by Kaite Welsh
Lucy hadn’t been so lucky. Life had been cruel to her, but she still had fought for it. She had been stronger than I, but not strong enough. I retched again, but there was nothing left to bring up.
The oblivion laudanum gave her would have been so sweet. Her miserable existence would have fallen away, and she would have slept more soundly than she had in months. I could understand the desire. In that moment, if I could have exchanged every material advantage I had for insensibility, to block out the sight of Lucy’s face, first terrified and then blank and bruised, to drive away the memories that crept about the edge of my mind constantly trying to find a way in, I would have taken it and gladly.
But I had no such drug on hand and the stones dug into my knees as I knelt there. The chill brought me back to my senses and I welcomed the biting wind. My apron was wet with rain and stained with vomit. Damp tendrils of hair clung to my skin. I stood shakily, ready to make my way back inside, only to feel the pressure of a hand on my back.
“Miss Gilchrist?”
Professor Merchiston stood before me, the flickering gaslight casting shadows over his face.
“Are you unwell?”
I saw him taking in my disheveled appearance, my eyes red from crying and my lips speckled with vomit. I knew what “unwell” meant to a doctor.
“Thank you, Professor, I was merely”—I gulped, as nausea threatened to overwhelm me again—“a dissection class—I was overcome. I just needed a little fresh air.”
“You need a pot of tea and a towel,” he commented.
I knew that the chances of getting either were slim.
“The practical joke hasn’t been cleared away yet,” I informed him, in an effort to distract him from my tearstained cheeks. I had no fight left in me, but perhaps he could do something about the ghastly thing.
His expression darkened and his hand fell on my shoulder.
“Don’t let them frighten you away.”
I stood frozen in place by the warmth of his skin through my damp blouse.
A door banged somewhere down the corridor and we both started. He pulled his hand back as though I had scalded him.
“I shan’t keep you, Miss Gilchrist.”
I fled down the stairs to the morgue.
I found McVeigh, slouched and surly in the study adjoining the dissection room. The way he eyed me made me want to flee the room, but I pasted on my best drawing-room smile and stared him down.
“The woman I was supposed to examine. I knew her, and I’d like to arrange a burial. I can pay . . .”
There was an infinitesimal shake of the head. “Against university regulations, miss. When they’re here, they’re here. Besides, there’ll be no’ much left of her by now.”
I shuddered, my nausea returning in waves. “That’s impossible, Mr. McVeigh. I saw her less than fifteen minutes ago.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised—Lucy was a specimen, a body to be used in death the way she had been in life—but it unsettled me that she would go unmourned to the next student and the one after that until there was nothing left for them to use except her skeleton, with no one to care about what had brought her beneath their scalpels.
The thought of the men getting their hands on Lucy, the same ones whose hands grabbed and snatched at our skirts as we passed them in the halls, who had strung up that horrid parody of a female student outside the medical school, made my blood run cold.
He sniffed. “Aye, well we’ve a lot of students. It’s no’ just you lasses.”
“Please,” I said urgently. “I’ll pay you however much you think is fair.” I ignored the fact that I had no way of getting my hands on the money without asking Aunt Emily, whose generosity was unlikely to stretch to the funeral of a prostitute.
He smiled unpleasantly, sucking his yellow, tobacco-stained teeth, enjoying my discomfort. I could imagine what he might consider a fair price, but it was not one I wanted to pay.
“Rules is rules.”
It was clear that my pleading was futile. Any offer I could make would fall on deaf ears; save something I was not willing to barter. I heard the clock strike the hour, and I had no time to beg.
“What if a friend or relative claimed the body? Then you’d have to let it go, surely?”
He blinked and then smiled slowly. “Where d’ye think we gets them from in the first place?”
It didn’t bear thinking about. I couldn’t imagine the poverty that would mean denying a loved one a decent burial in exchange for a handful of coins.
“But if you did?” I persisted.
He shrugged, clearly eager to be rid of me. “Aye. I suppose we would.”
I pulled off the brooch at my neck. “If you keep her . . . intact for another day, you can keep this. Sell it, give it to a sweetheart, I don’t care.”
He looked at it impassively and pocketed it.
“Tomorrow afternoon, then,” I urged.
He gave what I took to be a nod, and I had to content myself with that.
If my uncle found out that I was leaving the confines of the university, he would have me locked up in my room for the rest of my days. But I couldn’t go back inside and face the others with my grief. I couldn’t hear them dismiss Lucy as just another tart, a whore who deserved everything she got. I fled past clattering trams and taverns, full even before lunchtime as I stumbled my way down Candlemaker Row. By the time I reached the doors of the infirmary, I was out of breath and sobbing openly.
Fiona broke off from issuing orders when she saw me.
“Sarah! Whatever is the matter? Come inside, girl, and sit down.”
One of the nurses brought me some hot, strong tea and I gulped it down.
“Lucy—the girl who came to us the other day. The . . .”
“The prostitute?” I winced at the blunt way Fiona dismissed her, as though that was all Lucy had been. Not a daughter or a sister or a friend, just another girl who worked the streets.
