The Cunning House

by Richard Marggraf Turley

  Cline directed a sharp glance at him. “Which parties?”

  “Millenarians, mollies, the Tyrant’s mameluk for all I know. It’s impossible to tell – and in each case, the lead proved worthless.”

  “You needn’t worry about my allegiances, Mr Wyre. They are to Hippocrates alone.” Cline followed the lawyer’s eyes down to his filthy frock coat. “Blood and pus – it’s worn as a badge of honour around here.”

  “I believe you have something to show me.”

  Cline bowed slightly. “This way, Mr Wyre.” He started to walk, leading Wyre through the hospital’s labyrinthine corridors, finally arriving at a flight of narrow stairs that led down to a set of double doors.

  “This is our Dissecting Room. What goes on here is not all that unlike an inquest.”

  Nothing Wyre had seen in Crispin Street could prepare him for Cline’s human abattoir. Wherever he looked was a hollowed-out, gouged, flayed or atomized travesty of the male or female form. Many of the corpses had something else in common apart from their incompleteness: a band of raw flesh around their necks where the rope had tightened.

  “Nature laid bare,” Cline said, his eyes on the lawyer, “can be disconcerting. But anatomy is the alphabet of physiology. Without its lessons who would risk cutting for stone?”

  “It may surprise you,” Wyre replied, fighting to keep his voice steady, “but I’m not one of those who need convincing of the necessity of such places.”

  Near the double doors, two medical students were preparing a young woman for dissection; the air around her was salty and ferric. Her black hair and tawny skin – mottled with syphilitic scars – confirmed her as a member of the middle tinge. One of Cline’s students started shaving her dark pubis with quick, deft strokes.

  “You spend a deal of time in hospitals,” the surgeon went on, “you develop a sense of indifference. The breasts, and down here – ” he indicated the woman’s natural parts, now bare and alien, fringed with purple “ – the cunt.” He leaned in, his manner fraternal. “We can dispense with the Latin. She’s beyond theory now.”

  An eruption of dry skin at the base of her bosom and sores on her tongue put the cause of death beyond doubt. Pox – she’d been dripping with it.

  “May I see Sellis now?”

  With a touch of the showman, Surgeon Cline pointed to the far end of the chamber where a linen sheet had assumed the contours of a body. “After you, Mr Wyre.”

  At the gurney, Cline pulled aside the sheet. The valet’s familiar olive features appeared, his handsome jaw held shut by a bandage as if he’d been gagged. As if someone were afraid of what he might say, even now . . .

  An aroma of figs; cedar, perhaps. Some sort of light embalming oil, prolonging the indignity.

  “When my students have finished, his remains will be returned to the county. It’s customary in England to bury suicides at a three-went way, though I believe the stake through the body is now at the discretion of the magistrate.” The surgeon opened his hands as if releasing a bird. “And so our traitor passes from the educated fingers of science to the ham fists of superstition.”

  “A verdict hasn’t been reached yet.” Until the inquest jury had met and declared a judgment, Sellis wasn’t technically a self-murderer. “It might be premature to treat his body in this way.”

  Cline placed his head at a wry angle, a look that conveyed everything.

  Had the scalpels of Cline’s novices gone to work on Leighton’s torso, too? That beautiful body, razed to its parts.

  “Far better post-mortem dissection,” the surgeon said, “than the living variety. If Sellis had been arrested, Read would have had him taken apart in the public square. Not even the dignity of privacy in those final, most revealing of moments.”

  “Perhaps that’s exactly what Sellis deserved.”

  Cline gave a little shrug. “Needlessly cruel, socially useless.”

  Wyre looked back down at the valet’s naked body. The surgeon’s letter had mentioned marks, but other than the gash at the throat there was nothing blatant.

  “It was actually one of my assistants who noticed it,” Cline said, waving over the two frock-coated students. Together, they heaved Sellis’s cadaver onto its front, and Cline slipped a bolster under the hips. With a wedge-shaped piece of iron, he prised the valet’s elevated buttocks apart. “See for yourself.”

  Forcing himself to peer inside, Wyre saw around the puckered waxy orifice thin lines that put him in mind of a perverse attempt at the kind of counter-hatching William used in his drawings.

