‘Don’t,’ said Will, seizing my arm. ‘Have we not had enough of the place today that we must look over our shoulders at it too?’
‘I must,’ I said. ‘I must see who watches us go,’ and I turned to gaze up at the building. Was there a movement at a window? The shadow of a face recoiling into the shadows? I saw no one. I did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed.
The apothecary was as warm as summer, the stove was burning cheerily, the afternoon sun illuminating the jars of tincture that lined our window ledges. The air was thick with the scent of drying hops and liquorice root, fennel, rosemary and camomile. I took a deep breath of those beloved herby scents and felt all the better for it. Before we went out I had tasked Gabriel with making a gross of worming lozenges and I could see that he had completed the task and cleared everything away. The pills lay on the work bench in a box, their sugar coats drying. Beside this, the condenser had been set up, and a distillation of St John’s Wort, newly extracted, gleamed red-orange in the flask.
‘Well done, Gabriel,’ I said. I handed him an orange I had bought as we came down from the asylum. A spray of oil burst from it as the lad ruptured the peel and tore the segments apart. Juice ran down his chin.
Will made a cup of tea and unwrapped a cherry cake he had bought from the bakery at the end of the lane, and we settled down on either side of the stove, our boots warming on the hearth. I had seen Dr Rutherford’s phrenology ledgers before. He was proud of his position as collector and curator of so large a museum of human skulls, and in his ledgers he had a description, and an illustration, of each one of them. Measurements – of jaw, brow, depth of cranium, width of eye sockets – were recorded precisely, and any interesting aspects noted down. What he knew of the subject – their origins, life history and manner of death – was faithfully recorded alongside in a cramped hand. I knew the content and layout of the ledgers because he had once explained it to me. He was pleased with what he believed his collection had taught him about human nature, what it suggested for the study of behaviour, criminality and madness and he was keen to share it with anyone who would listen. A number was recorded in the top right-hand corner of each page, beneath which, in a short paragraph, were the doctor’s observations.
‘How meticulous he was,’ said Will.
‘It was an obsession,’ I said.
‘And Letty?’
‘I’ve no reason to doubt the man’s intention to make Letty well again. And chloroform has done much to open men’s imaginations as to what might be possible. Physic is all very well; theory, too – about physiology, about anatomy, about how the mind works. But surgery – physically intervening in the mechanics of the body – that becomes at once a place of such potential. Risks have to be taken if progress is to be made.’
‘You sound as though you approve.’
‘In general, I suppose I do,’ I said. ‘Given my own situation, how could I not? Would I allow myself to be cut if I thought it would save me from my father’s malady? Only if all else were lost. But who we are is inside our heads. It is not something others should have the power to excise if they do not like the sort of human being we are. Should we not accept those who are different – cherish them and care for them rather than seek to make them “better”? Should we put Edward Eden under the knife merely because he’s simple?’
‘No,’ said Will.
‘No,’ I said. ‘And yet what might be cured, and what must be endured, are sometimes one and the same thing.’
We fell silent then, both of us thinking of my father, of my own future, of Letty staring blankly and hopelessly at nothing.
‘Pass me the skull,’ I said.
It was small, no bigger than a baby’s. The number at its base, 260442, was etched onto the bone with a sharp knife and stained with ink. ‘The numbers are not chronological,’ Will said. ‘Look. They start with 181136, then 110137, then 020237. Did Rutherford explain his filing system?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But these are dates. Day, month and year. The skull we have here was recorded in the ledger on 26th April 1842. There is no code, no mystery here. He recorded them as they came into his possession.’
Will was turning the pages. ‘17th November 1840, 3rd January 1841, 3rd June 1842—’
‘Go back,’ I said. ‘You must have missed it out.’
‘No,’ said Will. He turned the pages rapidly. ‘Itgoesfrom 3rd January 1841 to 3rd June 1842.’ He ran a finger down the seam between the two pages. ‘There’s a page missing.’
