The Convictions of John Delahunt

by Andrew Hughes

  Outside in the hallway, there were hurried steps and raised voices. One was the porter, but the other spoke with educated tones and sounded displeased. Devereaux looked towards the door, then motioned for me to come and stand with him behind the curtain. He closed it over so we were hidden, and held his hand against the fabric to stop its sway.

  The door opened and two men entered. The man in charge was speaking. ‘There’s a routine. We take in cadavers at seven in the morning. They can’t just deposit them in the middle of the night.’

  Devereaux held his finger to his lips. An odour wafted from the hollow of the dead man’s chest, like the inside of a tannery.

  The porter’s voice sounded nervous. He said the form was correct, and he had been reluctant to turn the body away. ‘You know yourself, sir, these days in the poorhouse, there’s no room left in the morgue.’

  ‘That’s not our problem.’ I could hear the sack jostle as the rope was untied, then a long moment of silence. The surgeon may have been impressed with the quality of the specimen for he said, ‘I have a demonstration on Friday at midday. Bring this new one to me at the Benson Theatre.’

  The porter readily agreed and said he would make the arrangements. As they left the room the dissectionist said he would be writing to the governor of St James’s to make a complaint. Devereaux and I waited for their steps to recede before we slipped out.

  When we emerged in the courtyard, I breathed in the night air despite the smell of refuse coming from an outbuilding. Holt stood by the cart. ‘What kept you?’

  Devereaux spat into the dirt. ‘The smell in that room. I need a drink. We can leave the cart here.’

  Holt nodded.

  ‘What about you, Delahunt?’

  I did want a drink but it was two hours past midnight. Devereaux said he knew a place.

  He led the way through sloping cobbled streets, still slick from the evening showers, and regaled Holt with an account of our skulking behind the curtain. Digges Lane was dark except for a few street lamps, showing a butcher’s shop with shuttered windows, the locked yard of a sign-maker and a terrace of ordinary two-storey houses. Devereaux opened the railing gate of one and took the steps down towards the basement. A hatch in the door slid open and a voice said, ‘Let’s see your face.’

  Devereaux swept off his hat, then turned his head to show his profile in the dim street light.

  There was muttering behind the hatch, but the door opened to allow us entry. We passed through a dingy hallway with broken mosaic in the floor. Beyond another door there was a large room – the basements of two houses knocked through. The whitewashed bricks turned yellow, then brown where they vaulted in the ceiling. Shelves containing empty glasses and various liquor bottles were mounted behind a plain counter.

  There was a jumble of furniture, as if patrons had brought whatever seats they happened to own. In one corner, a round tabletop was nailed to a beer keg, and empty crates were the stools. But next to it lay a chaise longue, shabby and frayed. Some men sat with drinks around an oak writing desk with the drawers removed. Elsewhere a man sat in a leather armchair, like those seen in a club; his companion made do with the seat from a barber’s shop. The clientele spoke under a pall of smoke, and I looked around at their colourless faces in the shadows, their lank hair, and pale, slender fingers resting on glass rims.

  Devereaux pointed to some empty chairs. He went to the bar while Holt and I sat down. In the darkened corner behind us, a man lay awkwardly atop a woman. Her arms were around his neck, but she was otherwise motionless, and his hand disappeared beneath her petticoats. Devereaux arrived with a half-bottle of whiskey and three tumblers. He noticed the couple, went over and kicked the man on the sole of his boot.

  ‘Take her to the back room.’

  The man looked back, flushed and glaring. But perhaps he recognized Devereaux, for he rose without comment, and pulled the girl to her feet. She was pretty, with unfocused eyes and an unsteady step. Devereaux put the whiskey bottle down and stopped the couple as they passed. He took hold of the girl’s face with a thumb and forefinger beneath her jaw, and tilted her head this way and that. When he let go, her chin sank into her chest, and a white thumbprint was left on her sallow skin. Devereaux smoothed a ruffled collar on the girl’s blouse by rubbing along her collarbone three times.

