TWO. THE YARROW
“What’s the yarrow but a river bare,
That glides the dark hills under?
There are a thousand such elsewhere
As worthy of your wonder.”
LAZARUS
Muttering darkly as he trudges through the drifts heaped up around the steps of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, Dr. D. W. Delp is in no mood for miracles. In fact, if a miracle sat up and slapped him in the face over his small beer and muffin he’d shout it down and chase it right back where it came from, and then possibly, if he felt insulted enough, dissertate in Latin on the experiential impossibility of its existence. He is in a funk this morning, a screaming blue funk, rankled to the quick by what he perceives as a failure of government — or rather, the impossibly inconsistent and unpredictable judicial system upon which it rests. The idea of hanging a man on Christmas Day! Shocking. Barbaric. Worse than that: inconsiderate. He swipes angrily at the iron handrail, misses, catches a pool of dead gray ice with his left foot, and goes down cursing on the hospital steps. “Where the bloody hell is that porter?” he shouts, slamming through the door and shocking the nurses out of their bonnets. “Do we pay him his five shillings a week to remove the frost around here or don’t we? Well, where is he? Malingering by the fire and warming his lazy arse no doubt, eh? Sucking at a pot of beer, eh?”
The porter peeks out from the broom closet, sheepish, while patients in nightcaps, splints and yellowed wrappings sink into themselves, momentarily hushed by the doctor’s outburst. Delp stands there a moment in his greatcoat, muffler and beaver hat, snorting through his mustache. And then an elderly patient, his leg withered and eyes clouded with cataracts, calls out in a feeble voice: “Doctor, it’s me lungs — me lungs is stopped up till I don’t know whether I’m dead or alive.”
That’s all it takes: the spell is broken, the pall lifts. Like supplicants before the oracle they crowd in on him with their arthritic hands and gouty legs, bleating Doctor, Doctor, Doctor.
But Delp has neither time nor inclination for them. He shoulders his way through the press, long legs kicking out impatiently, and makes his way up the corridor to his laboratory. No, it’s not sprains, rheumatism and goiters that have gotten him out of bed this morning. Suppurating sores and compound fractures are quotidian, unremarkable — hardly the sort of thing that would make a man forgo his holiday excursion to Bath on the day after Christmas, a trip planned long in advance to coincide with his son’s vacation from classes at Oxford and his daughter’s arrival, amidst trunks and boxes, from Miss Creamer’s boarding school. Oh, no. The only thing that could draw Delp to the hospital on such a day as this is scientific curiosity — the consuming desire for knowledge, the chance to extend the limits of anatomical understanding, the chance to perform a pedagogical dissection on a pair of cadavers obtained from the hangman the previous day.
The doctor pauses by the bust of Vesalius to blow out a long sigh of resignation, the columns and cornices of Bath and his children’s disappointed faces already receding into the far corners of his consciousness and the problem at hand emerging like a coach hurtling out of the mist. You’ve got to take them when you can get them, he knows that. Christmas, anniversaries, the first golden day of spring — if Quiddle comes round and says he’s got a corpse on ice, then it’s an operating day. No two ways about it. There’s been a real dearth of cadavers these past few years, and the competition has been fierce for the few clean and unmutilated specimens that do turn up. Everybody’s getting into the act. The Royal College of Physicians, Oxford University, St. Thomas’s Hospital, St. George’s, Guy’s, Westminster, Middlesex. The earth doesn’t even have time to settle over half the churchyards in London before someone’s dug up the late dear departed and sold off his moldering remains to the highest bidder. But what’s a man of science to do? Look at Philpott, over at the Royal College. He was so hard up for bodies he dissected his own three-year-old son, dead of the whooping cough, before a class of unsuspecting anatomy students.
“Decius!” Quiddle is waiting for him outside the door of the amphitheater. “How are you this morning? Have a good holiday?”
Delp fixes his assistant with a fishy stare. “What do they look like?”
“The one’s a beauty, laid out like a dead angel. The other—”
“Yes?”
“The other’s a dwarf.”
“A dwarf? Damnation. He came cheap I suppose?”
“Thirty-five quid for the sound one, twenty for the dwarf. Agent for Middlesex Hospital beat me to the first one — a pity too. He was a real corker, that one. A giant. Six-two or — three, at least.”
Delp, absorbed in the process of unbuttoning his greatcoat and ducking out of his muffler, looks up sharply. “You mean that son of a bitch Crump is selling them off to Middlesex now — after all the business we’ve given him?”
“ ‘They goes to the ‘ighest bidder,’ that’s what he told me.”
The doctor shrugs angrily out of his coat, tears off the muffler, fumbles for a match and then throws the whole box of them down in disgust. The corridor is haunted with shadows, early morning, underlit, a cold wind humming at the walls. “Well, let’s have a look at them then.”
♦ ♦ ♦
In his garret on Paternoster Row, Dirk Crump warms his hands over the grate and counts through the pile of coins on the table before him — nearly a hundred pounds. Not bad for a day’s work. The real stroke was to get that old hag in there to claim the murderer’s body. What hangman is going to deny the poor unfortunate’s dear old mom? The dwarf was up for grabs, of course — where would you find a hoary old midget to play the bereaved father anyway? But the big one, he was easy. Just hand over five shillings to Tall Bob, the apothecary’s assistant, and have him run over his lines twenty or thirty times: I’m Will’s brother, come over from Southwark. Da’ sent me to fetch ‘im ‘ome in the cart.
Bob blew his lines, but there was nobody there to care much about it, and the old lady — she was perfect. Absolutely deranged with grief. He’ll have to see if she wants to work for him on a regular basis. There were two or three friends or relatives or whatever pressing the hangman to give up the body to them, but the old lady shoved her way through the throng, screeching and blubbering like the mother of Christ come to haul him down from the cross. The only problem was she didn’t want to give up the body once she’d got it into her cart and hustled round the corner. Even now it makes him shudder to think of the look in her eyes as she sat perched atop the donkey cart in her black tatters like a ghoul or zombie or something. “Eeeeeeeeee!” she shrieked, “ ‘ee’s sleepin’ sound now I’ll warrant. Five pund and ‘ee’s yours.”
She had him over a barreclass="underline" he knew he could get thirty easy. He counted the coins out into her twisted claw, tossed the corpse in with the other two and trundled up Paternoster Row. Then settled down in a chair by the grate and waited for Quiddle and Babbo and the rest of them to come round and bid up the price. What am I bid? he asked Quiddle, leering across the table. Eh? What am I bid?
♦ ♦ ♦
The operating theater is close and warm. The two students from Leyden are there, bent over drawing pads and notebooks; behind them Delp recognizes Freischütz, the serious young German with the long nose and frazzled hair. Dr. Abernathy is there of course, seated in the front row, ever curious about the mysteries of the organism. In the back: four strangers, one of whom is a lady. Quiddle had arranged it. Society people with a scientific bent and a pocketful of guineas. They’ve come for the frisson.