Henry steps from behind the table, determined to lead her out of the room. He is stopped by a vehement, high-pitched voice.
“I will sign.”
They are all startled at Andrew Mazby’s declaration. The student’s face is mottled and his lips tremble. How can I disappoint this brave young woman? he thinks, his admiration overcoming, for a moment, his fear of Henry’s displeasure. She is ready to sacrifice her own body for the man she respects most in this world; why should she expect any less of me? He moves to take the paper and pen she holds out, and in doing so exposes to Audrey’s view the sunken-jawed face of the naked cadaver.
“You are dissecting a woman, I see,” she says bravely, stepping past Mazby to observe the open body on the table. “Oh.”
“Audrey, come with me outside,” Henry commands.
“All the more reason for my petition,” Audrey says, taking a long, woeful look at the body on the table. “Oh, Henry, then you won’t have to cut up women you were sent to help.”
Stung by her words, he turns away and says nothing.
“Thank you, Mr. Mazby.” Audrey nods grimly at the young man as he signs his name. “Mr. Bietler? Mr. Coombs? Mr. Grose? My fiancé has spoken so often of you, I feel I might, without offense, solicit your help. Will you not, in the interests of your own profession, publicly donate your bodies for dissection?”
Why doesn’t he thrust this meddling female out of the room, Grose thinks, as he sullenly takes the pen and scrawls his name under Mazby’s. Bietler is equally angry at being shamed into signing away his remains. His family has a mausoleum at St. Peter’s, where the Venerable Bede was laid to rest, an old and established vault into which every Bietler for the last two centuries has been interred. His father is going to kill him when he finds out. Coombs is the only one who signs blithely, completely convinced that with the speed of modern medicine, a cure for death will surely be discovered before it is his time to go.
Audrey nods to the boys and takes up her pen and paper. She throws one last unhappy look Henry’s way, but he does not turn around.
“Let us hope that by example, we will lead this age out of darkness,” she says simply, and pulls the door behind her as she goes. Henry waits a long few seconds before he slams his fist on the table and runs out behind her.
“Audrey! Wait!”
She is at the bottom of the stairs, being helped into her cloak by Williams. His manservant throws the frantic doctor a sly, self-satisfied look, and Henry vows to dismiss him before the day is done. Williams quickly withdraws into the parlour, leaving the two alone in the sunny foyer.
“Henry, how could you?” Audrey sobs, her brave front crumbling at the sight of him. “I promised that woman I was sending help.”
“I went to honour your promise,” he insists, wanting to take her hands, but conscious of the blood and gore upon his own. “She was already dead when I got there. She died of the cholera, darling; there was nothing I could have done.”
“But you didn’t have to steal her in the middle of the night. You didn’t have to make her naked body an object of curiosity for young men.”
“Audrey, you cannot have it both ways.” Henry is so very tired, and he does not want to argue with this weeping woman before him. “You cannot sign away your own body and expect men not to look at it. It is what doctors do. This woman was dead, she had no more use for her body, she was a danger to others in her house, for she very well might have been infectious. Why should she not serve our purposes? Why should something devoid of life not teach us how to save the lives of others?”
Audrey has stopped crying and looks now merely miserable. She cannot articulate what bothered her so greatly in seeing Fos upon her fiancé’s table. Perhaps it was her position, prone and so very vulnerable, just as Audrey had last seen her, glowing in her straw. Maybe it was finding a roomful of men standing over a woman’s naked body, and feeling that their wicked thoughts had immediately transferred themselves to her when she walked in. But more than anything else, Audrey is certain this is all her responsibility. If she had never mentioned the glowing woman and the extraordinary child to Henry, this poor creature would not be here today. She would not be hanging open with her breasts under her armpits and her legs spread apart. She would not have been cruelly snatched from her coffin, if Audrey is to believe the rumours she heard this morning. It is all her fault.
“Did you do it, Henry?” she asks at last. “Did you take her yourself?”
He does not know what to say. He has never lied to her, but then she has never asked a question that warranted anything other than the truth. She places her hand over his heart and looks pleadingly into his eyes.
