by Ian Weir
“The apprentice, you mean? Still amongst the living, Mr Atherton. Still with us in this vale of tears. But he declines.”
The boy’s name was Isaac Bliss. He was crouched over a work-bench as they came down the stairs, his back bowed like a barrel hoop.
The workshop was a cellar room, dank and smelling of sawdust, with planks of wood stacked against one wall and a coffin taking shape upon a trestle. Light struggled in from one small window opening onto the yard; on sunny days, dust-motes would dance before Isaac. Nothing danced behind him, for behind was the room where the Subjects were laid out for preparation. Isaac could feel them at his back, as he worked; just there, on the other side of the wall, staring sightless at the roof beams. Sometimes when old timbers creaked he imagined it the sound of necks rotating, as they turned their faces towards him. Plink-plink went pennies, falling from eyelids.
“You have a visitor, Bliss,” said Mr Bowell.
Isaac turned, but didn’t straighten. Isaac never straightened. Because of this he had come cheap from the Foundling Hospital in Lamb’s Conduit Fields, bent foundlings being available at a discount.
“It’s the medical gentleman. Come to visit you again, of the goodness of his heart.”
“Hello, young Isaac,” said Atherton. Smiling, for they were chums. He had noticed the boy some weeks ago, and come back several times to visit.
Isaac recoiled — as best a boy may do, whose back is bowed like a barrel hoop.
“Get away,” he said.
“Bliss!” exclaimed the undertaker.
“You lied to me, Mr Bowell. ’Ee’s not a doctor — ’ee’s a surgeon!”
He said the word as if it might summon the Fiend.
Mr Bowell’s mouth turned down dramatically. The expression came naturally, and did not require mechanical assistance. “Who told you such a thing?”
There was movement at the top of the stairs. Thos Bowell the Younger peered down: a spotty youth of sixteen, trying not to look like a young viper with nothing better to do than to torment defective apprentices.
His progenitor continued to glower. “This gentleman is your benefactor, Bliss. You have your Place because of this gentleman!”
True enough. Discovering that Isaac was even more defective than he had supposed, the undertaker had been set to send him back to the Foundling Hospital. But Atherton, upon noticing the boy, had intervened, offering to reimburse Mr Bowell for Isaac’s keep, with a little bit extra to offset inconvenience. Now he dropped to one knee, regarding Isaac earnestly. “I want to help you,” he said.
“I know what you want.”
“Does the pain grow worse?”
“There ent no pain,” swore Isaac, clenching himself against it.
“Is it harder to breathe?”
“Never.”
The curvature of the spine had been more pronounced each time Atherton had come. Today there was a rattling in the lungs. Isaac’s eyes were huge and hollow.
“I’m fine, sir. Right as rain. So please go an’ ’elp someone else.”
He was twelve years old. Isaac Bliss was the name he had been given at the Foundling Hospital, where they were famous for the whimsicality of their naming. Isaac’s only friend there had been Augustus Rectitude; the two of them had been daily cowed by a girl called Janet Friendly.
“Let me listen to your lungs.”
“No,” said Isaac, shrinking further.
“I won’t hurt you.”
“You’re not to put me there,” the boy burst out. “Not on one of them shelves you ’ave!”
“What shelves?”
“The ones you’ve got in the locked room at that ’ouse of yours, full of ’orrors! The little lamb with two ’eads, and the baby crorkindill, and them other things without they even got names, all twisted in jars!”
Bowell the Younger still hovered atop the stairs. Atherton shot him a look that had pure murder in it. But his face was mild as he turned back to poor Isaac.
“There is no such room in my house, and no such shelf, and no such intention of mine,” he said. “You have my word upon it, as your friend.”
He spoke with earnest intensity, holding Isaac with his gaze. He had blue, blue eyes, did Dionysus Atherton. The bluest eyes that ever yet existed.
“I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “Nature is a most cunning physician. I’ve seen fellows sink much lower than you — many of them, Isaac, and they were given up for lost — who awoke one fine morning and rose to their feet and snapped their fingers at the doctor. I’ve seen it often and again — snapped their fingers at him, exclaiming ‘A fig, sir, for your powders and your potions!’”