“I saw her. In the university mortuary. They said she’d killed herself.”
Fiona cursed beneath her breath.
“That poor girl,” she said shakily. “I wish there was more that we could have done for her.” She paused, trying to form her next question as delicately as possible. “Was she still . . . ?”
“You think she could have had an abortion?”
“There are backstreet butchers all over the city. More than one drunken old sawbones who’ll take a girl’s money and leave her broke and bleeding and no better off than before.”
“And they say we’re no’ fit to be doctors,” grimaced Matilda Campbell, the anesthetist. Her perennially cheerful countenance had darkened, and her Glaswegian accent thickened as her temper flared.
“Mr. McVeigh said it was probably her family who’d sent her to us. The university, I mean.”
“You spoke to McVeigh?” Fiona looked startled. “He’s hardly the most pleasant of men, Sarah.”
I recalled the way his eyes had dragged across my figure, pinning me in place, and I shivered.
“I paid him to keep her . . . so that none of the other students could—” I broke off, unable to finish. “I wanted to arrange a funeral for her.”
She shook her head. “Sarah, you can’t bury every unfortunate soul you come across. You lost your first patient. There will be more; you can’t avoid that.”
The thought of a life full of women like Lucy, women I couldn’t save any more than I could save myself, weighed impossibly heavy on my conscience.
“Does it get easier?”
She smiled ruefully, the kind that didn’t reach her eyes. “You get harder. In time, you convince yourself it’s the same thing.”
I wondered which patient Fiona had failed, to make her look so lost and sad.
“It isn’t fair,” I whispered. “Professor Williamson treated her as though she were nothing. And then when I told him who she was—what she was—he looked at her as though she were so much less than that.”
“Could you do somethi
ng for me, Sarah?” Fiona asked. “Don’t tell your aunt. We can’t afford to lose her patronage, or your help, and if she learns that our patients are the kind of women who seek out illegal procedures, we could be closed down.”
She handed me my coat, with an expression that told me our conversation was over.
“Go back to your lecture hall, Sarah. Save your tears for your examination papers, because they won’t do any good here. It may sound harsh, but it’s the truth. You can do more for these women with a clear head than you can with a big heart. Your compassion may seem like a good thing now, but if you care too much, it will destroy you.”
“How do I stop caring?”
I looked at Fiona, with her pale, drawn face and the evidence of sleepless nights written across it, and I wondered if she took her own advice or if she was kept awake with a litany of names of women she had lost.
“If I ever find out, I’ll let you know.”
The damp mist had broken into a drizzling rain and I sheltered under the umbrella the infirmary’s porter held over my head as we walked in awkward silence. He was hardly the sort of man my aunt would have permitted me to exchange pleasantries with, and in truth I had no idea how one struck up a conversation with a man like that, but all the same our brief walk felt excruciatingly stilted. He sheltered me from the male passers by as though even brushing their coattails would irrevocably damage my reputation. He escorted me as far as Middle Meadow Walk, and I took a moment to breathe in the cold autumn air before entering the medical school gates.
“That kind of woman,” Fiona had said. Did she know she was speaking to one? In the weeks following my encounter with Paul Beresford, that horrible purgatory before I knew that I had escaped at least one blot on my character, I had promised myself that I would rather smother my child at birth than live with a permanent reminder of what he had done to me. I hoped that in the rational light of day I would do no such thing, but if I had been pregnant and had I known someone who would relieve me of my burden, I would have entrusted myself to a hundred drunken sawbones. Fiona knew a lot about medicine but, I thought, very little about desperation.
I staggered through the rest of the day’s lectures, barely taking anything in. In biology, I was called upon to answer questions I hadn’t heard; in botany, I found myself sketching a diagram on a different page from the rest of the class; and I ended the day by spilling my compound from the chemistry practical all over Moira Owen’s apron. Lucy was hardly the first corpse I’d laid eyes on, but she was the first with whom I had felt such kinship, and the sight of her lifeless, battered body unnerved me. There was only one step I could take that would quell the whisper of doubt in the back of my mind. While the rest of my cohort made for the delights of the university library, I retraced my steps to Forest Road, toward another treasure trove entirely.
The bell jangled loudly as I entered the dim shop, meeting the stern gaze of the man behind the counter with all the bluster I could manage.
“I need to buy a bottle of laudanum.”
CHAPTER SIX
If my dress had not marked me out, then my accent certainly did. I cringed, wishing for the thousandth time that I was back in London, where at least I could open my mouth without drawing attention to myself. Still, if I had expected to be challenged or questioned, I was sorely disappointed. My money was as good as anyone’s, it seemed, or perhaps well-brought-up young ladies from England frequented pharmacies alone all the time.
I had seen the bottles in the refuse around the Cowgate; I knew what I was after. I asked for a glass bottle whose label I recognized—it was by far cheaper than the bottles in the infirmary but probably watered down so much it was daylight robbery.
I left the pharmacy, shaking and convinced that a fellow student would recognize me. The bottle felt heavy in my reticule, and my mind whirled with visions of the bottle breaking, soaking through its brown paper bag and smearing my notes, staining my character. Would they think I was a weak, fragile creature who needed to ward off the vapors, or would they see what I truly was—a fallen woman with opiates on her person and the stench of the slums on her skin and hair?
