by Kaite Welsh
Neither so much as glanced up when I entered the room, so absorbed in their respective tasks. Walker was elbow-deep in some poor fellow’s sternum, and Anderson was preoccupied with the skeleton with which I had become so unpleasantly familiar.
“I believe one of you dropped this,” I said, forcing any emotion out of my voice. “I came to return it.”
Walker glanced up. “Not mine. But if you were missing our company . . .”
“I wasn’t,” I snapped. “Tell me, gentlemen, do you have to drug all your women?”
“What’s the harpy on about now?” Anderson growled.
“Wants to return a handkerchief. Soaked in chloroform, by the smell of it.”
Anderson glared, the memory of my self-defense still rankling. “This might be too much for your delicate little brain to comprehend, but none of our patients down here require anesthesia.”
Looking at the exposed chest cavity on Walker’s table, I had to concede his point, however crudely made.
Shrugging, he returned his attention to the corpse. “Could be anyone. Give it to your sweetheart when you find him. Now leave us in peace, you bloody virago.”
I walked out, still clutching the fabric. Much as I disliked the men, I believed them when they said they hadn’t left the dissection room.
McVeigh was nowhere to be seen, and I abandoned my search, eager to return to the land of the living.
I looked at the note crumpled in my hand. I hadn’t questioned it, just stumbled down here in blind naïveté, convinced that a man like him had decided to help me out of the goodness of his heart. McVeigh, who knew where Lucy’s body had come from; McVeigh who had told me she had been taken away to be buried. Who, if rumor was to be believed, had more than a professional acquaintance with the local brothels. How easy it would have been to conceal his crime, somewhere that one more corpse would go unnoticed. And who was to say that she was the first? And I had walked into his trap like a lamb to the slaughter, when I had every reason in the world not to trust him. Had he meant to only frighten me, or had he meant to return, to see me on the slab the way he had seen Lucy?
Unable to bear being trapped in this chilly, morbid place for a moment longer, I broke out into a run, desperate to get into the fresh air and light, where I could think . . .
I rounded the corner and collided with someone, finding myself sprawled on the floor for the second time that day.
“For God’s sake, look where you’re going, you blasted woman!” No mistaking those surly tones. I felt my cheeks burn at the memory of the body I had just slammed into stripped to the waist and glistening with a sheen of sweat.
Merchiston sighed. “Gilchrist. I might have known. Are you incapable of staying out of trouble for more than five minutes?” He helped me to my feet and I shivered, remembering the same hands covering mine, warm and reassuring as we worked together in the police mortuary. “And might I remind you,” he added in a stern tone, “that running in the corridors is strictly forbidden.”
Despite my recent ordeal, I found myself smiling. “I assure you, Professor, it won’t happen again. Unless”—I grimaced—“someone else tries to attack me.”
He reached out as if to comfort me but caught himself. “Attack you? Sarah, what happened? Are you all right?”
Scared and still shaking though I was, his inadvertent use of my Christian name warmed me.
“McVeigh, I think,” I said softly. I prayed that my suspicions were correct, otherwise I would be implicating yet another innocent man.
He frowned. “The porter? I’ll thrash his hide and have him dismissed. Then I’ll march him to the polis myself, and have him thrown in the cells for having the sheer bloody temerity to—”
I stopped him. “He didn’t interfere with me, if that’s what you think. But he did give me one hell of a fright.” Merchiston nodded, struggling to stay silent and let me speak. His eyes were dark with fury, and his breathing came in harsh, angry snorts like a mad bull. I remembered suddenly why I had been so afraid of him. “He sent me this note,” I explained, handing it to him, “but when I came down here, I couldn’t find him.” I paused, recalling the other unpleasant incident I had faced. “If you’re looking to thrash someone, might I suggest Walker and Anderson? They weren’t exactly welcoming.”
Merchiston’s countenance darkened further. “Aye, I know who you mean,” he muttered, and I almost felt sorry for them. Almost.