He leaned in close, and lowered his voice. Isaac’s whole world was the blue of those eyes.
“It is my private opinion, young Isaac, that you may outlive the lot of us. And so I ask you for a favour, friend to friend. On the day of my funeral — and may it be many years from now — on the day of my funeral, you must pause for a little moment, as you hear the procession pass by. You must say, to whosoever might be close to hand: ‘There passes a man whom I knew in my youth. He did his best, and helped where he could, and I pray God will pardon the rest.’ And then, young Isaac — this is most important of all — you must raise your hand in my honour, and snap your fingers.”
It would have warmed every cockle of your heart if you’d been there to see, cos a flicker of actual hope had kindled in Isaac’s eyes. This was Atherton’s gift, one of so very many. He could summon such powers of reassurance that you could not help but believe him. And for the span of a slow spreading smile — in the pure blue radiance of the moment — I swear that Dionysus Atherton believed himself.
He slipped the boy a sixpence.
“There,” exclaimed Mr Bowell. “Now, Bliss — what do you say to your benefactor?”
Bent like a barrel hoop, Isaac twisted his head to look up at the surgeon. A tremulous smile tugged. He raised one spindly arm, and snapped his fingers.
Atherton clapped his hands in delight. “Well done, young Isaac!”
Outside, he paused for a private word with Bowell the Younger, explaining what he would do to vipers who tormented defectives — the description would wake Young Thos up six nights running, with the gibbering meemies — after which he gave an extra guinea to the undertaker.
“Treat Isaac well,” he said quietly. “Do you understand me, Mr Bowell? The scoliosis is grievously advanced, and there is nothing to be done. But he is a human creature, and deserves your consideration. Do not work him over-hard. Make sure he has sufficient food, and a blanket at night. And send me word directly, when he fails.”
*
And you may say to Your Umble Narrator: How do you know? Were you there on that day to witness? At the hanging, or at Bowell’s, or in that alley near Seacoal Lane where Blossom bobbed and Dionysus Atherton imagined himself exalted? Were you inside the man’s head, to hear his inmost thoughts and share the deepest intimations of his heart?
And the truth is: no, I was not. Not on the day I’ve just been describing, or on many others still to come. But I know what Atherton did, on each of them. I’ve ferreted out the pieces, one by one, and puzzled them together. Oh, he’s a great one for puzzles, is Your Wery Umble Narrator. A great one for ferreting, as you’ll come to understand once we’ve been properly introduced.
So yes, I know what Dionysus Atherton did. I know what he did next, and I know what he was thinking while he did it. And what I don’t know, I can guess — because I know the man. I have come to know his heart as I know my own.
Look at him now, striding down Aldersgate Street.
The streets are still choked with crowds from the hanging. Carts clattering, coachmen bellowing, drunken louts lurching amongst the long-suffering respectable, who hold their wives close and their purses closer. Outside a gin-shop some Nymphs of the Pave exchange jeers with a clutch of passing Rainbows — gay young bucks, that is to say, on a roister. Around the corner a half-pay officer trembles o
ne of their sisters against the wall, to the great disgust of all right-thinking passers-by, and the greater delight of a murder of apprentices, who commence pelting the amorous couple with clods of horse-shit. In other words, London is being London, in this year of 1816.
It is a year since Waterloo. Bonaparte is in exile on St Helena, and our Redcoats are back home. Many are missing bits, to be sure; an arm or a leg. Tom Lobster may be seen hopping himself along any street in London, or sitting on the corner, cap in hand, such being the fortune of war. There is a public house with this very name — the Fortune of War at Pye Corner, which will shortly come into this narrative — so named by one of its long-ago owners who had lost one arm and both legs in a battle at sea. But there is a new energy surging through the Metropolis, after a lean and anxious decade. A sense that much may be possible again — and very little may be forbidden. The topsy-turvy feeling that something has utterly fallen apart, though you can’t be sure what it is, and that something throbbing and burgeoning has begun. There is a mood of seeking and striving and seizing, and Atherton is as one with the Spirit of his Age. He glistens with it.
