‘You experimented on a colleague, a student, without his knowledge?’ said Will. ‘You could have killed him!’
‘Exactly,’ cried Dr Allardyce. ‘Why on earth do you think I did it?’
‘But look at what you could have achieved!’ I cried. ‘The city – all our great cities – are bedevilled by cholera, year after year. Theories of miasma are accepted everywhere. You could have taken your idea to the Royal Society. You could have tested it properly. You could have saved thousands by proving you were right, rather than using it to try to kill a man.’ I could not believe what I was hearing. How, when, had Dr Allardyce so lost sight of the purpose of his knowledge, of his profession? When had he become so blinded by jealousy that he took the germ of a great discovery and turned it to so personal and wicked a purpose?
‘You were so close, so very close to being a great man,’ I whispered. ‘To achieving precisely what you wanted – the admiration and respect of your peers. A place in history, even! And yet you threw it away!’
Dr Allardyce shuffled his feet. His eyes were red rimmed from lack of sleep. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. His face had closed to me, his eyes wary. ‘You have no idea at all. But I did not kill John Halliday, for all that I tried.’ He laughed. ‘And you cannot prove anything.’
I knew I should stay away from the Hall. I had no real reason to be there – I did not pay to attend classes, I did not buy a ticket for the anatomy museum. Skinner let me in because he knew I came to see Will, but I felt like an interloper. I did not linger in the hallway talking to the students, but hastened through the building with my bag of bread, cheese and apples, and my bottle of cordial. Will was always pleased to see me, though there were times when he looked disappointed, as though he’d hoped my footsteps had belonged to someone else.
On one occasion I met Miss Crowe on the stairs. ‘Mr Flockhart,’ she said. ‘I have just been to see Mr Quartermain. My father is very impressed with his work.’
‘He is very skilful, Miss Crowe,’ I said.
She looked at me for a moment, with a slight smile on her face, as if she were weighing up my ugly red birthmark and wondering what type of a rival she had – certainly, not one who could compete with her in terms of looks. She smiled and said, ‘He is lucky to have such a chaperone. You are very vigilant about his welfare. Do you worry something will happen to him? I can assure you I am looking after him very well. He said you would probably come,’ she added, the smile falling away. ‘You always do, don’t you?’
I continued up the stairs. Had the two of them been talking about me? I could not believe Will would be so disloyal.
The following day, as I approached the room where he worked I heard voices. Will’s voice was no more than a murmur. And the other voice? I listened. It was Dr Crowe. At first I thought they might be talking about the anatomy textbook he was working on, but then I heard Lilith’s name.
‘She is not like other women,’ Dr Crowe insisted. ‘She has lived a sheltered life, and no matter how worldly-wise she may appear to you, Mr Quartermain, I can assure you she is not. She has received a singular education for a woman, something I have insisted upon and which I hoped would provide her with fulfilment enough to prevent her from—’ He stopped, as if unable to say the last words of his sentence. What did he hope to prevent? From the way he was talking it was as if he hoped to prevent her from marrying. ‘But it is not an education in the ways of the world,’ he went on. ‘I fear she does not understand matters of etiquette.’
‘I find her outspokenness most refreshing,’ said Will.
‘No, sir,’ said Dr Crowe. He sounded impatient, frustrated. ‘She is used to young men, such as yourself, and perhaps does not always act in ways considered . . . to be the ways of a lady. I trust you will behave honourably and consider her sensibilities at all times.’
‘Of course, sir,’ said Will. I could tell he was mystified, and on this occasion when I appeared at the door he looked greatly relieved to see me.
‘Ah, Mr Flockhart,’ said Dr Crowe. ‘I’m glad you are here – someone to watch over Mr Quartermain.’ He laughed, and though I thought it a queer thing to say, I did not remark on it. Why would Will need to be watched over? ‘Well, well,’ he said, evidently unwilling to continue with the topic of his daughter, now that I had arrived. ‘I must go back to my anatomists. A dull lot they are this morning. I fear Dr Allardyce has bored them half to death, which has not helped matters. Mind you, apart from Halliday they are a lacklustre group. I fear for the profession if this is the best we can get. All they do is complain – about the fees, about the teaching, about the bodies. They have no idea how lucky they are! Why, one of the first things I was expected to do when I began my medical education was to procure myself a corpse! It was the same for Cruikshank and Allardyce. Dr Wragg was most useful, advising where to go and how to manage it, but nevertheless we were all expected to dig up our own cadaver. A terrible business it was too – sometimes they were rotten, sometimes we were chased from the kirkyard by gangs of relatives. More than one of us was caught. One poor chap was sentenced to three years’ transportation, just to make an example of him.’ He shook his head. ‘These young fellows have no idea!’