  Cline traced the marks in the air with his finger. “You see all manner of peculiarities in this region, natural flowerings and outgrowths of various kinds. These here, however, are the result of deliberate action – of an assault calculated not to incapacitate so much as humiliate.”

  “The wounds appear fresh,” Wyre said, fighting a rising sense of horror.

  “Say unhealed, rather. They were inflicted mere hours before this unfortunate man’s demise.”

  “Does Mr Read know?”

  “Not from me. Would you prefer it remain that way?”

  Wyre paused. Nodded.

  Cline regarded the lawyer. “Would you say you’re making any headway?”

  Wyre smiled mirthlessly. “It’s a tornado of fragments.”

  “That, sir, is a perfect description of the human body.”

  Lawyer and surgeon walked back through the unrisen Lazaruses. Before they reached the double doors, Cline stopped at a skeletal female cadaver. Was Wyre’s capacity to take in the death of the body being tested? The tall surgeon combed his fingers through the woman’s brittle hair. A raised line of livid lacerations ran between her shoulder and elbow. Before Wyre’s imagination, a sudden image arose of rattling drive chains and flat-toothed cogs.

  “Needles,” Cline said, softly. “I drew more than sixty from her flesh. I believe she used a prayer book as a hammer. Her injuries are self-inflicted, a phenomenon seen all too often in those who suffer from womb.” He patted the bluish shoulder. “I’ve known girls thrust splinters of glass into the least welcoming of places. Some grind it between their teeth.” Cline’s face remained as neutral as ever.

  “Mr Jackson’s adamant the Duke’s attacker struck a sabre blow to the skull using such brutality only a miracle prevented part of the head from being carried away, but he permits no-one to remove the dressing. Tell me, Mr Cline, in your opinion, could any man receive such a wound, yet retain sufficient command of his faculties to swear an affidavit just moments later?”

  Another little shrug. “The human frame, so delicate in certain respects, is all but indestructible in others. A few years ago, a young French nobleman was wounded in a skirmish with his Majesty’s infantry during which a portion of his scalp and skull was sliced off by a sword. A painful drawn-out death from infection seemed certain to be his lot. The attending surgeon, an exceptionally resourceful man, swiftly killed a dog and cut out a corresponding section of its skull. This he knitched into the nobleman’s wound, achieving a perfect cure.”

  “Did he survive?”

  “He did. Unwisely, he told his friends about this miraculous operation, which in time came to the attention of the Archbishop of Paris, who promptly put him under the ban of the church.”

  Wyre gave him an incredulous look. “What on earth for?”

  “For having a fragment of a bestial body united with his own. A dog-man, or man-dog. The nobleman was banished from all assemblies of the faithful for as long as the piece of canine skull remained in his head.

  “What did he do?”

  “He had the offending part removed, and the sentence of excommunication was duly revoked. Then he died.”

  “And the surgeon?” Wyre felt sure he knew the answer.

  “Still exceptional, still very much alive.”

  “You seem to have spent a lot of time in France, Mr Cline.”

  “When I was a young man, it was the fashion to see as much of Europe as possibl
e. The Grand Tour. Geneva, Paris, the Alps. I even ascended once in a balloon. Thanks to the present campaigns, people these days must make do with Bath and the Welsh hills.”

  Cline set off again, only to pause for a second time at the female cadaver parked beside the mortuary doors.

  “One medical clique insists the human body is no more than a flesh-and-bone house for our thoughts, a mere mechanism for the traffic of philosophical ideas. Another faction, smaller though equally zealous, maintains our thoughts are simply the means by which bodies are steered towards each other for the purpose of sexual union. No higher end than that.” He smiled with an impish air. “The entirety of our literature, political economy, engineering feats – all by-products of that single, overriding imperative.”

  “And what, pray, is your opinion, Mr Cline?”

  “That philosophers make entertaining dinner guests.” The surgeon pushed up his spectacles, making another deft adjustment to the multi-coloured ribbon. “I know of anatomists who swear the mouth is the first hole to form while we are still eggs in the womb. Their antagonists are just as convinced this particular honour should be accorded the anus. I’ve always thought the position one adopts on the issue says something profound about one’s outlook on life.”

