Can you really not yet know, Fos?
Tell me!
We all have a job to do, and ours has been to undertake the telling of this story. Still, there are days in any job when you want to turn away, to leave unfinished what must be done, to leave unsaid what must be known. We will tell you, then, that it is not yet time for you to rest. You have baled hay, you have painted matches, you helped narrate the beginning of our story, but you are being put back to work one last time, Fos. Your body still has some use in it.
I do not understand.
If you will know, then, look ahead with us an hour. See that clumsy black dog digging furiously under the fence separating two backyards on Nile Street? He scratches down a few inches, thrusts his muzzle in to measure, paws more red soil, snorts into the hole he’s made. It is too much to ask of a dog that he remain indifferent to fresh meat, especially when his master is out of town and the servant boy forgot about his dinner. He scratches and scratches until the hole is big enough—see how he wriggles through and ranges about the yard? A few perfunctory sniffs take him straight to a plot of fresh-turned, shovel-flattened earth. The dog spins in a frenzied circle once, twice, three times, then turns up his snout and howls ravenously up at the moon. At the sound, a doctor, upstairs in his library, pauses before his glass-fronted cabinet, where he has just selected his largest saw.
What does any of this have to do with me?
Ah, Fos. You will learn soon enough.
II
A HOUSEHOLD DIVINITY
“… the heart is the beginning of life … it is the household divinity.”
—William Harvey, The Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
IX
A PETITION
God bloody damn!” Whilky Robinson roars into the empty coffin. “Where is she?”
Pink’s eyes fly open. From where she fell asleep before the fireplace, she scents red-eyed, sour-stomach danger in the room, but not fast enough to outrun it. Danger has her by the hair and has smashed her face against the coal bin in the time it takes to say “eek.” Pink knows; she tried to say it. But the word drowned in a thick gulp of blood.
“I ask one thing! One thing!” he shouts down at the ball she’s curled herself into, and kicks at its spine. “Watch a bloody dead woman. So, where is she?”
Pink inches herself toward her corner. She’s never seen her Da so mad; even Mike, hissing under the table, is afraid of him. She glances up at the tin clock. Quarter to five; time for them to light the fire and fix coffee. It’s coming back now. Dreaming of her mother. Fos in her coffin. But how could it be that Fos is gone?
“Did she come back to life?” Pink asks anxiously.
“Did she come back to life?” her father parrots. “Did she come back to life? Of course she didn’t come back to life, you stupid little bugger. She’s been stolen! From my very own house! While you were supposed to be watching her.” Whilky rears back a heavy-booted foot and kicks a splintery hole in the flimsy Sunderland Parish coffin.
A crowd of sleepy, tousled lodgers, roused by their landlord’s shouts and Pink’s screams, has gathered at the top of the stairs. Whilky spots Gustine near the front, the only one among them who looks well rested. He lunges for the dress lodger, catching hold of her wrist and pulling her down the last three stairs. “This is your fault!” he shouts.
“What are you talking about?” Gustine struggles against him. “What’s happened?”
“You know damned well what’s happened. That doctor who was here last night looking at your abortion of a baby came back and took—” He sputters unintelligibly at Fos’s coffin. “I ordered him out—goddamned bloody body snatcher!”
“How could that be?” Gustine wrenches her arm away. “How could he have gotten in? Even if Pink fell asleep, the Eye was here. She would have stopped any doctor, and you know it.”
Gustine’s words bring Whilky up short. His fury had been so leveled at Pink, he’d almost forgotten about the blinking fixture on her stool. But Gustine is right: the Eye was here, and the Eye never sleeps. He walks over to where she sits, in her same place, dogged beneath the blue dress. He screws up his face and tries to summon the courage to shout at her.
“What did you see?” It comes out a whisper.
But in all the years he’s never seen Eye sleep, he’s never heard her talk, either. She sits with her feet wide-planted, her heavy ape arms on her knees. Her eye fixed on the floor, she sees again the rat’s shadow creep out with the cheese. Poison, she thinks thickly. Eye. Have. Been. Poisoned.
