The Resurrection Fireplace

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The Resurrection Fireplace Page 1

by Hiroko Minagawa




  The

  Resurrection Fireplace

  Bento Books, Inc.

  Hayakawa Publishing Corp.

  The Resurrection Fireplace

  Originally published as Hirakasete itadaki kōei desu—Dilated to meet you

  Copyright © 2013 by Hiroko Minagawa

  Originally published in Japan by

  Hayakawa Publishing Corporation, Tokyo

  English translation © 2018 by Matt Treyvaud and Hayakawa Publishing Corp.

  Edited by Stephen Shaw

  Cover art by Kasia Bytnerowicz

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book

  in excess of fair use considerations may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means without

  written permission from the copyright holders.

  Published 2019 by

  Bento Books, Inc.

  Austin, Texas 78732

  bentobooks.com

  ISBN-13: 978-1-939326-20-1 (Hardcover)

  978-1-939326-42-3 (Paperback)

  978-1-939326-21-8 (Kindle)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965850

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition, March 2019

  Chapter 1

  “Hide it!”

  Clarence opened the rear door just enough to hiss the warning into the room before pulling it shut again from the outside.

  The body lying face-up on the dissecting table had been sliced open with an X-shaped incision across its swollen abdominal region, with the four triangular flaps of skin folded back to expose the gravid womb within.

  Beneath the table, a dog of mixed pedigree lay curled up on the sawdust-strewn floor.

  Daniel Barton, a surgeon at St. George’s Hospital, was just injecting the blood vessels on the surface of the womb with coloured wax, stubby fingers working the syringe with surprising delicacy. Having already filled the arteries with red wax, he was now introducing blue wax into the veins.

  They were not at St. George’s. This was Barton’s own private anatomy school.

  Benjamin “Fatty” Beamis, who had been watching his teacher’s hands closely, looked up at Clarence’s warning, rosy cheeks turning pale.

  “Professor, please stop the procedure for a moment,” whispered Edward Turner, another of Barton’s pupils.

  “Can’t,” said Barton. “The wax will harden.”

  “We haven’t time. They will be here any moment. We apologize, but…”

  Ben took one of Barton’s arms. Albert “Skinny” Wood took the other. A fourth pupil, Nigel Hart, looked up from his half-finished drawing of the cadaver in black lead pencil, meeting Edward’s eyes. The two nodded and prepared to move the body.

  “Wait! Do not damage it!”

  Barton was just past forty, with a countenance not unlike a potato. He refused to wear a powdered wig, dismissing the very custom as a nuisance, and bared his shock of red hair even when delivering a public lecture. The current dissection, of course, was not part of the school’s curriculum, but for a man of his position to go wigless was like appearing in public clad only in his drawers.

  Struggling against Ben and Al, who held his arms firmly behind his back, the potato now became as florid as if it had been dyed with cochineal.

  “Trust us, Professor. We’ll take good care of the body. If they discover it, they will only confiscate it.”

  More to the point, everyone present would be thrown in gaol.

  “Professor, please be calm. It would make matters easier for all of us.”

  Nigel and Edward laid the cadaver on a white sheet on the floor, then wrapped the sheet around it and secured the bundle with wide strips of cloth before carrying it towards the fireplace.

  “Be careful!” said Barton. “That is a very rare and precious find!”

  “As we well know.”

  Fortunately, it was July. No fire was lit.

  Nigel lowered the fire door at the top of the fireplace so that it hung down vertically from just below the mantelpiece, concealing the upper third of the firebox from view. This would arouse no suspicion: such fire doors were common, and it was usual to lower them when the fireplace was unused in summer.

  Edward opened a secret door next to the fireplace and entered a narrow space hollowed out within the thick wall. A sturdy winch was installed inside.

  This chamber and apparatus had been prepared by Barton’s pupils for just such situations. The five had worked together to complete the job, since they could not entrust it to other people.

  Using chisels and saws to open skulls and section bones was hardly easy work, but the construction had been a major undertaking. First they had removed bricks from the wall to create the opening. Next they had set up a winch inside, added a catch to prevent the handle unwinding, and attached a pulley to the wall adjoining the fireplace. Finally, they had made an opening in the wall and passed a rope with a hook through it.

  Today they would put the results to use for the first time.

  Clarence entered the room. “Is it hidden?” he asked.

  “Completely.”

  “Cupboard,” said Clarence, pointing. All the pupils except Edward, who was still in the winch chamber, dragged the cupboard in front of the secret door. The door had been papered to match the rest of the wall, though on close inspection the seams were visible. The cupboard was left empty to make it easier to move, helping to conceal the door further, but was quite heavy even so.

  “Bent-nose” Toby, Barton’s doorkeeper and factotum, arrived to announce the arrival of two Bow Street Runners, constables employed by the magistrate for the City and Liberty of Westminster. This formality gave the pupils a little more time, and they hurried to put the room in order before Toby actually showed the visitors in.

  Barton’s face was still red, and no less like a potato, when he greeted them. In his right hand he held a scalpel still wet with gore.

  “Stealing bodies again, Professor?”

