Will squeezed the old man’s hands beneath his own. ‘You’re Dr Rennie, sir,’ he said. ‘A self-made man, former assistant to John Hunter, and surgeon on board the Golden Fleece. A man who fought beside Nelson at Trafalgar, who has sailed the seas and saved men’s lives. You are the author of two important books on military surgery, and one of the British Museum’s most valued benefactors and collectors. That, Dr Rennie, is who you are. It is a life well spent, sir.’
Dr Rennie peered again at the scrap of paper. He put his hand to his arm, to his own tattoo, hidden beneath his shirt sleeve. ‘We called ourselves the Resurrection Society,’ he said. ‘Not like those fellows who supplied the anatomy rooms with corpses, though we all did our fair share of that, you can be sure. But we hoped we might discover the secrets of life. The more we knew about life, and about death, then the more chance we had of defeating it. “O death, where is thy sting?” It was a society for experiments. For anatomy. For testing our ideas. Dogs mostly.’
‘Only dogs?’ I ventured.
‘Sometimes rats,’ he said. ‘Nothing more.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘Very certain. I was our secretary. I knew everything.’ He chuckled. ‘We were four ambitious lads hoping to impress our master by working in secret so that we might appear cleverer and more inspired than we actually were. Sackville especially took it very seriously. Especially the idea that we were a secret society.’ He smiled. ‘Foolish really. Of course, we dreamed that we might find a way of understanding the very essence of life, of prolonging it indefinitely, or bringing back those who had died. Imagine if we could have uncovered the precise means by which electrical impulses are carried through the body! Or revealed ways of replacing a morbid organ with a healthy one! We tried, of course we did. But we never succeeded. That must be the preserve of future generations.’
‘What about Dr Cole and Dr Antrobus?’ said Will. ‘Are they in your society too? Did they know about it?’
His face became wary. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘I fear the Resurrection Society has been resurrected,’ I murmured to Will.
‘You think Dr Sackville knew?’ Will said.
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘And that he was a member?’
I addressed Dr Rennie. ‘Did Dr Sackville ever talk about the Resurrection Society to you recently?’
‘He said he had heard that the younger men had started their own. He was pleased.’ Dr Rennie lowered his voice. ‘But it always had to be a secret. Who knew what they might discover! And one must be careful how one shares one’s ideas. Look at Hunter himself, Dr Sackville always said. Hunter’s own brother stole his ideas and passed them off as his own. He was not the only one!’
‘Perhaps that’s why Dr Sackville took Aberlady’s tattoo,’ said Will. ‘If he was so wedded to the idea of this little society being a secret.’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I think also that both Aberlady and Proudlove came to see their little club as more evil than good. I believe they sought to remove their tattoos as a result. Aberlady knew what was going on. Knew what the club was really about, and wrote to me for help. Unfortunately I came too late.’ I turned again to Dr Rennie. ‘What of Aberlady?’ I said. ‘You remember him, sir? I think he knew of this Resurrection Society too. And of a new one?’
‘He asked me about it, certainly. Was he a friend of yours?’ I was leaning forward, my face illuminated in the candlelight in what must have been a horrible, lurid mask, for all at once the old man gasped, and drew back, as if seeing me properly for the first time.
‘You!’ he cried, grasping my arm. The candle flickered as he seized it and held it close, the better to examine my face. ‘You’re the one with the mask! The mask, Aberlady said. I was to look out for it. I was to tell you.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘That Aberlady is here! Down here. Come along. Quickly now.’
And at that the old man sprang to his feet and went to the door. ‘He’s here,’ he repeated, this time in a whisper, for by now we were out in the main orlop deck. The stairs that led back up to the lower ward, and from there to the light and air of the top deck, were right beside us. ‘He had to hide, so that everyone thought he was gone. Only then could he follow them. He would follow them and find out, he said!’
‘Find out what?’ said Will.
‘Why, the truth, of course! Where they were and what they were doing. That’s how Proudlove heard about it. He was always standing in the shadows, eavesdropping, for they tried to exclude him. And then he insisted that they let him join once he knew—’
‘Join the Resurrection Society?’
