‘Am sorry, am sorry, I didn’ know what ter do, ‘e were a dyin’ man, yer know, and I jus’… I jus’… put ‘im ‘ere. An’ Billy from ter disinfectors helped, and we didn’ see no docter and no nurses and didn’ know what ter do! I ran around and didn’ find no one, all ter time thinkin’ about tha’ poor man dyin’. And then I came back and you were ‘ere an’… an’… ‘e were dead.’
The old man had tried his best to help and I’d behaved like a snotnose.
‘My apologies, Mr Osburn,’ I mumbled ashamed. He stammered something unintelligible in response and hobbled back to his little porter house.
I asked a nurse to send the body to the anatomy lecture hall and to announce a presentation at four o'clock for students of medicine and bacteriology.
~~~
I stood in the centre of a room the shape of a semicircle, a single marble slab with a contorted corpse in front of me, and behind it several rows of students. Most of them were familiar to me and the few new ones in the first two rows would soon push back. The room was packed; murmurs and the scraping of feet filled the air.
I coughed and most faces turned into my direction. The ones who knew the rules elbowed the new students who were about to light their cigarettes or pipes, resulting in a short moment of confusion and muttering.
‘Ladies and Gentleman!’ I announced - it was my private bold joke, as only male students were admitted. Not to mention male lecturers. After a short moment the hall went quiet. My reputation here was such that students obeyed the few rules I set: no talking and no smoking or they would have to leave immediately. But they also knew there wouldn’t be a dull moment in the next hour and a half.
‘Today around noon, this man was found at the entrance gate. He had severe muscle spasms and couldn't walk any further. He was brought into the ward for infectious disease and died within minutes. Can anyone tell me the cause of death?’
After a moment, a new student from the front row squared his shoulders and cried: ‘Tetanus!’
I smiled. ‘You might be wrong there.’
He defended himself: ‘With all due respect, Dr Kronberg-’
‘I do hope so, Mister, but I fear you forgot to introduce yourself.’
‘My name is Wallace McFadin.’
‘A Scot! Very well then! I like your music, Mr McFadin, do you play the bagpipes well?’
‘Er... I'm... I don’t play bagpipes.’
‘But you are Scottish?’
‘Yes, I am.’ He was a little red faced now.
‘So if you are a Scot, why don't you play the bagpipes?’
‘Only because I'm a Scot doesn't mean I play the bagpipes!’ He slammed his hand on the table in front of him.
‘Exactly!’ I cried and saw that I had lost him. ‘My apologies, Mr McFadin, I used you for a demonstration. When you meet a Scot he doesn't necessarily play the bagpipes. The same is true for Mr Unknown here.’
I pointed to the man on the slab. ‘He died while exhibiting severe muscle spasms. You can see all the typical tetanus symptoms including the remarkable devilish grin!’
I touched the man’s face and was wondering how many of my students felt repelled, how many pitied the man, and how many were amused by his shocking appearance. I looked back at them and continued. ‘But does that necessarily mean he died from tetanus? No! It doesn't! I urge everyone in this room to be cautious and not let our limited knowledge mask our senses. Just because we think it must have been tetanus that killed the man, doesn't necessarily mean this was indeed the case. Preconception prohibits learning! Only after we have learned all there is to learn, after we have studied and observed, only then can we draw our conclusions. And don't expect that you will always find an answer. If you have done your very best and still can not find an explanation, it is acceptable to admit that you do not know the answer.’
Several students were looking a bit perplexed now. I knew they had learned that superiority goes hand in hand with practicing medicine. This, in my opinion, was all rubbish.
‘You must see yourselves as scientists. And science is a work in progress. As is learning. You are solving a bacterial crime, gentlemen! I know your anatomy professors teach you to view the person you are dissecting as a subject. It is easier to slice apart a thing than a human being. But if you do so, you are ignoring important facts. The man could have died of an infectious disease, which makes him a human being with a significant history. A history that you have to reveal! How else would you identify the causative agent and aid in the prevention of further infections? Read up on Dr Snow’s reports on the last cholera outbreak and how he found the pump on Broad Street as the vector of transmission. The man investigated the history of the cholera fatalities and only that made him successfully prevent any further spreading of this disease! When you wake up in the morning - every morning! - I want you to think of the only thing we know for sure, which is, that we indeed know very little. After you have done so, throw away one of your favourite preconceptions.’
