The Anatomist's Apprentice

by Tessa Harris

  “And did you see where they went?”

  The cleaner looked blank and shook his tousled head. “They went that way,” he said, waving a dirt-encrusted hand in a vague and wholly unhelpful manner, leaving Thomas none the wiser and doubly unsettled. He had assumed that once Hannah had signed her confession, the court constables would be summoned to arrest her. That would have been the correct procedure. Now he was confused, unsure, and deeply troubled as to the maidservant’s whereabouts. Without her confession, the fate of Captain Farrell still lay precariously in the balance. He told himself he was being ridiculous; that Lavington had probably taken Hannah somewhere quiet to question her. He would go to the lawyer’s lodgings in Merton Street later, but right now, he had urgent business of his own.

  Thomas was relieved to find Professor Hascher in his laboratory. Here there was order amid this chaos in which he suddenly found himself immersed. Here were the labeled jars and the numbered receptacles; the surgeons’ instruments, the sutures, the pliers, the forceps; their capabilities, their functions all tested, all certain, all known.

  “I think I have made progress,” Thomas explained, dispensing with customary pleasantries. The professor saw that the young man looked troubled and stressed as he opened his case and took out a physick bottle and a phial containing a sample from the jar of foxglove leaves from Hannah’s kitchen.

  “My laboratory is always at your disposal,” the Saxon reiterated.

  “And what about your mice?” asked Thomas, casting his gaze toward a large cage in the corner.

  The professor nodded, looking at the rodents scurrying about in their cages, eager-eyed and twitching. Thomas was reminded of Franklin in his own laboratory and how he had saved him from the fate that he was now to bestow on one of these helpless vermin. He had no liking for it, but he could see no other way.

  Carefully he picked out the plumpest mouse and, using a pipette, he dropped a solution of the digitalis, which he had made up earlier, into the creature’s mouth. He had added it to Lord Crick’s physick, just as Hannah had done, and used the exact same strength of the poison that she had used. Normally the effects of ingestion in a human, he had read, were felt between thirty minutes and two hours later. It troubled him somewhat that, according to Hannah’s account, the poison had taken hold almost immediately, and only a few seconds after the young earl had swallowed the physick.

  Placing the mouse back in the cage, all Thomas could do was watch and wait. Professor Hascher joined him in his vigil. The minutes passed. Ten, twenty. The mouse interacted quite happily with his fellows, showing no adverse effects from the digitalis whatsoever.

  “I shall increase the dose,” said Thomas. “I shall double it.”

  This he did, so that the solution a second mouse now ingested was twice the strength of the one given to Lord Crick. He waited another ten minutes, the professor at his side, watching eagerly, but again, nothing happened. Again the mouse remained active and alert. Thomas was perplexed. If such a dose had killed a man outright, why was it having no effect at all on a mouse? He grappled with the conundrum, turning the quandary around and around in his head. But time and time again, no matter how many different strands of logic he applied to the problem, he was forced to come to the same startling and wholly unexpected conclusion.

  Chapter 42

  Thomas made his way hurriedly toward Merton Street. He knew that Lydia and Lavington had taken rooms there. Just exactly where, he was unsure. He was grasping at straws, he accepted, but he needed to find them. Through the narrow gate he went, which led out of Christ Church Meadow and past Chapel Tower. Skirting Merton Tower with its high walls topped by battlements and massive doors, he turned right into Merton Street and proceeded to walk along the cobbles heading toward Magdalene Bridge.

  Farther down, the rows of houses afforded lodgings to scholars and fellows. It was here that Thomas supposed he would find Lavington, but he soon came to the end of the street and was berating himself for his pathetic attempt to find Hannah and the lawyer when he spied a familiar figure. Walking along the street, wearing the same battered bonnet that she had worn for the inquest, was Eliza, her fulsome hips swinging provocatively down the street. He quickened his pace. She was perhaps only half a furlong head of him. He saw her stop outside a house and disappear inside.

