Surgeons’ Hall

by E. S. Thomson

  ‘How? That’s easy. Franklyn himself tells us how: the building at Tanner’s Lodgings was like a warren, men and women were everywhere. There was a door at the back of Mary’s room. It was not locked. Anyone might come in or out. Franklyn tells us that he found a boy outside with a silver shilling in his hand. Where would a boy of that age have got such a coin and not have had it snatched from his fingers by his drunken mother? I would argue that he had been in possession of it for only a short time. I suggest to you that it was Dr Allardyce who strangled Mary Anderson almost to the death, but that he was disturbed in his endeavours by Miss Crowe. Perhaps she had come to the Cowgate in search of her father. Perhaps she had come to reason with Mary Anderson. We may never know, but come she did, and it is just as well that she arrived at that moment. The memory she has of her fingers pulling the scarf about Mary’s neck are a memory of her trying to loosen it, trying to save the girl. And when she could not, when she thought her dead, she did a quite extraordinary thing: drawing upon the knowledge her father had never stinted to give her, she performed a caesarean section and saved the dying girl’s babies, her own half-sisters.

  ‘And while all this was taking place, you, Dr Allardyce, were hidden in the passage at the back and had paid the lad you found there a shilling for his silence. According to Dr Strangeway, he and Lilith finished their work about the body of Mary Anderson and left, he first, she second. Dr Strangeway assumed that Lilith had murdered the woman before he arrived and then cut off her face after he left. She had no clear recollection of it. At fifteen years old to cut open a dying woman and remove her foetuses? Is it any wonder she could hardly say what she had or had not done?

  ‘But what if those acts were committed by someone else? Someone else strangled Mary, and someone else cut off her face. That someone was hiding in the passage, waiting for Lilith and Dr Strangeway to leave before he finished off the job he had started, his last act being to take away the face that had so entranced him. It was the face of the woman he had loved, the face of Mrs Crowe, curiously possessed by the girl Thrawn-Leggit Mary, the crippled prostitute who did not deserve to have it.’

  ‘This is complete nonsense,’ cried Dr Allardyce. His hands clutched at the box on his knee, as if he were about to throw it at my head. ‘How dare you accuse me—’

  ‘And of course,’ I went on, ‘there is the evidence of Dr Cruikshank. Allardyce’s excitement was palpable, he says. And yet why would you be so excited at the death of a prostitute? He also notes that Allardyce already had his coat and hat on and had picked up a lantern from the store. But then later he tells us—’ I shuffled through the pages, searching for the bits I had marked out. ‘He tells us the blood from the dissecting tables still glistened on the lad’s fingernails, so hastily had we left our work at Surgeons’ Square. But Allardyce had not been at the dissecting tables. There was no reason for him to have bloody hands, bloody cuffs. Unless he had been dissecting elsewhere that night.

  ‘As for the knife that was left at the scene – Franklyn’s Liston knife. Dr Cruikshank says that Franklyn went to get his coat abandoning his knives and saws where they lay. It was the perfect opportunity for Allardyce to put one in his pocket. And he was the last man out at Tanner’s Lodgings, both Dr Wragg and Dr Cruikshank remarked on it. Dr Allardyce had plenty of time to put Franklyn’s knife wherever he wished.’

  ‘Unless Cruikshank purposely wrote his statement to incriminate me,’ cried Dr Allardyce. ‘He was crouched over the body the whole time. He had more than enough opportunity to leave Franklyn’s knife there. It is he you should be accusing. He never liked me. He still doesn’t. Look how I have never been promoted beyond demonstrator. They will not even let me lecture!’

  ‘Because you are not good enough,’ said Dr Cruikshank. ‘I always hoped you’d develop a private practice, more surgery less anatomy, just to get you away from the class, but you never did. I’ve seen you when you have the knife in your hand and the patient before you. Even now that they are etherised still you cannot make the cut.’ He frowned. ‘And yet you never used to be so. Back when it was speed that mattered, when they were alive and screaming under our hands, then you were not so bad at all.’

