The anatomists, p.8
The Anatomists, page 8
“Please describe this ‘chapel,’” Jean-Claude directed, trying to keep the lad’s thoughts moving in one direction for more than a moment.
“Well,” he said, closing one eye tightly in an apparent attitude of deep concentration. “…it was about four feet wide—I told you it was small—and ten feet tall. Three stories tall, it was, with wings, like, sticking out from the corners. Quite odd.” He paused thoughtfully, and continued, clarifying his description. “Beautiful, but odd.”
I grew increasingly confused with every detail of the account, so it was with no small amount of vexation that I noticed Jean-Claude nodding knowledgeably, for the world as if he knew precisely what Jimmy was talking about. “A pagoda,” he said.
“A what?” Jimmy said, giving voice to the exact question that hung upon the tip of my own tongue.
“A pagoda,” he explained. “And you are not very far amiss in calling it a church, because it is a type of holy place, or a shrine, in the Orient. Its presence in the garden is not unexpected, given Sir Alfred’s devotion to the Eastern culture. Nor is the forest of bamboo, through which you passed with such great difficulty, particularly surprising, since it, too, is indigenous to Asia.”
“It may not strike you as extr’ordinary, having a church in your backyard, but I find it mighty queer, myself,” Jimmy said, in a tone of forced annoyance, but actually quite pleased with himself for having been so nearly correct in his description of a pagoda as a church.
“Continue describing the garden, if you please,” Jean-Claude urged.
“Well, about a stone’s throw from the house, there’s a little shed, with a bridge leading over a stream that runs onto a pond. Now this pond…it’s got a waterfall on one side and lily pads floating all over it.” I couldn’t help thinking of the newspaper article about Sir Alfred’s cremation, and reflecting on what else might be floating on the pond’s surface. “Swimming around in the water,” he continued, “there was all kind of fish—big ones, little ones, orange ones, black ones, and some you couldn’t hardly see, ’cause they was the same color as the water. Those people are mighty fond of their fish, make no mistake.” Pausing, as if he’d just made a mental connection that had heretofore eluded him, he leaned toward us, alternately fixing our eyes with his, to assure himself that he had our full and undivided attention. “They even keep some inside the house.”
“What do you mean, ‘inside the house’?” I said incredulously, sending a quick accusatory glance toward Jean-Claude. “Your instructions were to explore the house from the outside only. Entering the house itself exposed you to far too great a risk of discovery.”
“There’s no need to have a fit, gove’nor,” he responded, with a look of amused smugness spreading across his face. “Nobody ‘discovered’ me. My former line of work taught me a great deal of—what do you say?—discretion. Why, more than once I’ve crept into a house and snatched a body, while the people inside were right in the middle of a wake!” He reflected silently for a moment, while a look of pride spread across his face. “Get discovered?” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Not bloody likely. I’m very discreet, see, so you needn’t worry about me being such a careless chap as to go and get myself caught.” Here, he paused, chuckling once again at the absurd prospect. I, however, was neither as amused, nor as assured, as he. Jean-Claude, on the other hand, appeared to be of one mind with Jimmy.
“Was there anything else of note in the garden?” he asked the lad. “Anything that appeared to have been recently moved or disturbed?”
“Not that I noticed,” he said, apparently taking a quick mental inventory. “From the looks of things, nobody’s been in that garden for a long, long time. There’s a stone path from the shed to the rear entrance of the house that’s so overgrown—with grass, you know—that you can’t see the stones unless you’re right on top of them. Them folks is in dire need of a gardener.”
Jean-Claude’s eyebrow wrinkled slightly, as if a stray thought were struggling to work its way from the depths to the surface of his mind, but he quickly relented and allowed it to sink back whence it had come. “So you entered the house,” he said, fully attentive to the moment again. “Tell us what you saw there—something about fish, you say?”
“That’s right.” Jimmy’s eyes brightened. “Just when you come in the rear entrance, there’s another garden, like, inside the house. In a big room with a glass roof.”
“A winter garden,” I offered, but Jimmy simply went on.
