Surgeons’ Hall

by E. S. Thomson

  ‘Who is it?’ cried Sorrow. She looked about wildly, her face anguished, tears pouring from her silver eyes. She would be able to sense death, and fear, though her world would be dark. How terrified she must be. She staggered against the chair where Dr Strangeway was positioned. Blood from the stump of his hand had pooled about the floor and sopped into the hem of her dress.

  ‘What in God’s name have you done?’ cried Will. He staggered back, his hand to his head, his face grey. The sight was so horrible I was sure he would faint, but he did not.

  ‘Help me, Will,’ I said. ‘Find a paintbrush.’

  ‘A paintbrush—?’

  ‘Just do it!’ I dashed forward. ‘And then get this thing from around his neck. Is he alive? Miss Crowe. Sorrow. Is he alive?’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered. Her fingers gripped my arm like the roots of a tree. ‘I was trying to . . . to—’

  ‘To help. Yes,’ I said. I seized the length of bandage that streamed from her hand. ‘And this was to be a tourniquet. It is perfect.’

  I slid the paintbrush beneath the tourniquet I had tied about his arm, and turned it, pulling the band tight and stopping the flow of blood. The cloth about his neck dug into his flesh but I sliced through it with the Liston knife, snatched from Silence’s limp grasp. She seemed transfixed, staring at her uncle, at the blood, unable to move. Dr Strangeway slumped sideways almost onto the floor. Together, Will and I hauled him onto the workbench. He lay there, as still and silent as one of his own wax models, surrounded by his paints, pigments, varnishes, all the clutter of his life.

  ‘Who did this?’ Will said. He seized Silence by the shoulders. ‘Who? Did you see them?’ But she could not speak, she could not do anything but shake her head, her face paler than ever, a great splash of blood across her cheek. Her cuffs were daubed in the stuff.

  ‘Let her go,’ I said. ‘She must fetch help for we do not have time to fetch it ourselves.’ I took Silence Crowe by the shoulders, and looked into her eyes. ‘Miss Silence,’ I said. ‘I need you to bring your father here. He will know what to do with Dr Strangeway. He must stop the blood. Sorrow must stay with him, the tourniquet must be pulled tight or he will die.’

  I turned to leave – our night had just begun and there was no time to waste standing over a dying man – when I noticed a letter lying amongst the wreckage on the table top. The address was freshly inked, the folds recent, the sealing wax hastily done. It was addressed to me. I snatched it up and stuffed it into my pocket. ‘Upstairs,’ I said to Will. ‘But softly.’

  He was sitting at his desk, the stuff of his profession, his calling, all around him in a sea of bottles, papers, bones, books. He had taken his neckerchief off and flung it aside. I thought I saw a ruby pin glittering amongst its folds, and then I realised that it was a great clot of blood, wet and sticky against the freshly laundered cambric. He was working. Somehow it did not occur to him to stop – there were jobs to be done, sections for the anatomy manual to write, specimens to be re-labelled and catalogued. He could not sit still. His work was his life, and as always he turned to it for solace. But there could be none for him that evening, for he would hang for what he had done.

  ‘Yes? What is it?’ he said, as if it was just another day and Will and I just another interruption. ‘I have to get on. I have work to do before I go.’

  ‘Go where?’ I said. ‘To Newgate?’

  At that he stopped, and turned to look at us. ‘Yes,’ he said lightly. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ He sighed and sat back in his chair. The candles on his desk quivered at the movement, the shadows of skulls, bones, boxes, all the lumber of generations tall and black against the wall.

  ‘I knew you’d find me.’ He sighed. ‘You see, Wilson was always a problem, and he was only the beginning.’

  ‘Wilson?’ I said.

  ‘Of course, I wanted them to know straight away what was happening, to guess that judgement had arrived – and they would guess.’ Halliday leaned forward. ‘I wanted them to be terrified. Terrified – of what might happen, of who would be next, terrified by their own uncertainty – how could retribution have arrived? From what quarter? How might they stop it? Should they confess? But I knew they would never do that. And so it was up to me to bring them to justice.’

  ‘Who?’ I said. ‘For what?’