McFadin's colour turned back to a normal shade and he almost looked proud now. Everyone was glued to my lips and the show could begin.
‘Now, if you please,’ I waved them forward. That was unusual for anatomical demonstrations. Normally, students were asked to keep a respectful distance. Not during my lessons, though. I wanted them to observe closely. But I had to keep an eye on the faint hearted ones; it usually helped them when I gave them something to do. But so far, everyone looked brave. ‘Now tell me, what do you observe?’
Several students answered.
‘His clothes are dirty and old.’
‘He is thin.’
‘He is poor.’
‘He has brown hair.’
‘He is about forty years old.’
‘His body is distorted.’
I interrupted: ‘Thank you very much! We can safely assume that the man was poor, has brown hair, and was probably thirty years old. Poverty often makes one look older than one really is. And his body is distorted. Can anyone say where the man came from?’
Everyone shook his head.
‘Exactly. So far, we can't tell.’ I fetched a pair of scissors and cut away trousers, shirt, and underwear. I took off his shoes and placed everything next to the slab on the floor.
‘What can we see now?’ I asked the group.
‘He is naked!’ someone shouted and we all had to laugh.
‘Excellent observation!’ I replied and added: ‘I should have asked my question a little differently: What can we not see?’
That was always the hardest, detecting things that where off-pattern. As expected, no one answered.
‘How do people contract tetanus, typically?’ I hinted.
‘Through dirt in a deep wound,’ someone answered.
‘Do you see any?’ I asked.
The young men craned their necks and after a while they shook their heads.
‘Shall we turn him?’ We did, but no deep wounds on his back either.
‘How else could tetanus enter the body?’ No one answered, so I did. ‘You could eat an animal that had tetanus, for example.’
Suddenly, I remembered the Hampton man. I looked at the man's wrists and ankles but found no restraint marks. Then I checked the bends of both his elbows - nothing. The students looked at me enquiringly.
‘What else could produce these symptoms?’
Silence. Well, most of them hadn’t had toxicology yet, so I answered my own question again. ‘The alkaloid of the Strychnos tree, commonly known as strychnine, killed Alexander the Great, for example.’
Murmur filled the room and I waited for silence before I continued. ‘To be able to distinguish between the two, we have to open the man.’
I moved the table with my utensils closer to the slab and cut a large Y into his torso and abdomen. The first students pushed farther back.
I could not find any infected areas in his gastrointestinal tract, but his heart had a swollen and dark, almost black area. I cut it open and bent do
wn to sniff; it stank. I couldn't explain to my students how tetanus had gotten to the man's heart. We were all mystified. I opened the cranium and sliced the hemispheres in sections. I saw the typical liquid filled lesions that only tetanus would produce and not strychnine. I straightened up and said loudly: ‘It appears that Scots do play bagpipes after all.’ McFadin grinned at me.
After the lesson was over, I sent a wire to Holmes, packed the boots and the pile of clothes in wax paper, and left for home.
Chapter Six
I walked along the buzzing streets, trying to avoid collision with other pedestrians. Street vendors were loudly advertising their goods and a variety of odours wafted through the heavy summer evening air – fish, pastries, blood, urine, and stale sweat. I bought an eel pie and ate it while walking and juggling the package under my arm.
The direct route home would be a three-mile journey, which I usually did not take. I also avoided walking or riding the same route on two consecutive days. It was my way to disconnect my two different lives - male and female. If anyone wanted to follow me from Guy’s to my home, they would have a hard time doing so.
Often, I walked when the weather permitted me to do so; on other days I took either an omnibus or a hansom to some place close to Bow Street.
