The Anatomist's Apprentice

by Tessa Harris

  Sir Theodisius peered down at Francis’s legs and clearly saw the strange substance to which Thomas referred. “What is the meaning of this?” he quizzed.

  The young doctor stood up and walked over to Sir Theodisius. Holding up a flap of his torn shirt in front of the coroner, he said: “You see this?” Sir Theodisius scrutinized the piece of linen. “That gray powder resembles the powder on Mr. Crick’s stockings, does it not?”

  The coroner nodded. “It appears so.”

  “It is beech lichen. Otherwise known as enterographa elabo-rata .”

  Sir Theodisius sniffed. “What of it?”

  “It grows on the trunks of ancient beech trees,” explained Thomas. “I picked it up in the wood just now.”

  Sir Theodisius was becoming impatient. “Very well, Dr. Silkstone, but where is all this leading?”

  Thomas looked at Francis Crick, whose cheeks had suddenly lost their entire color. “It is exactly the same beech lichen that is on Mr. Crick’s stockings.”

  Lydia turned and stared at her cousin, a look of mistrust etched on her face.

  “You were in the woods, Francis,” said Thomas softly. “And you killed James Lavington.”

  At this accusation Francis darted up from the chaise longue. “How dare you, sir?” he cried.

  Sir Theodisius interjected. “What can you say in your defense, Mr. Crick? If you were not in the woods, how do you explain the lichen?”

  Francis grew increasingly agitated. “What motive would I have to kill Lavington?” he blurted defensively.

  “Money. Power. Love. I could go on,” taunted Thomas.

  “Explain yourself, Dr. Silkstone,” barked Sir Theodisius.

  It had been Dr. Carruthers who had first drawn his attention to it. “What did you say that young earl’s name was?” he had asked one evening after dinner a few weeks ago. When Thomas replied, somewhat puzzled, that it was Crick, his mentor had clapped his hands gleefully.

  “I thought so,” he replied.

  When Thomas enquired why that particular fact should be of significance, the old anatomist leaned forward in his chair. “I remember now,” he whispered enigmatically.

  “Remember what?” urged Thomas.

  “I remember two or three years ago, when I could read the newspaper for myself, there was an engagement announced between a Crick and another Crick in the court pages of The Universal Daily Register. I remember it particularly because the father of the boy was a patient of mine, until he drank himself to death.”

  Using this snippet of information, Thomas had visited the offices of the newspaper and asked to look at their back issues. Sure enough the engagement of Lady Lydia Sarah Crick to Mr. Francis Henry Crick had been announced on May 30, 1775.

  “You were betrothed,” said Thomas.

  Francis suddenly began to tremble. “Yes.”

  Lydia lowered her head in embarrassment. “We were young and foolish,” she mumbled.

  “Foolish?” repeated Francis. “Foolish?” He looked at her incredulously. “Is that what you call it now? We had everything planned. We had your parents’ blessing. How can you say our union would have been foolish?” Thomas watched the young student grow more tense. “If anyone was foolish it was you, leaving me for that Irish wastrel.”

  Lydia’s elopement with Farrell had been exposed in court, but what only a few people knew or remembered was the fact that she and Francis had been childhood sweethearts.

  “Your mother always wanted us to be together, you know that.” Francis was staring at Lydia reproachfully now. “I was the one you were meant to marry. I was the one who was meant to take on all this.” He waved his hand in a grand gesture that suddenly took on a poignant impotence.

  “You did not need to kill for it, Francis,” cried Lydia.

  He clenched his fists and brought them up to his chest in a gesture of frustration. “I could not let Lavington have you, after all we had been through,” he sobbed.

  “So, you confess to his murder?” interrupted Sir Theodisius.

  Francis took a deep breath and drew himself upright, as if he were proud of the confession. “That I do, sir, just as I would have killed Silkstone if he had taken her away from me.”

  “Then, Francis Crick, I arrest you for the murder of James Lavington.” At these words Lovelock and Kidd marched forward and took hold of Crick. He made no attempt to resist, but simply looked forlornly at Lydia. “I will always love you,” he whispered before they marched him out.

