The Way of All Flesh

by Ambrose Parry

  ‘I need to see that list,’ Raven told Sarah, almost uncontainable in his frustration. ‘But how can I do so if it is locked safe in their keeping?’

  ‘Every lock has a key,’ Sarah had replied. ‘It is simply a matter of acquiring it.’

  ‘I would not be able to locate it, far less procure such a thing unnoticed.’

  ‘A set of keys hangs from a hook on the wall behind the counter, just to the right of the cash register. They are in the charge of Ingram, the assistant. I have heard him talk of how he opens the shop and prepares the premises before the Misters Duncan and Flockhart arrive.’

  ‘And how do you propose that I lay my hands on them unseen?’

  ‘I do not propose that you lay your hands on them at all. For such a task you require a person to whom nobody pays any notice. Such as a housemaid.’

  Watching through the window, she observed what she expected: Mr Flockhart tending to some matter at the counter, assisted by the smug and dim young runt whose suitability for employment here was considered greater than hers by virtue of what dangled between his legs. Mr Duncan was, as usual, not to be seen, busying himself in the laboratory towards the rear of the building. Mr Flockhart was the more garrulous of the pair, and therefore more frequently the public face of the partnership.

  In time, she saw Mr Flockhart slip out of sight too, either to the lab or one of the storerooms. She knew from experience that he was happy to let Ingram deal with customers of lesser standing, such as a maid running an errand. If someone important came in, the lad would fetch his boss.

  This was her moment.

  As she stepped through the door and the bell rang, Sarah felt it trilling right through her. She was jangling with tension. She didn’t only feel it in a quickened heartbeat and a tightness in her gut; her fingers tingled, her elbows, her knees. It was manifest in a heightened state of perception affecting all sensations. The colours in the room seemed brighter, the smells more distinct, the sounds sharper.

  She wondered if this was down to a pronounced awareness of all that she stood to lose should she be caught. Never would she be allowed in this shop again. She would be thrown out of the household, in fact, and what future would be open to her then? Sarah became privately angry whenever someone suggested she should be grateful for her job as a housemaid, but she knew there were worse fates. Nonetheless, there was someone in this city who saw housemaids and other young women as disposable, and she was resolved to see their wickedness unmasked.

  ‘Can I help you, young lady?’ the assistant asked.

  She wanted to swat him for that. She estimated she was at least a year older than him, possibly two.

  ‘I require some items for Dr Simpson.’

  ‘Dr Simpson of Queen Street?’

  This annoyed her too. He was verifying whose account should be billed, even though he saw her at least twice a week. Either he was acting as though he didn’t recognise her or he genuinely didn’t recognise her, and she wasn’t sure which one was the greater insult.

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘And what does Dr Simpson require?’

  Sarah rhymed off a short list and cast an eye upon the high shelves while Ingram retrieved her requests, all of which were within easy reach.

  ‘Oh, and he also wished a quantity of carbonic acid.’

  Ingram frowned and turned to search the nearby cabinets. He did not see what he was looking for. This was because she had asked him to supply a quantity of fixed air, the transparent and colourless gas that, according to Gregory’s Outlines of Chemistry, he was currently exhaling and he hadn’t the knowledge to realise it.

  ‘I’ll just go and ask Mr—’

  ‘It’s right up there,’ Sarah interrupted, stepping behind the counter and pointing to a high shelf.

  ‘I don’t see it.’

  ‘Then let me fetch it,’ she said, reaching for the ladder.

  Ingram blocked her way. ‘That is not permitted,’ he told her in a scolding tone.

  ‘For only a man will do,’ Sarah muttered, stepping away from the ladder but closer to the cash register.

  As Ingram climbed, his attention firmly upon each spar, Sarah lifted the keys from their hook and slipped them into her pocket.

  ‘I still don’t see it,’ he reported.

  ‘My apologies. I just remembered that Dr Simpson merely mentioned it. He didn’t mean for me to buy some, otherwise he’d have told me a quantity, wouldn’t he?’

  Ingram sighed with irritation at this stupid woman.

  As he began descending, Sarah was already heading for the door, as though some force was pushing her out of the shop before she could be apprehended. She felt heat in her cheeks and it was all she could do not to break into a run once she was back on Princes Street.

  She had travelled only a few yards when she heard the voice.

  ‘Young woman! Stop!’

  Sarah felt time suspended as the recklessness of her actions came crashing in upon her. She saw McLevy hauling her away, the stern face of a judge, rats and chains in a jail cell.

  When she turned to face this grim future, she saw Ingram striding towards her, holding a brown paper bag.

  ‘You forgot to lift what Dr Simpson did order,’ he said, his tone patronising and heavy with scorn. ‘That would have earned you a dressing down when you got back, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, relief lending her tone sincerity. ‘Indeed it would.’

  Much like one might receive for misplacing one’s keys.

  Fifty-One

  Raven tried turning another key without success, huddled in the darkness at the back door to the building. Though few people were likely to be passing at this hour, he had opted to approach from the rear as it was secluded from view. Unfortunately it was also secluded from the illumination of the nearest street lamp. Sarah had tried lighting a candle, but the breeze was too strong even back here, whipping through any gap it could find.