  “Is this the medical equivalent of gallows humour?”

  “The face is just public display, Mr Wyre. You have to look deeper.”

  “Deeper?”

  “The things of greatest importance are actuated down there – ” Cline pointed to the bulging organs of a male corpse on the neighbouring gurney. “And there also – ” he gestured down at the female’s swollen hairless pudendum. “Some men never get over the fact that women possess such things.”

  He escorted Wyre out, and up, through the maze of interconnecting passages into the bright courtyard. The roasting air came as a relief. Cline raised his palm to the sun as if he would seize it and toss it in the Thames.

  “What is it like,” Wyre said as they made their way to the hospital’s wrought-iron gates, “operating on a living person? Cutting into someone.”

  “Oh, it’s not very elegant. Just blood, muscle and fat. Greasy. Gut is glibbery. Bone is cleaner than gut.” He glanced up, tracking some high birds. “In some of the larger amputations or internal procedures you literally wade in blood. It clots on you. Sometimes, you find yourself standing above the scene, looking at it through foreign eyes. It takes on the character of a slaughterhouse. But you hold fast, Mr Wyre – ” he suddenly clenched both fists “ – you hold fast to the fact that you’re curating, not butchering, the flesh.”

  The clock tower showed ten past three. Miss Crawford would be on her way to St James’s Park. Thanks to Leighton’s wooden gelding, he’d easily make it in time – no need to put himself to the expense of a cab. Then back punctually for the interview with the Duke of Cumberland.

  There was always the chance Aspinall had resurfaced and was willing to put the finger on Parlez-Vous . . . What an entrance Wyre could make.

  Cline saw him to the pavement, offering for the second time that day a hand that had been to the darkest of places. He raised his eyebrows at Leighton’s dandy-charger, but said nothing.

  Slouching against a wall opposite the hospital was a figure in a natty blue hat, the identical twin of that worn by the man who’d stood to slovenly attention outside one of those endless Palace doors. Blue Hat seemed oddly solid among the spectral platoons of pedestrians. He raised a finger to his forehead. Leighton’s world again – a universe of feints and deceits dreamed up in the rooms of the Office of Surveillance.

  Guy’s clock struck the next quarter as Wyre threw his leg over the running machine, and cast off, those thin, scratchy lines vivid in his mind’s eye. Whatever Joseph Sellis had been while alive, it was easier to decide what he was in death.

  He’d gone along tolerably well for ten minutes, and was looking about for the turning to take him up towards Blackfriars Bridge, when he became aware of something other than the usual foot traffic, something low and loping, still some way off, but closing. Heat, he decided, shimmering up curiously in the form of an enormous mastiff? He cast another swift glance over his shoulder, but the chimera had evaporated. He’d taken fright at hot air. He put it down to the delayed effects of the ten-day parenthesis in his life.

  At that moment, he caught his toe on a raised corner, which sent him veering off the pavement, down into the path of laden dray-carts and flying hackneys. Pulling at the tiller, he corrected course, mounted the pavement again, and – face screwed up in concentration – worked on recovering his rhythm. Now, where the devil was the turning? He scanned in both directions along the brittle avenue – and felt the hairs on his nape prickle . . . Through the shifts of late-afternoon light, it was there again. The dog. Not heat, then; no play of mind. Was he the only one who’d noticed the shuck prowling?

  Frowning deeply, he kicked off at a smarter lick. Christ, but where was he? Without his noticing, the clean and neat shops had gone, replaced by rough affairs with tiny windows, and the taverns were little more than out-and-out trugging houses. Everything was run-down and cheerless, made worse by the all-pervasive stench of horse dung and stale sweat rising around him in the blazing sun. Ahead, the hospital’s loquacious clock proclaimed another quarter. Ahead? But he’d come from that direction. With growing alarm, Wyre flung another quick glance over his shoulder to discover the dog was keeping pace. Panic washing through him, he swerved into the next side street, wrestling with the dandy-charger’s woefully inadequate tiller. Whenever he turned, it was to find the animal following.

