The anatomists, p.9
The Anatomists, page 9
“How so?” I mumbled, growing vaguely interested in spite of my physical misery.
“Regarde. Mme Abigail dies. Her body is, presumably, placed in a coffin, where it lies throughout the night awaiting a ceremony and burial. Keeping watch over the body, according to custom, is a surviving family member—the brother, Peter Worthington. Sometime during the night, the brother is killed, and his body placed in the coffin. What becomes of the lady, we will not concern ourselves with for the moment. Our killer, already a close facsimile of the brother, attires himself in such a manner as to complete the transformation. And then, sealing the coffin himself, he takes the bereaved brother’s place and awaits the dawn arrival of the undertaker, who conveniently carries away the evidence of his crime.”
“But we’ve already established that,” I said, irritably. “What’s this new ‘sinister’ element you referred to?”
“When we paid a visit to Darcy, the alleged Peter Worthington mentioned two servants, a groundskeeper and a cook, yes?” Jean-Claude’s eyes sparkled, both with the cold, and with delight at the added complication our “chess game” had thrown in our way. I simply nodded in reply. “And who would have more direct access to the contents of the house—bodies included—than the two servants who live on the estate? Now the thought had entered my mind,” he said, punctuating his observations with a pedantically raised index finger, “…that this groundskeeper may very well be the killer of, and poseur for, Peter Worthington. But there were two problems with this theory. First, with only two servants on the entire estate, would not the domestic immediately recognize the groundskeeper beneath the ‘mask’ of Peter Wellington? And second,” he added, marshaling his middle finger to stand at attention beside his index finger, “even if the domestic were sufficiently deaf and blind not to notice this bold substitution, the arrival of Peter Worthington’s sister would greatly embarrass the groundskeeper’s attempt to maintain the façade.”
“Of course,” I replied irritably through my scarf. “Hence our concern for the sister’s safety upon her arrival. We’ve already said…”
“Ah, you have gone straight to the heart of the matter, my friend—to the ‘rub,’ as Hamlet would say. The sister does arrive, and does meet with the false Peter Worthington, but does she expose his fraud? And does he harm her in retaliation? No! Quite to the contrary. Jimmy finds the man and the lady conversing with great familiarity, like a real brother and sister, yes?”
“And what the devil if they actually are brother and sister, Jean-Claude,” I snapped, as a gust of icy wind whipped the scarf from my face, allowing a blast of sleet to abrade my frozen skin. “He’s Peter Worthington, and she’s…Margaret, or whatever the name was—the sister from France. Maybe everyone is telling the truth, and we’re simply suffering from an overactive imagination.” I regretted the words the instant they came out of my mouth, not wishing to offend Jean-Claude, even if he was a source of occasional irritation. I needn’t have troubled myself, however, for, when thus in the grips of a logical conundrum, he was totally unflappable.
“Have you forgotten the dead man whose body provided us with a subject for anatomical study, hmm? He was no ‘flight of fancy,’ nor was the hole in his brain.”
“Very well, then. Proceed,” I said, fully aware that he would most certainly proceed, whether I gave him leave or no.
“Regarde, on the very occasion when Jimmy sees the gentleman and lady—presumably strangers, according to our first theory—conversing in a manner that is anything but strange, he also notes the complete absence from the house of anyone else, servants included. We begin with four people in the house, and we end up with two. So I ask you”—he paused, as the wind once again ripped the scarf from my face—“where are the servants—the groundsman and the cook?”
“On holiday?” I guessed weakly, unable to think much about anything save a warm fireplace in the lecture hall.
“They have gone nowhere,” he announced, snapping his fingers, by way of prologue to the denouement that was sure to follow. “The cook and the groundskeeper are still very much in residence at Darcy House, only they are no longer serving in the capacity of servants. They are posing, respectively, as Peter and Madeleine Worthington, brother and sister of the deceased Abigail.”
“So you think…” I asked, trying to assemble the oddly shaped puzzle pieces Jean-Claude had just laid out before me.
