Newes from the Dead

by Mary Hooper

  I’d stared at the money in awe and not a little consternation, for five shillings was the most money I’d seen altogether in my life, and near equal to my year’s wages after my livery is taken off.

  “You must spend it on something splendid to wear,” he said, “for when I raise you up you’ll be required to dress as a great lady, and this can be the start of your wardrobe.”

  I’m ashamed to say that these silver coins were enough to turn my head, and I took them from him, knowing they were enough to buy me a very handsome gown or two or even three second-hand ones, and after this we parted and said no more. I was most happy and relieved to see him go back to school, however, and I resolved that, come what may, I would not succumb on his return.

  There being nowhere in Dun’s Tew to spend such an amount of money, on my afternoon off (with Mrs. Williams being busy in the cellars with Mr. Peakes), I took a ride on one of the carts going into nearby Woodstock, which is a fine and fashionable town. Here in a shop in the High Street I purchased—not a gown, but a most beautiful bodice embroidered all over with silver thread and embellished with pearls. I did not have a skirt to match it in beauty—nor indeed any occasion to ever wear such an item—but I kept it wrapped in tissue paper under my mattress and sometimes took it out and looked at it. I told no one about it, for I’d already been chastised by Mrs. Williams for wearing a red petticoat on a Sunday and knew the bodice wasn’t a suitable thing for a maidservant to own.

  I never wore it. The last time I saw it was in prison, when I handed it over to Ma and then went to meet the hangman.

  Chapter ~ 8

  As the coffin lid was removed, Robert found his hands were shaking and that he was unable to look directly upon the corpse, although for what reason he couldn’t say. Perhaps he feared that the girl might have taken on a terrible aspect, her face contorted and her eyes starting from their sockets. Perhaps it was that he didn’t know whether she lay in the coffin in her undersmock, or naked—and that if the latter, he feared the sight of her might induce some fellows to sniggering, or to make lewd jokes that even the presence of Dr. Petty might not prevent. But then, he reasoned, Dr. Petty would probably cut her clothes off before they started the dissection, so that sooner or later she would be naked before them all. And more than that, for very soon they would see not just her skin, but her flesh, her muscles, her bones, and her very heart. No, he thought, it was something to do with that other coffin, the one that remained elusive to him. Despite being recalled but hazily, it was a matter so sensitive, it almost hurt him to think of it.

  But when Robert finally forced himself to look at the body of Anne Green (for they had not bothered to dignify her corpse by wrapping it in a shroud), he saw nothing too gruesome. The girl still wore the stained and wet under-smock she’d been hanged in, and although her hair was in damp strands, her face, streaked with tears and dirt, seemed in repose. The flesh of her arms and legs was creamy white—as white as the cheap cloth that lined the coffin—her face was somewhat pink—due to, perhaps, the breaking of blood vessels—and the only strange and jarring aspect of her appearance was that the great knotted rope by which she had been throttled was still around her neck.

  As the lid was placed on the floor, there was a movement from the scholars as they craned and peered into the coffin.

  “You may remove the corpse,” Dr. Petty said.

  Robert swallowed the bile that had risen in his throat, thinking to himself that strong beer too early in the morning should be left to more experienced constitutions.

  “You take the top half,” Wren instructed him.

  Robert nodded, then slid his hands under the dead girl’s shoulders. As they lifted her, the hangman’s rope slid toward the floor, jerking her neck and, for a ghoulish moment, making it look as if her head had nodded.

  “She moved!” Norreys said in alarm, and there was a collective gasp from the assembled students. Dr. Petty, engaged in unrolling a chart, glanced over and smiled slightly. “My dear boys,” he said, “I can assure you that she did not move. She has been dead these three hours and more.”

  “She is certainly dead,” another confirmed with a slightly nervous laugh. “She hung over half an hour on the scaffold. And her family swung on her legs to hurry her end.”

  “Until the jailer told them to stop for fear the rope would break!” another added.

