Cadaver & Queen

by Alisa Kwitney

  “Don’t be an imbecile,” the young man was saying as he poured a shot of whiskey into a glass. “Grimbald will never condone murder.”

  “Perhaps not. But Grimbald’s not the one in charge,” he replied in the dream. “Moulsdale is the one pulling the strings.”

  “That fat lushington?” The young man handed him the whiskey, then poured another for himself. “He’s too busy guzzling Madeira to hatch some mad plot to replace the queen. Besides, even if Queen Victoria’s health has been deteriorating, she’s not dead yet.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Henry. She is dead. From the state of the body, I’d say she’s been that way for at least a day.” He threw back the whiskey in one quick swallow, but the brief warm burn of alcohol didn’t make him feel any better. “Can you think of a reason why the heads of school would be keeping Her Majesty’s death a secret? Because I can.”

  “Come on, man. Listen to yourself. What you’re saying is preposterous!”

  “I know it’s hard to take in, but we have to face it. They intend to transform her.”

  “Calm down, Victor. Here, you look like you need another drink to steady you.” His back turned, Henry poured the whiskey. “Bottoms up.” His smile seemed a bit forced as he handed Victor the glass. Perhaps he was beginning to realize the full danger of their situation.

  “Thanks. I realize you might not want to believe it because he’s your mentor, but Moulsdale’s the ambitious one.” He tossed back the second shot, which left a medicinal aftertaste in his mouth. “Listen, you don’t need to take my word for this. You’re the top medical resident. They approached me first because I’m surgery, but they’ll need your skills to keep her functioning. Moulsdale will go to you next.”

  Behind the spectacles, his friend’s eyes flickered with a strange look, part triumph, part guilt. “He already has.”

  In the dream, Victor recalled trying to respond to the spectacled man, only to discover that he could not speak, or even swallow. As he clutched his throat, the room began to spin around him. Henry, who had been his friend since the age of thirteen, said, “I’m sorry, old sport, but you’re on the wrong side of history.” He did not look sorry; he looked terrified and triumphant. Then Henry’s face and the room both began to fade to gray. Victor felt himself falling, and without thinking, he grabbed on to Henry’s lapels.

  “What are you—get off!” With a wild look of panic, Henry grabbed something from the instrument tray and slashed it down toward Victor’s face. Instinctively, Victor raised one arm to protect his eyes and felt the sharp cut of the blade a moment before the pain registered.

  This can’t be happening.

  Feeling as though he were moving in slow motion, he reached for his friend’s wrists, trying to immobilize him. Henry brought the scalpel down again, and then again, slicing into Victor’s forearm. On the last cut, Henry hit bone and the blade bounced off. There was metallic clatter as it fell to the floor.

  I’ve been stabbed. Stabbed and poisoned.

  He stared at his oldest friend, who looked as stunned as Victor felt. How could this be happening? They had climbed trees together, fought imaginary pirates, stolen sweet rolls from the kitchen and eaten them with fingers salty with sweat and dirt. Henry knew all his secrets. Victor had thought he knew all of Henry’s secrets, too.

  Take it back, he wanted to say, as if this were just another quarrel.

  But there was no going back this time. Victor felt the arterial throb that signaled rapid blood loss, a stinging rush of cold and then nothing.

  That was the end of the dream.

  He lay on his back, staring wide-eyed into the darkness, trying to make sense of things. Victor, he thought, his eyes finally adjusting to the gloom. My name is Victor, and I was poisoned by a man I thought was my best friend. He tried to move and discovered that he was bound, hand and foot. He tried to call for help, and all that came from his mouth was a low, guttural noise that sounded more animal than human.

  Then he heard the sound of footsteps. Thank God, he thought. Help. He turned his head to the sound of heavy locks being slid back, and then there was a creak and Victor had to close his eyes against the sudden bright light. When he could open his eyes again, he saw that his room had an arched roof and stone walls and resembled a windowless medieval dungeon. A young woman dressed in a nurse’s starched white linen cap and apron was carrying a small gas lantern. Standing just behind her was the man from his dream, stocky and pale, with receding reddish-blond hair and protuberant eyes magnified by round spectacles.

