But Caley too has changed, his temper darker, more certain. Where once the violence in him seemed always ready to reveal itself, now he is quieter, more calm. As the days pass my money bleeds away, as must his own, but he shows no inclination to work, rather sitting in the kitchen with Graves and Walker and myself. There is a watchfulness in him, something that broods and gnaws as might a nest of rats.
When one night Rose appears in Graves’s company, Caley does not object, nor threaten her. Graves cannot have kept his secret to himself, and indeed she is wary of Caley now, watching him as one might watch a dog that one has reason not to trust, steeling herself against his smiles and charms with careful looks and cautious hands.
THE NEXT IS A BOY Caley brings to the house. The old woman ten days dead; Rose asleep in Graves’s room. Though he laughs, the boy is in an evil mood. Graves and I are in the kitchen, and seeing us there he calls us nancies, and tells us he will put a dagger up our arses if we touch him. He has one too, for he shows it to us: a nasty thing with a chipped and broken edge. Yet he takes the drink that Caley offers and seats himself. Though no word is said I know what is intended here.
We give him rum, and laudanum, and soon enough he grows sly with it. He is a dirty boy, with a face angry with pimples and tufted hair, yet as Caley touches his cheek he does not resist, and only watches me so I will know what kind of boy he is.
‘Show us that knife again,’ Caley says, and with a knowing smile the boy produces it.
‘You’ll give it back,’ he says and Caley smiles as he takes it from his grasp. Graves has stopped his giggling.
‘Oh yes,’ Caley says, ‘oh yes.’
When the time comes he dies easily, stupid with the laudanum. I do not help this time, just watch as Caley takes a pillow and presses it down upon the face. I might be outside myself, as if it were not me who sat here in this room, as if I were asleep and watched this thing in a dream. Caley’s whole being is newly concentrated in the doing of this thing, as if he seeks some answer here, some release. But in the moment the boy dies, as his body kicks and jerks and then grows still, Caley takes a sudden breath, an intake sharp and quick, and I see it is not delight but loss that shudders in him then, a thing gone as soon as it is done.
The boy’s body we sell to Sir Astley’s porter as we did the woman’s ten days earlier. Eight guineas we get, a sum that seems too small. Though Graves does not come with the three of us, Caley keeps a guinea for him, slipping it in his hand when we return to Clerkenwell. Taking the guinea from Caley’s hand Graves stands with his body poised as if he fears we might snatch it back from him, then with a snuffling laugh he slips it in his coat.
Caley’s mood is ugly, seeming to teeter on some precipice. Moving slowly about the room he picks up the things that sit upon the mantelpiece to examine them. He is unsatisfied. Then he pauses by the door to Graves’s room. Rose is within, asleep. Stepping through the door Caley goes and seats himself beside her on the bed. She murmurs something, and turns away from him a little bit, still lost in sleep. Graves advances slowly on the door, his cross-eyed face quivering. Beside me Walker is still, his breath whistling in his ruined mouth. His eyes are bright with fear, and tears too, I think. Caley looks up at Graves, then letting his hand fall he runs it across Rose’s hair, once, and then again.
The next is a cripple called Matthiessen, whom we smother like the boy. Despite his infirmity he fights and kicks, striking me in the face with his fist as we hold him down upon the bed, and loosening one of my teeth. We sell Matthiessen to Brookes, who gives us twelve guineas, remarking on the freshness of the corpse. Brookes does not care for Caley, and though Caley is careful and polite, I see the way he watches us.
And afterwards, in the kitchen of Graves’s house, the rain outside heavy in the yard, we sit and drink. Caley has a knife, and he presses it into the tabletop, gouges deep across the wood, his arm straining with the force of it. Graves is murmuring something, whether to himself or Rose I do not know. Walker sits apart from us upon the floor, his legs huddled up against his chest, staring up at Caley. His eyes are wide, and wet, and I remember now the way he looked after we killed the boy, as if something he loved had died, and now nothing made sense, not any more.