Amidst the throng, he is half a head taller than all but the tallest, and handsomer than any. He wears fawn-coloured breeches and a sky-blue coat, and his hair is long and golden. He would have a man come in to curl it for an hour each morning, except he’d never have the patience. So it is wild instead, which suits him all the better.
Crossing Cannon Street he makes towards the Thames, bound for Guy’s Hospital, where he is the brightest rising star in the chirurgical firmament. Guy’s is on the south side of the river; he will hire a lighter to ferry him across.
He redoubles his pace.
He is forever eager to arrive, wherever he is going. Once there, he is eager to be away. He was in motion well before dawn today, when he arose to supervise a dissection, and many times he is still in motion when dawn comes peeping again. At Guy’s he will conduct his rounds in a whirlwind, with worshipful students flapping behind. He will scarcely slow down when he lectures — pacing back and forth, words cascading.
There is no one swifter in surgery, either. Not even his old schoolmate Alec Comrie, whose own speed is legendary. And there is certainly no one swifter to reach for the scalpel to begin with. No one even half as swift, not when patients must be held down shrieking, and surgeons themselves are chalk-white as they commence. The only exception occurs at the dissecting table. There in the Death House — with the rats and the stench and the horror and the sparrows (oh, I’ll tell you of the sparrows) and the corpses carved and grinning — Atherton is stillness itself. He’ll stand for hours in searing concentration, separating layers of tissue with tiny measured movements.
“Soon I shall know the Great Secret!”
Ronald Peake’s last words upon the scaffold. And by now Peake knows it, doesn’t he? At ten minutes past eleven on this Monday morning, as Atherton is borne across the Thames with the air of a man who might choose to part it instead, the poisoner has arrived upon another shore. He knows what the surgeon does not.
Not yet.
2
When Jemmy Cheese was very young, his brother Edward had warned him about the fireplace. It gaped like a maw in the middle of the room, and if Jemmy ventured too near, the Devil would come bursting from the chimbley with a shriek and a bang, to hale him away with all the other wicked boys who fiddled with their willies. Unless the gobbling witch in the jakes got him first, clutching with her talons from beneath him as he squatted. Jemmy had in consequence spent his boyhood with a dismal clammy squirming in his guts.
He feels that way again tonight.
He breaks stride as they cross Whitechapel Road, switching the sack from one shoulder to the other and casting a chary look skyward, cos he does not like the looks of that moon.
“’S nothing to fret about,” mutters Little Hollis, skulking alongside.
But a moon is always bad. This one has slipped behind the clouds, plunging them back into darkness. It has been doing this for some time. It disappears, but then an edge will come sidling out again, dirty-white and deceitful, like an old whore leering from a window.
Jemmy follows, but the clamminess grows worse. Another man might put this down to the oysters, which slosh with his long clumping strides. Jemmy Cheese has partaken of two dozen, along with four quarts of porter; tonight’s enterprise is not of a sort that a man can approach in the nakedness of sobriety, with nothing to stand between him and what he is up to. But it isn’t the oysters. It is the old gobbling-witch-down-beneath sensation, coming on all sudden and sick. It dawns upon Jemmy that he is having a whatsit, a thingummy, when a man senses that something dreadful is about to happen.
He had met Little Hollis at the Fortune of War Tavern, which is where these nights customarily began. After a period of fortification they had set off, stopping briefly at the alley where Little Hollis had stashed the implements. Now they are on the Ratcliffe Highway, angling east towards St George-in-the-East churchyard.
A premonition. It occurs to Jemmy that he is having a premonition. It is strong enough to make him break his stride, and puts him on the cusp of turning round again and long-shanking it straight home to Meg. Except how would he explain this to his brother? Ned would fly into a rage and call him obtusus and sundry cruel words besides, many of them in Latin, for Edward Cheshire is a scholard. Ned is cleverer than the surgeons themselves. He owns a pawn-shop near Old Street, and is going to become a dentist.
