That evening, as a light mist dappled the cobblestones and pushed a chill into the air, Clow and Kierney pulled their dog cart up a steep street, nodding to those they passed. They turned onto Infirmary Street, sighting the hospital and tree-lined Surgeon’s Square just beyond. It lay out of reach of those dirty, rotting streets and was like a world unto itself. The buildings were tall and clean, set with carvings and high windows. No beggars and trash and filth to be found here. The gaslights flickered evenly. Boys meticulously swept the cobbles free of dirt. Over to the right was Surgeon’s Hall and to the left was a tall, narrow building with hooded windows.
Dr. Gray’s anatomy school.
A couple of regal, elegantly dressed men passed Clow and Kierney, snapping open umbrellas and ignoring the men entirely.
Kierney looked over his shoulder at the clock on the steeple down the hill. “Oi, we’re late,” he said.
“Off with us, then,” Clow said.
They pushed the cart over to the rear entrance of the anatomy school, a wind kicking up now and spraying rain in their faces. It was an ugly night, but they’d worked worse. Dr. Gray had need of the complete skeletons of a boy and girl both under ten years of age, and Clow was only too happy to oblige. He had the both of them in stock, just a bit of washing and dusting and those bones were shiny and proper-looking.
They knocked on the door and it was answered by Gray almost immediately. He was tall and stern, with piercing eyes like needles. Dressed in a surgical apron dark with old stains, he motioned them in.
“And be quick about it,” he said.
They brought their crates down the stairs and set them atop a scathed wooden table. Anxiously, Gray opened them and examined the bones within. He studied scapulas and tibias, baskets of rib cage and pelvic girdles with an appraising, expert eye.
“Hmm,” he said. “Interesting… interesting.”
“To your liking, guv?” Kierney said.
“We shall see, we shall see,” Gray said, examining the vertebral columns with a magnifying glass.
Kierney looked at Clow and he smiled. Good old Dr. Gray. A fine enough man in his own way, but a bit fussy, a bit overbearing. But he was no fancy high-hat, and they both knew it. Though he exuded culture, intelligence, and sophistication, they both knew he’d been born in the slums of Glasgow, working himself out step-by-step and putting himself through medical school. Now he was a surgeon and anatomist of no little skill. But when they were with him sometimes, they could still see it in his eyes… that predatory gleam that bespoke humble, lean beginnings. He was a gentleman now, to be sure, but there was something stark and subtly evil about him that told you flat out you did not ever wish to cross him.
Gray cleared his throat, studying first the wrist bones, then the skull of the girl. “This girl… seven, no, eight years of age… excellent. She died of meningitis, yes.”
Clow chuckled. “Ye always know, don’t ye, Doctor?”
Gray gave him a withering look. “It’s my business to know. You’ll not pass any murder victims onto me, Clow. I’m not Knox. I don’t plan to be persecuted.”
“Of course not,” Kierney said.
Gray gave him the look now. “Yes…”
The cellar was made of gray, chilled concrete blocks that dripped water. A series of tubs was set out into which cadavers were dunked into preservative, left until needed. The air was close and stank of formaldehyde and alcohol and sweet decay. The cadaver of a middle-aged man was spread over a wooden table, his yellow flesh waxen and his eyes glazed over. He was slit open from crotch to throat, the flaps of skin pinned down so the viscera was on display, intestine and stomach and liver. Cold and meat-smelling. The top of his skull had been expertly removed, a bloody saw lying nearby. There was a tray of instruments arranged at the corpse’s feet. His brain was bobbing in a glass jar of serum.
“A bit of private research,” Gray said.
He poured himself a glass of claret, swirled its contents in the light of the gas lamps. He tasted the purple liquid, nodded, and dropped a few coins into Clow’s hand.
“Thank ye, guv,” Clow said.
“Before you leave, gentlemen,” Gray said, “tell me of John Sherily. He has not been by in some time… is he ill?”
Clow swallowed. “He’s gotten a bit superstitious, Doctor. Afeared of things what go bump in the night.”
“Sad, very sad,” Gray said.
“It is at that,” Kierney put in. “And him like a dear father to me. It saddens me poor tired heart, it does.”
Gray and Sherily went back together many years. It looked as though Gray was remembering each of them. “Mr. Sherily is a wise man, you know. You may think him a superstitious fool, but he is hardly that. Is it the North Grounds again?”
Clow nodded. “Johnny claims there’s… oh, it’s all bosh, not the sort of thing an educated gent would want to hear.”
Gray lifted an eyebrow. “Amuse me, then.”
“Well, sir, it’s that Johnny believes there’s something in the North Grounds what eats corpses and the like.”
“And you don’t believe that?”
Clow laughed nervously. “Not me. Rats, I say, nothing but the rats. Them graveyard rats can be quite fearsome, ye know.”
“Yes, I know.” Gray swallowed more claret. “But these stories do not concern you? Nor the missing resurrectionists and those poor souls that have been driven mad?”
Kierney laughed. “Not in the least! We laugh at spooks and boggles, we do!”
Gray looked at him like he thought he was a fool beneath contempt. “Then you will have no problem gathering certain materials I may need in the North Grounds?”
Clow assured him that they would not, would be only too happy to fill any orders Gray needed for his work and that of his students.
“Excellent,” Gray said, chuckling at some secret joke. “As they say, gentlemen, God protects fools. And with that, I bid you good night.”
Clow and Kierney left, glad to be free of the morbid Dr. Gray and the embalming stink of his workroom. They nearly ran up the steps and out into the rain, each wondering if Gray had been pitying them, warning them, or merely laughing at them.
If the lives of grave robbers loomed large and grim to the street rats and residents of Edinburgh and Glasgow—the sort of thing that fueled macabre bogey stories by hearthside and wild tales of evil men opening graves and plundering tombs by moonlight—they also inspired fear. For the crowded narrow byways of West Port and the shadowy, foul-smelling cul-de-sacs off the Trongate were thought by young and old to be teeming with gangs of body-snatchers, desperate and disturbed men who waited in alleys and dark doorways with sacks and chloroform pads and empty trunks. After the murder spree of Burke and Hare, it was not just the dead that had to worry, but the living. For there was a lot less work involved in snatching a fresh body than in prying open a grave.
Some of these fears were justified, others mere fantasy.
The winds off the Trongate in Glasgow were considered to be composed of a miasmic vapor produced by chloroform and gases emitted by decomposing bodies the body-snatchers had tucked down into those seething, polluted waters. One whiff of them was enough to make you swoon and two or three would put you out completely… and then, from the darks and damps and desolate places, the body-snatchers themselves would rise like rats seeking carrion.
And in West Port, wicked tales had existed long before Burke and Hare and their compatriots arrived on the scene. For centuries, the area was considered a place of malignance and iniquity. A place of terrifying legendry and stark belief, centuried tradition that had as yet not been shrugged off. The narrow winding closes and crooked stairways and rotting medieval houses were thought to be the haunts of witches and devils. People vanished in those high houses and cobbled, gaslit lanes and they had, it was said, since man had first began to hew the city from the dark primeval forests.