WHEN IT BECOMES A HABIT I do not know. At first it seems to happen almost at random: a night of drinking, a new friend, the walk to the house. It is like a game, the rules of which we each of us understand without being told. But in truth it is not random, or not quite. All of us know what will come each time it begins, and it quivers in us, the anticipation as irresistible as the act itself.
We sell the bodies where we will: some must suspect but none refuses the goods we bring. Of Brookes alone are we wary, Brookes and Mr Poll. Our takings we split three ways, a third each for Walker, Caley and myself, keeping always a guinea back for Graves’s hand. And though we need it, the money sometimes seems more like an afterthought, unconnected to the act from which it came.
After Matthiessen there is a Scotswoman whose name we never learn, brought by Caley on a freezing night with the offer of food and a place to sleep. After her another youth, blind in one eye and half-simple, who begs in the mornings by Clerkenwell Green, and whom we dose with laudanum and choke by pressing closed his nose. An Italian boy named Fido too. There are others, a half-dozen more, too many to remember easily, though with each there seems to be a hastening in us, a sense of slipping down.
It is not that I do not understand the nature of my acts, nor that I feel no guilt. Yet these things are somehow without meaning now, seen as if from another place, another time. Perhaps it is the opium, but it seems not me who commits the acts, or no more me than the sleepwalker who lifts a hand in sleep, without volition, or presence in the limb. As if I myself were hollowed out, and this thing an emptiness inside of me.
AND SO I RISE, weightless. Sometimes in the shapeless time of the passing hours I wake to voices from the other rooms, laughter and sounds of pain, the disjointed dreams of fever’s sleep. Beneath my face the wool of my bedding rank, and thin, my skin icy in the freezing air. Outside, the world moves by like a void.
They come more often now, twice a week, sometimes thrice. And still they are so few of all there are. In the caverns of the city perhaps we might do this thing for ever and for ever and still there would be thousands left. Someone must know, someone must see. But there is no word of rumour or fear that people vanish from their lives, snatched away and slipped onto a table for some student’s education. Surely there must be spaces left, I think, relatives and friends who mark their absence? And yet even when I sit in the shops where gin is bought, or in the marketplace, I hear no whisper of this terror in their midst. They might be ghosts, these people that we take, for others clamour everywhere to fill their places, the waters of the city closing over them too easily, unremembered and unmentioned, as if they had never been, had never breathed.
I DO NOT NOTICE he is gone at first. He is so quiet, so careful to remain always out of one’s way. Caley sits in his chair by the fireplace, a piece of wood in his hand, his knife slipping back and forth as he whittles. Outside the day is bitter, the clouds moving fast against a dead sky. Taking the bottle which sits upon the tabletop, I drink, aware of the way he does not look at me. It is then I realise he is not here, that I have not seen him anywhere. There is something odd in this.
‘Where is Walker?’ I ask, but Caley’s gaze stays on the piece of wood, his busy knife. In my chest a tightness forms.
‘What have you done with him?’ I ask now, but still he keeps on whittling, his knife moving faster. I cannot take my eyes from the blade.
‘Why do you not speak?’ I ask. ‘What is it you are not telling me?’
In his chair he sets his mouth.
‘Tell me.’ My voice is harder, and quavering, ‘tell me where he is.’ I would go to him, put my hand upon his arm and turn his face to look at me, but I am afraid of the fixity of his stare, the motion of his blade.
‘Tell me,’ I say aga
in, and at last he starts to his feet, casting the piece into the corner so it rattles on the stones.
‘Gone away,’ he says, voice cracking, his expression daring me to contradict the words. He looks very young suddenly, a boy again, scarcely older than myself. Something more like pain than anger in his face – pain, and an intensity so great I think he will do himself harm.
Later I wake to find him upon my bed. Though there is no reason for it, he has never entered my room before, always lingering just outside the door, as if he is afraid of what it contains, or of me. Now he sits, his back to the wall, knees drawn up. Perhaps I should fear him, but I do not think he means me harm, so out of place does he seem here. In his hand he holds something. Quietly drawing myself upright, I see it is my locket. With one finger he traces her face through the glass.
‘She was your mother?’ he asks.
I nod, not speaking. His eyes do not leave her face.
