The weather grew warmer. How many days had we been at sea? I had no idea. Down in our bunks we were stifled — there was often no breeze at all, the only way for it to get to us was through the hatch, and yet when the hatch was closed it was thickly barred, and as impenetrable to air as any prison wall. The sun blazed down, the pitch dropping from the seams in the hull in burning black pennies. We longed for water, fresh water, our ration of two pints of warm putrid water a day the cruellest of jokes. And yet the opposite of this burning heat was no better, for in heavy seas the water poured down the hatch, so that those nearest were soaked to the bone, and all of us, by the morning, were crusted with salt and vomit.
Dr Rutherford spent much of his time in his cabin – he had secured a berth to himself, despite the cramped situation most others endured. What he was doing down there had become the subject of speculation. Some said he had animals – rats and birds — and that he experimented upon them at night. Others said he was dead drunk, or that he was dissecting the body of one Jane Calloway, a convict who had died even before we were a fortnight out, and whose corpse none of us had seen since. He showed no interest in the male prisoners, but stood watching us women as we went about out tasks or stood idling on deck. One day he had us line up before him. He went from one to another, taking our names, noting our convictions and measuring our heads with his metal callipers. He wrote everything down in his notebook. He was especially interested in those with the most violent and troubled pasts, though habitual thieves and prostitutes also fascinated him. These he took to one side. He had set up his box – a camera was what he called it – behind a screen of canvas, and he positioned these particular miscreants in a chair and took their likeness.
Then he came to me.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Will knew that I had been sleeping badly, and when I did not wake early and join him for breakfast the next morning, he decided to let me sleep on. By the time he realised that I was missing from my bed, it was past nine o’clock in the morning.
‘I was sure you’d gone to Angel Meadow,’ he told me later. ‘We were supposed to go together to find Miss Mothersole’s notebooks, but I knew you for the most independent and inquisitive creature I’d ever met. If you could not sleep, what else would you do but carry on where we had left off the night before?’
Just as he resolved to go up to the asylum himself, he said, Mrs Speedicut appeared. She looked as though she had been sleeping on the floor somewhere for she was dirty and stained, with soot on her apron and straw in her hair. Mrs Speedicut admitted that she had ‘fallen asleep at Sorley’s’, and Mr Sorley had left her where she lay. When he opened up the next day and found her still there he had kicked her out and sent her down to the apothecary with the bill. ‘I gave her a mug of coffee, took her asylum keys, and went up to the place directly.’
By that time the air was clear, the black smoke that trickled from the chimneys streaking the angry sky like banners of tattered silk. London is rarely silent, the parish of St Saviour’s – its tenements stacked together like rows of battered books, its houses divided and subdivided and filled to bursting with people – almost never so. There were always people about the streets, always noise and bustle, commotion and movement. And yet, Will told me, the road to the asylum was quiet that morning.
‘I knew something was wrong,’ he said. ‘Even Angel Meadow was subdued, though there were people everywhere – attendants criss-crossing the hall, their strides purposeful, their arms full of swathes of black fabric, and groups of serious-looking men standing about waiting. Mrs Lunge had festooned the place with black crêpe, the banisters were sheathed with the stuff, the clock, and the portraits of asylum worthies had been draped in it.’
For a moment, he wondered what was going on. Mrs Lunge herself always wore black, so her garb was no more or less different than usual. But that day everyone else was dressed in black too. Then he remembered – today was the day of Dr Rutherford’s funeral. A number of lunatics had been lined up to attend – men only, of course, and a white-faced Edward Eden stood sullenly at the end of the line. The serious-looking men were Dr Rutherford’s colleagues – phrenologists, and men from the Mind and Brain Society. As Will arrived, the doors that led through to the mortuary eased open, and two attendants wheeled Dr Rutherford’s coffin into the centre of the atrium – the main entrance hall of the asylum. The presence of ‘the casket’ as Mrs Lunge kept calling it – a magnificent affair in polished mahogany and brass, paid for by the grateful members of the Phrenological Society – meant that everyone was suddenly distracted, and Will could pass through the crowds without anyone asking where he was going. No one was noticeable by their absence. He saw Pole buffing the mahogany lid of the coffin with a soft cloth. Dr and Mrs Hawkins were standing side by side at the foot of the stairs, Dr Stiven, once more in his wig, waited a little way from them. Dr Mothersole, a mountain of mourning flanked by his wife and daughter, stood with his huge bald head bowed, his chin sunk to his breast, a black handkerchief pressed to his lips.
