The Impossible Girl

by Lydia Kang

  “That would be my uncle,” Cora interrupted.

  “Oh! I believe I met him, then! Well, he’s making some fine pieces, but Duncan says it can’t all be wax. He wants preserved human specimens. Barnum’s is making too much money, and they’re only just down the road. Duncan needs more bodies to compete.”

  “I already know this,” Cora said, picking flecks of pepper out of her teeth with a fingernail, careful not to dislodge the black wax over her canine.

  “Ah. Well, what’s more—the medical school will soon be at the new location. It’ll be quite grand. Seating for six hundred students, with three lecture rooms and two museums. One is slated for specimens only. And they want me to help fill it.” He paused to catch his breath, and Cora took a long drink of Croton water to soothe the swimming feeling she had from drinking the brandy. “If you’ll help me with these jobs, I’ll split my profits with you.”

  “Split the profits, eh? Why bother? I’ll have Cora sell the corpses directly to the curator and Professor Pattison, who knows us already.”

  “He knows you? But at the dissection today—”

  “You think a dapper professor of the University of the City of New York would acknowledge a resurrectionist under the roof of his establishment? Of course he knows me. He knows Cora too. She shared a glass of the finest raspberry cordial with him only a week ago.” Which was true.

  Flint looked flummoxed. “Well then, why did he ask you the anatomy questions?”

  “Because he knew I knew the answer. He likes to show the other students that they aren’t nigh as high and mighty as they think they are. I’ve gone to those lectures of his, as well as those at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the ones at the Anatomical Museum. I can outanswer you in any anatomy question, Flint, and then some.” Her entire first year of work had been spent memorizing anatomy books. Quain and Sharpey’s, Cruveilhier’s, and Harrison’s were her favorites.

  “Then you know what killed Hitchcock, without having been at the dissection? Because I’m sure you weren’t.”

  This time, Cora paused.

  “Ah. I see you don’t know, or that quick tongue of yours would have whipped me already. Well, I’ll tell you what. If you split the next six resurrections with me for both the medical school museum and the curator’s collection, then I’ll tell you what happened to him. It’s quite scandalous, actually.” Watching the emotions flit across her face, he added, “Or do you need to speak to your sister about this first?”

  “She’s my sister, but no woman tells me what to do,” Cora said sourly. Half the profits? That was a lot of money. She didn’t want to split more than was necessary; the goal was to buy time to stifle Flint’s competition, so that eventually all the profits went back to her. “Three resurrections,” she said. “Take it or leave it. Then you can be on your way, and we’ll be on ours.”

  “Very well. I’ll drink to that.” Flint waved the saloon owner over to refill their tumblers with more brandy. They both drew deeply of the amber liquid, and Cora enjoyed the sweet burn of it as it went down her throat. “But here’s something I won’t drink to. The bastard that killed Hitchcock.”

  Cora coughed and sputtered, nearly tipping over her brandy. “What? Killed Hitchcock?”

  “Quiet now, hush!” Flint hissed. “After the dissection, I went to ask Dr. Pattison why the green tongue, and what was the cause of death. He wouldn’t say in class.”

  “The aneurysm hadn’t burst, as you’d said?” Cora asked.

  “No. Even though it was the size of a small melon. It was that green color. It was on his tongue, and trailed all the way down his esophagus and stained his stomach. But his stomach was empty. Some cathartic perhaps—he must have vomited before he died, and emptied his bowels out too.”

  “What are you saying?” Cora said, not understanding. The green color was something she’d never seen in a dissection, not ever.

  “I mean . . . I think he was poisoned.”

  “You really do? With what, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll never know. I’ve never heard of green poison. Have you?”

  Cora shook her head. “What about the mab he was with? At Madame Emeraude’s?”

  “Mab? What?”

  Of course Flint wouldn’t know. She had forgotten, for a moment, that his world was so very different from hers. Hitchcock’s doctor had said nothing of vomiting. Just him falling down dead on Belle, while having his way with her. Part of the story was missing.

  “Well, that makes for two strange things to happen to my people,” Cora murmured.