  “I owe you an apology, Dr. Silkstone,” admitted Sir Theodisius graciously as he was about to leave.

  “No need,” replied Thomas, proffering his hand. “No doubt we will see each other again in court,” he said.

  As soon as the coroner left to return to Oxford, Thomas walked over to where Lydia was sitting, a glazed expression on her face. Sitting beside her he took her hand in his. She flinched and turned away momentarily.

  “Oh my dear Lydia,” Thomas began. “Look at me, please.”

  She turned to face him slowly. “Mama wanted us to marry so badly. She could see no future for Edward, but Francis was always her favorite.”

  Thomas stroked her cheek. “And because Francis was family it did not matter he had no other inheritance.”

  Lydia jolted upright. “You knew?”

  Thomas nodded. “I could tell that Francis was not called to medicine by some greater good, but by necessity. Then I found out his father was a drunkard and a gambler and had squandered his only son’s inheritance. Francis had to work for his living, until he saw a way of marrying the woman he loved and inheriting her fortune. He may not have killed the captain himself, but his execution would have suited his purpose.”

  Lydia now stared ahead of her, as if she could see the scenario played out before her.

  “So, it was Francis who sent you that threat and who had you attacked?”

  “Yes,” said Thomas. “But he had not bargained on Lavington’s designs on you.”

  Lydia thought for a moment. “Is it possible that he killed Edward, too?” she asked, almost childlike.

  “No doubt he will be questioned,” replied Thomas.

  At that moment Lady Crick flounced into the room, wearing a bright straw bonnet and a woolen shawl.

  “Where is Francis?” she asked. “I thought I heard Francis. He promised to take me out.”

  Thomas and Lydia eyed each other awkwardly. “He was called away on urgent business,” said Thomas quickly.

  The old dowager looked deeply disappointed, her countenance visibly drooping at the news. “What a pity,” she bleated. “I do so enjoy our walks in the woods.” And with that she trailed forlornly out of the room.

  “Poor soul,” whispered Lydia as she watched her crestfallen mother leave. “She didn’t even know about my marriage to Lavington.”

  Chapter 52

  Francis Crick was spared the degradation of the barber-surgeons’ scalpels after his execution. The judge had ruled that, while he showed no remorse for his crime, he had at least confessed to it.

  The trial had been held at the same Oxford court where Captain Michael Farrell had been tried not three months before. Thomas and Lydia had attended, but as Francis had confessed, it was a summary affair, without any of the intricacies and legal arguments that had been aired at the Irishman’s trial.

  Lydia had visited her cousin in his condemned cell afterward and given him what little comfort she could in his last hours. But there was something she needed to ask him before the noose was tightened around his neck and she knew her question might prove almost as painful.

  “Do you know who killed Edward?” she said, forcing the words from her mouth.

  Francis looked at her, his eyes red from crying, and shook his head.

  “You cannot ask me that,” he said and turned away, but Lydia grabbed his hand.

  “Surely you cannot take the answer with you to the gallows?” she asked incredulously.

  He looked at her earnestly once more. “
I love you, Lydia. I have loved you for years and you should have been mine.” His words wounded her like arrows because she knew them to be true. “If it wasn’t for Farrell, we would have been together, wouldn’t we, Lydia?” There was an urgency in his voice that suddenly frightened her. “Wouldn’t we?” he cried, taking her by the shoulders and shaking her.

  “Stop it, Francis,” she called. “You’re hurting me.” She pulled herself away from his grasp and he relented, taking two or three steps back and composing himself once more.

  “Do not take your secret with you to the grave, Francis,” pleaded Lydia.

  The young man looked at her intently once more. There was still a family likeness between them, he thought to himself. The same blood ran through their veins. He could never be robbed of that. “I can and I must,” he replied. “For all our sakes.”

  And so it was that on the morning of August 15, 1781, Francis Henry Crick was hanged by the neck until he died, taking with him to his grave the secret that still haunted Boughton Hall.

  For the next few days Lydia shut herself away in her room. “The mistress does not wish to see anyone,” Eliza told Thomas when he called.