“Yes. The groundsman, or even the cook, mon dieu, killed Peter Worthington, and together they placed his body in the lady’s coffin. When the evidence was out of the house and safely under the ground, voilà! They assume the roles of the deceased widow’s brother and sister—sole heirs to the Darcy family fortune.”
“I say,” I reflected aloud, forgetting the cold temporarily, or perhaps simply numbed to such an extent as to be impervious to it. “There is a certain logic to that. Yes. One thing still troubles me, though,” I added. “Why go through all the bother of taking Mrs. Darcy’s body out of the coffin and replacing it with Peter’s, when all their efforts still left them with a body to dispose of?”
Jean-Claude pursed his lips, silent for the first time since we left our rooms. “I am afraid,” he finally said, “that we shall have to explore that question at another time, for we have arrived at our destination.” And in truth, our plodding footsteps had led us, once more, to the gate of St. Alban’s, a place of which I had, quite frankly, grown weary during the past few days. I found myself involuntarily drawing back from the entrance, but when I considered the prospect of retracing the icy way back home, a few hours of bandaging “broken” arms and legs suddenly seemed quite attractive, and giving vent to an ambivalent sigh, I gratefully stepped through the door and out of the cold.
When we walked into the hall, we found most of our colleagues already seated, arranged in ascending tiers from a central “stage,” upon which sat James Lear, an extremely self-conscious-looking first-year student who, based upon his “privileged” location in the center of the hall, had fallen prey to the legendary persuasive powers of our head of school, Dr. Edmonds, and “volunteered” to serve as a subject for the day’s demonstration. Seats near the fireplace having long since been spoken for, we settled ourselves as far from the drafty doorway as possible, and prepared to learn all there was to know about setting broken bones.
A few moments after our arrival, the casual chatter of eighteen men in various stages of thawing, suddenly died down as our lecturer, Dr. Clarke, strode in from the wings carrying what appeared to be enough splints, cloth, and gauze to mend the fractures of an entire Roman legion. A general rustling sound, not unlike the winter wind through the dried brown leaves outside the window, ensued as students throughout the hall thumbed through their notebooks in search of a fresh page on which to record the day’s proceedings. Without so much as a “good morning” by way of preface, the good doctor laid into his reluctant volunteer, setting and bandaging virtually every bone in the poor man’s body, until by the end of the proceeding he resembled nothing in the world quite so much as an Egyptian mummy.
Having thus thoroughly immobilized his patient, Dr. Clarke invited us to proceed in an orderly fashion to the floor of the theater, where we could more closely observe his handiwork, and secure splinting and bandaging materials with which to practice upon each other. We did as instructed, and spent the next three hours tying hopeless knots around limbs twisted into assorted inhumane positions until the session finally came to an end, not because we had mastered the required technique of setting broken limbs but because we had endured just about all we could as subjects of it.
Throughout the last hour or so of this session, we rather unconsciously became aware of a muffled roar emanating from outside the lecture hall. Sounding initially like a rising wind—a not-unexpected phenomenon, given the season—the roaring gradually increased in volume and intensity, until by the time we tidied up and prepared to retire for a late luncheon, it had reached a rather alarming pitch. And when James, gratefully freed from his state of mummification, stepped out into the courtyard to get a breath of air and find out whence the sound originated, alarm proved to be an entirely appropriate response. No sooner had the poor man walked out the door than he ran back inside, his face grown white as a sheet.
“What the devil is wrong with you, man?” asked Thomas Bailey, sober now, as he typically was during the daylight hours before noon.
“We’re under attack!” replied the terrified man. “There’s hundreds of them. Maybe even thousands. We’ll all be killed!”
“What’s this about an attack?!” roared Dr. Clarke, as he strode through the cluster of students gathered at the door. “Get ahold of yourself, man. You’re positively hysterical.” With this exhortation still ringing in the air, he threw open the door to see what all the fuss was about, and the sight that greeted our eyes indicated that our frightened classmate was not terribly far off the mark in his assessment of our situation. However one cares to define the term, “attack” was not a bad description of what was going on outside—although “siege” might have been a little more precisely accurate—for massed at the front gate of the school were at least a thousand people, some of whom were armed, and all of whom were angry. Dr. Clarke closed the door, considerably less self-assured than he had been before he opened it, and said in a husky low voice, “Someone go fetch Dr. Edmonds, quickly!”
