The Anatomist's Apprentice

by Tessa Harris

  “Why do you not go into Brandwick this morning, my dear? ’Twill take your mind off things.”

  Farrell obviously had no comprehension of just how wretched his wife was feeling. Lydia’s brother would be laid to rest, aged just twenty-one, in the family vault the very next day. She marveled at his insensitivity. Were she to set foot in the village she would be forced to run the gauntlet of rumor and innuendo. She dared not tell him that the draper had even refused Cook credit for a new apron. Yet she had no stomach for a confrontation. She said simply, “I think not,” and was about to excuse herself from the breakfast table when Howard, the butler, entered with a letter held aloft on a silver salver. He presented it with great ceremony to Farrell, who opened the seal with a knife.

  Lydia watched as a frown settled on her husband’s brow.

  “What is it, Michael?” she asked with trepidation. It took a great deal to make her husband frown. He unfolded the parchment and scanned it for what seemed like an age to her. He then looked up and paused for a moment, as if wondering how to frame his reply.

  “ ’Tis from your brother’s godfather.”

  “Sir Montagu?”

  Farrell was studied, yet forthright. “He has heard gossip.”

  “Gossip?” Lydia found herself echoing her husband and the very word chilled her to the bone.

  “Rumors about Edward’s death.”

  Lydia breathed deeply. It was almost a relief that someone other than herself had brought the situation to her husband’s attention.

  “You know something?” His voice was almost accusatory.

  Lydia nodded slowly. “In the village they say ...” She broke off, unable to bring herself to reiterate what scandalous rumors were being spread like shovelsful of dirt around Brandwick and beyond to Banbury, where Sir Montagu Malthus lived.

  “What do they say, Lydia?” His voice remained calm, but she could see there was anger in his eyes.

  “They say that perhaps ... perhaps Edward’s death was murder.” She waited anxiously for her husband’s reaction, wringing her linen napkin under the table. Although the word had been on her lips for several days, it was the first time it had been spoken.

  Farrell paused for a moment. “Then Sir Montagu is right,” he said finally, standing up. “We must stop these vile rumors spreading.”

  “Yes, but how?” pleaded Lydia.

  “It was well known that Edward was sickly. We must order a postmortem to prove he died of natural causes.”

  The young woman looked at her husband. There was a defiant air about him. His head was tilted back slightly, highlighting his jawline. Just then a ray of morning sun caught the blade of a knife on the table, making it glint menacingly. The thought of her young brother being opened by a surgeon’s scalpel appalled her, but at the same time, she knew her husband was absolutely correct.

  And so it was that a surgeon, Mr. Walton of Oxford, and a physician, Dr. Siddall of Warwick, called at Boughton Hall on the morning of October 18, 1780, six days after Lord Crick’s untimely demise. Captain Farrell greeted them courteously enough and showed them to the upstairs room. Lydia watched from a half-opened door in the drawing room.

  “Who is it, Lydia?” Her mother, seated in a large, high-backed chair, heard the men talking in the hall and became agitated. In fact these days agitation was her natural state. The death of her husband had had a profound effect on the woman, who was now in her early fifties. She had lost what little ability she ever had to concentrate and her addlepated mind flitted butter-flylike from one often unrelated subject to another. Lydia was sure she did not realize her only son was dead, or indeed how he had died. She had heard her daughter screaming for help on that terrible morning and had screamed with her, but Lydia did not believe she had any idea why.

  “Funeral? Who’s dead?” murmured the dowager, her lace cap tilted at a rakish angle over her gray, wiry hair, which she wore in the old-fashioned way. Lydia envied her sublime ignorance.

