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Authors: Catherine Johnson

Sawbones (17 page)

BOOK: Sawbones
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“Gentlemen, scholars!” Lashley announced. “I am taking off the limb here, above the knee. I will be quick, and it will be efficiently and neatly done.” He waved a hand towards Ezra. “You may have noticed Ezra McWilliam, lately the apprentice of the most esteemed William McAdam.”

Ezra looked from Mr Lashley to the crowd in surprise, and blinked. He still was not used to the new name. He had changed it as Dr James had promised legal action should he not, and he thought it still reflected the high respect in which he held his old master.

Whatever his name, he was not used to being made the centre of attention, not at all.

“Gentlemen,” Mr Lashley said again, taking out his pocket watch and handing it to a student in the front row. “Your watches, if you please.”

Ezra passed the flesh knives. Mr Lashley dropped one, which fell among the straw on the floor under the operating table. Ezra scrabbled about, picked it up and passed it back. There was a ripple of sound from the crowd. Mr Lashley coughed and set to work.

The woman screamed. She screamed so loud and so high that Mr Lashley stopped cutting. The flesh was in ribbons, half hanging round the bone. Ezra looked at the woman, her face a mask of agony. Shouldn’t the man be working faster?

“Someone shut her up!” Lashley hissed, and one of the porters took a pad of leather from his pocket and made the girl bite down on it. “Thank God!” Mr Lashley went back to work. Ezra had counted a minute and a half gone already – but the bone was not exposed cleanly, and he had left no flap of skin to close over the stump.

“Artery hook, sir?” Ezra said, keeping his voice calm and low. Mr Lashley needed to cauterize the femoral artery. Right now.

“Can’t you see I’m busy?” Lashley snapped.

From outside Ezra could hear the baby yelling louder than ever.

It was another thirty seconds before the surgeon was ready for the artery hook. The woman’s eyes were round in agony. Her face was wet with tears.

“Bone saw!” Lashley barked.

Ezra passed it over and Mr Lashley began sawing. Time seemed to have slowed into eternity. Another minute and a half and he was through; the ruined stump dropped to the floor.

At last the woman faded into unconsciousness.

Ezra looked from the surgeon to the stump. It was not a clean cut. The audience were nudging each other, speaking low; the whole room was thinking the same thing. Ezra had to say something. Surely Mr Lashley couldn’t leave it at that?

“What would you have us do, sir?” Ezra asked.

Mr Lashley looked at him with an expression that seemed to be pitched between fury and panic. Then, in a flash, his face changed. He smiled, turned to face the crowd.

“Gentlemen! Scholars! I have decided you shall witness young McAdam’s – I mean, McWilliam’s – first surgical operation!” He turned back to Ezra and began untying his apron. “Finish up, boy.”

“But sir, the cut’s not ready to close up.”

“I thought I would see how McAdam’s boy might do it,” Lashley said with a sneer.

Ezra swallowed. “But…”

“No buts. Let’s see if you can follow in your master’s footsteps.”

Ezra stared at him. What was Lashley doing? Of course – he meant to show Ezra up.

He looked at the leg. It was a worse mess than before. And it had been close to four minutes since Lashley had begun his butchery. The woman was now a pale pearly grey, not unlike a fresh cadaver. Ezra felt for a pulse – she was still there, just.

What would the master do? He would have to take some more leg off. If there was a choice between being alive with a shorter stump and dead with a longer one, then there really was no choice at all. But time was running out. The longer an operation took, the less chance the patient had of being alive at the end of it.

Ezra took the bone saw and cut – long, strong, sweeping movements, that’s what the master would have said. His heart was pounding, his blood thundering in his ears, but he kept his hands steady – he couldn’t afford to waste a second. He cauterized the artery as he’d watched the master do so many times before, then flapped up the skin, careful but quick. Then, as fast as he could, he wadded and bandaged the stump. When he finally let himself wipe his face, he realized he was running with sweat. But he had done it; he had really done it. His first amputation.

That was when he realized the crowd was on its feet, whistling and cheering. The men in the front row leant forward to shake his hand; there was an avalanche of applause, of
Well done
s, and
Good show
s, and
The old man would be proud
s. Lashley was scowling but Ezra didn’t care. He could do this! He could do it well. In fact, Ezra felt at that moment that there was nothing in the whole world he could not have done.