I sighed. ‘Of course. It would be too easy otherwise. Very well, but what can we learn from the surrounding cases? I will not be defeated by this.’ I sat back in my chair and took a mouthful of boiling tea. ‘Read out the two entries that fall before that missing page.’
‘“Subject”,’ read Will. “‘Jane Calloway. Twenty-five-year-old woman of low origins. Born: London. Died: Norfolk. History: theft, drunkenness, licentiousness, association with known criminals. Syphilitic: notched incisors, flattened bridge of nose—”. It goes on in much the same vein.’
‘And the one after?’
“‘Subject: Mary Gillies. Fifty-(approx.) year-old woman of low origins. Born: London. Died: Norfolk. History: violence, forgery, attempted murder. Dmnkenness. Pugnacious appearance. Had to be restrained”—’
‘What picture emerges?’ I said. ‘There are similarities. All Dr Rutherford’s skulls are female, all belonged to criminals. What else do they have in common?’
‘They all died in Norfolk.’
‘How many in total?’ I said.
Will flicked through the pages. ‘Three,’ he said.
‘And before that where did they die?’
‘London.’
‘And after the missing page?’
“‘29th April 1842. Subject: Mary Hale. Eighteen-year-old woman. Born: Bristol. Died: Newcastle. History: theft, robbery, infanticide.’”
‘Newcastle?’ I blinked. ‘Really?’
‘Yes. The four that fall after the missing page all died in Newcastle.’
‘And after that?’
‘London again.’
We fell silent. The clock on the mantel ticked. It sounded like the disappointed clicking of a tongue, so that I was reminded suddenly of my father, and in my mind’s eye I saw him shaking his head at me. ‘Is this the best you can do, Jem? Is there nothing else you might learn?’
I jumped up. ‘There is something here, Will, something important. London, Norfolk, Newcastle, London. Did he work in these places?’
‘I think we can assume so,’ said Will. ‘What other conclusion might we draw?’
‘I think we must empty our minds of this piece of the puzzle for now,’ I said. ‘We must take up another unanswered question.’
‘Who is the woman in the photograph?’
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘And I think the House of Correction is our next destination.’
Gabriel had listened to all this in silence, sucking noisily on his orange. Now, he spoke up. ‘Not again,’ he said tearfully. ‘You’ve hardly been here this past week, Mr Jem. You’ve been up at Angel Meadow every day and given me no help down here at all. There’s remedies to be made and customers comin’ in and out all day and you don’t see none of them any more, though they’re always askin’ where you are and whether you know who killed them doctors. I don’t know what to tell ‘em about where you are or what’s goin’ on. But ain’t this place our livelihood? Ain’t I got my apothc’ry examinations to think about? What if something happens to you? Who’s goin’ to teach me then?’
‘Nothing will happen—’
‘How d’you know? There’s two of ‘em murdered already. Murdered, Mr Jem, and cut and stitched and I don’t know what else.’
‘Nothing else.’
‘Ain’t it enough? Ain’t you scared?’
‘Gabriel—’
‘You should be! ‘Specially now there’s this.’ He pointed to the skull. I had placed it on the stove top, its eye sockets mournful
shadows above the small toothless jaws. I had seen dead babies aplenty – infants didn’t stand much of a chance in the city. Diarrhoea, typhus and cholera saw to that. Had this one met a similar fate? Or should we be thinking about its beginnings rather than its end?
‘Well then,’ I said. ‘Let me put it out of sight.’ I placed the skull in one of the drawers of the cabinet that was marked with a skull – a drawer where I usually kept the poisonous substances – arsenic, or digitalis. The phrenology ledger I put on the shelf above, amongst my own recipe books and prescription ledgers. ‘Just get on with your work,’ I said, ‘and don’t think about it.’
‘Can’t he have a few hours off?’ said Will. ‘What’s the worst that may come of it?’