‘Did you know her?’
I shake my head. ‘No,’ I say quietly. ‘And yours?… Do you remember her?’
His face knots. ‘Sometimes,’ he says. Listening to his flat, Irish voice I try to imagine the Dublin slum in which he was born.
‘If I had a picture of her, perhaps I would remember more.’
‘Perhaps,’ I agree. For a long time then he looks into my locket. When he speaks again his voice is quieter.
‘It was not what you think.’
‘What?’ I ask.
‘I had to do it, he gave me no choice. He did not understand.’ He turns to look at me, his eyes seeking my attention, needy of so much I cannot give. At last I nod and look away.
‘Yes,’ I say, though something in me rises up to contradict my words, ‘I understand.’
After he has gone I uncork my bottle and drink, willing myself away, out of here. The opium is bitter, a sour taste in my throat. Yesterday I walked alone through the streets of Bloomsbury, staring in the windows. Men and women moving in their little worlds of light, speaking and laughing, reading and listening. I wished that I might go to them, and sit inside, and become once more one of their kind. But I knew that I could not, that I had moved outside the world, and beyond.
WITH WALKER GONE a difference descends upon the three of us. We are bound together now, all of us know it. Caley seems wilder, his mood more brittle, and yet at once more still. Though we barely speak, an intimacy lies between us two now, some sense that we understand the other’s mind better than we might care to.
Graves guesses as well, seeing Walker gone, but keeps his questions back. Where once he fawned on Caley now he seems almost afraid of him, preferring to mutter to himself alone by the fireplace. Once in the hall he comes close to me and, crossed eyes staring into mine, puts a hand upon my chest and asks me what I know of it, what it was that Walker did. But his needy fascination repulses me, and I leave him there without a word, pushing past and on into my room.
That night he is strange with us, distant and peculiar, and when Caley rounds on him he pulls away, lifting his hand and giggling as if unhinged, before beginning then to weep inconsolably. In another I might think these were signs of some repentance, but he revels in the work we do.
I should care, I know, but I do not. With each of them something dulls inside of me. Even as it holds me here I feel a hopelessness, a sense not that this is wrong but that I have failed somehow. Of something once within my grasp and already fled.
THEN BY ST PANCRAS, where the ivy grows upon the wall and the water seeps out through the stone, I hear a noise, the quiet sound of something cocked in stealth. In the shadows up ahead Craven’s figure emerges from the gloom. I know him at once by the way he holds himself, the stooping posture of his frame. Behind him Bridie, and another man I do not know. In his hand Craven holds a pistol, and he lifts his arm so it is trained on us.
‘So,’ he says, ‘then it is true.’
In my hands the barrow is heavy; carefully I lower it, unsure of what he means to do. In front of me Caley does not move, just stands staring at the pistol’s barrel.
‘What business have you here?’ he asks.
‘I might ask the same of you,’ Craven replies. Taking a step closer he reaches down to the barrow, the pistol still held high. With one hand he draws aside the sticks which cover our bundles.
Something troubles him, something he does not understand quite yet. Caley takes a step closer, but Craven aims the pistol towards him.
‘Where is your shadow?’ he asks then – ‘that wretched dog you call a friend?’ For a moment I think Caley will lunge at him, but he stays still. And then Craven lowers the gun and turns to me.
‘I once said we were fools to let you close,’ he says. ‘Now I know I was right.’
Once they have gone, Caley and I gather up the cart and move away, neither willing to meet the other’s eye. Caley wheels the cart hard, his pace furious. I follow, though not close, something choking up inside me. I can hear Caley’s breath, coming rough and hot, and in my head my beating blood, like waves heard from far away.
I AM WITH GRAVES in the kitchen by the fire when Caley enters. Across the table Graves looks up, and in his face I see he is fearful. All night he has been silent, and restless, but until now I have given it no thought.
‘Where is she?’ Caley asks, advancing on Graves’s chair.
‘Who?’ Graves starts up and backs away.
‘Do not lie to me.’ Caley grabs Graves’s collar and throws him back down. Though Graves is the larger man by half a head, I see the strength in Caley’s arm.