  He said, ‘Let me know when you’re done with her,’ before pointing to the man in warning. ‘And you better not leave any marks.’

  The girl lifted her gaze, catching my eye for a second, before the man jerked on her arm to lead her away.

  Holt poured three drinks as Devereaux took his seat, saying, ‘You always did like to work on a blank canvas.’

  A corner of Devereaux’s mouth curled up, but he didn’t reply. Instead, he raised his glass in a quiet toast, saying, ‘To Delahunt’s corpse. May he prove a great boon to medical research.’

  I smiled as the glasses clinked. The amber liquid scorched my throat and I could already feel the twinge of a headache. Holt drained his glass in one gulp, then licked at his drooping lip.

  After a few sips, I asked if the surgeon who had come in at the end might cause problems, but Devereaux shook his head. ‘He’ll forget about it in the morning. The dissectionists have few qualms about how they get their cadavers.’ Holt had picked up the bottle to pour himself another.

  ‘Anyway,’ Devereaux said, ‘if he does cause a fuss, Sibthorpe will have a word.’ He leaned towards me. ‘There’s a fellow in here who could tell you all about the surgeons.’ He indicated a man at the corner of the bar. ‘That’s Malachi Phelan. A resurrectionist.’

  I looked to where he pointed. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘He’s a grave-robber. The surgeons are his best customers.’

  The unassuming man had black receding hair and bulbous eyes, which gave the unsettling impression that he could see in the dark.

  ‘Malachi can mine a grave in a couple of hours. Then leave it neat and pristine, looking for all the world as if it’s untouched. Some people are still visiting gravesides today containing nothing but earth-filled coffins, thanks to Malachi.’

  ‘Why doesn’t the Castle stop him?’

  He shrugged. ‘The surgeons have to master their profession somehow. Better than practising on the living.’

  It had been a year since I’d visited my mother’s grave. I went with Cecilia just before she was married. To think the earth might have subsided as we put down the flowers – caved in on the void. I poured myself another drink. ‘How does he get them?’

  A simple shaft sunk to meet one end of the coffin. A hole cut in the lid and the body exhumed by hooks in the scalp or feet, depending on how it lay. The earth returned, and a fresh sod placed on top to conceal the disturbance.

  Devereaux said it used to be a thriving trade. Every surgeon at work today had to deal with the body-snatchers when they were students, as the college would only allow them to work on cadavers they obtained themselves. He had heard of young educated men dressed in mourning clothes, walking into morgues, trying to dupe staff that they had come to retrieve a beloved family member. Or two students hailing a hansom cab to transport a cadaver from the house of a resurrectionist to the college, propped upright between them on the seat. On the way, the cabman halted outside a police station and said the fare had increased from two shillings to two guineas, and if they felt that was unfair, they could get out immediately. Or the student in the dissecting room who pulled back the sheet to reveal a favourite niece he had helped bury the previous week.

  Helen’s father had been a surgical student in Mercer’s Hospital. I said, ‘But now they get them from the poorhouses?’

  ‘Well, that’s the idea. But there’s never enough to meet demand. And the college still has to shop around if it wants a body of a particular age or condition. They love pregnant women, for instance. They’ll always pay extra.’

  Holt was on his third glass. He recalled a woman died in Pill Lane a few years previous, who was six mont
hs gone with twins. Her funeral had been in St Michan’s Church. ‘Some of the mourners had brought their shovels.’

  Devereaux chuckled in his glass, but then his smile faded. He said there was no doubt it was Malachi who took her in the end.

  I looked again at the man by the counter. He held his glass on the bar in both hands, and looked over it into the middle distance. Perhaps he was forever haunted by images of his quarry. ‘Were the twins dissected?’

  Devereaux frowned. ‘How would I know?’

  I imagined the woman on the anatomist’s table. The mother taken from the earth, and the innocents taken from the womb, their birth perfectly still. Maybe the tiny siblings still clung to each other, suspended in a jar of spirits, buried in a jumble of shelves. Surrounded in darkness on every side by the pickled organs of murderers and paupers.

