The Dress Lodger (5 page)

At this last table. Far back in the dark corner. That night a month ago they sat at this same table for two bound by a broken chain of round, white water stains. Usually this table beckons those that come in via the Church Walk. Two came in tonight, a different two will come in tomorrow night. They can tell it’s a table for hiding, it’s a table where a glass can leave a stain from not being lifted and toasted of an evening. Back here it’s dark enough for those that have just buried a loved one to cry a little more, or to hide dry eyes if not crying is what they feel bad about. With the Church Walk only two narrow alleys away, the Labour in Vain sees its share of burying customers. John Robinson got the chills the night Gustine sat down with the wild-looking, mud-spattered doctor. He always thought it foreboded something ill if an unbereaved couple picked that table to sit at; it was like courting certain death in the family, or at best a crippling accident, and he didn’t like it. Of course, John Robinson couldn’t know that that night they’d had a right to the burying table.

But back to work.

He turns over the chair that held an eager, animated Gustine. Sweeps beneath it. He lifts the chair upon which sat Henry, whose heart that night raced with fear and laudanum. John Robinson remembers serving him gin after gin, with sugar cubes for Gustine. He can still see them clearly: Gustine leaning in, her small pink tongue playing around the edges of the sugar cube clamped between her teeth; Henry taking suicidal gulps of gin, talking crazier and crazier, looking over his shoulder as if pursued by the Devil. John Robinson remembers glancing around for the Eyeball, waiting to see if she would step in and steer Gustine toward more profitable customers; but the Eye merely watched from the corner, patient and implacable.

The proprietor sets Henry’s chair and sweeps out a few stray frogs before heading downstairs to perform his nightly transubstantiation of vinegar and lead into wine.

And now, dear readers, the Labour in Vain is quiet. We have it all to ourselves until John Robinson comes back to lock up and blow out the last light. Perhaps since we are finally alone, we should take this opportunity to make an apology. When the body of a story is stretched out before us, we who are new to the telling of tales sometimes don’t know where to make the first cut. Which is the best way to enter? Shall we plunge deep into the heart of the matter or begin systematically with the extremities? It is clear to us now that we have opened this particular story in the wrong place. We realize now that it would have been better to have begun a month earlier, not among the jostling wicker baskets of the marketplace, nor picking our way through an explosion of river frogs that provides the ribbiting backdrop to our narrative, nor even beneath the great Wearmouth Bridge where Gustine found the means of returning to Henry. No. How much wiser to have begun a month ago with their first encounter, on a night Henry wishes to push aside forever, but one Gustine cherishes like a pressed flower. Since it is impossible to take back a cut once given, let us then trick time. Let us use this back corner table that has absorbed so many sad cemetery tales as a talisman, and learn of it the story Henry told Gustine the night of his failure, the night he brought her here and changed both their lives irrevocably. Readers, touch your hands to it like a seance table and allow it to lead us back to a dark night in September. Slowly back. Go slowly back. Do you see yourself strolling along the Church Walk, through the acclivitous shadows of orphanage on our left and workhouse on our right, down to the inevitable caesar of this grim triumvirate, the Trinity graveyard? Are you prepared to begin again with the story our table has to tell?

The moon shines eerily on a false chemical winter, the alternate night of our beginning. Emaciated box shrubs stand stiff and defiant against the white sky, the lead roof of Trinity Church gleams like quicksilver. All is cold and silent and dusted white. With the cholera scare, by order of the new Board of Health, the sexton must mix great shovelfuls of quicklime into the mounds of earth that partner all fresh six-foot troughs to corrode diseased bodies into instant bones. We may have watched him of an evening chop and turn, heave and pat, raising pure white drifts throughout the yard, and when he was done, drive the flat headstones into place like sledding accidents gone face-first into snowbanks.

The sexton’s dog, who is usually left tied up to warn off intruders, who would at the skittering of a squirrel or the fluttering of a mourning dove bark until all the veins stood out on his muscular neck, died two weeks earlier from gnawing a brick of unbroken lime. The sexton himself is down with the ‘flu he periodically picks up from the bodies he handles and is sleeping it off at his sister’s house. It has been two hysterical years since Burke and Hare were caught; the town has calmed down; the graveyard, no longer patrolled, is once more the exclusive domain of its tenants. On the alternate night of our beginning, as Henry creeps across the town moor, crunching through shimmering floes of broken glass, skirting the ghostly skeletons of dumped cattle given their last rites by rats, his is the only ghost that stirs.

