The Anatomist's Apprentice

by Tessa Harris

  “Clever boy,” said Thomas, looking at the thin rope. He had put it in his pocket almost immediately at the jail. In all the subsequent drama it was something that had completely slipped his mind. He unraveled the cord and laid it out on his desk. It was around seven feet long and at one end it was stained with what appeared to be blood. Thomas assumed that this was where it had sliced through the epidermis at the neck as the body hung. A section of about three inches was stained, but one small patch was darker than the rest.

  Holding the silken cord in his hand, his mind suddenly flashed back to his penultimate visit to Lydia’s lodgings at Merton Street. Eliza had been fumbling with the curtains as Lavington came downstairs. Why? Could it have been that the pull cord had disappeared so that she had to draw the drapes by hand?

  Thomas reached for his microscope. He then took a glass slide from one of the small drawers on his desk and positioned it. Next he secured the cord onto the slide and peered through the lens. What he saw, magnified one hundred times, confirmed his analysis. The cells that lay before him, like so many brown roof tiles, were those of blood, but their density varied. Where the stain was darkest, there were more of them, indicating the possibility of a much deeper wound. It was something that puzzled Thomas and unless he could gain access to the captain’s corpse, it would forever remain a mystery. Each day that the decay spread was a day the truth rotted, too.

  Lydia bent down, took a handful of loose earth, and threw it on top of the simple pine coffin that held the body of her late husband. There was a tragic finality about this act, as if she had just closed a book or drawn a curtain. James Lavington stood at her side, supporting her throughout. He nodded to Lovelock and Kidd to proceed shoveling in the dirt.

  The burial was a private affair. No pastor was there to lead prayers; no friends to eulogize. Lady Crick was attending an imaginary bridge party and only the servants had shown their loyalty by paying their respects. Lydia had bid a dutiful farewell and Lavington, too, had said a few well-chosen words, designed to ease her burden of guilt.

  Lydia had selected a place for the burial just a few yards away from the pavilion at the top of the hill, so that when she came to visit the grave, she could look out at the rolling vista and remember the times they had shared up there. A simple wooden cross rested at the head of the grave that gave no hint of the tragic circumstances that lay behind this shocking death. No future generations would know the true facts of this tragedy if Lydia had her way. But as she watched Kidd and Lovelock shovel the earth back over the coffin, it occurred to her that there might not even be another generation. With Michael’s death, she might never bear a child to carry on the line at Boughton. The thought of it was too much for her and she broke down in tears, so that Lavington had to help her onto the dogcart and drive her down the hill and back to the hall.

  “My dear Lydia, please calm yourself,” he urged her. They were sitting in the darkened drawing room later that afternoon. She had asked him to leave her alone earlier, and he had respected her wishes, but she remained inconsolable and he was becoming increasingly concerned, showing her slow gestures of care. Easing himself down on the settee beside her, he put a comforting arm around her. She pulled away at his touch, but he persisted. “Do not fear,” he told her. “This is what Michael wanted. You know he asked me to look after you, if anything happened to him.”

  Lydia looked up at him suddenly, shocked at the impropriety of this last statement. Lavington reached out for her hand and kissed it, allowing his lips to linger on her wrist, but she withdrew it quickly.

  “Come, come, Lydia. Why do you shun my concern?” he asked her.

  Lydia’s back stiffened. “You speak to me in terms which are not seemly, sir,” she scolded gently.

  But instead of feeling duly humbled by this chastisement, Lavington simply smiled in the half light, the hideous part of his face hidden in shadow, so that he looked strong and handsome. He pulled her gently toward him and said sweetly: “That is where you are wrong, Lydia. I have every right.”

  Unable to bear his touch, she leapt up from the sofa and hugged herself, as if she felt a chill. “I am in mourning, sir. Please respect that,” she rebuked him, more sternly this time. “I would ask you to leave now.”

  Lavington looked at her contemptuously. “I doubt if you would treat Dr. Silkstone the same way,” he ventured, his lip curving in a sneer. She resented the remark, but said nothing. Now she knew how her dead husband must have felt—alone and in a prison of his own making.

