He pours a cup from the strong sugared pot boiling in the fireplace, and sets it before her. Carefully, she cools a bit in a saucer and holds it to the baby’s lips, hoping to tempt him, but he makes no move to drink, just stares up bewilderedly, looking for all the world like he would cry if only he could only raise the tears. She wishes he would scream or flail about; she could bear anything easier than this fixed, mute suffering.
“What do you expect for that child, Gustine?” asks John, still standing over her. “Ye should’ve drowned it the day it was born, as Whilky said. It has no kind of life.”
“I will give him a life,” she whispers fiercely, holding his two small hands over the steaming cup of tea.
“And if he grew up, what would he grow up to be? An invalid? A monster in a freak show?”
But she has imagined a future for him, she realizes, though she’s never put it in words. “He would grow up like him,” Gustine says, staring at the pitcher upon John Robinson’s mantelpiece: The Sailor’s Tear, her potter’s most popular item. When she stops to think about it, that is how she has always pictured her grown son. A thin, sinewy sailor, healthy enough to leave her behind. The sailor jumped into the ship/As it lay upon the strand,/But, oh! His heart was far away/With friends upon the land. She stands on the shore in a lamé turban with trembling ostrich feather, her matching earrings and necklace flashing in the dying sun, waving him off to war. That’s her boy on deck, all grown up, his arms too long for his jacket, his pants just a bit too short. He’s outgrown every piece of clothing she’s ever bought him, but where most mothers would bemoan the expense, she has always been secretly delighted. Every extra inch of him has been wrested from death, every popped button and let-down hem means another year of victory.
He thought of those he loved the best,
A wife and infant dear
And feeling filled the sailor’s breast
The sailor’s eye, a tear.
Yes, of course he will be married and a father. It took her a while to learn to love his wife, Gustine admits, for she was pert and strong-minded and Gustine hated giving up any place in her child’s affections; but at last she grew to love one who loved her own so well. Lying exposed for all to see, her son’s heart had been the target of too many trifling East End girls, but the one he married never sought to break it. She treated him gently and gave him a son, exactly the same age today as he was that awful cholera winter they had the scare. Oh, Gustine can laugh about it now, but she thought she’d lost him then, so blue and cold had he lain at the Labour in Vain. She lifts his own rosy pink son and waves his chubby fist for him. Be safe! she cries, straining to be heard over the hungry gulls following the boat, but he has already turned away, his eyes averted, his hands warding off the sentiment.
She leaves him there, in the exact attitude of the Garrison pitcher, unable, she realizes, to make out his features in their deflection, or to know his body except in its turning away. She has never seen the face of the man whose life she imagines for her son. He is painted perpetually leaving her.
“Baby?” she whispers, for he has grown awfully still.
The boy John Robinson sent out slips back through the doorway. He hisses to his master, I met her on the street. She’s coming.
“Who’s coming?” Gustine asks, looking up sharply.
John Robinson takes away her cup of tea, pretending not to hear her. “Who’s coming?” she repeats, looking around at the old sotted women, the lightermen, the burly day labourers, who have stopped drinking and fallen silent in anticipation. She’s the one that clout the Eye. Ran away from home; now the Eye’s come after. Should be here any minute. Who needs a ratting? They are getting their fight early.
No, she must not find us here. They must get out fast, before the Shadow of Death catches up to them and finishes her business. Gustine frantically snatches up her poor sick child, pressing his shuddering body to her breast. Why did she think she could trust John Robinson any further than the rest of them? So he spoke a few kind words, so he kept her bed neat; he is still no better than a dishonest bartender and cheap brothel keeper. And her landlord’s brother.
“Excuse me. Please!” Gustine shouts, trying to squeeze between two wooden tables. But it is too late. A girl can only lose her shadow for so long. Even as she breaks free, the door flies open, scattering those who sit nearest. When they discuss it later, no one will remember having ever seen the Eye look so fierce. Blood and snow wind down her forehead across the bridge of her flat nose, pinkly dribbling from her chin. Because the swelling from Gustine’s blow has completely obscured her atrophied eye, her one good one has taken on even greater intensity. She is all vision now, all-seeing single-minded vengeance. She carries the wet reproach of Gustine’s dress in her arms. Climb back in, treacherous rat. Do not make me chase you.