  His hands were cold and he was shivering. Neither of these things were helping either.

  ‘Are you sure you lifted the right keys?’ he asked.

  She did not respond to this, but he could imagine her expression. Sarah had only surrendered the keys on the walk here, once everyone at Queen Street had gone to bed. It had been her way of ensuring that he could not go without her. He did not understand why she would wish to, but he was learning that it was usually futile to argue.

  ‘We are equals in this enterprise,’ was all she told him.

  Raven tried the first key again, and this time it turned. In his trembling anxiety, his fumbling fingers had not inserted it properly before.

  The door opened with rather more of a creak than was comfortable. With the wind blowing so hard, the sound would not carry more than a few feet, but to Raven’s ears it sounded like the wail of a banshee calling attention to their crime.

  Sarah lit the candle now that she had some shelter. By its meagre light, they found their way into the laboratory, where Raven located an oil lamp. As he turned up the flame, he saw dozens of leather-bound volumes lining a bookcase, amidst shelves upon shelves of powders and liquids. Bottles, beakers and flasks reflected the light. Raven was wary of the many retorts jutting out, inviting accident, which would preclude their intention to pass here without leaving any record.

  He held the lamp to the spines. None of them was what he sought.

  ‘I have often seen Mr Flockhart write in his ledger upon the counter,’ Sarah told him. ‘I imagine it is kept close by.’

  They crept through to the front of the shop on quiet feet, though Raven did wonder why he felt an instinct to tread so softly. The glow of the lamp through the window was more likely to be noticed than any footfall.

  He turned down the lamp accordingly and they waited for their eyes to grow more accustomed to the dark, alleviated only sparingly by the street lamps on Princes Street.

  Sarah went to the back of the long sales counter and rolled out a shallow drawer from beneath. There indeed was
the sales ledger.

  ‘Let us take it where we can turn up the lamp,’ Raven said.

  They withdrew into the laboratory, where they placed the ledger upon a table. Raven turned the pages carefully as Sarah held the lamp close. It was not difficult to find what they were looking for. Sales of chloroform had only commenced in the past month.

  Raven ran a finger down the column on the far right, where it stated what had been purchased, and each time he encountered the word chloroform, he traced his finger left, to the name of the customer.

  The first few instances were no surprise.

  Simpson.

  Simpson.

  Simpson.

  Then other names started to appear: Professor Miller, Professor Syme, Dr Ziegler, Dr Moir. Surgeons, obstetricians. There was Dr J.M. Duncan, insisting upon the extra letter, Raven observed. Mostly they were names he recognised, and it gave him pause to ask whether he was truly considering them to be his abortionist.

  He saw a couple of names unfamiliar to him: a Dr John Mors, a Dr Edgar Klein. He was about to bid Sarah fetch some paper to write these down when the next purchaser stopped him with a jolt. Sarah’s eyes were quicker than his finger, and she spoke the name aloud even as he read it.

  ‘Adam Sheldrake. Rose’s employer.’

  Raven gaped, feeling like a fool. He recalled Simpson’s lesson outside the inn near the Royal Exchange: People often hypothesise the sensational, and become inexplicably blind to the obvious that is before their very eyes.

  It had been in front of him all along. He and Sarah attended the Sheldrakes’ church in order to talk to Milly, and that led them to suspect Grissom. It had never occurred to him that Sheldrake himself was the obvious suspect.

  ‘Not a doctor, but a medical man, of sorts,’ Raven said. ‘A dentist. Perhaps the wealthiest in the city. He might even have been responsible for Rose’s condition. She was scared she would be dismissed if he found out.’

  ‘I heard Mina make mention of a man in Glasgow believed to have murdered his housemaid because she was pregnant by him. But why would a wealthy dentist risk his reputation to carry out abortions?’

  ‘Perhaps dentistry is not his most profitable practice. And you forget he has an ingenious means of protecting his reputation. Madame Anchou is the public face of the business, while he remains in shadow. Besides, his clients are young women from the lower orders, unlikely to be familiar with him as a dentist.’

  ‘Until one of them turns out to be his own employee.’

  Raven opened his mouth to speculate further, but no word issued from it, for at that moment they heard a key in the front door. He looked down the passage and saw the silhouette of a man in a top hat behind the glass.

  Though the hour was past midnight, Mr Flockhart had returned to his shop.

  Fifty-Two

  Sarah had seldom moved so fast in her life. The state of heightened alertness she had experienced in these same premises several hours previously restored itself in an instant and drove her to action. In a quarter of a second, she recognised Mr Flockhart at the door and understood all possible implications as they applied to her circumstances. She also understood that the doom she envisaged earlier, when she heard a voice call ‘Stop!’, might merely have been postponed, not avoided.

  She turned off the lamp as Raven lifted the ledger from the table, and led him swiftly to the storeroom. If Mr Flockhart was visiting at such an hour, it was either to retrieve something or because some idea had come upon him, and both were likely to bring him to the laboratory. The storeroom was off the passageway between it and the shop. There was no reason Flockhart would not need to visit it also, but it was the best chance they had to avoid detection.