From beyond the noise and celebration of the operating theatre there was still a thin high cry, the woman’s baby. Ezra looked back to the table, where a porter was loosing her straps. Another had brought a stretcher, and together they manhandled her onto it like a piece of meat.

“Please! Be careful!” Ezra squeezed back through the crowd. Mr Lashley was there already, looking down at the young woman, a thin smile on his face.

“Take her to the mortuary,” he instructed the porters.

“What?” Ezra looked from Lashley to the girl on the stretcher. Her mouth was slack, her eyes staring, open.

“She’s dead.” Mr Lashley was pleased at last. “No one could survive all that.” He looked at Ezra. “You still have a lot to learn, boy.” Lashley followed the porters and the body of the dead young woman out of the theatre.

In the hall there was a girl holding the baby, still desperately trying to shush it. She came up to Ezra, her face red and streaked with dirt.

“Oh, sir! Is our Nelly all right? Is she, sir?” she asked.

Ezra felt his mind seize up. He could think of nothing. All the joy and elation he had felt only moments before had vanished. The theatre audience swarmed out past him into the courtyard beyond. Some of them slapped him on his back as they left, told him what a fine fellow he was. One of the students saw the look on his face and told him not to worry. “People die on the table every day, you know that.”

He did. He’d seen it many times. But it had never been under his own knife. He wondered when she died exactly. Was it when he cut the bone off, or before? Why hadn’t he noticed? Ezra cursed. He should have known better than to try and clean up Lashley’s mess.

The girl holding the baby was crying too now, sobbing as the little one screeched. Ezra dug deep in his pockets and pressed the half-shilling he found there into the girl’s hand. He was still wearing his apron, stained with blood. What use, he thought, was a surgeon? If someone he cared for – Anna, Mrs Boscaven – got caught in some kind of accident, would he take them to the table, put them through the pain and trauma of an operation? Would it not be kinder to fill them full of gin until they slept and then hold a pillow down hard over their head? Perhaps he should give up now before he killed anyone else.

This was, Ezra was sure, what Lashley had wanted – he was letting the man get to him already! Mr McAdam would never have done that, pitched him in halfway through a procedure. Ezra would not let Mr Lashley’s inadequacies as a surgeon ruin his own practice. He would not.

It was grey outside the hospital, the clouds low and dark, and he turned, unconsciously, towards Great Windmill Street – but of course there was only the shut-up shell of a house there now. No Mrs Boscaven making rice pudding, or Ellen to build and light the fire before he woke. Ezra sighed. He had been featherbedded in every sense. He’d had a laboratory and all the books in the world at his disposal, but now… For the past three nights he had shared a tiny garret with Lashley’s footman in the man’s cold house in Brunswick Square. Ezra imagined that after another few days in those lodgings he might conceivably even miss Toms.

He hadn’t seen Loveday Finch since the night in the graveyard and she had sent no message. But she could find where he was simply enough if she wanted to. Those things he’d taken out of her father’s head… He closed his eyes and tried to shake the memory away.

Grave-robbing – Anna would think him a prize idiot for agreeing to anything so low. How he would have loved to talk to her now. He tried to imagine sitting down next to her on the bench in the churchyard at St Anne’s and explaining all that had happened – four murders in such a short period of time, all of them somehow bound up with a mysterious boy who claimed to be a prince. About Dr McAdam selling the museum and the house, selling him – as good as – to Mr Lashley. About the politics and the Ottoman prince – she would never have believed that. About losing the girl on the operating table… He sighed. Anna would tell him to go back and bear it, work through it. She would have said the girl’s death was God’s will, that no man could have changed a thing. Ezra smiled. He should have liked to see Anna in argument with Monsieur Bichat and his kind, those who saw surgery in the future able to extend knowledge, perhaps extend life, in ways they could only dream of. And Ezra knew he wanted to be a part of that – whatever else happened on the way.