“No!” Gustine screams, warding off the old woman. “Get away from us!”
“Gustine, it’s time to go home,” John says sternly.
But Gustine will not go back. She barrels into the patrons at the bar, shoving three startled labourers into the Eye. The old woman lurches off-balance for only a moment, but it is enough to let Gustine through. She darts through the door and back out into the furious snow.
No! No! We will never go back there. Gustine races down Union Lane and up High Street, while overhead green lightning fires through the low snow clouds. No stalls decorate High Street tonight, no candles gutter in hollowed-out turnips to light her way. The streets are bitter and desolate, emptied of people by the unnatural electrical snow and the contagious fear of disease. She must find someplace to hide. She must find someplace—Oh, please, please! She bangs on a still lit milliner’s window, where deep inside a woman counts money behind a counter. The tidy shop girl screams in horror at the raving muddy apparition, and clutches the day’s receipts for dear life.
“Please help me!” Gustine cries, abandoning the shop. Across the street, a middle-aged man is fumbling with his umbrella and house key. “Sir!” She races over and tugs his sleeve. “Please, I will give you all the money I have if you will let us come in and stay the night.” He throws her off and she skids across the snow. Taking a panicked glance over her shoulder, she sees that the Eye is right behind. Relentless. Automatic. A machine built solely to destroy her child.
She tears down High Street, pounding on doors indiscriminately. Inn-keepers take one look at her child and slam their doors shut. No vacancy. “I have money!” she shouts against vibrating wood. “I can pay!” But the doors do not open.
Gustine is running blindly now, following the silhouette of the river, escape being the only thing keeping her lungs inflated, keeping her screaming legs moving. A string of great smoking tar barrels—set up by the Board of Health to purify the air of pestilence—burns at the intersections of High and Queen Streets, High and Gray, George, Sans, all the way to the corner of High and Villiers. Gustine, like a soldier caught in the line of fire, races to each barrel, pausing long enough to catch her breath before the noxious fumes overwhelm her child, making him gag and cough.
“I am so sorry,” Gustine sobs, when at Bridge the street runs dry of burning barrels. Her baby is shuddering horribly and he sucks in air in raspy gulps. How small and helpless he has become, no bigger than a corncob doll.
Round-eyed gulls, plumped with cold, look down from their roof perches as Gustine paces the final tar barrel, rocking her child and crying. Please be strong, she begs. Please. Up ahead, lightning strikes the great Wearmouth Bridge and grounds to the water, crazing floes of hard black ice, sending unlucky river rats swirling to the bottom. Behind her she hears the Eye breaking the skins of puddles that splash icily behind her, never far behind no matter how fast Gustine runs. She darts right on Lower Bedford Street, then cuts across an alley onto Bridge Crescent. Skidding down the dark muddied embankment, she stumbles over the shadow of the Iron Bridge, nearly landing on her limp child.
On her bare hands and knees, Gustine crawls to safety beneath the ferr
ous arch. She is so cold, she’s lost the feel of him; so blinded by tears, she can barely make out his shape against the snow. But neither tears nor frostbite nor utter physical collapse can erase Gustine’s old ability to see through clothes. Beneath the baby’s sodden christening gown, something stirs; and in the moment of her darkest despair, the miracle for which she has fervently prayed every night of his short life at last is granted. His troubled eyes close, his arms relax, and as Gustine watches, her child’s soft blue heart gently ebbs into his chest and slowly comes to rest. She places her cheek upon the smooth flat landscape of rib and skin, as normal as that of any other child of any other mother.