“What in the hell am I asking you for?” Whilky slams his fist into the wall beside her head, startling a shiver of plaster from the ceiling. “A bunch of traitors and morons, that’s what I keep in my house!” He whirls around, rushing the lodgers on the stairs. “Get out of my sight, every last one of you!”
They flee upstairs, hurriedly dressing, not caring if they reach work fifteen minutes early and have to wait outside for the gates to open. This proves it, rages Whilky. The infernal partnership between doctors and tyrants. Frog eggs were not enough—now the Government wants us to know we are not even safe in death. Why, even as he is standing here, the Tories are lobbying for a bill that would hand the bodies of them that die in the workhouse over to the surgeons for dissection. It’s not enough the Government has taxed the poor man into the workhouse in the first place, has stripped him of his dignity so that he is ashamed to consort with his former friends. Now, if he dies alone and no one comes to claim him right away—or even if they do come to claim, but cannot afford a funeral—he is considered unwanted, unloved, and no more than fodder for the surgeon’s knife. Used to be only executed murderers were dissected, as punishment for the most hateful of crimes. But now it is a crime simply to be poor.
But are the bloody sawbones satisfied with a bill? No! They are so greedy they will steal into a man’s house and take the dead from their very coffins! One was in here last night, prying through Whilky’s things, touching his possessions. God bloody damn! The landlord of 9 Mill Street ranges about his parlour like a lost child, touching his carefully chosen artworks, picking up his Wearmouth West View 25-Year Commemorative milk pitcher and placing it woefully back on the mantel.
Pink notices the change in her father from where she crouches behind the coal bin. Mike too senses it, and creeps slowly out from beneath the table. Whilky Robinson cocks his big square head and turns his palms up to Heaven, and (oh God, gasps Pink, tears!) fat tears ooze from his stinging hungover eyes. I am not safe, even in my own house, he thinks. If They can just come in here and take whatever they please, what is left for us? He drops heavily onto his stool, surveying what used to be his kingdom but which has turned overnight into a pathetic hovel fit only for a pathetic, powerless man. They have gone too far this time, he whimpers. They have gone too far.
Sucking the blood from the tooth her father knocked loose, Pink inches around the coal bin to marvel at this stranger sitting on her father’s stool. He has Da’s red hair and wears Da’s jacket covered with medals, but where is Da’s bluster? Where is his pride? Mike rears back on his hind legs, gingerly sniffing, as if he shares Pink’s confusion.
She creeps out a centimetre more, and abruptly her father’s gaze turns to her.
“Comfort me, Pink,” Whilky Robinson wails, reaching out his arms to his dazed and bleeding daughter. “Yer Da has been violated.”
Dr. Henry Chiver saws through the sternum along the median line, taking care not to nick the soft organs beneath, and skirts the bottom of the rib cage. This one’s bones are frail, he thinks as the saw goes in, not much more trouble than cutting into a large dog’s chest. Setting aside his saw, he takes up a scalpel and divides the intercostal muscles, separates the costal cartilages on each side from their ribs, and carefully cuts through the pleura, which he will have his students examine in a moment. By his separating the two halves of the sternum and raising the cartilages on each side down to the diaphragm, they will be able to see the internal m
ammary artery, the intercostal nerves, and the three serous sacs of the thoracic cavity, one for each lung and one for the heart. The lungs, Henry sees, are strangely shrunken in their sacs and lie farther back as if pressed against the spine. Cholera lungs.
“Each sac is divided into a visceral and a parietal portion,” he says, pointing with his scalpel. “The visceral portion lines the exterior of the organ, while the parietal adheres to the cavity that contains it. Both surfaces are constantly lubricated with serum so that no friction might impede the movement of the organ.”
Four heads block his light and he has to ask them to step back again.
“Notice the pleura. It acts like the skin of the inner cavity. It proceeds from the sternum all the way back to the spinal column. It forms a septum, here; and here it adheres to the pericardium. Here it gathers around the root of the lung from which it extends, forming the pleura pulmonalis. This middle section, from the upper thorax, bounded by the sternum, vertebral column, and diaphragm below, is designated the ‘mediastinal space.’ You should be looking, Mazby, not writing.”
