Will and I took a spade each from beneath the tarpaulin. We started directly against the foot of the northern wall. The grass was tightly matted, but we dug it out in a thick shaggy layer. Beneath, the ground was hard – a dense, sticky brown mass that cleaved to the blades of our spades like cold fat.
They were not far below the surface. Six of them: one for each tiny coffin, lined up, head to toe, along the very edge of the wall. Unmarked by any headstone, they had been crammed into the vile earth and hastily covered over; the ground stamped down, the sod carefully laid back.
The clay had preserved them well. They had not rotted, but instead had turned waxy and hollow, their faces black and sunken, but recognisable – eyes closed, mouths open as if in a scream of fear and pain. Each was clothed only in a simple chemise – once white, but now ragged and blackened with water and dirt, dried blood and time spent underground.
We laid them side by side, some distance apart from the mountain of bones. I could tell from the way their filthy underclothes clung to their bodies that something was amiss. I crouched down and lifted the hem. I cut it with my knife, an incision from ankles to sternum, and peeled it open. Beneath, where the skin should have been taut across their shrivelled womb, was a great dark hole. Within, the blackened cavity was empty, the pale bones of the pelvis clearly visible. But this was no butchery: there was no ripped and ragged flesh. Instead, I could see that the skin bore the signs of the knife – the neat cut from hip to hip, from pubis to umbilicus, the uterus removed cleanly from its moorings. Who were those six girls? For girls they were, their long hair clinging to their skulls in matted locks of brown and yellow; their skin blackened like the skin of a raisin; their once-young flesh now dried and cleaving to their bones.
What had we learned? That in his four score years as sexton Dick had repeatedly turned a blind eye to the activities of the resurrectionists? That someone had put six bodies into the ground – at night, in secret, all of them young women, each of them with their wombs cut out? There was no evidence of foetuses buried alongside them. Had they been pregnant? We could not tell. I could not work it out, and I could still prove nothing. Everything was connected; it had to be, but how? I remembered Mrs Roseplucker’s story . . . for the Abbot of St Saviour’s was as wicked as the rest of them, and he was lookin’ for a young girl to slake his appetites . . . No one would miss a street girl, a prostitute. No one would ask where they went or care what had happened to them. And there was something else too, something else Mrs Roseplucker had said about one of the girls who had vanished. Fanny Bishop . . . Pretty girl. Leastways she was till she got her teeth bashed in one night . . . I was not mistaken: one of those empty, butchered corpses had no front teeth.
Perhaps it was the Abbot, I had said, my manner impertinent. I had been right. If only I had realised it at the time. And yet we had unearthed nothing but more mysteries, more questions. Who was to say that those six bodies were not simply the corpses of six paupers, or six cadavers no longer required by the anatomy school? We still had nothing concrete; we could accuse no one. We were so close, and yet the truth, whatever that might be, still eluded us.
Time was running out. I went to Newgate every day: I could not leave my father alone there, waiting in the condemned cell without love or comradeship. And I could not persuade him from his purpose. ‘I cannot kill myself,’ he said. ‘I cannot forfeit my immortal soul for the sake of my own peace. But I can save you, and I can be spared from madness.’
I did not tell him that someone had thrown a stone through the apothecary window; that Gabriel had been pelted with mud on St Saviour’s Street, and that crowds of curious onlookers gathered every day at the infirmary gates to catch a glimpse of me, the heir of a murderer. But he was no fool. He knew we would have our own troubles.
‘You must not stop me, Jem.’ Always, it was the same thing. Often, he said nothing, just stared into the candle, rocking to and fro.
I brought a soft cloth and a bottle of rose water, and I wiped his face and hands. The smell of the roses mingled briefly with the stink of sweat and drains, rotten straw and stale food, before being consumed by it completely. It was like a garden glimpsed through a charnel house. I wondered whether it reminded him of a world he would never see, or smell, ever again. How could he be so calm? It was clear to me that he never slept; day after day he became more gaunt and wraithlike. Often I would go and he would look at me with no recognition in his eyes. He stared into the candle without flinching, as though he saw no light at all, only a black abyss.