  “People?” Flint asked, and drained his tumbler. His eyes were glassy and his face pink.

  “The ones that Cora watches.”

  “You said two. Was there another? Who?”

  Cora hesitated. Was it worth telling him about Ruby’s disappearance? The brandy had made Flint’s hazel eyes less intense, but more genuine. Urgency and concern tinged his voice. This seemed more like the real Flint.

  Cora finished her brandy and with a small burp, decided yes, it was worth telling him.

  “There’s a girl I know, lives well enough, but she has a vestigial tail.”

  “Tail! By Jove—”

  The saloon owner seemed to think he was being summoned, and poured yet another six-penny tumbler full of brandy for them both. He paused at the table. “Go join the hockeys upstairs. Hop the twig.”

  “Let’s go. There’s a groggery up there where we can drink,” Cora said to the befuddled Flint, tossing back her drink. “He wants this table, and we’re not eating anymore.”

  They paid for their food and followed a few other men up a narrow, creaking set of stairs to a drinking saloon. Large-bosomed Lacey Stanton, “the Widow,” stood behind the bar, and there were several tables of men playing euchre, brag, whist, and faro. Tobacco was offered around, and pipes filled the ceiling with a haze of smoke. Tonight, Lacey was delivering trays of whiskey punch to her patrons. Most of the men paid a weekly subscription to enjoy the Widow’s upstairs, but Jacob didn’t come regularly enough.

  “Just tonight, thank you,” Cora said, pushing ten cents toward the Widow. Flint did the same.

  The Widow leaned over, showing her bulging wares above the lace of her neckline. “And will this young one be wanting some time with me in the back room, perhaps?”

  Cora laughed. The Widow already knew Jacob wasn’t interested in other amenities—after several refusals from Jacob, she’d simply assumed buggery was more his flavor, and never asked again.

  “No, thank you,” Flint said hurriedly.

  The Widow leaned toward another more interested customer, and Cora and Flint went back to talking in the corner.

  “A girl with a tail? That’s a fine speshumen!” Flint said, a little too loudly. He was slurring now. “Where did you find her? Is she ill? Does she have other ailments?”

  “None that I know of. I didn’t think that she would fall ill—there’s nothing else the matter with her. But she’s gone missing,” Cora admitted.

  “You have dirt on your face,” Flint said, and sloppily attempted to wipe Cora’s face. But she was a touch more sober and easily dodged his hand. She waved his attention away.

  “Do you know anything of her? Heard if she’s been ottomised—” At Flint’s blank look, she clarified, “I mean, dissected?”

  “No, but she’d be a prize piece to have.”

  “Will you tell me if she has been?”

  “I will.” Flint looked into his tumbler. “Empty. You need to catch up. Because I have something else to tell you. ’Bout the curator. ’Bout a girl he’s watching.”

  Cora put her cup down. “What girl?”

  “Drink first. Tell later,” Flint said, waving over the Widow for another round. “S’not a good thing, being drunk alone.”

  Cora dutifully downed another cupful, and when she wasn’t seemingly drunk enough, Flint urged one more. Cora wasn’t happy about her swimming head—she worried that she’d break charact
er. But she didn’t mind being drunk if it meant Flint was. Flint was so much simpler this way. She liked the absence of his bravado and posing and one-upmanship. He seemed lonely. He seemed afraid Jacob would leave.

  By the end of that third punch, Cora was decidedly inebriated and laughed heartily at Flint’s description of Professor Pattison carrying around his dueling pistols everywhere, including to the bathhouse and to bed, so fiery was he and ready for words with anyone. The idea of holsters built into his undergarments had them both undone. It was only after catching their breath that Cora vaguely remembered that she was supposed to ask something of Flint.

  “Fffflint,” Cora slurred. “Theodore. Teddy, my oaf. What was the curator looking for? What woman did you say?”

  “A figment,” Jacob said, licking drops of whiskey out of his mostly emptied glass. “A fairy tale. A tale!”

  Cora scrunched her eyes together. “A tail? I already told you about the tail lady!”

