by James McGee
“I’ve had enough of this,” Jago said, his face ghostly pale. “And we ain’t any nearer finding Molly Finn, or your damned sawbones.”
“No, but the bastard’s been here.” Hawkwood turned, and found he was talking to himself. He left the room and its grisly contents and discovered Jago standing in one of the two doorways on the other side of the cramped landing.
At first glance the room was no different to the others they had looked in: peeling plaster, bare floorboards, boarded-up windows. There was, however, a mattress. On top of the mattress was a heap of soiled bed linen. Next to the mattress was a small table, on which sat a candle-holder and some sulphur sticks. A larger table was set against the wall. On top of it was a chipped basin and jug. Caught by the lantern light, several small beads of moisture glistened at the bottom of the basin. He glanced towards the fireplace. There was grey ash in the hearth.
Hawkwood reached down towards the pile of linen. He straightened. In his hand was a petticoat. A woman’s scream pierced the night.
“Sweet Mary!” Jago spun round.
The scream sounded as if it had come from below them. It was followed by a second of equal intensity and another after that, both in quick succession. By which time, Hawkwood had thrown the petticoat down and was running for the stairs with Jago in close pursuit.
They were halfway down the stairwell when the screams ended abruptly. Hawkwood wasn’t sure what was the more disturbing, the screams or the uncanny silence that followed.
Jago stared about him wildly. “Where the hell did that come from? We looked, damn it! There’s no one here!”
Jago was right. They had looked.
And then, the moment they hit the ground floor, Hawkwood saw it. “There!”
Jago swore. There was another doorway, tucked deep in the shadows beneath the stairs, almost hidden from view. They’d both missed it the first time around.
Another room, small and airless, but with signs of recent occupation: on the table stood an empty Madeira bottle and some mugs. Several news-sheets lay scattered across the tabletop. Beyond the table was an opening that led off towards the rear of the property. The house, Hawkwood was starting to realize, was like a rabbit warren. They ducked through the aperture and found themselves in yet another cramped room. A row of coat hooks ran along one wall. The only notable item of furniture was an old wooden desk.
They both saw it at the same time: a pale ribbon of light at the base of the far wall.
With a nod of agreement from Jago, Hawkwood stepped forward and hauled the door open.
It was smaller in scale than the operating room at Guy’s, but the design was almost identical: a series of wooden benches rising in semi-circular tiers towards the ceiling. In the well of the amphitheatre, framed within the light of a hundred candles, two men dressed in shirtsleeves and bloodstained aprons were bent over an oval table. Between them lay the naked body of a young woman.
At the sound of footsteps, the two men turned, faces frozen in shock.
“It’s over, Colonel,” Hawkwood said. “Put the knife down. Move away.”
Titus Hyde stood perfectly still.
Hawkwood looked at Hyde’s companion. “That goes for you, too, Surgeon Carslow.” Hawkwood raised the pistol. “And that’s an order, not a request.”
Slowly the two men stepped away. Jago gave a sharp intake of breath as the body on the table came into view.
A sheet covered the lower half of the woman’s torso. If it had been placed there to preserve the victim’s modesty, it had been a gesture too late. In a scene almost indistinguishable from the autopsy in Surgeon Quill’s dead house, Hawkwood saw that the woman’s chest had been cut open. The flesh on either side of the incision was on the point of being peeled back. Had her screams not told him already, Hawkwood did not need to be informed that Molly Finn was beyond help. In death, her young face, framed by her mane of blonde hair, looked remarkably serene; an expression undoubtedly in sharp contrast to the fear and terror she must have felt in the moments before Hyde cut into her with his scalpel. Wordlessly, Hawkwood pulled the sheet over the rest of her.
His eyes moved to the second table and the object that rested upon it. There was a covering sheet here, too. Cautiously, Hawkwood lifted it away and found himself looking down into a shallow metal trough. The trough was filled with a honey-coloured liquid. Immersed in the liquid was another body.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Hyde said. There was a note of pride in his voice.
