Surgeons’ Hall

by E. S. Thomson

  ‘Should I?’ I said. ‘What good would that do?’

  He pursed his lips. ‘I think he is upstairs,’ he said. ‘His workshop is beside the anatomy museum. The public are allowed through the museum on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and later this morning, though as you are with me I’m sure it will be permissible.’

  I scowled. Was I no more than a member of the public? Was I allowed into the place only as his companion? I followed him up the stairs, my face thunderous.

  He led me towards what had once been the ballroom. I remembered it as two elegantly proportioned rooms that were separated by a folding wall of white-painted panelled wood. Once the wall was folded back, the room was some fifty feet long, illuminated by tall casement windows that ran east to west.

  ‘It is another anatomy museum,’ said Will. ‘There is a door at the end that takes one through to the museum where Dr Wragg works.’ He threw back a pair of double doors.

  The room was filled with skeletons, animals of all kinds – an anteater, a wild boar, an Arabian horse, a rhinoceros, a tiger. There were apes, birds, crocodiles, fish. In front of them all, standing on a raised dais of varnished mahogany, was a woman. Her right hand was raised above her head, her legs set in a stride. She alone was more than just bone, for her skeleton had been shrouded in a glimmering layer of crimson muscle.

  ‘What’s that?’ whispered Will, his eyes wide. ‘It wasn’t here yesterday.’

  ‘It is a life sized écorché,’ I said. ‘A scalded woman. You see there is a man too? They are made from wax overlaying bone.’ I stepped closer. The detail was extraordinary. We stood in silence, just looking. And then all at once a voice spoke: ‘Come in, gentlemen.’

  Behind us, the door closed. We sprang round to find Sorrow and Silence Crowe standing side by side. They led us down the room. There were one or two students bent over glass cases, their books open and papers spread out. When they saw Sorrow and Silence they gathered their books and left without a word.

  Another door took us into a long narrow chamber that did office as a wax modelling studio. As the door closed behind us a man stepped forward and held out his hands; pale hands, textured and thickened with scar tissue, the characteristic whirling and pitting of smallpox. His face was expressionless, his mouth a dark hole, his eyes glittering beneath his textured lids.

  ‘Thank you.’ He reached forward and pulled the box of knives from out of my hands. ‘Mine, I believe?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You find us still unpacking,’ he said, waving my apology, and my introductions, aside. ‘It is the bottles and the bodies that matter most, and we are left to last.’ He shook his head. ‘I am always the least important. My girls the least important.’ On the table top was a life-sized model of a young woman. She was lying on her back, a wax hand upon her breast. A folded pad of fine white cotton lay across her eyes, tied loosely in place with a pink silk ribbon.

  ‘You see how carefully she has been looked after? How we wrapped her as best we could so that she would not be frightened?’ He put out a hand and touched the model’s hair. ‘No one makes them like this anymore. It’s all function and utility now. She was to be sold to a fairground, you know. A fairground! Mr Halliday was quite determined. He calls my girls “dolls”. He says only a real cadaver can teach a man about the human body.’ He snorted. ‘He tries to be like Dr Cruikshank, but Dr Cruikshank has always admitted the value of my creations even if he prefers a corpse himself.’ He turned to face me, the semblance of a frown creasing his pale, scarred forehead. ‘As if every one of my girls is not the result of months and months of anatomy.’

  ‘And yet a student of medicine must see a cadaver, must work with the real matter and substance of the body,’ I said. ‘Does it not behove them to meditate on the fate of all mankind as they work? What else but a corpse might encourage such reflections?’

  ‘My models promote a scientific understanding of human anatomy based on rigorous dissection. My dissections. I can see the value of the cadaver, of course I can. Do we not live in a world of death, of pain and horror and suffering?’ He held out his own hands. The scarred flesh pulling the fingers into curled fists. ‘And yet when they use my models they are brought to an almost divine reflection on the glory of the human body. Memento Mori and anatomy lesson are one and the same. Body and soul, relic and specimen, is there a need to draw a line between the two?’

  The wax girl was lying on a rumpled sheet, her head thrown back as if in ecstasy, her lips a faint smile beneath her blindfold, so that for a moment I was reminded of Annie, one of Mrs Roseplucker’s girls, who had once worked from a brothel on Wicke Street. A large panel had been lifted from the girl’s waxy chest and abdomen. Inside, the wax organs were visible – the heart, the lungs, the liver, all perfectly formed and neatly packed within. I noted a line in the model’s hair which marked the place where the top of its head screwed off to reveal a wax brain.

