A Dark Anatomy

by Robin Blake

  ‘I find it no more incredible,’ he replied, ‘than the mixture of male and female in Dolores Brockletower. Rather less, I think.’

  ‘But there is one important question, Luke. Can the unfortunate Dapperwick reliably tell the difference between a dream and his memory? That dream-visitor of his, the one he mentioned, was perhaps no dream at all. He really had a caller, and I know his name. My wife saw Barnabus Woodley coming away from Molyneux Square on Friday last. You see the significance, Luke?’

  ‘Woodley the architect was the visitor? Yes, that is striking. Woodley asking about the fertility of hermaphrodites? Now that’s surpassingly interesting. Shall we sit a few moments?’

  We had reached the green in the centre of the square and Fidelis was indicating one of the curved marble benches that stood on scrolled feet at each of its corners. George plumped himself down at one end of the seat and opened his sketchbook. Taking chalk from his pocket, he began to draw. Fidelis and I sat down on the opposite extreme of the semicircle.

  ‘It cannot be a coincidence,’ I said. ‘Woodley must have known Dolores Brockletower’s secret.’

  ‘Yes, either from the squire or directly from her.’

  ‘From the squire, I would think. The two men were close, while there was a strong dislike between Dolores and Woodley.’

  ‘But why would he, of all people, concern himself with her possible fertility?’

  ‘That’s hard to guess. Not only did the squire and his – what shall we call it? – consort? – his consort then – not only was there in fact no prospect of a direct heir of the Brockletower blood coming from their union, but both of them knew it, beyond any doubt. And must have from the beginning.’

  ‘So they must,’ said Luke, with another rather heartless laugh. ‘The anatomy that George has drawn so prettily for us was well hidden under fine dresses and hunting clothes. But it could never have been concealed in the bedroom. I’m thinking Brockletower was not a dupe when he married his Dolores – or, at any rate, he could not have remained so for long after.’

  But something else was on my mind.

  ‘Yes, Luke, but it also makes them unlike other couples that do not become parents, do you see? The latter continue almost into old age to hope, and pray, and perform superstitious rites, because they cannot explain their barrenness. The Brockletowers could never have had any such hopes. Whatever form their intercourse took—’

  ‘Did not the vicar of Yolland tell you something about that?’ interrupted Fidelis.

  ‘Not specifically, but he did strongly suggest certain,’ I dropped my voice, ‘irregularities. And, as I say, whatever they did was not going to result in a child under any circumstances.’

  ‘What did they do, sir?’ asked George, still sketching industriously but all the while listening with long ears to every word.

  I ignored him. He was too young.

  ‘But my point is that all this accounts for Dolores’s interest in the Talboys girl, and her being with child.’

  ‘Which she actually promoted,’ Fidelis said, ‘from what you told me.’

  ‘Excellent! You think exactly as I do, Luke. Dolores Brockletower does appear to have encouraged the girl to put herself in the way of pregnancy.’

  Luke rose and dusted his breeches.

  ‘And my guess is,’ he said, ‘that Mrs Brockletower was premeditating the adoption of the child by herself and her husband. But I am afraid I must leave you now. I have a patient waiting.’

  I held him back for a moment.

  ‘The truth about Mrs Brockletower must be kept a close secret, Luke. For the time being, anyway. Is that agreed?’

  ‘Agreed,’ he said.

  I turned to George.

  ‘Agreed, George? No telling of this, not even to your own shadow.’

  George nodded his head and I turned back to Luke.

  ‘Let’s you and I meet later,’ I said. ‘At the Turk’s Head coffee house in three hours’ time.’

  We three did not part finally until we had passed under the covered alley, or tunnel, that connects the square with Market Street. From there Fidelis hurried off to his consultation, while the boy and I turned the other way. The mention of Abigail Talboys had reminded me that I wanted to pay a visit to Talboys’s shop. At the top of Friar Gate, George told me he too must leave me, to rejoin his master at Patten House.

  ‘He is finishing the portrait of Lord Derby. Well, the face.’

