The butler followed my gaze. ‘Dr Sackville’s wife’s late mother,’ he said. He cleared his throat, holding a white gloved fist delicately to his lips. ‘I think you are expected round the back, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘The entrance you require is on Mill Lane. Number six. It adjoins this house. It is a part of this house and yet,’ he smiled, ‘it is very different to this house. Down the lane at the side,’ and he ushered us out and shut the door.
We went back down the crystalline steps and walked down the street to the ‘lane at the side’. It was dark, with a high wall to left and right, and lit by the yellow smudge of a single lamp at the far end. The shadows lurched as the wind blew and the clouds covered the moon. At the street lamp we turned left and walked down another, darker thoroughfare called Mill Lane. Number six was a dark building of yellow brick, blackened and streaked with soot. It was three storeys high, with a deep basement, and yet compared to the house we had just seen it seemed mean and crouched. The windows were all shaded. The neighbours’ houses were dark and ill-lit, silent and bounded by black, slimy walls. There were two entrances to number six – a door at the head of a flight of steps, and a ramp, wide enough to admit a coach and four, which plunged into a dark space beneath the building. Above this was a sort of drawbridge, which might be lowered to allow other deliveries to be made into the building itself, and which might be raised to allow access to the subterranean coach house.
A lamp burned beside the front door, the only sign that the place might be occupied or expecting visitors. I rang the bell. We heard it jangle deep inside the building. There came the sound of hasty footsteps on a hard floor, and then the door swung upon.
We were greeted by a young man wearing knee britches, white stockings, a thick wool coat with a shawl collar, and a white neckerchief. He had a business-like air, a brisk manner and a darting, inquiring glance. I recognised him as one of Dr Sackville’s students from the Blood, who also worked as an assistant in the dissecting rooms of Dr Sackville’s anatomy school. ‘You’re the last to arrive, sir,’ he said. He looked askance at Will, who he evidently recognised, but who he had not expected to be admitting. ‘You’re not a medical man, sir. Dr Sackville said nothing about— that is to say I’m not sure that I—’
‘Indeed, sir,’ I said. ‘But Mr Quartermain is assisting me on board the Blood at the moment. Besides, where would we be if we made a policy of excluding those who are interested in our work but unqualified to undertake it?’ I gestured to the painting of John Hunter that hung in the passage behind him. ‘Dr Sackville worked with Hunter, did he not?’
‘Oh yes, sir,’ said the young man, ‘he is forever telling us so.’
‘And was not John Hunter what many would describe as unqualified when he first helped his brother at the anatomy tables?’
The young man blinked. ‘I believe so, sir,’ he said, though he was clearly unsure.
We followed the student into the building. It was tiled, like a mortuary, and smelled unmistakably of the mortuary too. The young man carried a lamp, and the shadows reared and jumped about him.
‘Does Dr Sackville live at Livingston Fields, or at this house?’ said Will, perplexed by the world we had glimpsed at the front, and the one we had entered at the back.
‘Both,’ said our guide. ‘Mrs Sackville is holding a soirée this evening. Dr Sackville will step through later on, though he says that The Society for Medical Inquiry trumps any soirée or party Mrs Sackville might hold.’
‘Might you show us around a little?’ said Will.
‘I don’t think so. Not without—’
‘Of course, of course,’ I said, fixing him with a condescending eye. ‘You are not permitted to do so without Dr Sackville’s express permission. I told Mr Quartermain here that you young fellows were probably kept on a short leash and never made your own decisions about anything. It’s unlikely he trusts any of you sufficiently, and you probably don’t know your way around the collections anyway—’
‘In fact,’ he said. ‘I know all about the collections.’
‘I doubt that,’ I said. I gave a patronising chuckle.
‘Can you show us?’ said Will.
The young man hesitated. ‘This way.’ He pushed open a door and held the lamp high. Inside was a large basement room with the shades drawn over its windows. Within, lamps burned here and there, but the room was so cavernous that they seemed like beacons in a sea of floating objects, for it was lined from floor to ceiling with shelves, more of which ran out at angles from the walls, like ribs, and all of which were laden with ranks of anatomical specimens. I had seen anatomy museums before – we had had one at St Saviour’s, and a rather unambitious one containing brains at Angel Meadow Asylum. Most of the medical men I knew had their own small collections, but this! Here was the product of over fifty years of dissecting, slicing, preserving and bottling.