  Henry Clerval.

  “’E’s awake!” The nurse, a buxom redhead, took only an instant to compose herself. “I mean, he’s awake, Doctor.”

  “Yes, I can see that, Probationer. Turn on the light, if you please, so I can read his notes.”

  Probationer? That meant the girl was only a student nurse.

  How do I know this, when I don’t even know where I am?

  Victor’s eyes followed the probationary nurse as she turned on a table lamp, and the doctor examined the chart that hung over the back of the bed.

  “It’s just—I didn’t expect him to be awake.” She frowned. “Is he really a Bio-Mechanical? He looks so human!”

  “Don’t be such a ninny,” Henry said, not looking up from the chart.

  He’s nervous, thought Victor, and trying to cover it up.

  “Of course he’s a Bio-Mechanical. The newer models don’t have the greenish pallor or the heavy stitching, that’s all.”

  “Poor thing. He must have been quite young when he died. And good-looking.”

  When he died. The words were chilling but made no sense. He was sick, certainly, but hardly dead. Did she mean that he was dying now?

  The nurse tilted her head to one side. “Why, just look at him watching me! As if he understands every word I say.”

  Henry sighed as he looked up from the chart. “Don’t they teach you anything? He may be listening to your voice, but that doesn’t mean he comprehends your meaning.” He replaced the chart. “Bio-Mechanicals can be trained to follow simple commands and perform basic tasks, but that is all. That thing may look like a man, but he has no memories, no emotions, and no more intellect than an ape.”

  Victor lifted his head, and his left hand gave an involuntary twitch. That’s not true, he tried to say, but all that emerged from his mouth was a strangled mess of vowels.

  “There! I think he did understand you, Doctor!”

  “Because he grunted? Don’t be absurd.”

  “But what if he just can’t form the words? There was a young fella in my village that hit his head and folks called him an idiot, but he knew what they were saying. He could still write, you see, he just couldn’t speak.”

  “Fine.” Henry extended his pencil to Victor, then, flustered, recalled that the patient was bound. “Undo his right wrist.”

  The nurse loosened the binding. Victor tried to clench and unclench his hand, but found he could only move two of his fingers. The rest felt numb and unresponsive. He tried to ask what had happened to him, but the sound that emerged was a long moan.

  “Right, then. Shall we hand him the pencil and paper and see if he can write us a message?” Henry placed the pencil into Victor’s right hand, and it slipped out instantly. “There,” said Henry. “Satisfied?” Victor’s left hand, still bound, contracted in a spasm.

  “But look, he’s trying!”

  “It’s a reflex action. Until they are trained, Bio-Mechanicals are only capable of rudimentary reflexes. They can’t sit up and feed themselves, let alone write or converse.”

  “But, Doctor—”

  “Look. I’ll show you.” He reached out a finger, placing it in the center of Victor’s right palm. Victor attempted to close his hand around it, but could not quite bring his fingers to touch. “There? See? Simply an autonomic response of th
e—” He broke off as, with shocking suddenness, Victor’s left hand shot up, breaking through its restraint and closing around the other man’s finger like a vise.

  “Doctor, what’s happening?”

  “I don’t know. Try to pry his fingers open.” Victor stared at his own hand, appalled. The hand was half-covered by a brass gauntlet that reached from his elbow to the middle joint of his fingers. Dear God, thought Victor, what have they done to me?

  “He won’t let go,” said Henry through gritted teeth. “Give him the sedative, and be quick about it.”

  “I haven’t given any injections yet! How much morphine do I need?”

  “Depress the plunger to the first marking. Inject him at an angle, into a vein.”