  “Tell her ladyship I can give her a draught to soothe her,” pleaded Thomas.

  The maid went away and returned shortly afterward, shaking her head.

  “My mistress thanks you, but says she would rather be left alone,” reported Eliza.

  Forlorn, Thomas returned to London to his dissecting rooms. He tried to immerse himself in his work, but the passion of Vesalius had deserted him. He no longer felt compelled to probe the intricacies of the human body, to tease out tubules, to dissect tissue. Its mysteries no longer held out a promise of redemption, but of damnation. Each organ became a Medusa’s head that would turn him blind, just like Dr. Carruthers, should he set his inquisitive eyes upon it.

  Furthermore, he received word from his father in Philadelphia that Charleston had fallen to the British and that much of South Carolina was being coerced to return to British allegiance.

  Nothing made sense to him anymore. Into his ordered, structured existence chaos had come and brought with it destruction and death. Not only that, with it had come love, too—an emotion he had never felt before, and now that had also been taken away from him. He felt confused and bereft. Lydia had given his work a purpose. He had been on a mission for her. Now that she chose to exclude him, he felt deprived of any reason to go on.

  It was therefore hardly surprising that on the ninth day after his return, having received word that Lydia wished to see him, he was on the coach that left from London to Oxford within the hour.

  She received him in the drawing room, holding out her delicate hand for Thomas to kiss.

  “I have been so worried about you,” he told her, continuing to hold her hand. She made no attempt to withdraw it.

  “Let us sit,” she said softly, guiding him to the sofa. Thomas studied her face. She looked gaunt. It was obvious to him she had lost a great deal of weight.

  “You should have let me stay with you,” he chided gently.

  She looked at him, slowly shaking her head. “You have done more than your duty asks of you.”

  Thomas felt wounded by this remark. “I would do anything for you,” he replied. “I thought you knew that.”

  “I know it,” she acknowledged, “and yet I wish it were not so.”

  Thomas frowned. “What do you mean?”

  She rose deliberately and walked to the window, gazing out at the gardens beyond. “Three men I once loved, my brother, my husband, and my cousin, not to mention James Lavington, are now dead because of me.”

  Thomas could not believe what he heard. “No, Lydia,” he said, rising and walking toward her.

  “Lavington almost killed you, too,” she continued.

  “You cannot blame yourself for any of this, Lydia,” he assured her, but he detected his words were of little comfort. So often he had witnessed the cruel aftermath of bereavement that left loneliness, depression, and guilt in its wake. He wanted to share her pain and he suddenly found himself acknowledging his own guilt. He sighed deeply. “You asked me to find your brother’s killer, but I failed. If I had been successful early on, then your husband and Francis, and Lavington, might still be alive. We can all blame ourselves if we look back,” he told her.

  Lydia smiled meekly. “You have done more than any man,” she assured him, pressing her hand onto his in a gesture of intimacy.

  Just then, Lady Crick came into view, passing the drawing room window carrying a pannier and wearing a moth-eaten bonnet adorned with pheasant feathers.

  “Dear Mama,” sighed Lydia, watching the old woman shuffle toward the garden gate. An air of fragile melancholy seemed to surround her. “I cannot understand what ails her. One day she is in some far-off land of her own and another, she seems perfectly well.”

  Together they watched the old dowager walk out of the walled garden and down the path.

  “Where is she going?” asked Thomas.

  “For her walk in the woods. She and Francis would often go and she misses him.”

  “Does she know?”

  Lydia shook her head. “If she does, she has not spoken of it, but she is sad, that much I do know. It will be a year tomorrow since Edward died. She mentioned the date only yesterday. I wasn’t even sure that she had grasped he was dead. I only wish I knew what went on inside her head.”

  “Would you like me to speak with her?” Thomas ventured.

  Lydia swung ’round. “Would you? “ she said.

  The day was bright, but the air was chill as Thomas followed Lady Crick as she ventured into the beech wood. He kept his distance so that he could observe her and watched curiously as she weaved in and out of trees, entering deeper and deeper into the forest.