  Dr Strangeway was looking down at her fondly. He stroked her cheek. ‘I saved her. I couldn’t let her be stared at by urchins and drunkards. She’s my daughter, gentlemen. One of many, but no less dear to me because of it.’

  ‘I think I too would prefer to be taught by one of your so-called “dolls”, sir,’ said Will.

  But Dr Strangeway seemed hardly to be listening. ‘You see, for men to be instructed they must be seduced by the subject they encounter,’ he said. ‘And yet how might the image of death be rendered agreeable? We might show the body’s constituent parts in isolation – organs, limbs, the fine tracery of the blood vessels – but it does not teach the whole. What might we do to overcome this? Dissection, of course, but when that fails? When men cannot bear to wallow in death, what then?’

  ‘A manual,’ cried Will. ‘I am helping Dr Crowe create the perfect handbook—’

  Dr Strangeway thumped his fist on the table. ‘No, sir! A mere handbook will not do! Accuracy is all, Mr Quartermain! Being able to see the subject from every angle, the relation of one organ to another organ. You must know that much.’ He turned to Will, jabbing a finger at his chest. ‘I’ve seen what you are doing. Your illustrations are diagrams, without detail, without intimacy. You are the very worst of this new scientific method. How might your pictures show us anything of the beauty of the body? It is simply a catalogue of parts!’

  ‘I merely draw what I am told to draw, sir,’ replied Will. ‘I make no claims about scientific method.’

  Dr Strangeway sighed, and nodded. ‘Forgive me, sir, I fear my outlook is at odds with everyone else’s.’ He ran his hand down the waxen arm of the blindfolded model. ‘Some two hundred cadavers were required to craft this single figure. The speed of decay renders a cadaver useless in no time at all – what knowledge might a man acquire from stink and decay? When he is repelled, how can he learn? And you see how plump she is? How rounded? We modelled her from the best – nothing fat, nothing old or rotten. Not like those miserable cadavers from the workhouse.’

  ‘She is beautiful, sir,’ said Will. ‘What medium do you use?’

  He looked pleased. ‘I see you are an artist, sir, though you may be apostate, and have of late sold your soul to the world of catalogues and handbooks. It is beeswax. White virgin wax from Smyrna or Venice. I mix it with turpentine, with oils and fats, until I have the consistency. Plant resin helps to sustain the structure and maintain the vivid colour. You see those flabby specimens in the anatomy museum? Grey, pale, blobs bobbing in fluid? All very well, but where is their vitality? Their lifeblood? Their visceral truth? No living being has organs that look like that! But I show what is really within. I use the very finest pigments, sifted through cloth and dissolved in oil. You see the blood vessels? The nerves? They are silken fibres dipped in wax. Intricate, detailed, exact. My precise mixtures and preparations are a secret, so don’t ask me. No, sir!’ he covered his ears as Will opened his mouth to speak. ‘I will not tell!’

  He took a deep breath. A sheen of sweat covered his brow. Sorrow and Si
lence, Will and I, stood before him without speaking. Had he finished? I saw him swallow.

  ‘I’m sorry, gentlemen.’ He pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at his lips. ‘It is a subject close to my heart, as you can imagine. Please, take a look at my work. Some of my very best pieces are in this room.’

  Around the walls, standing in glass cases like crystal sentry boxes, were six more écorchés: three men and three women. They stood opposite each other at intervals down the room – wax over real human bones. Wax faces – moulages – demonstrating dermatological complaints, eczema, chancres, pustules, hung from the walls. Each face was different, but each perfectly rendered. Will was transfixed by a series of models depicting diseased genitals. Further down the room a woman gave birth by caesarean. Two pairs of disembodied male hands helped her, one holding the wound open, the other easing the waxen child into the world. The model had turned her face away, her eyes languid, her brow creased as if in no greater pain than if she were having a splinter removed.

  Dr Strangeway bent over his workbench, rummaging through his pigments. Antimony white, burnt umber, cadmium yellow. He fussed about, dabbing up spillages and rearranging pots. The air was heavy with the smell of hot wax, and the inevitable stink of decay. On a bench in the middle of the room was a torso minus its head, arms and legs – no more than a ribcage and abdomen. A hole had been cut in the flesh, to reveal the organs within. I saw Will blanch at the sight. Silence saw it too and she stepped forward to cover the torso up with a sheet of thick heavy cotton.