  ‘I suppose he will return to Warrington to complete the figure, ’ I remarked.

  George made a sound that might have been interpreted as a scoff.

  ‘Not him.’

  ‘You mean he will finish it here?’

  George made the sound again.

  ‘No, he will cut out the face and send it to Mr Van Aken in London.’

  I stood still, in amazement.

  ‘Why? Who’s Van Aken?’

  ‘He sticks the faces that others paint on a canvas, and paints the body around it – clothes, hands, wig. He’s famous for his drapery.’

  ‘Good lord! Is that how it’s done now?’

  ‘By Mr Winstanley it is.’

  ‘You do not approve?’

  ‘I think an artist should be a complete man. Not one that farms things out.’

  ‘Your master is trying to get the best possible result, I suppose.’

  ‘No. He does it because it makes him feel more important. Only the face matters to him. It is all he can be bothered with. The rest is for others.’

  ‘Lesser beings, he thinks?’

  ‘Yes. He’s God Almighty, him.’

  ‘So when we view the portrait at last, it will only be my lord’s face we see. The body will be that of another person?’

  ‘Not another person. A lay-figure. That’s a puppet made of wood. A toy in toy clothes.’

  ‘Couldn’t you do the drapery for him, George?’

  ‘I’d refuse and he knows it. I’m not to be treated as less than him.’

  Such confidence, in a mere boy and apprentice, took me by surprise. I decided to caution him about it.

  ‘To think like that could cut short your indentures, George. Only a particularly patient master will endure insubordination. I hope Mr Winstanley is patient.’

  I said this in as kindly a way as I could.

  ‘Only a patient apprentice will endure a bad master,’ he said, looking me boldly in the eyes. ‘And I am not patient, Mr Cragg. Time with Dr Dapperwick or Dr Fidelis is better spent than it is with him.’

  Though I was itching with curiosity to know if Abby Talboys had had an inkling of Mrs Brockletower’s unusual physiologia, the real purpose of my visit to the Talboys was to tell her I would, after all, be needing her as a witness at the inquest. I found her father in his shop, unpacking some newly delivered rolls of Nottingham lace.

  ‘Eh, Titus!’ he exclaimed when he saw me, and came round the counter to clap me on the shoulder. ‘Bailiff locked you up, but could not keep you. You bested the man!’

  I had not bested Grimshaw – not yet – but I thanked my old friend for his sentiment. Then I asked after his eldest daughter.

  ‘Abby is to go to Yorkshire,’ he told me. ‘To her late mother’s sister at Gargrave, a good Christian woman. She will give birth there and stay on after.’

  ‘You will miss her.’

  He laughed, for with Talboys good humour cannot help breaking through.

  ‘Eh, I’ll miss her work. Not her wilfulness.’

  ‘And you’ll be a grandfather, before I am even a father. Think of that.’

  ‘Must I think of it? I have enough trouble with fatherhood. Four daughters and three still cluttering my home!’

  ‘I wonder, Ned … has Abby told you anything more in detail about her conversations with Mrs Brockletower?’

  ‘Not me. She tells me nothing. But here she is and you can ask her your questions in person.’

  Abigail had come in from the street, carrying some packages.

  ‘Abby,’ said Talb
oys, ‘Mr Cragg would like a word. Would you like to take him up to the fitting room?’

  Abby seemed neither welcoming nor hostile. She led me briskly up to the first floor, and into the room that looked out over Friar Gate. It was furnished with a couple of dressmaking dummies, but otherwise resembled a comfortable parlour, with upholstered chairs, polished furniture and a fire burning in the grate.

  I sat in one of the fireside chairs while Abby put her purchases on a sideboard.

  ‘I am to make a journey into Yorkshire, Mr Cragg,’ she said. ‘As I shan’t be returning soon, I have been shopping for necessaries.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Your father told me. It is a good solution.’