  Once or twice he had snapped a twig underfoot and the old woman had stopped in her tracks. Perhaps sensing she was being followed, she had turned and looked about her, then shrugged and carried on, going ever deeper under the forest canopy. Was she nervous about being detected? She seemed to be on a mission. Her steps were purposeful and confident, as if she were going to meet with someone.

  Presently the track became narrower. The sun no longer reached into the dark places and the smell of rotting vegetation assailed the nostrils. There was no birdsong now and Thomas was growing increasingly uneasy. If he revealed himself to her, he would frighten her out of her skin and risk causing heart failure. He would have to bide his time and be silent.

  A few seconds later, however, the old woman stopped for the first time in her foray and began looking at the ground. Thomas strained his eyes to see what she was doing. It appeared as though she was looking for something. Suddenly she bent down, plucked something from the ground, and put it in her pannier, then again and again.

  Thomas, too, shifted his gaze, trying to see what the dowager could be collecting. The answer was quick to reveal itself to him. On the trunks of fallen trees, nestling in dead leaves, in little clearings, Thomas could see them everywhere. Flat purple ones, rounded scarlet ones, ochre helmets, brown mushrooms: the fungi were everywhere in various stages of growth or decay. The old woman was doing nothing more sinister, or strange, than collecting mushrooms. He smiled to himself, more out of relief than anything else. After all the intrigue and mystery he had encountered over the past few months, his mind had become suspicious. He upbraided himself for being so mistrustful and allowing himself to doubt the innocent intentions of an elderly gentlewoman. He was just about to turn and go back to the hall quietly, without attracting attention, when he noticed Lady Crick do something rather unexpected. He saw her eat what he assumed was a raw mushroom. Chewing it slowly and deliberately as a cow chews cud, she pulled another from her basket, then ate it before straightening herself and turning to leave the forest the same way she had entered it.

  Thomas ducked behind a tree, not wishing to be seen, and watched the dowager pass, carrying her pannier full of mushrooms. He rema
ined at a discreet distance behind her for the next few minutes. He estimated the old woman had traveled almost a mile into the woods and it would take her almost half an hour to reach the garden gate moving at her steady but slow pace.

  It was not until she came to the edge of the forest that Thomas noticed something else. The sun was dappling the ground now and the path was only a few feet away when Lady Crick appeared to stagger slightly. She put her hand out against the trunk of a tree to steady herself, took a deep breath, then carried on.

  Not wishing to alarm her, but being near enough to the garden to pretend he had come from that direction, Thomas decided to approach the old woman from the side.

  “Are you well, my lady?” he asked her gently.

  She stopped and looked at him quizzically. “Francis? Is that you, Francis?” she asked.

  “No. I am Dr. Thomas Silkstone, a friend of Lady Lydia. May I help you?”

  Lady Crick cocked her head at an odd angle as if trying to orientate herself.

  “Where am I?” she asked weakly.

  “In the grounds of Boughton Hall, your ladyship,” replied a puzzled Thomas.

  She looked at him with the dull eyes of a fish and then seemed to have difficulty focusing. The young doctor was just about to take her by the arm and guide her inside when she suddenly let out a shriek and started pointing at his head.

  “There’s a monkey. Look,” she screamed. Her breathing became harsh and labored.

  Unsettled by this sudden outburst, Thomas once again began to take her by the arm, but she refused. “No. No. Get the monkey away,” she yelled, flailing her arms and dropping her basket so that its contents scattered on the ground below.

  Alerted by the old lady’s cries, Lovelock, who had been working the garden nearby, approached to see if he could help.

  “Come, my lady,” he told her soothingly. “ ’Twill be all right,” he told her, taking her gently by the hand. She smiled at the burly servant. “Francis,” she said calmly. “I am tired,” and she surrendered herself into his arms as he picked her up with ease and began walking back to the hall. Thomas followed swiftly behind. Lady Crick was humming gently now, like a contented babe, and by Lovelock’s demeanor Thomas surmised this was not the first time she had behaved in such an odd manner. “Pretty penny,” she mumbled. “Pretty penny and white roses.”