Surgeons’ Hall

by E. S. Thomson

  ‘I understand Dr Crowe believes they will raise the moral tone of the school, as well as affecting the way we go about our business,’ replied Halliday. ‘Amongst other things.’

  ‘And is it working, would you say?’

  ‘I have little experience of other places,’ he replied. ‘Though I would say that most of the men don’t like it. The sisters used to be permitted in the dissecting room too, and the dead room, but there were some objections to that. Dr Cruikshank agreed. They tend to stay out of those places now – some of the time, at any rate.’

  I tried to get Halliday to tell us something about himself, but he shrugged and said, ‘My provenance is uninteresting, sir. My mother and father are dead. There was a little money put aside for me and I chose to spend it on a medical education. I came to London for my studies. It is probably why I am at Corvus Hall so much, as I have no family to visit and no money to spend on pleasures. And the work is fascinating.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘I cannot deny that.’

  We talked on, about the nature of the profession (crowded, with the best posts taken by sons of the wealthy), about surgery (transformed since the appearance of chloroform ‘but men dabble about in the abdomen for far too long. Is it any wonder that more of our patients die than ever before?’) and about the appeal of Corvus Hall (Dr Crowe was a brilliant anatomist, Dr Cruikshank a first-rate lecturer, the anatomy museum second to none). The evening passed easily. The stew was warming and tasty, the dumplings light and fluffy, and we made sure to compliment Gabriel and Jenny equally. We finished our beer, and then Jenny told Will how best to slice up the pineapple. He did so using a long surgical blade Halliday produced from his bag. We ate the sweet golden pieces in silence.

  ‘How did it taste?’ I said to Gabriel, who had savoured every mouthful.

  ‘Like sunshine,’ he said. ‘If you could slice up the sun and put it in a bowl it would taste just like this.’

  We played cards for a while. Beggar My Neighbour, a game Jenny had enjoyed at the seaman’s hospital. It was simple and rather childish, but it always ended in hilarity. I was pleased to see Halliday laughing as he lost the game yet again, and I was reminded of how difficult it was to be all alone in the world trying to make one’s way in a competitive profession without connections or patronage. Would his ability be enough to enable him to succeed? I hoped so.

  ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said as the apothecary clock struck eleven. ‘I had better be on my way.’ I fetched his hat and coat, for Gabriel and Jenny had already gone to bed – the former on his truckle bed beneath the apothecary table, the latter amongst the hop sacks in the herb drying room. At the door, as he took his leave, Halliday shook my hand. His grip was tight, and to my surprise there were tears in his eyes. ‘Thank you, Jem,’ he said. ‘Thank you. For inviting me. For your hospitality. You have a most unusual family.’

  ‘I have no family,’ I replied.

  ‘Neither do I,’ he said. ‘And yet whereas I remain alone in the world, you seem to have found yourself one. You bicker and argue, you are all separate, different, but you are together. There is a love,’ he faltered, as though the words were pulled from a dark corner of himself that he hardly dared look into. ‘There is a love that binds you together. You are a family. You will always have each other, I can see that clearly. But I? I have nothing like that.’

  ‘You have Dr Crowe. I know he loves you—’

  ‘He loves my speed and confidence with the knife. He loves my ability to memorise the parts of the body. He loves my ambition. But all of these are done without real care, without unconditional love; I would not look to Dr Crowe for comfort or succour—’ His voice was tight, and filled with emotion. ‘I fear I would not get it. Not from that quarter. No, Jem, I have no family but corpses and specimens. I stink of death, not life. But here, here in this apothecary and in your garden earlier, here it is all warmth and light, it is fragrant and filled with laughter and good cheer. I envy you, Jem, I envy what you have.’

  ‘You will have the same,’ I said. ‘One day.’

  ‘I think not.’

  ‘Are you afraid, John?’ I lowered my voice. ‘Afraid you will suffer the same fate as Wilson? As Dr Wragg?’

  ‘Wilson? Dr Crowe says there is every chance it was not his corpse at all.’

  ‘And Wragg?’

  ‘Suicide, surely?’

  ‘And what if they were – if they were both murdered?’

  He turned pale. ‘You cannot mean it?’

  I saw his alarm and I was immediately sorry. ‘It is unlikely. I should never have mentioned it.’ I clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I have a foolish and sensational imagination. As you saw from our shelves, we have no shortage of Penny Bloods here. But if you are ever afraid, or worried, or . . . want some company then you are more than welcome in my home.’