“And in this room, there’s a big pond, like the one outside, but a bit smaller. And swimming around in this pond,” he said, lowering his voice and shifting his eyes back and forth, as if concerned some invisible person might be eavesdropping, “were some of the strangest-looking fish you ever saw.”
“What was so peculiar about them?” Jean-Claude asked.
“Well for one thing, they were all ugly. I’ve seen a lot of fish in my day, and some of ’em haven’t been none too pretty, but these were the ugliest by far. Some of them were long and flat, kind of like snakes that’ve been stepped on. And there were some other ones, even uglier—gray and fat, with no particular shape at all, kind of like swimming rocks. But the shape wasn’t the queerest part.” He looked side to side, watching out for the invisible people once again, then spoke in a low, secretive voice. “It’s what they do when you touch ’em.”
“You touched one?” I said, completely aghast at the license this lad had taken with the instructions we gave him.
“Yeah I touched one,” he replied matter-of-factly. “And do you know what he did?”
“What did he do?” Jean-Claude asked, with amused interest.
“He blew up like a balloon, and just rolled around there in the water. I sure would like to have me one of those things,” he said, his face growing dreamy at the prospect. “Imagine what the lads down at the Jolly Fox would say.”
Jean-Claude struggled to hide a sense of great amusement with the lad’s narrative, which I, quite frankly, did not share, such needless peril had he exposed himself to in thus roaming about the interior of the house. “Peculiar,” Jean-Claude finally said, intruding upon Jimmy’s fond reverie, then attempted to guide him back onto the path of his story. “And was there anything else noteworthy in this ‘room’?”
“Not really,” Jimmy answered, thoughtfully stroking the light fuzz just barely visible upon his chin. “A few green statues along the wall, some trees planted in big clay pots, a couple of chairs…nothing else really notable—except for that pond, like I said.”
“So you continued on into the main house, I assume,” Jean-Claude said, refilling the empty glass that Jimmy had placed, none too subtly, upon the table where we were sitting.
“Right,” he answered, holding the glass in front of the fire to admire the deep red color of the claret. “I continued to the main house.” Then, after taking a grateful draught and smacking his lips in contentment, he suddenly thought of something. “Have you gentlemen ever been to the museum?”
“Do mean the British Museum?” I asked.
“I suppose that’s the one,” he replied, frowning slightly. “Is there another?”
“Yes,” Jean-Claude intervened, to keep Jimmy from drifting off track. “We’ve both been there a number of times.”
“Well then, you know just what this house looks like on the inside. It looks like the British Museum. There’s statues everywhere, and suits of armor, and swords, and paintings on the wall. That’s in a couple of the biggest rooms. Then when you move on toward the front of the house, there’s another room—not quite as long, but taller, much taller—that’s nothing but books, books, and more books, all the way from the floor to the ceiling. I never seen so many books in my life. And that was all on the ground floor. When I went up the stairs, the main hallway had some statues and pictures and such, but mostly it was just ordinary bedrooms, and most of them ain’t used anymore, from the looks of it.”
“Throughout your grand tour of the Darcy House,” I said, somewhat sarcastically, “did you happen to see any people?”
“I saw a gentleman and a lady—the masters of the house, I assume.”
“A lady?” I said, looking at Jean-Claude in surprise and meeting a similar expression on his face.
“This lady,” Jean-Claude asked, “…could she have been a servant—the cook perhaps?”
“Cook?” Jimmy repeated incredulously. “Why would you think that? Didn’t I say a ‘lady.’ And a gentleman, too, that appeared to be her husband, based on the looks of it.”
“And what were this gentleman and lady doing?” Jean-Claude continued, in a tone that only hinted at the puzzlement we both felt at the revelation.
“Talking,” he replied. “Just talking.”
“What were they talking about?” I asked, somewhat more impatiently than I intended.