“Then, when I went to look for McVeigh, someone grabbed me from behind and covered my nose and mouth with this.” I fished the chloroform-soaked handkerchief out of my reticule. His eyes widened. “Professor, I think McVeigh lured me down here to frighten me. Walker said that he visits prostitutes, and I know that he’s responsible for collecting the corpses donated for dissection. He even prepared Lucy for me for God’s sake!”
Merchiston held a hand up, looking ill. I mentally chastised myself for reminding him of the gruesome end his beloved sister had come to.
“If he didn’t murder Lucy himself then he knows who did. McVeigh intended for you to abandon your investigation, makeshift and foolish as it is. I suggest you do so, and leave me to take care of him.”
Reluctant as I was not to see this through to the end, I couldn’t stand another moment down there.
“You will let me know?”
“I will. And, Sarah—thank you. You’ve been a thorn in my side these past few weeks, but you have helped me more than I can possibly say. If ever I find a way to thank you—”
I cut him off. “Just don’t fail me in the Christmas examinations.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Students scurried past Teviot Row House from one lecture to the next, and the strains of Saint-Saëns echoed from the Reid Concert Hall, where the music students were practicing. That fleeting sense of reassurance, of finality, that I had felt standing with Merchiston outside the dissection rooms had vanished. My head still throbbed with the aftereffects of the chloroform, and I felt horribly tired. In the past few days, I had come to trust the dour professor, even to like him. But I could no longer be certain that he was telling the truth. I had stumbled down so many blind alleyways in the course of my “makeshift and foolish” attempt to find Lucy’s murderer, but weeks later and I felt no closer to any answer.
Sighing in frustration, I turned back toward the medical buildings. At least in there, the mysteries had solutions I could decipher.
It was a relief to leave the claustrophobic environs of the university for the rookeries, and I arrived for my shift at the infirmary, eager to lose myself in the work. By the end, I was swaying on my feet. Although the doctors and nurses around me had worked far harder and accomplished far more, most on considerably less sleep, I felt bone weary. I wondered, in a flash of exhausted terror, how I would ever survive as a doctor with such little stamina. I knew that days and nights like this and far worse would become my normal routine, with meals and sleep snatched here and there in rare quiet moments, but I was still soft and weak, my life as a lady, albeit an educated one, had not prepared me for hard work. I realized, with a sinking feeling in my stomach, that our end-of-term examinations were only a few weeks away and my marks in chemistry were still not what they should be. I was, if not excelling myself, at least not heaping shame down upon my head in every other subject, but chemistry had been my cross to bear for years now, and it didn’t seem to be getting any easier.
At least tomorrow was Saturday, and I could spend the day in the warmth, even if I was paying calls and being dragged from one house to the next with exactly the same conversation taking place and only the quality of the cakes being any different. I also knew that the next day meant spending two hours in church trying not to fall asleep as the reverend droned on and on about hellfire and damnation. It should not have been possible to make eternal torment sound quite so dull but, if the vicar were to be believed, the devil wanted nothing more than to bore us all to death.
As I removed my apron, noting with annoyance that the bl
ood and vomit I had spent the afternoon clearing up had soaked through to my dress, Fiona came in looking equally haggard.
“Off already? You lucky thing! I still have house calls to make this afternoon,” she groaned.
“Dr. Thomas is worried about overworking me.” I smiled. Mairead Thomas was easily the most kindhearted of the staff at the infirmary, and one of the youngest—as she had pointed out earlier, she remembered the days of balancing her studies with whatever clinical work she could to get a little better than her colleagues.
“She’s too softhearted on you.” Fiona chuckled. “I thought you young ones were supposed to be full of energy. Look at you, you’re stooping like an old woman!”
“I am not!” I replied, outraged and standing up straight. “I’ll have you know I could have carried on for hours if Dr. Thomas hadn’t relieved us.”
“Then you won’t object to accompanying me on my rounds.” Fiona smiled wickedly. I laughed, realizing how readily I had walked into her trap.
“Just promise that you’ll have me back by eight,” I told her. “I’m supposed to be having supper with Elisabeth Chalmers.” If nothing else, my truce with Merchiston had returned my friend to me, and I was looking forward to seeing her even if it meant apologizing to her and her husband in person.
