The Dead Shall Not Rest

by Tessa Harris

  Books by Tessa Harris

  THE ANATOMIST’S APPRENTICE

  THE DEAD SHALL NOT REST

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  THE DEAD SHALL NOT REST

  A DR. THOMAS SILKSTONE MYSTERY

  TESSA HARRIS

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Notes and Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Postscript

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  Discussion Questions

  Copyright Page

  To Philip and Reinhilde

  Author’s Notes and Acknowledgments

  I first encountered Charles Byrne in 1998 at Tate Britain art gallery, in London. His image, or rather a silhouette of a clay model of his skeleton, formed part of an installation by Christine Borland, whose work was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize that year. To the side was a small, leather-bound volume, open at a page that gave a tantalizing glimpse into the extraordinary story of Charles Byrne, known as the Irish Giant, and his tormentor, the aptly named Dr. John Hunter.

  For almost fifteen years I have wanted to tell Charles’s story, first in the form of a screenplay. Hilary Mantel’s excellent but totally different novel, The Giant, O’Brien, was published after I had written my film script, and for another five years my own version of the story remained in limbo until it was optioned by a production company. The project was shelved after a year.

  Now, however, I am so thankful to have the opportunity to bring Charles Byrne’s story to a wider audience with this, the second in the series of the Dr. Thomas Silkstone Mysteries. While The Dead Shall Not Rest is essentially a novel, I have not changed the names of the three main protagonists because their stories and characters are so extraordinary, I did not want to detract from them. Charles Byrne, Dr. John Hunter, and Count Josef Boruwlaski were all real, and to a great extent I have remained, as far as is possible, faithful to their recorded characters, appearances, and actions. There is one important exception, however. There is no evidence to suggest that the count betrayed Charles Byrne and was instrumental in the treatment of his corpse. Boruwlaski went to live in Durham, in the north of England, and died at the age of ninety-seven. The very unsavory characters of Howison, Crouch, and Hartnett were also real.

  For the purposes of dramatic unity I have compressed the action that occurred over the course of fourteen months, from April 1782 to Charles Byrne’s death in 1783. For unity of place, I have confined the action to Hunter’s home in Leicester Square, although he did not move there until 1783. Charles Byrne did not lodge with the count (who had lodgings in Jermyn Street, opposite John Hunter, for a time) but in Cockspur Street.

  For readers whose interest in this period has been awakened, I can recommend no finer book on Dr. John Hunter than Wendy Moore’s The Knife Man.

  As ever, I am grateful to Dr. Kate Dyerson for the benefit of her medical knowledge. My thanks also go to Patsy Pennell, Katy Eachus, and Beverley Vine for their help. Finally, my gratitude goes to my agent, Melissa Jeglinski, and to my editor, John Scognamiglio, and the team at Kensington Books, for their belief in me.

  —England, 2012

  If I have seen further it is by standing on the

  shoulders of giants.

  —Sir Isaac Newton,

  from a letter to Robert Hooke, 1675

  Chapter 1

  London, England,

  in the Year of Our Lord 1782

  Death was not sleeping in St. Bride’s churchyard that night. She was wide awake and watching, in readiness. She knew her peace was about to be disturbed. She had only claimed what was rightfully hers. Dust to dust, was it not written? But there were those who wished to rob her of her precious new treasure. Fresh flowers had been laid on one of her graves, snowdrops and primroses, and she understood the prospect of new flesh was too much of a temptation for some. So she watched and she waited.

  Dr. Thomas Silkstone had been there only a few hours before. The child they had laid to rest was one of his patients. Just eight years old, Evelina had suffered corruption of the flesh. A bad fall meant that a surgeon had no choice but to amputate her leg, but infection had already crept in and invaded her whole body when her distraught parents had brought their rag of a daughter to him. In life her pretty face had been twisted with pain and her flaxen hair soaked with sweat. But now that the peace of death had descended on her, it seemed as though she was merely asleep. She looked just as his own dear sister had looked when she passed at a similar age all those years ago in his native Philadelphia.

  Evelina’s parents, Mary and Peter Chepp, were good, honest citizens. Evelina was their third daughter, and their second child to die before the age of ten. They had brought her to him when her blood was already poisoned. All he could do was dress the bloodied stump, clean it with oil of thyme and alum, and keep down the girl’s fever. But to no avail. The passing of any of his patients always affected Thomas, even though he knew it should not. It was all part of the circle, the endless round of birth and death that physicians dealt with daily. But when it was a child called before its time, it was all the more heartrending.