  “Tale! Fairy tale! It’s complete rubbish, but he said he heard from an old doctor in Brooklyn—Brooklyn!—about a woman with the most p-priceless find.” Cora had to wipe his spittle from her face, but it only made Flint laugh harder.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Not possible.” Flint waved his glass and dropped it onto the carpeted floor. “Not possible.”

  “What’s not possible? Tell me, you sot.”

  “He said . . . He said . . . that there was a girl in town with two hearts. They say she may have Chinese lineage. Can you believe it?”

  Flint guffawed, then promptly vomited his dinner of oysters onto the floor, not even realizing his companion had abruptly stopped laughing.

  CHAPTER 8

  The next hour was a blur. Cora was so drunk that she could barely walk. She and Flint clung to each other’s shoulders as they staggered out into the September night and up Broadway.

  The gaslights hissed merrily, but in Cora’s eyes, they were an evil illuminating her guise. She was conscious of Flint’s hand on her shoulder and the padding just beneath her jacket. Could he sense, even in his inebriation, that it was fake muscle? At supper, had he been staring too closely at the false stippling of whiskers? If anything comforted Cora, it was that Flint kept calling her Jacob even as he slurred his words.

  “Jacob Lee, you are a terrible person to let me drink so much of that punch.”

  “Jacob Lee, why is your sister so mean to me?”

  “Jacob Lee, I believe I am going to regurgitate again. Right here, in front of this very fine Olympic Theatre.”

  Which he did.

  Finally, they reached Flint’s boardinghouse, several doors down from the Stuyvesant Institute. Cora had to snatch the keys from his fumbling hands to enter the front door. A nightcapped woman cracked open a door within and tsked her disapproval.

  “Theodore Flint, you need a visit from the Temperance Society!”

  “I need a visit from my mattress,” he responded with as much dignity as possible. Which was not much, given he had a glob of vomit on his chin.

  “Sorry, ma’am. Just dropping him home, and I’ll be off.” Cora was fairly impressed with how sober she could sound and act even though her head was swimming.

  “Quickly then, and don’t wake up the other boarders,” she snapped.

  Cora nearly dragged Flint up the stairs because he’d pause after two and start snoring. On the first landing, she slapped him.

  “Ow! Why did you hit me?”

  “Which one is yours? Which room?” Cora hissed.

  “Top floor, number eleven.”

  Cora slapped him again.

  “Aaaaah. Why’d you hit me again?”

  “For living on the top floor, you sot.”

  They stumbled up two more flights. Room eleven was tiny, not larger than fifteen feet square. A thin mattress, neatly made with sheets and an old brown blanket, was squared into the corner. An oil lamp perched beside a stack of medical textbooks—outdated and very worn—atop a wood desk. A sheet was draped across the corner, behind which a few shirts and trousers sat inside a nearly empty trunk, so well used that half the rivets around the brass bands were missing.

  One could learn a lot from a person’s room. And at a glance, Cora knew that Flint studied hard, and had very little money and no family. There were no piles of letters to and from loved ones, no painted miniatures or pictures propped anywhere. But the room was impeccably clean, and what little he had was ordered to painful squareness.

  Theodore Flint was lonely. The walls spoke about nights alone, and hours spent by the window looking out on Broadway and not participating. Wanting, but unable. Cora recognized the language of isolation in her own room at home. She saw it in the looking glass as well. Cora needed only to glance at herself to feel as if she didn’t belong in any world she set foot in. At least Theo didn’t have to hide, but poverty and friendlessness struck their own kind of blow. She wanted to laugh—a competition between who was lonelier was a terrible competition, indeed.

  Flint released a loud burp, scented with the sour tang of stomach acid.

  “Ugh, Flint. No one deserves to smell the insides of your belly. You owe me for this.”

  He was barely hanging on to her shoulder. Cora staggered over to the thin bed and considered throwing him down, but decided on gentleness. The result, however, was that after she lowered him onto the mattress, her arm was trapped beneath him.

  Exhausted, and still foggy from drink, Cora sprawled half on, half off the lumpy mattress (which was shockingly comfortable), and closed her eyes against the clean cotton sheets. She would rest, just for a minute, then wrestle Flint off her arm and go home. Before that, though, she grabbed the edge of the sheet and gently wiped Flint’s face and mouth clean.