In truth, looking out the door at the angry mass of humanity, having multiplied at least tenfold since yesterday’s “call” at the school, we were all painfully aware of what the spectacle meant, since similar scenes were all too frequent an occurrence throughout Great Britain in the days before the Anatomy Act provided a legal, reliable source of human subjects for anatomical study. Schools had been ransacked, physicians’ homes had been burned, and students and surgeons had been violently attacked, because of the uneasy but necessary alliance between the medical profession and the resurrectionists, among whose well-organized trade our friend Jimmy was but an apprentice, and fortunately for him, a retired one. It took but a spark to ignite the smoldering public resentment against our profession. Perhaps a dog unearthed a bone from a hospital yard and dragged it home to his horrified master. Perhaps a careless grave robber left behind obvious evidence of his night’s work. Or even, perhaps—as was not at all an uncommon occurrence—a disgruntled resurrectionist tossed a putrefying corpse at the front gate of a medical school during the night, as punishment for nonpayment of services, and the morning sun rose to confirm in the people’s minds that, so long as the medical schools operated, death and burial were but minor inconveniences compared to the fate that likely awaited them once “safely” underground.
Alas, it is all too true that bodies were exhumed by the scores for the purposes of medical study, but how many thousand lives have been saved by medical advances arising from this anatomical study? These people massed at our front gate, however, were not thinking about medical advance as they angrily waved their pitchforks, guns, and shovels above their heads. All they could see when they looked through those iron bars were the fiends who “snatched” their dear husband, or their child, or their aunt Martha, and we “fiends” knew that we were all in serious trouble.
It took several minutes for Dr. Clarke’s envoy to find Dr. Edmonds—he was in the archives searching for a letter describing a surgical procedure performed in Scotland the previous year—and by the time he arrived in the lecture hall, the crowd had grown visibly larger, and angrier. As angry as the crowd was, however, the scarlet hue spreading across Dr. Edmonds’s broad forehead hinted that the anger at the gate very possibly had a rival on this side of the door.
“Did I not tell you,” he roared, in his thick Scottish brogue, “that such would be the result if you ‘gentlemen’ went messin’ around in graveyards? ‘Leave the body snatchin’ to them that knows what they’re doin’,’ said I. ‘We mustn’t let it be common knowledge that our sacred profession relies heavily upon the professional traffickin’ of dead bodies,’ said I. ‘Heaven only knows what’d happen if it were one of you butchers got nabbed in the graveyard.’ Didn’t I say it? If I said it once, I said it a hundred times. And now look out there!” With this exhortation, he threw open the door, exposing us all to the nearly palpable gusts of wrath emanating from the crowd. “I’ll tell ya this,” he growled, sweeping a flashing eye and an accusatory finger around the room, making sure to include everyone present in the scope of his mounting anger, “if I had so much as an inkling which of you it was went diggin’ around the churchyard at All Souls the other night, I’d grab ye by the collar and throw ye to them wolves out yonder.” He closed the door, and appeared to regain some small degree of his composure, his face now merely bright red, instead of the deep purple shade it had worn during the initial blasts of the storm of his indignation. Of course, throughout the entire speech, I writhed in mortification at knowing far more than I cared to about the late-night episode to which he referred, and literally quaked at the suspicion that it was only a matter of time before someone read the guilt that must be clearly written upon my face. I don’t know how Jean-Claude was comporting himself during this display, for I dared not look at him, fearing that our complicity would ring out across the entire hall.
“But since,” he continued, in a slightly more measured tone, “I do not know who it was that dug up the lady in All Souls, I have no choice but to face the crowd myself—try to talk some reason into the irrational beasts.” At this statement of his intentions, a collective gasp went out from the lot of us, for we all believed that such a confrontation would undoubtedly end in the good doctor being torn apart limb from limb. When I saw the iron determination fixed upon his face, however, I had to conclude that if there was anyone in the world who was the equal of such an unequal match, it was Dr. Edmonds. Clutching the iron handle, he pushed open the door and took one step outside. Then suddenly, poised, as it were, upon the threshold between two worlds, he roared out a final, parting vow. “If anyone of you has that lady, or any other human body that’s not livin’ and breathin’, on these premises, I’m comin’ back here, if it’s the last thing I do, and dissecting your quiverin’ body with my own bare hands!” The door slammed shut behind him, leaving us all quivering indeed.