‘Very well.’ I sighed. ‘I suppose Mrs Speedicut will be along soon. They can both— talk of the devil!’ A round podgy face had appeared at the window, its nose pressed against the pane. ‘She leaves a greasy blob on the window pane every time she comes,’ I muttered. ‘Why she insists on pressing her nose to the glass before she enters I have no idea.’ The woman’s panted breath misted the window. She caught my eye and vanished. A moment later the door was kicked open. The bell jangled violently, before falling suddenly silent, the clapper ricocheting across the apothecary to vanish between two bushels of lavender. ‘For heaven’s sake, Mrs Speedicut,’ I cried. ‘Can you not just open the door using the knob like everyone else? You have broken my bell – again! Gabriel, see if you can find the clapper.’
‘I’ve come for my tea and my shag,’ she said, her expression belligerent. ‘They made me clear everythin’ up,’ she added. She scowled. ‘Everythin’. And it were all your fault!’
I handed her a poke of tobacco I had bought on the way down from Angel Meadow. She pulled out her pipe and rammed a tufted plug of the stuff into the blackened bowl.
‘Allow me, madam.’ Will lit a taper from the stove and passed it over. She sucked hungrily on the yellow-stained stem, a cloud of acrid smoke billowing around her, and gave a grunt of satisfaction.
‘Gabriel is coming with you to Sorley’s,’ I said. ‘Tell Mr Sorley to send me the bill. And no more than four pints of beer, mind.’
‘Each?’ said Gabriel.
‘Between you.’ I shook my head. Mrs Speedicut was no lover of restraint when someone else was paying the bill. I wondered at the wisdom of my decision to send them both together. What mayhem would Will and I return to? But I had other things to think about and we left them to it.
‘What do you hope to find?’ said Will as we walked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘There are links here. Between the present and the past – not the recent past either, but something further away, something Rutherford thought he had escaped. I don’t know what we are looking for, exactly, but the skull, the phrenology ledger, the image from that camera, they are all connected – to each other and to Rutherford’s death, as well as the manner of it.’
‘And what about Tom?’
‘Poor Tom Golspie is a different matter,’ I said. ‘I think we have a different murderer, though there is no doubt that the two are linked. How could they not be?’
‘And what links them is Susan Chance?’
I hesitated. Susan Chance had given me little cause for confidence. Even Dr Stiven was beginning to doubt her. And yet ... ‘I think not,’ I said.
‘Then what—?’
‘I don’t know, Will. I truly don’t know.’
I had never been to the House of Correction before, though I knew well enough where the place was. It was a long, low fortress of a building, not unlike Newgate in the heaviness of its walls and the tiny windows, thickly barred, that blighted its face like scabs.
‘Extending the gaol will mean that more women can be housed here,’ said Will. ‘Whether or not the conditions within the place are any better remains to be seen. Any improvements will, I fear, prove to be brief, and illusory.’
‘Who’s kept here?’
‘Women convicts – those who are not to be transported. They used to keep those who were to be transported as well, but not any more. Their terms are usually no more than a few months, a few years at most.’
‘Are any of them lunatics?’
‘Not any longer. I believe they go to Angel Meadow. They tended to disrupt the other prisoners if they were all quartered together.’
‘All women?’
‘Yes.’ He laughed. ‘I can’t believe I know something about the city that you don’t, Jem.’
‘And Christie works here?’
‘He has a consultant position here.’
The doors to the prison were massive, dark with soot and mud and studded with thick iron rivets. I could smell the place even before we were inside it – but then every place in London had its own stink – the brewery, the slaughterhouse, the meat market all reeked of the industries that took place within. But at the hospital, the workhouse and the prison it was human beings that were crushed, ground, and rendered. The smell from these places was the same – it was the smell of poverty and despair, of hopelessness and misery. I had grown up with the stink of it in my nostrils, though I had never become accustomed to it.
Will rapped upon the door – a small portal large enough for only one person to enter at a time that was cut into the tall arched gates. The superintendent obviously recognised him, for although the man looked at me askance, he gave Will a surly nod and motioned us inside. He beckoned one of the wardens, the blank-faced woman with the dirty neck that I had seen in the picture Will had taken with the prison camera. She scratched a flea bite on her wrist, plucked something from her skin and cracked it between blackened fingernails.
‘Where’s it to be today, then, sirs?’ she said.
