The Way of All Flesh

by Ambrose Parry

  His instinct was to deny it, as people always do when someone has shown that they know them better than they find comfortable. However, to Evie such a denial would be as good as an admission, so he said nothing.

  ‘Was there a particular one you lost, that you’re ever after trying to make up for?’

  ‘No,’ he had replied, grateful he had his back to her. His answer was the truth, yet nonetheless a deliberate deceit.

  Sometimes it was a fight you won that proved hardest to bear.

  Raven got out of bed and examined his face in the mirror above the washstand. He was pleased to discover that he could open both eyes. He gently prodded along his cheek, which was coloured by purple bruising that extended almost to his chin. The wound remained tender but looked clean, without any signs of impending infection around the stitches. The salve that Sarah applied appeared to have been quite effective. If it was a remedy of her own making, she should patent it, he thought. Or perhaps he could, once he had qualified and could put his imprimatur upon the product as an Edinburgh doctor. He would ask her about it later. Obtaining the patent on a popular new medicine could prove highly lucrative, especially if it actually worked.

  He recalled his conversation with Simpson the day before regarding the search for an alternative to ether. The alleviation of all pain and suffering was certainly a lofty ambition, but Raven doubted if such a thing was possible, even with an unwearied will and a passionate desire or whatever pieties Simpson had been spouting. However, anything that offered a way out of his chronic penury was worth pursuing, particularly with Flint’s debt to be considered. Simpson would find him a willing participant in whatever experiments he proposed.

  His bags had arrived from Mrs Cherry’s, a clean shirt and trousers making him look and feel instantly more respectable. His clothes from yesterday seemed to have disappeared. He wondered if the butler had burned them.

  Raven rubbed a hand across his chin. At nineteen years old, his face was not quick to bristle, but stubble was beginning to form a shadow as he hadn’t shaved in two days. He had never pictured himself with a beard, but looking at Henry’s needlework, it struck him that growing whiskers may prove a necessity, as they would cover up the scar.

  He descended to the dining room, finding it empty, though the fire had been lit and the table laid, suggesting he would not have long to wait for breakfast. It was a large room dominated by an expansive table and a mahogany sideboard. A richly patterned paper decorated the walls and a pair of heavy brocade curtains in a complementary colour hung either side of the windows. A cage containing a large grey parrot was situated before the glass, presumably so that the bird could enjoy a view of the street and the gardens beyond. The parrot’s interest was primarily taken right then by a Raven, which it was eyeing with the same mixture of curiosity and distrust as its housemate Jarvis.

  On top of the sideboard a selection of serving dishes were waiting to be filled. Raven picked up a pepper shaker, turning it upside down to look for a hallmark. This resulted in a streak of pepper spilling onto the sideboard which he hurriedly swept up in his hand and then sprinkled onto the carpet. The parrot squawked loudly, as though in rebuke.

  Placing the shaker carefully back down, he noticed that one of the sideboard doors was ajar, and he bent to satisfy his curiosity. As well as a stack of crockery and a large soup tureen, he spied several piles of papers with barely legible notes scribbled upon them, as though scrawled in a hurry. More intriguingly he also observed a selection of glass bottles containing a variety of clear liquids. These were labelled in a contrastingly precise hand, though some of them were smudged, presumably from repeated handling. Nitric ether, benzine, chloride of hydrocarbon. To Raven, who had been a middling chemistry student at best, the names didn’t mean much. He removed the stopper from the bottle of benzine and took a sniff. It had a pungent aroma and caused a slight dizziness. Given his recent infirmity, he decided that further investigation was best avoided at present.

  He had just returned the bottle to the cupboard when the dining-room door opened and the entire household seemed to pour through it.

  ‘Mr Raven. What a pleasure it is to meet you.’

  The woman who greeted him had a pleasant, open countenance but appeared exceedingly pale, as though she hadn’t been outdoors for some time. She was dressed in black, evidently in mourning. Raven wondered for whom.

  ‘I am Mrs Simpson and this is my sister, Miss Wilhelmina Grindlay.’