‘This is only one room,’ said the student. ‘There are three others beyond this, and more at his country house up at Islington. He has animals too. Did you see the lion and the panther in the drawing room of the Livingston Fields house? No? Stuffed, of course,’ he added, seeing the looks on our faces. ‘And there are some two thousand specimens in this room alone.’
‘Will some of these be used this evening?’ said Will. I saw him stare queasily at a nearby jar that contained a six-fingered hand, the flesh pale and greyish, with that clammy water-logged appearance all specimens get after a while. The spirits in which they were kept had to be changed periodically. It would be a full-time job making sure a collection of this magnitude did not putrefy.
The student looked at him strangely. ‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘Specimens from the collection are rarely used during a Society meeting.’ A smile tugged at the corners of his lips. ‘The Society is principally for live demonstrations and experiments.’
From somewhere far off a bell rang. ‘It’s starting in ten minutes,’ he said. He led us out into the hall, moving quickly now, opening a succession of doors to show the inside of rooms, all of them deserted, and yet with lamps burning within them as if they had only just been abandoned, their former occupants intending to come back at any moment. We saw a library filled from floor to ceiling with books. A small spiral staircase led up to a narrow walkway, bounded by a filigree iron railing and skirting the higher shelves. Another room contained stuffed animals – birds and small mammals mostly – their beady eyes glittering angrily at our intrusion. The next contained bones and fossils; a fourth was home to cases of butterflies, birds’ eggs and insects, laid out in neat rank and file. The last door he opened gave out into an anatomy room – by now we had ascended a flight of stairs to the top of the building.
‘The bodies are brought up from the mortuary by a hoist,’ said the young man. ‘The mortuary is in the basement, but we need the skylights for our work.’ The northlights in the ceiling, black as polished jet against the night sky, reflected our lamplight in slivers of gold. They would provide a clear harsh light without the glare from the sun, and the room was cold, as it ought to be. With the coming of the autumn it would, I knew, have entered its busiest season. It reeked of putrescence and of the spirits of alcohol used when bottling the specimens. Beneath this I detected the waxy aroma of the resins that were pumped into the veins, lungs and other delicate vessels of the body to reveal their fine tracery and preserve it forever. A carboy of embalming fluid stood on a table beside the slab.
Downstairs, the bell rang once more. ‘Quickly now, gentlemen,’ said the young man, ushering us out and pulling the door closed. ‘Tonight we are in the lecture theatre.’ He sounded urgent, and we could hear voices, louder now, echoing up the stairs.
We joined a line of serious-faced, black-clad medical men. Their feet scuffled on the tiled floor. Indeed, the entire building was paved with tiles, as if wet substances constantly dripped and spattered upon them, and were forever being mopped up.
‘Are the two houses joined?’ said Will, who seemed unable to believe that the golden mansion we ha
d seen on Livingston Fields had anything to do with the dark frontage on Mill Lane and the macabre spaces we had just been through. ‘Or are they completely separate?’
Our guide nodded to an ordinary-looking door. ‘That leads through into the other house. The Livingston Fields residence.’ He was looking nervous, as though he hoped no one was about to ask him where he had been for the last fifteen minutes. ‘Mrs Sackville never comes through here.’ He gave a quick grin. ‘The resurrection men swear like the Devil. It would never do for a lady to hear that.’
‘Indeed,’ Will murmured. ‘The heavens would fall.’
By now we were in a familiar place – an operating theatre and a lecture room. There were some twenty medical men present. The room was steep, cup-shaped, and ringed with wooden terraces, so that those at the top might see what was being undertaken on the operating table below. The room echoed with murmuring voices, for medical men always have plenty to say to one another. I recognised a couple of students from the Blood, and in the front row sat Dr Cole, with Dr Antrobus at his side. I nodded to them both as we shuffled into our place. I saw Dr Graves and Dr Catchpole, both from St Saviour’s, though they had not noticed Will and me. Further back, high above the others, Dr Proudlove sat alone. I realised then that much of the murmuring concerned his presence there that evening, for everyone raised their eyebrows in his direction.
