by Ian Weir
“I concede the point, although it is a technical one.”
“Technical?” sputtered Abernethy. “Technical? It is the difference between Science, sir, and Necromancy. It is the difference between legitimate endeavour, and Blasphemy!”
Voices rose again, some of them shouting Abernethy down. The students in the room were still with my uncle, in the main, as were many of the younger surgeons. And even those who deplored him were riveted to see where this would lead.
“I agree,” retorted my uncle, “that Hunter’s attempt was limited in scope and ambition. It was left to Signor Aldini to take the next long stride.”
Aldini, the Italian, who had sought to resurrect corpses by means of electrical current.
“And Signor Aldini, sir, was advised that his experiments were grotesque,” cried Abernethy. “Signor Aldini was denounced by all right-thinking men. Signor Aldini was invited to leave London, sir — and did!”
My uncle flushed at this, and for just an instant he seemed unnerved. He had surely expected opposition, but not such ferocity. He was Dionysus Atherton, after all; he strode golden and gleaming through life.
“Gentlemen! I stand here to tell you that Hunter was right, and Aldini also. Although they failed in their attempts, the theory was sound. The dead may be summoned back.”
“God’s bollocks, Atherton — what have you done?”
Mr Comrie’s voice rose above the din. Atherton’s eyes sought him out — found him, standing rigid amidst the throng. Found me as well, wedged in at Mr Comrie’s side. A glow of triumph was on that handsome face. And then, as an awful hush descended, he told us.
“The body remained at the undertaker’s for approximately half an hour, at the end of which I made my decision. Rather than attempt resuscitation directly, I would have it transported to my residence at Crutched Friars. There is a stable behind the house, and here the corpse was laid out upon a table at seven minutes past one o’clock — four hours and thirty-four minutes after death had been pronounced.
“As you well know, a pronouncement of clinical death may be far from definitive, even if the surgeon be both competent and sober. But I will say that the appearance of the body as it lay before me was wholly consistent with death by strangulation. There was no trace of heartbeat or respiration. The skin seemed very slightly cool to my touch, although I concede that this was a subjective judgement. The mark of the rope showed as a bruised indentation above the hyoid bone, angling upwards. The face was very pale, with the curious placidity that is often seen in victims of judicial hanging, despite the intense suffering that is involved. The tongue was black and protruding, and a frothy mucus flecked the corners of the mouth. The eyes were open and protuberant, and the hands had been clenched so tightly that the fingernails were driven into the palms. Bladder and rectum had both released.
“I swaddled the body in heated blankets to stimulate circulation, and at sixteen minutes past one o’clock, attempts at revival commenced. At first these involved initiatives to stimulate respiration by inflating the lungs with a bellows, followed by the administration of hartshorn and hot balsam. Subsequently galvanic stimulation was employed, by means of voltaic piles, with metal rods applied to the chest area. At the first such stimulation, the extremities juddered. Upon a second application, a groan issued from the subject. Upon a third application, the body lurched upwards at the waist, as if the victim sought to rise.”
All air had been sucked from the operating theatre. Atherton stood motionless, now. He seemed to look at each one of us in turn.
“This proved indeed,” he said, “to be the case. I caught her in my arms before she could fall back again. There was a discharge of black bile and blood from the mouth, after which a stertorous respiration resumed. The legs convulsed; the arms flailed; the eyes, shot red with blood, searched wildly, and found mine.
“You will imagine, gentlemen, my emotions in this moment. Holding her in my arms — a living woman whose death had been pronounced nearly five hours previous. Her lips twisted, trying to form words, which issued as a rasping sibilance, owing to the damage done by the rope to the vocal apparatus. I believed at the time that she was calling for water, which I provided. She dashed the cup from my hand, and I have wondered since if the syllable she had attempted was in fact ‘woe,’ this being a word she later described upon the wall of the room where I was forced to contain her, using faecal material scooped from a bucket that had been supplied to meet her most basic need.