  No. 22 Merton Street was a substantial dwelling with stone columns that stood abreast a large door. It was grander than most of the other houses in the street and Thomas pulled the bell cord. Sure enough, it was Eliza who answered.

  “Is your mistress at home?”

  Eliza recognized Thomas instantly and was clearly a little taken aback by his presence. “Yes, Dr. Silkstone,” she said. “Please come in.”

  The maid disappeared into the hallway and returned a few moments later. “Come this way,” she said, leading Thomas upstairs to a large, airy drawing room. Lydia was seated at the window seat, gazing down onto the street below. She seemed strangely subdued and motioned to Eliza to leave.

  It was only when Thomas walked over to her and she turned to face him fully that he saw the bruising down one side of her face. Her right cheek was swollen and inflamed.

  “What happened?” he asked, taking her face in his hands and inspecting the bruises.

  She remained silent, but her silence spoke volumes. “What sort of a man does this to his wife?” he asked, the anger rising in him. “He does not deserve to live.”

  Lydia stretched out her hand. “You must not say that,” she reprimanded him, but her voice remained calm.

  Thomas took a deep breath and composed himself. “I am sorry. I should not ...” He broke off, remembering the real reason for his visit. If he did not trace Hannah, the captain might still be in danger.

  “Have you seen Lavington?”

  Lydia frowned. “I last saw him when the court adjourned,” she replied. “Pray tell me—what is it, Thomas?”

  “Lydia,” he said earnestly. “I fear that Hannah might have escaped.”

  “Your fear is well-founded,” came a voice from behind.

  It was James Lavington. He stood at the doorway, looking slightly disheveled. His cravat was askew and his normally immaculate topcoat was torn on the sleeve, just below the elbow.

  “The witch gave me the slip,” he panted, wiping his brow with a kerchief. “She told me she wanted one last look at freedom before she made her confession and I, like a fool, obliged.”

  “You mean you let her escape?” cried Lydia incredulously, jumping to her feet.

  “The constables are out looking for her now,” said Lavington, mopping his brow.

  “God grant they find her,” cried Lydia.

  The woman lay on the table in front of him; a heap of tissue and skin, of bone and muscle; a conglomeration of all that is human and yet not. Only a few hours ago she would have been alive. Her heart would have pumped, her lungs would have inflated; her liver would have drawn nourishment. Now she lay lifeless with her face so badly beaten that her features melded into one grotesque, amorphous mass.

  Like a rotten piece of meat, she had been discarded and thrown into the Cherwell. Some bargees had spotted her floating facedown among the duckweed in a shallow channel, with only a chemise covering her breasts. With their billhooks they had dragged her to the bank, adding to her already horrific injuries, and smiled among themselves. There was money to be made from a corpse, so once again the sack-’em-up men were summoned. True to their name, they put the corpse in a sack. “Four guineas,” demanded one of the bargees.

  “Not with her face smashed in like that,” said a sack-’em-up man. “Two.”

  And so a deal was struck and, for the price of a few yards of worsted, they bagged her up, this unfortunate woman, and took her to the door of Professor Hans Hascher. It was Thomas who answered their knock.

  “The foreign one not in?” asked one.

  “He is here,” replied a wary Thomas, looking at the hessian sack at his side.

  Professor Hascher cam
e to the door. “We got an adult for you.”

  The old man waved his hand distastefully. “Not today,” he said dismissively, but Thomas countermanded him.

  “How much?”

  “Four guineas,” replied the senior man.

  “Here’s three,” said Thomas, putting a handful of shiny coins into his soiled palm. The man nodded, knowing that once the doctor had seen the face, he might well not be interested at all.

  The scoundrels brought in their gruesome cargo and put the sack on the table, leaving Thomas to discover its grisly contents.

  “A woman, aye?” he said as the men wiped their wet hands on their breeches.

  “Yes. In the river, she was. Upstream from Magdalene.”

  Not wishing to engage in conversation, the two hoodlums took their leave and Thomas and the professor were left to discover the macabre offering for themselves.

  “You sink zis could be your woman?” asked Hascher as Thomas took a scalpel to cut open the sacking.