He smiled and turned to leave. ‘Capital work, my dear Quartermain,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘I could not have chosen better in choosing you.’
‘What was that all about?’ I said.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Will. ‘I think he was warning me away from his daughter. He said she must never marry, though I don’t understand why. Why may she not, if she wishes it?’ He turned back to his work. ‘You’re late tonight, Jem. But I am still not finished, even so. Will you wait a while?’ I nodded. I had taken to searching through the various boxes of letters that were stacked about, to see what I might find. He never asked me why and I did not say, but hours would pass with us both working in silence – he on his drawings, me searching, searching in vain for something more from my mother, another letter perhaps, a voice from the grave that told me something more of the person she had been.
The hours passed. Neither of us noticed how dark and quiet it had become until we were disturbed by a scuffling sound coming from downstairs. Somewhere deep in the building a clock chimed – nine o’clock! How late it now was! The scuffling grew louder. I heard a gasp, and then all at once there came the sound of glass shattering. I sprang to my feet and rushed out into the passage. I should have guessed that something was amiss – the silence had been too pregnant, the scuffling that had started up had had a desperate quality to it, like heels drumming and fingers scrabbling though I had been too distracted for it to register in my mind. I clattered down the stairs to the museum. The place was in darkness, and although it was clear that something was happening somewhere, I could not see where. At the sound of my feet on the stair the noise stopped – to be replaced by a gasp and a hoarse cry. I still could not see who it was or what had happened. I crept forward, through the dark ranks of glittering specimens.
Ahead of me in the gloom I saw a figure, a dark shape struggling to its feet. He sank to his knees, then tried to rise again, his hands clutched about his neck. It was Dr Strangeway. Up ahead, beyond the figure, there was nothing – and yet the darkness seemed to stir, as if someone had just that moment moved quickly through it. Dr Strangeway was now leaning against the shelves, coughing and gasping, his hand to his throat. Beside him, knocked to the floor, his candle rolled. His attacker would have been able to follow him easily through the exhibits on stealthy feet.
‘Will!’ I shouted, but he was already close behind me. ‘Look after him,’ I said. My eyes fixed on the shadowy darkness ahead, I plunged through the shelves and into the heart of the anatomy museum.
The museum was the largest room in the building. A pair of double doors half way down opened out onto the room of écorchés – the scalded men – the wax exhibits and animal bones, and from there through to Dr Strangeway’s workshop. All was dark. Usually there were students, at leas
t one or two, their candles glowing amongst the shelves, though Dr Crowe was always complaining how rarely the students used the museum. Now, there was no one at all. I wished I had a candle myself, though as my quarry did not have one either we were evenly matched. I stopped and listened. Up ahead I felt the whisper of movement, though the darkness seemed thicker than ever. Bottles and jars, usually catching the candlelight in a thousand glittering points, were dark. The blinds over the windows that protected the specimens from the glare of the sun were half raised. Halliday liked to position them that way once the day was on the wane, for he preferred to work in daylight if he could. Outside the moon was shrouded in clouds of tarnished silver. But the wind was up, and all at once the dark was swept aside. The moonlight flooded in, the museum glimmering in a ghastly monochrome. Ahead, a shadow drifted silently away.
‘Stop!’ My voice was as shrill as broken glass. I ran down the room, the only way out was back the way we had come or out through the doors at the end and into the écorché room and the wax workshop – Dr Strangeway’s lair. Surely I could catch them before they reached it. But the moon was a capricious friend that night and all at once it vanished. The darkness it left behind was more complete than ever. Up ahead I sensed that my quarry had hesitated. Something had stalled them – now was my chance!