  ‘These days it is organs mainly,’ said Dr Strangeway. ‘No one wants the whole body. Of course, we need dissection for that too. I prefer to get them at night when no one is looking.’ His hands were balled into fists, his eyes watery, as if even talking about it caused him pain. ‘The students can be so cruel. I sometimes think their close association with the dead breeds an unkind nature. And they have certainly moved away from my models in recent years, preferring their own corpses instead. But you have seen what you wanted to see, have you not? You can go now.’ He turned away from us.

  ‘What are you making, sir?’ I said. ‘I am a great admirer of your work. Your recent work in particular. I saw your contribution to the Exhibition. The heart. The head and face. Extraordinary.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘At the Exhibition.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes. Yes. My most recent work, sir, you are quite right.’

  ‘And you work here with Miss Crowe?’

  ‘With Lilith, yes. But also with Sorrow and Silence.’ He smiled indulgently at the two women, who had donned aprons and set about their business at the other end of the workbench. One of them attended to a pan of melted wax, the other ground up pigments in a pestle and mortar. Dr Strangeway pulled the canvas shroud off the torso. ‘They will open the ribcage and reveal what lies within – heart, lungs, oesophagus. It is a complex piece. Dr Cruikshank asked for it. He sent up the torso. It is rare to have one so young to work from.’

  ‘I thought he disliked models,’ I said.

  ‘They have their uses.’

  I looked at the torso on the workbench. Dr Cruikshank asked for it. He sent up the torso. It is rare to have one so young. I had seen it before, I was certain, although it had been rendered even more anonymous now that it was without arms, legs, or head.

  ‘It’s Wilson,’ I whispered. ‘Wilson, I’m sure of it.’

  I looked at Dr Strangeway, but he was rummaging earnestly amongst his paintbrushes and did not meet my gaze. ‘Et mortui sua arcana narrabunt,’ I said. ‘One way or another, Dr Strangeway, the dead will give up their secrets, whether you and your fellow anatomists like it or not.’

  Will left me after that. He seemed irritated that I persisted with ‘this Wilson business,’ though I knew I was right. I said I would find him later. I hoped we might sort out our differences, as I could not bear the coolness that seemed suddenly to have arisen between us. I watched him go. Usually he left me with a quip, or a remark about meeting up later, but this time he said nothing.

  I went to find Dr Wragg. Might I persuade him to tell me more about the men of Corvus Hall? I had brought some of my remedies in my bag, a salve of comfrey to rub into his arthritic fingers, a tincture of cinnamon bark for the rheumatism I had noted afflicted his knees and back. Something told me that Dr Wragg would not yield information easily, but I had to try, for I knew I would get even less from Dr Cruikshank and Dr Crowe.

  The public were allowed in the museum for a few hours that afternoon, and there were ladies and gentlemen sauntering about amongst the exhibits. They gasped and gawped, in much the same way that people had once looked at the mad, as something to marvel at and to exclaim over. Skinner was in attendance, and he told me that Dr Wragg hated the public, and retreated into his private room whenever it was a ‘ticket day’.

  ‘Down there,’ he pointed to the far corner of the room, where a narrow flight of stairs led up into a gloom. ‘Not that he likes guests much either, sir. I’d leave him be if I were you.’ But I was not about to listen to Skinner telling me what I should and shouldn’t do, and so I thanked him curtly and headed off through the shelves.

  I found Dr Wragg in a long, low room beneath the eaves, lit by the smallest skylight I had ever seen. It must be freezing in the winter, for beyond the rough wooden planking of the sloping ceiling there was nothing but roof slates.

  There was a workbench along one wall, with a tap, a sink and a drain. It was clear that it was a place of work, for there were carboys of preserving fluid, knives, bottles, books and lumps of flesh littered about the place. Flies buzzed lazily above my head, as if too fat and sated to move with any speed. It smelled of decay, the way everywhere seemed to at Corvus. I saw that Dr Wragg’s room was on the same storey as Will’s, and that they were separated only by the maceration room where the specimens were soaked, and by another store room filled with the stuff needed for specimen preparation. Against one wall was a brass bedstead, mounded with quilts and blankets. Dr Wragg, it seemed, preferred to sleep in his workshop. He was standing at the workbench. He had pulled his sleeve up and was worrying at his forearm with grubby fingers. An array of dark scabs stood out against his white skin like beetles.