  ‘Delighted to make your acquaintance,’ Raven replied.

  Miss Grindlay looked momentarily taken aback by his appearance but regained her composure to offer him a smile.

  ‘You may call me Mina,’ she said.

  Mina was slightly taller and thinner than her sister, making her features seem pinched in comparison. She was beyond the first flush of youth but still pleasing to the eye. Raven wondered why she was not yet married.

  The ladies were followed by the domestic staff, who lined up along one wall. Raven allowed himself a glance at Sarah, but averted his gaze as a matter of reflex when she met his eye. It was his understanding that servants were specifically not supposed to do this. He wondered whether the Simpson household afforded greater leeway to those below stairs or whether this meant that his status was not considered to be above.

  His attention was taken by the arrival of a fellow surely not much older than him, but who carried himself with a great deal more certainty and poise (not to mention within a suit of far finer tailoring). He had the gait of someone comfortable in his surroundings and enjoying great confidence in his purpose. He did not introduce himself, instead taking position behind a chair as they awaited the master of the house.

  Dr Simpson entered last of all, bade everyone good morning and took his seat at the head of the table. He opened a grand leather-bound Bible and read something from Psalms. Everyone then bowed their heads for a few minutes of silent prayer. To Raven’s empty stomach, this represented an unwelcome delay, rendered all the more frustrating by his never having been much inclined towards the church. He was not even sure whether he believed in God. (The devil was quite another matter.)

  Eventually the doctor said amen and the domestic staff left the room, Raven hoped as a prelude to their imminent return bearing food. When the door opened once more, however, it was the dog that entered, followed by two small boys who proceeded to chase it round the table, and from whose giggling entreaties he learned that its name was Glen.

  He heard an approaching thump of hurried footsteps and had to suppress a smile at the harassed appearance of their nanny, who looked mortified that they had escaped her charge. Raven felt guilty for his amusement as he braced himself for the rebuke that would surely be handed down, reckoning that whether the boys or the nanny got the worst of it would be a revealing detail. However, Simpson responded instead with raucous laughter, to which almost everyone reacted with similar mirth, prompting the dog to bark with excitement before even the bloody parrot joined in.

  Almost everyone, mark you. There was an exception. The smartly dressed young man merely issued a tired sigh, while presenting a token smile as thin as Ma Cherry’s porridge.

  Simpson quieted the dog with an affectionate hand upon its head, the tail wagging like a metronome. Then the squealing boys were similarly calmed by the tender ministrations of their father’s hands before being led away meekly by their grateful governess. The sight piqued something bittersweet in Raven, but before he could dwell upon it, his senses were busied with the arrival of platters piled high with sausages, eggs, kippers and freshly baked bread.

  Raven eyed it all longingly, awaiting Simpson tucking in as his cue to commence. The doctor was reaching for a sausage with a fork when he suddenly paused and put it down again.

  ‘But I am forgetting myself. Introductions! James, this is my new apprentice, Will Raven. Will, this is Dr James Duncan, recently arrived from Paris.’

  Raven was about to extend a hand but noticed that Duncan’s remained fixed by
his side. He wasn’t sure he was on the right side of the etiquette, but he was quite sure Dr James Duncan saw him as an inferior, and by ‘saw him’, he meant much as in the way one sees a fellow by using a telescope.

  If Raven was the type to feel slighted, then the sting would have been drawn by Simpson finally signalling that everyone should eat. For appearance’s sake, he did not pile his plate conspicuously, but even then it was probably more food than he had faced at a sitting since last he visited his mother, and he was sure it would taste so much the better without his uncle reminding everyone who had paid for it.

  ‘Dr Duncan, I meant to ask but I kept forgetting,’ ventured Miss Grindlay, peering across the table. ‘Are you any relation to Mr Duncan of Duncan and Flockhart on Princes Street?’

  Duncan gave her a look indicating that he considered this a self-evidently stupid question.

  ‘No. Though I understand they’re doing a fairly brisk trade in ether since its discovery.’ This latter he addressed towards Simpson, by way of moving the subject on.