  ‘And there are other matters,’ I said. ‘The dresses that were saved from the fire. It is customary for the possessions of a smallpox victim to be burned, and yet a couple of Mrs Crowe’s dresses were saved. No one knew how. Was it you, Dr Allardyce? As Dr Crowe’s apprentice you lived with him and his family, you had every opportunity to take some of Mrs Crowe’s clothes. And then to see it on a crooked beggar girl? You hardly knew whether you loved it or hated it, did you? You admitted to Franklyn that it was you who had got the green dress back from the pawn shop.’

  Dr Allardyce said nothing.

  ‘And it is my belief that we might find something of great significance to the case in that box of specimens that you have so kindly saved from the inferno – an inferno started by you, I might add, for someone locked the doors upon us. We all saw the tooth that night, Dr Allardyce, you drew the same conclusions that Miss Crowe and I drew. You had to get rid of Halliday before he got rid of you – or before he admitted who he was and why he was here. Before he showed these precognitions to anyone and they too worked out, as I have, what happened on the night of the 18th December 1830.’

  ‘But Dr Allardyce was with us in the anatomy room,’ piped up Tanhauser. ‘He was there all evening. He helped us raise the alarm. He worked all night to save Dr Crowe’s possessions—’

  ‘He was not with us the whole time,’ said Squires. ‘He went out to the dead house. Not for long, but long enough to go round and up to the museum.’

  Will stepped forward and pulled the box from Dr Allardyce’s grip. At first, I thought the man was not going to let go, for his fingers tightened about the edges, his expression darkening. And then all at once he gave it up. He sat back and closed his eyes, his face a slack mask of defeat. Will put the box on the table. One by one he lifted out jars of specimens. They were monsters and curiosities mainly – a two headed baby, a diseased pancreas, a giant liver fluke. And then, at last, there it was: a large jar, the glass thick and yellowish, the liquid within freshly changed. I lifted it gingerly and placed it on the table top. Inside, no less beautiful despite all it had been through, was the face of Thrawn-Leggit Mary.

  It was a skilful job, of that there was no doubt, and Dr Allardyce had looked after it well. It swam before us, the mouth a sorrowful crescent, the eyes closed, the lips pale and waxy, the flesh with that waterlogged look all specimens take on in the end.

  It should have ended there. But he had given up too easily and I might have guessed there would be more. And we were all mesmerised by the face in the jar, the face that had caused so much misfortune for so many. Allardyce was a coward, there was no question, but he was a desperate one. It took only a moment. He sprang to his feet, pulling a knife from his pocket. I recognised it as the knife Halliday had abandoned beside Strangeway’s severed hand. Upon it, already darkened with blood, were the words et mortui sua arcana narrabunt. Holding the knife in his right hand, with his left he seized Silence by the arm, jerking her to her feet and holding her tight against his breast. She made a low moaning sound, the knife at her throat drawing a trickle of blood as the tip pierced the skin.

  ‘Let me pass,’ he said. His eyes were wild, darting here and there, his forehead beaded with oily sweat. I saw his tongue, white and anxious, flicker across dry lips. ‘Let me pass and I will be gone and you will never see me again.’ He dragged Silence towards the door, the knife jagging her throat so that the blood flowed faster. One slip and he would slice through her neck as if through butter. ‘It is Halliday who was guilty,’ he hissed. ‘Not I, you saw that yourselves. And now Halliday is dead. Mary Anderson was nothing. Nothing! A crippled beggar. How dare she have the face of my beloved. How dare she! She made a mockery of my darling’s memory, with her vile shuffling gait and her filthy black crutches. And so I took it. I took the face she sho
uld never have had in the first place and I kept it safe—’

  He got no further. The gunshot rang out, a great roar that made our ears sing, the world turning dim and muffled as our eardrums rang. Instinctively I clapped my hands over my ears. I saw that everyone else had done the same, saw their mouths wide with horror, their lips moving as they cried out, though I could not hear what they said. Everyone, that is, but Silence Crowe, who had not heard a thing and remained where she was, standing motionless, the blood at her neck trickling into the collar of her dress. At her feet lay Allardyce, a hole between his eyes, the wall behind him an explosion of crimson mush. And behind me, her silver eyes blind and clouded, stood Sorrow Crowe, Dr Cruikshank’s service revolver still smoking in her hands.