(Later, at the Labour in Vain, Henry will tell Gustine that the laudanum he took to calm him for the task had, in fact, the opposite effect. Once he had leapt the cemetery wall, he had the sensation of skiing wildly through the night, of trees and stones and shadows rushing too fast past him, of time itself speeding downhill. He carried a burlap sack, a shovel, and a crowbar; he could feel the sweat running down the back of his neck and realized his arms were shaking from clenching the crowbar. Henry later told Gustine that he made an enormous effort to slow his racing heart.)

Despite the frozen look of the land, it is not cold. The soil gives off a damp chill from the previous night’s rain but the warm air soups a lazy white fog in the hollows between mounds. Henry moves efficiently through the thicket of last century’s gravestones, barely glancing at the names. There had been no feared epidemic to frost these graves with lime, and Henry moves past them quickly. He needs to select his grave as he would a fresh fish, and he knows that a young woman, first cousin to the couple who took the back table at the Labour in Vain that night, was interred this morning. The couple looked so wretched he doubted they could have afforded a sturdy coffin. Probably the cheapest of nails and few enough of those. He wants only to finish this awful thing, to slap the wet body onto the slab and say to his students, Here, I have done it. That I may not ever again be accused of conspiring with murderers, I have dirtied my own hands with grave soil, I have carried the dead weight of a body on my own shoulders. That I may never again be accused.

(Have you ever taken laudanum? he will ask Gustine later, sitting with his elbows on the same back corner burying table where earlier he had narrowed fragments of that grieving couple’s conversation into a point on the map of Trinity’s graveyard, a brilliant patch of earth buzzing as though freshly sifted with cocaine, underneath which sleeps a pale first cousin. No, she will shake her head. I never have.)

Henry is so dizzy he hardly knows how his shovel makes connection with the soil or how the first clod of earth comes to hit his boot. It rained the night before and the dirt is heavy, pregnant with earthworms and busy black pill bugs, but he digs and digs like a man possessed. At last, he is doing it. He is the teacher now; he is doing what Sir Astley Cooper never had the guts to do, what Knox would rather pay professional murderers to do. Time moves in fits and starts as he digs deeper and deeper, not the required six feet, barely four, when his shovel strikes home. He flings it aside, wedges the crowbar beneath the floor on which he stands, prying back the coffin’s lid with a loud crack of splintering wood. At last. At last, he kneels, looking upon his prize. Shrouded in a length of filmy linen from which a few strands of long brown hair escape over her shoulders, she sleeps on her right side, dreaming of angels and hot cups of tea and a comfy seat at the sandal of God, the usual poor person’s dream of Heaven. He can reach in and touch the rounded curve of her hip, embrace her narrow shoulders. He could climb in beside her and pull the dirt over them both like a blanket.

He gently rolls the girl onto her back and reaches around her waist to draw her up. But barely has he gotten his arms around her when he feels this girl is spongy underneath, her winding sheet wet and reeking. Mary Paterson? he whispers, breathing in the unmistakable smell of cheap whiskey. I left you behind in Edinburgh.

Henry drops the body sharply against the coffin and scrambles back to the surface. This isn’t happening. Calm down. Calm down, he tells himself. Men far less competent and careful than you have dug up bodies and not been driven mad by it. Reach in, feel under her armpits. Pull. Yes, this is not the smell of rye, but merely a ripening body not yet preserved in salt. This heaviness I understand; it is not a frantic pulling back to the grave but the purely scientific phenomenon of blood pooling in the extremities. He lies flat on his belly and tugs the young woman free of the earth. Now that he has her above ground, he sees she looks nothing like the one for whom he almost mistook her. By laudanum moonlight, the similarity in height and hair coloring had been uncanny, but it was a momentary terror; he has composed himself now. He eases his bag over this first cousin as gently as he might help a lady into her cloak. I have only to fold her gently into this sack, replace this earth, climb this wall, and fly across the town moor. I have only to secure seven more first cousins for my students before the school year is out.

Knox holds the purse strings Chiver saws the bow With hearts as black as sin And hands as white as snow… .

