The Dress Lodger (44 page)

She makes it only as far as High Street and the corner of Nile before she’s forced to duck back from the road, hide herself and His Majesty behind a lamppost, and curiously peek around. Maybe God loves a poor girl, too, for her Da is not at Fawcett Street uprooting her happiness after all; he is turning onto Nile Street at the head of a grand procession. “Today, the poor man’s revenged!” shouts her Da.

Forty or more of her Da’s friends, brandishing newspapers and swinging axes, tramp down the street. Though Pink knows none of their names, we might recognize among them a fagged Student of Life, all but worn out from chronicling this mess and desiring nothing more than to find a cup of coffee; Robert Cooley, the almost-flayed, hungover and miserable from last night, squinting in the bright morning sun; and Mag Scurr, who has scavenged a few items to pawn from her night’s work. Behind Da, two strong keelmen drag a gentleman kicking and screaming, who to her amazement Pink recognizes as the doctor who marveled at Gustine’s baby. Behind the struggling doctor, two more men follow with a sedan chair. Pink can’t make out who is inside it; from behind, the only clue to the passenger’s identity is a stringy, golden braid spilling from the window.

The men stop before a house that has been through a storm, by the looks of it: its shutters list from their hinges, the panes they were to have protected punched out and left like broken teeth in the snow. Without bothering to turn the knob, Pink’s Da kicks open the unlocked front door. They march the doctor through his ruined parlour, sick and anemic in the dusty sunlight, with broken plaster chalking its Turkey rugs and shattered glass stuck between the keys of the pianoforte. Up the stairs, they push him to the second-floor landing, stepping over the broken banister and cracked posts, kicking in the door to his study. Oh Jesus, cry the men who joined the party late, instinctively crossing themselves if Catholic, spitting upon the ground to honor the Church of England. What sort of sick sod is this sawbones?

Mary, Mother of Christ, whistles Whilky Robinson, surveying the work his people did on the small anatomical study. All sorts of leathery, bladdery things in spirits swim about the room; who knows what they are, except that each one once belonged to a poor man—certainly there’s no blue-blooded pickled parts in here. Broken-spined books: Albinus, Vesalius— who the hell? The landlord picks up Henry’s costly leather-bound volumes and tosses them carelessly back on the floor. Laid out on the hearth in a respectful row are bodies they found in the study or dug up from the backyard: Whilky’s lodger Fos; Reg Smith, taken from Mag’s; Gustine’s brat; and a jumble of miscellaneous bones—most likely dogs and cats, but one can never be too careful. Their greatest piece of luck of the night came, however, when they had destroyed just about everything they could destroy and were preparing to take the bodies away. A lady’s maid came racing down Nile Street, screaming for Dr. Chiver—her mistress had been taken sick, please God come right away! She stopped in horror at the devastation all around her, babbling some story of a nighttime visitor in a blue dress and the news she brought along with the clothes of her mistress’s father. Whilky understood almost immediately that this had been his dress lodger’s doing, and offered to accompany the doctor to his fiancee’s house so they all might be of service.

“Put her over here, lads,” Whilky orders the men with the sedan chair.

And now, twelve hours later, they’ve all come back, conquering heroes leading their captives. Whilky left the vigil at Fawcett Street long enough to drop off his champion Mike, collect more men, and learn that both his dress lodger and her shadow were in the grip of what he’d just quit in Bishopwearmouth. He thought Gustine, no matter how sick, would rejoice to learn her child was avenged; but she didn’t even crack a smile, paradoxical girl that she is.

“Now there, Dr. Chiver,” larks Whilky, dancing Henry’s carefully appointed skeleton about the room and gesturing didactically. “Since you like so much to cut people up, how’s about getting started?”

“This is obscene,” Henry spits. “You have no power to make me do this.”

All jollity gone, Whilky leans in and slaps his newspaper, hard, in the doctor’s face.

“She wanted it. Says right here in the public paper. Now get to work, you infernal sawbones, or I’ll think nothing of taking this ax and striking that smug head right off your bony little shoulders.”

Downstairs, Pink and the Crown Prince have sneaked inside the house and creep up to the second-floor landing behind the crowd of her Da’s friends. Why were they dragging and shouting at Miss Audrey’s husband-to-be? Surely that would make her new friend horribly upset if she found out. Pink’s Da and his friends are crammed into a little room at the top of the stairs, she sees; some are turned away, holding their hands to their mouths. Others—grown men—cover their eyes and look ready to faint. Pink pushes through the press of fustian and corduroy breeches, clutching the Crown Prince for courage. What is her Da talking about in there?

