I had left her. Her legs were visible, plastered with gore and grotesquely twisted. Her dress, a green one I had seen Mrs Crowe wearing on many occasions, but which the girl had not been wearing when I had last seen her, was rank with blood. She looked tiny – her torso so bunched and twisted that she appeared hardly bigger than a child. Her hands were white as bone in the lamplight, curled into claws and held up stiffly, as if she sought to tear at her own throat. Something was twisted about her neck – a shawl of some kind, the red weal that it had caused as it rasped against her skin visible upon her flesh. Her face, which had once so entranced us all, was turned to the wall, hidden in shadow. From where I stood I could see that it was darkly livid.

  As the others busied themselves with the corpse I contented myself with taking a look about. At the back of the room the building seemed to merge into the rock and soil at the very root of the city. To the right, set deep within the wall, was a door. As everyone else was occupied, and there seemed naught else for me to do, I went over to examine it. The door had a key, but it was not locked. I opened it and looked out. A narrow flight of steps on the left led up to the next floor, whilst to my right the passage curved around to the neighbours’ house. Tanner’s Lodgings is a warren of a place, its rooms divided and subdivided, with stairs climbing up to dark landings and doors leading into windowless rooms. The poor are crammed in on every floor. From upstairs I could hear weeping, from behind the neighbours’ door I heard voices raised in fury, the sound of smashing crockery and a baby crying. On the stairs, just where they turned to wind out of sight, was the crumpled form of a drunken woman. The air stank of dampness and urine. Some half dozen steps down from her, just outside the doorway where I stood, sat a small boy of some seven or eight years. His face was filthy, his feet bare. He was rubbing something, a coin of some kind, on the ragged tail of his shirt. I had the impression he had been there for some time. ‘Has anyone come out of this room while you have been sitting there?’ I asked. He shook his head, still intent on his work. ‘Are you sure?’ He laid the coin on his palm. It was a shilling, bright as a diamond in the darkness. ‘Aye,’ he said. He held the coin up to his eye, the way a bit faker might when examining his coins through a jeweller’s loupe. I felt sorry for the lad, sitting there in so cold and vile a passage while his mother slept off her drunken stupor, a murdered girl not ten paces away. I might not be a gentleman, I thought, but I was glad I had not been born to stock as common as this. I was about to hand him a sixpence when Dr Cruikshank called me. I shut the door, and locked it.

  I helped Dr Cruikshank wrap the body, and then we were ready. We took her to Surgeons’ Hall. Allardyce and I removed the girl’s blood-soaked dress and under things, and laid out her corpse in readiness for our work. I looked closely at her crimson face, her raw neck from where the ligature around it had abraded the flesh, her neatly sliced open abdomen. The handiwork I judged to be particularly skilful. I said as much to Allardyce, and he agreed, remarking that the perpetrator, whoever he was, was without doubt a master with the knife. But then the constable came and we were sent away.

  I did not see the body of Mary Anderson again.

  True in soul and conscience,

  [Signed] James Franklyn

  We arrived home some time after four and woke everyone. Mrs Speedicut shook the embers back into life, and with the speed and efficiency of long practice put a pan of porridge on the stove top to simmer. How she got the stuff to look so grey and lumpy I had no idea, though with the addition of a dollop of molasses to each of our bowls I managed to make it tolerable. Will and I both stank, and something vile had dried on my coat. I bundled all our clothes up and bade Gabriel and Jenny to take them down to the washerwoman later that morning.

  There was not enough time to prepare a bath, and so I filled the basin, added some drops of lavender, some bicarbonate of soda and some tea tree oil, and set it out with a wash cloth. We washed our hair under the kitchen pump. I had formulated a shampoo, based on an Indian recipe my father had bought from a sea captain. It smelled of lemon geranium, cardamom and rosemary, and by the time we were done we were as fragrant as the apothecary on a warm day. Jenny insisted that we put in a few drops of essence of yew berry, a poisonous tincture, but one which she assured me would frighten away the dead, for even bundled up our clothes made the apothecary stink as though a decayed corpse had followed us home from the mortuary.

  Will seemed reluctant to talk about what had occurred. He said he had accompanied me for no other reason than because I had asked him to. ‘I cannot see what has been achieved by it all,’ he said peevishly. ‘Other than the fact that we both stink to high heaven, you have ruined a perfectly good coat, and between us we have terrified my employer’s brother-in-law almost out of his wits.’ I tried to tell him what I had found, that I was sure I could now identify the owner of the severed hand, but he would not listen. He stamped up to his room to change his shirt. When he reappeared, some twenty minutes later, he was washed and brushed and smelled strongly of sandalwood and orange blossom. He seemed distracted, ignoring the coffee I offered him, and sifting anxiously through the papers on his desk. I knew that he had completed his drawing of the skeleton hand the day before, and hoped that morning to present it to Dr Crowe, to see whether it met with the man’s approval. He was anxious, and preoccupied. More tha
n that – he was excited. Breathless almost. Usually he shared all his thoughts with me, all his worries and concerns. That morning, he was silent. He wolfed down his porridge with hardly a word.

  ‘Take this,’ I said. I handed him a bottle of the cordial I had prepared to quench his thirst and act as an expectorant. ‘It will help to prevent the dust from settling on your lungs.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, stuffing it into his satchel. ‘Why don’t you come up to the Hall later, Jem?’ he added, though I detected no great sincerity in his voice. ‘If you want to, that is. You may not be welcome after last night. I can only hope that I still am.’ He brushed his hair and smoothed the nap of his hat, and then he was gone.

  Soon after, Mrs Speedicut went out too. Gabriel, Jenny and I went about our tasks. I wanted the condenser set up for I had some rosemary oil to prepare. I needed Jenny to make some sulphur pills, and the herb woman was due later that morning – I owed her money, and needed some more hops, so I had to clear some space in the herb drying room and see to the accounts. After that I found I had a little time on my hands, and so I took out the fold of paper I had brought with me from the dead room, and onto which I had collected the fragments I had scraped from beneath the fingers of the severed hand. I put them onto a slide and examined them beneath the microscope. The fragments were small, but left me in little doubt as to who owned the hand.

  I went up to Corvus Hall. I took some bread and cheese for Will, and Silas Strangeway’s box of surgical cutlery in my satchel. I asked to see Dr Crowe.

  ‘He’s dissecting, sir,’ came the reply. ‘Got a ticket?’

  ‘Then perhaps I might see Miss Crowe?’ I said.

  The doorman shrugged. ‘Skinner!’