A long shadow falls across Gustine as she kneels in the snow. She does not need to look up to know who is approaching. She was young and foolish when she first agreed to wear the dress. Eye held out the fantastical blue gown, and Gustine dove into it like a mermaid, surfacing with her arms caught in the sleeves and the laces tight around her rib cage. In the background their landlord was saying to the old woman, I am paying you to keep an eye on that dress. If she steals it, I’ll come after you both. And Pink was saying, You look so pretty. Oh, Gustine, you look so pretty. But once outside, Gustine realized that like a mermaid, she had no voice on the streets or down through the lanes; was barely able to speak above a whisper to the first man, or the second, third, fourth, or fifth of that first night. She called out only once, to the Eye, but her words went unheard, as though she’d never uttered them. Don’t watch this, she begged. Don’t watch me.
“Please go away,” Gustine pleads, struggling to her feet.
But still the old woman advances. Like God commanding Eve to step outside her naked skin and into the shameful life of clothes, she squares off against the girl and thrusts out the dress lodger’s blue gown.
“You need to watch? You always need to watch?” the dress lodger sobs, spinning on the hateful old woman. “Then look what you have done!” And with a cry caught up on the cruel east wind, Gustine counters the body of the dress with a body of her own. That of her precious only child. Cold. And still. And blue.
An appeal to the enlightened citizens of Sunderland,
by Miss Audrey Place
I come before you, my friends and neighbours, to ask your help in stamping out a medieval superstition that pervades our otherwise modern and sophisticated town. In these days of reform and progress, should we still labour in darkness where afflictions of the human body are concerned? Should we condemn our illustrious medical men, who daily risk personal safety for our sakes, to consort with criminals and degenerates because they lack material for study? You know of what I speak; I need not give offense by naming it. Simply let it be known that four hundred citizens of Dublin (a far less superior populace, I believe all will agree) found the courage to throw outdated convention aside and rally to their doctors’ aid. I hereby circulate this open petition, with the hopes that our voluntary gifts will make it unnecessary to trouble the poor, who cannot understand the importance of medical discovery, and have learned, through current unlawful practice, only to fear it.
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 put to use in the service of Greater Good.
Miss Audrey E. Place
Mr. Andrew Mazby
J. Bietler
Thomas Coombs
Mr. Lawrence Grose
James Harrison, CPA
XIV
NEWS
Why didn’t you simply take out an advertisement—‘My Fiancé, the Body Snatcher’—for the entire town to see?” Henry rages, shaking today’s copy of the Sunderland Herald in Audrey’s pale, frightened face. “My reputation—what was left of it, anyway—is ruined. I’ll be lucky if I’m not driven out of town. Why, just now a letter has arrived from Sir James Bietler, removing his son from my instruction and requesting prompt return of payment. What in bloody hell were you thinking, Audrey?”
He has never spoken to her this way; she would not have thought him capable. She desired only to be of use, but it seems she has made things far worse than they already were.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, flinching before his agitated, accusatory face. Only moments ago, he’d burst through the door like a madman, waving the paper, interrupting the quiet tea she was having with her godfather. Mother has not been well, and Dr. Clanny had just put her down with a sedative. He said it was nothing a good night’s rest wouldn’t cure, but with cholera in town, Audrey was dreadfully worried. Now to have her dearest shouting at her …
“And to leave your own name in print,” fumes Henry, “in the company of those men. Who is this Harrison, anyway?”
At the mention of her father’s accountant, Audrey’s mortification knows no bounds. She bursts into tears and runs from the parlour, racing upstairs to the comfort of her old childhood bed.
“Weren’t you a little harsh?” asks Dr. Clanny from the depths of his armchair.
“I spoke to her of it earlier, Uncle, and thought I’d made myself clear. She willfully disobeyed me.”
Clanny sighs and lifts the china teacup to his lips. “It will blow over,” he says mildly. “You are not a body snatcher, after all.”
“Not anymore,” Henry says with some passion, pacing before the fireplace. “After I received the letter from Bietler’s father, I wrote the fathers of my other students returning their fees as well.”
Clanny looks at his nephew incredulously. “Why on earth would you do that? That is more an admission of guilt than anything Audrey ran in the newspaper.”