  The young doctor looked the professor in the eye. “I pray God it is not.”

  Carefully he began slicing the hessian that covered the head and within a few seconds the woman’s face was revealed.

  “Dear God,” Thomas let slip when he saw the pulverized mass of tissue and bone where once there had been a nose and eyes and cheekbones. In his seven years of anatomy, he had never seen an attack so vicious and brutal as to leave a woman bereft of her entire face. All that remained were fragments of long brown hair.

  For a moment he needed to calm himself, to remind himself that he was a professional and that he needed to distance himself from any emotion or repulsion that he felt.

  The corpse was naked, save for a coarse, white linen chemise that was caked in blood. This woman, he surmised, was of lowly birth. He cut open the front of her shift to reveal her breasts. They were small, but quite pendulous, indicative that she might have nursed at least one infant.

  Thomas noted the contusions along the length of her body. Whoever she was, the woman had been beaten before her face had been pulverized. There were long marks along her back, arms, and legs, the marks of a bar or a stick, Thomas surmised.

  “She tried to shield herself from the blows,” he remarked to the professor. “Look, her hands, inner lower arms, and fingers are badly bruised.”

  Now he moved to the abdomen and began to examine her pelvis. Thomas noticed it had widened and the slackness of her pelvic ligaments suggested she had given birth more than once.

  “A mother?” queried the professor.

  Thomas nodded. “Definitely.”

  There was bruising, too, around her genitalia and scratch marks on her inner thighs. “Whoever beat her raped her, too,” concluded Thomas, a note of disgust in his voice at this final act of barbarity.

  “But who was she?”

  “I’d say she was in her thirties. She had borne at least one child, and was probably in service,” Thomas concluded.

  “The calloused hands?” remarked the professor, looking at her palms. “But is she the woman you were looking for?”

  Thomas sighed deeply. “Of that I cannot be sure.” He paused reverentially for a moment. “She must have a decent burial.”

  The old Saxon was about to protest, thinking the torso a fine specimen for his students. When, however, he saw the look in the young doctor’s eyes, he capitulated. It was clear Thomas felt this corpse had been through too much already. She did not deserve to endure the final humiliation of the dissection hall in front of dozens of undergraduates who had no care for the fact that this was a woman who had suffered unspeakable horrors before being beaten to death.

  “I shall call ze constables,” said the professor.

  “Yes,” nodded Thomas, aware that whoever had committed this heinous act of savagery needed to be caught and brought to justice.

  “We may have found the woman they were looking for.”

  Chapter 43

  Thomas slept fitfully that night. The pieces of the puzzle that only twenty-four hours ago were beginning to fit so neatly into place were now falling apart. The results of his tests on the digitalis purpurea, Hannah’s disappearance, and now the discovery of this woman’s body all felt so wrong. It was as if an experiment he had conducted and noted dozens of times before had yielded a completely different and contradictory result when he had repeated it one last time.

  He thought of Captain Farrell, too, alone in his cell. Just a few hours before, freedom had seemed within his reach, but it was dangling perilously on the end of a fragile thread and that thread had now broken.

  At first light when he reached the prison gates he surmised that the jailers would run such a harsh regime and wake the prisoners at dawn, if only to prolong their interminable agony of incarceration.

  He found the jailer sitting at his table with his mouth wide open, dabbing a troublesome tooth with a grubby gin-soaked cloth. When he saw the young doctor, he took his fingers out of his mouth and eyed him suspiciously.

  “You’re an early bird,” he greeted him warily, then under his foul-smelling breath he jibed: “Come to see the worm.”

  Thomas heard him, but chose to ignore his cheap aside. “Is the captain awake?”

  “Slept like a baby all night, he ’as,” said the jailer, peering through the grille. “More than I ’ave,” he moaned, clutching a grubby hand to his jaw. Thomas peered through the grille, as well. He could see the Irishman was lying under his coarse blanket on the wooden platform that served as a bed. He could not see his head, only a mound of coverlet and straw, which, he assumed, had escaped from his torn palliasse.