I plunged between the shelves. I did not see the row of glass bottles that had been set across my path until it was too late. I ran straight into them, kicking one over with the toe of my boot. It spun out across the floor, the contents spilling in a slippery pool. My feet skittered in the mess, the smell of preserving spirits rising up. I felt something soft and meaty squelch beneath my heel and I slipped, crashing down to lie amongst the wreckage. I felt a cold, yielding wet blob beneath my hand, the spike of a shard of glass, and then I was up again and moving forward. Behind me I heard a voice – Will shouting after me – but I did not answer. Part of me hoped that he thought I might be hurt, that he would worry and come after me, that he would think about me at least. The moon came out again, and then vanished once more, a strobe of silver in that gleaming world of flesh and glass and fluid. Up ahead, my quarry moved without hesitation, still no more than a dark shadow. Was it man or woman? I could not tell.
I saw a shape flit through the door up ahead and I followed it into the museum of bones. Inside, everything was suddenly, eerily, still. There was no way back other than past me, and no way forward but into the wax workshop. What would I do when I found them? I hardly knew. I heard a sound behind me – Will at last! I turned to bid him be quiet – but it was not Will at all. Instead there was only blackness, and in it, surging towards me, was a vision of hell, red muscle and white eyeballs, a grinning mouth and high bald head. I had only a moment to wonder – were there two of them? Two working in tandem? – before the thing was upon me – cold and hard and much heavier than I expected. Down I went, crushed to the floor beneath the female écorché. In the darkness, her face, inches from mine, seemed demonic, furious, a parody of my own crimson mask. But while my face was ugly in its lack of uniformity, she was perfect in every line and angle, possessed of a terrible fiendish beauty that made me cry out in terror, for all that I knew she was nothing but wax laid upon bone. I heard footsteps, hasty now, but light and faint. A door opened and closed and I knew they were gone. I shoved the wax model aside. Hands helped me to my feet. It was Will.
‘Leave me alone,’ I said, petulant that he had seen me caught out, that he had heard me scream. He stepped back while I dusted my clothes.
‘Dr Strangeway was attacked in the anatomy museum,’ he said. ‘This was about his neck.’ He held out a scarf, a thin shawl of pale blue lace stretched tight into a narrow rope. I had seen it before. I could tell by Will’s face that he had too, for it belonged to Lilith Crowe.
Dr Strangeway sat in his wax workshop. He was alone at his workbench with his head in his hands. Usually the place was blazing with light, but he sat now with only a candle on the table, a dim and lonely flame that made the shadows leap. The shelves that lined the walls were filled with skulls and faces, organs, limbs, malignancies, bones and torsos all perfectly rendered in wax. On the table before him lay Mrs Roseplucker’s visage. Her eyes were closed, her expression set in a belligerent frown. It had been expertly painted, from her whey coloured flesh to the fine bloom of thread veins that covered her cheeks, and the moist sore at the edge of her nose. Somehow I found the image reassuring – if Mrs Roseplucker was with us then surely all was well?
‘Yes,’ he said, seeing where my gaze was fixed. ‘It’s very good, isn’t it? It’s from a series of moulages of syphilis we have worked on over the years. I believe Sorrow and Silence—’ his voice seemed to snag on their names, as though he wished he did not have to utter them. ‘I believe they found this lady at the gates. We have a series of six now.’
‘You no longer make models, do you, sir?’
He shook his head and held out his hands. ‘The scars,’ he said. ‘I had smallpox years ago. My sister – Dr Crowe’s wife – and myself, we both had it. I have no idea where it came from. A nursemaid who was helping to look after the children, some said. Her cousin was afflicted,’ he shrugged. ‘Who can say why the disease chooses some and not others? Why some of us recovered and others did not. We had all been vaccinated.’ He held out his hands. ‘It did not seem too bad at first, but as time passed I lost more and more movement. I lost the desire to draw too.’
‘It’s Lilith, isn’t it? Lilith who makes the models.’
He nodded. ‘Lilith and her sisters. They do all the wax modelling. Sorrow and Silence are quite remarkable. Especially Sorrow. She is blind, but her hands—’ he shook his head. ‘She does not need eyes to know what is before her.’ He stood up and went to a screened-off portion of the studio. ‘Come and see this.’
