“What are all the seats for?” Unlike a regular church, the pews had been reconfigured in rows that mounted up the back and side walls, circling the pulpit and tables like an amphitheater.
“Ah, yes. Dr. LaValle likes to give lectures on occasion, for a certain discriminating crowd.”
“They come here, then, the city’s medical students?” Molly’s pulse quickened.
“Many of them.” Ava nodded. “There are also other broad-minded individuals who are curious about the art of anatomy. Even some ladies. It’s becoming as fashionable as talking to ghosts.” She smiled.
“How often does the doctor hold his classes?”
“Most weekdays for students. Lectures for the public are by invitation only and held at my discretion.”
“But surely the community must protest.”
“I rent the place out to other groups at a generously low price when it’s available. Suffragists, abolitionists, whoever is in fashion at the moment. Even, on occasion, actual religious groups. They’d hate to lose such a valuable space.”
Molly wondered why her aunt was telling her all of this. Acknowledging she was in the illegal business of selling the dead seemed a dangerous admission to make to a girl she’d just met, even if there was blood between them.
“What about the bodies?” Molly asked. “Don’t people object when they see you bringing corpses inside?”
“No one ever sees,” Ava said, eyes twinkling. “But if they did, what better place in the world for a body than a church?”
6
Ava took the lantern from the butler. “Thank you, William. I believe that will be all for tonight. We’ll lock up after ourselves.”
“Yes, miss.” The butler bowed stiffly, retreating.
She locked the door behind him. “As you may have noticed, I keep a rather sparse staff. Just William and his niece Maeve on a permanent basis. Maeve is a treasure—she can cook, clean, and keep a secret.”
“And Tom?”
Ava studied her. “No, we can’t forget Tom. He’s my jack-of-all-trades. But of course his main job is to do what you did tonight. He has two boys working under him, but their pay and discretion are his concern.”
“You must pay him well, then,” Molly said.
“Loyalty can be bought, but you mustn’t be stingy,” Ava said. “An extra penny in Tom’s pocket is worth a pound in mine.”
She held the lantern higher, so that its flames brightened the shadows. Behind the pulpit hung a large theater-like curtain, its maroon deep enough to hide any stains. Ava pulled it aside to reveal a heavily padlocked door, the frame so crooked a child might have hung it. Taking another key from around her neck, she undid the lock and opened the door, revealing a narrow flight of stairs that descended into darkness.
“Are you coming?” Ava raised an eyebrow.
Forcing herself to take a deep breath, Molly followed, this time making sure to pull the excess fabric of her too-wide skirt taut so that she wouldn’t trip.
The stairs were hardly finished, chiseled out of the dirt and propped up with scraps of wood, so that as Molly descended into the cellar, she had the feeling of crawling into an animal’s den.
Or a coffin.
At the bottom, Ava hung the lantern on a silver hook. Its light gave off a sickly glow.
The room was small, the walls the same dirt as the stairs.
In the center of the room was a large table. Unlike the varnished wood above, this one was plain pine, the planks unsanded. Three bodies lay atop, spaced evenly apart. Molly recognized the middle one immediately. Or the part of it that remained. The swollen head rested on a velvet cloth, carefully nestled against its folds like an unusual jewel.
Slowly, she made her way toward it.
The face was the same but wiped clean now of all dirt. The eyes were closed, two copper pennies holding them down. The swollen head, though still horrible, seemed more at peace, more human. The wiry, sparse hair had been neatened and brushed away from the face.
And the smell was nearly gone, replaced with the subtle scent of peppermint.
“We prepare them here,” Ava said, moving to the other side of the table, on which rested an old woman, who was also clean and tidy. “Other purveyors don’t take such care. It’s why the doctor and I can charge the prices we do. Only the best specimens make it to our table, and we ensure that their presentation is as lifelike as possible.”
Molly felt a pull between twin emotions of disgust and fascination. “What could it possibly matter what a dead body looks like?”
“A body is a commodity,” Ava said. “And while the boys who cut them open might seek to dehumanize them by making jokes and stuffing severed hands into each other’s pockets, above all what they are engaged in is a business. They pay money to come to Dr. LaValle’s lectures. Good money. And I can assure you that there are many other venues from which they might choose. But they prefer Dr. LaValle. Because he is the best. His bodies are the freshest, his display sheets the cleanest, and his knives the sharpest. Other places miss the details. We don’t.”
“So this is what you want me to do?” Molly said. “Collect bodies and prepare them for medical students to cut up?”
“Those would be your daily duties, yes. Though it isn’t so simple as it might seem. Some of the corpses you handle might be rather . . . unpleasant.”
“Like tonight,” Molly said.
Her aunt nodded. “We are one of the few places in town to deal in anomalies. You have to have a strong stomach.”
She thought of Kitty’s tail, sliced cleanly from her body.
“Where do you get the bodies?”
“Graves and almshouses mostly, all around the city. There’s no shame in it. If we didn’t take them, they’d only rot, their potential wasted. We live by three rules, Molly—steal when you can, pay when you must, and, above all, respect the body.”