  As Thomas watched the couple, standing forlornly together, overseeing the gravediggers lower the little coffin into the earth, his thoughts turned to another funeral. He recalled Lady Lydia Farrell at her mother’s interment. It had been a long and lonely winter without his beloved, with only her letters for comfort. Now that the weather was turning and spring was on its way, the coaches from London to Oxford would soon be running their daily service and he would return to Boughton to see her. He was just waiting for her word and he would be with her. Both of them agreed that it was best, out of respect for the dead and for the sake of their reputations, to keep their plans secret for the time being. If they were to announce their betrothal so soon after her late husband’s death, vicious tongues would wag once again. Thomas did not want Lydia to suffer more than she already had.

  “We have paid both the undertaker and the sexton well,” Mr. and Mrs. Chepp told Thomas as the gravediggers smoothed over shovelfuls of soil, patting them into a mound. The doctor smiled and nodded reassuringly. He hoped that their monet
ary incentives were enough to keep the grave robbers at bay. All the same, he feared for their daughter’s safety even more than his own that night.

  Now that winter had loosened its icy grip on the earth, the sack ’em up men could work with impunity. No corpse was safe. The dissecting rooms of London needed cadavers, and the anatomists did not care how they came by them or who they were. Feeding this insatiable appetite for the dead was a lucrative business for those with low enough morals and strong stomachs—and there were plenty of those—as Thomas knew only too well. He had been approached many times by such scoundrels, but had always sent them away. Once you did business with them, it was hard to break free. He had even heard of a surgeon who refused to play by their rules and woke to a rotting corpse on his doorstep the next day.

  “Our Evelina will be safe,” repeated Mr. and Mrs. Chepp to Thomas as they left the graveside. “No one will steal our child.”

  Now it was a late hour. The spring-guns were set around the churchyard wall, or so the sexton said. The night was moonless. A dog barked and the men appeared. There were four of them and they knuckled down to work as if they were smithies in a forge or infantrymen loading their rifles. Each knew his task and performed it efficiently. Two dug a hole down to the coffin where the head lay while the other two stretched out a canvas sheet to receive the displaced earth. They dug with short, flat, dagger-shaped pieces of wood so that the sound of iron striking stone did not alert anyone.

  Within half an hour they had reached the small coffin. The lid came off effortlessly—the undertaker had seen to that—and they pulled out the girl’s body with ease. And there she was, pure and delicate, dressed in a flowing white shroud and with a garland of fresh flowers wreathed around her pretty head. Still they stripped her. Their own lives were worth more than a few grave-clothes and faded petals. They would not swing for stealing a shroud. So they bundled her, naked, into a sack. Carefully they reburied her grave-clothes and lowered the coffin back down, taking great care to smooth the surface all around. No one must know that the earth had already given up one of its newest and sweetest secrets.

  The sexton, who had been watching proceedings, keeping lookout by the spring-guns which he had previously disarmed, nodded at the men. He saw them slip the sack over the wall and he knew his work was done.

  All that remained was to take the booty—there were two other corpses on the cart—to Castle Street in Leicester Fields. The moon that had been so obligingly absent earlier now reappeared from behind a blanket of cloud, so that the road was easier to trace.

  The cart pulled up in front of a large town house and one of the men alighted by a wooden gate. He tapped on it and a few moments later there came the sound of locks being unbolted before it creaked open. A swarthy guard appeared, lantern in hand, and nodded to the men, who were clearly expected. He returned inside and a few seconds later a drawbridge was lowered into the street and the cart was driven through. Once it was inside, the guard climbed on board. Bending down, he took a tape from around his neck and measured the length of each sack from top to bottom before opening all three of them, one after the other. Seemingly satisfied with their contents, he counted out a number of coins and handed them to the man, who signaled to the others to begin lugging the cargo off the cart and through the gate.

  A few minutes later, their transaction complete, the men drove off. The guard looked up and down the street once more, making sure that no one had been privy to these unconventional business dealings, then cranked up the drawbridge once more.

  Chapter 2

  The annual spring fair at Boughton, in the county of Oxfordshire, was in full swing and it did not take long for the crowd to swallow the little man. At first they must have taken him for a child. Measuring barely three feet tall, he was the height of a six-year-old, but this was no grubby urchin out on a thieving mission. Abandoning his usual dapper French-cut redingote, Count Josef Boruwlaski sported a drab dung-colored frockcoat to blend in with the unwashed horde and headed, virtually unremarked, into the bowels of the throng.

  Each April, beginning on the first Thursday of the month, the fair was held on the estate, near the village of Brandwick, and had been for the last three hundred years. The world and his wife rubbed shoulders with each other as all manner of entertainments, contests, and sports were laid on for the general delectation of the public. There were soothsayers, who would give you good fortune if you crossed their palms with silver and curse you if you did not, and mountebanks who sold miracle cures for a variety of agues and malignant effluvia that, most often, did more harm than good. There were prizefighters and wire walkers, fire-eaters and ropedancers, jugglers and acrobats. There were pigs that could fire a cannon and horses as small as dogs. There was a man who could lick his nose with his tongue like a cow and a hermaphrodite with both breasts and male genitalia clearly visible under its breeches. But as blasé to such spectacles as the good people of Brandwick had become over the years, even they were intrigued by what was billed to appear on a raised dais at the far edge of the fairground.