“A period of distraction lasted for some days, on the final evening of which she briefly escaped custody. But after that she grew much calmer, and the following morning I went into her room to find her standing at the window, turning her face to the sunlight. She subsequently busied herself in cleaning the chamber, during the course of which activity I heard through the door a croaking rasp that I was joyful to interpret as her best attempt at singing. This afternoon she smiled with pleasure when I laid out the new gown I had purchased for her, after which she washed herself and combed her hair.
“Gentlemen.” His voice was ringing now. “You, of all men — as fellow surgeons, as Men of Science — will understand the immensity of what has been achieved. At the very least, this is to challenge the accepted definition of clinical death. At best I have upended all previous assumptions as to what may be possible to modern Scientific Medicine, in the matter of human longevity.”
He let the silence hang. A low strangled murmuring began, rising with each instant.
“Odenkirk!” cried my uncle. “Mr Odenkirk — lead her forth!”
The murmurs had become a tumult. Every eye turned with Atherton to the entrance at the back. I was dimly conscious of Mr Comrie clutching my left shoulder — a shoulder that had been kicked with particular industry by the Under-Sheriffs — but I scarcely felt it, riveted with all the rest upon the open doorway, through which at any instant Meg Nancarrow must issue, like Eurydice redeemed.
And no one came.
“Odenkirk!” my uncle cried again.
From out of the din, the first harsh caws of laughter.
Then Odenkirk appeared, sloping hurriedly. But he was alone. Something had gone wrong. I saw it in his urgent expression, speaking into Atherton’s ear.
“Good God,” exclaimed some wag, “he’s resurrected her as a man!”
A bellow of derision; the giddy merriment that comes on a flood of relief. Catcalls and jeers. They were on him now with a vengeance, all of those who had come in secret hope that he would fail; and with each moment the others were turning as well. I stood feeling the ground give way, as if I had been some imp of infinitesimal consequence on the very fringe of the battle on Heaven’s Field, watching the vertiginous instant at which Lucifer, Bearer of Light, began to totter, gazing down with disbelieving eyes into the Chaos that swirled below.
Atherton stood stricken. He exclaimed something to Odenkirk in muted fury. Then he caught himself and turned, making one last attempt to command the moment.
“Gentlemen!” he cried. He had turned quite pale. “Gentlemen, it falls to me to inform you that a woman resurrected from death itself, with such consequence to her mental state as remains to be fully determined, has broken from close custody and now is somewhere loose in London!”
11
Jemmy Cheese hears her calling to him. Not an actual voice; it is not that, exactly. Just a sudden conviction, so intense as to sweep away all the other wisps of thought that drift and mutter at the edges of his waking dreams, that she is calling.
This is the way he would describe it — if indeed he could describe it to you at all, which he cannot. Jemmy Cheese has not had words since they cudgelled him down in the churchyard at St George-in-the-East. He sits rocking slowly in the straw on the dank cellar floor of Dr Paxton’s house in Camden Town, as he has since they first brought him here. Chain and strait-waistcoat; sad old lunatick bruin. Forwards and back again, forwards and back; rattle of the chain as it sags, and the sharp metallic chink as it pulls taut.
His neck is one great suppurating sore inside the iron band; the stench in the cellar is so thick that you can practically see it hovering, like mist on the Woolwich marshes where the Prison Hulk Retribution lies at anchor many miles to the south and east.
But thoughts come to him. Not as they did once; but they come, fluttering for a moment before slipping back into the darkness, like bats. Thoughts and images: a patch of night sky through the small barred window, which seems to become a different glimpse through a different window, into a room where his Meg once lay curled beside him. A fluttering and a confusion; the sudden conviction that something has gone terribly wrong, if he could only grasp what it is, and think how to set it straight. That strange dark boy who came: They’ve took her, Jemmy — it’s worse than bad. It makes him moan with a desolate anxiety; he shakes his shaggy head from side to side and rocks harder, forwards and back again, rattle and CHINK.
