Norris felt anticipatory nausea as Dr. Sewall reached for the shroud. Already he had guessed who lay beneath it, and he dreaded the unveiling of the half-rotten corpse he and Wall-eyed Jack had unearthed last night. But when Sewall swept off the sheet, it was not the stinking man.
It was a female. And even from his seat in the auditorium, Norris recognized her.
Curly red hair cascaded over the edge of the table. Her head was turned slightly, so that she faced the audience with half-closed eyes and parted lips. The lecture hall had fallen so quiet that Norris could hear his own heartbeat pounding in his ears. That corpse is Rose Connolly's sister. The sister she adored. How in God's name had the girl's beloved sister ended up on the anatomist's table?
Dr. Sewall calmly picked up a knife from the tray and moved to the corpse's side. He seemed oblivious to the shocked silence that had fallen over the room, and when he regarded his subject, he might have been any tradesman, about to set to work. He looked at Edward, who stood frozen at the foot of the table. No doubt Edward, too, had recognized the body.
— I advise you to slip on an apron. —
Edward did not seem to hear him.
— Mr. Kingston, unless you wish to soil that very fine coat you're wearing, I suggest you remove your jacket and put on an apron. Then come assist me. —
Even arrogant Eddie, it appeared, had lost his nerve, and he swallowed hard as he donned the neck-to-ankle apron and rolled up his shirtsleeves.
Dr. Sewall made the first cut. It was a brutal slash, from breastbone to pelvis. As the skin parted, the abdomen released its contents and loops of bowel spilled out, pouring forth from the open belly to hang in dripping streamers over the side of the table.
— The bucket, — said Sewall. He looked up at Edward, who was staring down in horror at the gaping wound. — Will somebody position the bucket? Since my assistant here seems incapable of any purposeful movement whatsoever. —
Uneasy laughter rippled through the audience at the spectacle of their overbearing classmate being so publicly yanked down a few notches. Flushing, Edward snatched up the wooden bucket from the instrument table and set it down on the floor, to catch the loops of dripping intestine as they slithered from the belly.
— Lying atop the bowel, — said Dr. Sewall, — is a caul of tissue called the omentum. I have just sliced through it, releasing the intestines, which you now see cascading from the abdomen. In older gentlemen, especially those who have indulged too heartily in the pleasures of the table, this caul can be quite dense with fat. But in this young female subject, I find rather sparse deposits. — He lifted the sheet of almost transparent omentum and held it up in bloodied hands for the audience to see. Then he leaned over the table and tossed the mass of tissue into the waiting bucket. It landed with a wet plop.
— Next, I shall clear away this bowel, which so thoroughly obstructs our view of the organs beneath. While any knacker who's butchered a cow or horse is well acquainted with the voluminous mass of intestine, new students attending their first dissection are frequently astonished when they encounter it for the first time. First I shall resect the small intestine, slicing it free at the level of the pyloric junction, where the stomach ends —
He leaned in with his knife, and his hand came up holding one severed end of the bowel. He let it slither over the side of the table, and Edward caught it with his bare hand before it could splatter onto the floor. In disgust, he quickly dropped it into the bucket.
— Now I shall free it at the other end, where the small bowel becomes large bowel, at the ileocecal junction. —
Again he reached in with his knife. He straightened, holding up the other severed end.
— To illustrate the marvels of the human digestive system, I should like my assistant to grasp that end of the small bowel and walk up the aisle, as far as he can go. —
Edward hesitated, staring down in disgust at the bucket. Grimacing, he reached into the mass of entrails and came up holding the severed end.
— Go on, Mr. Kingston. Toward the back of the hall. — Edward started up the center aisle, pulling his end of the bowel. Norris caught a foul whiff of offal and saw the student across the aisle clap his hand over his nose to mask the stench. And still Edward kept walking, dragging a coil of intestine behind him like a stinking rope until it finally lifted from the floor and stretched taut, dripping onto the floor.
— Behold the length, — said Dr. Sewall. — We are looking at perhaps twenty feet of bowel. Twenty feet, gentlemen! And this is only the small intestine. I have left the large bowel in situ. Contained within the belly of every single one of you is this most marvelous of organs. Think of it as you sit there, digesting your breakfasts. No matter your station in life, rich or poor, old or young, within the cavity of your belly you are like every other man. —
Or woman, thought Norris, his gaze not on the organ but on the gutted subject lying on the table. Even one so beautiful can be dissected down to a bucket of offal. Where was the soul in all this? Where was the woman who once inhabited that body?
— Mr. Kingston, you may come back to the stage, and the bowel can go back into the bucket. Next, we shall see what the heart and lungs look like, nestled within the chest. — Dr. Sewall reached for an ugly-looking instrument and clamped its jaws around a rib. The sound of snapping bone echoed through the hall. He looked up at the audience. — You cannot get a good view of the thorax unless you look straight into the cavity. I believe it might be best if the first-year students rise from their seats and move closer for the rest of the dissection. Come, gather around the table. —
Norris rose to his feet. He was closest to the aisle, so he was one of the first to reach the table. He stared down, not at the open thorax, but at the face of the woman whose innermost secrets were now being revealed to a room full of strangers. She was so lovely, he thought. Aurnia Tate had been in the full bloom of womanhood.
— If you'll gather 'round, — said Dr. Sewall, — I should first like to point out an interesting finding in her pelvis. Based on the size of the uterus, which I can easily palpate right here, I would conclude that this subject has quite recently given birth. Despite the relative freshness of this corpse, you will note the particularly foul odor of the abdominal cavity, and the obvious inflammation of the peritoneum. Taking all these findings into account, I'm willing to offer a conjecture as to the likely cause of her death. —
There was a loud thud in the aisle. One of the students said, alarmed: — Is he breathing? Check if he's breathing! —
Dr. Sewall called out: — What is the problem? —
— It's Dr. Grenville's nephew, sir! — said Wendell. — Charles has fainted! —
In the front row, Professor Grenville rose to his feet, looking stunned at the news. Quickly he made his way up the aisle toward Charles, pushing through the students crowded in the aisle.