The corpse might have been beautiful once, Hawkwood supposed; perhaps in the full bloom of life. It had arms and legs and breasts and was undoubtedly female, but beautiful wasn’t a word he would have used to describe what he was looking at now. The flesh had the appearance of melted wax. A patchwork of stitching, clearly visible along the arms, thighs, hips and hairline, indicated where the sections of skin excised from the Bart’s cadavers had been transplanted. An incision had been made in the chest wall and the skin had been folded away, following the same procedure Hyde had been in the midst of performing on Molly Finn. But whereas Molly Finn’s face still retained its colour and the freshness of youth, the face on this body looked about a thousand years old. It reminded Hawkwood of the monkey head he’d seen in one of the jars upstairs.
On the floor of the operating room, adjacent to the second table, was a cluster of cylindrical objects, about a dozen in all, each approximately half the height of a man. They were columns of metal discs. The top of each stack was connected to its immediate neighbour by a strand of copper wire. Hawkwood did not need to be told what he was looking at. It was an electrical battery.
Hawkwood swallowed bile. He turned. “You really believe you can perform miracles, Colonel?”
Hyde held up his blood-stained hands. “With these, yes.”
“You’re not God, Colonel.”
“No, I’m a surgeon.”
“And that gives you the right to commit murder? I thought physicians took some kind of oath.”
“She’s my daughter. She was taken from me. I have the power to restore her. I can make her whole again. I can turn back time.”
“Daughter? She’s not your daughter, Colonel. She never will be. I’m not even sure you could even call that thing a she. That’s what the sack-’em-up men call them, by the way: things. All that thing is now is skin and bone and whatever fluid she’s embalmed in. You think she’s beautiful? God help you. Molly Finn was beautiful, before you butchered her. What in God’s name were you after, Hyde? What had this poor girl ever done to you? Good Christ, you’ve killed three people – and for what? A bag of bones in a bathtub? You really are insane.”
Hawkwood turned his gaze on Hyde’s companion. “I wonder what that makes you, Surgeon Carslow?”
“You don’t understand,” Carslow said.
“Don’t I? Well, maybe you could enlighten me. I knew someone had to be helping him. It had to be someone with the money; and you, Carslow, you’ve got more money than God. And this is how you choose to spend it?”
Hawkwood turned back to Hyde. “Your friend here told me he never visited Bethlem, but that didn’t stop the two of you corresponding, did it? What did you do, Colonel? Write out a shopping list? What did you send him first, I wonder? The drawing you got from James Matthews? All this equipment doesn’t come cheap. You’d need to have had it specially made. And he’d have told you about this place being empty, of course: your old school. You must have jumped at the chance. It’s even got its own operating room. How’s that for convenience? I did wonder how you knew who I was, too, but then I realized it had to have been Carslow here who gave you my name and description. It must have been damned cold, hanging around Bow Street, waiting for me to turn up. Oh, and it was Sawney who gave you up, Colonel, in case you were wondering how we got here. He’s dead, by the way. They all are. It’s been a busy night.”
Hawkwood smiled. “Still, look on the bright side: we saved Jack Ketch a job. That way, he can concentrate on the two of you.” Hawkw
ood turned to Eden Carslow. “What? You think keeping silent won’t incriminate you? It’s too bloody late for that.”
Carslow blanched, recovered quickly, and drew himself up. “You know nothing. You think science stands still? Tell that to Leonardo and Galileo, and John Hunter. It’s surgeons like John Hunter and Titus Hyde, men who are prepared to take that first step beyond the frontiers of knowledge, who light the way for others. You’ve been in the wars, Hawkwood, you’ve seen men like Colonel Hyde work, you’ve seen the miracles they can perform. I suspect you’ve even had occasion to thank men like Titus Hyde for sewing you back together after some bloody encounter. How do you think he acquired that sort of skill? It was because the men before him dared to explore beyond their boundaries.”
“You can save the lecture, Carslow. I’m not one of your damned students. I’m not impressed. You’ll go down as his accomplice. Hell of an end to an illustrious career, don’t you think? Swinging from a gibbet. I wonder what your students will think of that? You never know, you being a condemned murderer, they could end up with your body to dissect. Now that would impress me.”
Carslow went pale.