Darkness through the window, and the wan white face of the moon. Thoughts fluttering, maddening, here and then gone. If only his hands were free, he might seize one of them as it bat-winged past. He strains his arms within the strait-waistcoat, and feels the shift. He has lost weight since coming to this cellar — two stone, at the least. There is more room inside the waistcoat than they’ve realized. And Jemmy Cheese is still fearfully strong.
The ghost white moon in the window. An overpowering sense that she is calling.
“Jemmy.”
The ghost white moon.
A small white face. A white face in the window, and blood-red eyes looking in.
“Jemmy.”
Some while later the cellar door is unbarred. Light spills down and the Keeper trudges into it. Mr Wallis, conducting his midnight rounds.
“Fucking stench,” he mutters. “Fucking animal. Fucking make you sick and — oi.”
He breaks off, peering. Lifts his bull’s-eye for a better look. Jemmy Cheese lies slumped, as still as death. His eyes in the lantern-light are blank and staring.
“Oi,” says Mr Wallis, moving closer. “Are you alive, you stinking pile?”
Jemmy Cheese is indeed alive. More than that, he is in full possession of a Thought. He caught it by the wing as it darted past, and now he has it in his grasp. It is a simple thought, but very powerful, and it is not going to get away from him now.
“Oi,” says the Keeper once more, giving a nudge with his boot. When that provokes no response, he delivers a rousing kick.
Jemmy stirs. There is a metallic rattle: the chain. Mr Wallis notices — half an instant too late — that the bolt has pulled loose from the floor.
12
By the following morning, half of London had heard about Atherton’s calamitous presentation. The taverns and coffee houses were abuzz, and the newspapers were off and running. There had been a mordantly witty drawing in one of them, a surgeon dressed up as one of Lazarus’s sisters, with a harried expression and a sign that read: “Lost — One Risen Sibling.” By Sunday the first sermons against blasphemous practices would be thundered, and by Monday the tone of the newspaper drawings would change. One would depict a surgeon who was unmistakably my uncle, levitating a corpse right out of a coffin with an expression of unholy triumph, while in the shadows two desiccated devils, like bats, clutched one another in horror. “He will empty H—— itself!” cried the first. But a third and wiser devil smirked. “Not so,” he said. “He will increase our number in the end — by ONE!”
And of course the Scientific world was consumed by the overwhelming question: what had Atherton actually done?
Mr Comrie believed that my uncle had done what he claimed: acquired the body, and revived it. “But mind — I said revive.” Scowling over a glass of pale at the Black Swan. “I do not say resurrect. For the dead do not rise up and walk, William — not this side of bollocking Golgotha.”
This was two nights following the debacle. The Swan was busy, and bursting with vitality. Three apprentices at the next table tried gamely to impress a pair of shop girls, and a lugubrious baritone in the corner was bawling out “Life Let Us Cherish,” which seemed on the whole appropriate.
“So she was cut down alive?” I said.
“’Course she was,” he snapped. “And it’s not as if that’s never happened before.”
“Half-Hanged Smith,” I said.
“Exactly.”
Half-Hanged Smith was a man named John Smith, scragged for house-breaking in the last century, in the days when you rode the Wooden Mare at Tyburn. Cut down after twenty minutes, Smith proceeded to choke and twitch, and came sputtering back to life right there beneath the gallows. He was duly reprieved and went on to live another twenty years, during which time he was convicted twice more for house-breaking. Smith was not a man who learned easily from his mistakes.
“But Smith was revived at once,” I pointed out. “Atherton left Meg for nearly five hours.”
“Or so he claimed.”
“You think he was lying?”
He eyed me with immense Scotch understatement.
No one had seen my uncle since that night, when he had fled from Guy’s with Odenkirk. He had posted a reward — that much was known — one hundred guineas for information concerning the present whereabouts of Meg Nancarrow, payable upon her apprehension. He was said to be ranging through the city each night, seeking her out in all the sinks of London. But she was nowhere to be found. There were reports, but these were too wild to be believed. Meg sighted on a ghostly ship upon the Irish Sea, which disappeared into a bank of no earthly fog; Meg appearing in a spout of fire and galloping across Hampstead Heath upon a coal-black horse.