“You thought nothing of taking our dead before they were even cold, as if the poor, along with being strangers to money, had no passing acquaintance with love,” she hears him say. “Well, how does it feel, sawbones, to slice into someone you cared about? Where is your rationality now? How does it feel to be a poor man?”

Henry stands over the body, numb with shock and grief. His once-beautiful girl, now an old hag, with a sharp blue nose and shriveled washerwoman’s fingers; his beloved, still spasming a good hour after her heart gave out, whose arms, in a cruel parody of life, contract across her chest as if in prayer.

“We want to learn too, sawbones,” says the infernal landlord, handing Henry his scalpel. “You taught your students on one of us. Now teach us on one of you.”

Henry stands stupidly over the body of his dearest love, whose devotion to him put her in this place. The landlord commands him to teach. To teach! He almost laughs at the absurdity, when unbidden his words come back—the lesson he gave only the other day. Nature does not provide one nerve without pairing it to a second, he’d said. She invests us with two lungs, two kidneys, two eyes, two ears. The singular brain is divided into identical hemispheres; the heart has two corresponding auricles and ventricles. We are paired creatures, mourns Henry. He took the dress lodger’s baby. She took his beloved in return. He should have realized: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Even revenge is paired.

“Take up the knife, sawbones,” Whilky commands threateningly.

Only the hardest-hearted would not be moved to pity at the doctor’s deep unmanly sobs. There, there, Dr. Chiver. You can’t expect to find compassion in the lodging house keeper’s raw meaty face, nor forbearance in the quivering jowls of Mag Scurr, morgue keeper. But look about you— we know for a fact the crowd contains a few old friends. Don’t you see, peeping over the shoulder of the Student of Life, your grinning, daft-looking chum from Edinburgh, with his extra toes and cauliflower ears? And there, to your right, just past Robert Cooley, that poor pickled old woman with her twelve-year-old grandson? We’ve all of us turned out for the show: those you bought from Burke and Hare, friend Fos, cadaver Liss, and that beautiful naked whore, your reproach Mary Paterson, raining a pool ol whiskey upon your wasted study as she leans in to observe you make the first cut. The horror we see spreading across your haggard face makes us believe you’ve learned the truth at last. Though she is stretched before you on the table, your dearest stands with us now, married to you in a far more final way. Look upon your eternal family, Henry Chiver, surgeon and body snatcher. We will be with you always.

Pink has pushed her way through the crowd of men and finally is able to see what all the fuss is about. The little girl finds herself in a room straight out of her nightmares, with a dancing skeleton in the corner and the floor roly-poly with eyes. She sees her Da, standing behind Miss Audrey’s fiance,

and the doctor himself, knife plunging in, sobbing like a man condemned. She sees a long yellow braid hanging over the side, she sees a limp hand, she sees … “Oh God!—Miss Audrey!”

Pink screams and screams until Mag Scurr, mercifully, leads her outside.

vVhen Fos passed over, she consigned to the ages a few coins, a ticket stub, a well-thumbed Bible: the remains of a quiet circumscribed life. Her possessions were meagre, but riches compared with what a shadow might leave behind. With no money of her own and only the filthy brown dress upon her back, what could the dying one-eyed woman possibly have to include in her Last Will and Testament?

But now that she and the girl have come to terms, now that she has been forgiven, it troubles the Eye not to have something to leave her. She has never had much in her life beyond tenacity and gravity and an uncommon sort of vigilance. But that is something, after all. Instead of money or goods, which have never been hers, she might in this, her final hour, turn her genius of vision upon Gustine, and will the girl a future.

Dr. Clanny leans back in the straw and removes the stethoscope from his ears. “I’ve lost a pulse.”

But Gustine, guarding the old woman as closely as she was once guarded herself, sees the twitch of a thick-padded finger. Come closer, the Eye motions weakly, but is it a genuine gesture or nothing more than the dumb show of cholera tetanus? Pay no attention, the doctor warns, as Gustine leans down and puts her ear to the dying woman’s lips. It’s a trick of the disease.

I am a genius of vision, the Eye seems to say. Look with me, girl, and know the future I see laid out for you. Eye hears her voice inside her head already part of our growing chorus, and for the first time in her life, it sounds rich and eloquent.

