We passed numerous doors – some broken down, revealing dirty rooms and shattered windows; others standing open, and we saw figures huddled in blankets sitting on the floor drinking gin by the light of a tallow candle. From deep within the building we could hear men shouting, women screaming, children crying.
On the top floor, there was only one door. It opened without a sound.
Inside, a single candle burned, reflected off a familiar array of jars, bottles, knives and saws. Skulls of all kinds lined the walls, beside resin models of bodily organs – the delicate tracery of the lungs, the veins and arteries of the arm. Above, the rafters were exposed, and amongst them I could make out the dim shapes of other organs, suspended, drying in the warmth of the stove so that they might be varnished and added to the collection. There were jars containing curious fish and pale coiled worms, lizards and blobs of matter I could not make out at all. And in the middle of all this stood an operating table. Upon it lay the body of Dr Antrobus, strapped down, stripped naked, as thin and pale as a flounder. Standing over him, tall and dark in his long black travelling cloak, was Dr Proudlove.
He held a knife in his hand. To his left was a large acid pile battery, fizzing excitedly, wires springing from it like the antennae of a giant insect. It was a larger and more magnificent version of the small galvanic battery I had seen in the consultants’ sitting room that first day, its wires attached to the legs of a frog. ‘One of Dr Antrobus’s little experiments’ Dr Birdwhistle had called it. Now, I saw that both of Dr Antrobus’s collar bones were bleeding from an incision. The same incisions had been made in the skin of Mary Mercer, of Jane Stalker and Susan Williams; incisions into which the wires of the battery had been thrust, clamped onto the clavicle, and the bones of the feet, so that the electrical charge could be jolted through the body.
‘Dr Proudlove?’ I could not keep the amazement out of my voice. Not three hours earlier we had carried him up to the mortuary on a hand cart. Will and I had laid him on the slab ourselves. There had been no post-mortem, and we had left him there beneath his winding sheet. He was dead, there had been no doubt about it. Had there?
The face he turned to us was unsmiling, half hidden in the shadows, his cheekbones catching the light in a dark gleam. I saw his eyes glitter, his lips move as he drew them back over his teeth angrily, furious with himself for not having locked the door, for being so easily discovered. I could hardly believe my eyes. Had he arisen from the dead? How was it possible that he was standing before us? For a moment I wondered whether it was a trick of my mind, a final lingering hallucination as the last traces of opium cleared from my system, and I put my hands to my head, as if to shake myself free of it. But I knew I was not seeing things. I knew there was no mistake, that there was indeed a tall black man standing before us, before an operating table upon which he had strapped the naked body of Dr Antrobus. Was there more to the Resurrection Society than we had realised? Or had we simply been mistaken when we loaded his body onto the slab? And yet resurrection was not possible. And I had never once mistaken a live man for a dead one.
‘Dr Proudlove?’ I said again.
‘Yes, Mr Flockhart?’ And then I understood everything, and the whole world shifted into focus around me.
Her head was newly shorn, her clothes those of her dead brother. She had his travelling bag beside her, his gloves and tall hat, and she wore his caped travelling coat, buttoned up to the neck. It was loose at the shoulders, though she wore it as if she were born to it. Her eyes were wet with tears of sorrow and fury.
‘This man has taken everything from me,’ she said, pointing to the pathetic figure on the table before her. ‘Everything that was dear to me, and I will kill him.’
‘Dr Cole is dead,’ I said, thinking to distract her. ‘The snake—’
‘Is he?’ she said. She gave a shrug. ‘Good.’
‘You killed him!’ said Will.
‘I didn’t kill him,’ she replied. ‘He tortured Minimus and Maximus. All I did was give them the chance to take their revenge.’
‘But why?’ What else might I do but keep her talking while I decided which course of action might be the best. And I could not deny that I wanted explanations. ‘Dr Cole was not to blame for Mary’s death. For your brother’s.’
‘They are all culpable,’ she said. ‘If Antrobus worked alone it was because he was driven to it by Cole, by Sackville, by their collective ambition and lack of humility. Besides, I hardly knew which was which – does anyone? Cole, Antrobus, Antrobus, Cole. They are indistinguishable, from each other, and from the great mass of second-rate doctors who will never do anything worthwhile.