I could not bear the place – the rattle of the keys, the cruel scrape of the locks seemed like nails driven into my brain. I would sit beside him and hold his hand. Neither of us spoke – what was there to say? But he would repeat over and over in a whisper: You must not stop this from happening. You must clear our name. You must find out who did these things once I am gone.
‘I will, Father,’ I replied.
Sometimes his gaze was as sharp and keen as ever, his brain focused, his attitude as abrasive as always. ‘Why are you here?’ he cried then. ‘Go! Go away from here. I don’t need your company. I need you to take action. Come along, Jem. I have taught you to be bold, have I not? Now is the time to act, and to do so without fear.’
Sometimes his mind was lucid and calm, fixed on the mundane activities he could no longer attend to. ‘Have you changed the leeches’ water?’ he said. ‘Make sure Gabriel dusts the bottles on the top shelf. You must stay at the apothecary, you and he. He is a good boy, and there’s always been a Flockhart at St Saviour’s.’
I did not tell him that the Secretary of the hospital had already asked us to leave. ‘Yes,’ I said instead. ‘Gabriel is working hard.’
The warders told me that Dr Hawkins had been. I did not see him. I did not want to talk to him. Not then. Later, I was to wish I had sought him out straight away. Even now, I cannot dwell on the subject without pain.
And so, what had once been a week vanished as quickly as a nightmare. Will still slept on the truckle bed in my room. He could easily have used my father’s bed, but I had grown used to his company, and I found comfort in the sound of him breathing, as I lay and stared up at the whitewashed ceiling, the wooden beams hung with bunches of lavender and rue. I thought I could not sleep, but then I would feel Will shaking my shoulder, and he would thrust a hot mug of tea into my hands. My dreams were like waking – filled with dread, memories of the past mixed with the worries of the present and fears for the future. I dreamed I saw Eliza arm in arm with Dr Bain, their lips stained crimson with bloodroot. I saw a woman in a green dress sprigged with flowers walking away from me. I called out to her, ‘Mother!’ But she did not turn around. I saw her vanish into St Saviour’s churchyard. I dreamed that I ran after her, only to find her lying in a ditch of clay against the wall of the graveyard, her face cold and sunken. When I awoke I was crying. I felt Will put his arms about me in the darkness.
And the questions remained unanswered. The women we had disinterred were added to the bone pile. What else might we do with them? We took some of the fabric from their chemises to compare to the fabric that was swaddled about the wooden dolls, but the stuff was too dirty, too dark and impregnated with moisture to allow us to draw any useful comparisons. Had Dr Magorian killed the girls? Had they died of natural causes and simply found their way to the anatomists’ classroom by the usual means? In my dreams their eyes stared up at me accusingly. Their leathery fingers pointed up at a dark hooded figure; the boy at his side had the face of Mrs Magorian.
I did not see Eliza again, though I looked out for her. I thought of the hour we had spent together and it seemed lost in a haze. What game had she been playing? Did she love me? I could not fathom it. Will came and went, working first in the apothecary, then, as dawn broke and the thin grey drizzle became visible in a veil of grey, he pulled on his boots and his oilskin and vanished into the graveyard. I did not know how I would have managed without him. How dear he had become to me in so short a time, al
ways to be relied upon, his loyalty and affection the one constant and good thing in a dark and miserable world. In the depths of my heart I dreaded the day he might leave us. As for the others, Mrs Speedicut moped at the fireside, Gabriel worked at every task in grim silence. His hands grew raw. He asked to come to Newgate with me but he could not be spared, and besides, in those final days my father had deteriorated to such a degree that I did not want Gabriel to see what had become of him, did not want him to see the terrible surroundings in which my father now lived.
And then, all at once, it was too late. Now I would not even be able to tell my father that yes, I had discovered who had murdered Dr Bain, Mrs Catchpole, Joe Silks. I would never be able to tell him that I knew who had done it, why, and by what means. I could tell him nothing – nothing but my suspicions, and they were no use to anyone.