‘They probably think the poor fellow is someone’s servant,’ I said.
‘More likely they think he’s one of the exhibits this evening,’ muttered Will. ‘Not a man at all, but a specimen to be vivisected, like any other animal. I admire the fellow for coming.’
At that moment Dr Sackville entered. There was a genteel ripple of applause at the sight of him, and the room fell silent.
Dr Sackville held up his hands. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the five hundredth meeting of the Society for Medical Inquiry.’
I had been to meetings like this before, and I had to admit that I always felt vulnerable – perhaps like Dr Proudlove, for he, like me, was unique. No one would really suggest Dr Proudlove might be brought forward as a specimen, but what if they knew I was a woman? They would not be so sanguine then. Would I be vivisected? My skull sawn open and my brain taken out so that they might examine it for signs of madness? Would my sex be scrutinised for deformity – I must be a hermaphrodite at least, they would say, to live as I did. How was it that I was not betrayed by my menses? They would be angry too, angry that they had not noticed that I was different, that they had not only tolerated me, but had treated me as an equal when I quite evidently was not. Their ideas about a woman’s inferiority, their conviction that she was biologically and temperamentally unfit to practise medicine would be proved wrong, and they would not take it easily. The setting too gave me pause, for was not the theatre the place where cross-dressings were unmasked – the universe would be thrown off-kilter if they were not. I suddenly realised I was staring at Dr Proudlove – a heathen Othello sitting opposite my disguised Viola – and I felt a wild laugh rising up inside me. I swallowed it, and set my face into what I hoped was an expression of masculine gravity.
Beside me, Will was looking tired. The heavy meal we had eaten on board the Blood, the terrible night we had passed was sapping his strength, and I saw his eyelids drooping. I jabbed him in the ribs as Dr Sackville finished his address.
‘Gentlemen,’ he cried. ‘Allow me to start the proceedings.’ The door at the back burst open, and the patient from the Blood with elephantiasis was brought in by a pair of thick-set orderlies. He was a sailor, originally from Bristol, Dr Sackville told us, and he had spent much time in West Africa.
‘Slaving, no doubt,’ muttered Will. ‘I can think of no other reason why he might need to be there.’
‘This is not the first case we have seen on board the Blood,’ said Dr Sackville. ‘The disease affects the face, the genitals, the lower limbs.’
The man was wearing a long robe of white linen, and all at once Dr Sackville whisked it off and cast it aside, so that the man stood before us quite naked. ‘Note the grotesque swelling of the legs and feet, the thickening of the skin, the ulceration—’ He bade the man get onto the operating table.
Beside me, Will moaned faintly. ‘“Live demonstrations and experiments”?’ he said. His lips were bloodless.
‘You have your salts?’ I whispered.
‘I am never without them when I am with you,’ he replied. I saw him slip his hand into his pocket.
‘Elephantiasis is a scourge throughout her majesty’s colonies,’ said Dr Sackville. ‘Many thousands are prevented from working. It is a blight upon the utility of the native, his health and happiness. Worse still, gentlemen, it does not confine itself to those indigenous to the countries in which we find it, but might affect all those who live or work there.’
Dr Sackville waved a hand. Dr Antrobus sprang up, a chloroform inhaler in his hand. He affixed it over the man’s nose and mouth and dripped liquid from a bottle onto the gauze pad of the apparatus. When the patient was unconscious, Dr Sackville pulled out his knives and bent over the man’s groin. And all the while he talked, a jocular commentary on the blood and the lymph system, which he called the ‘lacteals’, describing their passage through the body, the findings of his hero, William Hunter, the arguments and rivalries that had followed the lacteals’ discovery.
At length, he stood back from the body and held up a silver syringe. The thick bloody patina on his apron shone like burnished rosewood in the lamplight. ‘I have exposed the lacteal nodes at the groin and extracted some fluid,’ he said. ‘We shall examine it together. With a little help, of course.’