“Lying about the five hours? Aye. Unless I’m wrong, and he was lying about all of it.” Mr Comrie scowled down into his glass. Despite everything, he retained his old fondness for my uncle. “All of it, start to finish, and he never had the body in the first place. But why would a man do that? Any man, and Atherton most of all? To make himself a laughing-stock — ruin his reputation. And for what? It makes no sense to me, William.”
There was something that made even less sense than that. A question had been tugging relentlessly, like the small dark demon of doubt at my sleeve. If Atherton had wanted Meg dead, then why would he try to revive her at all? If Uncle Cheese had been murdered to keep him silent — if Little Hollis had been topped for the exact same reason — then why in the name of God and the Devil would Atherton bring Meg back to life?
In the old days, I could have shared this with Mr Comrie. But a shadow had fallen between us of late, and I left feeling more alone than I’d done since the night my friend Danny Littlejohn had died, and haunted besides by a spectre near as unsettling as the horse with half a head: the gnawing fear that I had somehow got it all wrong, and misunderstood everything that Atherton had done — and why he had done it — and where it would lead.
But in the morning came two revelations, and suddenly everything had changed.
The first was the news that Jemmy Cheese had escaped from Dr Paxton’s asylum. It seemed he had somehow wrapped his chain round a Keeper’s neck; snapping it like a twig, he had barged up the cellar stairs and then out into the night before anyone could stop him. And hard on its heels came a second piece of news — news I’d been seething for ever since Meg’s trial.
Master Buttons had been found.
I’d had eyes watching out for him, all over London.
It sounds considerably grander than it was, put like that. You may conceive an image of Your Wery Umble at the centre of a web, his ogles hooded and his cogitations deep, dispatching agents across the length and breadth of the Metropolis. In fact I’d slipped coins to a few of the street arabs who loitered about Smithfield and Cripplegate, with a promise of more if they brought me information.
And one of them did. Barnaby, his name was. Ten years old or thereabouts, with a hatchet face and a sly knowing air — the sort of lad who would make a success of himself one day if someone didn’t hang him first, which seemed on the whole more likely. He was waiting
for me as I came out the door of the gin-shop.
“Seen ’im,” Barnaby announced. “Buttons.”
Barnaby never quite looked straight at you. He had a habit of squinting towards the horizon instead, as if something much more interesting was off in that direction.
“You’re certain it was him?” I demanded.
“Said so, dint I?”
“Where is he?”
Barnaby grew absorbed in studying the clouds that were forming high above the dome of St Paul’s. I fished out sixpence.
“A shilling, this is worth,” he said.
“I’ll give you another tanner, if the information turns out correct.”
“Prime fucking intelligence, this is.”
“First you tell me where he is.”
“Fuck you very much,” muttered Barnaby. But he told me. “Got a crib just south of Piccadilly, this Buttons. Near Haymarket.”
It turned out to be a lodging-house in a lane off of Norris Street, where a ragged old man with a prophet’s beard lay in a spreading puddle, and three younger men played pitch-penny against a wall. Yes, said the Landlord who answered my knock; Master Buttons lodged here, though he was out at present.
I kept my voice calm. “D’you know where he might be found?”
The Landlord hawked and spat, in the direction of the derelict prophet. “Try Fishmonger’s Hall.”
I knew the place: a gambling hell not far away in King Street, just west of St James’s Square. It doubtless had a proper name, but everyone just called it the Fishmonger’s, on account of its being run by William Crockford. A rising man, was Crocky, who grew up in a fish shop next to Temple Bar, and made his start in low hells out by Billingsgate. He’d migrated steadily westward as his wealth grew, and undoubtedly aspired one day to a club in Mayfair, where the likes of Beau Brummell gamed, and entire estates were won and lost between dining and dawn. Just now he was in between the two extremes, catering to a middling class of blackguard.