  Chapter 46

  With the twenty guineas James Lavington had paid for her silence, Hannah Lovelock caught a coach to London and took rooms in a lodging house for gentlewomen in Bedford Lane. She had bought herself a dress of printed calico and a thick woolen cape and passed herself off as a married woman come to London to visit her ailing father in hospital. The rules of her boardinghouse dictated no visitors, and lodgers were to be in by dusk, but that suited Hannah’s purpose very well.

  London, to her, was a frightening and strange place, far removed from Brandwick, or even Oxford. From her upstairs room, all Covent Garden lay before her in all its squalid, frantic, and colorful glory. Strolling performers beat their salt boxes, making music with rolling pins; crows fired cannons with their beaks; and she had even seen a pig arrange lettered blocks with its snout. Quacks called out their cures for the French pox and merchants with baskets on their heads hawked live mackerel, lemons, and fine Seville oranges.

  This was a world where Hannah Lovelock most definitely did not feel she belonged, but she had come here on a mission. She needed to find the man who had wanted to take her to her death. Thomas Silkstone had uncovered her darkest secret. He had made her stare into the cold, unforgiving eyes of reality. He had made her confess. But despite the fact that she had faced the gallows, and still did for all she knew, she was grateful to him. She could not have lived with herself with the young lord’s death staining her soul and she was glad that her misdeeds had been uncovered.

  It mattered not that Dr. Silkstone thought he was driving her to her trial and ultimate execution. She would have died for a noble cause. As the hangman placed the noose around her neck, she would have cried out the name of her dead child and died for her. What really mattered now was that she had escaped from the clutches of a man whom she thought she could trust, but who had threatened to make the rest of her family suffer if she had not left the courtroom that day, vowing never to return. That man was James Lavington and now she sought to expose him to the only man she felt could help her.

  She walked the one and a half miles from her lodgings in Covent Garden to the sprawling mass of St. George’s Hospital, just beyond the western gates of the city. This is where she told her landlady her stricken father lay and the woman had obligingly given her directions, but now that she had arrived at the forbidding building, she had no idea which way to turn. It was her hope that someone, somewhere in this vast edifice might have heard of Dr. Thomas Silkstone, so they could tell her where she might find his rooms.

  As she walked through the giant portico, the porters bustling around her helping patients with bloodied bandages walk along its vast corridors, Hannah Lovelock felt alone and very frightened. The sickly sweet smell of vinegar that washed the walls and floors assailed her nostrils and the distant groans of patients in distress droned in her ears.

  “Oi, you. Nurse. Give us a ’and,” commanded a gruff voice nearby. Hannah turned to see a porter trying to lift an elderly woman who had fainted. “Come on, then,” urged the man, struggling with the limp patient. Hannah looked nervously around, hoping he was addressing someone else. But no, his eyes were firmly fixed on her and she walked over to him and took some of the woman’s weight, while the porter eased her onto a bench. “Don’t just stand there. Go fetch a physician,” he barked.

  Hannah felt helpless. She began walking, frantically searching for anyone with an air of authority. A few yards down the corridor, she spotted a white-haired man with a kindly
face who was carrying a black bag.

  “Doctor?” she said tentatively.

  “What is it, Nurse?”

  “I am no nurse, sir,” she replied timidly.

  He looked at her incredulously. “Then who are you, pray?”

  “I am but a visitor, sir,” Hannah replied.

  “Then, my dear lady, I suggest you report to the reception,” he said, pointing to a large sign over a door on the opposite side of the corridor.

  To a woman who could not read, such a sign was of little relevance, but at least she now knew where to seek help.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, curtsying.

  The hall was lofty, with a large table on the left, behind a wooden screen, behind which lay wooden cubbyholes that bulged with packets and documents. Young men swarmed about them, like drones on a honeycomb, filling and emptying the spaces, opening packages or thrusting in documents.

  As Hannah approached the desk, she could see a bewigged porter seated behind it, only the top of his head and his eyes visible from where she was standing.