  “Come now, Mr. Hales! Your suspicions are absurd,” said Clarence, a practiced smile on his freckled face.

  Constables Hales and Bray were quite familiar to Barton’s students. This was not the first time the pair had forced their way into the school.

  The constables screwed up their faces and covered their noses.

  “Stinks even worse than usual in here today,” said Bray. “Turns my stomach, it does.”

  “It must be the heat,” said Clarence. “You may smell no better when you pass on.”

  Hales ignored him. “The grave-robbers were, as usual, Gobbin and Dick,” he said, looking around the dissection room. “They told us everything. Paid a pretty penny this time, eh, Professor? That Dick was bragging about asking more than the market rate for the bother of shifting the mortsafe.”

  The five pupils stood in a row before the dissecting table, blocking the constables’ view:

  Clarence “the Chatterbox” Spooner, twenty-two years old.

  Ben “Fatty” Beamis, twenty-one.

  Al “Skinny” Wood, twenty-three.

  Refined and elegant Edward Turner, twenty-one.

  Nigel Hart, just nineteen but a gifted illustrator with an eye for detail.

  But wait—in reality, the row was only four pupils long. Refined and elegant Edward had failed to leave the hidden chamber in time, and was still in there waiting.

  “Move,” said Bray, shoving the pupils aside.

  Strapped to the dissecting table was a dog, rendered senseless with et
her. Part of its leg had been opened to expose an artery.

  “You intrude on a delicate procedure,” Clarence said with lofty condescension. He was by far the most accomplished among them at talking his way out of trouble. “To interrupt such work as this! As you see, we are peeling away the arterial walls, layer by layer and with great care, until we can perceive the flow of blood within.”

  “That’s all my eye,” snorted Bray.

  “You are wrong, sir. It is a most important matter. We intend to ascertain whether the arterial wall possesses the power of self-regeneration. Imagine, Mr. Bray, that you had been pierced in an artery and were bleeding copiously. Would it not be a great comfort to know that your arterial wall could rebuild itself?”

  The guinea that Al slipped the constable proved immediately effective in a way that Clarence’s inflated chatter did not; this, too, was not unusual. Bray closed his mouth. Al’s skinny form belied his bulging purse: his father was a successful trader. A guinea was two days’ wages for a surgeon. A guinea could buy a whole butt of gin. Grave-robbers, too, generally charged a guinea per body. Under most circumstances, a guinea was enough to buy silence—but Hales snatched the coin, with its bas-relief portrait of King George III, from Bray’s hand, and placed it beside the dog’s leg.

  Refusing bribes on principle was another unique custom of the Bow Street Runners.

  When the previous magistrate for Westminster, Henry Fielding, was appointed, the position of magistrate itself was virtually an honorary one, public service done for almost no reward, and there was no public police force in the city of London. Private individuals—“thief-takers”—had borne that burden, receiving payment for the criminals they arrested. Miscreants wanted for capital crimes were particularly valuable. But because thief-takers had no other guaranteed income, they eagerly apprehended even those guilty of only minor infractions—or, indeed, nothing at all. Conversely, bribe a thief-taker generously enough, and he would overlook even the most vicious of crimes.

  Henry Fielding had reformed this system. Placing a few trusted officers under his direct command, he had paid them a fixed salary and strictly forbidden them to accept bribes.

  His younger half-brother, Sir John Fielding, had worked alongside him on this project, even becoming the next magistrate for Westminster upon Henry’s death—a position he continued to hold at present. Sir John had expanded and strengthened the force, establishing district stations and working with officers there to apprehend criminals. He had formed both foot and mounted patrols where there had once been nothing but a night watch staffed by elderly “Charlies.” He had only so many public officials at his disposal, however, and thus there were still many private individuals who made a living informing on or capturing others for a fee.

  Sir John, who had lost his sight as a young man, also went by the name of “the Blind Beak.” His hearing had grown sharper to compensate, and he was known and feared by criminals as a man who could tell truth from lies from the speaker’s voice alone.

  The law enforcers under Henry and, later, Sir John were known as the Bow Street Runners after the address of their headquarters: 4 Bow Street, Covent Garden. This building served as both residence and office for the magistrate, and even had facilities for temporarily detaining captured individuals. Hearings for minor offences were delegated to the magistrate, while more serious cases were referred to the Sessions House for London and Middlesex—better known by its nickname, “the Old Bailey.” Suspects were held in gaol for the duration of their trial.

  Daniel Barton’s anatomy school was in Covent Garden, too, between Leicester Square and Castle Street, not far from Sir John’s offices. It should be noted, however, that the term “Daniel Barton’s anatomy school” is something of a misnomer: although Barton and his pupils were currently in his private dissection room, the school itself belonged to his elder brother, Robert Barton, and was therefore named the Robert Barton School of Anatomy.

  The Bow Street Runners were known for their integrity, but the pay they received was meagre, albeit regular: from thirteen shillings and sixpence to, at most, seventeen shillings a week. The citizens of London took as dim a view of paying the police from public funds as of granting them public authority, and the government showed little interest in providing the necessary funds either. The ideals of the Fielding brothers notwithstanding, it was inevitable that the Runners should include some such as Hales and Bray.