  The place where Corvus Hall had stood was a place of terrible destruction. The building, so filled with dried and preserved items, with vats of wax and bottles of spirits, had burned with an incandescence that had been visible as far away as Islington Fields. What was left once the fire had burned itself out was no more than a shell. The walls loomed black and windowless. Some of the structure had been rendered unstable by the heat, and men had come and pulled it down. In its truncated form, only the ground storey and a flight of steps leading up to the non-existent front door remained. A pathetic stump of a building, it looked curiously benign, so that it was hard to imagine the activities that had taken place within its once proud walls. By spring and summer the whole area would be colonised by plants that loved scorched earth – rosebay, poppies, buddleia. Until their wild beauty softened its harsh black edges, the place would remain an ugly ruin.

  What had been found inside the building’s burnt out shell was even more unsettling. The boys and girls of St Saviour’s Street had sifted through the wreckage in amazement, for everywhere amongst the rubble they had found what looked like tears, frozen glittering tears of melted glass. And scattered all about them were bones of all kinds, legs, arms, ribs, the bones of humans and the bones of animals – mammals and birds – and skulls, skulls everywhere. Everything was as black as charcoal, and so charred that they crumbled to ash as soon as they were touched, blowing away like ghosts upon the wind. After that the children stayed away.

  But there was one last surprise from Corvus Hall. It came a week after the place had burned down. Will and I were sitting in the apothecary on either side of the fire. Above our heads were bunches of hyssop and feverfew drying in the warmth. The air was heavy with the smell of cardamom and ginger, for Gabriel was boiling up a cordial. Jenny was grinding nutmeg, and the scent of the crushed spice was warm about us. Will regarded me thoughtfully. He had been pensive, distracted, for some days, and I was becoming worried about him. He had not mentioned Lilith Crowe once, and I had not pressed him, for we had seen none of them since that night. I wondered whether he was going to mention her now, for I saw him take a breath, his gaze sorrowful, but wary.

  ‘Look, Jem,’ he said. ‘You know that day in the bone room, the day you found . . . that letter from your mother.’

  I blinked. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well I found some others. A number of them. They are from . . . from some months before your birth.’

  I sat up. ‘How long have you had them?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter how long. The question is, do you want them?’

  ‘Of course I do!’

  ‘Do you? They may tell you something about your parentage that you do not wish to hear. Or they may not. Whatever they say, there is every chance it will not make comfortable reading.’

  ‘You mean I may learn that my father was Dr Bain?’ I said. ‘I may learn that my mother betrayed her husband with the student who shared their lodgings?’

  ‘If you learn that it will mean that you are free from your father’s shadow,’ he replied. ‘Free from the threat of madness that hangs over you every day.’

  ‘It would mean that my life so far has been an even bigger lie than I had realised,’ I muttered.

  ‘Your father did his best for you, whatever choices he made on your behalf. He believed you to be his child, that much is clear. And perhaps you are.’ He held the bundle of letters on his lap. ‘Or perhaps not.’

  ‘And if I find that Dr Bain is not my father I should be disappointed?’

  He smiled. ‘I have no idea what you should feel, Jem. Only you can know that. But it is your choice to know, your choice to read these letters from your mother to Dr Bain. You may discover your true parentage, which may mean that you are truly your father’s child, or it may mean that you are not. But one thing is clear, and that is that Jeremiah Flockhart was your father. He looked after you, he cared for you, he gave you his love of medicine, his profession, his name. Everything that you are, everything about you that we – that I – love, is because of him. And that, my dear Jem, will never change.’ He held out the letters. ‘Take them.’

  They were old, faded and yellowed. They had been tied together with a narrow pink ribbon as if once upon a time they had meant something to someone, though after years at the bottom of a box it was frayed and dirty. Should I open them? Would it not be better to leave the man I had always thought of as my father with his dignity? Or should I too betray him, and read my dead mother’s secret words to her lover? I ran my finger across the smooth nap of the paper, and then I slid them in my pocket.