“If they’re dead, why does it matter?”
Her aunt stiffened. “It’s the poor who end up on our tables, mostly. The forgotten. Some people think that means they aren’t worth anything.” Her lips hardened to a thin line. “A person’s body is a gift. If someone chooses to accept that gift, then it is their duty to honor it.”
Ava pulled a stool from beneath the table and sat, gently brushing back a stray strand of hair on the hydrocephalic’s head. Molly sat too. “You asked me earlier what happened between me and your mother. Do you still want to know?”
Molly nodded, throat catching.
“Elizabeth fell in love with a young man when she was a girl. A shepherd boy. They were to be married. I went to bed with the man before she could.”
The nakedness of this confession, the lack of any attempt to soften it, was startling. “Why would you do that?”
Ava shrugged. “In the cold light of day, the whys of night are only so much smoke. And in the end, they don’t matter. We must face our sins in the sunlight.”
“Did she hate you for it?” Molly couldn’t imagine her mother with anyone besides Da. But if it were true . . . Ma’s love for Da was her guiding light, her purpose for being. If she’d really felt that for another man, to have Ava undermine such a supposedly eternal bond between her and her betrothed would have been unforgivable.
“Hate is a strong word,” Ava said carefully. “She refused to see me. Refused to speak to me. She was upset, and she was young. So she did what most young girls do—ran away from the problem. All the way to America. She met your father on the passage over, and I think he eased her pain some.” A rueful smile. “In the end, he was much the better match. Your mother had a great weakness for dreamers.”
“Did you know my da well?” Molly asked, eager to drink up the spill of a past memory of her family.
“I met him only once. I found out through the ship’s log that your mother had married on her way to America. The log liste
d her new husband’s name, but no new address. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t locate them. I did manage to find another passenger, a friend who’d traveled with them. He said your da was trying to start a business outside the city, and so I sent money to help. All I asked in return was my sister’s address so I might write her.” She paused, fingering a remaining bit of dirt on the table. “Your da refused. Traveled all the way into Philadelphia to return my money. I could tell it pained him, though. He had very grand ideas of being a gentleman, but he did not seem well-off himself.”
“He wasn’t,” Molly said simply. She thought of the chipped boards on the floor of the farmhouse, never sanded because Da had left to chase a spot of land he’d heard was selling for cheap. The drafty windows that couldn’t be replaced because Da had spent the money on a shipment of silkworms, which died before they had a chance to weave anything but their own shroud. The endless stream of impractical books.
“Da had a good heart, but he never was any good with money. He gave too much and worked too little. But he was happy.”
“Were you?” Ava asked.
Molly thought back to her days with her parents, the two of them always together, dancing in the night when they thought she was asleep. Sending her to the neighbors’ for some chore so that they might have a little time alone. They’d never had any other children, though it was certainly not from lack of trying. It seemed they were always burning with fever, even before the sickness that killed them.
“I was loved,” Molly said. “But their life . . . it never moved me. I didn’t want what they had.”
She and her aunt sat in silence for several seconds. The flickering lantern light washed over the bodies between them, suggesting movement from limbs that would never move again.
“What do you want, Molly?”
The answer sprang to Molly’s lips so immediately that she had to physically swallow it back down.
To find Edgar and slip my knife into his heart.
“To learn,” she said swiftly, dropping her eyes. It wasn’t a lie. Not entirely. “I like to learn new things. I’m a fast study.”
Ava stared at her, as if she could sense the omission. Finally, she spoke. “If that’s the case, I have much to teach you.”
Molly nodded.
“Then you accept?”
The dim light cast a shadow across Ava’s face, so that Molly could not tell if the shine she saw in her aunt’s eyes was truth or illusion.
The question hung in the air.
Ava ran her gaze over the splintered surface of wood between them. “Each night, you’ll be asked to supply this table with its devil’s spread. Wash its flesh and serve it to men, with as little compunction as if cleaning and serving a chicken for dinner.”
Molly hesitated, searching her aunt’s eyes for some reflection of herself.
“You’ll have a good life, Molly,” Ava whispered. “You’ll attend the best parties, have the best dresses. You’ll want for nothing.”
“And the price is becoming your grave robber.”
“Oh, no. That’s the job.” Ava’s eyes slid over the bodies, and there again in the trick of the light was a shimmer, briskly blinked away. She laid a hand gently on the old woman’s naked arm, stroking it as one might a lover.
But when she looked up, her eyes were clear.
“The dead never leave, you see. The price is living with ghosts.”
Kitty’s bloated body.
Kitty’s rotting skin.
Kitty’s pleading gaze as she begged Molly to follow her into the dark . . .
They want to know where I got the knife.
It is my second morning here, and they walk me down the hall to wait my turn for the baths.
They say a girl like me, I shouldn’t have such a fine instrument, jewels in its handle. One of them pokes my ribs, says maybe I like to play rough.
That if I like knives so much, maybe he should tie me up and tickle me with one, like the street girls who’ll let you draw a bit of blood for a penny.
They won’t believe me when I say it was a gift. That you gave it to me.
