by Robin Blake
‘When it’s known that … this person was not as she seemed it will alarm the people, that’s certain. They already suspect an irruption of evil here. Now it will only be confirmed. Is there no explanation in natural philosophy we can give them? Is this a freak of nature, or truly something outside nature, Luke?’
Fidelis took off his hat and rotated it thoughtfully in his hands.
After some moments he said, ‘It turns everything over, you see. If there were any two absolutes in this life, I would have said it was the separation of the sexes. Until now.’
I was struck by his manner. Luke Fidelis, who is usually so sanguine, and so precise, was no less confounded and confused by this than I.
‘Well, it resolves one puzzle, at any rate,’ I said. ‘The entry in Dolores’s commonplace book. It was not just the story of Mr Eustace that disturbed her, though it must have done so. It was also the question of sex and souls. She didn’t know how to fit her own case into the system.’
‘What did she write? “Imagine then: my fear and pain”. She was afraid for her own soul, for its integrity.’
‘For its very existence.’
Of the three of us, it was the young artist who seemed the least perturbed. Having deposited himself at a few yards distance he had produced a sketching book and a piece of black chalk and was now absorbed in making a careful drawing of the Ice-house. I suppose his calm was natural, because as a stranger to the town he had no preconceptions of Dolores Brockletower in life. Having known her, seen her, accepted her as a high-ranking woman and a wife, it was hard for Luke and myself to discover at the flick of a blanket that she had all the time been a monster, a double-sexed mongrel, an affront to nature and decency.
‘We must appeal to someone who can pronounce on this definitively,’ I said.
‘Definitive is a word in law, my friend, not in nature.’
‘Yet we must know what this means. We want an authority on the question.’
‘An authority? In this town? London or Edinburgh might offer us one, but there’s no such person here!’
And then it burst on me, like a brainwave breaking.
‘No, Luke,’ I said quietly. ‘You are wrong.’
I got to my feet and walked across to where the boy artist was at work. Crouching behind his shoulder, and squinting to sharpen my eyesight, I looked over his work. It was rough but extraordinarily like, the small sunken building appearing on his page in just proportion, and from just this viewpoint.
‘Now, I am told,’ I said, ‘that you know someone in this town who should take a very particular interest in what is inside that Ice-house.’
‘Yes, sir. I was thinking just the same.’
‘Then we are agreed. But will he come out here, and view it himself?’
George shook his head decisively.
‘He never leaves his house. He might want to come, but he would not be able to, I think.’
Fidelis joined us now, and peered over my head in order to study George’s work for himself. I turned to him.
‘We refer to old Dapperwick, Luke. He interests himself particularly in genitalia. Did you know? His library is lined with casts and bottled samples, I’ve seen them myself. If anyone can speak with authority on this sort of question, he can.’
Luke straightened his back and stretched his limbs. He seemed a little put out, as if I had questioned his judgement, or his knowledge of the world. Then, taking my arm, he drew me a little distance out of George’s hearing and spoke through compressed lips.
‘I don’t know Dapperwick, but have heard he’s senile. Would he have anything useful to say on this?’
‘Yes, he is old, sick and reclusive,’ I said, ‘but not entirely mad. He forgets the day of the week, but he remembers his grammar and rhetoric. I wish we could fetch him here to make an examination. But at the least we can go and talk to him about this.’
Fidelis rubbed his chin.
‘We can do better, Titus. I shall finish my examination – it’s essential to look inside the body – and as I do so our young artist shall make drawings.’
‘Which we will take directly to the venerable doctor for an opinion. Excellent! What do you say to that, George?’
The boy, who had looked so withdrawn and passive in his work, now looked re-animated. He closed the book with a snap and rose to his feet.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind. I can start now.’
Leaving the surgeon and draughtsman to their work, I decided to stroll down to the yard and then up the path to the workmen’s camp. I hoped to learn more about poor Solomon and his escapade with this out-of-the-ordinary corpse. I wanted to know how and why it was in his possession because I believed this would tell me who knew its secret, and what consequences that knowledge had had.
