Unhonored

by Tracy Hickman

  She heard her father laugh.

  Ellis lunged forward, grasping her father’s arm and pulling him into her embrace.

  Bronze.

  Ellis shivered, her arms still wrapped around the chill figure.

  Her father was made of bronze.

  She let go, tumbling awkwardly backward through the air and landing painfully on her side against the wet ground. She looked up at the figure, now fixed atop a carved granite block, the shape of which she knew only too well.

  His epitaph. His headstone.

  His monument.

  9

  ALICIA’S FOLLY

  Ellis rolled painfully to sit up on the sodden ground. Her tears mixed with the rain falling about her, lost in the pools atop the already soaked ground. She sobbed, water flowing around her open mouth, her shoulders slumped forward in her newly discovered grief. She remembered her father—her papa—and now she sat at the foot of the cold and unforgiving monument to the man who had showed her a father’s love and left her alone before she was ready for the world.

  Ellis felt as though her heart would break. A flood of impressions, disjointed and incomplete, burst into her mind in quick succession. Her father’s smile at her wearing her party dress. The hurt in his eyes when she had lied to him about the broken vase in his study. The bent shoulder and tears—her father’s tears—when the Jensen boy died under his care and all he could do was hold her so tightly that she thought she might break. Sitting in his lap in his study, the sound of his deep voice reading to her from Tom Sawyer because her mother was out for the evening …

  “Ellie!” Her father’s voice was dull and distant through the rain. “El-lie!”

  She drew in a shuddering breath.

  He was gone. She loved him and she believed that he had loved her as best he knew how. She had wished he could have told her in so many words but that was not his way. She had chased his approval all her life and he was gone before she heard it from his lips.

  “Ellis!”

  It was a whisper through the rushing sound around her. The rain was falling now in torrents, obscuring even the frozen figure of her father into a darker shape against the gray of the deluge falling about her. It seemed like her father’s voice but it was not coming from the statue. Ellis began noticing other shapes, like shadows of windswept trees shifting in the rain about her, far enough so that she could make nothing more of them than their vague forms.

  “Ellis! Come … It is your turn…”

  She scrambled to her feet, her high-button shoes slipping slightly against the soaked ground. She turned, trying to discern the direction from which the voice was speaking to her.

  “Ellis! Come on. They’re waiting for you…”

  Ellis looked up once more at the cold, bronze figure of her father towering in the rain above her. She had hated to visit his grave though her mother had insisted each Sunday. Each time she could not help but know that her father was not found in the chill metal or even beneath the frozen ground. He was anywhere but here.

  She caught up her hat from off the ground and set its sodden form firmly on her head. She wiped the water from her eyes, squinting into the torrent, believing that somehow it would help her pierce the veil of gray falling about her. Just at the edge of her vision, she caught movement in the rain, shifting shadows just at the edge of her vision that disappeared when she turned her gaze directly on them.

  “Who are you?” she cried out, her voice muted in the rain. “What do you want?”

  “Ellis, everyone has to take their turn…”

  She swallowed. She could not be certain where the voices were coming from through the rain. Indeed, now that she considered, she was not all that certain that the shapes she was seeing were actually there. They might be some trick of the light in the downpour, shadows of phantoms that existed only in her own mind.

  Whatever they were, she realized she needed shelter from the increasing savagery of the storm. She cast her eyes about again and soon set her gaze on a great shadow fixed in the veil of the storm.

  The folly.

  Ellis could just make out the dim form across the park grass. She staggered toward it, struggling to keep her feet under her in the downpour. As she approached, the shape grew more distinct and solid. She could make out the broad steps of its porch and the towering columns that formed a colonnade around the perimeter of the structure. She quickly climbed the slick granite stairs and slowed her steps as she approached the rectangular doorway that led into the interior of the folly.

  The exterior of the folly had been patterned after the Pantheon in Rome and the interior followed the theme. There was an oculus cut into the pinnacle of the dome, a round opening that permitted a dim shaft of light to penetrate the interior.

  Ellis followed the shaft of dull light down from the oculus opening to where it rested on a stone bier that was made of polished stone as black as night. The jittering flash of lightning suddenly illuminated the bier in stark light. A figure lay atop it, draped in white. It was face up with its arms resting along either side as though in stately repose. She could not see the face, for it was covered by the sheet. The rain poured down through the oculus opening overhead directly down onto the figure and its bier, running down it to be collected in a pool around the base of the bier. Here, the waters poured into a surrounding trough that carried the water away down through underground pipes.

  Ellis listened to the rain. It continued to pound against the stones overhead and the ground behind her.

  She drew in a long breath and blew it out.

  Ellis took a step toward the bier.

  “Miss Harkington! We’re waiting!”

  Ellis turned with a start toward the voice barking in her right ear. The sounds of the rain were suddenly silenced.

  She was no longer in the folly.

  She was in the amphitheater of Boston Medical College.

  She stood at the open end of the U shape that formed the enormous operating room in the school. Arranged above the floor were eight concourses, each following the same shape and accessed by steep stairs. The warm color of their polished wood was accentuated by the six gas lamps suspended from a framework that hung over the center of the room from a long pipe mounted to the ceiling. Large skylights also might have admitted light into the space but for the storm howling and moaning against them. The rain had inexplicably turned into a winter snow squall.