  The jailer opened wide the cell door, allowing Thomas to enter, the smell of urine and filth assailing his nostrils. As soon as the door was shut behind him, Thomas went over to the bed. It surprised him that the Irishman had not stirred when the key had clanked in the lock.

  “Captain Farrell,” called Thomas, standing over the crumpled heap, softly at first, then louder. “Captain Farrell.”

  Receiving no response, Thomas lightly prodded the blanket, but his fingers felt only straw below. Shocked, he pulled back the cover. Farrell was gone. A mound of hay brought from the spoil corner lay in his stead.

  “Guard, guard,” he cried, rushing to the door. The jailer came swiftly. “The captain—he’s gone,” called Thomas. But the look of shock on the young doctor’s face was as nothing compared with the fingerprint of horror that had suddenly stamped itself upon the jailer. Thomas followed the man’s terrified eyes to where they had rested, pupils dilated, the hairs on the back of his neck erect, then he, too, was suddenly gripped by the chilling sight—the sight of a hanged man.

  Gently they cut him down. Thomas sliced through the cord as the jailer took the weight of the body, then together they carried him over to the wooden pallet. Thomas felt for a pulse. There was none and the precariousness of his own mortality flashed before him, as it had never done before. As he lay on the reeking palliasse, Captain Michael Farrell looked dignified in a place that dignity had long deserted. His eyes were shut. They had been shut when he first saw him hanging. His facial muscles were not contorted in any way, but relaxed. There was a peaceful beauty in the death that made Thomas believe for a moment that perhaps he was only sleeping.

  He had seen many a man hanged, sometimes several at one go. If the drop was short they would often writhe in agony for up to an hour. Sometimes relatives would rush forward to pull on their legs to end their loved one’s suffering. Michael Farrell could have been accorded no such mercy and yet, thought Thomas, his face was not contorted in any way. He was tall and his body had only dropped six inches from the ceiling and yet his lips were not bitten, as most men’s are when they are gasping for breath, nor was his tongue protruding, as in some grotesque gargoyle’s grimace.

  The captain may have wanted to die, but even so, his body would have put up a fight against his mind. There were certain involuntary reactions, which always occurred—the emptying of the bowels, for examp
le—but this had not happened in this case. Such thoughts, however, the thoughts of a surgeon, had to be put aside for the moment. He had a more pressing task to which it was his grim duty to attend.

  Eliza answered the door. “My mistress is dressing, sir,” she told Thomas.

  “I am afraid that I have some grave news which I must impart right away,” he told the maid. She could tell from his expression that something terrible had indeed happened and she did not argue. Instead, she ran upstairs and Thomas heard her knock urgently on her ladyship’s door. There were muffled calls and shouted questions. He heard Lavington’s voice, too, upbraiding Eliza for disturbing her mistress.

  “What’s the meaning of this, Silkstone?” the lawyer called angrily, fastening the belt on his robe as he limped down the stairs.

  “Is Lady Lydia coming?”

  “What business is it of yours, sir?”

  “What I have to say concerns her deeply.”

  Lavington could tell by Thomas’s tone that there was, indeed, some disturbing news to impart.

  “You’d better go in,” said the lawyer, motioning to the drawing room. “Her ladyship will be down shortly.”

  Eliza scurried in front of them into the room, which was in darkness. She went to draw back the heavy drapes, but fumbled among the folds, as if looking for something.

  “What’s the matter with you, girl?” barked Lavington.

  “Sorry, sir, I ...” she began and then, as if she had found a solution to her problem, she stopped and gripped a side of one of the curtains, pulling it back so that the watery morning light flooded the room.

  Thomas did not sit, but paced the floor, trying to frame his words. He had lost count of the number of times he had had to break the news to a relative, a husband or wife, a mother or a son. It was never easy, but this time would be by far the worst.

  “Good God, man. You’re acting like a caged animal,” accused Lavington. Thomas ignored him until, after what seemed an age, Lydia finally appeared at the doorway.