  As the drum rolled in the shadowy twilight, the gypsy violins and tabors fell silent, the dancing troupe was stilled, and the costermongers and quacks stopped hawking. The servant girls in their Sunday best hushed their swains, and even the painted women shut their scarlet lips as the showman’s voice rose hard and loud above the throng. All were drawn toward a makeshift stage that was flanked by two flaming torches.

  “Come and see the tallest man in the world,” he cried, dressed in yellow pantaloons and wearing a curly-brimmed green hat. His face was set in a wide, almost demonic grin. “He is not six foot, not seven foot, but eight foot high,” he called into the chill air.

  All eyes now focused on the stage. They did not notice the little man edging his way toward the front. Weaving past starched skirts and coarse smocks, he huffed and puffed. Buttons and brocade scratched his cheeks and boots bludgeoned his toes, but he remained steadfast in his purpose.

  Now and again he would jab his elbow into a man’s buttock or tug at a lady’s skirt so that he could pass. One woman screamed when she looked down, believing him to be a cutpurse, but he managed to duck under a bridge of thighs and scurried off too quickly to be caught.

  A few seconds later he reached the edge of the stage, out of breath and with his graying hair quite disheveled, but, he told himself, the excellent view was well worth the discomfort.

  The drum roll grew louder and the excited murmurings from the crowd receded to a hush.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen, the moment you have all been waiting for,” called the showman, his eyes wild with excitement. “I give you, all the way from the Emerald Isle, the truly amazing Irish Giant.” He flung his arm toward the tall drapes that hung behind him from taut ropes at the back of the stage as the drum thundered. Nothing happened.

  Some apprentice boys had clambered up on hay bales stacked by the stage for a better view and, emboldened by strong liquor, began to heckle.

  “Where is he, then?” one called.

  “Buggered off back to Ireland,” shouted another.

  The showman smiled nervously and repeated himself, only this time even louder, making another sweeping gesture with his arm. “The truly amazing Giant Byrne.”

  Still nothing, and a rotten cabbage landed on the stage. “Get on with it,” called a gruff voice, and the crowd started to murmur. The showman began to move backward, his face still set in a wide grin, when suddenly the drapes were drawn apart and a figure appeared in the amber glow of the torchlight.

  A collective gasp of amazement rose as all eight feet of Charles Byrne, the Amazing Irish Giant, lumbered forward, causing the flimsy stage to creak and groan under his weight. He was, indeed, like a storybook ogre, with flowing black hair and arms as fat as ham hocks. Around his massive shoulders was draped a cloak, which dropped to the floor to reveal his naked torso and tight breeches. But his expression was vacant rather than vicious, and he looked more bewildered than belligerent.<
br />
  Nevertheless, the showman’s expression changed instantly from one of nervous anticipation to exalted relief. “Such a giant as never was before seen on these shores,” he shouted out, barely able to contain himself, as the audience cheered and whooped.

  When the cries had settled down to a murmur, the showman leaned forward. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Let me take you back through the mists of time. A time when this man’s ancestors roamed the land. The dark days.” He motioned to the giant, who began to stride purposefully from one side of the stage to the other as directed. To gasps of alarm, he then stopped to look out over the audience, shielding his eyes from the torchlight in an exaggerated pantomime gesture.

  The showman continued his patter as the giant hunched his shoulders menacingly and obligingly mimed gestures to match the speech. “These evil ogres strode over the hills and dales, terrorizing our towns and villages. They slew the menfolk. They carried off our women and used them for their own gratification. They even ate our babes.”

  There were more squeals from the female members of the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, this giant, this Goliath that stands before you here today, is their descendant,” cried the showman, delighting at the ensuing alarums of amazement. “Yet be not afraid, for this colossus is made of altogether gentler stuff.” The showman looked at the giant, who was still grimacing. “Gentler stuff,” he repeated, and the giant duly forced a smile. “Yet he still has the strength of a hundred men, as you will now see with your own eyes.”

  The showman danced over to a large object on the center of the stage that was covered with a crimson cloth. Bending low, he removed it with a flourish to reveal a ship’s anchor.

  “This anchor, ladies and gentlemen, comes from the thirty-ton lugger, the Phoenix, that was shipwrecked off the shores of Cornwall last year. It weighs half a ton, and Giant Byrne will now lift it and raise it above his head in a show of his extreme power.”