Fiona frowned, and I realized that she did not entirely approve of Elisabeth. Perhaps she thought that mixing in such rarefied circles was frivolous for a woman who was supposed to be dedicating her life to helping the less fortunate. Still, she accepted my request readily enough, and I followed her out into the streets, where I was surprised to see that she intended to walk rather than take the tram, an omnibus, or a carriage.
“It’s not far,” she assured me. “Only three or four houses. You can apply some dressings, but I’m afraid it won’t be anything terribly complicated. Most of these poor souls are too old to make it down to the clinic easily, or too afraid of hospitals to venture through our doors. At least we can make them comfortable in their own homes, such as they are.”
The light was fading rapidly, not helped by the fact that we wandered through narrow alleyways that could barely be called streets, where the buildings loomed and leaned and blocked out even the tiniest scrap of sky. I could not imagine what it would be like to grow up in such an environment, and not for the first time I found myself empathizing with the drunks and addicts that found their way to the infirmary in search of help we could not give them, though their need was none the less for not being physical.
In the dim light, Fiona looked grim and exhausted, and I wondered what toll it took on her, working in these conditions every day. She could do with a holiday, I thought, or at least a good meal. She had lost weight in the past few weeks, and tonight she wore a sad, resigned expression. I wished that she would open up to me and share her troubles, but I knew that asking would result in only a gruff refusal of my offer of friendship. She had been even more isolated from her colleagues of late, and Tillie Campbell had confessed in low tones that she worked even harder than usual, and took every death of a patient to heart as though it personally grieved her. Well, if all I could do was assist her in her rounds at these run-down tenements and slums, then that was what I would do.
It was a relief to join Fiona on her rounds, although our surroundings were hardly pleasant. After the first house call, where we eased what suffering we could to a family who had to contend with whooping cough on top of rickets and malnutrition, I resolved to count my blessings. Had I been born into the world I visited, I would likely not have survived to my present age, much less gained any sort of education. If infant disease didn’t kill me, childbirth combined with the unsanitary conditions in which these people lived almost certainly would have.
Although the houses we visited were dingy and their occupants poor, Fiona had the knack of acting like an honored guest as much as a physician. After we had left one house, leaving an elderly woman in as much comfort as we could—which is to say, not very much at all—I asked her why she was so willing to accept the stale cake or bread and butter that her patients and their families pressed on us.
“Surely it would be better to let them eat it themselves, rather than drain what little resources they have?” I questioned, confused by her constant acceptance.
My mentor shrugged. “It’s a point of pride for them. If I refused, it would insult them, casting aspersions on their kitchen or their purse.”
This part of the city was so shabby and ignored that no one had thought or could afford to install electricity in any of the buildings, much less the streetlamps.
“It’s not far,” she said, squinting into the darkness. “Here, this will warm you up.” She pressed a flask into my hand and I gulped the coffee greedily, feeling the medicinal whiskey tang burn my throat.
Eventually, we paused as Fiona fumbled with matches and a lamp to illuminate the gloom, and we mounted the stairs of a dingy building that looked uninhabited.
“Are you sure this is the place?” I asked nervously.
“Oh, quite sure,” she called back, but I followed her with trepidation.
On the second floor, Fiona pushed open a door and I heard her voice soothing the room’s inhabitants.
As I stepped into the room, I realized it was empty.
I heard the door lock behind me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The room was small and cramped, with a long table taking up most of the space. It looked like an operating table, and I realized with confusion that there was another, smaller table with surgical implements on it. There was a glass-fronted cupboard filled with bottles, and as I moved closer, I recognized ether and chloroform.
I turned to Fiona in confusion. She was pale, but there was a determined cast to her expression.
“I’m sorry, Sarah,” she said in a voice that shook only slightly. “If there was any other way, believe me, I’d let you leave here unharmed. But you kept asking questions—” Her voice broke, and she pressed her hand to her mouth, unable to speak for a moment. “First Lucy, now you. Am I to have no peace?”
A sick sort of dread filled me.
“I told you to leave well alone.” Fiona’s voice was cold as she mastered herself. “I did all I could. What happens now is your fault. You haven’t left me with a choice.”