  As soon as Farrell opened the door for the medical gentlemen, the young earl’s corpse made its presence felt. The room was filled with the unmistakable stench of decomposing flesh. The cadaver lay covered under a white sheet on the bed, and with handkerchiefs over their faces, the surgeon and the physician approached it with caution. Captain Farrell watched their fearful expressions with muted amusement. Dr. Siddall stepped forward first and gingerly pulled the sheet back. Mr. Walton had approached the corpse, too, out of a sense of professional duty. Neither of them, however, was prepared for the grotesqueness of the vision that awaited them. Crick’s hideously contorted face had already fallen prey to rigor mortis and proved too great a challenge for the mortician. Although his lids were closed, his mouth was open and creamy gray grave wax oozed from the orifice. The pallid cheeks had been almost comically dusted with rouge, but they were bloated and maggots were already feasting inside the nasal cavities. Both doctors let out a simultaneous groan.

  “My brother-in-law is not a pretty sight, gentlemen,” remarked Farrell wryly.

  The two men looked at each other gravely and retreated to confer. After no more than a minute Mr. Walton spoke for them both. He cleared his throat, turning away from the cadaver. “Have you any notion as to how ... ?” He did not finish his sentence, as if not wishing to appear indelicate.

  Farrell nodded his head slowly. “Indeed, gentlemen,” he began in a sombre tone, “you have heard directly from his physician, have you not, that my brother-in-law was a sickly youth?” The doctors, who were aware of the young lord’s general malaise, nodded sympathetically in unison. Leaning forward, rather conspiratorially, as if about to let the men in on some terrible secret, Farrell continued: “It is an indelicate matter, gentlemen, and not one that is common knowledge, but poor Lord Crick lay with a doxy in his first term at Eton and was never the same again.”

  This news, however shocking, seemed to satisfy the medical men that Lord Crick’s death was perfectly natural. If the French pox had not killed him, then some complication of the vile disease had. There was no more to be said.

  It was therefore with great relief that Mr. Walton concluded to Captain Farrell: “We fear that his lordship’s corpse is in far too advanced a state of decomposition for us to draw any conclusions as to the cause of his death other than the fact that he was”—Dr. Siddall cleared his throat and obligingly finished his colleague’s sentence—“infected.”

  The captain nodded and looked at them earnestly. “There is, too, a risk of contamination, is there not, gentlemen?”

  Suddenly finding a sympathetic ear, the two doctors nodded their heads vigorously with one accord.

  “Indeed so,” retorted Mr. Walton eagerly.

  Farrell looked solemn. “Would I be correct in assuming that you agree with Dr. Fairweather that my brother-in-law passed away through natural causes, then, gentlemen?”

  The two doctors looked at each other gravely and, once again, nodded their heads eagerly in agreement.

  “Then I am free to bury him?”

  “By all means and with the greatest of haste for all our sakes,” urged Dr. Siddall obligingly.

  From the drawing room, Lydia could hear footsteps descending the stairs. She rose and walked softly toward the door. She could hear her husband bidding the gentlemen farewell and waited till the front door was shut before confronting him.

  “They were here not ten minutes,” she said, frowning.

  Farrell turned and held her hand. “Your poor brother is too far gone, my dear. We must bury him at once.”

  Lydia’s heart sank. She feared Edward would take the secrets of his death with him to his grave and no one in Brandwick, nor in the whole of Oxfordshire, would ever know the truth. More importantly, nor would she.

  Chapter 4

  Very few people mourned Lord Edward Crick. He was interred in the family vault in the estate chapel the following day, watched only by his mother, sister, and his brother-in-law; his cousin Francis Crick, an anatomy student in London; and James Lavi
ngton, a neighbor and friend of the captain’s. His legal guardian, Sir Montagu Malthus, was suffering a severe attack of the gout and was unable to attend.

  How different it had been when they were children. She remembered playing with her brother in the woods, skimming stones on Plover’s Lake and, on warm summer evenings, taking bottles of lemonade up to the ridge that looked down on the house. Sometimes they would be joined by Francis and all three of them would roll down the slope, falling down from dizziness as soon as they tried to stand up at the bottom. She remembered, too, the heartache when her father sent Edward to Eton. He was thirteen. On his return home after the first term she no longer knew him. He was so changed that he would not even stroll with her in the gardens, caring more for his card games with his newfound friends than for either her or the estate he would one day inherit.