The door crashed open once more and another orderly wheeled in a great gleaming microscope. I could see it was the best, German, no doubt, and a beauty in brass and ivory. Dr Sackville dripped the contents of his syringe onto a glass plate and slid it beneath the microscope’s golden eye. One by one we filed past to look.
‘Well, gentlemen?’ cried Dr Sackville.
‘Worms,’ said someone. ‘The fluid contains worms.’
‘Quite so,’ said Dr Sackville ‘The system of drainage usually afforded by the lacteals is blocked by worms. Parasites. Unable to drain away, fluid gathers in the body, resulting in what we see here – an unstoppable distortion of the legs, the genitals, the face.’ He waved a hand towards the body still unconscious on the operating theatre. Dr Antrobus had stitched the patient’s groin up and taped a gauze pad over the wounds. The orderlies appeared once more, heaved the man onto a stretcher and hauled him away.
‘What might be done to help him?’ said someone else.
‘Black cohosh,’ said another. ‘Mixed with wormwood.’
‘I have tried both with another patient,’ said Dr Sackville. ‘Neither are effective.’
‘How did the worms get in there?’
‘From the food, I imagine, or some other native practices.’
‘But this man is English,’ said someone. ‘Did he eat their food? Did he engage in native practices?’
‘Have you examined the blood?’ I said.
‘We found nothing,’ replied Dr Sackville.
‘Did you look during the night time, as well as the day?’ It was Dr Proudlove. The room fell silent. Someone sniggered.
‘No, sir, I did not,’ said Dr Sackville. He sounded incredulous. ‘You think that would make a difference?’
‘The creature’s larvae may be nocturnal.’
‘Would you suggest we look when there is a full moon, or a waxing gibbous?’ said Dr Sackville. There was another laugh. Dr Sackville turned away.
‘Is it possible,’ said Dr Proudlove, evidently not discouraged, and perhaps so used to the scorn of his colleagues that he hardly noticed their hostility, ‘is it possible that the worms that cause this disease have their origins in tiny eggs, too small to be detected by our microscopes, and that these might enter through the skin?’
‘Undetectable by this microscope?’ Dr Sackvi
lle shook his head. ‘It is the most powerful one available. Besides, to get such “tiny eggs” to the lacteals would require the skin to be fully penetrated. They must enter the lacteal fluid, and this assumes that first, they must enter the bloodstream. How might that be possible?’
Dr Proudlove held up a bottle. I recognised it as the one he had shown us on board the Blood, the night that John Aberlady had leaped from the apothecary window. ‘I suggest—’ he licked his lips, his face excited, his voice trembling with nerves. ‘I suggest that it is an insect – the mosquito, that is the vector of this disease. The vector of many diseases.’
‘A fly?’ Dr Sackville chuckled.
‘The mosquito sucks blood. But might it not also inject a foreign substance as it does so? Some of its own matter. Saliva, say—’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, man. These are worms, Dr Proudlove, not mosquitoes, and not mosquito nymphs. Did you not see them with your own eyes?’
‘But if there was something in the saliva, some other creature’s eggs. If a man might harbour parasites might not an insect harbour them too?’
‘You are all “ifs” and “buts”, Dr Proudlove. You are dealing in a world of the invisible. So invisible, sir, one might even say that you have entered the realm of fantasy!’ There was laughter and the shaking of heads. ‘You have nothing to contribute here, sir, but absurdity. Night blood and flies? We are a serious society. Not a place of superstition and old wives’ tales. Had I known you were going to contribute nothing but childishness I would have followed my own counsel more closely and not invited you.’ Dr Sackville turned away. The others, still clustered about the microscope, did the same.
Dr Proudlove opened his mouth to speak again, but then closed it. He put the bottle back into his pocket and sat down, his face tense with rage and humiliation.
But there was more – and worse – to come, for up next was Dr Cole, who had brought with him a collection of skulls, which he proceeded to set out on the operating table. I hoped he wasn’t going to talk about phrenology, for I had had enough of that dubious practice up at Angel Meadow Asylum – but he didn’t. Instead, he had something much more interesting to say.
The Blood: What secrets lie aboard? (Jem Flockhart Book 3) Page 23
