The Dress Lodger (28 page)

“The cadaver under the bridge, the woman in your lodging house, they were only bribes to secure my help?”

“I thought it was a fair exchange: what you want for what I want.”

“What is it that you want?” he asks cautiously.

“Life for my son.”

She says it so simply and with such complete confidence in his abilities, Henry is momentarily at a loss for words. Life for her son, as if she desired him to make change for a crown or pick her an apple. Henry reads in her face the same implacability her customers find when they seek to leave without paying. “Gustine,” Henry shakes his head, “there are medical limitations—”

“Watch this,” she interrupts, digging her fingers under the baby’s ribs, tickling him mercilessly. The child wriggles, and as he squeals with laughter, his blue packet of heart spasms up and out, leaping into his neck. It appears not properly anchored in the chest, but freewheeling, like Aristotle’s wandering womb. “It happens when he cries as well,” says Gustine, pulling down his gown. “Joy. Pain. You can read everything he is feeling by the beating of his tiny heart. He can’t survive so wide open. You must help him.”

“Let me see him,” Henry says doubtfully, holding out his arms for the small bundle, which Gustine happily hands over. He is unnerved by her expectant, too eager eyes and seeks refuge in case history. “Was the father in any of his parts, deformed?” he asks.

Gustine blushes deeply. “I know nothing of his father.”

“Your pregnancy then,” he backtracks quickly. “Did your routine change, did you see or do anything that might have affected the fetus?”

“I did nothing unusual,” Gustine answers, shaking her head. “I went to the pottery, I put on the dress. I ate bread and butter like always. And a little fish when I could get it.”

“But something must have happened to you,” Henry insists, knowing there must certainly be a scientific explanation for this child’s deformity. “Did you fall? Did you have a bad scare?”

“There was one thing …” Gustine begins but stops herself.

“What?”

“It’s nothing I’ve ever said out loud.”

“Everything is important,” says Henry, mesmerized by the rhythmic beating in his lap. The child coos, contentedly oblivious.

She is loathe to say it, for she knows how it will sound: silly, childish, stupid to one so educated as himself. Thirteen hours of pushing and moaning in the straw of the common room; Pink fell asleep, the midwife fretted about sending for a doctor, only the Eye never budged from where she knelt between Gustine’s legs. She stared and stared and would not take her gaze from that hole.

“He was given the evil eye,” she says at last.

“If you are not going to be serious,” Henry says, a little exasperated.

But the girl insists, “That was it. I’m sure of it. And she will finish him off if I ever give her the opportunity.”

“Gustine, I can’t help you if you won’t at least try to be scientific.” Henry holds the child out to her, but Gustine shakes her head.

“There is no science to explain how he makes you feel,” she says softly. “Hold him closer. Don’t you see? You fit.”

Reluctantly, Henry returns the child to the hollow of his chest, feeling, oddly, the power of her words. Back in Edinburgh, he met an army surgeon whose patient’s stomach was made visible through an old war wound. For years, this doctor fed his patient different foods, on a string, then charted how each was dissolved, and thereby plumbed the secrets of digestion. What might Henry’s career become, given the opportunity to study the heart in that way? Might he not far outstrip Galen (who would haunt the gladiator ring, waiting his chance to observe the torn chests of fallen champions), and advance Science by decades, without recourse to vivisection or the stain of the graveyard?

The heart is the beginning of life, the sun of the microcosm, even as the sun in his turn is the heart of the world, thinks Henry, remembering the words of William Harvey. He looks from the child into the trusting eyes of the mother. She does not realize that she has laid a choice in his arms. He might turn away from this sun, might live by night as he has done since first arriving in Surgeons’ Square, a stunted, shrinking thief and a murderer; or—dare he dream it?—give his talents over to something beyond the grave; become the nurturer of new life instead of a carrion-feeder upon the dead. He might chart patterns of growth as opposed to decay; learn how we live as opposed to how we die. The heart is the beginning of life, thinks Henry, staring down at the babe in his arms. You could be my new beginning.

“I will do what I can for him, Gustine,” he says at last. “But you realize he must remain with me.”

“With you?” This she had not anticipated. “Certainly he can live with me while you treat him.”