The surgery had been a mistake, he said to himself, and next time he would make sure things were different. Better. Ezra found himself back outside the hospital and went inside, he had work to do. He began to change the blood- and bone-spattered straw that lay on the floor of the theatre. Then he sat close to the brazier and ate his lunch of bread and cheese that had been wrapped up in his apron pocket all morning. He rested his feet on the edge of the stove and enjoyed the feeling of the heat seeping up through the soles of his boots. He drifted off into sleep for a moment. In his dream the baby cried and the girl was dead on the table. Then his boots slid off the brazier and landed with a thump on the floor, jolting him awake.

At that moment the theatre doors swung open and the small figure of Miss Loveday Finch, wearing a black floor-length cloak and a black bonnet, swept in.

“Mr McAdam, I have found you at last!” She was out of breath, her grey eyes shone. “I have so much to say. We are so close to making sense of
everything
!”

“Then truly I am glad for you.”

“Don’t mock me! It was just as I said: the boy was the key. I have written it all down, everything he said, everything that happened in Constantinople, and everything that was in father’s letter.”

“You had it translated?” Ezra sat up.

“Yes, by a very kind young man at the Algerian coffee shop on Swallow Street. His name was George. I had to promise to teach him how to turn a red handkerchief blue.”

“How can you trust him?”

“He had kind eyes, and he said my hair was beautiful. I trust him as much as I trusted you, anyway. And I copied out a translation – which took me a whole candle – and sent it to Great Windmill Street, but you were not there.”

“No.” Ezra looked away.

“But listen –” Loveday ploughed on regardless – “I have great news! Important news. And you must come with me. Now!”

Ezra thought later that if he had been wide awake he would have argued with her, but still on the edge of sleep he merely jumped up, brushed the crumbs from his lap and let her help him off with his apron and pull him out into the street.

“Where are we going?” he asked. “I have to be back for the afternoon lecture. And you must refrain from calling me McAdam – Dr James has waved a hand and made it so, apparently.”

“What should I call you, then?” she asked.

“Ezra will do well enough. After this morning I am not sure I deserve any surname at all.”

“Don’t be such a misery,” Miss Finch said and sped up, running in between the traffic on Ludgate Hill and by St Paul’s Cathedral. She was right. He bit his tongue, but then another thought made him pull her to a stop, just by the junction with Fleet Street. “Miss Finch, please.”

“Call me Loveday.” She stopped and turned to face him. “I think you know me well enough by now.”

“Where are we going?” He lowered his voice. “Because if it is to dig up yet another body, I will not be part of this enterprise.”

“Do you think me quite mad?” she exclaimed.

“Sometimes, yes, I think I do!” The two of them stared at each other, stubbornly, at the side of the road. “Whatever you might have found,” he said, “there is no point any more. I am in no mood.”

She rolled her eyes. “So change your mood, sir, and come along.”

“I am not an automaton!” He raised his voice to be heard above the traffic. “I killed a young woman on the table this morning. I have never done that, yet.” He paused. “You cannot know what that is like.”

“Perhaps not. But you deal with life and death every day, and I don’t doubt, if the poor girl was on your table, that you were her very last hope.”

The traffic swirled east and west and north and south. Cries for apples and pears, nuts and hot pies rang out around them.

Loveday said, more gently this time, “If you want to be a good surgeon, this will happen again – is that not so?”

“Of course.”

“So I am taking your mind off one worry and asking you to replace it with another. Is that so bad?” She grinned at him. “I have found out something, which, in the run of things, may greatly improve your situation, and, in doing so, improve mine own.” She took her bag from under her cloak and pulled something out.

“This is the lead shot that killed your master,” she declared triumphantly. “There are some advantages – only a few, mind – to being a girl. I sweet-talked the coroner into letting me see it and palmed it while he was too afraid or surprised to quarrel with me. I am not sure which.”

Ezra tried to speak but she went on.

“I am certain that you could prove it is of a piece with the shot that killed our tongueless friend, whose name, Mahmoud tells me, was Abd.” She passed it to him and he felt the weight of it drop into his hand. “From Mr Ahmat’s gun, no doubt.”

“This little thing is the cause of all of my misfortune?” Ezra turned it over in his hand.

“Oh no,” Loveday said. “I think you will find your misfortune rests just as heavily on the shoulders of Dr James McAdam of Edinburgh, or your Mr Lashley.”

BOOK: Sawbones
10.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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