The desire to steal away to the meager facilities the university offered to women and steady my nerves with a fortifying swig was overwhelming, and I dug my nails into my palms in an effort to stop my hands from fumbling in my bag.
In my first weeks here, I had been overcome daily with the urge to flee, to hide in the stuffy respectability of my aunt’s house, far away from the curious eyes of the male students and from Julia Latymer’s all-knowing smirk, but even then I didn’t have the gnawing temptation of release on my person. I wouldn’t keep it, I told myself. I would hide the bottle with the rest of the household refuse just as soon as I had ascertained its contents. Forcing my steps toward the library and some semblance of respectability, I tried to convince myself.
I would.
The lecture theater was abuzz when I arrived. I caught the tail end of Julia’s scornful laugh.
“She should never have tried for a degree at all, if she’s going to fall at the first hurdle. Some women simply aren’t made for it.”
It felt as though my insides were curdling like rotten milk. I faltered in the doorway, wanting to flee but needing to hear what came next.
“Girls like her are ten a penny in London. The only reason they go to scientific talks or philosophy lectures is to meet a man.”
She broke off as Edith elbowed her sharply, nodding toward me. Julia shrugged. “Like I said, we’re different from the others. But sometimes ordinary girls like that just slip through the cracks.”
I perched on the very edge of an aisle seat, not meeting anyone’s eye. Where was the girl who had marched up to the front row of the lecture room at Saint Bart’s, daring anyone to send her away?
Alison inched over to me a little, enough for me to hear her but far enough away that she could scoot back to the others as soon as Julia saw her.
“A history first-year has left to get married,” she whispered. “Eleanor Niven—her fiancé said he’d break it off with her if she didn’t leave by Christmas. It’s such a waste.”
I exhaled a shaky breath. So they hadn’t been talking about me after all. I still felt fragile, like a glass ornament rather than a living, breathing woman of flesh and blood, but for once Julia’s beastliness had been aimed elsewhere.
Why did we do this to each other? I was as guilty as the next woman, I knew it. I had nodded along like a lapdog when Vanessa Templeton, with her love of chemistry and her heart set on Oxford, had wondered aloud in all seriousness whether our generation had evolved to be brighter than that of our mothers.
“I don’t see any of them able to calculate equations in their heads,” she had insisted, after we both got into trouble for staying too late at the Natural History Museum on the day of a ball. “All they care about are dresses and marrying us off.”
But she had not been so enlightened either, not in the way she had so callously discarded me when news of my ruin began to spread. We had sneered at the way our fellow debutantes competed with one another to be the prettiest, the most charming, swearing we would never fall into such petty rivalries, but in the end had we just exchanged one kind of competition for another?
As soon as the lecture was over, I alighted into my uncle’s carriage with unaccustomed relief, setting my sights on home and a cup of tea. Usually resisting the siren call of another hour in the library or the dissection room would have proved difficult, but I was no longer in the mood to work. My peers would study well into the night, bribing the librarians for just half an hour more in the stacks, but I had been late to dinner too often this past month and I could not afford to test my relatives’ kindness any further. I leaned my head against the cracked leather of my seat and closed my eyes, although I could not drift into sleep.
The sight of Lucy’s bruised, lifeless body haunted me. This wasn’t just grief over a woman I had barely known, the very sentimentality that everyone, fr
om hospital porters to newspaper editors printing withering criticisms, believed made women unsuited for medicine. Someone had done this to her, and enough people had failed to care that the murder had gone unnoticed.
I had no idea what my next step should be, and if I had hoped that the distraction of the after-dinner ritual of dull books and sermonizing would distract me, I was left wanting. The hours before I could decently retire to bed seemed to drag, but finally I pressed a dutiful kiss to Aunt Emily’s cool cheek and escaped upstairs.
Once in my nightgown and reasonably sure I wouldn’t be disturbed, I retrieved my bag and pulled out its contents. I hadn’t thought to bring a spoon, so I put the bottle to my lips with shaking hands and let the liquid coat my tongue.
It was the strongest bottle a pharmacist could sell me—costly enough that I would be going without lunch from the refectory for a few days—but from the taste it was weak, diluted with sugar water, and just enough opium to send the first flickering tendrils of pleasure coursing through my veins. A bottle of this would render me insensible, but it wouldn’t kill me. Even a mouthful wasn’t enough to summon up that drowsy languor it promised. Whatever Lucy had taken, it wasn’t this. So I had a second gulp, and then a third. And after that, the discrepancies didn’t seem terribly important.
As I drifted into consciousness in the morning, I struggled to place my surroundings. How many times had I woken up to feel the last traces of laudanum leave my system only to submit to the morning round of ice baths and more medication? But the bed was soft, and a fire burned low in the grate. There were my books, my blue dress strewn on the floor where I had discarded it last night, my toiletries on the dressing table. I forced back the rising tide of terror. I was in my aunt’s house, not the chilly sanatorium in the countryside, a genteel madhouse where girls from good families were taught to behave.