We stood in complete stony silence for a full minute, listening for an alteration in the pitch or intensity of the crowd’s fury as he approached them, until one of us—a third-year student from Lancashire—found the breath to speak. “I’m sure glad it wasn’t me who took that lady. I’d far rather confront that mob out there than stand face-to-face with Dr. Edmonds, if and when he should return, and confess that it was I who managed to get us all into this mess. By the time this whole thing is over, St. Alban’s, and Sloane’s Hospital, too, for that matter, could very well be reduced to a pile of smoldering embers. Dr. Edmonds has poured his heart and soul into this place, and to think that a single careless act should bring all those decades of hard work to naught.”
The already oppressive air attained an even greater density during this heartfelt panegyric, and every word of it pierced my guilty heart like a dagger. The lecture hall in which we stood seemed to contract around me, squeezing the breath out of my lungs. So terribly constrictive was the grip my guilt had upon me, that I was just before screaming out a confession, when a familiarly sardonic voice pierced the heavy silence.
“Are you daft?” said Thomas Bailey, rescuing me from myself, just in the nick of time. “It’s not because of the bloody hospital that he’s so angry. Oh, sure, he’s not delighted at the prospect of having the place pulled down around his ears, but what’s really got his choler up is something a little more personal.”
“What do you mean, ‘personal’?” asked the third-year from Lancashire, in a wounded tone, clearly offended at having his dramatic moment thus interrupted. “What could be more personal than a man’s lifetime of work.”
“You are mad,” replied Thomas, with an incredulous grin on his face that soon proved contagious, despite the dire circumstances. “If I thought that, after six or seven decades of life upon this earth, the only thing that could arouse my passions was my work, I’d just as soon be shot right now, because there would literally be nothing left for me to live for. Bloody work!” he huffed, and then chuckled in derision.
“I’ll tell you what’s got the old man’s ire up,” he continued. “It’s that woman, the Darcy lady, that was snatched from the graveyard. There’s the sore spot.”
“That’s what I said, you fool!” Lancashire retorted, in a tone that belied his apparent self-assurance.
“You said nothing of the sort!” sneered Thomas. As befuddled as our colleague typically was “after hours,” he was a fairly formidable rhetorical opponent if one happened to catch him before he had had the chance to get very far “in his cups.” “You said it was the peril to the hospital that angered him about the incident. And I’m saying it was the theft itself, or rather the object of it, that’s got the good doctor so red about the temples. Don’t you know who that woman was?”
We all glanced around at each other in confused silence, knowing full well the identity of the “stolen” body, but suddenly sensing that this knowledge barely scratched the surface of a much more elaborate story, no one dared to say anything. For the first time since Dr. Edmonds stormed into the hall, I felt my intense guilt evaporate in the heat of an even-more-pressing interest. Sneaking a glance at Jean-Claude, I saw that he was as riveted to Thomas’s “oration” as I.
Sensing he was in full, unchallenged possession of the “floor,” Thomas paused dramatically before satisfying the curiosity he had aroused. “He was acquainted with her, you see,” he began, “…through her husband, Sir Alfred. The old man and our Dr. Edmonds went way back, to university days, in Cambridge. They studied there at the same time, Sir Alfred having gotten rather a late start, due to the time he spent traveling the globe in search of ‘treasures.’ When they completed their studies, and each embarked on a distinguished ‘career’”—he paused over the word, and glared sardonically at Lancashire—“they corresponded frequently, Dr. Edmonds from London, and Sir Alfred from all over the world. When Alfred finally ‘retired’ here, to work on his endless translations, and catalog his vast collections, the two of them, along with several other scholars of note, formed the Atheneum, a philosophical society.”