  ‘It’s a bad business.’

  ‘True, but it has its uses.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Yours is not the first body we’ve deposited with the surgeons.’ His glass was halfway to his mouth. ‘And I doubt it’ll be the last.’

  The conversation entered a lull, and Devereaux looked over his shoulder at the doorway through which the girl had been taken. I felt drained. I had drunk a lot over the course of the night without eating, and I felt queasy. I thanked both men for their aid, and told them I wouldn’t forget it. Holt said men in our profession had to look out for each other. His chin slumped forward to nod farewell. Devereaux offered his hand. As I shook it, he said he would be in touch. Then he rose as well and went towards the back room, leaving Holt with the last of the whiskey.

  I left the establishment, wandered the narrow streets for a few minutes, lost, then emerged into South King Street and back on to the Green. I stretched my sore arm. It wouldn’t lift above the height of my shoulder, and there was an unpleasant sensation that it didn’t sit snug in its socket. But ultimately I felt relief. I was free of pursuit, and free of responsibility. Back home, I tidied up the parlour and the kitchen. I placed the poker back in its stand with a clink, and took the stained cushion up to my room. By the time I climbed into bed, the first light of a new day was filtering through, taking the edge off the darkness.

  4

  Sleep is wasteful, and its absence from the last few days provokes odd thoughts and waking dreams. Throughout the night I lie quite still, and fix upon the semi-circle window high in the cell. In the pre-dawn, its contour emerges from the black as the barest light shows through the thick, scratched glass and metal grille. At that hour I get up, keeping the thin blanket around my shoulders, though the weather has mercifully become warmer. Not quite the clemency I require. These are the pangs I feel most keenly, the thought of walking in a walled garden on a warm day, free of labour’s demands and dark thoughts, and with no risks to run. Actually, I struggle to think of a time I experienced that.

  Each morning, I retrieve the manuscript from beneath my mattress and take it to the desk, then light a candle from my dwindling supply. I’ll have to inveigle more from the cleric, on the pretence of nocturnal Bible study. I flipped through the pages this morning, but I won’t read over what’s written, unless I manage to complete it in time.

  The routine continues when Turner brings me in a bowl of oatmeal along with the post. I’ve received two or three letters a day since my trial began. By the time they reach me the seals are broken, the pages have been unfolded, and all metal clips and pins are removed. My correspondents can be divided into three categories. The first implore me to turn with a contrite soul towards God and seek the extension of His grace; they counsel that salvation is still possible. The second assure me that God relishes the prospect of my punishment, and they pray for my perpetual torment. I find each category equally amusing as I read them flattened on the desk beneath my breakfast bowl.

  The third class of letters are from people who wonder why I did it. Some are doctors who specialize in mental disorders, and they ask me to describe the symptoms of monomania that took hold of me. One such letter was among the latest batch, from a Dr Whitley, whose questions were not couched in flattering terms: ‘Is your mental condition so wretchedly low, or so extensively muddled, as to render it totally unconscious that you were acting wrongfully in giving loose even to the wildest gratifications of your animal propensities?’ I appreciated his letter though. It was particularly longwinded and he only used one side of the stationery. I’ll be able to use the blank pages for my statement.

  Another letter came from a Montfort Sweetman. I knew what that was about so I set it aside for later. The missive at the bottom of the pile was written by my sister Cecilia. She began as she did in every letter: ‘My dearest John, I hope you’re well.’

  She was sorry to intrude on my unhappy state with more sad tidings, but she thought I would wish to know. Word had come from the office of the Secretary for War to say that Alex had been killed in a skirmish outside Kabul.

  I paused and looked into the candle flame.

  They had described the manner of his death. Alex’s commanding officer had become stranded between enemy lines when he fell beneath a lame horse. My brother took it upon himself to lead his own mount into no-man’s-land. He lifted the injured officer on to the saddle and began walking back to the British side, but was struck in the back of the head by a jezail bullet and died at once. His body was later retrieved and buried with full honours. The officer survived.