  As the nurse fumbled with the syringe and vial on the tray behind her, Victor tried to unclench his fist. It refused to obey him, but now he could feel sensation in that hand—a warm rush of blood, and something more. A memory flashed behind Victor’s eyes: some man’s neck, the bones cracking beneath the pressure of his hands. That’s not my memory. But how could he know what belonged to him and what did not, when he scarcely remembered who he was?

  “Hurry, I think he’s going to break my finger!” There was a sickening crack, and Henry cried out in agony.

  Victor watched in horror as his left hand began to crush the man’s already broken finger. Victor turned to the nurse, begging her in his mind to prepare the sedative already.

  “Got it, Doctor!” Wide-eyed, the nurse approached him with the metal and glass syringe in hand. Victor grunted, trying to tell her to tap the syringe to remove any air bubbles.

  “For the love of Christ, woman, inject him!” Henry’s face was white with pain, and his eyes were beginning to roll back.

  Before she could bring the needle any closer, Victor’s left hand lashed out, slapping the hypodermic from her hands. The nurse screamed, and Victor gave a hoarse shout. You will not touch her, he thought, and the hand turned, as if contemplating him. I can make it listen, thought Victor. I can make it obey me.

  “I’ve got another needle, Doctor!”

  There was a blur of motion in the corner of Victor’s eye, a quick jab in his right arm, and then the darkness began to settle back over him. His last thought before succumbing was that he hoped the hand fell asleep at the same time he did, and would not wake before him.

  4

  Ingold was tucked inside a wooded valley and surrounded by hills, and had, at various times in its past, been a Cistercian monastery, a noble home and a ruin. The monk who established the order in the early twelfth century had described this corner of Yorkshire’s North Riding as “a place of horror and dreary solitude.” The school preferred to describe its location as “a stunning bucolic haven,” but clearly, some of the students disagreed. On the day Lizzie arrived, some pranksters had hung a banner across the entryway that read Believe the Monk.

  On the steamship journey from New York City to York, Lizzie had read up on the school’s history. Ingold was not the first medical school to produce Bio-Mechanicals: Nikolay Pirogov, the brilliant Russian field surgeon and scientist, came home from the Crimean War and founded the surgical department of The Academy of Military Medicine at St. Petersburg, where he announced his intention of creating a new kind of soldier to spare young men the horrors of war. Lord Sidney Herbert followed suit in London, as did Johannes Friedrich von Esmarch in Germany, but it was Pirogov who succeeded in 1869, with the creation of the first Bio-Mechanical. Nearly a decade later, a second generation of Bio-Mechanicals was tested by Pirogov during the Russo-Turkish war. Slow-moving and unable to fire a rifle, these Bio-Mechanicals were famous for shuffling forward even after sustaining severe chest and head wounds. They did succeed in deterring Turkish troops, however, mainly because the Turks thought they were demons.

  It was about this time that Great Britain began producing its own Bio-Mechanicals at Ingold, while its sister school in Germany rolled out its own models. According to Lizzie’s book, Ingold Abbey: Parting the Mists of Myth, the school’s design was widely considered the most advanced. The book’s author, Letitia Broadbelt, provided no proof of this, although she did include side-by-side illustrations so a reader could compare British and German Bio-Mechanicals. The German model appeared to be both larger and bulkier than its British counterpart, and the top of its skull seemed flatter. Lizzie looked for an explanation, but alas, there was no text accompanying the images.

  Instead, Miss Broadbelt had gone into great detail about the history of Ingold Abbey, noting that the place had been looted and rebuilt so many times that it seemed at odds with itself. When Lizzie had arrived earlier in the day, she had learned that there were four main buildings—the School of Surgery, the School of Medicine, the School of Engineering and the School of Nursing—all designed in a Gothic ecclesiastical style that made Lizzie think of austere hooded monks chanting dirges and arranged around an open central courtyard. Each school building had its own student living quarters, which were located in separate buildings arranged in a loose outer quadrangle. After some discussion among the staff about the propriety of allowing a young woman loose among the male medical students, Lizzie had been placed in Nightingale House, with the nursing students. The head of nursing, Ursula Shiercliffe, had explained this in a way that implied that it was the young men’s virtue, and not Lizzie’s, that was in need of protection. Perhaps Shiercliffe thought that a female unnatural enough to become a medical student might be unnatural enough to seduce unwary men.