  The insipid October sun offered little comfort as the small procession entered the musty chapel. Lady Crick thought it was an ordinary Sunday and wore a bright bonnet trimmed with roses. Lydia placed her mother’s ice-cold arm around her own and choked back acrid tears as the vicar read from the gospel.

  Captain Farrell thought it right that he should deliver the eulogy. If she had felt stronger, Lydia might have insisted that Francis, who had been closer to Edward, address the congregation, but instead her husband, the man who loathed her brother perhaps more than any other in life, now sang his praises in death. He found himself having to dig deep to find good things to say about his brother-in-law and even Lydia was forced to admit to herself that Edward Crick had not been a likeable young man.

  “Those who knew Edward, as I did, will remember him as a private person.” Lydia knew what her husband would say next: that her brother may not have been very forthcoming, but that he was quietly dedicated to the estate, even though its burden had been placed on him at such a young age. He worked, he told his meagre audience, quietly behind the scenes to ensure that all ran smoothly. She could not force herself to listen to the clichés that were as empty as most of the pews in the chapel. Instead she let her eyes roam around the porticoes and columns, lifting her gaze to the ceiling. She settled on a face carved in stone and framed by large oak leaves at the top of a pillar to the left of the altar. Its mouth was drawn tight and its eyes were bulging and immediately she saw Edward’s anguished face once more. Was he listening to her husband’s lies? She prayed to God that this final ordeal would soon be over.

  Afterward they gathered in the drawing room in an uneasy atmosphere that was thick with nagging suspicions and thinly veiled recriminations. Farrell smiled calmly through it all, making small talk and frowning sympathetically now and again when someone invoked Edward’s name, until, that is, a grotesquely disfigured gentleman limped over to him from the other side of the room.

  “You play the part of the bereaved brother-in-law well,” remarked James Lavington when he finally had Farrell to himself in a corner. He had known the Irishman since their days in India. It was there that the accident had happened, leaving him partly paralyzed down one side of his body and his face horribly disfigured. A prosthetic nose of ivory had replaced his own, which had been blown away. The captain allowed himself a fleeting smile.

  “What I do, I do for her,” he told him in his soft Irish brogue. He looked over toward Lydia, who was talking to Francis. “It has hit her hard.”

  Lavington nodded and gulped back a sherry. He and Farrell were of the same ilk. The only difference between them was now the captain had the means to sustain his lifestyle and Lavington, disabled as he was, did not.

  “You’re a fortunate man, Farrell,” he said, looking at Lydia in profile as she talked earnestly with Francis. The Irishman nodded.

  Francis was roughly the same age as his beautiful cousin and as a boy even nurtured dreams of marrying her when he was old enough, but she had chosen otherwise. His features were smooth, almost feminine. People said they looked alike and although they both always denied it, Lydia liked to think it drew them closer.

  “Your husband delivered a good eulogy,” said Francis, being unusually formal. Lydia knew that what he really meant to say was that the captain concealed his relief at Edward’s death well.

  “Yes,” she replied, but it suddenly struck her that if he could lie that well in church before a congregation, maybe he could lie to her, too. She hesitated, wondering whether or not to reveal her fear. She decided she must.

  “You have heard the rumors?”

  Francis feigned ignorance. “Rumors?” he repeated.

  Lydia sometimes wished he were not so polite and proper. “Francis, I must be truthful with you. ’Twas bad enough losing Edward, but now all this scandal—”

  Francis nodded, making Lydia break off. “I must admit I have heard talk.”

  “What are they saying?”

  He took a deep breath, but in the end there was no tactful way of putting it. “They say that Edward was poisoned.”

  Lydia knew that was only the half of it. “And do they say by whom?”

  Francis bit his lip, as if apologizing for the accusations of others. He did not have to speak Farrell’s name. It was written in his eyes.

  Lydia felt the anger that had been so unfamiliar to her before surge through her veins once more. Seeing her distress, Francis put his hand on her shoulder.