‘We will find out,’ said Will.
I could not answer.
On the morning of the hanging I could not get out of my bed. I lay there, cold as bone beneath the sheet, my eyes staring, dry in my head. How had this happened? What had we done, my father and I, that we found ourselves here, now, like this? And yet in those last few days he had seemed serene, pleased that he was soon to be reunited with my mother. I could not be so sanguine. If being a good man meant one had to decide between the ignominy of madness or the notoriety of a public hanging, if it meant a choice between the disgrace of a felon’s death or to be sent, raging, into the night, how could God be merciful? Our sufferings seemed like the cruellest kind of sport. There was no logic, no coherence, no justice or fairness in the world. At that moment I hated God for his malice and wantonness. And what of Dr Magorian? Would he have to wait until judgement day before he received just punishment? It was no consolation.
Will brought me some tea. He toasted a slice of bread for me, but I could not swallow it.
‘You must eat, Jem,’ he said gently. I hid the toast in my pocket when he turned away so that he might not worry about me.
I went to my father’s room. I had not been in there since he had gone to Angel Meadow with Dr Hawkins. How little time had passed since then, and yet how much had changed. I sat on the bed. Outside, I heard St Saviour’s clock chime the quarter hour. The scaffold would have been up for some hours already, the hammer strikes echoing through the streets even before the crowds began to gather, measuring out the passing of time with their cruel blows. I closed my eyes and pressed my palms into the sockets. Had I loved him? Even now I could not be sure. I feared him and respected him. But he had been a difficult man to love – distant, aloof, humourless. He had neither touched me, nor shown me any affection as a child. I had tried hard to please him, to be as he wanted me to be, but always I knew he was disappointed. I stood at the window, looking out over the city but seeing nothing. The sky was the colour of blood.
At eight o’clock, Dr Hawkins came to see us. We made a sad group, Gabriel’s face raw with crying, Will silent and subdued. I was gaunt and dazed, my eyes bloodshot in my red mask, which had turned an ugly greyish colour, so sickly and ashen had I become. Mrs Speedicut sat on her chair, an empty mug in her hand. Tears stained her flabby cheeks. Dr Hawkins shook my hand. ‘I’m sorry, Jem,’ he said.
‘He’s innocent,’ I said. ‘You know that, Dr Hawkins?’
He nodded. ‘It’s against my judgement to applaud his chosen course of action, but I cannot find it in my heart to stop him.’ He rubbed a hand across his eyes. He too looked as though he had been up all night. ‘Nathaniel is dead,’ he said. His expression was bleak, and he looked at me strangely, with a mixture of sympathy and horror I had never seen before. I knew, then, that he had seen the future: my father’s and mine. ‘You slept?’ he said.
‘It hardly matters today,’ I replied.
He did not look at me but allowed his gaze to rest on his hands, his fingers smoothing away the creases in his white buckskin gloves. ‘I wonder if I might – that is, if you would allow – I hardly know how to ask—’
‘You wish to anatomise him,’ I said.
Dr Hawkins nodded. ‘If it’s not in the blood, then we must look to the mind – the brain. The connection between the two is little understood. If we could—’
‘You have Nathaniel.’
‘Yes, but a comparison would be most instructive—’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Though I imagine Dr Magorian will be there before you.’ In my pockets, I balled my hands into fists. Would I watch my father die on the gibbet, and then have to wrest his body from the medical men crouched like scavengers at the foot of the gallows? They would be sure to be there, waiting for their prize, and a felon was accorded no choice in the matter.
‘I have paid the hangman to ensure my prior claim,’ said Dr Hawkins. ‘It’s all settled. Your father was adamant that his remains should come with me, but I wanted to speak to you too.’
‘You’ll take him to Angel Meadow?’
Dr Hawkins nodded.
‘May I see him there?’
‘You know he may not . . . he may not look himself.’
‘All the same—’ I did not want to discuss the matter. Dr Hawkins inclined his head. He shook my hand once more.