Andrew Mazby sets down his notebook with a blush.
“These two shiny gray bands running through the middle of the mediastinum are the phrenic nerves.” Henry plucks them lightly with the back of his scalpel. “They communicate with the diaphragm and the pericardium. As we go deeper into this woman’s body, you will learn the inescapability of symmetry. Nature does not provide one nerve without pairing it to a second. She invests us with two lungs, two kidneys, two eyes, two ears. Even the singular brain is divided into identical hemispheres. Even the heart has two corresponding auricles and ventricles. We are paired creatures. If you take nothing else away from your lessons, understand that. We cannot exist in singularity.
“Now, moving on to the pericardium,” Henry continues when his students nod blankly. “You will note this is not the pericardium of a healthy person. This albuminous film”—he rubs his fingers together, working it into a lather—“I’ve never seen before. And these little bruises, here, are not normal. I would imagine they are factors of the disease.”
“Aren’t we at risk for contagion, standing here breathing in the miasma?” asks Bietler nervously.
Henry shrugs. “It’s all in your attitude, boys. If you are weak and panicky, you will become sick; if strong and resolute, almost nothing can touch you.”
The four students take a step back anyway, and Henry has a good deal more light.
“This woman has no fat around her pericardium, I see,” he says, prodding it with his scalpel. “Notice how the membrane is attached to the diaphragm below, and the thoracic fascia above. The left lung is excavated to fit the heart. Here you can see the external layers of the aorta, the vena cava, and the pulmonary artery.”
Mazby can’t help himself, and reaches for his notebook. The four boys look almost professional in their chocolate brown shalloon aprons and tied-on sleeves. Their deep pockets are filled with scalpels and hooks and other dissecting equipment, which they are all itching to use. Enough talk, they are thinking, let us cut. But Henry is not about to let them mangle this body. This hard-won woman is more than an anatomy lesson; she is Jack Crawford and Isabella Hazzard and all of those he supposes will die after her. She is a study in a new disease.
“I am just going to make a longitudinal incision here, like this,” he says, “and expose the heart.”
Sunk deep inside the chest cavity, the muscle inside is firmly contracted in its left compartments, slightly less so on the right. The right auricle and ventricle are both filled with dark, clotted blood, while the heart in its entirety is rigid and deep red. A cholera heart.
The heavy curtains in the library billow as a cold current of air slides across the room. Henry watches his breath wreathe over the old woman’s open chest, while across from him, Coombs’s eyes disappear behind fogged glasses.
“Here it is, my boys,” says Henry, stepping back from the body for effect. “Cut out an eye, and you will live. Injure the brain, and while intelligence may flee, function continues. You might destroy nerves and tissue and bone and fat, but puncture this organ, interfere with the working of this most primordial piece of man, and all life will cease. Look here,” he says, pointing to the clenched left auricle and ventricle that speed blood to the rest of the body. “You will almost always find the left chambers contracted in a cadaver, because the last impulse of the dying body is to infuse itself with blood. The heart reaches out to the extremities. It dies fighting.”
Henry stares down at the organ that has been the singular fascination of his life. He has learned a hundred reasons why the heart should stop beating—a mortal wound, strangling fat, a blockage in the arteries—but he cannot conceive of a single reason why it should start. The fetal heart emerges first from chaos, bringing with it brain, lungs, bone—but by what celestial magic does it call itself into being? If only a doctor were like a geologist, who every day finds another ancient species impressed in stone; if only Henry might lay a bit of clay over a dying heart and take a fossil of the soul, surely he could find the secret of the first heartbeat impressed upon the last.