  The beast knew its game, carrying its head high, no raking along, nose close to the ground. Wyre was sprinting on his seat now, sweat pearling off his forehead, muscles in his calves tightening into excruciating knots, heart straining against his ribs – a blown fox!

  How had the animal tracked him? It hit him: Rose’s filched handkerchief . . . Yes, a dog could get a man’s scent that way. Someone at the Palace had made their move. This was view halloo!

  Wyre’s heels slithered over the flagstones, his legs those of a clockwork maquette’s, joints pivoting on cruel nails. Half-dressed trulls peered incuriously from niches in the walls like grotesque alabaster figures lining cathedral naves. In desperation, Wyre pointed the dandy-charger’s unresponsive tiller at the next alleyway, only to find his escape route tapering appallingly towards a high brick wall.

  He heard the dog padding in behind him, a savage sound brewing in its throat.

  Wyre let the running machine fall, scrabbled out from under the perch and backed towards the wall, terror gripping his chest. The dog came forward crouching, matching him step for step, the final stage all instinct.

  With a desperate glance, he sized up the wall. Impossibly high – but nothing to lose. Wyre sprang to his feet, and launched himself, somehow hooking the tips of his fingers over the top. Clawing for purchase, finding some, he ran ridiculously on the spot, waiting for the hideous compression that would snap bone, hauling himself up, each division of a second registering in a strange attention to the crosshatch patterns of the brickwork, the name Paston stamped deep in the middle of each block.

  His trailing leg – a tearing sensation – then Wyre was tumbling –

  57. Court-Plaister

  – landing sprawling with a thump that knocked the air from his lungs. The danger wasn’t over. He could hear the dog jumping repeatedly at the wall, its claws scratching near the top. Scrambling to his feet, he tottered out into a wide thoroughfare, half-blinded by pain in his leg, straight into the path of a four-wheeler.

  “ . . . of the way, brickshit!” yelled the driver, pulling at the reins. More by luck than design, Wyre’s fingers found the corner rail as the vehicle slewed past. He swung himself up onto the footrest, wrenching open the carriage door with his free hand.

  Empty! In! With a sob, he slid the glass slider to, just as the great shuck slammed into the side of the coach, enormous paws reaching half-way up
the window.

  Then it was gone between the wheels, the coach springs absorbing the yelp.

  Wyre staggered from the coach at the east entrance to St James’s Park, where Miss Crawford was waiting, engrossed in a small, auburn-leather book. Poems by her ‘young lord’, no doubt. She raised her head, and stared aghast at the shreds of his left trouser leg. Tucking her book into her skirts, she rushed over.

  Leaning on her shoulder for support, he recounted the action with the dog. His shin felt open, cold; standing was an agony. After listening in silence, Miss Crawford insisted he come to Great Windmill Street, just a short walk away; she had dressings there, bought in preparation for Robert’s pillorying.

  Wyre protested weakly about the interview with the Duke, but allowed himself to be led away, his thoughts shifting from the raw sensation in his leg to that smooth volume lying perfectly flat against her thigh.

  Great Windmill Street was numbered curiously. Her building, No. 17, was wedged between 23 and 37. He hobbled up the narrow side stairs, helped by the dark woman. In the void below, the baker’s window was dusty with flour.

  Miss Crawford’s rooms lay across a bare landing. Dark patches on the walls and ceiling. A single window looked out onto a blind side alley. She watched as he took it in. “I used the last of my savings to settle Robert’s prison expenses,” she said simply. “It was either that, or see my fiancé moved to the debtors’ prison.” She guided him to the single chair. “We ought to cleanse that wound. Dogs are dirty creatures.”

  She turned her head away modestly as Wyre removed his breeches. Just as well – he wasn’t one of those dandies who affected to wear undergarments; instead, he pulled his shirt tails down and around, covering his loins like a savage’s cloth.

  He waited while she inspected his wound. By some miracle, it seemed the animal’s jaws, which had made such a good job of shredding his breeches, had only grazed the skin. The blood on his trousers, she announced, could all be explained by a badly skinned knee. He must have got that when he landed on the other side of the wall.