  ‘Dr Wragg,’ I said. ‘You have eczema, sir? I might have something—’

  The old man jumped, for so absorbed was he in his task that he had not heard me come in. ‘No,’ he snapped.

  ‘But—’

  ‘It’s nothing. Nothing for you.’

  ‘I have a salve—’

  ‘I don’t want a salve.’ He ran a hand over his scab-studded arm. ‘I’ve had some of these for months,’ he said. He picked at the corner of a large one with a horny fingernail, and I saw that his shirt sleeve was blotched with blood. ‘This one is almost ready.’ He grinned at me. ‘It’s my scab farm.’ The grin fell from his face as he turned away, pulling his sleeve back down. ‘And they don’t need any salve!’

  He turned to his bench, plucking up a bottle and holding it up to the light. It contained what looked like a length of tapeworm. ‘From a workhouse corpse,’ he said without turning round. ‘Wilson wanted it. Biggest I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Wilson?’ I said. ‘He’s dead, sir. He won’t be wanting it now.’

  Dr Wragg turned to face me. ‘Then I’ll give it to Tanhauser.’

  ‘So you know Wilson is dead?’

  He nodded. There was a sluggishness to his movements, and I saw that his pupils were no bigger than pinpricks, tiny black dots in the rheumy green of his eyes. ‘And the dead shall surrender their secrets,’ he whispered. He held up the bottle. ‘They always do.’ He smiled, showing me his crooked mis-matched teeth set in their wooden gums.

  ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘Wilson? No more than any of them. His father is to blame for it, though he’s dead now too.’

  ‘To blame?’ I said. ‘For what?’

  Dr Wragg’s grin grew wider. ‘You think I don’t know your tricks, Mr Flockhart? You thi
nk I don’t know you? He is to blame for sending him here – amongst other things.’ He shook his head. ‘This is the beginning,’ he said. ‘The beginning of the end. I said it would come.’

  I had seen opium addiction many times, and I could tell straight away that Dr Wragg was a habitual user. Had it started for medicinal purposes? Perhaps to numb the pain from some malady or other – judging by his teeth the man had suffered badly in that quarter alone. Now, however, like so many whose use had started innocently enough, I would wager any amount of money that he was unable to live without it. He continued to work, to appear lucid, as did so many whose lives had been governed by it for years, and whose daily life was one of habit and sameness. I had no doubt that it was the opium that had rendered him less cautious than the others, though if Dr Wragg knew that the corpse was Wilson’s then I was quite certain that they all did. He turned back to his workbench. There was no point in offering him the remedies I had brought, I could see that much.

  ‘Your museum is a credit to you, sir,’ I said instead.

  ‘Indeed, sir,’ he replied. ‘No school can be taken seriously without one. Few students can attend enough dissections to familiarise themselves with the range of normal and diseased appearances, so they need a well-ordered representative collection.’

  ‘And yet most anatomy museums are merely an assortment. Here, you have something far more impressive.’

  ‘I have set nature properly in order, sir. Museum work is prized – and fought over. Being appointed curator to a pathology museum is a great honour for any man, a testament to his work and esteem, and for that reason I am proud to say that I have curated some of the best anatomy museums in the world – Paris, Edinburgh, London.’ He fell silent. I saw his face cloud over, as though a wave of opium had smothered his thoughts.

  ‘Did Wilson help you with the collection?’ I said.

  ‘Wilson? That idiot? It is Halliday who helps me. He knows how to prepare a specimen – how to preserve an organ, wet and dry. He’s very good. Not that I needed him. I’ve been curator of this collection for twenty years, and for ten years before that. It was I who packed the collection up when we left Edinburgh, then when we left St Bride’s, and I who set it all out here. I arranged everything according to the correct system by which exhibits should be arranged. A taxonomy favoured by Hunter, by Monro secundus, by Knox – some of the greatest anatomists to have lived! It was not for Halliday to decide he had developed a better way.’ He shook his head. ‘He came with two of his stupidest friends – Tanhauser and Wilson. One a sycophant, the other a blockhead. They had no idea what they were doing. And so I put everything back the way it had been. The way it should be.’ He smiled faintly, his eyes narrowing. ‘Edinburgh,’ he murmured. ‘That was the best of them. No one questioned my methods then.’ He grinned at me again, his dentures as uneven as ancient tombstones. His eyes were watery grey-green voids, like blobs of phlegm. ‘Want to see my private collection? They never touched that! No one would dare to.’