  Robert opened his mouth to add something of his own but then thought better of it. No matter, for one of the scholars had seen the same thing and was speaking his lines. “I saw someone batter her breast with the butt of a musket to help her on her way.”

  Dr. Petty nodded. “She is undeniably not of this world.” An ironic smile played across his lips. “Even now she may be knocking at the door of heaven.”

  Dr. Petty’s charts had been unrolled and put up on the wall behind him. One depicted a skeleton, every bone down to the smallest precisely labeled; another showed the muscles in the body, red and livid; the final one was a depiction of a human head, the front of its skull removed to show an approximate replication of the whorls, cavities, and coils within the crater of the brain.

  The dissection tools—knives, saws, gimlets and pliers, brass probes, pincers, curved needles, syringes, long-handled scissors, and a range of small knives with blades as sharp as razors—had been removed from the bag and stood at the ready. And, although a corpse was not expected to bleed much, wadding had been provided, and there was a pile of it at the head of the table. As a further precaution, Martha came in with a pail full of sawdust brought in from a nearby coffin maker’s and threw handfuls of it onto the floor. She stole a quick glance at the corpse as she went out, shuddered dramatically, and then looked at Norreys to see if he was looking at her.

  The crowd outside in the High Street seemed quieter now, for a small detachment of soldiers had arrived and were rough-handling anyone foolhardy enough to get too close to the fence. Robert wondered to himself how Anne’s mother—and her younger sister, had it been, who’d been near her in the prison yard?—were faring. Were they still waiting out there in the sleet with the others, or had they gone home to mourn?

  As Dr. Petty and Mr. Clarke conversed in low tones about who should take responsibility for which part of the body and in what order, the scholars either spoke among themselves or just stood and stared first at the charts and then at Anne Green, trying to work out for themselves the positioning of some of her interior organs. Robert stared too, and fell into a kind of reverie in the staring, trying to remember more details of that other coffin and who’d been lying inside it.

  The fellow next in line, young Wilton, nudged him, making him start. “Were you at her trial?” he asked.

  Robert shook his head, and Wilton directed his speech behind his hand so that Sir Thomas could not overhear. “The whole business of the trial and hanging was a strange one,” he confided. “And an unjust one, it seems to me.”

  Robert looked at him intently, for he knew Wilton to be a fellow who took a deep interest in the politics of the day. It was rumored, too, that he’d kept faith with the Levelers at one time, until the last rebel band of these fellows had been rounded up in Burford the previous year and their leaders shot.

  “He”—Wilton nodded toward Sir Thomas and lowered his voice—“had too big a hand in it.”

  Robert was anxious to hear more but, curling his lip with frustration, knew that it was well nigh impossible for him to pose the question.

  Sir Thomas suddenly spoke up, his voice brusque and impatient. “Will it be much longer to wait? When are you going to start the business?”

  Dr. Petty pulled out a pocket watch, which the students regarded with a great deal of interest. “We are waiting for Doctor Willis. I believe he had an important laboratory experiment already booked for this morning.”

  Robert wondered what this was and if it might be something innovative and radical—like the recently posited notion from Dr. Willis that catarrh did not pass into the nostrils from the brain, as h
ad always been presumed. He thought of the experiment he was currently running, which involved a chicken and a constant supply of eggs, the contents of which were examined and logged a certain number of days after they’d been laid. The chicken, whom he’d named Scarlett on account of her red feathers, lived in his lodgings with him, ate scraps, and provided him with quite congenial company, for (to his surprise) Robert had found that he could talk to her almost normally and with rarely a stammer. He let her out into the yard every morning for regular liaisons with a rooster, and so far no one had noticed her presence in his room; although the students were forbidden to keep gray-hounds, ferrets, or hawks, a chicken appeared to be beyond this censure.