“Except for its sunken position and the clotting, which must be due to the disease,” he forces himself to go on, “this is a structurally normal organ. We might expect to find considerable fat deposits between the muscle fibers and the serous layer, but fortunately for us, this woman’s heart is emaciated. You’ll notice it is vaguely conical in shape, with its base looking upward, backward, and to the right side of the body, its apex facing forward, down, and to the left, resting on the diaphragm. Now, descending into the upper right auricle, here, is the vena cava. …”
He hears himself explain the principle vessels—aorta, pulmonary artery, vena cava decendens—yet handling this normal heart only turns his mind toward the aberration at Mill Street. He has been thinking of that child non-stop since he saw Gustine’s dress hanging above that horrible one-eyed creature who follows her everywhere—there could be no two such alike dresses, certainly no two such alike old women in the impoverished East End. Why did she not tell him she lived in that house? What reason would she have for not admitting her proximity to that child? It is beyond puzzling—it is downright deceitful, when she knows how interested he is in studying it. Stop, he thinks. You are becoming greedy. Concentrate on the body at hand.
“… And the pulmonary artery, here,” he continues mechanically, “speeds blood to the lungs, where it undergoes a chemical process that changes it from a dark to a florid color. This clean blood comes back into the left auricle and ventricle, from whence it is pumped through the aorta to be distributed to all parts of the body. Now, the walls of the left ventricle are about three times as thick as those of the right—”
Henry is interrupted by a soft knock on the door. He looks up angrily. What is wrong with Williams? He knows not to disturb him when his students are here.
“It’s me, Henry,” a clear voice announces. “I am sorry to disrupt your lesson.”
Henry and his four students look up to see a young woman neatly turned out in a brick red poplin dress. She stands in the doorway, pale with resolution, for she has never been allowed inside her fiancé’s inner sanctum, and trembles now at her own audacity.
“My God, Audrey, what are you doing here?” Henry yelps. His students, blushing to the roots of their hair, instinctively shift to block the naked body from view. The blood-spattered doctor flings down his scalpel and comes around from behind the table.
She swiftly throws up her hand to stop him. “I am here only for a moment, and it is to see your students.” She shifts her focus to the four boys standing shamefacedly before the corpse, looking at the sawdust-strewn floor, at the bookshelves, anywhere but at her. From the pretty silk reticule she carries, Audrey draws forth a quill pen, a little pot of ink, and a crisp piece of parchment. Careful schoolgirl handwriting covers the top quarter of the page, but the rest has been left blank—except for a single name, in the same hand
, written beside the number 1.
“I have never met any of you before,” she says, as though she’d been practicing the speech. “But you mustn’t think of me as an excitable girl, to be disturbed by the realities of medicine. Think of me instead as a woman who shares her future husband’s belief in his work—no, who even more than shares: as someone who honors it above all other professions.”
But if Audrey’s heart honors her fiancé’s profession, her nose rebels against it. The gassy, gamy scent of flesh is so strong in the room that she is forced to lift her handkerchief to her nose or risk having her gorge rise in her throat.
“I have begun a petition to be circulated around the town,” she continues. “My own name is first, and I thought Dr. Chiver’s students might appreciate having their names affixed next.”
“Audrey,” Henry demands roughly. “What on earth are you talking about?”
She lifts her head proudly and turns to him with shining eyes.
“Like the intellectuals you spoke of in Dublin, I have begun a body donation drive. I plan to secure you and the doctors of Sunderland as many donated bodies as you need so that we might end, once and for all, that unholy practice of body-snatching. My own name, willing my body for dissection, is first.”
Bietler can’t help himself: he lets out a strangled nervous bleat.
“What are you talking about?” Henry shouts. “Have you gone mad?”
“I am doing it for you,” Audrey says uncertainly. “There are rumours on the street today—I heard them doing my charity work—that another body has been taken in the East End. Every doctor in Sunderland is under suspicion. If people will only donate—”
“People won’t donate, Audrey.” Henry is so embarrassed by her behaviour, he is beside himself. “And it is certainly not a suitable cause for you to espouse. You are a woman; it is inappropriate for you to even know of such things.”
“But I do know,” she replies heatedly, forgetting for a moment the presence of his students. “And it does affect me if my husband is forced into immorality because of other men’s superstition.”