  The problem was, she wasn’t completely sure how to get from the medical building to the nursing school and then out into Nightingale House. No one had given her a map and, as far as she could tell, corridors led to staircases that led to other corridors without apparent rhyme or reason, and even the remarkable electric lanterns that lined the hallways could not dispel the medieval gloom. She wouldn’t have wanted to admit it out loud, but she was glad that Byram and Will had offered to keep her company as she walked back to her room to fetch the magnometer.

  “I can’t imagine how the monks managed to find their way around with nothing but the odd candle,” she said over her shoulder.

  “If you think this is dark, you wouldn’t like the tunnels,” said Byram.

  “Tunnels?”

  “See that?” Will pointed to a grate in the stone floor and then to a small door tucked into an alcove. “There are subterranean passageways, built by the monks to escape King Henry VIII’s soldiers,” said Will. “The Bio-Mechanicals use them to get around the school without getting in the way.”

  “They say a servant girl got lost down there, back when this place was still a private home,” Byram added. “Rumor has it the poor girl’s ghost still roams the ancient tunnels.”

  Lizzie snorted. “Do you actually think you can scare me with that story?”

  “Not at all,” said Byram. “You don’t seem the superstitious type. Still—” he dropped his voice “—you can’t deny that the old stone hallways have a cool, dusty, sepulchral odor...as if the presence of the living cannot entirely dispel the echoes of the dead.”

  She glanced back, eyebrows raised. “What was that? A quote from one of Mr. Poe’s horror stories?”

  Byram put his hand on his heart. “You wound me. I write my own material, thank you very much.”

  She had to laugh. “You are a complete idiot.”

  “And you are completely lost,” said Byram, stopping abruptly in front of a tapestry as faded and frayed as an old tea towel. “Admit it.”

  “I’m not lost. I’m just not entirely sure which building we’re in.”

  “Here,” said Will, opening a door for her. “I think it’s easier to get our bearings on the outside.” Even though the walkway was covered, the flagstones under her feet were slick from the constant mist of rain, and she was aware of Byram walking with deliberate care behind her, no doubt mindful of his bad leg
.

  She paused, squinting up at the white limestone facade of the Gothic tower on their right. “I think this might be the place.”

  “Not unless your room is in Percival House, with Will and me.” Byram limped over to the door and pointed to a small brass plaque.

  “So Nightingale must be over there.” Will stepped over the low cloister wall and crossed the grassy square that formed the center of the quadrangle. Then he turned back, frowning. “Can you manage that in your skirts? If not—”

  “I can manage it.” She straddled the wall, trying not to think how inelegant she must look. Will had offered her a hand; she refused it. She turned back to see Byram twist his ankle as he stepped over the wall.

  “Are you all right?”

  Byram lifted his chin. “I could ask the same of you. Really, what would you have done if we hadn’t come along? Women. No sense of direction whatsoever.”

  Lizzie bristled. “While men strike out with false certainty, praying that they’ll figure it out along the way.”

  “Ah, but women are so much wiser than men,” said Will, smiling back at her over his shoulder. “They know that acknowledging weakness is not in itself a weakness.”

  She hated those kinds of compliments. They put women in the same category as dogs—nobler and simpler beings than men. “And what does it get them? A lifetime of planning dinner menus and cornstarching gravy stains out of linen tablecloths.”

  Byram stopped in front of Nightingale House, holding the door open for her. “I take it, then, that you do not agree with the theory that women are most suited to the occupation of wife and mother?”

  “Are you trying to annoy me?”