‘What is this?’ I ask, starting to my feet.
‘He has betrayed us,’ Caley says. ‘Telling old Barker he has a body he would sell.’
‘No,’ Graves whimpers, ‘I would have divided it with you.’
Caley shakes his head. ‘Where is she? What have you done with her?’
Graves begins to weep, and all at once Caley pulls a knife from his belt and holds it to his throat.
‘Do not defy me,’ he says, forcing Graves down onto his knees.
‘Please,’ babbles Graves, ‘I did not mean it, it was an accident.’
Caley presses the knife harder to his throat. ‘I will not ask again.’
‘Mercy,’ Graves cries. Caley lets go and Graves stumbles to his feet, one hand fumbling at his neck to check it is intact. Still weeping he looks from Caley to me and back again. Caley takes a step forward, lifting the knife again. Graves backs away.
‘No,’ he says, ‘I will show you.’
He takes us to the cellar, where a girl lies in the coalscuttle, one arm cast back unnaturally, her hand knotted tight in what looks like pain. She is young, and pretty too, though black with coal. Her face is scratched, and her mouth hangs open, but there is no other sign of death. Yet as Caley and I pull her loose we see the back of her head has been bludgeoned in, the skull a filthy mess of broken bone and clotted blood. She is stiff, and we must break the rigor of her limbs, twist them back into some semblance of peace. Behind us Graves has ceased his weeping, and though he will not come close, he addresses us as we work.
‘You will pay me for her, won’t you?’ he snuffles. Caley turns to him then looks away again, his face and arms filthy with the coal.
‘I should give you nothing to teach you honesty,’ he says.
Graves points at me. ‘Yet he shall have half for bearing her to the damned anatomists?’
‘Aye,’ Caley says, then smiling, he reaches into his coat.
‘Here,’ he says quietly, drawing out two sovereigns, ‘take these now and let this thing rest.’
Sulkily Graves extends a hand, but as he does Caley grabs his wrist and pulls him close.
‘Betray us again and it will be your body we sell,’ he hisses, his mouth hard against Graves’s ear.
IN THE SKY the moon hangs like a pale eye. My skin shivers, alive to the whispering around me. Too much opium again. The night is cold, yet I linger in the streets. I feel a rupture in the surface of the world, and the runn
ing forth of what lies beneath.
I come upon him on the street outside a tavern by Clerkenwell Green.
At first he does not see me, but as I approach he turns, and begins to cower, and I know something is wrong.
Two men are with him, weavers perhaps, and they watch me suspiciously.
‘No,’ he whimpers, ‘don’t let him near me.’
As he speaks one of the men approaches me, Graves cowering behind him.
‘Graves,’ I say, ‘why are you hiding from me?’
‘Because you mean to kill me,’ he says. His words make me nervous, but I look at the two men and shrug.
‘He is a friend,’ I say. ‘I mean him no harm.’
‘He says he knows the whereabouts of some resurrectionists,’ says the larger of the two men, his tone implying that I must be one of these men.
I shake my head. ‘He is a fool with the drink,’ I say. Looking past them I smile at Graves.
‘Come now,’ I say. ‘Are we not friends?’
Graves stares at me for a moment, and then lurches to his feet.
‘It’s not him I was afraid of,’ he says in a wheedling voice, sounding more like a child than ever. I look at his protectors one by one.
‘I think it would be better if he were inside,’ I say. ‘It is a cold night and he might come to harm.’ For a moment they stand before me, as if undecided, then without a word they step aside, and I take Graves by the arm.
‘Come,’ I say as brightly as I can. ‘I will help you home.’
In the moonlight the snow seems to shine, dark footprints lying in it like pools. As we walk, Graves takes my sleeve. ‘I cannot help myself,’ he says. ‘I am damned, we all are.’ I want to slap him, for this idiocy will betray us, if it has not done so already. Instead I march him down the narrow alley to our door. I am not sure what I intend, beyond leaving him here and seeking out Caley. But Caley is already seated within. Seeing him, Graves cowers back, but I will not let him flee, and push him through the door, close it behind us.
The Resurrectionist Page 17