Today I went by foot. I crossed London Bridge, turned left into Upper Thames Street all the way to Blackfriars Bridge, crossed the river a second time, onto Stamford, crossed it again at Waterloo Bridge, passing The Strand - sometimes I took dinner here, but not today - walked along Charles Street and into Bow Street.
At the back door of the cobbler’s, I climbed up a narrow staircase and went into a dark and low corridor just underneath the attic. I unlocked the small door at the far end and entered a tiny hole in the wall with a window the size of a stamp. Very conveniently, my landlady had poor eyesight, and I could make her believe I used the room as a storage place for costumes. I had told her that at odd times, I or customers of mine would enter, pick a dress of their liking, and leave again. And as these few possessions of mine represented my entire riches and I could not afford losing them, she allowed me to install an extra lock at the door to which only I had a key. An unusual arrangement, but she needed the extra shilling I paid her each week for my secret dressing chamber.
I bolted the door and started my daily ritual. I lighted the two oil lamps standing on either side of a locked wardrobe, slipped the key in and turned. It clicked open and the glass on inside of the door revealed a view of Dr Anton Kronberg, respectable member of the medical establishment, dressed in a sand-coloured cotton shirt, cotton trousers of a darker shade, and patent leather shoes. His hair was combed back into his neck and sleek with makassar oil.
I unbuttoned the shirt, took it off, and draped it over a hanger, then pulled off my shoes, trousers, and stockings, too. I extracted one end of the bandages I had tucked in at my bosom and unwrapped my chest. While rolling the broad cotton strip into a ball, I watched the red stripes on my breasts turn pale. I pulled off the white cotton underpants and smiled at the absurd appendage that stuck out between my legs. I wore a harness with a penis made of finest calf leather. It looked authentic enough as long as no one examined too closely. It had a narrow rubber tube inserted with its other end attached to a leather pouch filled with water. I made sure that every so often one of my male colleagues saw me take a “pee” at the urinal, drowning every doubt about my sex before it could even surface.
Carefully I took my fake penis off, wrapped it in a towel, and stuck it into my doctor’s bag.
I gazed at my naked self and let the fact sink in that I was yet again a woman. Every morning I shed my female part and made myself believe I was a man. To me, it was the only way not to be afraid. I had no time for fear when I was at work. Rather – I had no time for fear at all. It was naivety rather than courage. If my identity were revealed, I would simply start a new life elsewhere. That’s what I made myself believe. There was, though, the one part of my consciousness that kept telling me how hard it would be to let go of all I had accomplished. But I rarely listened.
The left hand side of my wardrobe contained all things female. I pulled on a bodice, stockings, a petticoat, and a simple linen dress. A scarf around my head concealed the fact that my hair was rather short. All in all, I wasn’t worth looking at and yet, once I entered the streets again, it felt as if I had thrown myself onto the market for sexual reproduction. Half the men noticed me; several of the ones I walked past swayed or reached out almost unintentionally just to brush my shoulder or waist. As a woman, I had many more obstacles in my way than as a man.
From Bow Street I turned north and walked the few blocks to my small flat in Endell Street, right in the worst rookery of the British Empire - St Giles.
To me, London was a monster with many heads, or faces, to be more precise. You could stroll down a clean and busy street, but making a wrong turn, you would disappear into a maze of dark and filthy alleys, harbouring millions of rats the size of raccoons. Rodents thrived in the slums more than anything else, as they were the only inhabitants who always had enough to eat. Be it fermenting cabbage, faeces, or cadavers of both animal and human origin. The uninitiated would probably not return, at least not without getting mugged, probably beaten up, and sometimes murdered. Clean water was a rare commodity, as was food, shelter, a warm place in winter, clothes, and basically anything that would make life acceptable. On the other end of the scale were the absolutely quiet and clean upper class areas. Beautifully dressed and well behaved ladies could take strolls with gentlemen in the park without being bothered by the poor and dirty. Here, even the trees and bushes were well groomed. People had enough to eat, and they had servants, who often didn’t have enough to eat.
