“Hold her,” the voice said.
She felt her legs pinioned; then her arms. They were wrapping some kind of binding around her wrists and ankles. Her head snapped to one side and she saw the thick leather straps – and they were being drawn tight.
Molly realized then it wasn’t a bed they were tying her to. It was a table. She continued to struggle, but the more she fought, the tighter the straps were pulled. Held fast, unable to move, she saw for the first time the rest of the room and realized with a jolt of terror that it was neither church nor chapel.
The true nature of her situation struck Molly like an arrow to the heart. She stared around her in horror. From what seemed like a thousand miles away, she heard a voice she recognized dimly as her own, whispering falteringly, “Am I going to die?”
The reply, when it came, was soft spoken and reassuringly calm, almost affectionate.
“No, my dear. You are going to live for ever.”
Molly Finn’s screams were already filling the room as Titus Hyde placed the point of the scalpel in the valley between her pale breasts and, using the minimum of pressure, drew the blade down the length of her sternum.
Hawkwood heard Jago mutter a curse under his breath. He turned and followed the upturned, awe-struck gaze.
Bones; too many to count, suspended from an array of ceiling hooks, like withered bats in a dark cave. Femurs, fibulas, ribs, pelvic bones, bones from the feet and bones from the forearm, many with hand, toe and finger bones still connected, all blackened with age and candle soot, hung alongside clavicles and spinal columns; many of them with remnants of muscle and what might have been ragged strips of long-dead flesh still attached.
Hawkwood dragged his gaze away. The second, closer collection of jars also looked to be free of dust. The liquid inside them was a lot cleaner than in the containers on the opposite side of the room. He remembered what McGrigor had told him, that the favoured preservative was spirit of wine. Hawkwood wasn’t about to take a sip to test it. The transparency of the liquid gave him a clear view of the contents. He tried to recall which items had been removed from the Bart’s cadavers and the corpse found suspended over the Fleet. From their colouring and the consistency of the solution, there was little doubt the organs contained within these jars were much more recent additions to the collection.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Jago said, his face ghostly pale. “And we ain’t any nearer finding Molly Finn, or your damned sawbones.”
“No, but the bastard’s been here.” Hawkwood turned, and found he was talking to himself. He left the room and its grisly contents and discovered Jago standing in one of the two doorways on the other side of the cramped landing.
At first glance the room was no different to the others they had looked in: peeling plaster, bare floorboards, boarded-up windows. There was, however, a mattress. On top of the mattress was a heap of soiled bed linen. Next to the mattress was a small table, on which sat a candle-holder and some sulphur sticks. A larger table was set against the wall. On top of it was a chipped basin and jug. Caught by the lantern light, several small beads of moisture glistened at the bottom of the basin. He glanced towards the fireplace. There was grey ash in the hearth.
Hawkwood reached down towards the pile of linen. He straightened. In his hand was a petticoat. A woman’s scream pierced the night.
“Sweet Mary!” Jago spun round.
The scream sounded as if it had come from below them. It was followed by a second of equal intensity and another after that, both in quick succession. By which time, Hawkwood had thrown the petticoat down and was running for the stairs with Jago in close pursuit.
They were halfway down the stairwell when the screams ended abruptly. Hawkwood wasn’t sure what was the more disturbing, the screams or the uncanny silence that followed.
Jago stared about him wildly. “Where the hell did that come from? We looked, damn it! There’s no one here!”
Jago was right. They had looked.
And then, the moment they hit the ground floor, Hawkwood saw it. “There!”
Jago swore. There was another doorway, tucked deep in the shadows beneath the stairs, almost hidden from view. They’d both missed it the first time around.
Another room, small and airless, but with signs of recent occupation: on the table stood an empty Madeira bottle and some mugs. Several news-sheets lay scattered across the tabletop. Beyond the table was an opening that led off towards the rear of the property. The house, Hawkwood was starting to realize, was like a rabbit warren. They ducked through the aperture and found themselves in yet another cramped room. A row of coat hooks ran along one wall. The only notable item of furniture was an old wooden desk.
They both saw it at the same time: a pale ribbon of light at the base of the far wall.
With a nod of agreement from Jago, Hawkwood stepped forward and hauled the door open.
It was smaller in scale than the operating room at Guy’s, but the design was almost identicaclass="underline" a series of wooden benches rising in semi-circular tiers towards the ceiling. In the well of the amphitheatre, framed within the light of a hundred candles, two men dressed in shirtsleeves and bloodstained aprons were bent over an oval table. Between them lay the naked body of a young woman.
At the sound of footsteps, the two men turned, faces frozen in shock.
“It’s over, Colonel,” Hawkwood said. “Put the knife down. Move away.”
Titus Hyde stood perfectly still.
Hawkwood looked at Hyde’s companion. “That goes for you, too, Surgeon Carslow.” Hawkwood raised the pistol. “And that’s an order, not a request.”
Slowly the two men stepped away. Jago gave a sharp intake of breath as the body on the table came into view.
A sheet covered the lower half of the woman’s torso. If it had been placed there to preserve the victim’s modesty, it had been a gesture too late. In a scene almost indistinguishable from the autopsy in Surgeon Quill’s dead house, Hawkwood saw that the woman’s chest had been cut open. The flesh on either side of the incision was on the point of being peeled back. Had her screams not told him already, Hawkwood did not need to be informed that Molly Finn was beyond help. In death, her young face, framed by her mane of blonde hair, looked remarkably serene; an expression undoubtedly in sharp contrast to the fear and terror she must have felt in the moments before Hyde cut into her with his scalpel. Wordlessly, Hawkwood pulled the sheet over the rest of her.
His eyes moved to the second table and the object that rested upon it. There was a covering sheet here, too. Cautiously, Hawkwood lifted it away and found himself looking down into a shallow metal trough. The trough was filled with a honey-coloured liquid. Immersed in the liquid was another body.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Hyde said. There was a note of pride in his voice.
The corpse might have been beautiful once, Hawkwood supposed; perhaps in the full bloom of life. It had arms and legs and breasts and was undoubtedly female, but beautiful wasn’t a word he would have used to describe what he was looking at now. The flesh had the appearance of melted wax. A patchwork of stitching, clearly visible along the arms, thighs, hips and hairline, indicated where the sections of skin excised from the Bart’s cadavers had been transplanted. An incision had been made in the chest wall and the skin had been folded away, following the same procedure Hyde had been in the midst of performing on Molly Finn. But whereas Molly Finn’s face still retained its colour and the freshness of youth, the face on this body looked about a thousand years old. It reminded Hawkwood of the monkey head he’d seen in one of the jars upstairs.
On the floor of the operating room, adjacent to the second table, was a cluster of cylindrical objects, about a dozen in all, each approximately half the height of a man. They were columns of metal discs. The top of each stack was connected to its immediate neighbour by a strand of copper wire. Hawkwood did not need to be told what he was looking at. It was an electrical battery.