  He wrung my hand, though I could see his eyes were still troubled. ‘Thank you, Jem,’ he said again. ‘Thank you for everything.’ And then he was gone.

  Will was a fast worker – partly because he was not enjoying his job, partly because every time he finished a drawing he vanished to look for Miss Crowe, who would admire his work, his skill and sure hand, and would take the picture to her father, or Dr Cruickshank. ‘Why can you not take your work to Dr Crowe yourself?’ I said. ‘Or to Dr Cruikshank?’

  ‘Why would I do that? Why would I take my work to those two old curiosities when I can show it to a delightful young woman?’

  ‘Hardly young!’ I said. ‘She is at least ten years your senior.’

  ‘And what do I care about that?’ He was sitting at his desk, under the eaves, the microscope in front of him. He was intent upon his task, periodically peering down at the slide, his pen moving with confidence across the page. The lemon cordial I had brought up from the apothecary to help prevent the bone dust from settling on his lungs sat untouched at his elbow. ‘She is an artist in her own right! She admires my work in the most fulsome terms.’ I saw his cheeks glow at the thought. I said nothing, but in my chest I felt my heart grow cold. I had no right to keep him for myself, especially when I could never offer him more than friendship. I had hoped it would be enough – for a time at least. But now, it seemed, that time had come. What chance did friendship have against romantic love? Such love was evanescent. By its very nature it was transient and subject to change. Friendship could weather all storms if it was true, as mine was. And yet how unworthy it must seem to him now that his heart had warmed to Lilith Crowe.

  Halliday was busier than ever. He had recovered from his sickness and was re-ordering the anatomy museum according to a new taxonomy of pathology. He had enlisted the help of Tanhauser and Squires. He was barely older than they were, but was fast and confident, and he seemed driven by a furious energy. When he was not downstairs attending to the museum he was in the dissecting room helping Dr Allardyce or working with Dr Crowe and Dr Cruikshank. When he was not doing those things he was at his desk beside Will, peering down the microscope or scribbling in his notebooks. He would not tell us what he was working on.

  ‘Not after that business with Allardyce,’ he said when I asked him. ‘I cannot risk such imputations, not again. The work I do is my work and mine alone. I cannot help it if Dr Allardyce is too slow-witted to draw the right conclusions and write up his work coherently.’ Young, lively and energetic, it was impossible not to like him.

  One day he put on a microscope demonstration. It had been organised weeks earlier by Dr Cruikshank. Despite the death of Dr Wragg everyone at the Hall was keen that the event should go ahead, the work of the anatomy school continuing no matter what.

  ‘Can you help, Flockhart?’ Halliday said. ‘I know you’re au fait with the microscope. Quartermain told me, and I saw that magnificent beast of a scope you have in your shop. What was it? A Lintz and Messberger?’ I could see why Dr Crowe was so fond of him. The tension that had gathered about the place on the death of Dr Wragg seemed to subside as Halliday darted about the place.

  At the microscope demo
nstration, Dr Cruikshank was at the front. He stood with his hands behind his back, clearly enjoying the spectacle of a dozen ladies positioned behind the gleaming brass instruments, all watching him expectantly. Some of the medical students had been co-opted in to help. The ladies were encouraged to pull hairs from one another’s heads to examine them. Others were given a slide upon which a dead flea had been mounted. A third slide showed them a droplet of Thames water.

  At the back, Halliday and Miss Crowe stood side by side. I saw Dr Cruikshank’s gaze linger on her face, calm and beautiful, and upon Halliday’s face, young and smiling. Later, I came across Dr Cruikshank staring out of the window of his room. His back was to me. ‘They say the study of anatomy is an immoral undertaking for a woman,’ he said, without turning around. ‘That it is a subject fit only for those without scruple or delicacy. I have always maintained that this is not so, that a woman may be trusted to use her knowledge of the human body and its functions with sensitivity and feeling. To use it wisely.’

  ‘I can see no reason why women should not be as trusted with anatomical knowledge as men,’ I replied.