One of the many songs the balladeers wrote during the trial coupling his name with Knox’s is stuck in his head. He works quickly to refill the grave, sending shovelfuls of earth into darkness. His hands, he realizes, have become uncomfortably hot, and when he looks down, to his dismay, they are white as snow. Henry could shake himself for his stupidity. Even the most witless hireling would have thought to wear gloves before he dug around in a poison-laced graveyard. Henry wipes his raw, quicklime-corroded hands on his white powdered jacket. He tears open his contaminated frock coat, pushing against the cool white shirt, and leaves hot bloody handprints against his chest. He needs to wash this off fast; his hands—his surgeon’s hands will be eaten away. He frantically refills the grave, but there is no time. Flinging aside his shovel, Henry lunges for the bag of first cousin— they must get out of here. But when he lifts his hard-won prize, the burlap sack runs with clear yellow whiskey.

No! Henry cries, flinging the bag back into the half-filled grave. He pushes hard against the chemical snowdrifts, stumbles and falls on a hard stone marker, cracking his lip, instinctively touching his searing hands to it and igniting his mouth. Stay away! Just behind him he hears a stampede of stumbling, heavy footsteps, he feels the heat of breath against the back of his neck, reeking of filthy rags, sweet drugged-gin, yellow-tongue, headachy anger. It overpowers the putrescence of the graveyard, coming closer and closer, the fetid breath that hid in the mouths of all sixteen corpses delivered to Dr. Knox’s school. He scrambles up and over the high brick wall, leaving far behind cousin, crowbar, and bag. He looks back and finds himself face-to-face with whiskey-bloated Mary Paterson and the furious, limbless gang of sixteen.

(They had followed me, you see, he will say to Gustine later at the Labour in Vain, watching pass over her thin intent face the masks of those beggars, all murdered over two yeafs ago in that cheap Edinburgh boardinghouse, crept up upon and suffocated while passed out drunk, consigned not only to haunt the living for evermore, but to do it with crippling, bloody, eternal hangovers.

How could I have not known they were murdered? he will ask her as if expecting an answer. When Burke and Hare brought bodies so fresh that blood still foamed at the mouth and dripped from the nose? Why didn’t I ask the question we all had on our lips when six-toed, cauliflower-eared Daft Jamie, beloved by all boys and organ grinder monkeys for his liberality with cashew nuts, went missing from the street, just at the time a headless, footless corpse appeared on Dr. Knox’s dissecting table? Or go to the police the night they arrived with a grandmother and a twelve-year-old boy folded into a pickle barrel, whose bodies had so obviously set into rigor mortis while inside that we had to smash the barrel before we could free them? Or cry out when they presented us with the naked body of a prostitute I’d been with only the night before—giddy and beautiful and very much alive—folded inside a tea chest, franked with threads of moldy black pekoe? She is almost too beautiful to cut, Dr. Knox had said, calling in an artist to paint her as a cadaver odalisque, preserving her in a trough of whiskey for three months so that his students might explore her perfect musculature. How could I deny Mary Paterson? Would you have kept silent, Justine?

Gustine, she corrects.

Would you?)

Henry falls running from the wall and never looks back.

It is at the town moor communal pump that Gustine finds him as she is heading home from a long night’s work. She stops by the pump as she does most nights to wash away an evening’s accumulation of gentleman callers and finds a man slumped over at the watering trough, running cold water over his hands and face. He is staring at her so strangely she thinks surely she must know him from somewhere. Henry sobs through the cascade of icy pump water when he sees the pale blue vision advancing on him. I didn’t know. Leave me alone.

Had we only chosen this night as the night of our beginning, we might even have ended our chapter conveniently here at the Labour in Vain, where Henry took Gustine once he realized that she was not Mary Paterson—how could she be—but in fact one of her kind, a creature who might, more than anything else, help him erase this awful night from his mind. Another girl already had a customer upstairs at John Robinson’s, so they waited at the burying table, and while they waited Henry found himself telling this strange blue girl everything about himself. He poured it all out to her: how he fled Edinburgh after Burke and Hare were arrested rather than face the public’s wrath, how doctors must constantly battle stupid, stupid superstition when people should just donate their bodies to Science damn it like he was going to do, like the valiant Jeremy Bentham had done, and how he was a goddamned failure, yes he was, having to face his students empty-handed, and all because he couldn’t secure them a body. A damned dead body. She listened carefully, barely sipping her gin, and when she finally spoke, she surprised him.