  Sarah ushered Raven inside and pulled the door to, but not fully closed. She could hear approaching footsteps and knew the sound of it meeting the frame would be too loud. It was not so much a room as a cupboard, a tiny space within intended for one person to reach the shelves on three sides.

  They were pressed tight against each other, lest they nudge the door open. Sarah could feel the warmth of Raven against her chest, his scent in her nostrils, her nose almost touching his chin.

  She tried not to breathe as she heard footsteps nearing. Through the crack in the door, she saw a dance of shadows, the aura of a lamp as Mr Flockhart made his way through the building.

  She heard a cough, a clank of glass upon wood, a bottle or flask being placed on a table. Laughter, a tipsy giggle. Mr Flockhart was a noted socialite. He had stopped off after a night of revelry, but for what?

  A few moments later, footsteps approached again. Did he need something from the store?

  Once more the shadows flickered, the dancing aura visible through the crack. Sarah felt her heart thump against Raven as the footsteps grew closer.

  Then they grew fainter. She heard the front door open. Flockhart was leaving.

  Sarah breathed again, then the feeling of relief gave way to something more powerful, as though the lifting of fear had broken a dam within her. Even as the sound of the bolt reverberated from the front door, she pulled Raven closer, though that felt barely possible. She lifted her head in the darkness and found his lips. It felt as though this cramped little space was the whole world, and that world was filled with light.

  Fifty-Three

  Raven extinguished his lamp and lay down, though he knew he would not sleep. The events of the past hour felt like they might take days to absorb. He could not even settle his mind to focus upon a single component of it, tossed amidst a storm of information, revelation and emotion. He did not lie alone in the dark as long as he feared, however.

  He had barely settled into the pillow when he heard his door open and the sound of dainty feet upon the floor. Sarah stood before him clutching a candle, by the flickering light of which he could see that she was dressed only in her nightgown.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, his voice a whisper. He could not disguise how pleased he was to receive her, but was mindful of the consequences should they be discovered.

  ‘I would hold you just a little longer,’ she replied.

  She slipped beneath the blankets alongside him, her arms tangling around him and pulling him close. There were but two thin layers of cloth between them as she pressed herself against him.

  Raven recalled his youthful excitement when first he saw Evie unclothed, and of all that followed. This felt more powerful, though they merely lay together in silence, unmoving, the darkness enveloping them as though banishing the world outside. There was a rushing in his ears, soothing for being a sound without meaning. Sleep might come yet, though not with Sarah here. Much as he enjoyed the warmth of her against him, for them both to fall asleep would be to court disaster.

  In time Sarah spoke softly, but one word.

  ‘Thomas?’

  ‘Yes?’

  Raven’s response was instinctive, too fast to avert.

  He endured a moment of shock, but no fear and no threat. It felt like an intimacy, almost as much as the one that had preceded it.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘From parish records. I went in search of knowledge about Beattie, and in particular his family background. While I was there, I confess I indulged my curiosity. I smelled secrets upon you from the moment you entered this house.’

  ‘And what do you smell upon Beattie, beyond oranges and sandalwood?’

  Sarah paused.

  ‘Hidden purpose. A man whose true intentions are always occluded.’

  ‘What did you learn of him?’

  ‘There is no record of Beattie’s uncle or his mother ever having lived in Edinburgh. Nor is there record of his uncle living here now. I consulted the Post Office directory too.’

  ‘Have you told Mina this?’

  ‘Certainly not, for fear she shoots the messenger. She has an understandable faith in him, and would see it as inexcusable impertinence were I to reveal what I have found or even that I went looking for it. Nonetheless, I will not
let her be deceived and walk blindly into a marriage that is not all she believes. There may yet be an innocent explanation, but I suspect Dr Beattie is not all that he pretends, and it is my intention to have answers from him.’

  ‘He will not answer to a housemaid.’

  ‘He will if she might otherwise reveal what she knows to her employer, Dr Simpson. I am tenacious, Mr Raven. And I would have answers from you also.’

  She prodded him in the chest accusingly.

  ‘Do not think I failed to notice that you changed the subject. How did Thomas Cunningham become Will Raven?’

  Raven had indeed hoped she would forget. It would not do to deny her satisfaction, or some honesty.

  ‘I changed my name when I enrolled at the university,’ he said. ‘I took my mother’s surname and the middle name she chose for me. I wished to be entirely her son and not my father’s.’

  ‘Dr Simpson said you attended Heriot’s school for fatherless boys. Yet the parish holds no record of your father’s death.’

  Raven lay quiet a moment, considering how he might best explain.

  ‘I told Dr Simpson my father was a lawyer in St Andrews. That was not true. My father was a philanderer and a drunk, one prone to violent rage. A vintner whose business faltered because he was too fond of his own goods, and who took out his anger at his failings on us. My mother and I lived in permanent fear, never knowing what demeanour would be upon him when he came home.

  ‘Then one night he beat my mother so viciously I feared he would kill her. After that, he walked out and left us. Perhaps when he saw what he had wrought, he finally felt shame, or perhaps he merely sought to escape the debts of his collapsing business.’