  Ellis remembered it had snowed that day, too. It had been a bitter winter and even Boston Harbor was in danger of freezing solid.

  The benches surrounding the operating theater were more occupied than she might have expected. Certainly there were students here who were not part of her class. Someone had spread word of what was happening today and it had drawn a greater attendance from the medical students than might normally attend. Dr. Donnelly, her instructor in gross anatomy, was glaring at her impatiently from where he stood on the far side of the operating table in the center of the room. He wore a surgical apron over his shirt and tie, his sleeves rolled up past his elbows as he stood with his arms crossed over his chest. Dr. Donnelly had a bushy, gray mustache beneath a wide nose, his dark eyes gazing at her in his ever-critical manner. His spats over his polished shoes were bright white and Ellis knew woe betide anyone who caused a stain to fall on them.

  Ellis glanced down at herself. She was still in the drab, green traveling suit, now dripping rainwater on the floor of the operating theater. She took off her soaked hat with a slight feeling of embarrassment for having entered the room in front of all the other students with it still on her head.

  “Well, Miss Harkington?” scowled Dr. Donnelly. “Your patient may have all day but the rest of us certainly do not!”

  Laughter rippled among the students gazing down from the benches onto the floor of the operating room.

  “Yes, Doctor,” Ellis said as she turned her attention to the operating table locked atop the pedestal in the center of the room. A white sheet lay over it, its contours easil
y recognized as being draped over a body. The feet were exposed from beneath the bottom of the sheet but covering the face at the top.

  My patient, Ellis thought with a scowl on her face. My patient can be patient indeed … seeing as they are already dead.

  Ellis looked about her for a surgical apron but found none. An instrument stand stood next to the operating table. She recognized a number of bone saws, retractors and scalpels. They appeared to be well sharpened and clean. A second table, longer, stood to one side. There, a number of metal bowls were arranged, each one gleaming brightly under the gas lamps overhead.

  “When you are quite ready!” Dr. Donnelly snapped.

  Ellis looked up sharply. “I’m quite ready, Doctor.”

  Donnelly gave a curt nod, then turned to address the students in the gallery. “Knowing why someone has died is an imperative aspect of your chosen profession. How can one hope to keep someone alive if they do not understand what kills? We discover the cause of death through the process of an autopsy. It is one of the few procedures that a doctor can perform without risk to the patient.”

  Dr. Donnelly laughed at his own stale joke. The students in the gallery knew enough to chuckle diplomatically.

  The operating theater felt familiar to Ellis but there was also something of a sense of dread about it. She knew this was somehow a memory of her past that was playing out again for her in this bizarre place. Something she had regretted. Something of which she was ashamed. But it lay at the edge of her memory, just beyond the next moment in time.

  Ellis reached for the top edge of the sheet covering the corpse with both hands.

  “The first part of the process involves cataloging the particulars of the subject.” Dr. Donnelly had turned his voice toward the more familiar mode of lecturing that so often put his students to sleep. “In this case, we know that the individual is a white male, sixty-four inches in height weighing two hundred and thirty-six pounds…”

  Ellis pulled the sheet downward away from the face and chest toward the corpse’s waist.

  The students roared with laughter.

  Ellis caught her breath, blushed without volition and hastily tossed the edge of the sheet back. It did not cover the face but fell only as far as the body’s shoulders.

  “Very funny.” Dr. Donnelly scowled once more.

  Ellis’s hands shook as she stood, her gaze fixed on the face staring straight upward from the table.

  “I see that my students have too much time on their hands.” Dr. Donnelly stepped to the foot of the operating table and lifted the paper tag tied to the corpse’s toe. “Then let us consider instead this white female, sixty-seven inches in height, one hundred and twelve pounds, approximately twenty-two years of age. The body is cold and unembalmed. No readily apparent lividity or rigor. Signs of some blunt-force trauma in the posterior cranial region but otherwise no other unexpected or unusual external markings…”

  The corneas of the eyes were cloudy. The hair was wet and matted where it was splayed on the table beneath her head, but Ellis knew at once the identity of the body lying on the operating table before her.

  “Having completed the external examination, we now move on to the—”

  “I need another body,” Ellis blurted out.

  “What?” Dr. Donnelly was not used to being interrupted, especially by a student.

  “Please, Dr. Donnelly,” Ellis pleaded. “If we could just … just get a different body from the morgue…”

  Sniggering laughter passed as an undercurrent through the observation gallery. Ellis blushed. One or more of her fellow students had substituted this body for the one she had expected. She was doing exactly what they had intended her to do: embarrass herself before their instructor.

  “There’s no time for that!” Dr. Donnelly insisted. “Just carry on with this one!”

  “Her name is Alicia,” Ellis said, trying to remain calm. “I know her.”

  “Nonsense! The body is listed as a Jane Doe,” Donnelly said pointedly. “And even if you did know her, it shouldn’t make any difference! If you’re going to ever become a practicing physician, do you really expect to only have strangers die for you?”

