by Kaite Welsh
The stench of raw meat had presaged my tentative arrival at the entrance of the close, and I was deeply thankful for my medical training when I took a few hesitant steps down the dark alley, beloved of the city butchers because the narrow gap between chilly stone walls kept their wares fresh. I suppressed a sigh of disappointment—had I risked my reputation for nothing more than catching Gregory Merchiston in the act of buying a few pounds of beef mince? But it was not into one of the butchers that he disappeared, rather through the doorway of one of the tenements.
After a few moments, ensuring that he would not emerge again immediately, I made for the occupier of the butcher that faced the doorway.
“Excuse me, sir, but can you tell me who lives in the building opposite?”
The man’s disinterest turned to outright disapproval.
“Dinnae waste your time, hen. If you’ve any sense, you’ll go straight home. This is nae place for the likes of you.”
“What kind of place is it, then?”
“During the day, it’s quiet enough. It’s at night their trade picks up.”
“It’s a brothel?”
If Merchiston was a frequenter of such places, it made sense that he didn’t limit himself to one house—or perhaps he had found another girl to his taste now that Lucy was gone. I remembered the warmth of his hand on my back as he helped me into the carriage. The thought of that same hand caressing Lucy or some other poor wretch, of dropping a coin or two onto the table beside her bed, made bile well up in my throat and my face grow hot.
He snorted. “Nae, hen. It’s worse than that.” He leaned closer, and his fetid breath gusted against my face. “Opium.”
Opium dens held a sort of Eastern exoticism that was markedly absent when I actually ventured inside one. It was the Orient via Orkney, as far as I could tell—a faded tartan curtain obscuring whatever secrets the room beyond held, and a woman barring my way who had clearly never been farther east than Musselburgh.
“Can I help you?” she asked coldly.
“I . . .” This was where I trailed off. I had not anticipated such a cheerless reception, assuming in my naïveté that they would welcome my custom, such as it was. It was time to dust off the mistaken assumption that had gained me entrance into Ruby McAllister’s home. “The gentleman who just entered, he’s my . . . um . . . my husband. Tell me, does he frequent this place often?”
The proprietress’s smile did not meet her eyes.
“Gregory Merchiston is a bachelor, as I’m sure you’re aware if you make a habit of following him down dark alleyways.”
“Well he’s not my husband yet, more my fiancé . . .” I stammered.
“Tell me, young lady, what is your purpose here? Blackmail? I’d advise against it. He is not an enemy any sensible woman would care to make.”
“What do you mean?” I asked in a low voice.
She smirked. “What exactly do you suspect him of? What could be worse than a doctor falling prey to such a shameful addiction?”
“Murder,” I whispered. The word hung between us. Our silence was broken by one of her customers, a stumbling, bleary-eyed man with what looked like a rather bad case of delirium tremens. All of a sudden I remembered what this woman did and how Lucy had died. Anger rose up inside me, and as soon as the poor fellow had begun his shaky descent down the stairs, I turned to her.
“What do you know about a girl—a prostitute—named Lucy?” Her eyes betrayed a flicker of recognition, but she said nothing. “Is she a customer of yours?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Do you really expect me to answer that?”
“Why not? You’ve already told me that Merchiston is. You know his name, his profession, his marital status—what more do you know?”
She shrugged. “The good professor is a medical man, as you doubtless know. Is it so strange that he should attend those customers who are, on occasion, taken ill here?”
“Is that what he was doing with Lucy?” I demanded. “Caring for her? Is that how she ended up with a stomach full of laudanum on the floor of a brothel?”
“That is how people end up unless they’re careful.” She moved closer to me, and although I was taller than she, I felt distinctly uncomfortable. “Especially if they come here asking questions.”
I backed away. “I’m sorry to have bothered you. Good day.”
“One more thing, Miss Gilchrist?” I froze in my tracks. I had not given her my name. “If you enter these premises again, I will call a policeman. My clientele is quite varied. Let me assure that should a man of the law find you here, it is not me who would be going to prison.”
I stumbled blindly down the staircase and exited the opium den into the dim light and fetid air of Fleshmarket Close.
I didn’t stop running until the university was in sight.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The sweet smell of the opium smoke lingered in my nostrils despite my dash through the drizzling streets back to the university. Physiology was the last thing on my mind as I paced the corridor, waiting for the tutor to arrive.
Brothels were one thing, but an opium den? The man was a chemist, for God’s sake—he knew how dangerous the stuff was. Laudanum was harmless in comparison, but I knew how seductive even that could be. Two men walked past, joking about a patient they had treated, and I watched them go, realizing how little I knew about any of the people I spent my days cloistered with.
A woman’s footsteps rang out and I looked up—a foolish impulse, since it wasn’t as though they were any friendlier than the men—and Edith met my eyes before looking down at the floor from a pointed distance. I wondered if Julia had forbidden her from speaking to me.
