Who in Christ’s name? Ned is thinking. The cousin? Yes, of course. Blinded by tears, he takes her hand and sniffs: “Cousin?”
She nods, her eyes filling.
May as well start here, he thinks, tucking the handkerchief away. “Oh cousin!” he cries, and buries his nose in her hair.
♦ ♦ ♦
Since that chaotic night in the Islington churchyard three and a half years ago, Ned’s life has followed as circumscribed a course as rainwater in a sluice — a sluice designed by Dr. Decius William Delp, man of science, husband, father, blackmailer, ghoul. . Delp, the eminently respectable professor-surgeon who takes a glass of Madeira with my lord or a hand at whist with my lady, and then sends his confederates round to rob their graves before the fluids have had a chance to settle.
Given the conditions, Ned had little choice. He was a survivor. He’d survived brutality, mutilation, drowning, the stink of fish, Newgate, the gallows. He looked back on it all as the pistol flashed in the utter desolation of the Islington churchyard and knew he could bloody well survive anything — the witches’ sabbath, an insurrection of the walking dead, the full onslaught of Delp, Banks, Mendoza and Napoleon himself. Besides, there was just a single shot fired and the ball missed him by a good two yards, striking Quiddle in the thigh and shattering the bone. The bullet hit with a dull slap, like the sound a good pig stunner makes when he brings his cudgel down in that clean, fluid, killing swipe that buckles the animal’s legs and pitches it limp to the ground — a sharp sound, almost immediately soaked up in the sponge of meat and gristle. There was a moment of surprised silence, as if no one had really meant to take things so far, and then the tattoo of Crump’s retreating footsteps and another outcry from Boyles. Quiddle said nothing.
Ned’s first impulse was to run. Shove the whole thing and run till his lungs burst — but then he remembered how Quiddle had stuck by him, nursing him, giving up his bed, defending him against Delp. “Horace,” he whispered. “You all right?” No answer. Blackness. Nothing. Ned began to feel his way round the open grave, fearing the worst. If Quiddle was dead, Delp would expect five bodies — and his former assistant would be cut up like the rest, so many feet of intestine, so many ounces of this organ or that, sausage, tripe, headcheese. The thought was so vivid and arresting that Ned nearly collapsed when Quiddle suddenly seized his hand.
Quiddle’s grip was a vise. His voice was hoarse. Between gasps he instructed Ned in the use of a tourniquet and emphasized the need for haste — both on his own account and because Crump’s indiscretion would bring the constables down on them. Ned understood perfectly. He bound the wound and dragged Quiddle to the base of the wall — but didn’t have the strength to get him over. “Hold on,” he whispered, and went off in search of Boyles.
Boyles was hunched behind a grave marker, gibbering and moaning to himself. He’d always had something of the Irish peasant’s fascination with elves and ogres and banshees — but this was the real thing. Not five minutes ago he’d come face to face with an impossibility. Call it specter, phantom, shade — it was real, a walking, talking dead man. He was shaken. Half-drunk, it’s true, but shaken nonetheless. Ned had to tackle him, pin him down, slap him forty or fifty times and twice run through the story of his escape from the hangman before he could convince Billy to get up and help him lift Quiddle over the wall.
Boyles sat up in the cart and sucked at Ned’s flask like a man in a dream. Quiddle bled and moaned. From time to time he would complain of the cold. Ned whipped the horse till his shoulder went numb in the socket, and back at St. Bartholomew’s Delp himself performed the operation, taking the leg off just below the hip and cauterizing the wound with the blade of a shovel held over the fire till it glowed.
With Quiddle out of commission, Delp came to rely heavily on Ned. And Ned, with few if any options left him, gradually overcame his resistance to the job and began to exercise his wits in competing with Crump and others for the short supply of cadavers in the precincts of London. For a gallon and a half of gin a week he was able to hire Boyles as his assistant, and the two soon became as familiar with catafalques and churchyards as they were with hogsheads and taverns. Within the year Ned was providing all the specimens Delp could handle, and doing a bit of free-lancing on the side. The following year he was able to move out of St. Bartholomew’s and take up lodgings in Limehouse. He began to dress with a degree of elegance. Dine out. Think about a trip to the Continent to track down his lost love.
He was alive. He was adapting. Despite the dangers and unsavory conditions of his new trade, he was infused with a guarded sense of optimism. Delp loomed on the one hand, demanding and unscrupulous, and Crump, rankled over the incursion into his sphere of influence, threatened on the other. But Ned was tiptoeing a fine line between them, and very gradually, with a steady, slow, incremental force, his star was rising.
♦ ♦ ♦
And so, like the mourners on the front steps and the old man distributing sprigs of rue, Ned is interested in the deceased on a purely professional basis only. The previous morning, while scanning the obituaries, he had come across the following notice:
The City will sorely feel the passing of Mr. Claude Messenger Osprey, manufacturer of fine porcelain and china, dead of the quinsy at the age of fifty-seven this eighth day of June, eighteen hundred and one. Mr. Osprey was perhaps best known for his determined and innovative work in the manufacture of porcelain chamberpots. He was the first to conceive of the personalized pot de chambre, and he employed a number of inspired artisans whose refreshing clover-leaf and willow designs are intimately known to us all. Mr. Osprey is survived by a brother, Drummond, of Cheapside, and a son, Claude junior, the Bristol china merchant. The deceased will lie in state at the residence of his brother this evening and throughout the day tomorrow. The funeral service is scheduled for nine o’clock tomorrow evening.
A few inquiries among the bereaved Osprey household staff turned up a rather intriguing bit of information: Claude junior, now en route from Bristol, was remembered only as a small boy. Due to a rift between the senior Osprey and his wife, the boy had been sent away to school at the age of nine, matriculated through the university, married, and had taken control of the Bristol branch of the family business without ever having returned to London. None of the London Ospreys had laid eyes on him in nearly twenty years.
That evening, Ned, Quiddle and Billy Boyles were waiting for the Bristol mail when it rolled up in front of the Gloucester Coffee House. Boyles, in livery, swung back the door of the coach before it had come to a stop and called out the young Osprey’s name in a voice thick with grief and anxiety.
He introduced himself as footman to the late Osprey senior, and led the young heir up the street to a waiting carriage. Inside the carriage, like house spiders anticipating a visitor, Ned and Quiddle toyed with lengths of rope and sturdy strips of cotton. Osprey didn’t have a chance.