  ‘Then why does she behave as she does?’ His voice was trembling. ‘I have tried to protect her, to look after her – she is not like others. She never will be. All her life I have sought to guard her from harm – and yet how can I protect her from herself? And how . . . how can I protect them from her?’ He turned to me. ‘No matter what she does, or has done, I love her nonetheless.’ His face was wretched, tear streaked and haggard. His curls hung limp against his collar, and his jewels seemed lustreless upon his fingers. A crimson smear of blood blotted his shirt, as if the stuff had leaked through from his broken heart. He sank into his chair and put his face in his hands. Behind him, at the bottom of the garden where the yew met the long couch grass and the tall overgrown lavender bushes waved in the sunshine, I saw Lilith Crowe and John Halliday.

  We walked down St Saviour’s Street, back to the apothecary as the evening drew down. Will had finished his work early and rather than starting another piece I had persuaded him to come home. Coming towards us was a burly man and a slight young woman. They wheeled a hand cart before them. The woman was pushing, for the man seemed wracked by paroxysms of sobbing, which required him to blow his nose and swab his eyes almost continually with a large grey handkerchief. He kept up a deep resonant moaning, rather like the lowing of a distressed bull, which echoed above the city’s evening cacophony in a dolorous monotone. On the cart was what looked at first glance to be a great mound of laundry, but which on closer inspection turned out to be the swathed body of a mountainous corpse.

  There was something about the pair that seemed familiar, and as they drew closer I saw that it was Mr Jobber and Annie from Mrs Roseplucker’s Home for Girls of an Energetic Disposition on Wicke Street. Will lifted his hat.

  ‘My dear Miss Annie,’ he said. ‘What a pleasure.’

  ‘Who’s this?’ I said, pointing to the cart. ‘A deceased client? One of your more mature gentlemen overcome by the pleasures of Venus?’

  ‘Or overcome by the prices,’ said Will. ‘It’s a late hour to be dealing with the laundry.’

  ‘Oh, sirs,’ cried Annie. ‘It ain’t laundry. It ain’t no gen’man either. It’s Mrs Roseplucker.’ Her face was tearful. ‘She died this very afternoon. She always said she’d given her best years to looking after the medical men, and so I thought I might bring her down here now, sir.’ She nodded to the gates of Corvus Hall. ‘Besides, it’s three pounds for a corpse as fresh as this.’

  ‘Guineas,’ I said.

  ‘Guineas!’ Her face brightened. ‘There you go, Mr Jobber, Mr Flockhart says it’s three guineas, so that’s even more than we was expecting.’ She patted Mr Jobber’s arm. He was a great lumbering idiot of a man. I had no idea what relation he was to Mrs Roseplucker, but he seemed to have always been with her. He had performed an essential function at all of Mrs Roseplucker’s establishments – the Home for Girls of an Energetic Disposition on Wicke Street, and more recently at the vile and wretched Number 10, Cats’ Hole, near the waterfront. He kept a note of the time each gentleman spent upstairs, and jettisoned any who made trouble. Mrs Roseplucker had doted on him. I wondered whether Annie would take over where Mrs Roseplucker had left off.

  ‘I only saw her the other day,’ I said. ‘Up here at the anatomy school, in fact.’

  Will was staring at the mound on the hand cart. ‘I can hardly believe it,’ he said. ‘I always thought she would outlast us all.’

  ‘Oh, it were a shock, sir,’ said Annie. She plucked out her handkerchief, as if realising a show a grief was required. She usually wore her skirts hitched provocatively to show a skinny ankle, but today she was clothed decorously in a long sweeping dress that looked to be rather too big for her. She saw my glance. ‘Now then, Mr Flockhart,’ she gave me an arch look. ‘Don’t stare at me like that, not now. Not with me all respectable like. Not over Mrs R’s dead body.’

  I laughed. I could not help myself. ‘I’m sure the surgeons will be delighted to receive her,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Annie looked down at the shrouded figure, huge beneath its wrapping of dirty sheets. ‘Don’t suppose I’ll get that bedding back, will I?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps not tonight. But you might be able to go back tomorrow to get it.’

  ‘We bound her up nice, didn’t we, Mr Jobber?’

  Mr Jobber made a bovine lowing noise, and buried his face in his handkerchief.

  ‘I’m Mrs Roseplucker now,’ said Annie, with evident satisfaction. ‘It’s what she’d want.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Will. He grinned. ‘I see you have her rings.’

  Annie held her hand out. Mrs Roseplucker’s rings – garnets cheaply set on thin brassy bands – hung from her fingers. ‘Had the devil of a job getting the damn things off her,’ she muttered. ‘Mr Jobber used all the butter! But it’s what she would have wanted.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I said. Although I doubted whether Mrs Roseplucker would relish the way her own corpse had been so quickly robbed and sold, such shameless profiteering was definitely what she would have recommended for anyone else.