My chest felt tight when I thought of how far reality was from what I had envisaged when I came here. I had watched students at the London School of Medicine for Women gad about together, arm in arm or cycling through Regent’s Park with their shared jokes and camaraderie. I had expected something more than this ragtag handful of girls—some like Caroline and barely out of the schoolroom, some like Julia and myself inching slowly toward the limits of marriageable age. Put simply, we had nothing in common but an interest in our studies—and that was something none of us were used to sharing. We were still the same oddities that we were at home, but if there was strength in numbers then we had yet to exercise it.
Loneliness stabbed at my gut and I turned to Edith, desperate for even a snatched moment of companionship.
“How did you find the Latin translation? I thought it was a bit of a slog.”
“Well, you can’t copy mine,” she said sullenly.
“I hadn’t been planning to,” I said, stung. “Maybe Julia cribs off you, but some of us prefer to do our own work.”
I regretted ever striking up the conversation. I had breezed through the damn Latin, but I hadn’t thought boasting would endear me to her.
“I’m not her servant!” Her cheeks were red, clashing horribly with hair that could only be called strawberry blond by someone feeling very charitable.
Another social misstep. At this rate I would graduate as friendless as I had begun.
“I only meant—”
“This is a new world,” Edith said in a rush. “An English aristocrat can be friends with a doctor’s daughter from Stirling. We share the same lodging, eat the same food, attend the same lectures. You have no idea what we have in common.”
I laughed, but there was no mirth in it. “You aren’t out of her shadow long enough for anyone to find out!”
“How would you know? You spend all your time with Mrs. Chalmers and your rich relations. The only other person you speak to is Thornhill, and everyone knows her people have money.”
My blood boiled. “In case you haven’t noticed, I can’t go where I’m not invited. The only place anyone talks to me is an infirmary in the slums! You think you’ve made your mind up about me, but Julia made it for you the moment she set eyes on me here. Tell your bosom friend to please decide if I’m a snob or a slut, because it
’s getting exhausting being both.”
I moved to the notice board and read an advertisement for a rugby game twenty times over. By the time we were called into the tutorial, my eyes were dry.
After a pointless hour in which I was no more enlightened as to the skeletal system of the common horse than before, I made for the library. I wasn’t going to make Edith like me, and I was even less likely to correctly identify an equine patella, but an idea had occurred to me. I found a spare desk and rummaged around in my reticule for a blank sheet of paper and a pencil. The Viennese art tutor my mother had engaged for Gertie and me one tedious autumn had, I thought, not been a complete waste. After two hours of ripped paper, some quiet swearing that had almost seen me ejected from the premises, and a detailed consideration of the sharply angled planes of Professor Merchiston’s face, I had a reasonable likeness of both him and Lucy. If either were regular visitors to that miserable dwelling off Cockburn Street then someone would recognize them.
“Good Lord, Gilchrist!” Alison gawped at me, ignoring the gasps her distinctly not-a-whisper provoked. “Don’t tell me you’re swooning over that tyrant!”
A groan sounded from a nearby table. “Oh God, women. I told you this would happen.”
I felt my forehead prickle with sweat and my cheeks flush. There was no way I could tell Alison the truth, but I knew what this looked like.
Grabbing my things, I dragged her out of the reading room and into the stairwell.
“I’m, ah, doing a study of the male facial structure, and since Professor Merchiston’s is so . . . distinctive, I thought he’d be a good subject,” I gabbled, hoping I sounded close to convincing. “I mean, his face is so bony, he’s practically a skeleton. I’m going to start on his muscles next.”
Alison snorted.
“On his face, Thornhill! I’m going to diagram the zygomaticus major and minor and the procerus muscle and the occipito . . . occip . . .”
“Occipitofrontalis?” she asked sweetly, with a wicked gleam in her eye.
“The very one,” I said through gritted teeth. “I swear on my life, Thornhill, I’m not some silly schoolgirl with a pash. I know what you all think of me, but I’m not like that.” Somehow, it felt very important that Alison not think I had romantic feelings for the man. I turned the paper over to Lucy’s portrait. “See?”
She examined it. “Oh, a female version as well. How clever. You’d make quite the good portrait artist if you ever abandoned medicine.”
“Not on your life.”
“You might not be destined for life as an artist starving in a garret, but you did miss lunch.” She was right, I realized; I was famished. “Here, I took some extra boiled potatoes. I’m always ravenous by three o’clock otherwise.” She handed me a greasy paper bag filled with hot, buttery potatoes and I could have kissed her.
As we made our way to the solitary cloakroom the medical school allotted for female students—facilities that the professors had been too embarrassed to even mention in our first weeks, much to our discomfort and the annoyance of the proprietress of a nearby coffeehouse—Edith’s earlier words returned to me.
“Do you think I’m a snob?”
Alison blinked. “You’re a little aloof, perhaps. Maybe if you tried a little harder to get on Julia’s good side, things wouldn’t be so hard. But you’re not a snob.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “I sometimes wonder if I am though. Oh, not intentionally! But I don’t know how to talk to someone like Caroline, and, frankly, Moira terrifies me. I feel like she blames me for all the world’s ills just because I was born into money. Julia’s just . . . easier, somehow. Like we’re speaking the same language. Literally, sometimes—when Caroline breaks out into Scots, she may as well be talking in Chinese. I knew medical school would be difficult, but I thought it would be the work, not the other students.”