Girls shouldn’t have knives, they say. They shouldn’t make bloody messes of living things.
But they don’t know how it was for me, the times I had to watch the others get what they wanted while I pretended I wanted nothing.
A girl is not supposed to want. A girl is supposed to give.
There’s four of us in the bathing chamber. They bind our hands so that we can’t move and pour buckets over us. The water is ice, and the woman beside me lifts her head and half drowns herself each time it crashes over her, sputtering and coughing in a mad suicide attempt.
The guards just laugh. “Keep trying, Agnes,” they tell her. “It will take more than that to get you out of here.”
Tomorrow, they say, they’re going to cut off my hair. It’s too long to keep the bugs out.
On the way out, one of the other women grabs my shivering arm and pinches, whispering in my ear. “You don’t deserve it,” she says, staring at my newly swollen stomach. “There’s plenty of others here who’ve prayed.”
Her face is hard and ugly, and I know she means her, though I doubt she’d find a man to put it there.
“Take it,” I say. “Bring me a knife, and I’ll cut it out for you.”
I spit in her shocked face, a great wet wad of phlegm, and she is on me, hitting and hitting and hitting—my breast, my back, my belly.
I let her.
Maybe if she hits hard enough, everything will come out. Spill onto the floor like blood porridge. Save itself a trip to the scaffold.
Part II
7
I brought you a gift.”
Tom Donaghue stood outside Molly’s bedroom door, a wrapped package in his hands. The late morning sunlight leaked through her window, and she could smell the faint hint of fresh bacon wafting up the stairs.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Molly clutched her robe tightly and moved to shut the door.
She was exhausted.
Last night, she’d lain awake, thinking of how she might honor her promise to Kitty. Fate had brought her to this house, and she did not mean to waste the opportunity. By dawn, she’d come up with a crude plan. She would do whatever it took to stay at Ava’s and find a way into LaValle’s lecture hall. Once there, she would speak to the medical students. Find Edgar. And when she did, she would get him alone and make him confess.
Then she would kill him, just as he’d killed Kitty.
She was in no mood for Tom and his distractions. “Go away.”
“Come, now. Don’t you like presents?” Tom stuck his foot in the door, holding it open. “I couldn’t fall asleep, trying to think of how I was going to make it up to you.”
Molly tried to shame him with a stare.
He only stared back.
Most men who had but one eye might try to hide the deformity, but his stare was more penetrating than any she’d encountered with two. The golden amber of his single eye, along with the scar over the other, put her in mind of a large tomcat she’d had once, as a child. The giant tiger cat was missing an ear and half his tail, and had been in more fights than he had lives. The cat was so fierce he’d once managed to scare a coyote from the chicken coop, though afterward he’d claimed a hen for his reward. Da had nicknamed him Goliath, and the feline had walked with the kind of arrogant strut that seemed to suggest he’d earned it. But that tom had also been sweet and gentle when it came to people. It would follow Molly around for hours until she would scratch his dusty belly and he would flop onto his back in the sun and purr.
This Tom was no pet.
Molly didn’t know what he was, only that last night he’d had her commit a horrific crime without a word of warning.
“I don’t want to speak to you.” She clenched the silk of her robe
in her fists, as if this might hold her nerves steady. “I could have been arrested. Worse, maybe.”
He frowned. “You weren’t supposed to open the box. That was a mistake.”
“My only mistake was trusting you.”
“Now, I never said you should do that.” He winked, once again offering the present.
She turned away.
“Molly, I’m sorry,” he said, voice softening. “But it’s like I said. That’s my job. Your aunt’s my boss.”
He swayed so fast from jokes to seriousness it made her dizzy. She shut her eyes, trying to still her spinning mind. He couldn’t have known how cruel it would be for her to touch a body after Kitty.
“What did your friend Ginny mean when she said people were disappearing?”
His lips tightened. “Why are you asking?”
“Tell me. I want to know exactly what kind of world I’ve become a part of.”
He sighed. “There have been rumors, that’s all. People not showing up when they should. Women’s bodies being found.”
“Doesn’t sound much different than your average Friday night,” she said dryly. “Do you just collect the bodies, or do you manufacture them?” Ava had denied the accusation, but Molly did not know her aunt enough to trust her.
Tom’s face grew red. “Now, see here, I come by my corpses honestly. And I don’t waste them neither. The kinds of things folks are finding—they’ve been mutilated. Takes a special kind of monster to do that, and I ain’t him.”
Mutilated. Like Kitty.
“If it’s not you, then who is it?”
“Somebody much sicker than our lot, I’ll tell you that.” He thrust the gift at her. “Now, are you going to take this or not?”
If only to be rid of him, she did. Ripping away the paper, she could feel his eyes on her. She’d endured the hungry stares of the older boys hired to work at the orphanage often enough, sometimes even the priests’. But this was different. He wasn’t looking at her with lust. It was a candid kind of appraisal, one that seemed to skip right past her skin and into something deeper. She felt like a peppered moth, suddenly pulled away from the camouflaging bark of its tree.
The Corpse Queen Page 5