“I don’t want to get you dirty,” he says, pulling away from her.
“Just tell me you don’t do this yourself,” she insists.
“I have someone,” he compromises on a half-truth, “who knows the neighbourhoods.”
His fiancée lets out a long sigh, relieved that at least he is not the monster. He is only doing what must be done until the laws might be changed; she knew that when she agreed to become his wife. “After my petition has circulated,” she says, fitting her head into the hollow of his chest, “you will be able to dismiss that depraved man.”
He cannot imagine what his darling might think if she knew that the “depraved man” who helps him secure his bodies is, in fact, a woman, younger even than herself.
“Don’t be distressed, dearest,” he murmurs into her hair. “That creature on the table is helping us understand the workings of cholera. In finding her, you may have saved any number of lives.”
But Audrey’s conscience is not so easily assuaged as her fiancé’s. She steps back and tugs on her black kid gloves, lifts her cottage bonnet off the peg by the door and secures it under her chin. She kisses Henry on his un-shaven cheek.
“I will make it up to that poor woman by getting as many names as I can. She was never given the opportunity to volunteer.”
“It would please me if you did not make a spectacle of yourself, Audrey,” Henry calls as she steps down into the street. “I fear we both will be gravely embarrassed.”
She looks him steadily in the eye. “I wish you had as much faith in me as I have in you,” she says, then turns and walks away down Nile Street, as self-possessed as any Queen of Egypt.
Henry watches her until the crowd on High Street swallows her up. A tiny coster girl, her basket stacked high with fist-sized bundles of cress, rounds the corner and smiles at Henry, but seeing his abstracted scowl and blood-soaked apron, she quickly scampers on to the next house.
“Williams!” he bellows, leaning against the shut door. “Bring me a pen and paper.”
The servant materializes as instructed and Henry scribbles a brief note. Is any of this worth it? The sneaking around, lying to Audrey? He needs to know what is being said about him on the street, but it is impossible for him to leave his students right now. They will need to work all day and all night for the rest of the week to finish her, and that’s if that damned Mill Street landlord doesn’t take it into his head to send round the constables. “Do you know the pub the Labour in Vain?” Henry asks his servant curtly.
“Yes sir.”
“Here’s a shilling. Deliver this to the proprietor there.” Henry hands him the slip of paper and heads back upstairs to his waiting students. “And Williams,” Henry adds as the valet pulls on his coat. “It was unpardonable of you to allow Miss Place into my study. Do not bother coming back.”
Williams snorts—as if all the money in the world could get him to return to this charnel house! He buttons his coat and sets off for the Labour in Vain to lift a pint to his liberation. As soon as he’s out of sight of the house, he unpockets the note and reads it. G: I am counting on your silence, wrote his former master. Sunday, let me take you to the country. You would like that, wouldn’t you? And bring the baby. I know you are more familiar than you have said. H.
John Robinson is on a ladder with a paint
pot, touching up his shovel-and-skull street sign, when Williams passes the note up to him. The outside is inscribed “Hold for the Woman in the Blue Dress,” so John Robinson, knowing full well Gustine can’t read, feels it his duty to review the contents. He sits on the top step, his paintbrush clenched between his teeth, narrowly studying the doctor’s letter.
“You don’t understand it either?” asks Williams.
The publican frowns and rights his tipping pot of paint. “Unfortunately, sir,” says he, “I fear I do.”
Audrey first tried her godfather Clanny’s house in Bishopwearmouth, but, poor thing, before she could even open her mouth to state her reason for visiting, Mrs. Clanny, her mother’s dearest friend, whisked her inside for a cup of tea. Have you picked your dressmaker? Chosen your flowers? Orange blossoms surely, for a June wedding, and camellias. Oh, we are so proud of you, like our own daughter, you are. Audrey didn’t have the heart to upset the kindly lady with her petition, so she kept it rolled up in her reticule while she nibbled an almond biscuit and listened to Mrs. Clanny’s opinions on fashion. One mustn’t wear a hat so large that dogs stop in the street to bark at it was the ultimate determination, and as Audrey shook hands good-bye, she vowed to keep that in mind.