  ‘Oh!’ he laughed. ‘Of course, you don’t know, do you?’He shook his head. Then, ‘I suppose it was the game that gave me away.’

  ‘The game?’ said Will. ‘What game?’

  ‘I thought nothing of it at the time,’ I said. ‘But Miss Crowe knew. And then when I considered what had happened that evening, when I thought about her reaction when she had played the game, then I knew too—’

  ‘Knew what?’ cried Will. ‘Come on, Jem, it can hardly be Halliday who’s to blame for all this.’

  ‘Oh he’s certainly to blame for some of it,’ I said.

  ‘What game?’

  ‘The memory game,’ I replied. ‘The tooth. The tooth that was in Halliday’s pocket. It was Dr Wragg’s tooth. When Miss Crowe – at that time quite innocent of whom she was talking to – asked Halliday to empty his pockets there was a tooth amongst the miscellany. Not that there is anything unusual about that for an anatomist. But this tooth was distinctive. It was a yellow front tooth, with a shard of mahogany adhering to it. It was a tooth from Dr Wragg’s dentures. I found the rest of them in Dr Wragg’s room. That was where you strangled him, wasn’t it? He struggled – as far as an old man who is sick and addled by opium can struggle. His teeth fell out. Perhaps they broke, perhaps they were stamped on, I don’t know what, but in the kerfuffle a piece lodged in your clothes, in the sagging pocket of your coat. Miss Crowe recognised it. Miss Silence too. And then they knew. Why else would it be there, if you had no involvement with his murder? And, although I have no idea why you have done these things, I am quite certain that they do.’

  ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ he muttered. ‘I suppose it’s fitting in a way.’

  In his hand I saw he was holding another Liston knife, the blade new and gleaming and razor sharp. The box from which it had come was open upon the desk. Inside, I saw the set of surgical knives Dr Crowe had presented to him earlier that evening.

  ‘He gave my brother a set just like these,’ he said. ‘And then he watched while he was wrongly accused of murder.’

  ‘Who?’ I said. ‘Who accused him of murder?’

  He tut tutted. Thrusting a hand into his pocket he pulled out a wad of papers, folded up long-ways and tied with a narrow pink ribbon. ‘These are all you need to see,’ he said. ‘Copied verbatim, but you can go to Edinburgh and read the originals for yourself.’

  I took them from him. Precognition Papers for the Murder of Mary Anderson, 18th December 1830.

  ‘1830?’ I said. ‘But you must have only been—’

  ‘Four years old,’ he said. ‘Yes. John Franklyn was my brother. He’s in those papers. Read them and you’ll see. He was accused of the most terrible of crimes, of the murder of a young woman. Of desecrating her corpse, killing her child and hiding its body. He did none of those things. I cannot believe it of him.’ He stopped what he was doing, and turned to face us. ‘My mother died of grief,’ he said. ‘Her precious boy, her clever lad who was to make her so proud – through his own brains and ambition had been chosen to be apprentice to the great Dr Crowe of Surgeons’ Square. He was made demonstrator when he was twenty-one years old. So young! They gave him knives just like these as a present.’ He held out one of the blades. The words engraved on it glittered darkly. ‘Et mortui sua arcana narrabunt. And the dead will give up their secrets.’ His smile was bitter. ‘I wondered, when they gave me these, whether they knew. But they did not. They saw it as fitting. An appropriate reward for all my hard work and achievements. I saw it as a cruel taunt. They had no idea what the consequences of their gentleman’s silence had been. Protecting their own, as usual.

  ‘You see, when it really mattered, when my
brother needed his medical friends, his own master, to speak up for him, they abandoned him. And when he died, trying to escape his pursuers, trying to run to the master who could have defended his honour and reputation, who could vouch for his character and integrity, they said nothing then either. His death – an accident, but the result of his flight from justice – was regarded as an admission of guilt. They say his knife was found beneath the dead woman’s bed. But my brother would not kill a woman in cold blood. And if he had he would not have left his knife behind! They say he wanted the girl’s corpse. But so did all of them! Would he have killed her for it? Of course not! She was doomed anyway, she could not have survived her pregnancy. All he had to do was wait.’ His face was dark with fury, the knife in his hand twitching, so that it jagged against the table with a harsh scraping sound.