‘I knew it was one of them but not which one. I listened to them whispering on the wards and I discovered what they were up to – I learned about their secret society, their little medical club. I followed them in the dark. But one of them was worse than the others, one of them was working on something of his own. Working alone, and in secret. I knew it was Antrobus – surly, resentful, mediocre – but I had to be certain. And then one of the street girls said she had seen him with . . . with . . . ’ Tears filled her eyes. ‘It took me a long time to find someone who had seen him, but there are no secrets on the streets, not if you ask for long enough.’
‘He was with a girl? With Mary?’
‘Yes. A girl. It was her. It was Mary. He brought her here, to this terrible place, and he killed her.’
Naked before us on the operating table, Dr Antrobus whimpered.
‘Take that cloth from his mouth,’ I said. ‘I need to ask him why.’
‘I know why,’ she replied. ‘I know why he killed Mary. And Susan, and Jane. I know why he murdered my brother and Mr Aberlady.’
‘I must hear it from his own lips,’ I said.
To my surprise, she did as I asked. She jabbed him with the tip off her knife. ‘Go on then,’ she hissed. ‘You tell them. If you can.’
His voice was faint, as if he had to force the words out, but he seemed determined to speak. ‘I had to show them,’ he whispered. ‘I had to show them I could do it. That I was better than everyone . . . I knew it was possible to recreate life. If all the organs were healthy, it needed only the right electrical impulse. Tried with a drowned body first. But I needed to be able to . . . to control the conditions of life as well as of death. And so I made my own.’ He took a gasping breath. ‘Made my own experiments.’
‘You experimented on women?’ said Will. ‘On human beings?’
‘Of course,’ he hissed. ‘What use is a dog? A rat? Nothing can be proved or demonstrated when the subject is a different species entirely.’
‘But – people?’
‘Hardly people, sir.’ He spat out the words. ‘Whores. Who would miss women like that? They are ten a penny. On the waterfront. Ten a—’ He stopped, his breathing laboured, his lips bluish.
‘And so you killed them,’ said Miss Proudlove. ‘Didn’t you?’
‘I chose how and when they should die, yes. And then I tried . . . I tried to bring them back to life again.’ He made a terrible rattling, wheezing sound, and I realised with horror that he was laughing. ‘I succeeded!’ Foam flecked his lips. ‘Once, I succeeded. It worked! But once is not enough. It had to be replicated. And so I tried it again. I killed her again. Suffocated her. Tried to bring her back. But this time it did not work.’ His expression grew puzzled. ‘Don’t know why . . . Did everything just the same. But I could not . . . could not show the gentlemen of the Society an experiment I could not replicate. I had to try again. I opened her up. I could see nothing. Nothing that might explain it.’ He was making no effort to escape, not struggling against his bonds, nor straining his arms, though his speech was growing more and more laboured. And yet he seemed crazed with the need to explain, as if his failure filled his mind and would not let him be.
‘You were in the Resurrection Society with Cole, Aberlady and Proudlove?’ said Will.
‘Sackville’s idea,’ he said. ‘He’d always been in on
e – discussion, philosophy, experimentation.’ He sneered. ‘Pathetic. Limited. Childish. There had to be more . . . ’
‘And the other men? They were not working with you?’
‘I didn’t want them. I had to succeed alone. I deserved it more than any of them. They were not prepared to take risks, to take a useless human life and use it to push at the boundaries of what we know.’ He rolled his eyes so that they were staring straight at me. ‘As for Proudlove and Aberlady with their naive notions about benefiting humanity.’ A sneer curled his lip. ‘They knew, or guessed, that I had higher ambitions. So I had to . . . to get rid of them. They didn’t have the courage for what lay ahead. For what had to be done. For it does take courage to forge a new path, to ask questions no one else will ask so that we can understand and press ahead. That’s what it has all been for, gentlemen, for knowledge. For understanding.’ His teeth were gritted, his eyes bulging. ‘Aberlady disappeared. I knew he was watching me. I knew he had discovered something about me. I was sure he suspected I had killed the girl Mercer, though what proof he had— but I knew too he wouldn’t be able to keep away from the Golden Swan. Opium eaters are devious, craven creatures, and he would reappear in the end. He would not be able to help himself. I told the hag and the boy to look out for him, and when he came they were to ply him with the stuff till he was dead. Paid them well!’ His brow darkened. ‘They said they gave him enough opium to fell an ox but it wasn’t enough. Back he came to the Blood. I saw him creeping along the waterfront. I knew he’d check on his precious snakes as soon as he came aboard, and so I put some cracked henbane onto the stove.’ His mouth twisted into a smile. ‘I had no idea it would work quite so well.’