She had no better luck with Dr. Haselwood’s wife, or Dr. Dixon’s either. Mrs. Haselwood was upstairs in bed, ill since this morning with a mysterious stomach complaint—they were all anxiously waiting the doctor’s return; and Dr. Dixon’s wife had been shipped off to her sister in Durham. Intrepid Audrey next set off to visit her old school friend Emily Peaverly, who was celebrating her first-year wedding anniversary with the birth of her first son. Audrey lifted the child from his mother’s arms—He looks just like you!—and planted kisses on both red cheeks. She knew she couldn’t possibly speak of death in the face of this promising new life, so once more she kept her petition hidden inside her reticule. She had thought it would be so much easier to bring up the subject with women, for women understand the importance of small heroic acts, and even if they would not themselves sign for fear of displeasing their husbands, they would applaud Audrey’s sacrifice for her own intended.
But now it is three o’clock and she has no new names upon her petition. She has watched the other women of Sunderland drink tea, dandle babies, fret the servants with their mysterious ailments, and she has begun to worry she is less a cynosure than she is, perhaps, unnatural. Maybe Henry is right. What business does she have imagining herself dead when others are getting on with life? Her last visit (to her second cousin, who broke down in tears when she broached the subject, and begged her not to speak of such horrible things) has put her out not far from East Cross and Low Street, where among the confusion of corporation offices, her father headquarters his shipping business. Perhaps she might feel comfortable speaking to his old employees, who have known her from girlhood and might sign their names out of personal regard and loyalty to her father. Yes, she’ll give it one last try. She turns her steps toward the muddy, inelegant corporation complex, where the shade falls heavy and mobs of gulls scold from red-tiled roofs.
Place Shipping, her father’s company, prides itself on having the lowest ratio of shipwrecks to years in operation. Only 6 of its clippers have gone down in the last decade, with a loss of life amounting to 114, while Sunderland as a whole has accumulated a far worse record (the unofficial count standing at 107 ships wrecked out of 600 in the last two years alone). Most of Sunderland’s overcrowded, leaking, slapped-together vessels are destroyed along the coast route ferrying coal from the Tyne and Wear down to the Thames; but all of Place Shipping’s accidents have occurred in the rough waters of the German Ocean, sailing to or from Riga, where the ships take iron rails and return with large clouds of Baltic flax. Audrey’s father, Captain Place, is one of the least hated shippers in Sunderland; he racks up the fewest fines for overcrowding, serves the least adulterated coffee, and has consistently had the lowest mortality from phthisis of any mogul in town. Though an owner, once every year or two Captain Place even takes command of his fleet to prove that he has not lost his feel for the sea. He set sail for Riga in late May of this year, despite reports of the cholera there, and was due back in early September. The Audrey Eliza, his ship, got trapped behind the Quarantine and neither the company nor the family has had news of it in over a month.
Audrey climbs the narrow stairs to the third floor, where Mr. Harrison, the company’s bookkeeper, answers her knock. She smiles wanly, for of all her father’s employees, including the rough-and-tumble sailors who load the ships, Audrey has always liked this man least. He has a round billiard ball face and a waxed mustache, and wears the most hideous green plaid suits.
“Miss Audrey Place!” Mr. Harrison exclaims, unctuously bowing her into the office. “We haven’t had the honour of yer presence in ages.”
She’s only come to her father’s office a handful of times, to drag him off to lunch or scold him for working too late on a Saturday. It is strange to be here without him. Four desks, three of them empty, are crowded with crates and ledger books. Cobwebs flutter from the beamed ceiling as Mr. Harrison closes the door behind her; sunlight, where it angles in from the windows, bleaches a stack of old newspapers swimming with silverfish. It smells masculine in here, but in a sour day-after-a-bender sort of way. Audrey is certain her father would disapprove.