You don’t look so hale and hearty now, Hawkwood thought. Do you?
Hyde’s thin lips split for the first time. “My dear Captain, you don’t seriously think that’s what’s going to happen? You can’t be that naïve. They don’t hang surgeons, Hawkwood. We’re at war. Who do you think is going to put all those wounded warriors back together again?”
Hawkwood said nothing. He could see that the look on Jago’s face was murderous.
Hyde gave a contemptuous snort. “Who was it you spoke with? McGrigor? That sanctimonious Scot! Calls himself the Surgeon-General? He might have succeeded him, but he’s not fit to clean John Hunter’s shoes. The man’s more concerned about offending God than serving the cause of science. What did he tell you? That they refused to hand me over because we don’t take orders from the French? You think that was the sole reason? You’ve been a soldier, Captain. You’ve seen inside the tents. You know what it’s like: the hopelessness, the futility. Think of the potential, if we can learn to harvest the dead to heal the living. If we can accomplish that, the possibilities are endless. Good God, man, you think I’d have been removed from duty if the Frogs hadn’t found that damned cellar? The reason they didn’t hand me over was because they need surgeons like me to heal British soldiers.
“You said it yourself: the worst they’ll do is put me back in Bedlam. The war won’t last for ever. When it’s over and the Frogs are back in their pond, I’ll be supping brandy in the officers’ mess. In the meantime, I’ll be able to renew my acquaintance with Dr Locke. As I said, not the brightest of fellows, but in a place like Bethlem one has to be grateful for what one can get. I’ll be needing a new chess opponent, though. Still, mustn’t grumble. The parson served his purpose. Interesting, the two of us meeting again. Strange coincidence, him visiting the hospital, don’t you think?
“You did know Tombs was an army chaplain? That we were colleagues back in Spain? Ah, perhaps not, from the look on your face. Why, he was a regular visitor to the hospital tents. The scars on his face – he got those courtesy of a French mortar round. I was the one who stitched him back together afterwards. Ironic, don’t you think? He was most grateful, mind you. Even offered to deliver letters for me when I was in hospital. You were right when you accused Eden of corresponding with me. The Reverend Tombs was our winged messenger, our Hermes.”
Hyde feigned forgetfulness. “But I digress. Where was I …? Ah, yes, I remember. No, they won’t hang us, Captain Hawkwood. We’re too damned valuable.”
“Not to me,” Hawkwood said.
Hyde’s eyes widened as, in a move almost too fast to follow, Hawkwood raised his pistol and squeezed the trigger.
He heard Carslow gasp. There was a flash, but that was all. In that instant Hawkwood knew the pistol had misfired. Although the flint had struck the frizzen and ignited the powder in the pan, the flash had failed to penetrate the hole in the side of the barrel. The only thing the pistol had discharged was smoke.
And Hyde was gone.
The man was fast. Hawkwood had forgotten how fast. One minute Hyde was there, the next he wasn’t.
“Door!” Jago threw his pistol up, brought it to bear. Hawkwood had a glimpse of a darting figure entering a patch of shadow beyond the arc of the candle glow and then it vanished.
“No!” Hawkwood pointed back at Carslow, who was standing open-mouthed, struck dumb by the escalation of events. “Mind him! Hyde’s mine!”
Hawkwood ran.
It was immediately apparent as he plunged through the doorway, that he’d entered a different world. There were no dingy passages here, no dark stairways, no bare boards. What he found instead was a long, portrait-lined corridor, with an open door at the far end. Not stopping to wonder at the contrast, he raced down the darkened corridor. Passing through the door, he found himself in what looked to be a large reception room, devoid of furniture. Neither was there artificial illumination, but the shutters on the tall windows were open, allowing the cold moonlight to pour in. He pulled up. Where was Hyde?
“Sawney said you were a bastard. He was right,” a voice said behind him.
Hawkwood spun. Hyde was standing perfectly still. A sword was in his hand, the point resting on the floor by his foot. He had divested himself of the blood-splattered apron. He looked perfectly at ease. His face was grey in the moonlight. His eyes were black and as hard as stone.