‘And then there was Dr Proudlove,’ I said. ‘He didn’t have to die, surely?’
‘Always creeping about and eavesdropping. He suspected something too, though he couldn’t be sure. Besides, he didn’t want to know. Not really. His ambition almost matched my own. And yet he was dogged by his conscience. It was only when you found the two girls I had left at Sackville’s villa—’
‘Sackville’s villa?’ said Will. ‘At Deadman’s Basin?’
‘Of course, at Deadman’s Basin,’ snapped Dr Antrobus. Foam bubbled at his lips.
‘Remember the portrait in the hall at Dr Sackville’s house?’ I murmured. ‘“Dr Sackville’s wife’s late mother, Maria Callard,” the butler said. And the villa was owned by Callard estates.’ I turned to Dr Antrobus. ‘Dr Proudlove guessed that you had killed those girls too?’
‘He confronted me. I said it was Cole. Then I took him to the Golden Swan. Said we should go there to find out what had happened to Aberlady, so that we could confront Cole sure in our knowledge. It was easy enough after that.’
‘And Cole?’
‘An idiot. A plagiarist. An insult to the profession.’ Dr Antrobus’s skin was bathed in sweat as he forced out his words. He gave a strangled laugh, and swung his gaze to look at Miss Proudlove. ‘I congratulate you, miss. If you hadn’t killed him, then I would have.’
‘They were your colleagues!’ cried Will. ‘Your friends!’
‘Useless, the three of them. I didn’t need any of them. I had to succeed alone. I knew there must be a way to bring back the dead. To re-ignite the vital spark. I was almost there, too! They would be queuing from here to Oxford Street for my services if I’d managed it! If I’d succeeded!’ He gnashed his teeth into a hideous grin. ‘Isn’t that worth the life of a few whores?’
All this time Miss Proudlove had been standing over him, her surgeon’s knife held against his neck, so that if we had leaped forward to seize her she would have slit his throat in an instant. I believed she would do it too, and I had made no effort to try to make her step away from him. Now, as he looked up at her, the spit trembling on his lips, his words ringing in her ears, she seemed to grow in stature, to draw herself up as if all the rage and sorrow, all the resentment and grief that she had kept tightly within her breast was rising up. She drew back her hand to strike.
Suddenly Will sprang forward, reaching out and snatching the blade from her fingers. The knife sliced his hand, the blood splashing across her face, but he had it. Miss Proudlove looked startled for a moment, and then she plunged her hand into her coat pocket and drew out one of her small blue poison bottles. She tore out the cork with her teeth and spat it aside. Seizing Dr Antrobus by the hair she tipped his head back and poured the contents between his lips. She slammed her hand over his mouth and clamped his nostrils closed between her fingers. He arched his body beneath his bindings, the first movement I had seen him make, and then it was gone, swallowed down in one gulp.
‘Laudanum?’ I said, with some relief. I knew a dose that size would not kill anyone.
‘Hemlock,’ she replied. ‘I think he had said quite enough, don’t you?’ She reached for her hat – the one her brother had worn that first night on board the Blood. ‘You should be careful to whom you show your poison garden, Mr Flockhart.’ Before her, on the operating table, Dr Antrobus lay still.
‘Where will you go?’ I said. ‘Let me help—’
‘I don’t need you,’ she said. She gestured to Will. ‘But he does. Help him, not me.’