  She was so very tired. She’d rest only a bit.

  Just one minute.

  Cora awoke to the sound of a door slamming somewhere at a distance. Which confused her—Leah was not the slamming-doors type, even when upset.

  She stirred, and realized her head was pounding with pain at her temples, and something heavy was lying across her chest. Opening her eyes, she regarded a water-stained ceiling with peeling plaster.

  Wait.

  Where was she? She inhaled, and smelled something earthy, something that reminded her of work late at night, when she was Jacob—the smell of men whose sweat had dried in yesterday’s clothes.

  That was when Theodore Flint snored in her ear.

  She froze, terrified.

  She was Jacob. Not Cora. And she was still lying on Flint’s bed. The dusky morning cast a buttery light into the far corners of the boardinghouse room. Holding her breath and trying not to panic, Cora lifted her head and saw that one of her legs hung off the side of the cot, the other one nestled next to Flint’s prone and sleeping body. Flint’s arm was draped across her chest.

  Not just across her chest—worse. Flint’s arm was lying on Cora’s sternum, and his hand had slipped under the edge of her jacket and was flat against her ribs, exactly over her second heart.

  Cora’s second heart.

  The very heart that Flint had spoken of only hours ago in the Widow’s upstairs saloon. After he had told Jacob that Hitchcock was likely poisoned, not dead of natural causes, and they had shaken hands over a deal that meant many more days ahead in each other’s company, looking for odd specimens, like girls with two hearts.

  Oh God.

  How could she have been so thoughtless and careless?

  Cora rubbed her eyes and face, dismayed to see that her makeup came off on her hand as a gray smudge. She had to leave, and quickly. Taking a slow breath, she carefully levered herself off the edge of the cot. As she did so, Flint’s hand dragged across her left bosom, bound tightly beneath layers of linen. But even Cora was aware that there was a slight swell there that couldn’t be hidden when touched.

  She froze again, and her feminine senses seemed to take over, registering that she had never been this close to a man, nor had a man’s hand ever touc
hed these illicit places. She’d gone dancing in the past, yes, but then she’d been touched only on her shoulder, or waist.

  When she couldn’t bear it any longer, Cora carefully shoved Flint’s arm off her body and stood. His sleeping eyes whizzed under satiny closed eyelids, and his hair was mussed in a fetching mess across his forehead.

  Stop staring. Stop it.

  Cora looked about quickly for her reticule, then remembered she was Jacob and didn’t carry a purse. She headed for the door.

  “Cora,” Flint wheezed, his eyes still shut.

  She whirled around and gaped at Flint, then exhaled slowly once she realized he was still quite unconscious. So, Theodore dreamt of Cora! It was both disturbing and pleasurable, and she had no idea what to do except leave.

  Forty-seven Irving Place was quiet on the outside, its simple red brick and its white window awnings neat and respectable. But even from the outside, she could detect Leah’s faint squeals and exclamations from the third floor. She went inside and up the stairs.

  Through the door, she heard Alexander sighing loudly.

  “Leah, she’s fine. I’m sure it was just an extra job that had Jacob working all night.”

  “She never does this, Alexander. She always tells me what job she’s got. She always checks in first. Cora wasn’t dressed for a resurrection tonight. She was wearing his second best!”

  Cora opened the door, and silence befell the apartment. In the kitchen, Alexander was smoking an early-morning pipe in front of the smoldering kitchen fire. At the sight of her, Leah snatched her apron to her face and cried with relief.

  “I’m fine,” Cora said, her voice raspy with tiredness and too much imbibing. “I only fell asleep after I had a little too much to drink. Everything is fine.”

  “Fell asleep? More like fell down drunk! I can smell your liquor stink from where I stand! Where were you? Who were you with?” Leah barked, after she’d mopped her face clean of tears.

  “I was with Theodore Flint.”

  “Your makeup! It’s all gone! He must have seen—he must have noticed.”

  “Oh, Leah, he was a nazy cove—he didn’t notice at all.”