‘Shh.’ Dr Aberlady put his finger to his lips and nodded. ‘But Aberlady said it was worse than experiments. There was one of them, one of them, he said, who was not as he seemed. One who thought he was God himself. But he couldn’t be certain which one. He said I was only to tell you.’ The finger he jabbed at me was as gnarled and bent as the root of a tree. ‘“The one with the red mask,” he said. “A mask, like you, Rennie. That’s how you’ll know him. And if anything happens to me, he will know what to do. But tell no one else or all is lost.”’
Dr Rennie took up his candle and beckoned us to follow. All at once my mouth felt dry. ‘Can’t you show us here?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s down below.’
‘Down below?’ whispered Will. We exchanged a horrified glance. ‘I thought we were down below?’
But we were not, for already Dr Rennie and his candle were vanishing down another laddered staircase, hidden in a dark corner, and steeper and narrower than all the others. Will snatched up another candle. We had little choice but to follow.
At the bottom of the ship, the ceiling was so low as to force us to walk at a crouch. The air was cold, the darkness, away from the candle’s feeble glow, was as thick as tar. I felt panic bubble within me. Below us, at the very bottom of the ship, lay a pool of sand and filthy water. Traversing this were thick oaken beams, upon which small shed-like structures had been erected, like giant sedan chairs. ‘Stores,’ said Dr Rennie. ‘Ropes mainly – not much else. No one comes down here these days. At least, not usually.’
‘And why do you come down here, sir?’ said Will.
‘Me?’ He turned to look back at us. The shadows behind him reared like demons. ‘Why not?’
He moved quickly now, his footsteps sure and confident, so that I was certain he could have negotiated the place in the dark. I heard a movement behind us. I turned my head but there was nothing, only my own silhouette huge and looming at my back. I saw tiny eyes glinting, red as blood in the dark, and I felt the panic coursing through me once more. I had spent my life in the city; I was no stranger to cramped spaces and rats and shadows, but this? It was all I could do to stop myself from seizing the man’s candle and scuttling back out of there. I imagined the timbers, softened with neglect, giving way, a sudden ingress of filthy, choking water—
‘What did you wish to show us, sir?’ I said. My voice sounded strange and dead in that ancient, cramped space.
Dr Rennie turned and grinned at me over his shoulder. ‘They say this part of the ship is haunted by the souls of the drowned,’ he said.
‘I can’t think why they’d want to spend eternity down here,’ I retorted.
I heard him laugh, a thin, dry hissing noise, like rope sliding across a polished floor.
‘I’m simply wondering what you could possibly have to show us down here—’
‘There!’ He stood back.
Between the narrow walkway and the side of the ship was a small cubby hole, the length and width of a coffin and some two feet high. Inside it was a blanket – rumpled, as if the occupant had recently flung it aside. Beside it was a candle stick, a book, a pannier of water and a tin which, upon opening, we found contained a mouldering crust of bread, a lump of cheese covered in green fuzz, and a rotten apple.
‘Stops the rats getting to it if it’s in a tin,’ said Dr Rennie.
I picked up the book. Bartlett’s Tropical Poisons. What fear must Aberlady have felt to hide like this, squeezed into a crack in the corpse of the old ship? Come quickly, Jem, but come ready to face the Devil . . . We had come too late for John Aberlady. We had come too late for Erasmus Proudlove too, and for the girls from Siren House. And yet it was still not over. Will lifted his candle high. Beneath the tangled bedding was a shape. A box. He threw the blanket aside. A rat scuttled out and Will stumbled back in alarm. I heard a movement behind me. Dr Rennie was disappearing into the darkness, humming as he went, his candle abandoned on the floor beside Aberlady’s lair.
Will looked at the blankets, his face appalled. ‘Aberlady slept here? Why?’