  The laughter in the gallery was hearty now.

  “No, Doctor,” Ellis replied. “Of course not.”

  “Then let’s get on with this, shall we?” Dr. Donnelly said with barely an effort toward patience. “As I was saying, having completed the external examination, we now move on to an examination of the internal organs of the chest and bowels. This is important as there is no obvious external cause of death. The first step of this process is to make a Y-shaped incision through the skin beginning from each of the shoulders down to the breastbone and continuing down the center of the body to the pubic bone. As we’re dealing with a female subject, I suggest making the slant cut from the shoulders around the top of each breast before opening up the center. We’ll then pull the skin flap at the top of the chest to toward the face and the two side flaps of skin to either side, exposing the rib cage and abdominal cavity. Note to use the scalpel to make quick cuts to separate the skin from the underlying tissue. It is also important to note any unusual odors that emanate from the body when the skin is pulled away as this may be an important clue should chemicals or drugs have been a factor in the death. Once the skin is pulled back, we’ll use a bone saw to cut the ribs on either side and remove the rib cage to expose the chest cavity. Miss Harkington, please proceed to that point.”

  Ellis could hear muttered words and sniggering from the gallery above her. She drew in a breath and pulled the covering sheet back down around Alicia’s waist. She hated to expose so publicly the skin of the woman she had known under the stark gaslight overhead and the prying eyes of the students leaning forward in the gallery.

  There was something about the wet hair that bothered her. Had she drowned? If so, it was such a cold day, wouldn’t that affect her body temperature?

  Ellis turned dutifully toward the instrument table and selected the proper scalpel. She gripped it so tightly that her hand started to shake. She took in a deep breath and willed herself to relax slightly. Her hand stopped shaking.

  I couldn’t let them see how nervous I was, Ellis recalled. I could not give those men in the room their smug satisfaction. I had to do it and hide what I felt.

  Ellis turned toward the operating table a little too quickly. Her hip bumped against the table, jostling it on its supporting pedestal. It was only the slightest of nudges but it was enough.

  Alicia’s head rolled to one side as though she were turning to look at Ellis. Her face stared back at her with haunting, dead eyes.

  “The first cut down the center from the breast to the pubic bone needs to be firm and deep.” Dr. Donnelly’s words rang clearly in Ellis’s mind even though her eyes were still fixed on returning the dead woman’s stare. “You’ll want to divert around the navel as it is particularly difficult to cut through.”

  Ellis held the scalpel raised in her frozen right hand. She could not look away from the dead face of Alicia staring back at her. This is wrong. It wasn’t Alicia on the table that day. That face was burned so deeply in my memory that I remembered it in my worst dreams. She looked nothing like Alicia …

  “Miss Harkington?” It was the voice of Dr. Donnelly. “We’re all waiting.”

  Ellis looked closer at the pallid face and the clouded eyes of the woman.

  A tear fell from the woman’s eye.

  She’s not dead. The thought shouted in Ellis’s mind as though she were deaf to her own thoughts. Everyone thinks she is but she’s not.

  “Miss Harkington!” Dr. Donnelly’s voice was muffled and distant, as though Ellis were underwater and her professor were shouting at her from the surface. “I was not in favor of your entering this school! A woman has no place in this profession! You will complete this autopsy or I will process your expulsion from this school myself.”

  Ellis’s hand moved as it had in that operating theater so long b
efore. She was powerless to stop it then and she was powerless to stop it now. As though moving through water the blade descended toward the soft skin covering the woman’s sternum.

  Ellis knew what was coming but was powerless to stop it. The welling up of the blood as she made the long cut. The woman’s scream as she came suddenly to consciousness. Her thrashing on the table. The blood splatter on Dr. Donnelly’s spats. It was all moments away.

  Where was her father when she needed him?

  Gone … gone to his grave …

  Her hand descended. The tip of the scalpel would not be denied biting into the flesh that beckoned it.

  A hand reached out, grasping Ellis’s right hand by the wrist.

  Lightning flashed through the windows overhead.

  The gallery, its students, Dr. Donnelly and the operating theater vanished. Ellis was surrounded by a cloud of dark, howling figures that retreated from her in all directions. Their cries faded almost at once and she could see where she was once more.

  She stood in the rotunda of the folly next to the onyx bier. She was looking down at the terrified face of Alicia, her rain-wet face glistening in the occasional flashes of lightning through the oculus above.

  Alicia was whimpering. “Please, Ellis … oh, please…”

  Ellis shifted her gaze to her right hand suspended over Alicia’s breast.

  It held a gleaming scalpel.

  A strong hand gripped Ellis’s hand by the wrist, arresting its descent. The hold was strong and a little too tight.

  It was Jonas’s hand.

  “It’s all right, Ellis,” Jonas said quietly. “You just need to relax now … and put that blade down.”

  Ellis’s arm ached. She drew in a shuddering breath as she made an effort to relax.

  “I told you, you could do this,” Jonas said, pulling her hand down slowly. He took the scalpel from her hand.

  “Yes,” Ellis murmured, still shaken. “You told me.”