  For three days I carried them about with me. Will never asked about them, and for that I was grateful, though I knew he was watching me, knew he was ready to talk if I wished it. And then on the fourth day, I decided. I owned only a very few items that had once belonged to my mother – a Bible, a book of recipes for herbal preparations, a green cambric dress, a miniature of her that my father had loved, and the trunk in which I kept them all. I sat on my bed with the trunk open before me. Outside the sun was shining. I could hear Will whistling downstairs in the apothecary, Gabriel and Jenny singing as they worked on a tincture of black cohosh, nettle and wormwood. It had been my father’s recipe, and one of his most effective against both the croup and the worms. I put the letters inside the trunk, and I closed the lid.

  I would never have completed this book without the help of some significant people. In particular, my marvellous agent-friend Jenny Brown, and all the creative and clever people at Constable, notably, Krystyna Green, Amanda Keats, Ellie Russell, John Fairweather, Kate Truman, Brionee Fenlon, Jess Gulliver, Ellen Rockell, Andrew Davidson, and my efficient and thorough copy-editor, Una McGovern.

  As ever, there are some friends and family who have made the writing journey less isolated – John Burnett, always my first reader and critic, and my super-talented writing coven Margaret Reis, Olga Wojtas and Michelle Wards. Trevor Griffiths remains the most interesting and witty man I know, and made a tough writing year much better than it might have been – thank you for everything. Thanks also to Paul Lynch, if only everyone was as complimentary about my output as you are! My mother Jean Thomson, and my lovely sons Guy and Carlo have put up with me for another long twelve months, and let me write when I needed to – love and thanks to you all.

  Jacqueline Cahif, archivist at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, gave up her time and expertise to show me the best things in her archive, as well as looking over some of my work. Jacqueline, I hope the ‘Edinburgh sections’ of this book do you proud. I must also acknowledge the help of Margaret Fox, who first told me about precognitions, and in so doing introduced me to my favourite historical documents of all time. Also Merlin Strangeway, brilliant wax anatomical modeller and artist who first told me about Joseph Towne, and explained wax anatomical modelling. Your emails at the start of this project were invaluable. My gratitude is demonstrated fully, I hope, by my hijacking of your marvellous surname.

  Finally, my grateful thanks to Mark Mercer-Jones, consultant surgeon and former anatomy demonstrator, who was prepared to answer all manner of questions about anatomy and surgery at all times of the day or night. What a kind offer that was – how glad I am that I took you up on it. Any mistakes made
in the interpretation of the information supplied are, of course, entirely mine.

  The events in this book are fictitious, but are inspired by real places and people. A number of secondary sources have proved invaluable. The Great Exhibition 1851 (Manchester University Press, 2017) edited by Jonathon Shears, and Michael Leapman’s The World for a Shilling (Faber, 2011) provided detail about the Exhibition and the extraordinary artefacts on display. The work of Ruth Richardson was essential, notably Death, Dissection and the Destitute (Penguin, 1989) which explained how bodies were procured by anatomy schools after the Anatomy Act of 1832. Also invaluable was The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy (Oxford, 2009) which inspired Will Quartermain’s role as artist and painted a vivid picture of life for medical students in an anatomy school in the mid nineteenth century. Equally relevant on this subject was Medical Teaching in Edinburgh in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (RCSEd, 2003) by Matthew Kaufman, and Druin Burch, Digging up the Dead (Vintage, 2008) – an earlier period but illuminating nonetheless. On the subject of wax anatomical modelling and the work of a female anatomist I drew upon The Lady Anatomist (University of Chicago Press, 2010) by Rebecca Messbarger, Joanna Ebenstein’s The Anatomical Venus (Thames and Hudson, 2016), and for medical illustration consulted Richard Barnett’s The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration (Thames and Hudson, 2014). Lisa Rosner’s brilliant discussion of the Burke and Hare scandal, The Anatomy Murders (University of Pennsylvania, 2011), and Anatomy of Robert Knox: Murder, Mad Science and Medical Regulation in Nineteenth Century Edinburgh (Sussex Academic Press, 2010) by A. W. Bates were both fascinating and invaluable. Finally, the sections in the novel that deal with organs and body parts owe much to the insights of Gavin Francis’s Adventures in Human Being (Wellcome, 2016). As always, any errors made in the interpretation of these marvellous histories are down to me.