As I made my way up the path through the dense wood that rose behind the Hall, the trees were still dripping from the morning’s rain as my nostrils filled with the spicy smell of wet humus and leaf-mould. I listened for the sound of laughing children echoing down from the camp. But I heard none and, on arriving at the clearing where I’d first talked with Solomon’s mother, I found it was a camp no longer. The tents were gone, the shelters dismantled. The ring of stones that had enclosed the fire had been disarranged, some of them kicked away, while within it was only a mess of sodden embers. The stool the woman had sat on lay overturned, its three legs pointing to the sky. In just a few hours they had all packed and gone.
I picked up the stool by one of its legs, meaning to take it back down with me to the dairy, from where it had probably originated. But first I wandered about a little and soon, in a corner of the former camp, some distance from the fireplace, I found a long mound of freshly turned earth and lying on it, having already keeled over in the rain-softened soil, a roughly fashioned cross.
I set the stool down and sat upon it to contemplate, for a few minutes, the unconsecrated burial place of poor simple Solomon. I guessed he had been put hurriedly in the ground without much ceremony. These people were not godly. His mother was not godly, certainly. She would not care that there had been no priest to recite words over her son, or that this was not consecrated ground. No one else cared, or would care, what happened to these itinerant labourers as they migrated from place to place, and job to job. What had been the woman’s simple idea of human life? A night waking. I wondered if that was all any of them believed.
Then I thought about Solomon himself. That this fool, fogged in his thought and confused in his speech, had been the solution to the disappearance of Dolores Brockletower’s dead body, was in reality no solution at all. Soon we would be digging for knowledge in the half-buried mind of Dapperwick. But to do so here, to dig for knowledge of Solomon’s motive, in a being born without reason into a life without purpose, would have been perverse and unprofitable.
All that could be said was that he was not only a fool, but a tool. But whose? Knowing what I now knew about Dolores Brockletower’s peculiar nature, I would have said this must be the squire. The body’s disappearance would have been very much convenient to him, if there was any likelihood of it being viewed naked by a jury, or medically examined for an inquest. In a man of his standing, to have it publicly revealed that his wife was not fully a woman would bring down a shame and notoriety that he could never outlive. But I found it hard to conceive that he dealt with Solomon directly. I supposed instead that he did so through the medium of Solomon’s employer, Barnabus Woodley, and that Woodley had operated through his foreman, the ganger Piltdown.
Oh well. The ganger had gone and Woodley was dead. Perhaps we would never know the truth in detail. I rose and picked up the stool, which I carried back down the path to the yard of Garlick Hall. Once there I saw Fidelis and the boy coming towards me. They were now ready to bring George’s drawings to Molyneux Square, to show to Jonathan Dapperwick. How fast they had worked! Hurriedly I deposited the stool by the kitchen doorstep for the milkmaid to find it and bustled away to collect our horses.
‘By Mallender?’
‘He was behind it. Oswald Mallender came up to the Ice-house after you left us. He gave me a letter signed by Grimshaw over the bailiff’s seal, forbidding the post-mortem. There was another communication for the soldiers, in which the bailiff instructed them to bar me from entering the Ice-house. He waved it at the soldiers and told them to let no one into the Ice-house. These papers must have been prepared before the inquest even began. The obstruction was premeditated.’
‘The Devil it was!’
It was the effrontery of this that surprised me, not the fact of it. Grimshaw stood for the interests of men like Brockletower. It was their plumage he borrowed to feather his own nest, while justice and truth could go to hell.
‘The squire must have put him up to it. With his feelings about me, you know, Grimshaw would be willing enough to conspire with him.’
‘Ephraim Grimshaw is a poltroon.’
‘But a powerful one. However, on this occasion, his letter has no more legal force than a page out of Mother Goose. You had my authority to proceed with the examination. That weighs heavier than all his seals.’