‘I am an emotional man,’ Will heard him say to his wife. ‘You know how deeply I feel, my dear. It is a curse, and also a blessing. Constance?’
‘I am writing it down, Father,’ Miss Mothersole intoned.
Dr Christie, his shock of white hair all the more dazzling amongst that sea of black-clad backs and shoulders, was looking at his watch, his manner impatient. He snapped it closed and blew a sharp blast on a whistle. The babbling lunatics sank into a nervous silence. Two of the more quiescent of them stepped forward, along with Dr Hawkins and Dr Christie himself, and two men from the Mind and Brain Society. They hoisted Dr Rutherford’s coffin onto their shoulders and, led by an undertaker in a tall black hat who kept time with his staff upon the floor, stepped solemnly towards the asylum doors. Outside, a hearse waited. It was hauled by six black horses festooned in feathers and dark polished leather, and preceded by six mutes carrying tall crêpe-swathed staffs. The undertaker opened the doors to the hearse and Dr Rutherford’s coffin was shunted inside, where it lay like a giant roasting tin inside a great glass oven.
The men filed out to climb into waiting carriages.
‘Are you coming, Quartermain?’ asked Dr Hawkins.
Without waiting for an answer he turned to Dr Christie. Will said he heard the two of them murmuring to one another about the day – the service was to take place at St Saviour’s Parish Church, and Dr Rutherford was to be interred in whatever space had been found in the remains of the graveyard, his bones forever a-tremble at the trains passing overhead. Dr Christie was to read something appropriate from the Bible, Dr Hawkins was to say something about Dr Rutherford’s work at Angel Meadow – Will had wanted to speak to Dr Hawkins but there was no time, and no opportunity, and all he could do was to follow him out of the asylum and blurt, ‘Where’s jem, sir?’
‘Not seen him,’ said Dr Hawkins. He slipped on a pair of black gloves. ‘I’m sure he’s here somewhere. What do you think of “tenacious”, Christie? Was Rutherford “tenacious”? Or “resolute”. I’d prefer “stubborn”, naturally, or even “obtuse”—’
Will slipped back into the asylum as Dr Rutherford’s coffin was slowly driven away. Pole had vanished. Mrs Lunge was examining a ledger in which she kept a list of quotidian tasks, a group of maids and attendants standing in a semi-circle before her. Naturally women were not expected to attend the funeral, and Constance and Mrs Mothersole were standing with a group of women Will recognised as members of the Ladies’ Committee. They were whispering together, and preparing to festoon the walls of the hall with swags of black fabric. They glared at Will with disapproval – should he not be on the way to St Saviour’s with the other men to watch Dr Rutherford being put into the ground? Did he not want to pay his respects in person?
‘Have you seen Mr Flockhart?’ he asked them. ‘Did any of you see him this morning?’ But none of them had anything useful to tell him about where I might be.
‘Perhaps he is in the library, M
r Quartermain,’ Miss Mothersole said, her expression filled with meaning.
Will went to the library. Like me, he looked under ‘M’, but found only a gap where ‘Mothersole’ might be. Wondering whether I had taken the notebook already and was pursuing something I had found inside it, Will went to the next place he thought me likely to be – upstairs in Dr Rutherford’s rooms. The door was open, and two men from the Phrenological Society were scaling the ladder that stretched up Dr Rutherford’s wall of skulls and plaster death-masks. One of them had a large, cream-coloured cranium in his hands and was running his fingers over its contours.