‘Evidently he was involved with this Resurrection Society. Experiments, anatomy, medical inquiry all conducted in secret by ambitious young men. Perhaps all quite innocent in its way. He and Proudlove joined. And yet something was not right about it. Aberlady suspected it, but he didn’t know what, exactly, or who. Dr Rennie said as much.’ I pointed to the wooden box that lay tumbled in the blankets. The lock had been forced, a sheaf of yellow paper visible within. ‘I imagine those are the confessions from Siren House. No doubt they tell us about the dead girls, what happened to them, who they really are.’
‘And who took their confession,’ said Will.
The box was full of paper. Each page was tightly written, each confession on a new page, each signed by a different hand. Some by Dr Birdwhistle, some by Dr Sackville. One or two had been signed by Aberlady himself. But three confessions stood out from all the rest: Mary Mercer, Jane Stalker, Susan Williams. Their confessions had been transcribed by the same hand, their note of discharge written by the same man. I recognised it from the Blood’s prescription ledger even before I saw the signature.
They see me, but they do not see me. I walk amongst them, behind them, listening, with my eyes downcast. I hear everything as I drift between the beds with my teaspoon in my hand, trickling drops of oblivion between men’s lips. I could kill them all, if I wished, every one of them on board that ship. I have the knowledge, and I have the means. Should I fill my bottle with arsenic? With monkshood, or henbane? What balm might there be for the pain I feel? Only love, but I can have none of that, for she is dead and I am alone again.
I watch them, all of them, and I wait for them to make a mistake. I have them in my eye, and in my mind, though I don’t know yet which one of them is to blame. I must be precise. I must know who as well as why, and I must be certain. I hide my grief and rage; my face is a mask – have they not always said that it was? The mask of an idol, a savage, or a false god. But there is no God, that is one thing, at least, they and I agree upon. They see it in the evidence and logic of scientific inquiry. I see it in the cruelty and hypocrisy of men and the wickedness and injustice of their world. I will be judge, jury and executioner, for who else will step up to stop them? In the shadows, in silence, I wait.
Chapter Twenty-One
I had never been so relieved to take a breath of London fog as I was that night when we emerged at last from the depths of the Blood. Below deck the men were silent. It seemed that sleeping draughts had already been administered, and everyone – including Mrs Speedicut, who I had seen napping in her chair in front of the stove – was unconscious. Upstairs, the weather deck was quieter than ever, for the fog suffocated all sound. With night drawing in, the docks had fallen silent, and I could hear the wet suck and slap of the outgoing tide. But something was not right on board the Blood. Will sensed it too. The lights on the rail were out, so that other than the lantern we had brought up from the top ward the deck was in darkness. On the other side of the deck the door to Aberlady’s cabin was open. We crept over, and peered into the rustling darkness. The stove was lit, but its embers dying. The frogs sat motionless on their moist leaves, the rats rustled and heaved in their crate. But the tanks that usually contained Maximus and Minimus were empty. We stood there listening.
‘Can you hear that?’ I whispered. ‘A scratching sound?’
Will nodded. ‘Over there.’ Together, we turned. Behind us, towards the bow, the door to the library stood closed. A thin ribbon of lamplight was visible at its foot.
I felt my skin prickle as we crept towards it in the thick choking dark. The noise, I realised then, was not so much a scratching, but more a smooth, rubbing sound. I turned the handle, but the door was locked, the key still in the keyhole. I turned it, feeling the soft click of the mechanism through the key’s cold iron shaft.
What awaited us inside was a sight I hoped never to witness again. The room was disordered, with books and papers scattered about, one of the armchairs overturned and the tea tray smashed and spilled on the hearth. Before us, crumpled on the threshold like a broken marionette, was Dr Cole. Around him, the snake Maximus was coiled. The chafing sound we had heard was the movement of his scales against the wood of the library door as he squeezed. Dr Cole was quite dead, though I had no doubt that the scratching we had heard at first had been his final attempt to attract the attention of someone – anyone – who might help him. His skin was still warm. His face was red, as if the vessels beneath the skin had ruptured, and his eyes, staring up at us, seemed to have wept blood. Two trickles of watery crimson tears had flowed down his face. On his neck a pair of red and bloody puncture marks, both of them necrotised and blackish, though I could see that they were fresh. I put out my hand to stop Will going further into the room, and pointed to the hearth. The poker, and the broken body of the poisonous Minimus, lay side by side there.