‘But that was the rub, Titus. I didn’t have it, not at first. The soldiers barred the Ice-house door and refused to let us pass. Even when your note arrived, I couldn’t persuade them to let us begin work. The soldiers were illiterate. Only when Sergeant Sutch appeared and read my warrant did I gain access.’
‘The squire must have asked Grimshaw to intervene. Didn’t I tell you he was all against your cutting his wife open?’
‘Yes. And now we know why.’
‘But now that you have cut her, what result?’
Fidelis shook his head.
‘None, Titus. It was necessarily a rapid survey. The anatomy was so strange and confused that I could make nothing of it. But I saw no disease in the principle organs. And there were no wounds, new or old, except the one we know about. The stomach was empty.’
‘The empty stomach doesn’t signify. The servants told me she never broke her fast until after the morning ride. Now, let us pick up the pace. I am impatient to hear Dapperwick’s opinion.’
Chapter Twenty-five
‘A CAPITAL EXAMPLE of hermaphroditism, is that!’ exclaimed the author of De Genitalia Virilis Muliebrisque.
Dapperwick’s fingers were fluttering moth-like over the page of George’s drawing-book, which lay open before him on his library’s writing table, around which we all stood: the old anatomist, the young artist, Luke Fidelis and myself.
‘Am I to understand,’ Dapperwick continued, ‘that the original of this subject is lying dead less than five miles from here?’
‘Yes, at Garlick Hall,’ I told him.
Dapperwick’s trembling fingers traced the outline of the naked corpse. Taking a downward viewpoint, George had drawn it with astonishing accuracy and truth, not only the outline, but the actual flesh of it, and with the complete illusion of three dimensions.
‘I only wish I could look at this in the flesh,’ Dapperwick went on. ‘I have never seen one, you know. They are exceedingly, exceedingly rare. But no. It is impossible for me to go to Garlick Hall, or anywhere outside this house. Quite impossible.’
His lips were pursed and faintly dribbling, but the eyes set in his masked, immobile face were on fire. They were like the eyes of a chained dog pulling at his tether for a piece of meat just out of reach.
‘That is a great pity,’ I agreed.
A thought struck him and he raised his head, darting a bloodshot glance towards me.
‘Can you not trundle it here to me, Mr Cragg? By cart, or litter, or … somehow?’
I shook my head.
‘I fear that is even more impossible, sir. It is against the law to move or remove a corpse that is under inquest.’
‘Oh, well. Fiddle-de-dee. Nothing to be done.’
Dapperwick returned his hungry gaze to the full-length drawing, then turned the page, where a detail of the genitals appeared, equally accurate and in considerably closer detail. He stabbed the image with his forefinger.
‘Oh, wonderful! It is exactly as described in the medical treatises. Exactly!’
‘I only know of such things from Ovid’s Metamorphoses,’ I remarked.
Dapperwick nestled the knuckles of one hand into the palm of the other and rubbed or screwed them into it. It seemed like a gesture of enthusiasm at my mention of the Latin poet.
‘Ah yes! Ovid, you know!’ he squawked. ‘A far better natural philosopher than is generally recognized.’
I looked at Fidelis interrogatively. Was the old man being satirical? It appeared not. Without drawing breath and with his whole head vibrating from increasing excitement, Dapperwick enlarged on his admiration for Ovid.
‘Ovid celebrates change, transformation, you know. I regard that as a vital principle in nature. As you may therefore surmise I say “Foo!” to those who maintain all species were fixed unchangeably at the creation. Modern poets such as Mr Pope who spout about the ladder of creation being immutable. Pure stultiloquence, sir. Living things are not eternally separated into impermeable envelopes marked “apple” and “pear”, “camel” and “leopard”, “male” and “female”. Under the right conditions, an apple may be grafted to a pear, a camel to a leopard, is it not so? Something of the same happens in cases like this.’