  “Please, dear Lydia. They are just cruel rumors.”

  “You call them rumors, but what if ...” Lydia stopped short of saying what she truly felt, but went on: “The fact is Edward is dead and we know not how nor why.” Hannah the maid, who was handing around a tray of savories that nobody wanted, looked startled and Lydia tried to regain her composure. Her back stiffened. Francis sought to ease her obvious pain. “The results of the postmortem will reveal all,” he ventured.

  Lydia frowned. “But there lies the problem,” she confided. “There was no postmortem.”

  Francis looked bemused. “But Farrell told me a surgeon and a physician were here yesterday to perform one.”

  Lydia felt panic suddenly take hold. “Michael did not tell you? They said Edward’s body was too badly decomposed. They said they could not perform one.”

  Francis swallowed hard and looked at Lydia. “A misunderstanding,” he replied quickly, not daring to look her in the eye. But it was too late and both of them understood the gravity of the situation.

  Later that night, when Farrell came to her in bed, he put his arm around her waist and drew her close to him. His body was cool and she felt his breath against her warm neck. He stroked her long chestnut hair tenderly, breathing in its lemon scent, before sliding his hand up her smooth thigh, taking her nightgown with it. She felt him hard and hot between her thighs, but she did not respond. Instead she feigned sleep.

  Chapter 5

  The old man was sitting in a chair near the open window, listening to the din below. “Must be a hanging,” he said knowingly. Thomas always marveled at how, despite being only relatively recently deprived of his sight, Dr. Carruthers’s perceptions had been sharpened to compensate for the loss of his most precious sense. “Who is it?”

  Thomas had turned his face toward his master, so that he could be heard better above the passing furor outside. “There are three of them, I understand, sir. One is a sheep stealer and the other two are said to have killed a lawyer.”

  Dr. Carruthers chuckled. “A lawyer, eh? Then surely they did the world a service.” His rounded shoulders, hunched from years of poring over dissecting tables, lifted slightly then sank down again into the winged chair. “You’re not watching it, then, boy?”

  Thomas did not have the stomach for such a show. He could drain a man’s carotid artery once he was dead without a second thought, but watching the life drain away from someone still alive was a different matter. “I think not. I have too much work to be getting on with,” he said, taking his leave and heading off for the laboratory.

  He did indeed have work. He had just taken delivery of a stillborn child from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. The
specimen was still wrapped in swaddling cloths and had arrived in a wooden box. Thomas took the tiny bundle out and laid it, still covered, on the marble slab. He paused before his fingers gently began unwrapping the frayed kersey bands. He had lost count of the number of fetuses he had preserved in formaldehyde, but he never found it any easier. He tried not to think of each specimen as a life lost, as a mother’s child gone forever, as a soul trapped in eternal limbo. He brushed such morbid thoughts aside, but they always came back to him each time he unclenched tiny fingers or touched tiny toes.

  Anxious to get to work quickly, he had just reached for a bottle of preserving fluid from high up on the shelf when there was a knock at the door.

  “Dr. Silkstone.”

  Thomas was surprised to hear Mistress Finesilver. He had assumed that she had gone along to witness the hangings. He let out a spontaneous groan, then immediately regretted it, hoping it had not penetrated through the door.

  “Yes, Mistress Finesilver,” he said, not bothering to get down from the stepladder. He watched the door open and saw the housekeeper standing at the threshold, but instead of her usual pinched, self-righteous expression, she wore a wry smile.

  “There is a Lady Lydia Farrell to see you, Dr. Silkstone,” she informed the young doctor. As he could see no one, he assumed that this “lady” must be one of Dr. Carruthers’s old trouts—the sort who felt they required a compress if they had so much as a twinge in their little finger. He was minded to tell Mistress Finesilver to ask Lady Lydia to make an appointment at a more appropriate time, when the housekeeper elucidated, “Her ladyship says she is here on the recommendation of her cousin, who has attended your lectures.”