  “Yes,” came a voice from above, as the porter looked down on her.

  “Please, sir, I am looking for a Dr. Thomas Silkstone,” she said in a thin voice.

  The porter consulted some sort of ledger that lay open on the desk, tracing the names on it with his quill.

  “Silkstone, you say. What department?”

  Hannah looked puzzled. She had no idea what the word meant.

  “I do not know,” she replied.

  “Um,” said the porter unhelpfully. “Silkstone.”

  Nearby, one of the young men at the cubbyholes turned ’round as soon as he heard the name.

  “No. No Dr. Silkstone here,” said the porter.

  Crestfallen, Hannah thanked the gentleman for his pains and slowly turned away, bumping into a young man as she did so.

  “Hannah?”

  She looked up.

  “Hannah, what on earth ... ?”

  The face of Francis Crick stared down at her and she could have almost fainted with relief.

  “Please, sir. I can’t talk here,” she said self-consciously. “I need to see Dr. Silkstone.”

  Francis looked puzzled but nodded. “Very well, then I shall take you to him.”

  Chapter 47

  James Lavington was not a patient man. A full week had passed since Lydia had laid her Irish husband in the ground and still she spent the day in a darkened room, still she refused to take food, and still she wept at the slightest reference to the captain.

  “Michael would not have wanted this,” he told her softly at first.

  Lydia raised her tear-stained face and looked at Lavington disdainfully. “You would upbraid me for grieving?”

  Limping over to her, Lavington put a hand on her shoulder. “Grief or guilt, dear Lydia? How much longer can you keep up this pretense?”

  Lydia sighed deeply, then looking at him directly and with desperation in her voice she pleaded: “What is it that you want of me, Mr. Lavington?”

  The lawyer shook his head. “Oh dear, I haven’t made myself clear enough, have I?” he mocked.

  Lydia frowned, still holding his gaze.

  “I want you, dear Lydia. I want you to be my wife.”

  At these words, she suddenly felt nausea rise in her stomach. “Your wife?” she mouthed. The words stuck in her gullet, like barbs. His insensitivity amazed her. “Sir, you are too hasty,” she cried, suddenly finding her voice again.

  Exasperated, Lavington clenched his fists. “How much longer do you have to play the grieving widow, Lydia? Do not tell me you need time. Time is what they said was needed to heal these wounds,” he barked, pointing to his disfigurement. “But time did not heal the scars. They were left for all to see. Time is vastly overrated.”

  He was walking toward her now, his eyes on fire. She cowered away from him, afraid that he would lash out.

  “Do not tell me you need time. You were the one who was whoring with that colonist when your husband was rotting in jail.”

  At these words, Lydia brought her hands up to her head to cover her ears. “No. No. It wasn’t like that. It was ...”

  “Love? Is that the word you have for it, you poor deluded slut?”

  “Stop it, I beg of you,” she pleaded, but still he lumbered toward her, his eyes fixed on her. From somewhere deep within her she summoned up the courage to straighten herself and face her accuser.

  “Get out,” she cried. “Leave my house and never come back here again.” Her outburst left her panting for breath as she watched for Lavington’s reaction. Yet instead of retreating, his back stiffened and his jaw set firm in a gesture of defiance. His head then began to shake slowly from side to side in a way that both puzzled and infuriated Lydia.

  Finally, after what seemed like an age of holding her gaze, he said: “You cannot ask me to leave what is rightfully mine.”

  Lydia was confused. “I do not understand you,” she said in a half whisper.

  The lawyer’s lip curled in a half smile. It was the same infuriating look that her husband had often given her to make her feel small and insignificant and worthless.

  “You are standing on my property,” he told her plainly.

  Lydia’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

  “Boughton Hall, or at least most of it, belongs to me.”

  Lydia dropped like a stone onto the sofa, closing her eyes as she did so. When her opened eyes scanned the room once more, they settled upon the card table in the corner and she began to make sense of Lavington’s words.

  “He lost the estate?” she asked incredulously.