‘Please elucidate, Doctor,’ I asked.
Dapperwick tapped George’s drawing.
‘Well, as Dr Fidelis will of course be aware, Dr Leeuwenhoek’s microscope taught us a few years ago that the male seminum contains animalcules, like shoals of tiny tadpoles, swimming around it. The question then arose, are these in fact embryos? Their matter is disputed. Dr Burton of Wakefield, with whom I correspond, contends the woman’s egg is the embryo-in-waiting and the animalcules are nothing but carriers of an electrical energy that, as he puts it, delivers a kick to the egg that propels it into life. Much as I respect Dr Burton as a man-midwife, I contradict him on this. In my opinion, the little tadpoles are veritable embryos. In the seminum they form a community of males and females – the males no doubt issuing from the right testicle and the females from the left, as Aristotle teaches – but once precipitated into the womb, they begin to contend with each other to get to the safety of the woman’s egg, which is their nursery, in effect. The first one to establish itself there proceeds selfishly by locking the door, as one might say, to keep all its competitors off.’
‘In that case how do twins come about?’ I asked.
The doctor smiled at me indulgently, as at a female pupil who asks a question cleverer than she knows.
‘Ah! Twins! In such cases, you know, two have burst through the egg’s door simultaneously and are forced somehow to cooperate. And this is very germane to the subject under discussion.’
With his finger he rapped George’s drawing again.
‘I believe it is a variation of the process of twin-making that results in the hermaphrodite. Sometimes, very occasionally, these twins become engrafted one in the other and are born as conjoined monsters. But in a handful of such cases (which, you know, are already very rare) a male and a female become completely merged and a single hybrid individual, both masculine and feminine, results. A monster, but not necessarily a hideous one. Which is what we have in George’s fine drawing here. There is no witchcraft about it. It may be very uncommon but it is natural, perfectly natural. And rather, um, beautiful, too, in its way.’
‘Do these, er, hermaphrodites always appear the same? Anatomically, I mean.’
‘Oh no, they come in various arrangements. With or without testes, with or without the vagina.’
‘And may such creatures become pregnant, and bear a child?’
‘Curious you should ask. But, in answer, I think an analogy with the mule may be draw
n. A mule is the intergrafting of a horse with a donkey, and it is utterly sterile, as everyone knows. So is the hermaphrodite. Tales of hermaphrodites marrying and impregnating each other are delightful, but I fear poetical.’
He turned to Luke.
‘I hope you agree, young Fidelis.’
My friend answered diplomatically.
‘I do not have a view, Doctor, as I have never until now had occasion to consider the matter. But I expect the Royal Society will give a ruling in due course.’
Dapperwick’s preternaturally unlined face registered a trace of disappointment that Luke had not endorsed him.
‘True … the Royal Society … true enough.’
We fell silent for a few moments, while Dr Dapperwick tapped his chin thoughtfully with his fingertips.
‘It is very strange,’ he said at last, his voice audibly thinner, and rasping slightly as if a reed needed changing. ‘I seem to remember having such a conversation as this in a dream, a few days ago. I fancied I received a visitor whose conversation turned after a while to individuals of mixed sex. And I dreamed that he asked me the same question as you have: is it the general view that they cannot reproduce? And I admitted it is not.’
He shook his head sorrowfully.
‘The whole field of generation is greatly argued over, you know. But, yes, it was strange, my dream. You might say predictive, yes. You might say auspicious.’
‘May I ask who your visitor was, in your dream?’
‘Oh, just some young fellow. He was unknown to me. He wore a most remarkable wig, though. An unheard-of, monstrous thing, such as one often meets with in dreams and nightmares. ’
We three walked across Molyneux Square a few minutes later. Fidelis broke the silence with a slight laugh, though a mournful one. I thought I could tell the reason.
‘Sense and senility,’ I said. ‘How is it possible for the two to be so thoroughly mixed in one man?’