  ‘Judging from letters to my father, my aunt does not think so. And nor do I. I will be spoken to roughly on arrival, no doubt, and put to work with the pigs and chickens. I am out of favour, in disgrace, but the fault is all my own.’

  She was standing at the window, looking not at me but out into the street.

  ‘Not entirely,’ I said. ‘There is someone else who takes half the blame.’

  ‘Oh, you may forget him,’ she said huffily, spinning around and briskly removing her bonnet, which she laid beside the parcels. ‘So, what is it you want to speak to me about?’

  I told her that I would still need her as an inquest witness tomorrow, but that there would be no need for her to reveal her pregnancy.

  ‘It will be enough for you to tell the court that Mrs Brockletower told you during your private sessions together that she very much wished for a child, and that she hoped to be able to adopt one. That is the only testimony the court will need.’

  Abigail pressed her hand to her forehead, like one soothing a headache. Then she turned to me, her face breaking into a charming smile. She had excellent white teeth.

  ‘I am relieved, Mr Cragg,’ she said. ‘It had been preying on my mind that I would be terribly frighted, speaking in public about being with … you know.’

  ‘Well, no one need know about that who doesn’t need to know.’

  I looked around me.

  ‘Well now, this is the room in which ladies have their fittings, is it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Mrs Brockletower included?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So it is here that you often talked so intimately, as you described to me the other day?’

  ‘Yes. This is where we talked.’

  I coughed and shifted in my chair. How on earth was I going to put this?

  ‘Did she ever speak to you, I wonder, about exactly why she was childless?’

  ‘She only said it was impossible for her to conceive.’

  ‘Without saying why?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you formed no idea yourself on the subject? That there might be some physical deformity, say.’

  ‘Physical deformity? What can you mean, sir?’

  ‘In the way her body was made. I imagine a dressmaker knows her customer in that way better than most – taking measurements and so on.’

  She looked at me intently for a moment.

  ‘Why do you want to know this?’

  Her voice was sharp, and edged with emotion as she went on.

  ‘Mrs Brockletower was a good friend to me. I will not have her talked of as being deformed.’

  ‘I am sorry, Abby. Sometimes a coroner must ask displeasing questions.’

  She turned back to the view from the window.

  ‘Well, I cannot answer yours. If there was anything, I knew nothing about it.’

  ‘Then we shall speak no more of the matter.’

  I rose and moved to stand beside her. The afternoon traffic in Friar Gate was mostly of carts and packhorses trundling empty churns and barrels of unsold produce back to the country from Market Place. Abby sighed.

  ‘A farm girl, that’s me from now on, sir. A slave of the muckheap, pigsty and cowshed. I had hoped for a life of more refinement. Not to be, now. I’ll never get a husband that isn’t coarse, and a bumpkin.’

  She was probably right. She was bonny all right, but with no dowry, and a little bastard in tow, her stall in the Gargrave marriage market was not likely to be under siege. I tried to boost her hopes.

  ‘Abby, you are pretty and you have wit. Some fellow of dependable means and good sense will come your way. Hold out for that, will you?’

  This time she smiled tightly, with closed lips. I could see she did not believe me but perhaps, with time for reflection, she might one day. So I found myself hoping as I gently took my leave.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  AFTER LEAVING ABBY TALBOYS I returned home. Legal correspondence does not stop merely because one is in the middle of an inquest so, having had a bite to eat, I intended to go from the parlour into the office. But first I allowed myself a quarter of an hour in the library, getting down the fourth volume of Tonson’s Miscellany of poetry, stoking the fire and settling into my chair beside it.

  Turning the pages I soon found what I was looking for: Mr Addison’s rendering in English of the fourth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which was embedded the lovely, liquid story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. It is a brief tale, told in a single scene. Hermaphroditus, handsome son of Hermes and the goddess of love, strips for a bath in a woodland pool, fed by a stream that gurgles under the protection of the nymph Salmacis. Seeing him naked and powerfully swimming, she so strongly desires him that she hurls herself into the water and locks her arms around him. Their passion is such that (I read)

  Piercing each the other’s flesh they run

  Together, and incorporate in one:

  Last in one face are both their faces join’d

  As when the stock and grafted twig combin’d

  Shoot up the same and wear a common rind:

  Both bodies in a single body mix,

  A single body with a double sex.