“How do you expect him to survive growing up in the East End?” Henry feels he must speak directly. “Suppose he’s not killed by the next fever that sweeps through—how long do you think it will be before he is brutalized by one of the other children there? Can you protect him every hour of the day? Especially when you are working two jobs? He’s not a normal child. He is special.”

“I know he is special,” Gustine says. “That’s why we came to you.”

“Then trust me.” Henry cradles the baby, staring down into his bright blue eyes. “Ever since I left Edinburgh, I have been searching for something that might recall me to life. I longed to leave death behind, but I knew no other way. Now I have found this child, and with a single visible beat, his heart can teach me more than all the cadavers in Sunderland.”

“It sounds like you want to put him to work,” says Gustine, growing increasingly apprehensive. “He is only four months old.”

“He will work, in a manner of speaking,” argues Henry, “I will study him for the good of all mankind. And with me he will be well fed, well clothed, treated as the most valuable experiment in my laboratory. Consider it. His life would certainly be better than anything you could provide.”

His words go straight to her heart. In giving her what she wants, he intends to take everything. “But he is all I have,” she says woefully, feeling her arms empty and aching.

“You will not have him long if you continue to be selfish,” replies Henry, matter-of-factly.

There it is again: the same casual cruelty that made her hesitate to confide in him the other night. She sees her child in Dr. Chiver’s house, hooked up to wires and prodded with needles. Would his life be worth anything, forced to live like that?

“Let me think about it,” Gustine responds, reaching to take back her child.

Instinctively, Henry tightens his grip. “And of course, I will recompense you handsomely,” he says quickly, trying to read her impassive face. “What do you say?”

“I said I’d think about it,” Gustine answers, blushing hotly. “Now give him to me.”

Henry steps back, disconcerted at her vehemence. Why does she set herself against him, when he aims to help her? He is overcome with the most intense desire to shove her hard to the ground and just run across the field, run with this miraculous baby and never look back. She gave him this child—how dare she now demand it returned? Well, he won’t let it go. He won’t.

“Be careful!” Gustine yells. “You’re crushing him!”

Henry sees he has the child clasped so tightly to his chest, the fragile heart is forced to beat sideways. God, what has come over him?

“There is no need to shout,” Henry says, thrusting the howling baby back at her. “I was merely trying to benefit all involved.”

“Please speak no more of it,” says Gustine, practically in tears herself. Oh God, baby—she presses his hot cheek to hers—I almost lost you.

“Of course not, if it distresses you.”

They stand in silence for some time, Henry choking back his rage, Gustine staring off toward the white castle. She feels the sharp edge of Henry’s invitation like a viper in her pocket. And yet. There is a lovely castle in the distance. Here is a hand-packed picnic. He has given a day of his life to please her, shown her riches she’d never dreamed imaginable.

Henry silently tosses the chicken carcass that would have made enough soup to feed Gustine and the baby for a week, finishes her untouched sherry, and packs up the plates. She cradles the baby while he shakes out and neatly folds the yellow plaid lap robe, then both walk dully back to the carriage. This is a miserable ending to a picnic, Gustine thinks, remembering her trembling excitement on the moor only hours ago. She pulls her shawl more tightly around her. It is nearly seventy degrees, but to her, winter has arrived.

Henry cracks his whip and the team jolts forward. Let her slump against the side of the carriage, as far away as she can get; her petulance is wasted upon him. He cuts through the meadow to bypass wretched Hylton Castle and rejoin the Southwick Lane farther along. There is only stubble in the meadow and a scattering of trees, their branches hopping with songbirds misled by the warm weather. Henry’s thoughts are dark. It has been the most insane of autumns—snowing one day, Indian summer hot the next. All of God’s creatures, not only these maniacally twittering songbirds, over-reproduced in the long warm spell, and now that the first frost has come are beginning slowly to starve. There is not enough food to appease the hordes of squirrels, deer, rats, Wearside frogs, and hunger is thinning the ranks. And as with the animal kingdom, so it goes with people. Henry is not surprised disease has come to this overcrowded, filthy town. He knows Nature, like some dissolute Roman empress, loves to binge and purge, every so often tickling the back of her throat with a feather of famine or typhus or cholera morbus.