  ‘And do you have a wake planned?’ I said. ‘For all Mrs Roseplucker’s girls, and . . . and clients?’

  ‘What?’ Annie pushed out her chin and put her hands on her hips in an attitude not unlike her deceased mentor. ‘Spend my guineas on gin and cake for a bunch of trollops, rogues and ne’er-do-wells? I don’t think so! Besides, there’s only me an’ Mr Jobber. The other girls wouldn’t move from their beds to help us. Mrs R were looking for new girls since she come back to Wicke Street. You know,’ she looked thoughtful, ‘I think it were the strain of it. The strain o’ coming back to Wicke Street. She said she were coming home to die, didn’t she, Mr Jobber?’

  Mr Jobber lowed again, his great shoulders shaking.

  ‘She always said, “They’ll carry me out of this place in my box,” and so we did.’

  ‘Well,’ I gestured at the hand cart. ‘Hardly a box—’

  ‘Don’t see no point in buying a box,’ said Annie. ‘Think she’d ’ave bought me a box? Mean old cow!’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘After you’ve taken Mrs R up to the anatomists, why don’t you and Mr Jobber come to the apothecary? Come for tea. We can have our own wake. It’s the least I can do. Mr Quartermain will be there too, and my apprentices Gabriel and Jenny, and Mrs Speedicut too, no doubt, as she seems impossible to get rid of at the moment.’ I smiled. ‘What do you say?’

  Annie pulled back the sheeting and gazed down at the woman beneath. Mrs Roseplucker’s puddingy face was pale as lard. Her scabs were hidden beneath a sleeping cap of dirty cambric pulled down low over her straggling hair. A wide band of grey crepe had been passed beneath her chin, holding her lantern jaw closed and giving her a fierce, bulldog expression. She had a moist, sweaty look, as if she were fashioned from warm cheese.

  ‘Got any gin?’ said Annie.

  ‘Of cou
rse.’

  ‘Then Mr Jobber and I would be delighted to accept your most kind offer.’ She dropped me a curtsey, and the two of them moved off towards the Hall.

  Mr Jobber and Annie appeared not long after Will and I had returned. Jenny and Gabriel had cleared the apothecary table and set out the food and drink I’d had sent down from Sorley’s: a crate of beer, a pheasant pie, a meat pie, a roast chicken and a potato pie, some plum cake, plus – inevitably – a bag of apples from the physic garden. Mrs Speedicut had come down from the anatomy school. She looked askance at Mr Jobber and Annie, but she knew better than to make a fuss about what company I kept. Besides, I knew the prospect of a free supper would overcome all obstacles. I could see that Annie was cowed by her surroundings, as this was the first time she had been in the apothecary. I wondered how much of her life she had spent in the care of women like Mrs Roseplucker. Mr Jobber too, for although too doltish to have many thoughts at all, the food mesmerised him as much as the ‘polite’ company he found himself in. Will grinned at me from across the table. Already I knew he was looking forward to putting his feet up on the stove after they had all gone and going over the events of the evening.

  At first, the atmosphere was strained, but Sorley’s ale worked its magic soon enough. In no time at all Annie was smiling and laughing with Will and teasing Gabriel. It turned out she had once lived in the same street as Mrs Speedicut and they reminisced about old neighbours. Mr Jobber ate in silence, the occasional belch and grunt of satisfaction escaping him. Only Jenny was unusually quiet. I wondered whether it was the bawdy talk that subdued her, as Annie held forth on Mrs Roseplucker’s peculiarities as a brothel owner. But Jenny had spent her early years in a similar establishment on the waterfront, so it was surely nothing new to her. Later, after we had eaten all we could, I produced a bottle of gin and we all had a glass of that too. Gabriel took out his fiddle, and – his enthusiasm outweighing his competence – began to scratch out a jig. Annie and Will, who I had never seen so animated, climbed on to the apothecary table and aped a country dance, she the blushing courtesan, he the charming lover. Mr Jobber clapped his hands like a Neanderthal smashing rocks together, and gave a bellow of approval. His chin glistened with grease, the napkin Annie had shoved between the buttons of his waistcoat splattered with spilled beer and smears of chutney. His cheeks were shining.