We have traveled only two weeks from this moment, the Eye hears herself say, and we find ourselves back here in this very house. My stool by the fire is empty, as is the straw you laid me on upstairs, unclaimed by you or anyone else after I added my old rusty voice to the Great Narration. Half the lodging house is gone—dead in the wave that followed my release, or fled as from a house of horrors, to take the cholera onto Gateshead and Newcastle and Hetton-le-Hole. Our landlord, Whilky Robinson, is nowhere to be seen, though someone heard he was headed down to the Low Quay and Mag Scurr’s pawnshop. Yes, there he is, standing before Mag (their camaraderie during the riot has not persuaded her to raise her prices; five shillings, not a penny more, will she give him for the ripped and stained blue dress he sets upon her counter).

Aw, come on, it’s worth eight at least, sulks he, but she will not budge. Whilky sells for five and leaves the store before Mag’s shears come out and cut the wretched dress to ribbons. We’ll see no more of you, vows she. Of you, we’ve seen enough.

But why did he sell your dress, you ask, you who almost died in nursing me? Do you not remember falling ill inside it, thrashing in agony for several days, crying out to your son, who stretched forth his arms, crying out for your wretched mother and even for me? But though you desired death, it was not yet time for you to come. The doctor who nursed me, nursed you more successfully, and slowly you grew stronger until you had the strength to stand up and walk, and that night you walked out of Mill Street. Don’t you remember stealing out of the house in the dead of night while everyone slept around you, everyone but the little girl in the patched pink dress, whose hand slipped into yours and begged to go along? They were the first words she’d uttered since the fateful day on Nile Street when all hope had died within her.

Two weeks into the future and what a change there is. Look with me across town now, down toward the south near Coxon’s Green. Do you see a tidy adolescent girl in an indigo frock, her hair smoothed back into a demure knot at the nape of her neck, her white nurse’s apron tied in a perfect bow in the back? She stands on a wooden box, applying whitewash to the new fever hospital’s walls, handing her brush off to the younger girl in her own simple blue pinafore, who splashes the stuff all over herself and drips it across the floor. They work in earnest, these two, as if their lives depended on a job well done. They wouldn’t want Dr. Clanny’s faith in them to be misplaced, nor would they want to lose the room they share with the other women who work at the hospital. Nurses are so hard to come by these days, and the doctor thinks you have a natural ability.

And some Saturday nights when you and Pink are buying sausages and coffee down in the marketplace, wiping your greasy chins and watching the crowds pass by, you are treated to a weirdly familiar sight. A pretty miss in a theatrical white gown, with her chin up and her eyes inviting, sets

her slippered feet toward the Theatre Royale or the Bridge Inn. A few steps behind her shambles a broken-down drunk of a woman (her two blurry eyes barely registering the smudge of white ahead) whom Whilky pays in beakers of gin. Three Saturdays later, the white dress has disappeared from the street, you notice, and a jade green gown replaces it, with yet a third old woman, temperate, yes, but birdlike and nervous, and easily overcome by jade green’s greedy punk of a boyfriend. Pale lavender watered silk is the landlord’s last try; but when that one too skips town, he swears off dress lodging forever, thoroughly disgusted by the ingratitude and perfidy of women.

But can the genius of vision see even further into the future? The Eye’s lips move and Gustine strains to make out any individual word. Where most women measure their lives in childbirth and miscarriages, the Eye hears herself say, you measure yours in epidemics. I can see ahead to 1848, when fifteen years later, the cholera, unappeased, comes once more for Britain. You are a matron now, happily married for the past ten years to that sailor who stepped off the pitcher and over the Quarantine. He treats you kindly and you go with him to visit his mother and your son at the Trinity Graveyard, you with no children in tow (your body was too ravaged for that) but happy nonetheless with your job as a nurse and your husband’s love. All the babies you could want live down the street at Pink’s house, where she is the mother of four, nearly a child a year since she married at seventeen a shortsighted, ferrety-looking young clerk who adores her. Your old skills as a dress lodger help you minister to the sick and dying. Those who cannot speak for pain turn to you, and you almost magically find the place that hurts them. It is your gift, and you have learned to use it well. Your family and Pink’s both come through the new epidemic intact, but not long after, word reaches you through old Dr. Clanny at the hospital that his nephew was carried off in London, ministering to the ill in the slums of Stepney. Perhaps it was more merciful this way, says Dr. Clanny, helping you hold down yet another convulsing dark blue patient. Henry was never the same after poor Audrey passed on. Stopped teaching altogether, moved back to his mother’s house. A gifted surgeon, though, his uncle says, shaking his head. Such a bloody shame.