  At last there came the sound of footsteps hurrying along the passageway and Martha’s voice was heard to say, “Just along here, sir, if you would be so kind,” and a moment later Dr. Robert Willis came into the room wearing a wool cloak, which he discarded at the door to reveal a stained black gown. Although not as charming a figure as Dr. Petty—for Dr. Willis was plain, stocky, and had hair as red and bristly as a pig’s—his intense intelligence, plus his avowed intention to unlock the secrets of man’s mind, was causing immense interest in his work both with the Oxford students and in the general scientific world. He had recently written a treatise on sadness, saying, controversially, that it was a complicated distemper of the brain and heart and not a melancholic humor at all. Robert felt himself lucky to be at Oxford with such a brilliant physician, and profoundly pleased that his first dissection would be conducted by him and Dr. Petty.

  “Good morning, gentlemen, and my apologies for keeping you waiting,” Dr. Willis said, bowing to all corners of the room.

  He went directly to the cadaver and walked up and down the table, surveying it with a keen eye. He slouched as he walked, Robert noted, and did not have the bearing of a gentleman or person of quality. He was certainly a gentleman in the true meaning of the word, however, for he had long treated the poor without payment.

  “This is the murderess? She seems a very mild one.” He caught up one of Anne Green’s hands and examined it. “She was a housemaid?”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Clarke, the apothecary. “A house-maid who was found guilty of murder, although she maintained she was . . .” He suddenly caught the eye of Sir Thomas, and his voice faded away.

  “She maintained?” inquired Sir Thomas. “Are you saying, sir, that the word of a whoring housemaid should be taken above that of judge and jury? Are you saying that the law of the land was not properly implemented and that twelve good and educated men were wrong in their judgement of her?”

  Everyone in the room waited for a response.

  “Not exactly,” Mr. Clarke said at last. “It’s just that she maintained her innocence until the end and—”

  “Have you ever known a convicted felon who did not proclaim his innocence?” demanded Sir Thomas.

  Mr. Clarke, who could be easily cowed, shook his head.

  “Fortunately, we are not concerned with the girl’s guilt or innocence now,” interrupted Dr. Petty, “for it’s obviously too late to discuss the finer points of the accusation. No, we are here with the express wish of improving our understanding of the functioning of the human body.”

  “Then I suggest you get on with it!” said Sir Thomas.

  “Indeed,” said Dr. Willis. “The fresher the body, the more we shall learn.”

  Sir Thomas nodded. “Quite. Quite. Even without the murder charge, the new laws state that fornication may be an offense punishable by death, so the jade has got what she deserved.”

  “But who was it that she fornicated with?” Wilton whispered to Robert. “Should he not also be culpable?”

  Robert, although rather startled by this thought, found himself nodding.

  “There has been some skulduggery here, you may depend on it . . .” said Wilton.

  Dr. Willis picked up a whalebone rod tipped with silver and twirled it in his hand. “Shall I begin?”

  “If only you would, sir!” came from Sir Thomas.

  Dr. Willis moved forward and, watched closely by everyone in the room, tapped the tip of the rod against Anne Green’s breastbone.

  A tiny sound escaped from her mouth.

  Only Robert heard it. At least, he thought he’d heard a faint noise, like the far end of a sigh, but with the press of people around couldn’t be perfectly sure of the direction from which it had come.

  He stared at Anne Green, pale, silent, and immobile on the table; her life force extinguished over four hours ago and dead as a flitch of bacon. Of course he hadn’t heard anything. But . . . He suddenly shivered so violently that Wilton gave him a concerned look. He saw, clearer than before, that other coffin. He saw another corpse, a young woman about the same age as Anne but tranquil and serene in her death, wearing a white ruffled nightgown, with dark curls showing at each side of a white cap. There were candles standing at the corners of the table, and a sweet, high scent perfumed the room. Incense, he thought to himself—although it had been banned from churches and it was a while since he’d last smelled its fragrance.

  Wilton gently pinched his arm. “You’ve gone as pale as a wraith, good fellow. Are you all right?”

  Robert formed his mouth into a yes and nodded his thanks. He pulled himself back from his reverie, paid attention to Dr. Willis.

  “I am about to dissect the corpse of a woman,” the doctor said. “She appears in good condition and was not suffering from any malady before her demise. With your permission, gentlemen”—he made a flourish toward Petty and Clarke—“I intend to make the first incision under her ribs and then open up her chest cavity to reveal her heart.”

  But as Dr. Petty and Mr. Clarke bowed back, another sound came from Anne: a faint rattling noise. It was a noise, Robert thought, more generally made by a corpse breathing its last than by one that had been pronounced dead some hours ago.

  This time, most of the room heard it, and although the medical men did not seem unduly disturbed, the scholars gasped, and Sir Thomas Reade took a step backward, looking affrighted.

  “’Tis nothing, merely the last breath she took, coming back from her lungs,” Dr. Petty said calmly. “I have heard such a thing before.”

  “I know what to do,” said a fellow standing on the bench, and he did no more than jump up onto the table and stamp down hard on Anne’s chest and neck. “That will see her off!”

  Robert and several other scholars gave a cry at this violation, and Dr. Willis ordered him off the table. “That was unnecessarily brutal and could have harmed our specimen,” he said brusquely.

  The fellow looked put out. “I merely sought to help, sir.”

  “Then please do not,” came the stern reply.

  Dr. Petty picked up Anne’s limp hand and felt around her wrist. “There is no pulse here and no sign of life,” he said. “I suggest we proceed with the dissection forthwith.”

  Chapter ~ 9

  Such a pain! Such a pain of a sudden came upon me, as if someone had hammered across my breasts and my neck and my rib cage. And there was no way of expressing it nor of screaming out with the agony of it, so I had to contain it within me, and thus it seemed so much worse.

  For a time (a moment? a hundred years? a thousand?) I could not think of anything but this pain, and then gradually, very gradually, it diminished. When it allowed thought to come in, I wondered to myself if this was the beginning of the torment I would have to endure to enable me to progress through purgatory. In that case, perhaps I should not fear it, but welcome it. It did not continue, however, and once the first agony was gone I felt nothing but a dull ache right across my body.

  At the start of the cider-making season I had my afternoon off and walked home to see my ma, only to discover a terrible thing; a thing which I had felt in my heart, but which I had pushed away as being too dreadful to consider.

  My home village is about three miles from Dun’s Tew. ’Tis a pleasant enough walk over fields and cart tracks, though ’t
is a sadness to see the ruins of Barton Manor, now all tumbled and near disappeared under brambles and briars. On crossing the common I met some of my old neighbors picking the last blackberries, and also saw our family’s two sheep, Bramble and Bracken, grazing peacefully near where the maypole used to stand. All was just as I remembered and how I like to recall it—although since I’ve been working for the Reades I’ve never visited my home without thinking of how small it is, and how humble. And indeed I thought it then, for ’tis but two rooms, one down and one up—this latter reached by a ladder—also an outhouse where the chickens live and are joined in winter by the sheep and, if Pa has had the money to buy one that year, a pig. There’s no glass in the cottage windows up or down, and the wooden shutters, which do their best to keep the wind out, also serve to keep out the light, so in winter it’s necessary to burn a tallow candle even by day. In our downstairs room there’s a wide hearth containing a spit, cauldron, and kettle, but there’s no bread oven, so Ma buys her daily loaf at the baker’s, and is thereby allowed to take her own pies and pastries along to be baked in his big oven. The room has not much furniture but is homely, with two benches, a table, and an oak coffer that stores linen and trenchers and so on. ’Tis passing sufficient, for there’s only Jane living at home now, and Pa is not often there, nor ever has been, for he labors long on the land and takes on extra work whenever he can and for whatever master. ’Tis long been his ambition to buy a cow, and they don’t come cheap.

  I know that Ma is not a clever woman when it comes to book learning—she has not had a day’s schooling in her life and cannot even write her name—but there are certain things she knows about, for I’d not been long inside the door before she put aside the piece of lace she was making and looked me over carefully.

  “You’re pale of face and have rings about your eyes,” she said. “Are you with child?”