  ‘And so my mother and I were left alone. My father was long gone. Jamie had taken it upon his own shoulders to look after us, and so he did, though he had little enough of a wage from Dr Crowe. But he worked hard, and we knew he was to be a great man. When he died we were left with nothing. He was a murderer, they said. The murderer of a poor crippled beggar, a defenceless girl and her innocent babe. He had lied in his statement; he had fled when his crimes had become known. In the space of an hour all we had was lost to us. Our Jamie, the reputation of our family, our old lives, all of it was gone for ever. I was now the brother of a murderer, a coward, a liar, a desecrator of corpses. Not that they cared anything for that. We were nothing to them. Even when my mother went up to Dr Crowe’s house he would not see her. Why? Because if they had spoken up, if they had insisted on his innocence, then that would mean the murderer of that crippled girl was still at large.’

  He coughed, his throat dry after such an impassioned speech, and he reached for the bottle of cordial that stood on his desk. He took a deep draught. ‘And so I decided that I would take matters into my own hands. Why should they escape their crimes? Who really killed Mary Anderson and took her baby?’ He looked about, his eyes glittering, his cheeks flushed. ‘The foetus is here somewhere in the anatomy museum, I am quite certain. I have not found it yet, but I will.’ He turned back to the box he was unpacking. One by one he pulled out the jars, examining the contents and the dates. ‘They would keep it, just as they have kept the bones of the mother and her sister. Did you know she hanged herself? Clenchie Kate they called her. She hanged herself from the South Bridge in Edinburgh, her body swinging over the Cowgate.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I saw her hanging there. Her face all black. A tiny figure no bigger than a child. I was a child, but I can still remember it. They killed her, just as they killed her sister, and my brother. They took the girls’ bodies for trophies.’ His voice was a low mutter, his fingers feverish as he rooted in another box.

  ‘Dr Wragg was meticulous,’ he said. ‘Despite his other failings. Every single item is labelled.’ He waved a hand. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Take a seat. Read those papers. They will tell you all you need to know. And I am not going anywhere tonight. Not till I find Thrawn-Leggit Mary’s child.’

  ‘You killed Wilson?’ said Will. ‘But why? He is younger than you. He was not in Edinburgh in 1830.’

  ‘No, but his father was. A constable, so I discovered. The man who found the knife beneath the bed, who asked no questions about it, but assumed Dr Cruikshank had merely overlooked it.’ He scowled. ‘As culpable as any of them. Did he not wonder that the perpetrator of such a terrible crime was so careless as to leave his own knife behind? A knife that could belong to only one person? No. He asked no questions as it suited him to accept the simplest of explanations. He’s dead, but his son, I discovered, was right here.’ He lifted another bottle, peered at the label, at the pinkish globular contents, and set it aside. The room was warm, the space beneath the eaves gathering the heat of the whole building. I saw the dust hanging in the air, felt it sharp and dry against my throat. Halliday felt it too, and he swigged again from the earthen bottle of cordial.

  ‘I was going to kill Wragg first,’ he said conversationally. ‘But then one evening I went out drinking with Tanhauser and the others. Wilson came along. He was as drunk as a lord. And so I took my chance – the opportunity may never have presented itself so readily again. And, I admit, I was probably not thinking as clearly as I should. I’d been drinking too – I realised that I would have the police upon me before I’d even started if I was not careful. And so I removed his face. I wanted to hide who he was, and yet it reminded them of Mary, and what had happened to her. You see I wanted Crowe, Cruikshank, Allardyce, all of them to know exactly what was happening – that their time had come at last. I left the hand amongst the exhibits. I wanted them to see it, in front of the students too. I had been led to believe that all of them were going up to the Exhibition – along with the students. I would not have them hide it away, and so I ensured that there could be no concealment. They would see the hand, the right hand, the hand that signed their statements, that was not raised in my brother’s defence, that they had held up under oath and condemned the reputation of my family.