He is just about to rejoin the main road taking them back to town when from the corner of his eye he spots a structure sitting alone in the middle of the uncleared field. Impulsively, he steers the horses toward it, marveling more and more the closer they come. How very strange. It is a tall marble temple built upon a shallow incline and guarded by an iron gate, the door to which stands open an inch or two. Above the temple grows a single plane tree, spreading its naked branches to shade those who have no more need of shade. The red earth around it looks churned and fresh-trampled as if just quit of a crowd. How odd, thinks Henry. The resemblance is uncanny.

“Why are we stopping?” asks Gustine dully.

“It is a mausoleum,” replies Henry. “Here in the middle of nowhere.” “I’ve had enough death,” says Gustine, turning away. “Keep going.” But Henry drops the horses’ lead and stares, transfixed. With the plane tree shadowing the false Greek temple, and the stones scattered about like ruined columns of a fallen city, this place could have come directly from one of his anatomy texts; all it lacks is an erect skeleton contemplating its own mortality. So isolated, this is surely the abandoned grave site of some old noble family that has moved its dead onto more fashionable pastures, but even knowing that, Henry cannot shake the sensation it is supposed to mean more. Why should we come across a page of my Albinus here in the English countryside? thinks he. What am I to make of this? All around the door, the earth is fresh-trod and the gate has been left half-open. Someone has been laid here since the last rain, which means a body no more than three days old. Have I been led here for a purpose? he wonders, stepping out of the carriage as if in a trance and walking toward the crypt. “Dr. Chiver,” calls Gustine. “Please take me home.” There is a Latin epitaph etched into the marble pediment, darkened into readability by the pollen from the tree above. Et in Arcadia Ego; I, Too, Am in Arcadia. Death follows me no matter where I go, thinks Henry, even here to this idyllic place. But I could turn away. Even if Death lays a trail of bread crumbs, I do not have to follow it. Behind him, Gustine sits miserably in the carriage. I should go back to the horses and drive her away from here, he thinks. But the tracks are so fresh, and the gate is ajar, beckoning, as if commanding him to come forward. This is her fault, he thinks irrationally. It was in her power to return me to the living; instead, she has forced me back among the dead.

He steps through the gate, crushing acorns deep into the mud. Yes, people have certainly been here. Many sets of footprints, a procession maybe; large feet, small, even the tracks of children. The person laid inside must have been highly regarded, a lord or a lady certainly, to command such a crowd and such a mausoleum. He will be no different on the inside, though, no matter how well bred; simply another map for his students, another page of notes, another few jars of floating organs.

“Please, don’t go inside!” Gustine shouts.

The ironbound door squeals upon its hinges as he pushes it open and slowly steps into the mausoleum. The old greed is upon him again; he feels as he did opening the door on William Burke smirking at him, offering Mary Paterson no more than three hours dead, so fresh he had to have her. As he did only moments ago, wanting to strike Gustine and make off with the child as if he were some depraved highway robber. Henry is losing control, and it scares him. Becoming involved with this girl who draws bodies to her like a lodestone, risking exposure by breaking into houses. Now pillaging a grave of God only knows who, because the crypt reminds him of his anatomy book. Turn back now, he commands himself. Before it is too late. But of course he does not.

Et in Arcadia Ego. I, Too, Am in Arcadia. Let us see who the procession of footprints laid to rest, who was mourned inside this facsimile of Albinus, who was left for Henry to find. He hesitates in the semidarkness, reaching out to take what belongs to him. Does his troubled conscience conjure that sudden accusing smell of cheap whiskey like static electricity married to the very dust motes? Or does his fevered mind misgive?

In the carriage, Gustine slumps against the door and draws her child close. She can just make out the doctor’s baffled shadow, as he turns around and around, groping blindly, alone inside the empty tomb.

Last night, while Gustine wept herself to sleep and Henry brooded before the fire, someone nailed a ninety-sixth thesis to the front door of the Sunderland Corn Exchange. Hammered rudely over the medical exhortations—”Do Not Drink, Incontinence Is a Friend to Cholera Morbus”; and “Avoid Pickled Pork, Especially at Dinner”—the resistance flyer sported a noblewoman dressed in the overwrought mode of last century, her wig teased to celestial heights, her skirt barely contained by the poster’s frugal margins. We should more properly say the flyer depicted half a noblewoman, for only her left side enjoyed the excesses of fashion. Her right side was another creature indeed: from the roots of her hair and the seams of her dress, a hideous skeleton emerged clutching a spear. In great red letters, the caption read: