by Ian Weir
So yes, Atherton could perform the surgery. The question was: should he? A terrible, bowel-voiding procedure with no way to dull the pain, and the chance of success perhaps one in four — at best. And a baronet’s wife was not a coachman. If surgery was a coachman’s only hope, then of course any surgeon would perform it. Simple human compassion demanded no less. And if — alas — the procedure failed, then nothing really was lost, and nothing left behind but a coachman’s widow and a snivel of coachman’s children. But the wife of a man with five thousand a year — there would be blame, however unfair. There would be censure, and pursed aristocratic lips, and Society doors closed firmly in his face. Mr Astley Cooper had not risen to the verge of a peerage by attempting heroic surgery upon baronets’ wives.
The coach rattled up Ludgate Hill and past St Paul’s Cathedral, whose bell was striking ten. The rain continued in sheets. Atherton huddled deeper into his cloak.
Poor Joseph Nightingale in the statue is a monument to human futility: one arm outflung against Death — he might as well be holding back the sea — and on his face both horror and abjection. In one more instant the Rattling Fellow will have Lady Elizabeth’s ankle; he will drag her shrieking down with him, and bolt his iron door against the light, and there is nothing that poor Joseph — or any man living — can do.
And yet.
And yet what if there were? A means to wrench open that door, and usher the dead back to life again. What is death, after all? And imagine being the man who could cast light upon the answer — or even the barest portion of it. That would be worth a lifetime of study — any number of mornings outside Newgate, observing and charting the process of strangulation. It would justify any number of experiments on animals, who were after all not capable of experiencing pain as we do. And perhaps — who could say? — it might even justify other forms of experimentation as well.
His sister Emily had believed him capable of extraordinary achievement. “I am in my soul half Gypsy,” she had said to him one day, “and I glimpse you working wonders.” Fourteen years old she’d have been, or thereabouts; three years younger than her golden brother. Her hands in his, eyes sparkling, and O! — his heart had burgeoned. He had been her hero and her protector, right up ’til the moment when she had actually needed him.
As the coach pulled up before his house, Atherton made a decision. He could not in conscience abandon the baronet’s wife. He would cast about for some colleague willing to attempt the surgery in his stead.
And now a cloaked figure was hurrying to meet him, hunched against the squall: Odenkirk, extending an umbrella. He was saying something, seeming to think it important, as Atherton pushed past him. Entering the house, he shook off the rain. It occurred to him that he hadn’t eaten, and he called for the housekeeper to fetch him bread and cold meats. Finally he heard what Odenkirk was saying.
“I believe it were the Deakins let him in.”
“Who?”
“The upstairs maid, sir — the one as hears peacocks shrieking. The man is waiting for you now.”
“What man?
“Our friend with the broken-headed brother, sir — and could have one himself to make a family pairing, if someone was to wish it. Nosing about the Collection, as we speak, sir. Cheese.”
“A marvel, sir, is what it is. A vonder of the modern vorld. The foetuses and such — the foeti, I should say, as speaking to a man as has his Latin, like myself — the foeti in their jars, and all the rest.”
He stood hat in hand, gazing. The three bottled foetuses gazed blindly back, like wizened miniatures of Ned Cheshire himself.
“What are you doing here?” Atherton demanded, arriving in the doorway.
“I do believe I am vorshipping, sir,” said Uncle Cheese. “At an altar of natural philosophy.”
The room was a library, in its way: lined floor-to-ceiling with shelves, with a ladder to reach the uppermost. Oil lamps cast a muted glow, and footfalls were smothered in a rug of deepest green. You lowered your voice in a room like this, immediately and instinctively. Words had a way of dying in the throat, for the books in this library were confined to a single squat bookcase in one corner, with a skull on top and a skeleton standing alongside. The shelves were for specimens instead. Scores of them — hundreds, even — row upon row. Some dried, and the rest in jars, lined up like the pickled preserves of some demented cook. Human and animal both: Atherton was an avid student of comparative anatomy, with an especial fascination with defects and deformities. Here were human shinbones with osteomyelitis, and the distinctive mal-union of a tibia and fibula; bones with bulging non-gummatous lesions indicative of syphilis, and a hydrocephalic skull as bloated as a bladder. A two-tailed lizard, and the beak of a squid, and a vast array of teeth from every creature you could imagine, as if Noah had awakened one night with a demented dental obsession and a pair of pliers close to hand. The larynx of a child who died with croup, and the penis of an elephant, and a kidney with tapeworm cysts. Stomachs of herons and pelicans and camels, and the femoral artery from a gangrenous leg; human eyeballs bobbing in alcohol, the heart of an ox and the skull of a monkey, and a baby crocodile forever lunging.
Ned Cheshire gazed in reverence at all of it.
“I ask again,” said Atherton. “What the Devil are you doing here?”
He had guessed the answer to that already. The man was after money — though whatever imp of presumption had possessed him to come here, to Atherton’s house, was another question.
“The Devil, Mr Atherton? Does he come into the matter? I suppose he does, sir, if it’s considered in a certain light.”
Uncle Cheese had turned to face him. He smiled a little, half in apology. “My brother, sir. Poor Jemmy . . .”
“. . . Is none of my concern.”
Not true, and Atherton knew it. Despite his mood, he forced himself to listen.
The news was hopeful, on the one hand. Jemmy Cheese had survived his ordeal, and was recovering at this moment. Unfortunately — “and here is the fly in the ointment, sir, the musca, as one might say, in the unguentum” — he was recovering in prison, where he would languish for half a year, unless set free by gaol-fever, or the murderous inclinations of his fellows, or just the cracking of a noble heart from grief. And who was left to bear this loss but Jemmy’s family? Ned Cheshire himself, deprived of both his brother and his half-crown — a cost that could be precisely rendered as one sibling, two shillings and sixpence — and of course poor Jemmy’s woman, Meg. Weeping in her desolation, sir — for herself and all her babbies yet unborn — unless the surgeon upon whose business poor Jemmy had been engaged should be mindful of his responsibilities.
“But I told her wery earnest, sir. Nil desperandum, I said, and translated it for her benefit: never despair. For Mr Atherton is a man to recollect his duty, and honour the principle of the douceur.”
Uncle Cheese held his hat in his hands. Rainwater dripped from his sodden clothes and puddled humbly at his feet. A little man in a red weskit, cocking his head like an obsequious robin, and gauging Atherton’s reaction with slantways calculation.
Lounging by the door, Odenkirk caught Atherton’s glance and arched one eyebrow in lupine query: Shall I? And God knows how sorely Atherton was tempted — on a night like this, no less, soaked to the skin and irritable with hunger, gnawed by misgivings about his patient the baronet’s wife in Mayfair, and haunted by Shadows from the past. But like any anatomist he needed subjects for dissection, which meant he needed Edward Cheshire, who operated one of the most reliable networks of Resurrectionists in London. And the man was within his rights to demand a douceur.
This principle governed the relationship between the anatomist and his necessary associate. An anatomist made a private arrangement with a Doomsday Man at the beginning of each season — normally in October, just prior to the teaching term at the hospitals and private schools — at which point a fee was offered. This was a token of goodwill, ten guineas’ worth perhaps, designed to foster the spirit of Chr
istian co-operation and stimulate an uninterrupted supply of corpses right through to the end of the term in April. A finishing fee was normally paid at this juncture, to ensure that the milk of goodwill did not curdle over the summer months, during which the graveyard soil lay largely fallow, owing to short moon-bright nights and the rate at which Things ripened in warm weather. Behind it all lay an unspoken agreement: a grave-robber’s family would be supported in the event of his being taken up. And Jemmy lay this night in shackles, with despair in his heart and Ned’s half-crown in his head.
With a muttered execration, Atherton produced a banknote. Uncle Cheese took it, fastidious as a lady’s spaniel accepting a sweetmeat.
“Ten pound,” he said, folding the note into quarters and tucking it into his hat. “Thank you, sir; a good start.”
“A start?”
“But of course, Mr Atherton, I should like to go many steps vurther. As perhaps the little fellow in the corner was thinking, as he arrived here at your house.”
He meant the skeleton by the bookcase. A stunted thing with crooked legs and a clubbed foot on one side. The bones were a dull brown colour.
The silence was left to hang for just a moment. If bottled foeti could blink in non-comprehension, they might have done so now. When Edward Cheshire spoke again, his voice was silken.
“I am a man, Mr Atherton, as hears tales.”
“And what tales are those?”
Ned Cheshire cocked his head. Lamplight flashed on his spectacles.
“Ah,” he said.
Atherton began to laugh. “That skeleton cost me a guinea. I found it in a curiosity shop in the Gray’s Inn Road, where it had been standing since God knows when, collecting dust. It’s decades old, man — look at it. The bones are brown with age.”
“Vith boiling, Mr Atherton. Boiling causes that discoloration, as any man of Science knows. That fellow might have been alive just yesterday.”
Atherton’s laughter had trailed away. A smile remained, but it was brittle as glass.
“What are you implying, Cheshire?”
“I, sir? Nothing at all.”
“Then perhaps you should take care.”
Odenkirk by the door commenced quietly flexing his hands.
If Uncle Cheese were to be truthful — as he would be on occasion, when there was no other option — he would admit to feeling a certain icy liquefaction in the bowels. A creeping sense that he might have overplayed his hand. But there was nothing for it now but to carry on.
“I propose,” said Uncle Cheese, “that Mr Odenkirk should step to the casement, and look out, so as to see the man standing by the lamppost on the corner, getting rained on. The little fellow with the werminous air — yes, there he is, right there — and the elewated arse. He’s soaked and shivering and cursing under his breath, no doubt. But he’s holding fast to his instruction, vhich is to run directly for the Vatch if Nedward C don’t emerge from this house in five more minutes. So what you’ll do, Mr Atherton, you’ll give me another ten-pound note to keep the first one company, and fifty guineas besides for the keeping of my brother’s poor Meg, and her babbies yet unborn. And then Nedward’s lips are sealed, Mr Atherton. It is done. All is resolved. Fast friends hereafter, absit inwidia.”
*
And there I’ve done it, haven’t I? Your Wery Umble has performed wonders of his own, entering the heart of another man and intuiting his innermost thoughts and secrets — down to the hunger he was feeling, and the conversation he had shared with his late sister three years before I was born.
But it is the truth. I am certain of that.
And now I’ll tell you something else. I’ll tell you about Flitty Deakins.
Her room overlooked the street. She often knelt at the window late at night in prayer, with the house in slumber below and Cook snoring in the bed they shared. Her shawl wrapped tightly against the chill, leaning her forehead against the cold glass.
She had been kneeling there that night, but found she could not compose her thoughts to pray. The agitation was too great — the mortal trembling and the green-eyed Hindoo on the landing, and the secret conviction that her own wickedness had placed her beyond all hope of forgiveness, in this world or the next. For her wickedness was grievous. She knew it, as did God, who Judges. He Judges each one of us, and he Judged the Revd Deakins’s own dear darling girl, weighing her in the balance and finding her horribly wanting.
Raising her head, she found herself staring wretchedly down as a man emerged from the house: Uncle Cheese. Despite her dolour, Flitty Deakins recognized him in the spill of light from within. He was swallowed by the darkness, to reappear a moment later in the lamplight on the corner, where another man awaited. They exchanged brief words and then disappeared into the night, Uncle Cheese leading and his companion scuttling after, arse upwards.
Flitty Deakins could hardly have heard what they said, of course — no more than she could hear the voices in the Collection Room, two floors below. She couldn’t tell you what Atherton and Odenkirk were discussing at that minute.