“You killed Lucy. Fiona, why?”
Fiona shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me! Fiona, you killed a woman; you at least owe me an explanation. What is this room? Some sort of makeshift operating theater?”
She nodded, her lips pressed tightly together.
“I help women. When they’re . . . in trouble.”
“You carry out abortions?” I asked. “Fiona, that’s illegal! I know you’re helping these girls, but you could be hanged!”
“Don’t you think I know that?” she snarled. “Lucy did too. Oh, she was very clever. Cleverer than her brother—she knew that if I didn’t want her to talk there was no end to what she could extort from me.”
“She was blackmailing you?”
“Money, laudanum . . . even morphine once. I came so close to getting caught.”
“You stole from the infirmary?” It was ridiculous really, but even after everything I had learned since walking in here, that shocked me the most.
“I replaced everything I could,” she said angrily. “But if she had gone to the police like she threatened, we would have closed down. I would have gone to prison! Sarah, everything we worked for would have been ruined, just because some silly slut died on my operating table.”
So Lucy hadn’t been the first.
“It was an accident,” she whispered. “Things go wrong in operations, you know that. Especially when you’re forced to work in a tiny room with no natural light and no running water. And I was tired, so tired, Sarah.” She was tired now, leaning against the table with a look of wretched exhaustion etched on her face. “I think the scalpel must have slipped, because suddenly there was so
much blood everywhere. I knew that something had gone wrong—I’d done something wrong—and it all happened so fast.” She stopped, gulping in air, and I realized she was crying. “She was dead before I could do anything.”
“And Lucy found out?”
“Amelia was another of Ruby’s girls. When she didn’t return, Lucy came to me. She knew who I was—there had been girls at the reformatory; I did quite the brisk business there. That lecherous bloody curate couldn’t keep his hands off Griselda’s chits and she could hardly show her funders a refuge full of pregnant tarts. Lucy said she knew that Amelia was going to see me, and when I tried to deny it she realized what had happened.”
“What did you do to Lucy?” I asked.
She laughed harshly. “Thank God for McVeigh. That lecherous drunk has been thrown out of every brothel in the city, but it didn’t take much for me to convince Ruby to open her doors to him again. Not if she wanted my help getting her sluts out of trouble. It was simple enough to get him to take her body to the dissection room along with the other unfortunates.”
It was shocking, it was illegal, but I could have understood it. Could have. Only . . .
“Lucy didn’t die from a botched operation, Fiona,” I said softly.
She looked up, as though she had forgotten I was there. “Oh. No, it wouldn’t have done any good. She’d just have blabbed to her bloody brother whether I got rid of her brat or not.” She smiled at my expression, but there was no warmth in it. “Oh, you worked that one out as well? Clever girl. Professor high-and-mighty Merchiston, who wouldn’t sully his hands helping the likes of us down here, has a sister on the game.”
“Had,” I corrected.
“She laughed at me,” Fiona said quietly. “Cheeks red with rouge and her belly swollen with some stranger’s brat, and she laughed at me. How are we supposed to do good in the world, when men call us witches or madwomen and even whores hold us in contempt? They come to us, thighs still sticky from the last man they lay with, and expect us to be able to help. We tell ourselves they wouldn’t survive without us, but the truth is we can’t survive without them. Nice girls don’t see women like us.” She stroked my hair softly, and I found myself leaning into her touch. “But then it’s been a long time since you’ve been a nice girl, isn’t it, Sarah?” A maternal kiss pressed against my forehead. “I saw you, watching him at that brawl. You didn’t care if he might be a murderer then, did you? Do you really think Merchiston doesn’t take his fill like the rest of them? My wards are full of the women he’s come in, cried over, called by his dead wife’s name. Just because he gives them pleasure first and doesn’t beat them afterward doesn’t make him a hero, you’d see that if you’d been thinking with your brain instead of your cunt. Instead, you’re no better than they are, a silly tart who thinks a man will see past her sins and love her just the same. But they never do.” She shrugged. “It was risky, putting her under the same roof as Merchiston, but it was all I could think of.”