  I wondered if Cecilia wrote to Alex about my conviction before his death. Even if she didn’t, my trial was mentioned in The Times of London, and I knew editions were sent out to regiments in the field, though they took weeks to arrive. I pictured him in a dust-blown tent, being handed the paper by some companion, who’d point to the article and say, ‘Don’t you have a brother called John?’

  On a happier note, Cecilia was with child. She had asked Captain Dickenson if she could name the baby Alexander if it was a boy, and he had said he would consider it.

  She ended by saying she prayed for me every night. ‘I shall always remember the kindness you showed me, and the gentle side of your nature. In your final hours I hope you find peace. I am, yours ever, Cecilia.’

  Our old nursery in Fitzwilliam Street was up four sheer flights, and consisted of two small bedrooms with low ceilings and tall windows. When we were young, Cecilia and I would often lean on a sill and observe the street life below: carriages skittering on an icy road, or barefoot children chasing a dog, or a rag-and-bone man pushing his barrow. I remember once she nudged me and pointed at a figure walking from the direction of Fitzwilliam Square. He wore the clothes and grime of a tradesman, but he carried what looked like a bird-cage in the crook of his arm, and another slung on his back. Inside, several black, sleek forms scrambled and writhed. A short-legged terrier followed behind his master, the rat-catcher, though the dog probably had better claim to that title. Secure in our room, we watched the sinister figure pass below and out of sight, then resumed our idle vigil. Foreheads pressed against cold panes; foggy breaths obscuring the view.

  I shared a room with Alex, our sparse belongings separated by an imagined boundary between his portion of the room and mine. His was larger to reflect his age; an arrangement I never thought unfair. Cecilia slept in the room next door with a parlourmaid named Ruth, who also acted as nanny. She was a Catholic girl from Wicklow, who seemed very grown up when I was little, but was probably still in her teens. Cecilia considered her a great friend, and Ruth was a playful, lively spirit in the house. She would often hide behind a curtain and pounce on Cecilia as she entered a room, resulting in shrieks and loud laughter.

  Our bedroom was near the top of a deep stairwell, from which one could peer down vertically past each flight to the flagstones in the hallway below. Tall handrails meant there was no real danger, but Alex liked to slide down the top banister. I was anxious every time I watched him do so. He would grab the rail and haul himself up, so he sat as if riding sidesaddle, his back to the void. It only took a moment for him to sw
eep down the railing, briefly become airborne and hit the landing with a few thumping steps. He never so much as stumbled. I always feared he would lean back too far while gliding down, and he mocked my unwillingness to try it myself.

  Cecilia told Ruth what he was doing, and she in turn informed my father. Information, it seems, must always work up through a chain. Fearing that Alex would suffer a catastrophic fall, he had a stout net fixed in the gulf between the second and third floors. It was a blue cargo net, secured by hooks in the wood of the stairwell, and visitors to the house would often wonder at its presence.

  Of course, I was the first to be enmeshed. Encouraged by the safety net, I attempted to copy my brother’s trick one afternoon while alone. For the first few attempts I leaned too far forwards, wary of the chasm behind, and slithered off the banister after a few feet. On my third try I over-compensated.

  The fall was so brief I can’t recall the sensation. One of my fingers caught in a loop, and was pulled from its joint. The small knots in the rope scraped and burned my face, and the hooks in the stairwell bent. I came to rest face down, my view unimpeded to the stone floor another two flights below. I was scared to move lest the net gave way.

  The noise of the impact alerted the household. My father rushed to the banister and gripped the rail with both hands, then bent over it, stretching as far as he could to reach me in the distended cords, as if he was a fisherman that had pulled a child from the deep.

  About a month after that, in the weeks before Christmas, Cecilia and I became unwell. We were weak and feverish, and our mother put us to bed early. The following morning, an unpleasant sensation made me lift my bedclothes to reveal a rash of red spots arcing along my side and down the length of my arm. I ran to the room of my parents, woke my mother and showed her the hives.