  ‘Just as I was leaving the place I bumped into Allardyce. I wondered whether he’d followed me – turned out he had, but not because he had any idea about what I was doing.’ Halliday gave a wild laugh. ‘He said he wanted to apologise for accusing me of stealing his work! Well, of course I went along. He took me to a chop house. I don’t know what happened but I ended up drunk and half dead with the cholera. By the time I got back you two were sniffing around—’ he shook his head. ‘Nothing was going to plan, but what could I do? Besides,’ he smiled. ‘They knew what was going on. Et mortui sua arcana narrabunt. The words engraved on my brother’s knives. The words Dr Crowe used to conclude his lectures – not that he has used them since he was in Edinburgh. But he knew. They all knew. They knew their sins had found them out, and that was enough for me. Dr Wragg was next – an old rogue with no scruples about anything, prepared to do whatever was necessary as long as there were enough bodies to ensure the students kept coming. And tonight it was the turn of Dr Strangeway – I thought you’d catch me that night in the anatomy museum, Flockhart. I’d no idea you two were still up here!’ He frowned and worked faster, pushing aside the box he had just looked through and lifting another into place. ‘It must be here.’ The room had become stifling.

  ‘But to kill them?’ said Will. ‘You’re no better than they are. Worse, in fact. And you will hang, and they will not. And what will you have achieved?’

  ‘I hardly care about that,’ he snapped. ‘Have you any idea what it is like to go to school and be taunted for your brother’s crimes – crimes he did not commit? To come home every day to a mother consumed by sorrow? She never recovered. How could she? We moved away from Edinburgh, we changed our name. But still we knew, she and I, we knew that someone, and not our Jamie, had killed that girl. They would not help us. They closed ranks. Gentlemen, of course, excluding the lad o’ pairts they liked to celebrate. Each one of them wrote a statement, signed it, witnessed it as being a true and honest account but at least one of them was lying.’

  ‘Can you smell burning?’ said Will. ‘And it’s as hot as Hades up here.’

  Halliday raised his head. He staggered to his feet. He took two steps forward, and his knees buckled. I stuffed the papers he had given me into my pocket and leaped forward. ‘What is it?’ I said.

  ‘I feel . . . I feel,’ he blinked and put a hand to his stomach. He licked his lips and coughed. I seized the bottle of cordial and sniffed it. I poured a splash into an empty gas jar that did office as a pencil holder. It was a bright, bilious yellow.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Will.

  ‘Cadmium yellow,’ I said. ‘One of the most poisonous of all the tints, paints and dyes in Dr Strangeway’s studio.’

  ‘Dr Strangeway did this?’

  ‘I doubt it. But the sisters, all of them, knew. Lilith felt the betrayal more keenly than anyone—’ I stopped. Should I tell him I had seen her with Halliday? I cou
ld not.

  But Halliday had other ideas. ‘That Lilith Crowe,’ he hissed. ‘She’s a demon.’ He sank to his knees. ‘A siren. Beautiful beyond compare but without scruple, without morals, without a care for anyone. I thought to seduce her, to add that to my destruction of this family, but it was she who came for me. And then once she’d had her fill she wished for nothing more. What manner of woman does that?’

  A woman with desires and passions, I thought. Why did men assume those things to be their preserve alone? Why could they not acknowledge that whatever lusts blazed within them might also blaze inside a woman? She can never marry, Dr Crowe had said. She is not like other women. I shared a similar fate. But such enforced spinsterhood did not remove the desires that raged within us.

  ‘You loved her?’ said Will.

  ‘I did not,’ he replied. ‘I had her, yes, and I was not the first either. But I did not love her. What man could? She is a succubus. A she-devil. I met my match in one such as her.’ He clutched at his stomach and then vomited a thin stream of bright yellow liquid onto the floor. He gasped and wiped his lips. ‘My God, and now she has killed me.’

  I tried to look at Will’s face. But he had turned away and I could not read his expression.

  We half dragged, half carried Halliday out into the passage. Downstairs there would be emetics of some kind that we might give him, something that might help him void the poison he had ingested. It was hot out there, and the air had a gritty smokiness to it. We reached the end, but the doors that might have led us down to the anatomy museum were locked. From beneath the door smoke wreathed. ‘The museum is filled with bottles of alcohol,’ said Will. ‘If the place is on fire, they will explode, and it will burn like Armageddon.’