Will ran back downstairs, calling my name now, uncaring who he might disturb or who might question his disrespectful behaviour. He went through the wards, through the dispensary, through the chapel, and the hall. Where previously the trestle tables had been set out with Dr Mothersole’s art materials, now they stood as long dining tables, dressed in black linen and laid out with food and drink. Mrs Lunge stood still and silent, plucking at her tall collar and its glittering jet brooch as if trying to pull it higher. Maids and attendants scurried about her like mice.
Will went through to the anatomy museum, the teaching room, and into the cold and echoing mortuary. Where Dr Rutherford and Dr Golspie had once lain side by side there was now nothing but an icy marble slab. Will swallowed and looked away. The stink of the place, he said, was enough to turn his stomach.
Next door, in the anatomy room, the air was curiously thick and damp, heavy with a smothering, moist heat that fogged the mind and snatched the breath. Will held a handkerchief to his nose to stop himself from gagging. Laid out on the table were half a dozen glass jars filled with a viscous whey-coloured fluid. Inside each floated a lump of flesh, a chunk of bone or an organ. They were new, Will could see that much, for they gleamed pinkly, and had not yet developed the bloated, waterlogged look of the long-preserved. On the far side of the room the fire roared and crackled. Upon it stood a large iron trivet, atop this was the source of the reeking, broth-like atmosphere: a huge copper-bellied cauldron, its sides crusted with a thick layer of ancient grease and soot. Its lid danced and trembled, belching hot breaths of meaty steam.
Will told me later that he had never seen an anatomist’s cauldron before. A horrified fascination drew him onwards, a terrible fear at who, or what, might be inside that man-sized stock-pot. He had to look, he said, had to see for himself, to be certain . . .
In one swift movement Will reached forward and plucked off the lid. A cloud of fatty steam breathed into his face, and then cleared. The contents of the pot bubbled. For a moment he thought it might be nothing but clothes, stuffed into a giant copper washtub and set to boil, so that he almost laughed out loud with relief. And then something heaved up to the surface and swirled lazily; something thin and fibrous and gingery, its filaments waving and billowing like weed tugged by a gentle current. What was it?
Will reeled back, his hand to his mouth, and vomited onto the floor. ‘I could not believe what I was looking at,’ he told me. ‘It was hair. A hank of hair. Who else but Rutherford had hair that colour? Yours is far paler – thicker and shorter too. And yet I had to look again. I had to have no doubt.’
He peeped into the pot once more. This time, something far worse than a hank of hair rose up to meet his gaze. It was no more than a glimpse but there was no mistaking that narrow skull, its top sliced off, the flesh stretched and flaccid as if it were two sizes too big for the bones beneath. A pale boiled eye rolled and glistened beneath a stitched and drooping lid.
I lay in the smothering silence. Tears stung my face, trickling sideways and filling my ears. I closed my eyes then. If I was to see nothing, I might at least be master of my own blindness. I tried to imagine light – the rising sun, the flame of a candle or the warm glow of a lantern. But my imagination failed me. I tried to shift my tense and aching limbs, but my bindings were too tight for any movement. I tried to scream, but my mouth was stoppered, my sobs muffled and impotent, so that I was reminded of those poor souls in the criminal wards at Angel Meadow, who had moaned and raved for a freedom that would never come. I heard my heart beating in my ears, and I forced myself to listen to its steady rhythm. Will will find me, wherever I am, Will will find me. But the rhythm was erratic, as if my heart were being stifled too. I opened my eyes. This was what death must be like, I thought. This was eternity, nothing but silence and darkness and a terrible clanging fear.
Into that silence came that rhythmic thumping once more. I thrashed against my bindings and roared behind my gag until my throat bled and I thought I might drown or choke. I fell silent then, my breathing shallow. My head felt dizzy, my chest tight. I knew what would happen when I had breathed in all the air. Had not my old friend Dr Bain showed me when I was an apprentice? He had caught a pigeon and trapped it beneath a bell jar. We had watched as the creature’s flaps grew feebler, the longer it spent in that enclosed space.