Beside me, Will was looking pale. He was holding his hand, his handkerchief – pressed against the palm – was soaked in blood. His face was white as whey. ‘That knife was daubed with slime from the skin of the blue poison dart frog,’ she said. ‘I nicked Antrobus with the blade to make him biddable. It paralyses almost immediately. It was only a little, not enough to make him shut up but enough so that I could get him onto this table. I wanted him to feel what she felt. What all of them felt. Fear. Pain.’
I looked at the battery, its stack of metal plates fizzing with bubbles, the wires, tipped with dried blood, hanging down. She had already made the deep excisions in his skin so that she might clamp the electrode to his collar bones, and to the bones of his feet.
‘You would never have done it,’ I said.
‘Perhaps I wouldn’t.’ Her face was stony. ‘But he’s dead, and I’m glad of it.’ She glanced at Will. ‘He will be too, before long. He took the entire blade of poison against his hand. There is no antidote, and nothing can survive it.’
Beside me, Will sank to the ground. I dropped to his side, pulling back the handkerchief. The cut was deep, and pouring with blood. Will stared up at me, his expression terrified. I turned to her. ‘Help me,’ I said. ‘Miss Proudlove. Gethsemane, please—’ I took Will in my arms as he slid sideways. ‘You can’t leave us—’
She took up her travelling bag and stepped to the door. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
I can hardly recall getting Will back to the apothecary in Fishbait Lane. All I remember is those endless dark stairs, the weight of his body against me as we stumbled down and down, into the howling darkness, the shouts and calls of outcast London echoing around us like the screams of demons. The poison’s effect was immediate, paralysis seizing his limbs in an iron grip, for it had entered directly into the bloodstream. And yet he would not die straight away, I knew that much, for John Aberlady and I had seen it with our own eyes.
When Aberlady first acquired the frogs we had tested the effect of the poison for ourselves. At first, we had marvelled over the frogs’ minute, harlequinade perfection. Such tiny, beautiful creatures! Exquisitely formed and gleaming moistly, their colours – rose red, saffron yellow, luminous greengage – were brighter than anything I had seen on any living creature. But the ones that were cobalt blue, like fragments of sky from their native South America, those had been the most poisonous of all. How would they fare in our dismal climate, I had wondered when I first saw them; would they turn grey, to match the dreary palette of our British clouds? They could not be touched, for their poison was secreted into the slime that coated their gleaming bodies.
Aberlady had smeared the glistening matter onto the blade of a knife, and then wiped it onto a c
ut on a dog’s back. Whether absorbed through the skin or ingested, the effects were the same: the recipient was paralysed almost immediately. Eventually the lungs were affected, the heart cramping and seizing. Death was the only outcome. We had seen not a single survivor from even the smallest of doses, and there was no antidote. Dr Antrobus had been able to speak, to move a little, but he had not taken a tenth of the quantity of poison that Will had.
I had left my lantern beside Dr Antrobus’s corpse. I could not support Will and carry it at the same time, and the darkness was almost complete. Will’s face, beside me, was white and frozen, his lips turning blue as he laboured to breathe. His bloody hand hung limply at his side, a crimson trail on the stairs behind us. I shouted for help, my voice echoing up and down, ringing against those damp and crumbling bricks so that I heard it over and over again. But such places clamoured with cries for help, and no one ever listened. No one cared. Why should they?
I saw faces, ugly and cruel, watching me from the shadows as I staggered down the steps, one at a time, Will’s body heavy against me as his feet scraped along on the stair. And then there was a breath of cold damp air about my face and we were out in Bishop’s Entry. Shadows lurched past, their faces turned away, their shoulders hunched. We were in the most crowded part of the city, where people lived crammed one on top of the other, and yet we were as alone as if we had sunk into the depths of the ocean.
I screamed for help but the fog swallowed my words before they had hardly left my lips. I knew no one would come. No one ever came. Will crumpled to the ground. I knelt beside him, and put my arms about him. His skin against my cheek was as cold as a corpse’s, his breath was barely breath at all. I cried out again, and again, my voice growing raw and choked. Was he to die here, asprawl in the gutter in the most lost and dirty corner of the city? What would I do without him? I would be alone again. How would I bear it? I opened my mouth and let out a howl.
The Blood: What secrets lie aboard? (Jem Flockhart Book 3) Page 30