  Raven decided to move it right back again.

  ‘Any relation to Mr Duncan the surgeon at the Infirmary, then?’

  For this he earned a sour look, one of which Raven was sure Duncan had a varied repertoire.

  ‘Again, no. There appears to be a surfeit of Duncans in Edinburgh at the moment. I am considering adding my mother’s maiden name to mine to distinguish myself.’

  ‘And what will your name become?’ asked Mina.

  ‘James Matthews Duncan.’

  ‘That does sound most distinguished,’ said Mrs Simpson. ‘You’ll have to make some notable contribution to medicine now, in order to be worthy of it.’

  ‘I intend to,’ he replied flatly.

  Raven thought this was another pass at shutting down irrelevant contributions from the distaff side, but it was in fact merely an overture. Once Duncan had gobbled down the solitary boiled egg he had abstemiously selected from the cornucopia before him, he proceeded to lay down his credentials, at the end of which Raven had a stark perspective upon just how powerful that telescope would have to be.

  Duncan had studied medicine in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, gaining his MD last year at the tender age of twenty, which required some form of special dispensation. He had travelled to Paris to further his studies, and while there had made extensive pathological examinations of women who had died in childbirth, considering himself to be something of an expert upon inflammatory conditions of the female pelvis. He spoke fluent German and French, and had translated Dr Simpson’s ‘Notes on the Inhalation of Sulphuric Ether’ into the latter, which had naturally flattered their host and no doubt played a part in his being offered a position as an assistant to the professor.

  ‘I have come here to find a better drowsy syrup than ether,’ he declared, which put a stopper in it as far as Raven was concerned, as he had only just begun entertaining the notion that this might be his own route to success.

  James Matthews Duncan, he decided, was going to be insufferable. He had the bearing of a young man who had never been punched full in the face for an unguarded remark, and Raven instinctively felt he might be the one to remedy that.

  The gathering was soon joined by another gentleman, who apologised for being late (having come on foot from his home on Howe Street) and insisted nobody should rise. He looked a few years older than Raven, tall and neatly dressed, with a receding hairline and a full beard. He was evidently well known to the family, as he sat down at the table without waiting for an invitation and was promptly served a cup of tea by Sarah.

  ‘This is my associate, Dr George Keith,’ Simpson explained, before completing the introduction.

  Dr Keith reached across the table to shake Raven’s hand, pausing momentarily as he took in his appearance.

  ‘What the devil has happened to you?’ Keith asked, not restrained by the same delicacy as the ladies around the table.

  ‘I was set upon by thieves in the Old Town,’ Raven said. ‘They came at me late at night and dragged me into an alley. I tried to fight them off, but that proved a mistake. They took every penny I had on me, which was quite a sum, as well as my watch. So as well as being battered and bruised, I am out of pocket and out of time.’

  He laughed a little at his own polite joke, as though trivialising his condition. Nobody joined in.

  ‘How awful for you,’ Mina said, looking genuinely distraught at his misfortune.

  ‘Are you quite out of funds, then?’ Simpson asked. ‘I’m sure that I could assist.’

  ‘Oh, not at all. I couldn’t possibly,’ he replied.

  The words spilled from his lips before Raven was aware of saying them. He knew immediately that his refusal of Simpson’s offer would come at a cost. Living here he would have bed and board, but beyond that he had only a small sum of money left among the belongings delivered from Mrs Cherry’s. Certainly not enough to keep Flint and his creatures at bay.

  However, having turned up bloodied and bruised, he did not wish his hosts to know also that he was impoverished. If you wished to be accorded respect by those who had money, it was imperative that they believed you had money too. It was a deception at which he had become practised, but it was easy to disguise your penury when you were a student living among your peers.

  ‘Well, at the very least allow me to lend you a spare timepiece until you can replace your own,’ Simpson insisted.

  ‘You are most kind, sir. I thank you.’

  Raven was contemplating a second serving of everything and wondering how much he could make selling stolen sausages when George Keith placed a hand upon his shoulder.