Hawkwood assumed Hyde had taken the sword from one of the racks on the wall. The room was lined with them. It was clear now why there was no furniture. This must have been where Hyde had obtained the sword-stick he’d been carrying the other evening. The selection of weapons displayed around the room’s perimeter was hugely impressive and would have done justice to a regimental armoury. There weren’t just swords, Hawkwood saw, there were pole-arms, too. Stilettos, sabres and foils vied for space with halberds, glaives, guisarmes and pikes.
“I can see you’re wondering where you are,” Hyde said. “This was Hunter’s house, too. He owned both properties. Go through those rooms and out of the front door and you’ll find yourself in Leicester Square. He had all this part built on afterwards – the operating room, everything. There was even a museum for his specimens. He welcomed his patrons and his patients through the door in Leicester Square and he took delivery of his bodies in Castle Street. Fascinating, isn’t it?
“They used to call this the conversazione room,” Hyde continued blithely. “It was his reception room. Curious that its purpose is now to do with the teaching of combat rather than the art of conversation. From soirées to swordplay, eh? Who’d have thought? They’ve preserved it rather well, though, don’t you think? The paintings aren’t the originals, of course. They were sold off with the rest of the contents when Hunter died. That’s when the main house was rented out. I’m not sure who was here before, but it’s a fencing academy now; a place for the sons of the nobility to learn the noble science. That’s what they call it, you know. Hunter would probably find that ironic, too.” Hyde gave a little laugh.
“Fortunately for me, the maître d’armes is indisposed. He’s recovering from a rather severe wound inflicted by an over-enthusiastic pupil. By a happy coincidence he is also one of Eden Carslow’s patients. We had the place to ourselves until you blundered in.”
Hawkwood watched the blade. He wondered what his chances were of getting to a weapon. He wondered why Hyde hadn’t attacked him as soon as he’d entered the room. It occurred to him that it had probably been Hyde’s intention to lead him here in the first place.
Hawkwood gauged the distance to the wall. It would be close. The colonel was quick on his feet. He, on the other hand, was still wearing his bloody coat. That was bound to slow him down. There was no button on the point of Hyde’s weapon, Hawkwood saw.
“How’s the arm?” Hyde said. “I almost forgot to ask. If it’s giving you pain, you sh
ould let me take a look at it. The cut on your cheek looks as if it’s healing nicely, though.”
Hyde smiled suddenly. “By the way, did you know – and this really is a most extraordinary coincidence – that I attended the Delancey boy after you’d shot him? Couldn’t do anything for him, of course. He was stone dead. A pistol ball to the heart will do that.”
Hawkwood stared at him. Delancey had been the Guards’ officer he’d killed in a duel following the battle at Talavera. Delancey had called him out after Hawkwood accused him of recklessly endangering his men. But for Wellington’s intervention, Hawkwood would have been cashiered and shipped home. Instead, he’d joined Colquhoun Grant’s intelligence unit as liaison with the guerrilleros.
“Made me wonder how you might be with a sword instead of a pistol. Ever used a blade, Hawkwood?”
“Occasionally,” Hawkwood said.
“Really? Ah, yes, but you were an officer, weren’t you? Eden told me. Well, how about it?”
“How about what?”
“Why, man to man, what else? At least I’m giving you more of a fighting chance than you were willing to give me back there. Tell you what; I’ll make it easier for you. Here, catch –”
Hyde tossed the rapier high towards him. Had it not been for the moonlight catching on the turning blade, Hawkwood would have lost sight of it in the air. But the high parabola had been a deliberate ploy, providing Hyde with the opportunity to re-arm himself. By the time the weapon was in Hawkwood’s hand, Hyde had turned and retrieved a second sword from the rack behind him. “You might find it easier if you removed your coat.”
Hawkwood hesitated. This is madness, he thought.
“Well?” Hyde said. The challenge in the soft voice was unmistakable.
Hawkwood took off his coat, dropped it to the floor. He heard Hyde chuckle.
There was, Hawkwood discovered, a distinct chill in the room. He looked towards the windows. There wasn’t a lot of light coming in. He wondered if the snow that Jago had predicted was finally on its way.