But I can guess — Your Wery Umble Narrator, who is telling you this story, from evidence puzzled together and long pondered. If you or I were at the door of the Collection Room, scarce daring to breathe with ear pressed against the keyhole, I wager we would hear Dionysus Atherton’s voice, suffused with fury: “Who the Devil has been telling tales?” And Odenkirk’s ominous reply: “P’raps I should speak with the Deakins, sir. P’raps I should do so directly.”
I can tell you for a certainty what poor Flitty heard next — because she told me. In the darkness thereafter, as rain lashed down and wind shook the house until its timbers groaned, she heard heavy boots coming up the stairs. One flight, and then the second, as inexorable as Old Bones himself, ascending with his summons. The measured tramp-tramp of Odenkirk, sticker of pigs.
10
Uncle Cheese found Meg at the Three Jolly Cocks. She had come in storm-drenched some while previous and now sat barefoot on a stool by the fire, her shawl and her woollen stockings draped on the hearth, giving off a waft of drowned mutton that mingled with the blue haze of smoke and the familiar reek of malt and humanity.
The ceiling sloped lower here at the back of the room; Edward Cheshire was required to stoop as he drew near. “I feared I might have missed you,” he said, “it being so late.”
He had told her to meet him at midnight, which had come and gone an hour ago. But it was good for Meg to wait for him; it would encourage her to recollect where favours were owed. Pulling off his sodden coat he rubbed his hands, blinking through misted spectacles and flinching to see that Meg was drinking gin. Meg Nancarrow on the blue ruin could be a dickey proposition; it had a queer effect on her. Instead of reeling with it, she’d grow steadily more intense, each drink adding to a cold unnerving clarity. Just now she was staring round at the men in the room, as if measuring each one in turn. These were such riff-raff as you would expect to find at such a time of night: swindlers and rogues and petty villains; a trio of house-breakers huddled in terse conference; some watermen who had wandered up from the Thames. Just inside the door a blind beggar sat with a mongrel that someone had shaved to look like a poodle. One of them had growled as Uncle Cheese passed by. The dog, presumably.
“Looking for an honest man?” he asked Meg, hoping to jolly her.
“I’m deciding how they’ll die.”
He tilted back his head, to peer underneath fogged lenses. This was dark, even for Meg.
“Stipendium peccati — eh, my girl? The vages of sin. But surely, Meg, you won’t be killing all of ’em.”
“Oh, no. I won’t need to do it myself.”
She lifted her chin, pointing with it to a red-faced rogue with bulging eyes. That one, she had decided, would die of a choking apoplexy. The one next to him would have his guts spilled out by his best friend’s knife. Over there was a man marked out for gaol-fever, and there was one destined to die at the end of a rope.
“But not at Newga
te. By his own hand, drunk and despairing. Fouling his breeches, underneath a bridge.”She spoke with cool satisfaction, which gave Uncle Cheese the willies, truth be told. It put him in mind of a witch. Not the sort that lurked in the privy, to the torment of younger brothers — the other sort. A witch that dances naked with the Devil.
“Stand us a drink, Cheese.”
Ned complied, being in an expansive mood. He was in fact halfways giddy with sheer pleasure at himself: two of Atherton’s ten-pound notes folded carefully into his hat, and the prospect of fifty guineas still to come. A dangerous game, but Ned was a bold and clever fellow, and had played it to perfection.
There had been a stab of qualm a few minutes ago, when he and Little Hollis had gone their separate ways just north of St Paul’s Cathedral. Hurrying on through the squall, he’d had a sudden sense of someone following: heavy footsteps — tramp, tramp, tramp — that went silent when he stopped. The feeling had crept upon him again as he reached the head of Black Friars Lane, but when he turned round quick and sudden there was no one behind him — or no one that he could see. Ahead, the light from the Three Jolly Cocks glowed with the promise of warmth, and banishing his misgivings he had hurried towards it.
“Have you seen him?” Meg demanded.
“Atherton? Oh, yes.”