  ‘I think it’s about time we got started, don’t you? They were spilling out of the waiting room already as I came through.’

  ‘Who were?’ Raven asked.

  ‘The patients,’ Keith replied, holding open the door. ‘Our consulting rooms are this way.’

  Raven obediently took his cue, though not without noticing that Duncan remained where he sat, the remains of his miserably ascetic breakfast still in front of him as he continued to converse with Simpson.

  ‘Dr Duncan’s duties are confined to the area of research,’ Keith explained. ‘You will be required to assist him, but mornings are for clinics.’

  Raven followed Keith out and past the stairs, where a woman wrapped in a dirty shawl was sitting nursing a grubby infant.

  ‘Dr Simpson sees the patients here, in his home?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. They turn up every morning and draw lots to determine who is seen first. That is unless a case is conspicuously urgent.’

  ‘There is no appointment book?’

  Keith pointed to his temple. ‘Dr Simpson insists that he can retain all important appointments and visits in his head.’

  ‘And can he?’

  Keith smiled. ‘Most of the time,’ he replied. ‘And when he forgets, the patients usually forgive him.’

  ‘But why see them here?’ Raven thought that if he were ever to own a house such as this he would not permit the great unwashed to parade through his downstairs hallway.

  ‘Convenience, I suppose. The professor is not unique in having consulting rooms where he resides, although many of his colleagues choose to keep their patients at a distance. Professor Syme, for one, lives out at Morningside, far away from the patients that he sees.’

  Raven was shown into a small room containing a desk and a couple of chairs.

  ‘When you’re ready, call for a patient and Sarah will show them in. I’m just next door. If you see anything strange or unusual let me know. Dr Simpson likes to see the rare stuff himself. He’ll be seeing the upstairs patients. The ones who pay the large fees.’

  ‘So what kind of fees do the ones we’ll be seeing pay?’ Raven asked, reckoning it would at least be better than nothing.

  ‘The invisible kind.’

  Raven saw a variety of complaints, mainly in women and children: sore throats, painful ears, coughs, sprains and skin diseases. He had h
oped that Dr Keith would be on-hand to supervise his diagnoses and prescribed remedies, but it quickly became apparent that there was no time for such doubling of duties. He was unsure just what Sarah’s contribution in all this was supposed to be, particularly given that each time he emerged, he found her perched on a chair outside the door reading a book.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  She looked up from the volume, her expression suggesting she was suppressing any number of impertinent replies.

  ‘Reading a novel.’ She flicked back to the title page. ‘By someone named Currer Bell.’

  ‘A novel?’

  ‘Yes. It’s called Jane Eyre. Have you read it?’

  Raven was exasperated. ‘Do you think a man has time to read fiction when he is training to be a doctor?’

  ‘I’m rather sure Dr Simpson did.’

  She put the book in her pocket and got up from her chair.

  ‘I’ll bring the next patient, shall I?’

  Raven was speechless as she summoned a bald-headed man suffering from the most distressingly livid rash. This was not how he imagined household staff ought to behave. His uncle certainly wouldn’t tolerate it, but this thought gave him pause. If he was using Miserly Malcolm as the compass for his behaviour, then he would soon be lost.

  He returned to his consulting room and sat down with the next patient, the poor fellow concerned that his rash might soon be the death of him. Raven diagnosed it as a psoriatic eruption and dispensed a soothing ointment to calm its angry heat. Without even having applied it, the man appeared to experience some relief, merely at his suffering having been given a name. Raven suspected this effect might not be so efficacious if the man knew how little experience his ‘doctor’ had, but was satisfied to be of assistance.

  He showed the man from his consulting room and stepped back into the waiting area, where the numbers appeared to have grown. So, quite considerably, had the volume of noise. Alerted by his appearance, he was dismayed to spot Sarah slipping the novel into her pocket again as she got to her feet. If she wasn’t even paying attention, he didn’t see what need there was for her to select the next patient when he was perfectly capable of assessing such things for himself.