Every day, my way to and from Guy’s hospital took me through these contrasting areas of London’s rich and poor. Every day I saw the transformation of the city, beautiful villas to filthy bottom-of-the-pit hovels with garbage or battered hats replacing missing windowpanes.
And so did I transform, from the bacteriologist and epidemiologist Anton Kronberg to Anna, medical nurse. I knew that changing identities had its risks, but I gladly took them. In Boston I had lived as Anton only and after three years my own body had become a stranger to me. The lack of a penis was highly bothersome and my breasts were useless and ugly appendages which, at some point, I hid even at night. After many weeks of tightly bandaging my chest, I got a breast infection that threw me down with a dangerously high fever and excruciating pain. I spend a week in bed, naked. After that I could not hide my female identity for much longer than a day. I needed to be Anna, to not lose myself.
~~~
Once at home, I quickly ate a sandwich and drank two cups of tea. Then I washed the oil out of my hair and the dissection odour from my body and dressed in a black sateen corset, a camisole, a petticoat, and a dark blue silk dress. Looking at myself in the half blind glass at the wall, I saw a woman I barely recognised. My dress poured from a too slim waist down to my feet, both stuck in tightly laced black leather boots. I wore a black velvet hat with a single raven feather stuck in the hat band. Black curls peeked out from underneath, almost reaching my chin. This hairdo was definitely too progressive and onlookers may think I was off to some radical feminist meeting.
But it wasn’t only my hair. Everything about my face screamed oddity at me – the constantly bold sparkle in my green eyes, the too determined black eyebrows, the decisive chin, and the too long nose, all made me look like a bird of prey. As a woman I looked too masculine. As a man I looked too feminine.
I shook my head and snatched the package off the table, took a small handbag, and started south. I had just turned a corner when I heard the flap-flap-flap of naked feet on the ground, hushed voices and whispers of children. They started splitting up to get to me from two different sides. I had to grin.
‘Oy! Is that you guys or a swarm of cockroaches?’ I shouted over my shoulder.
The splattering of feet came to a sudden
stop.
‘Anna? Tha’ ya?’ A boy's voice enquired.
‘No! Drat! I'm undercover! I'm disguised as a lady, you idiot!’ I mocked him. Someone chuckled and I turned around to show my face.
‘Ya can’t walk 'round like that!’ Barry sounded concerned and then nodded determined. ‘We give ya protection. Where’d ya wanna go?’ Then he walked up to me and offered his dirty arm. ‘My lady?’ he said poignantly and I laughed out loud, thanked him, and took the offered aid. The kids walked me two blocks to the next cab; I bowed to them for their services to Ladyhood, and took the hansom to Baker Street.
~~~
Mrs Hudson led me up the stairs and opened the door to Holmes's rooms. Two men were occupying both arm chairs. One was Holmes, who started coughing clouds of pipe smoke the moment I entered. The man next to him was moustached and stocky. He wore a wedding band that looked new. Both had their feet on the coffee table when I entered; they were comfortable together, good friends. This must be Watson. I took off my hat, stepped closer, and offered him my hand.
‘Dr Watson?’
He nodded and squeezed it lightly without saying a word.
‘I am Anna Kronberg. It is a pleasure to meet you, Dr Watson.’
Wordlessly he offered me his chair with a wave of his arm.
‘Thank you, I was on my feet the whole day.’ I sat down. The coffee table would have done it, too, but my dress didn't permit that.
‘My dear Watson, would you give us a few minutes of privacy, please?’ Holmes asked kindly. Watson nodded and retreated into the bedroom.
‘I am truly sorry,’ said Holmes quietly. ‘My fried was in the area and paid me a surprise visit. I told him whom I was expecting tonight and he was positively surprised and very much looking forward to meet you in person; naturally I invited him to stay. I couldn’t know you would come without your usual disguise.’
The Devil's Grin - A Crime Novel featuring Anna Kronberg and Sherlock Holmes (Kronberg Crimes) Page 5