“I had wanted to handle it privately, in my own way, but Audrey’s petition forced my hand.” Henry stops and faces his uncle. “Death and I are finished. I am giving up my anatomy school.”
“What?”
“I have been wed to the graveyard since I first laid eyes on Dr. Knox, Uncle. I have struggled with my conscience, knowing Science must be served, yet more often than not being its unwilling servant. Only now have I found something that has given me the courage to leave it behind, to step out of the shadows and into the light.”
“And in the meantime, you have thrown over your practice and all you have worked for these many years?”
“They are nothing to me now, Uncle, but so many nightmares. I have come into a time of health, I can feel it—a new beginning.”
Clanny sizes up his disheveled, wild-eyed nephew. Something has happened, but the elder gentleman does not know what.
“Just remember Jack Crawford, son,” says the old doctor, shaking his head. “And be careful your ‘time of health’ is not a further trick of the disease.” Clanny drains his tea, then slowly walks to the front door, where the Places’ girl Crimmons is waiting with his coat. “Go make it up with Audrey,” he says, winding his cravat about his neck and tugging on his gloves. “She only did it to please you.”
Henry watches his uncle walk off to the Infirmary for another night’s rounds. Maybe this has all been for the best. Audrey’s misguided petition forced him into action, when his natural impulse is always to delay. He climbs the front staircase and follows the sobs down the hall to a small bedroom. His fiancée has thrown herself over her large feather bed and buried her face in her enormous grisette woolen sleeves. These new fashions, Henry thinks, remembering the classic Grecian lines of his early twenties; they are so melodramatic. Audrey’s bedroom is much as he would have imagined: furnished with a poster bed, a writing desk, and a full-length pier glass that reflects her wallpaper of rose nosegays. A sentry of dolls, worn and much loved, guard the windowsills from any impetuous lover who might presume to hoist a ladder, while a wooden rocking horse, another loyal playmate, gathers dust in the corner. The entire room speaks of youth and innocence, and Henry feels almost profane stepping across the threshold. Her mamma is down the hall, asleep on laudanum prescribed by Dr. Clanny, and the servant is downstairs. What would they think of his entering her sanctuary?
??
?Dearest?” he asks, made contrite by her misery.
She jumps at the sound of a masculine voice in her room, for no man has ever come here, save her father and good Dr. Clanny when she had mild scarletina years ago. She turns her red, tear-streaked face to him, too hurt and ashamed to speak.
“May I come to you?” Henry asks gently.
She nods and sits up, trying to compose herself. How young she looks, he thinks, with her hair falling across her forehead and her cheeks hot and flushed. Henry feels so lost and awkward most of the time, he forgets that he is nearly twice her age and that he must be the one to guide her. It is his duty to teach her, to check her enthusiasms and save her from horrible mistakes like the one just made. He is as responsible for this mess as she is; for her own good, he should have insisted she rip up the petition, and he says as much, taking a seat beside her on the bed.
“I am sorry you lost your student,” Audrey whispers. “I am sorry I am so very stupid.”
“Oh, dearest, don’t say that!” Henry pulls her close and kisses her pretty white forehead. “You are not stupid, you are just too fond.”
They sit in silence for some few minutes, each awaiting more self-recrimination from the other. Audrey is sorry Henry lost a student, but after all, a gifted scientist like her fiancé deserves better than that ignorant landholder or his cowardly defector of a son. And can Henry refuse to see the courage it took to publish her own name before friends and family in support of his profession?
“We have much to learn about each other’s ways.” Henry gives her a chaste kiss on the cheek in deference to their unchaperoned position upon the bed, and starts to get up. Not that he would ever press an advantage, but he is a little disconcerted at not having to at least fight the impulse. He can’t imagine slinging his slop all over this pink and white little girl’s room.
“Henry, wait.” Audrey grabs his hand and pulls him back down upon the bed. “I am in such dreadful need of comfort. I am really the wickedest of girls.”