“At first I couldn’t tell, ’cause they was several rooms off. Then I moved closer—discreetly, though, so as not let on I was there—and I could hear them better, but it wasn’t until I got right outside the room they were in that I could make anything out. It was the front parlor, I think it was, and I situated myself so I could see them in the hall mirror. He, meaning the gentleman, was sitting in a chair by the fire, and she, meaning the lady, of course, was declining on the sofa. She seemed a bit agitated about something, and he was trying to calm her down.”
“Why did she seem to be upset?” Jean-Claude asked, giving voice to my own pressing curiosity.
Jimmy pursed his lips and closed one eye, clearly trying to recall what he had heard. “The best I could make out was it was something about money. Oh, and some man. Yeah, there was a man’s name came up a few times. A funny name.” He closed both eyes, for even greater concentration, and apparently found the answer on the back of his eyelids. “William…that was it,” he said proudly. “William Testament.”
Jean-Claude flashed an amused, knowing glance in my direction, and I had to divert my face to hide my own mirth. Realizing there was little benefit to be gained from pressing the issue, however, we both maintained our silence and permitted him to continue.
“That’s right. She was angry about this William, and the gentleman kept telling her not to worry herself about it, saying that what William did was…how did he say? ‘Common and lawful,’ that’s it. Whatever William did was common and lawful, so they—meaning, I suppose, the gentleman and the lady—wouldn’t have to pay for it.”
“Pay for what?” I asked, more confused than I cared to admit.
“No need to ask me, ’cause I can’t tell you.” He shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of resignation. “About the time I was starting to understand—you know, getting into the rhythm of their conversation—the gentleman stood up and disappeared from the mirror. Fearing he might just reappear in the hallway beside me, I took the opportunity to make my way to the rear of the house—through the kitchen this time—and out the back door into the garden. Then it was through the weeds, into the woods, and back to the road.”
“Are you sure no one saw you?” I asked, concerned. “One of the servants, perhaps?”
“Didn’t I already tell you there was no gardener, nor other outside servant—the weeds and all, you know?” he returned irritably. “And there wasn’t another living soul in that house besides the lady and gentleman, not unless someone was hiding in one of them dark rooms upstairs. Which I, frankly speaking, don’t find likely, do you?” He ceased his narrative, positively glowing with self-satisfaction at thus having the final word, and disabusing us both of our wild surmises. “One of the servants, indeed!” his expression said.
With neither Jean-Claude nor I seeing any advantage in pressing the lad further for knowledge that clearly was not in his possession, we paid him his agreed-upon fee, gave him a handful of biscuits from our pantry, and sent him back into the deepening night.
Glancing out the window to make sure Jimmy was well out of earshot, Jean-Claude turned to me and said in a tone of mock solemnity, “And so, another player enters the game. Tomorrow, we must seek out Mr. William Testament.”
“Indeed,” I replied, bursting into long-restrained laughter. “In-deed.”
CHAPTER 11
Having slept no more hours over the past few days than I could practically count on one hand, the very last thing I felt like doing after Jimmy left was to trek through the rainy darkness to St. Alban’s and bury a dead body on the grounds, but trek we must and trek we did. Dr. Edmonds’s exhortation for all students to “see to your carrion, lads, so’s to avoid a second resurrection,” customarily enigmatic though it sounded, was clear enough to a pair of future surgeons who were at that very moment concealing a dead body, with a sackful of rapidly decaying organs alongside, under a pile of coal in the cellar. With local public sentiment running so strongly against the medical profession at the moment, in wake of the recent body-snatching incident at All Souls, about which Jean-Claude and I knew entirely too much, one did not require an inordinate fund of imagination to conceive what would happen if this public ventured onto the school grounds and stumbled upon our specimen, or the half dozen others laid out in various stages of dismemberment in the common dissection hall. Some rather ugly confrontations had occurred in Scotland during the past year, pitting the medical community against the public at large. In one such incident, two medical students were caught transporting a man’s body—seated upright between them on a coach, of all things—and ultimately had themselves locked up in the local jail in order to escape the angry mob’s wrath. With such an unpleasant prospect all too clearly in our minds, Dr. Edmonds’s warning provided more-than-adequate impetus to send us all scurrying through the dark to the common burial field behind the school.