I had witnessed hangings before. Any corpse was worth fighting for and more than once I had accompanied Dr Bain, when he and Dr Graves had sought to secure a body for St Saviour’s dissection rooms. But how murder could be made into entertainment and spectacle I could never understand. I knew what to expect: the crowds that filled the streets, faces at windows and peering from rooftops, people climbing up lamp-posts and onto window ledges, all eyes turned towards the scaffold, and the rope. And so it was for my father’s hanging. I stood with Will, amongst the crowd. Should I have stayed away? My father had told me not to come, but I could not leave him to his fate, alone, without anyone there to think well of him as he died. I closed my eyes as a man appeared beneath the gallows, but I knew what was taking place: in my mind I could see the rope, the man examining it, testing its strength and evaluating the drop. I looked up. The rope had been approved. And now here was the Ordinary, come to say a prayer with the condemned man. His appearance was the cue for silence, and silence there was. How extraordinary a thing it is, for whole streets filled with people to be completely without sound. How strange it was to hear it, to feel it, the presence of so many, but all of them, for a moment, holding their breath.
I saw Dr Hawkins, at the foot of the gallows, nod to the Ordinary, and the hangman. And then my father was brought forward. His hands were behind his back, his white head bowed. He was so thin that it was as though a puff of wind might blow him away. Would he be heavy enough to make the drop a fatal one, or would he dangle there, kicking and thrashing until someone had the heart to pull on his legs – I could not bear to think of it. I let out a moan, and almost crumpled to my knees, but Will was there. He put his arm about me and held me up.
‘Don’t look, Jem,’ he whispered. ‘I will tell you when it’s done.’ But I shook my head. I would not look away, I would not desert him. For, as long as I was looking at him, I was with him; I was there beside him upon the scaffold and, somehow, I was certain he would know it and would take courage from it. And so I turned my gaze to my father, up there beneath the noose, and I did not flinch.
I heard the Ordinary recite the Lord’s Prayer, my father’s head still bowed. At the end of it, my father looked up, out across the crowd, and despite the hordes of people, the thousands of faces, he saw me instantly. He looked at me for a moment – looked at me and no one else – and then he smiled. He closed his eyes and I saw his lips move. Was he thinking of me? Was he saying a prayer to the God who had taken so much and given so little in return? But he would die with my mother’s name on his lips, I knew. And I? I would be left behind, alone, uncertain, counting the days until my own fate became clear.
The clock began to chime; the final moments were upon us. They tied his hands and covered his face. The crowd began to shout and hiss; there was laughter and hoarse cr
ies; the air prickled with excitement, and a curious ripple of energy passed through us all. I shivered as it touched me and I felt instantly filthy, sullied by the repulsive enjoyment of the crowd, and as though all the water in London could not wash me clean. As the clock struck ten, the air thrummed with expectation. A hush held the city, as if it were sealed in a bubble beneath a great silent ocean. And then came the harsh rattle of the drop as the trap opened, the gasp of the crowd as ten thousand onlookers drew breath at the same moment; and then the gentle groan of the rope, the rhythmic creak of its burden. There was a moment of silence as we all watched the body, my father’s body, swing . . . swing . . . swing . . . and then still.
As if from some distant place I heard the roar of the crowd. I clapped my hands to my ears and sank down onto my knees, leaning forward to retch. It was over. He was gone. He had made me who I was, and now, without him, I did not know how I was to live. Nothing could be the same. He had left me no guidelines, no set of instructions, no list of things I must accomplish. I was lost and alone, and I did not know what to do.
Somehow, Will dragged me through the crowd. They had been distracted by the spectacle, but now it was over they were free to look again at one another. When they saw me they knew straight away who I was. A boy threw a stone and it hit my forehead. The warm blood running over my face brought me to my senses, and I began to push my way back towards the infirmary. Ahead of us, in the middle of the crowd, a carriage blocked the road, positioned sideways so as to command the best view of the scaffold. I recognised it straight away, and before Will could stop me I bounded forward and wrenched open the door.
Beloved Poison (Jem Flockhart) Page 29