“So he gets a knighthood while Molly Finn goes to an early grave. Where’s the justice?”
“Justice, Hawkwood?” James Read sighed. “It is the way of the world.”
“It’s wrong.”
“Perhaps. But the world turns, there is no stopping it. It is relentless. It is inevitable.”
“It doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“No,” Read conceded. A silence fell between them. The fire crackled in the grate. It was Read who finally broke the spell. “How is Major Lomax?”
“He’ll live. He has more lives than a cat.”
“I am pleased to hear it. And Constable Hopkins?”
“I’ll be having words with him about the maintenance of sidearms.”
“And Sergeant Jago?”
“He was his usual efficient self.”
Read’s mouth twitched. “By the way, I’m assuming Twigg told you that he discovered the location of Hyde’s daughter’s grave?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“A very curious state of affairs.”
“How so?”
“It appears that the body was still in situ.”
“What?”
“The grave had not been tampered with. The body Hyde was attempting to resuscitate was not that of his daughter.”
“Then whose was it?”
“I doubt we shall ever know the answer to that question. I suspect, if anyone could shed light on the mystery, it would be Eden Carslow. He told me that Hyde had asked him to obtain the corpse.”
“He told you that?”
“In one of his more unguarded moments.”
“He wouldn’t have dug it up himself though.”
“No. He did, however, admit to making regular use of one of the resurrection gangs. A porter at St Thomas’s by the name of Butler is his liaison. Butler, you will be interested to know, is also a former military man. He was an associate of Sawney’s during the war. It would be ironic if Sawney was hired to retrieve the daughter’s body. Twigg tells me the grave was constructed of stone and protected by a metal grille. I think it’s safe to assume that Sawney and his cohorts, if indeed it was them, would have considered that particular exhumation to be too exacting. They evidently obtained another body instead and kept quiet about it. I doubt Carslow knew. Colonel Hyde, of course, had never met his daughter. He placed his reliance on Carslow to retrieve the body and preserve it until his escape. Carslow stored the corpse at 13 Castle Street …” The Chief Magistrate’s brow creased. “It was fortunate you found that note.”
“What are they going to do with the place?”
“No decision has been made. The contents will most likely be moved to Lincoln’s Inn to join the rest of John Hunter’s collection. I’ve yet to receive an explanation as to why they were not removed earlier when the house was closed. It appears to have been an oversight.”
“God Almighty,” Hawkwood said.
“Indeed. The Lord does work in mysterious ways. Which, incidentally, brings me to another mystery. I’m intrigued and not a little concerned to learn of the fire which consumed the Black Dog public house. I understand the owner and his sons died in the blaze, along with Sawney and his associates.”
“So I heard,” Hawkwood said. “A terrible business.”
“Indeed. So you would have no knowledge of how the fire might have started? It was down to good fortune that it did not spread to the surrounding buildings, though I believe the neighbours were able to offer some assistance. This morning’s early snowfall would also have helped to dampen it down.” The Chief Magistrate looked towards the window.
“Probably a stray spark,” Hawkwood said, moving towards the door. “You know how easy things like that can happen.”
James Read turned and looked down the end of his long nose.
Hawkwood paused, hand on the door knob, and nodded past the Chief Magistrate towards the newly installed fireguard. “Could happen to anyone, sir …”
Read’s eyes narrowed.
Closing the door behind him, Hawkwood smiled grimly at Ezra Twigg, who was seated at his desk in the ante-room, and murmured softly under his breath, “… even surgeons.”
HISTORICAL NOTE
By any definition, body snatching is and was a foul trade, and yet there is no doubt that during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, prior to the Anatomy Act of 1832, which allowed corpses other than those of condemned murderers to be used in anatomy studies, it played a crucial role in the advancement of medical knowledge. There were very few surgeons who did not rely on the resurrection men to provide fresh cadavers for their research.
Hyde’s real-life mentor, John Hunter, certainly made use of them and took delivery of fresh corpses for his anatomy classes at 13 Castle Street, now Charing Cross Road.
Other characters in the story also existed. James McGrigor was Surgeon-General of the Army, Richard Ryder was Home Secretary and both James Norris and James Tilly Matthews were patients at Bethlem Hospital. Mike Jay’s book, The Air Loom Gang, gives a fascinating account of Matthews’ incarceration in Bedlam, as well as great insight into the workings of the mad houses of the time.
Eden Carslow is a fictitious character, though based for the most part on the surgeon Astley Paston Cooper, who was a student of Hunter’s and who later became lecturer in anatomy at St Thomas’s and senior surgeon to Guy’s Hospital. There is no suggestion that Cooper was involved in aiding and abetting murder, though he was in league with the sack-’em-up men, using Thomas Butler, a porter at St Thomas’s dissecting room, as a go-between. Cooper often boasted that he could obtain any body that he wished and he paid the resurrection men handsomely for their services, despite referring to them as ‘the lowest dregs of degradation’.
In that, Cooper was not wrong, as I discovered during my reading of Ruth Richardson’s excellent Death, Dissection and the Destitute. The scene in which Hawkwood discovers that human flesh had been converted into soap and candles in the cellar of the Black Dog is not the product solely of my imagination. If anything, I have held back in describing some of the more bizarre uses to which human corpses were subjected. For example, John Sheldon, another of Hunter’s former pupils, lived with the preserved body of a beautiful woman in a glass case in his bedroom for ten years, while another, dentist Martin van Butchell, had his wife embalmed by Hunter and kept her in his living room where visitors could view her by appointment. I confess I did try to work a similar scenario into the story but decided to abandon the idea, for fear it would be considered too fanciful.
Equally, while some of the medical procedures I have attributed to Hyde during his service in Spain may seem unlikely, they too are based on fact. Crude blood transfusions had been attempted, including one from a sheep to a man by seventeenth-century physicians Richard Lower and Jean Baptiste Denys. John Hunter also conducted transplantation experiments involving both human and animal subjects.
Lest any readers think it a tad convenient that Hyde should have found himself a bolt-hole equipped with both an operating room and an escape route through an adjoining building that just happened to back on to his hideaway, I can assure them this was not poetic licence. Hunter did indeed own the lease to 28 Leicester Square, the house directly behind the Castle Street property. He had the gap between the houses bridged with an operating room specially constructed to aid his anatomy lectures. Above it he built a museum, in which were displayed thousands of his preparations. Following Hunter’s death in 1793, the Leicester Square property was rented out, while the museum remained in place, tended by Hunter’s former assistant, William Clift. The museum’s contents were later purchased by the Royal College of Surgeons. They are now displayed to splendid effect in the galleries in the Hunterian Museum at the RCS’s headquarters in Lincoln’s Inn. Sadly, unlike Hunter’s specimens, neither his home nor the school building has been preserved, though the plaque placed above his grave in Westminster Abbey can be seen, commemorating him as the ‘Founder of Scientific Surgery’. While researching the novel, I referred constantly to Wendy Moore’s immensely readable biography of John Hunter, The Knife Man. I cannot recommend it too highly. I am also indebted to Mick Crumplin, Archivist to the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, whose knowledge of general surgical history, in particular that of the Napoleonic Wars, is truly encyclopaedic. He responded to my questioning with great patience and good humour. Any mistakes in the story are mine, not his.