“Sumner banked all his cash, but I found a strongbox beneath a wide feather bed. Right below a latticed window that caught the first hours of moonlight. Everything smelled cold and wet the way it does in the first months of winter. He had a good wife, kept the insides smelling flowery despite the muskets and man-stuff all over the place. Made me kinda sad for the kinda home I never expect to have. Home, y’know? Nice.
“Anyway, being a smart young man I arranged to be in Sumner’s house on a night I heard he’d be away. ’Course, ol’ Bernie walks through the door, into that flowery bedroom, just as I’m standing there. I’d found a pepperbox pistol in his sock drawer and was aiming it at the lock on the box. It was a big box, kinda like Bernie, old and sturdy and immense.
“Then everything fell into its place. Bernie bellowed; I almost embarrassed myself; Bernie lumbered at me; I shot him through the throat. One minute I was a thief, the next I was a murderer. Didn’t even know what I’d done. I just ran. All the way to Boston with Mr. Sumner’s money.”
Outside the room a distant pub was full of smoke and cheerful uproar. Dysart coughed quietly and reached for his brandy.
Henry looked at Finella, drank her in, taking a ghost’s liberty. “I did wrong, a lot of wrong, always intending to set the balance with good works. That seemed right to me.” He had about one sentence worth of breath left in him. “I need you to know I’m not a bad man.” His chest ached. “That’s all I can say.”
Dysart swallowed his small mouthful and snuffled softly to himself, eyes on the snifter resting on his belly. Jukes’s eyes wandered around the table. Even Dorian said nothing.
“Sir,” Finella said quietly, her voice like balm, and looked him in the eye. “We are extraordinary.” Extra. Ordinary.
Henry looked about the table. All eyes were on him. No one said a word.
The extraordinary fell outside the ordinary.
Home.
“Thank you,” Henry said.
And Dorian raised his glass.
The group cleaved to one another in the days that followed. Their meetings became a nightly affair, giving Dorian and Dysart a chance to discuss and plan which working was to come next. While this went on Jukes listened attentively, while Finella went over the day’s notes from school. These she shared with Henry, taking him through what was covered that day, and in doing so she not only consolidated the lesson in her own head but imparted it to Henry as well. In this way Henry did not miss the school at all. Here he had not only the learning, but also the company of the one person he couldn’t put from his mind.
At school the lectures had shifted from diseases of the bone to injuries of them. Specifically compound fractures.
“What you did to young Leonard has made the rounds, I’m afraid. I suspect you may even have an admirer in the professor.”
“Leonard’s lack of popularity doesn’t make me anything special. Where were we?”
“Traumatic fractures. So…when force is transmitted to the seat of a fracture from a distance, the violence is said to be…”
“Indirect.”
“Correct. And the bone is broken by…”
“Torsion. The bone gives way at the weakest point, and the line of fracture will tend to be oblique.”
“Correct. Someone leaping from a great height, then, would…”
“Landing on his feet, the tibia would break in the lower third, while the fibula would break at a higher level.”
Finella went back over her notes and shrugged demurely. “I can only speculate, but I think that would be correct.”
“I think it is.”
“I see.” She smiled to herself, making a pretense of hunting for some fact among her pages. “Then I suppose you would also know the details of a compound clavicle fracture resulting from direct force.”
“Miss Riley, please…”
“Come on, come on.”
“Fracture by compression. The line of the fracture would be transverse,” he recited in a bored tone, waving a hand impatiently. “And the soft parts overlying the fracture would be damaged according to the weight and shape of the impinging body.”
“Give me an example of how someone might indirectly suffer a compound fracture of the clavicle.”
“This isn’t Sunday school, Miss Riley. We’re not going to—”
“Come on, come on.”
“Falling on an outstretched hand could result in a…fracture of the clavicle in the middle third…possibly also or instead resulting in a fracture of the radius at its lower end. If you would please hand those notes over, I think it’s time we moved on.”
Finella acquiesced, falling silent as Henry looked over her most recent notes. “If you were permitted to return to school, would you?” she said.
“I have to confess, I much prefer learning this way.” Henry smiled at the pages as he flipped them. “I trust that’s not too forward.”
“No. No, I must say I find this form of study far more invigorating than simply rehearsing the day’s lesson in my room. But what if you could return? There would be no reason for us to stop studying as we do.”
Henry kept himself from shrugging. “Life’s too short for maybes, Miss Riley. I would rather live with what I have than play house with what I don’t. No sense weighing ourselves down with ghosts and could-have-beens.”
Finella laughed politely, like a cough. “Yes, of course.”
“You don’t agree.”
“I agree in principle. But I do believe that you should at least make some effort to be reinstated in the professor’s class. You have a natural way with the science of this, Henry. To waste that gift would be a sin.”
“I’m not wasting it.” He tapped the page. “This is as good as being there. Better, even.”
She sighed, unconvinced. “I’m no doctor. Not yet. You can’t ask me questions that the prof could answer. I’m just a student, like you. Go back, Henry. At worst the old fellow will just refuse you. But I don’t think he will.”