‘Someone locked Dr Cole in here with Minimus?’ He sounded appalled.
‘Dr Cole sits with his back to the door. It would be easy to creep up on him and slide the snake onto his collar, especially if he was dozing.’ I pointed to the overturned footstool upon which the lethargic Dr Cole habitually draped himself. ‘The door was locked, so once he was bitten he could go nowhere for help – not that he would have been able to do much as the poison paralyses quickly, even from a snake that size. It seems he had time to beat the thing to death and make his way to the door. The exertion of killing his executioner would have exacerbated the poison’s effects, I’m afraid.’
‘And Maximus?’ By now, Maximus had uncoiled completely. As we watched he slithered rapidly across the library floor and disappeared behind a curtain.
‘Maximus is not a biting snake,’ I replied. ‘He squeezes his victims to death, though in this instance I think Dr Cole was already dead.’
I stepped over the corpse and went over to the curtain, gingerly pulling it aside. I was just in time to see the last of Maximus as he vanished out of the partly open window.
‘Who did this?’ said Will. ‘Dr Antrobus?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘But why?’
‘I don’t know. Let us hope we can find him and ask.’
‘Do you think he is still on board?’
‘I doubt it. At least – not now.’
‘He lives with Dr Cole at Dr Sackville’s anatomy school—’
‘Though it is very unlikely that he has gone there. There must be some other place they go. But where?’
‘It must be somewhere quiet,’ said Will. ‘Somewhere out of the way. Near the Blood, but also near Deadman’s Basin.’
Will was right. Deadman’s Basin had always been at the heart of this; it was on the axis between Siren House and the Blood. ‘Your drawing,’ I said. ‘That first sketch you did of the basin – we looked over it together in Sorley’s, d’you remember? You drew me standing by the water, and Aberlady watching us from the corner. And a face at a window.’
‘Looking out from above the archway to Bishop’s Entry?’
‘Yes.’
‘But that might have been anyone.’
‘Whoever it was they were standing there long enough for you to draw them. I don’t mean they were recognisable, only that they were watching. For a long time.’
‘You don’t think it was Dr Ant
robus, surely?’
‘What else do we have that might suggest a place to look? Whoever it was, they were clearly very interested in what we were doing. Of course, it was impossible to tell who they were, but there was something familiar—’ Was it Dr Antrobus? At the time I had dismissed the idea as nothing more than a foolish fancy after a long and difficult day. But what if it was not?
‘It was on the top floor,’ I said. ‘A south-facing room.’
‘What if he poisons us? What then?’
‘Then we die,’ I said.
We made our way to Deadman’s Entry, visible only as a damp-looking smear in the dark patchwork of the night. The last street lamp was on the wall at the corner, but from there up to the passage that led through to Bishop’s Entry and Cat’s Hole there was nothing. We kept close to the wall, making sure that we could touch it with our fingertips, for two steps to the left and we would stumble into the basin itself. At last we came to the buildings at the head of the basin. Overhead, a tenement loomed, tall and black as a rock face. From somewhere in the darkness I could hear the sound of trickling water. I felt the moist squish of ordure beneath my boots.
There was no door, just an opening in the wall, easy to miss unless you were looking for it. It was the sort of entry most people would hasten past, hoping that the shadows within were not for them. Will hesitated – we both did, for who amongst us would enter such a place without a sense of dread? And then we went in.
The stone steps were littered with refuse, worn smooth and sunken from the trooping up and down of boots. To our right, on each storey, a window looked out. Had the weather been clear we would have been afforded a rare view up Bishop’s Entry to Cat’s Hole. It would be a view of black walls and dirty windows, of lines of grey washing, suspended across the street. We could have watched drunk men pissing in the gutter, and girls whisking their skirts as they looked for customers. But it was too dark to see anything, and the window looked at nothing but a grey-black void.
The Blood: What secrets lie aboard? (Jem Flockhart Book 3) Page 29