It felt like she was speaking my thoughts aloud. It hadn’t occurred to me that even someone as comfortable in her social standing, as reassuringly normal as Alison, would feel out of place here.
“You should join us for dinner one night,” I offered tentatively. “I’m sure my aunt and uncle wouldn’t mind.”
The idea of Uncle Hugh being on his best behavior around what he termed “book-learned termagants” delighted me—and if I could persuade them to invite her during a night the Greenes were visiting, her incessant cheeriness might prove a useful buffer. Not only that—another socially acceptable friend meant more chances to escape the stuffy confines of their house—something which would prove useful if I wanted to find someone who had known about the connection between Merchiston and Lucy.
The portraits rested safely in my reticule as we made our way to the afternoon lecture. Somehow it felt like his gaze was burning through the leather of my bag, silently watching me.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The anatomy theater was a grand room for grand men to display their mastery over the human body. Decades ago, this would have been a brutal affair—a fully conscious patient, dirty instruments, blood-soaked sawdust coating the floor. Tonight, it was sanitized, tidy if no less bloody.
Tonight, it was a performance.
Julia shifted impatiently and tapped her foot. I felt no such anticipation. While I was grateful to be there, and curious to see for myself how the esteemed Professor Mackay, fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, worked, I felt uneasy. Surely the other women had some qualms about the procedure. Surely they felt some kinship with the wretched figure on the table. For all her pride, even Julia Latymer couldn’t think she was invincible.
As the great man himself, a legend in the wards of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh for his prowess with a scalpel and in the whisky-soaked environs of the New Club for his tales of medical derring-do, strode into the room, we stood en masse to applaud him. I was beginning to feel nauseous.
“Hysteria,” he announced. “The modern woman’s greatest curse.” His words were met with raucous laughter. “A variety of remedies have been invented to tackle such an affliction—laudanum, stimulation of the lower regions, even this new fad: psychology.” He smiled, but there was little humor in it. “As if any problem could be solved by a woman talking more!”
Cloistered at the front, we felt every eye in the room among us. Edith had stiffened and was staring fixedly in front of her, lips pinched. Julia looked as though she wanted to take a swing at someone. I wondered if that was why we had been given such a choice position. Not as a sop to our gentler sex, but as a warning.
Holding up his hand to silence the laughter—having finally decided our humiliation was at an end—Mackay continued. “But there is one remedy whose supremacy remains unchallenged. Through one simple procedure, we can restore this woman’s equilibrium, making her a fit wife and mother once more.” Applause. He looked at us, stony-faced and silent in the front row. “You disagree, ladies? Perhaps you feel she should remain as she is—melancholic, aggressive, in danger of taking her own life?”
“And what about leaving her scarred and infertile from completely unnecessary surgery?” I asked, shaking. “How enthusiastic do you imagine she’ll feel about her husband and children then, Professor?”
The room was deathly silent.
“If you have a better suggestion,” he said slowly, “then perhaps you should be standing up here, not I, Miss . . .”
“Gilchrist,” Julia supplied. Hateful beast.
I shook my head, not trusting my voice to speak. As much as what we were about to witness filled me with anger, I was not going to let him ban me from the operating theater. He had railed against admitting women as it was before relenting reluctantly in the name of progress—if I fueled the fire and he returned to his previous position, then the chilly indifference with which my peers treated me would turn into hatred.
He gave me a thin-lipped smile, unblinking, reminding me of a snake.
“It will calm her nerves,” Professor Mackay was saying, “and leave her more able to look after her husband and children. With the
added benefit, of course, of preventing any further progeny.”
How kind of him. Of course, there were far less brutal ways of ensuring that she didn’t fall pregnant, or at least carry the child to term. But, as Fiona had so amply illustrated, no respectable doctor would collude in such a practice. At least the infirmary offered advice about contraception, unreliable though it was. And, while I could see why vinegar-soaked sponges might not appeal to the husbands, surely the wives had the right to ensure they avoided unwanted pregnancy? But, as we were witnessing, it was men who controlled our reproductive futures.
“When she wakes there will be discomfort at first, of course, but she will find that her melancholia is gone, and that the nightly fits of rage that caused her to attack her husband have subsided entirely.”
I could hazard a guess at what had caused her anger, and I didn’t think that it was a removal of her reproductive organs that would solve the problem.
I felt overwhelmed by the futility of my presence. First Lucy, now this. There was nothing I could do but observe and offer what little comfort I could. Even when I was a qualified doctor, I could look after them only while they were in my care. The world outside was beyond my control, a cesspit of violence no matter what one’s social circle.
Hushed silence fell as Mackay turned to his patient. Tears stung the corners of my eyes and I hated every single person in the room with a white-hot fury for treating this butchery as entertainment. Still, I would not leave. The poor wretch deserved to have at least one person in the room who saw her as a human being, not just a canvas for Mackay’s bloody artistry.