The evening concluded, a final toast made, and the group forwarded out of their little back room, talking among themselves. Dorian and Dysart had talked themselves out. A decision had been made as to the best way forward for the Voso ritual, and now all that remained was to prepare themselves over the coming weeks by way of abstinence and good works. Henry wasn’t exactly clear on how any of that was meant to work, but Dorian would explain it all the next time they met.
The main room of the Coat and Arms had emptied itself as men collected their hats and coats and made their way back out into the chill. Both Henry and Finella recognized one man in particular, and stopped in their tracks. The professor had seen their group, blanched at the sight of Finella in the company of four men, left his port where it was on the table, took his hat, and stood. Instinctively Henry threw himself into the breach.
“Professor! How do you do. Had I known you would be here I would have invited you to sit with us.”
The old man feigned surprise. “Oh, it’s Mr. Lockrose isn’t it? And Miss Riley.”
“Professor,” Finella demurred. “Were you passing the evening alone?”
“Yes, as it turns out. Forgive my rudeness, as I must be going. It’s late.”
Henry inclined his head. “Indeed. Good night, Professor.”
The old man doffed his hat and exited. The group watched him go.
“He was here on your account, Henry,” Dorian said. “I’d bet my life on it.”
“And yet he said nothing,” said Finella. “On mine.”
Henry couldn’t deny it: the professor finding Finella in the company of four men, in the back room of a pub at night…
He remembered then something that Leonard had said, in the moments before Henry had floored him.
Does anyone here not know where she spends her nights?
Henry knew exactly what he had meant at the time, but had thought little of it once the incident had resolved itself. However, he would bet a lot that it was Leonard who told the professor where
to find him—if the old man had indeed come to have a word with him. Finella’s expression was a dark one. Her career was in jeopardy.
Dorian approached, laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “When I met you, you said that a moment like this was inevitable. That eventually people would begin to talk, and that it would make life at school difficult. I hope you don’t regret that decision now.”
Finella shook her head. “If you will excuse me, though, I think I would like some time alone.”
“Of course.”
“Good night, gentlemen.”
Henry stepped after her. “At least let us walk you to a cab.”
“Not necessary, but thank you.”
And Henry watched her go.
Finella did not attend the next night. Or the night after. The day after that Henry waited for her outside class, watching from a block away, and she did not appear.
“She’s been expelled,” he told Dorian that night. “I’m sure of it.”
“She can’t be expelled if no one enrolls,” Dorian said. “Anyone can turn up and pay by the lesson.”
“The professor can still choose to exclude someone from the class, if he thinks their attendance would tarnish the school’s reputation.”
“Good grief. This is ridiculous.”
“We have to find her.”
“She won’t have done anything stupid, if that’s what you’re thinking. Finella’s too proud for that.”
“She may have gone home,” Jukes said. “Back to Mother.”
“Too proud for that, too, I would have thought.”
Henry made for the door. “Tell me where she was staying.”
“Fine, I’ll come with you. Jukes, Dysart, amuse yourselves or come along if you’d like.”
Henry opened the door, onto an unreadable Finella, her hands clasped before her. “Gentlemen,” she said. “I have some things to say.”
It became apparent to Henry in the weeks leading up to the summoning that this meant more to Dorian than any simple bout of curiosity. And Dorian was more fluent with the language of hidden things than any man his age should have been.
Finella had been refused entry to the classroom for reasons the professor offered to keep between the two of them, in the hope that, perhaps, she would still be able to salvage some respectability. Finella had protested, had taken it to the school board, all to no avail. Having left the school, unable to stop angry tears from staining her face and refusing to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing her wipe them away, she had sat herself down by the least offensive part of the river that she could find and let her mind run riot.
Summoning an intelligence such as Voso’s is no easy matter. It is no tearoom beckoncall. It is an effort of collective will with no margin for error.
Finella decided she would try again, elsewhere, and that meant leaving all she had here in Boston. Margaret Fuller’s ideas were taking root in cities across the country. Somewhere she would find a place to finish her studies to her satisfaction. But first she had a final duty to the group, and she would see it through. She would be with them, prepare with them, and together—one last final, extraordinary act—they would summon Voso.
Henry didn’t know what to say. The news left him hollow, filled with cold air. Finella spent no time with him now, and instead focused rigidly on the task at hand. When Henry couldn’t sleep he found himself tangled in impassioned scenes he would never realize, and soon she would be gone.
Dorian vanished without so much as a word. Jukes rabbited on about it, speculating endlessly. Dysart was unflustered. The nightly meetings continued. Finella stopped coming once she realized Dorian was out of the picture for a while.
Three days later he resurfaced, contacted every one of them, and appeared at the Coat and Arms without any of his usual overflow. He ate no food during his time there that night, and drank no brandy. He provided them all with sheets of clean paper, wrapped in white linen. Hubris had made so many things possible for him in his short life. Overconfidence, he said, had been his greatest virtue. But calling down an ageless, cunning, and merciless piece of the universe was so much more than a trick of supreme confidence.