“I am surprised to find you alone, Mr. Harrison,” Audrey replies politely. “Where are the others?”
“Left early today, miss,” he replies, helplessly shrugging his shoulders. “Little to do wi’ yer father and the fleet still away.”
“So you’ve had no letter either?” she asks.
“Not a word.”
“Mother tells me not to worry,” Audrey says with a sigh, absently removing her bonnet and gloves, “but I confess, Mr. Harrison, I am growing concerned.”
“I’m sure there’s no need for alarm, miss,” he says, taking her things and pressing her into a dusty chair. “Sit! Sit! We’ll be hearing from him any day now.”
Mr. Harrison pulls a chair out for himself, catching a glimpse as he does so of the bottle of mercury pills he’s left sitting on his desk. That stinging in his privates had meant exactly what he feared it meant, and the apothecary has put him on yet another course of quicksilver. God damn that night under the bridge, thinks Mr. Harrison, whisking the bottle of pills into his coat pocket before his boss’s daughter sees. What he wouldn’t give to get his hands around that little whore’s throat.
“So, what brings you down here among us working folk?” asks Mr. Harrison, scooting his chair around and crossing his legs so that one of his green plaid knees is just touching Audrey’s. It’s a harmless game he likes to play, and hasn’t Miss Audrey grown into a fine-looking young woman? She sits with the low winter sun behind her, igniting the red in her molten gold ringlets. Yes, indeed, how fetching the boss’s daughter looks, thinks Mr. Harrison naughtily.
Certain Mr. Harrison must not realize his proximity, Audrey tucks her legs a little farther under her skirt. She glances uneasily around the office; the chairs at the other desks are dusty too, as though they have not been sat upon for days.
“I was hoping to have a word with all of my father’s employees,” she says, setting her reticule on her lap. “About something very dear to my heart.”
“Well now, you might have a word wi’ me and I’ll certainly pass whatever it is along,” says Mr. Harrison with a little pat to her knee.
I will speak of it, she decides, flinching at the pat. It is time to be brave. Audrey snaps open her reticule and draws forth the petition. She sets it on the desk before her, then folds her trembling hands primly back in her lap.
“As you probably know,” she begins, colouring slightly, “doctors have an imperfect understanding of the human body. They might learn a great deal from books, but it is the intensive study of physical anatomy that advances Science. How unfair it seems to me that the burden of such study must fall, as it does now, solely on
the backs of the poor. …”
Mr. Harrison is better with numbers than he is with words, but as he labours over the handwritten petition, a strange flush comes upon him. His mouth goes suddenly dry, his groin grows hot, and he is forced to rearrange his coat so as not to embarrass himself. To dispel superstition and light the lamp of anatomical inquiry, I hereby will my body to Sunderland Hospital for respectful dissection, so that it may be of use … Be of use? He glances up swiftly at the boss’s daughter. He can just imagine what sort of use a lovely body like hers would be put to—stretched out naked upon a table, alone in a roomful of men. Why, what’s to stop a randy medical student from fondling those parts of hers that—from climbing up and—from doing whatever he desired, with no resistance whatsoever! To be of use? Does she realize what she is suggesting with this petition? All the names set upon it are men, he sees, except for hers.
“Miss Audrey, when did that pretty little head of yours turn so morbid?” He laughs nervously. “Your papa needs to come back and speak sense to you.”
“I assure you I am in great earnest, Mr. Harrison,” Audrey says, a little offended by his laughter.
“You expect the people of Sunderland to line up for a carving? Just because of this piece of paper?” He cannot look at her now, too afraid she’ll read the rush of lust in his face. “I don’t like to imagine those dirty little boys hacking up such a fine figure as yours. As for myself, I can think of a hundred better things to do with it.”
The silence is oppressive in the empty room, broken only by a solitary gull landing awkwardly on the windowsill. My God, thinks Audrey, my father’s employee is making an advance at me. His knee is pressed against her own, and when she moves, his leg follows. This is wrong, thinks Audrey, rising swiftly. I must get out of here.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Harrison,” she mutters, moving for the door.