  Lavington smiled, twisting the disfigured side of his face. “No, no. Nothing as obvious as that,” he said cruelly. “But I do have in my possession debtors’ notes worth ten thousand guineas, and unless I am very much mistaken, you would be unable to honor that debt without selling off your beautiful home.”

  Lydia felt a great swell of anger surge through her body and suddenly leapt up from the sofa. “I will never sell Boughton,” she screamed, her fists clenched in unbridled anger.

  Lavington threw his head back and snorted. “My dear Lydia, whoever suggested that?” he sneered. “I could no more make you homeless than turn poor demented Lady Crick out on the streets.”

  Lydia thought of her sad, confused mother. It would be the death of her if ever she were to leave her beloved Boughton.

  “Speak plainly, sir, if you please,” she urged.

  Lavington limped forward. “Your mother shall stay here and so shall you”—he said softly, taking her hand in his—“as my wife.”

  Lydia wrenched herself away from his grasp. “So, this is what you planned all along,” she said softly, pulling away. “But Michael trusted you.”

  Lavington drew near once more. “He had every right to. I was a good friend, but an even better card player.” He shrugged. “Come, come, Lydia,” he began, reaching for her hand once more. “Michael would have won it all back from me eventually. It is just that now, poor fellow, he will never have the chance.”

  Lydia pulled away once more, shaking her head. “You drove him to the rope,” she screamed. “It suited you that he took his own life.”

  The sneer disappeared from Lavington’s contorted face. He looked offended. “How can you say that?” he whimpered. “Your husband was a brother to me. I would never have said nor done anything that would encourage him to do harm to himself,” he protested vehemently. He took a deep breath, as if trying to restore calm to his troubled soul. “Believe me, it is out of loyalty to Michael that I could not bear to see you sell your family home,” he said softly. “As your husband I can protect Boughton and ...” he looked at her knowingly, “your tarnished reputation.”

  Lydia sank once more, as if weighed down by the gravity of what Lavington had just disclosed. Her guard was down and she did not resist when the lawyer took her hand. “I am sure we can come to some sort of mutually acceptable and beneficial arrangement,”
he said softly and with these words, he lowered his face and let his scarred lips brush lightly against the back of her milk-white hand. “You have until tomorrow to decide.”

  Chapter 48

  Thomas read the letter once more. The unforgettable smell of Lydia’s scent wafted in the air at the touch of the paper. He had lost count of the number of times he had scanned each line, each sentence, and then searched it again for innuendo and double entendre. He looked for clues in each letter, each dotting of the i’s and crossing of t’s and from it, he deduced the message was clear. Lydia was in grave danger.

  Dear Dr. Silkstone,

  Please forgive me for not having thanked you in person for carrying out your duties in regard to my late husband so diligently. I deeply regret not having seen you before your departure from Oxford, but my state of mind was such that I could not receive anyone. As a man of medicine, I am sure you will understand.

  I also write to inform you that Mr. James Lavington has asked for my hand in marriage and I have consented. We are to marry within the next few days.

  Please do not think ill of me in these matters. I realize that the haste may appear unseemly, but I have my reasons.

  Yours truly,

  Lydia Farrell.

  A terrible, sickly feeling gripped hold of Thomas’s stomach. He looked at the letter once more, this time with unseeing eyes. Something was wrong—very wrong. Although Lydia had written only a few terse words, to Thomas they spoke volumes. They told him of betrayal and of duplicity and of malice and coercion. Lydia had been a good wife. She may have admonished her husband on a number of occasions, but these chastisements were deserved. She had been trapped in a loveless marriage and yet she endured her lot with fortitude. Thomas knew her to be constant and dutiful and she would never be so disrespectful to his memory so soon after his passing. She “had her reasons,” she said. Could those reasons be that Lavington was threatening her in some way, wondered Thomas. There was wrongdoing afoot, he knew it, and he determined to find out in person. On the morrow he would take the coach to Oxford and find out for himself the real meaning behind Lydia’s cautiously sparse words.