Venturing back into the cellar, our makeshift dissection room, we found our gentleman right where we had left him, under a pile of coal. As strongly as the now-familiar subterranean den smelled of mold, by the time we arrived that evening it was beginning to smell strongly, and distinctively, of another odor entirely. A lack of sleep over the past few days, and less-than-regular eating habits, had left my stomach in a somewhat weakened state, and it was only through an act of iron will that I kept down the meal I had consumed earlier in the apartment.
“Your dinner did not sit well with you, mon ami?” Jean-Claude said cheerily, trying to lure my mind away from our immediate circumstances. “Perhaps it was the cheese. It did taste a bit overripe to me.”
“Yes,” I replied, grateful for the distraction, and for the offering of a respectable excuse for my sudden fit of indigestion. “It left quite an unpleasant aftertaste.”
Eager to be out of doors as soon as possible, we worked quickly, laying aside the coal and retrieving two burlap sacks, one considerably smaller, and less sharply defined, than the other. This sack, the one containing the organs, we placed upon the surface of the larger sack—in the approximate location of the dead man’s chest—and then, both of us holding our breath, we lifted the body from either end, and carried it through a long, dark hallway, up a winding rickety staircase, and out onto a shapeless plot of earth known throughout the school as the “compost heap.” In actuality, of course, the isolated patch of ground served as the final resting place for unfortunate souls whose last contribution to the civilized world was the advancement of anatomical knowledge.
It was common practice, on visits to the “heap,” to drive a wooden stake a few inches into the freshly turned earth above a new arrival, in order to prevent other students from unearthing the remains when they came to bury their own specimens. Given the necessity for us to be able to recover our gentleman, if and when we should ever determine how he came to be in such a state in the first place, we took extra care to bury him a bit deeper than usual and to clearly mark the location of his grave so we could easily return to it when circumstances required. The smaller sack, on the other hand, we heaved into an open pit and covered with a few square feet of loose soil, greatly relieved simply to have it well beyond the reach of our visual and olfactory senses.
Safely back in our rooms, seated comfortably in front of the fire, I consumed an immoderate quantity of brandy, both to cut the chill that gripped my limbs and to mute the images that troubled my mind’s eye. After nearly an hour of fighting to keep my eyelids open—fearful of the dreams that lay in wait for my consciousness to go off duty, I finally drifted into a restless but welcome slumber, from which I did not emerge until the first gray light of dawn filtered weakly through the window.
CHAPTER 12
Upon stepping out the door into the street next morning, we were most rudely assaulted by a vicious western wind, which, in a fit of wintry malice, hurled handfuls of sleet directly into our faces. My head ached from the previous night’s libations, and the bitter cold exacerbated my misery to such an extent that all I could think of was burying myself in the covers of my bed and escaping the entire day through slumber. It was not a bed that awaited me this fine day, however, but a seat in the lecture hall where we were to spend the entire morning observing and practicing the delicate business of setting broken limbs. Wound thus tightly in a cloak of my own profound discomfort, I found myself irritated nearly to the point of violence by Jean-Claude’s obvious and unapologetic enjoyment of the “bracing” and “invigorating” foretaste of winter weather. While I spoke intermittently and with great reluctance, loath to remove the scarf from my numbed lips, Jean-Claude chattered like an excitable schoolboy throughout the duration of our journey, continuing his side of the conversation we had begun over breakfast.
“No cook, no gardener,” he yelled, over the biting wind. “…no servants in the entire house. What else could it mean?”
“They decided to try going it on their own?” I ventured, halfheartedly.
“‘Going it on their own?’ Mon dieu! The cold has perhaps frozen your brain, yes?” To which challenge he received no reply. My brain wasn’t frozen, but my face most decidedly was, and I felt no inclination to crack it open for his amusement. “It means,” he continued nonplussed, “that the plot is far more sinister than we at first imagined. In addition to a murderer, we also have an accomplice, not to mention a partner in fraud.”