The moon slides through the clouds again, illuminating Little Hollis looking back. He hisses — “’S this way” — and gestures.
There is a wall around the churchyard, with spikes on top and doubtless broken glass as well, this being the sort of low trick they are up to nowadays, to thwart the Doomsday Men. A wide gate in the front, and another along the side, much narrower. Unlocked, just as Ned had promised; he had fixed it with the Sexton. It creaks on rusty hinges, and the trees along the graveyard wall stir uneasily. Barren branches rattle.
“Wait,” says Jemmy.
Something is wrong.
Jemmy Cheese is not well suited to this work, even at the best of times. He has too much imagination for it, to begin with. But something is doubly wrong about tonight.
Little Hollis is already scuttling ahead, however, and Ned’s wrath would be unbearable. Worst of all his lovely Meg might shake her head in that way of hers and wonder — for the ten thousandth time — what the Devil she was to do with him.
So he follows.
There are scores of graveyards dotted about the Metropolis, unweeded gardens of death. St George-in-the-East is one of the largest: three acres of festering putrefaction, with headstones jumbling higgledy like an old woman’s teeth. This graveyard serves a parish of forty thousand souls, and Londoners die at a relentless pace, bless their hearts. They must be buried, and lie in peace ’til Gabriel’s Horn sounds the dreadful Day of Judgement — or ’til the likes of Little Hollis and Jemmy Cheese emerge from the sable of the night, with shovels and sacks. Little Hollis hazards a wink of his bull’s-eye lantern, sliding the gate open an inch. By the yellow gleam they find the grave they’re seeking: fresh dirt piled on from this morning’s burial, and a plain white cross.
There are pebbles as well, strewn apparently at random, and small white shells. These must be carefully moved, and meticulously replaced after the exhumation, for there is in fact nothing random about them at all. Friends of the departed with guile in their hearts will arrange such items directly after the burial, returning to see if they’ve been disturbed. If so, there will be exclamations of dismay, and the fetching of shovels, and louder exclamations if the grave turns out to be empty, and the swearing of terrible oaths. Often this will excite wider suspicion; neighbouring graves will be dug up, leading frequently to the discovery that these are equally vacant. In extreme cases it will be discovered that an entire graveyard has been honeycombed, as if it had been filled with corpses so saintly that the Almighty had been moved to
rapture them directly skyward, snatching them from the very mouths of indignant maggots.
Such discoveries are always bad for the Doomsday trade. There is furious denunciation in the news-sheets and heightened vigilance, with Watchmen poking their snouts about. Worse yet, friends of the newly departed come into the churchyards at night. They lurk in places of concealment, with cudgels.
Little Hollis sets the lantern down, and they begin.
It is Necessary, this act they are about to perform; every Doomsday Man in England would tell you that, and so would every surgeon. There are hundreds of surgeons and medical students in London alone — never mind the rest of England — working at the hospitals and at the private anatomy schools, of which there are dozens; and each one of them needs cadavers to carve. How else are they to learn and experiment, save on living patients, pinned down and squalling? And there lies the foundation of the Doomsday trade. The Law entitles the College of Surgeons to take possession of four murderers hanged at Newgate each year — but only four, and thousands are required. For all the rest, the surgeons and anatomists must rely on the Doomsday Men — Resurrectionists — grave-robbers.
Dig a narrow slanting shaft down to the head of the coffin: this is the knack of it. The shovels are wooden, for these make less noise. It can take an hour or more, if the dirt is packed down and the coffin lies deep. But a proper planting costs money, and tonight’s subject is only a coachman. The poor aren’t dug so diligently. Often they’ll be stacked atop of others, two or even three in the same grave, the topmost scarcely deeper than a potato.
Sure enough, they are barely two feet down when Jemmy’s shovel thuds. They clear enough dirt away to expose the very end of the coffin, and Jemmy reaches for a crowbar to prise the lid — gently, now, to minimize the noise — snapping the cheap wood against the weight of the earth above. Little Hollis fixes a grappling hook to the burial shroud and then stands back as Jemmy sets his heels and hauls on the rope, like a fisherman raising his net.