‘Will it die?’ I had said pathetically. ‘We can’t let it die.’
‘What’s one pigeon, Jem?’ he had replied. ‘Are there not enough of the confounded things tormenting us with their showers of droppings that we should lament the passing of one? Look at the shoulders of my coat.’
‘I know, but—’
He’d shaken his head. ‘Such sensibility is of no use to us here. Yes, the bird may die, but it will die for science. A noble death. Look! You see what happens when it has used up all the air in the chamber? And yet—’ The bird had lain motionless at the bottom of the jar. ‘Open the valve. See what happens now?’ I had done so, my eyes fixed upon that tattered pile of grubby feathers. But we had waited too long.
Of course, Dr Bain had insisted on running the experiment again, this time opening the valve as soon as the next pigeon was struggling. Naturally, it had revived. But I had not forgotten how we had suffocated that trapped and helpless bird. Once its air was gone, nothing could revive it. And so, as my head began to spin, the blood thumping in my ears, I knew what fate awaited me. I had no idea whether my eyes were open or closed, though I could now see flashes of light, as if stars were exploding in a silent cosmos hidden within my own head. I thought of my father and mother, of Eliza, and Will – all the people I had loved. I tried to conjure up Eliza’s face, but instead there was my father once more. He was shaking his head.
‘You didn’t need those notebooks, Jem,’ he said. ‘You had everything that you required already. Trust yourself. Trust your own eyes and ears and they will tell you everything you need to know.’
I tried to speak, to ask what he meant, but I could not. My head felt as though it would burst; my chest as though a weight had settled upon it. Would I die here in this place, the voices in my head mingling with the roaring in my ears, the thumping of my heart shaking my whole being, as if it were beating its last in desperate laboured gasps? And the light! The light was so blinding that I could not look at it at all.
Will said later that he thought he was too late. When he wrenched open the lid of Dr Rutherford’s coffin and hauled me out into the dazzling light-which was, in fact, the dismal grey of a drizzling London morning – I was as pale and limp as a corpse. He ripped the gag from my mouth, the rain misting my skin and mingling with my tears.
‘If Rutherford was in the stock-pot, then who was in the coffin?’ he said. ‘That was my reasoning – am I not as fast and logical as you? All at once it was as obvious where you might be as if you had pinned a note to the cauldron itself. There had clearly been someone in the coffin – had I not seen six men struggle beneath its weight as they carried it from the asylum? I knew where Rutherford was to be buried, and so I came. I came faster than I have ever come to anyone. I had to dig like a dog in that filthy wet earth, for they had already put the coffin into the ground. And then there you were, bound and silent in that box – your face so pale, your birthmark – that beloved stain – the only thing that seemed still to pulse with life.’ There were tears in his eyes as he spoke. ‘I could not believe tha
t you were dead, that I was too late and we would be parted so cruelly.’
I remembered how he had slapped my face as he pulled me out. ‘Wake up!’ he’d shouted. ‘Wake up, you stubborn, pig-headed wretch. How dare you make me dig in this infernal graveyard yet again. Have I not had enough of the place that I must root you out of it too? Damn you, Jem Flockhart—’
I had felt the stinging blows. I had felt the rain, the cold, blessed rain, briny against my lips where it had mixed with his tears. When I opened my eyes I did not know where I was. I could not speak. I could not move. I saw Will smeared from head to foot in stinking St Saviour’s mud. Beside him, Old Dick squatted, toad-like on the mound of sticky earth they had excavated from the hole. Will told me afterwards that he could hardly bear to look at me, that he had never seen a countenance etched with such blank and rigid terror. My hands, unbound, grasped his lapels as tightly as twigs that had grown through the fabric, my eyes so wide that he feared they might start from my face. I stared, and yet seemed not to see, my mouth open and screaming, but as silent as the ground from which I had been plucked.
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