He pulled back a curtain. On the table behind was a bust perfectly rendered in wax.
‘It’s me!’ I hardly knew what else to say. How had she managed to capture such a likeness with only her touch, I could not begin to imagine. There was but one crucial difference – she had omitted my scarlet birthmark. Of course she had, for she could not see it. Without it, I looked like the woman I was, my expression pensive, wary. I turned away, unsure how I felt to be confronted by my unblemished self. ‘Silence helped,’ said Dr Strangeway seeing my expression. ‘They both did it. They find you,’ he hesitated, a smile suddenly playing about his lips, ‘fascinating.’
‘But that night in the mortuary,’ said Will. ‘That was you. I saw you.’
‘It was Miss Crowe,’ I said. ‘Was it not? I think you no longer anatomise either, do you, sir? And it is such an unladylike activity. So Lilith does it, collecting the organs she needs at night.’
‘But I saw you,’ said Will. ‘Not her.’
‘She wears a mask,’ I said. ‘Though what, exactly, she is hiding is not yet clear.’ I looked at Dr Strangeway. ‘A mask of wax, I think?’
Dr Strangeway nodded. ‘The young gentlemen sometimes stay in the library all night. They work in the dissecting room until late, they appear at the oddest times, even,’ he gave the faintest of smiles, ‘even in the mortuary. Sometimes Gloag is there – it is so much easier, for everyone, if they all think that it is me. And I am easy to “be”,’ he looked at me without flinching. ‘My mask is a greater disguise even than yours.’ His glaze slid away. Dr Strangeway had a way of not meeting the eyes of his interlocutor. It spoke of the desire not to be seen. I had noted it also in the way that he kept to the shadows, the way he walked with his head down, the way he put a hand up to shield himself from the stares of others. They were mannerisms I had once had myself, when I was younger and more conscious of how ugly my birthmark was. People saw at a glance how he was afflicted and they looked away – in pity at his appearance, in fear at how disease might single out any one of us. It was easy for Miss Crowe to make a wax mask, the skin whorled and pitted, the eyes small and blunted by scar tissue. A cloak, some gloves, no one would notice. Silas
Strangeway was known to be reclusive, eccentric, anyone might become him if they wished.
‘What is going on here, Dr Strangeway?’ I said. ‘You know as well as I do that Wilson is dead. You know Dr Wragg was murdered. You know that those hands, severed and left to be found with that card between the fingers, are not simply a student prank. I’ve never seen a place less full of high spirits than Corvus Hall! Apart from in Dr Cruikshank’s lecture theatre the students seem uneasy. Frightened almost. Who can blame them!’ I added. ‘I have no idea why they stay!’
‘They love Dr Crowe and Dr Cruikshank,’ he replied. ‘Those gentlemen have always commanded the highest regard, the greatest respect. The men are loyal to them. They have always been so. They must be so, even though sacrifices sometimes have to be made—’ His voice trembled with anxiety, his scarred hands twisting together.
‘You mean murder?’ said Will.
‘The students have nothing to be frightened of.’
‘I think they have every reason to be frightened,’ I said. ‘Look at Wilson!’
Dr Strangeway shook his head. ‘You don’t understand.’
Dr Allardyce had said the same thing. ‘Then tell me, sir,’ I said. ‘What is it that I do not understand?’
He pressed his lips together, his eyes darting to the door as if in fear that someone might be out there, might be listening.
Will held out the blue silk scarf. ‘Dr Strangeway, I found you with this wrapped about your neck. Someone was attempting to strangle you. Is not the time for silence long gone?’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘It was very nearly quite definitely something.’
‘I cannot say—’ His glance flickered over my shoulder again. I turned, half expecting to see Sorrow and Silence. Instead, there was Lilith Crowe and Dr Cruikshank. At the sight of them, Dr Strangeway stood up. I could not tell from his expression whether he was alarmed or relieved. A muscle in his cheek quivered. ‘Thank you for your help, Mr Flockhart. Mr Quartermain. But there is nothing here to worry about.’ His eyes darted to Lilith.
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