  I shut my eyes, imagining the picture – a beautiful image of the very act of love, in which my beloved and I strive so strenuously to unite, to merge each into the other. My own person may be a little distant from Hermaphroditus, son of beautiful and illustrious parents. But Elizabeth … Elizabeth is the perfect vision of a nymph, or so I thought, and think.

  I jerked awake. An hour and more had passed, and I had slept. I hurried into the office, where Furzey greeted me with a superior look.

  Later, letting Elizabeth know I would be dining out with Luke Fidelis, I put on my hat and strolled across Church Gate to the Turk’s Head, where I found him in one of the confidential booths, smoking and drinking Burgundy wine. I joined him in the wine and called for a pipe, telling him of the poetry I had been reading. Fidelis is not one for poetry, not even when I mentioned Ovid’s use of the word intergrafting.

  ‘It is exactly the conceit used by Dr Dapperwick,’ I explained. ‘I believe it is what he meant by saying the poet is a better philosopher than most realize, and that he had thought the thing out.’

  ‘No,’ Luke muttered. ‘Dapperwick is merely happy to find poetic support for his daft theory. But as evidence it is not worth spitting at.’

  I told him he’d be a better man if he loved poetry more, and he countered by maintaining I’d do better to prefer reason to rhyme. So, differing amicably, we poured more wine and I asked Fidelis what he had been doing. He pulled a book from his pocket.

  ‘After leaving the Mayor, I also did some reading, though rather different matter from yourself. It is Dr Thomas Allen’s account of the Hampshire hermaphrodite, Anne Wild, born in the last century. It is among the Transactions of the Royal Society.’

  He tapped the book with his index finger.

  ‘Wild had the sexual equipage of both the male and the female,’ he told me. ‘But since at first she appeared to have no penis, she was raised as a girl until something remarkable occurred.’

  I was agog.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Presto! A male organ appeared and for three years she was more like a boy. Then, just as suddenly, her m
enses began to flow, which continued for another two years until, suddenly again, she began to have a beard. After that her body increasingly resembled a man’s.’

  ‘So she became a man, after all?’

  ‘Never entirely. She could be aroused by either sex. Listen to this.’

  He opened the book and read aloud.

  ‘“One night as she was making merry with her companions she cast her eye upon a handsome man and became so much in love with him that the excess of her passion made her hysteric.”’

  He closed the book once more.

  ‘So Anne Wild was capable of feeling both as a man and as a woman, depending on the circumstances.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘The article does not say. She lived and died in obscurity. Without Dr Allen’s intervention we would not have heard of her. The country people had been superstitiously afraid of her at first, no doubt, but probably came to tolerate or even grow fond of her in the end.’

  ‘It is better than being exhibited in a circus show, which might have been the case. But it isn’t easy to see how she can have been happy.’

  ‘She must have been tormented. I do wonder about the veracity of this author when he states she was making merry. Her life must have been a continual puzzle, a torrent of questions. The same goes for Dolores Brockletower. Waiting for your arrival, I have been trying to calculate the number of those questions.’

  ‘And have you succeeded?’ I asked. ‘How looks the balance sheet?’

  ‘It is divided into three columns: moral, medico-philosophical and legal.’

  ‘I am interested in the legal column, of course.’

  Fidelis held up his finger.

  ‘In which the prime question asked is, what was Mrs Brockletower’s legal status? Was she male, or female?’

  ‘I think I know the answer. But tell me first the philosophical position – the medical one.’

  ‘All right. Medically speaking, she was as Dapperwick described her: a hermaphrodite. Compared to the Hampshire case, she seems more female on the surface. She had the voice, skin, bosom and shape of a woman. Of course under her shift, in layman’s terms, were a cock and balls, if somewhat reduced in size.’