“When the time comes,” he had said, “it will be an hour before midnight, and the moon will be waxing, not quite at her full power. The weather will be calm, and still, and we will be in a place far removed from any disturbance. Before that time we will prepare. I ask that you pay close attention to me now, that you might understand my full meaning: we must be prepared, or we shall be destroyed.” He let his eyes rove from one member to the next, drawing from their eyes what he needed to know. “Prepared,” he said again. “Impeccably and, above all, sincerely.”
“Sincerely,” Finella repeated. “What form do these preparations take?”
“Destroyed?” Jukes said.
“For the most part it consists of what you would expect: abstinence. Complete and absolute, from anything impious or impure. Engage in nothing that offends body or soul. I shall provide each of you with a prayer, which you shall inscribe once a day upon the paper I have provided you, for three days. I shall provide you with an exact account of how the working will proceed, and you are to spend those three days considering it, meditating upon it as you work, placing yourself at the service of your fellow man.”
Dysart cleared his throat. “I see.”
“For three days you must surrender yourself to others. Seek out those who need you. Do so selflessly. Sacrifice your wants, your desires, your identity, your pride, and your doubts…become selfless. For three days.”
Henry watched Finella, expecting her to laugh, or to point out the inherent insincerity of such a thing. Instead she said, “Very well.”
Dorian looked to Henry. “Do you comprehend the change of mind I am asking you to undertake? To shift your world to a new axis, if only for three days? Are you able to permit such a shift to topple your psychological architecture into a new configuration? Can you both admire and dwell within this new house, completely and utterly, for three days?”
There were many things Henry could have said at that point. Instead he took one look at Finella, sitting straight-backed, hands laced on the table before her, and said, “Of course.”
“Of course,” Jukes said.
“What have you decided upon for the working itself?” Dysart rumbled.
“In the end the form of the service matters little. What is paramount is the purity of our souls, minds, and flesh.”
Dysart sighed luxuriously, thoughtfully, and raised his thick, cloudy eyebrows. “I’ve done worse.”
After shrugging into their coats, Dorian said, “Say good-bye to this room. We won’t be needing it again.”
“Indeed,” rumbled Dysart. “The time feels right for a good last act.”
“But…,” said Jukes.
“If we are successful,” Dorian said, “we progress. It may well be that our paths diverge from that point on. And if we fail…well…”
“Destroyed,” Henry said. “You believe the thing you want to call down could actually kill us.”
“All things are possible.”
Finella listened to the conversation as though it were one of the professor’s lectures: attentive, saying nothing, taking it in. Henry realized he really had remained here for her. Regardless of whatever fascination he had for the group’s explorations, regardless of the fact that these people now constituted the entirety of his social circle in a life now devoid of both family and schooling, he had remained here for her. He hadn’t even asked what the ultimate point of it all was.
“Good night, Henry. I will see you all four evenings hence, at the arranged location.”
“You’re not coming back to Mrs. Brown’s?” Henry said. “She’s been worrying after you.”
“As Master of Ceremonies my duties differ from yours. Remember: pursue your good deeds, memorize your prayer, study the service, give yourself over to a cleansing and selfless transformation—if only for three days—and we will all wi
tness and achieve the most extraordinary thing.” And Dorian left the room, walking stick in hand.
“Saintliness isn’t the aim,” Dysart rumbled, throwing a scarf about his broad neck and adjusting his aged topper. “Only the absolute suspension of our own needs and wants, which are the bedrock of our cumbersome personalities. Become selfless—without self—a conduit for the happiness of others. Embrace the change of mind, the feelings it provides, and come to us on the fourth night with a pure and selfless heart, untroubled and uncluttered by the baser needs of mind and flesh. A conduit for something greater still.”
Finella took his arm. “We want to be doctors, Henry. Selflessness should be in our very natures. Come on, walk me to a cab.”
The street air was bracingly cold, briny and feculent and still. A stray man clutching his tweed coat about himself hurried along, shoulders hunched, breathing into the heat of a cigarette. They stopped before a horse cab, and that was when Finella released his arm and said, “The next time we see each other shall be the last time. I wanted to thank you, Mr. Lockrose, for your company this past year. Though I admit things seemed to be at sevens and eights between us for a time, I am glad to have made your acquaintance and consider you a friend. You shall make a fine doctor, Henry.”
Henry didn’t know what to say. It was now or never.
Instead he said, “Good night, Miss Riley.”
“Good night.”
He held the door open for her as she climbed aboard. The driver nick-nicked, slapped the reins, and amid a crisp clatter of wheels and hooves Finella was gone.
It felt a little like being born, standing there, with nothing left and no real idea as to what came next. Everything was new, somehow. Blank. As beautiful and terrifying as an Arctic landscape. He thought about what was to come. Three days of selflessness.
Blank and empty, then, was a good beginning.
The air was rich and sweet with stink—a stench most people never paid any attention to. The sewers beneath them were barely contained. Overflows were frequent—an especially high tide could do it—and tuberculosis was on the rampage, more so in Boston than almost anywhere else in the country. On first arriving in New York, and then here, it had surprised and saddened Henry the density of filth a city could contain, how a metropolis could float upon it. Somehow he had expected something different.
The Music of Razors Page 5