  “Mr. Barton,” Hales said, softening his tone. “This is a serious business. The body you bought last night was that of Miss Elaine Roughhead, beloved daughter of Sir Charles.”

  The pupils exchanged glances. A baronet’s unmarried daughter, six months pregnant?

  “But nothing was bought,” cried Clarence quickly.

  The other three pupils began to talk as well, saying whatever came into their heads, intent on preventing Barton’s muttered “Daughter? Unmarried, then?” from reaching the constables’ ears. In anatomy and experimental science, their professor was without equal, but they were painfully familiar with his disregard for virtually every other concern.

  “Do you know the Roughheads?” asked Hales.

  “No,” said Barton bluntly. “They are not among my patients. A baronet, was it? Paid handsomely for the title, no doubt.”

  “The mortal remains of a young woman about to become a mother, sliced to bits,” sighed Bray. “That’s a heartless thing to do.”

  “Mr. Bray.” Barton’s voice was cold. “Would you care to be treated by a doctor ignorant even of where the stomach was located?”

  “This is not about—”

  “Do you know, Mr. Bray,” Barton continued, ignoring the other’s protests, “which organ it is that circulates blood through your body?”

  “I may not be an educated man, Mr. Barton, but I know that much.” He thumped his chest.

  “Correct,” said Barton. “The heart. However, until little more than a century ago, it was generally believed that blood came from the liver. The fact that blood circulates throughout the body was unknown even to physicians. The heart’s role in circulating the blood was proven through dissection by the physician William Harvey—a fellow countryman of ours, as it happens. A quite remarkable achievement. And yet—and yet!”—he turned his eyes heavenwards, catching sight of the dirty plaster ceiling—“it is in England that the science of anatomy has progressed the least, due to prejudice regarding the dissection of human bodies. Each year, the state provides just six criminal cadavers for dissection—in a year!—and even this pitiful offering is monopolized by the Company of Barbers and Surgeons. Could one hope to advance the study of anatomy under such conditions?”

  Barton’s pupils looked on nervously. The topic was Barton’s favourite, and once he began to discourse on it he lost sight of everything else, no matter whom he was addressing. Neither his Scottish burr nor his general awkwardness as a speaker (quite suiting his potato-like demeanour) were any impediment to his jeremiads on the theme.

  “In Paris, the law ensures a supply of cadavers sufficient for research purposes,” he went on. “But here, in England—”

  “Take it up with the big-wigs, Professor,” interrupted Hales. “Our job is to keep the peace here in London.”

  “That’s right,” Bray chipped in. “So hand over Miss Roughhead, and be quick about it.”

  Hales remained matter-of-fact. “If you’d only taken the body of Miss Roughhead’s nurse instead, we wouldn’t have had none of this fuss,” he said.

  “Her nurse died too?” asked Barton.

  “By her own hand. Unconsolable, she was, at the death of her charge.”

  “They say she took poison at Miss Roughhead’s grave and toppled over on the spot,” added Bray.

  “What was the poison?” asked Barton, unable to conceal his professional interest.

  “How should we know?”

  “A shame,” Barton sighed. “I
should have liked to have that body as well.”

  “You keep changing the subject. Where’d you hide Miss Roughhead? You want us to ransack the place?”

  Barton’s four pupils all swept into a low bow. Pray do as you please.

  Without hesitating, the constables began to search the dissection room, even pulling out the desk drawers (“She would hardly fit in one of those in her condition,” murmured Clarence), before they moved next door.

  The adjoining room was not unlike a zoo. A seal, a leopard, a monkey, an opossum, a mongoose, a crocodile: some had been opened at the abdomen, while others had been prepared in such a way as to partially expose their skeletons. If they had been alive, the screams and roars of pain would have been deafening.

  On other shelves were rows of specimens in glass jars full of preserving fluids, or skeletal forms standing upright.

  “Don’t touch them! Don’t touch my specimens!”

  Ignoring his distress, Bray tugged the sea lion’s whiskers and poked his hand into the leopard’s mouth.

  “Stop that!”

  “Simmer down,” said Bray with a smirk. “I thought you might’ve disguised Miss Roughhead as a leopard.”

  Part of the specimen room was used for the storing of cadavers. Naturally, Hales and Bray examined this area too. Had they visited in winter—dissection season—they would have found bodies acquired by all means available, legal or otherwise, treated against putrefaction and hanging from hooks, but this practice was untenable in summer. The rusted hooks hung empty as a failing butcher’s.

  The school offered no lectures or public dissections in summer either. This left Barton and his five most favoured pupils to pursue their researches undisturbed in his private theatre while the rest of the student body enjoyed a welcome holiday.

  Adjoining the specimen room were the students’ dissection area and an antechamber for preparing oneself for this work. Beyond these lay the lecture hall. Access to actual human cadavers was the unique attraction of the Robert Barton School of Anatomy, but it called for a considerable, and steady, supply of the same. Before Robert’s school was established, London had offered virtually no opportunities for even medical students to work with dead bodies.

 

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