She led us across a courtyard paved with crooked, slime-covered flagstones and unlocked a narrow side door, scuffed with the kickings of a million prison wardens and worn where their shoulders had heaved against it. I found myself wondering how many times I would hear the jangling of keys and the scraping of locks before we were done, before we had uncovered the truth and might return to our lives. Would we ever be able to put from our minds the memory of those terrible stabbed heads, the stitches at their mouths and eyes? I knew I never would. The door wailed on its hinges. I closed my eyes against the sound. Had Will not been watching me I might have stopped my ears too. But I could not show my weakness, could not let him see the fear that the place awoke in me. I took a breath, nodded to him grimly, and followed the woman inside.
‘Want to see around, sir? Them what’s from the buildin’ committee usually do.’
‘No,’ I said. I had no wish to look around the place. I knew that many of the women who found themselves there had already endured far worse – Newgate was the first destination for most. ‘Did Dr Rutherford work here?’ I asked Will as we mounted the stairs. ‘You asked, did you?’
‘I did ask,’ he said. ‘He did not work here. Perhaps we might assume he worked in Norfolk, though how we might find out where, exactly, is another matter.’
Something, some faint memory stirred at the back of my mind, uncoiling, like a snake moving silently through the grass. What was it? I could not place it. But we were climbing stairs now, winding around and around, and the noise from the wards was harsh upon my ears and disturbing to my thoughts. The convict women were kept in wards, long rooms where they were herded together and left to fight over what straw and bedding might be available. I could hear the crying of babies and the sobbing of their wretched mothers, a dismal rhythm beneath the oaths and raised voices of those with fight still inside them.
‘D’you want to see the wards, sir?’ the warden asked. I shook my head. In truth I was feeling sick and dizzy. My heart was racing and my hands felt sticky. I had been sleeping badly, though I had not told Will. I had not told Dr Hawkins either. I could not bear to have them worry, for Will to watch me with sad vigilant eyes, wringing his hands and asking me over and over how I was, for Dr Hawkins to test and prod me, to think of new w
ays I might be saved. But I could not be saved, I knew that much. There had been no developments in medical science to help me. The noise from the prisoners grew louder. My head reeled. Was this how it began, I wondered? Was this the start of my descent into sleeplessness and the madness that would so cruelly, so inevitably follow? I felt something cold beneath my hands, the sound of voices shouting, my name being called, and a curious sensation in my head, as if I were shaking it from side to side.
‘Jem,’ cried the voice again. ‘Jem.’
The warden loomed against the whitewashed walls, her face impassive. She cracked the back of another flea between her nails and drilled her ear with a forefinger. Who was she? Where was I? I scrabbled about on the floor. ‘Jem,’ the voice cried again. And then there was Will. He put his arm about me and held me close. ‘I’m here,’ he said. He peered anxiously into my face. ‘You fainted.’
I wanted to cry, to lean into him and tell him – how badly I slept, how worried I was for my future, for all of our futures, for how would Gabriel manage without me, where would Will live if there were no apothecary? How, when I did sleep I dreamed of dead men – my father on the rope, Dr Bain, his lips red with poison, Dr Rutherford and Golspie, cold and white against their blackened and bloody sutures. But instead I just nodded, shook my head impatiently at my own weakness, and struggled to my feet.
‘Lots of folk is taken over peculiar-like when they’re first here,’ said the warden. ‘Everyone gets used to it in the end.’ She grinned. ‘They ‘ave to. An’ there’s always worse places if they don’t be’ave.’
‘Perhaps you should wait here,’ said Will. ‘I’ll get the camera.’
‘Camera?’ said the woman. ‘That box what’s upstairs? That’s been took.’
‘Took?’
‘Took downstairs to the infirmary. All that stuff’s been took down.’
We followed the warden through another locked door and along an echoing corridor. I could tell by the familiar smell of the place that the infirmary was not far away. Ahead of us a door opened, and a fat woman emerged carrying a brimming chamber pot. The sounds of hawking, sobbing and moaning drifted up to meet us.
Dark Asylum Page 21
