by Alys Clare
I refrained from asking who else he expected to be in my bedchamber as dawn broke. ‘Yes. What is it?’
‘I need you,’ Theo replied. ‘Will you come down?’
‘Shall I dress?’
‘Yes,’ he said impatiently, as if I should have known. ‘And be swift, for we have some miles to go.’
I hastily put on the garments I had taken off the night before and, picking up my boots, went soft-footed down to join him.
‘I’m sorry about the stones on the window glass,’ Theo said as we rode off. Samuel had woken and come stumbling out into the yard, still half-asleep, to help me, and we had saddled and bridled my black horse as swiftly as we could. I was still trying to kick the resentful Hal into some semblance of eagerness, or even willingness, for this early outing. ‘I hope there was no harm done.’
‘No, there wasn’t.’
‘I didn’t want to go banging and pounding on your door and waking the household,’ Theo went on. He turned to me, grinning. ‘Bad enough that you and I are roused so untimely from our beds.’
I grunted my agreement. I hoped he would take the hint and not try to engage me in conversation. It really was too early for chatter.
He did.
For several miles we rode in silence. The previous evening’s mist still hung in the hollows. Ahead, to the east, the faint glow of light above the high moors strengthened, and presently the first brilliant edge of the sun’s great curve appeared. The birds were singing all around us. I identified blackbird, chaffinch, wren, robin and thrush. We were heading steadily uphill, into the wide, desolate, unpopulated places.
Presently I spotted a small cluster of buildings on the track ahead. It hardly warranted the term hamlet; it looked more like a run-down, abandoned farm. As we approached, I saw a man standing by the head of a stout mare in the shafts of a two-wheeled, flat-bedded cart, and two others leaning against the front wall of the largest of the buildings. Not that that was saying much, for it appeared to be little more than the sort of one-roomed dwelling with a second roofed space attached for the animals. The door of rotting wood was half off its hinges and had been propped in place.
One of the men stepped forward, giving Theo a curt bow; a mere nod of the head.
‘Anything to report, Arthur?’ Theo asked as we dismounted. The man – Arthur – reached out to take our horses’ reins. Along the track the mare shifted and gave a nervous whinny, her ears twitching back. I guessed she’d caught a whiff of what we were smelling.
‘Nah,’ Arthur said. ‘Quiet as the grave.’ He inclined his head towards me. ‘That the doctor?’
‘Yes,’ Theo said shortly.
Arthur was eyeing me, a faintly supercilious expression on his thin face. ‘Hope you didn’t pause to break your fast,’ he said. ‘Or, if you did, that you’ve a stronger stomach than young Gidley there.’ He nodded towards the other man standing by the dwelling, who I now saw was little more than a boy. Pale, shivering, he had wrapped his arms round his lean body and was hugging himself. A few paces away I spotted a pool of vomit.
Poor lad.
Theo had pushed aside the door and was entering the dwelling. I went in after him.
The body lay huddled on its right side facing the back wall of the room, beneath the portion of ruined roof that remained most intact. Animals had found it before humans, and there was evidence of predation. I noticed in my first swift glance swellings or lumps on the face, and the ghastly thought occurred to me that the predation must have begun ante-mortem, for the body so to have reacted … In addition, the garments were torn and ragged; perhaps from where the rats had tried to get at the dead flesh, perhaps because the deceased had been a vagrant and the clothing had consisted of ancient cast-offs.
Despite the plentiful fresh air afforded by the holes in roof and walls and the ill-fitting door, the room was heavy with the stench of decaying flesh and urine.
For a few moments Theo and I simply stood there, and I think he, like me, was silently regretting a world in which someone could die like this, alone and in deepest poverty, starving and in all likelihood wretched and sick.
‘Who found the body?’ I asked.
‘A pair of merchants on their way up from the coast to Tavistock,’ Theo replied. ‘Apparently they thought to shorten their journey by cutting across the moor, and got lost in the mist. They stumbled on this place and were all for sheltering until conditions improved, only then they smelt it. They came down into the river valley seeking someone to report it to, and thus I was alerted.’
I nodded. I said a prayer inside my head for the departed soul. Then I stepped forward, pushed up my sleeves and muttered, ‘I suppose I’d better have a look, then.’
The body was that of a slender person, not tall. The skull was neat, the brow ridges not very prominent. The bones were gracile, the limbs slender.
Theo said softly, ‘Man or woman?’
‘Good question,’ I replied.
I leaned over the corpse and unfastened the fraying ties that held the outer garment – tunic, coat, I wasn’t sure – together, and pushed aside the flimsy chemise. The chest, bared, showed very faint swellings that might have been the small breasts of a woman or the fatty deposits of a man. With a sigh, for I had a strong sense that I was violating what remained of this poor, lonely soul, I thrust my hands inside the hose and pushed them down over the upper thighs.
The penis was tiny, shrunken and curled against the top of the right thigh like a little finger. ‘A man, then,’ breathed Theo, right in my ear.
‘Wait,’ I said softly.
I pushed my hand deeper into the crotch, behind the small testicles. It was too dark to see, so my fingertips had to be my eyes. I advanced them, step by step, and then came to the anus. Withdrawing my hand – I felt an urgent need to clean it – I said, ‘Yes. A man.’
Theo was looking at me curiously. ‘Did the penis and balls not tell you what you needed to know?’
‘Yes, with hindsight,’ I agreed. ‘But very occasionally it happens that a body displays the sexual characteristics of both male and female. A person will have the appearance of an effeminate man, or a masculine woman. These people are called hermaphrodites and the condition is found elsewhere in nature. In snails, for example, and if you have ever seen a pair of garden snails in the act of regeneration, you’d have observed that both creatures are equipped with male and female genitalia, and the—’
‘Yes, thanks, Gabe, I’ll remember to look out for it,’ Theo said hastily.
‘Human hermaphrodites are, I believe, very rare,’ I went on. ‘I have never seen one, only read of the condition.’
Theo was still looking faintly horrified. ‘The sexual characteristics of male and female,’ he repeated, ‘in the one body. So, when you thrust your hand down between the legs, you thought to find a—’ He stopped abruptly.
I smiled to myself. I guessed he’d been about to use one of the vernacular terms, of which there are so many, but stopped out of respect for a physician’s presence. ‘A vagina,’ I said calmly.
‘Er – yes, quite,’ he agreed. I’ll swear he blushed.
‘Yes. I thought it best to check.’
‘But this is definitely the body of a man?’
‘Yes, Theo, it is.’
He gave a deep sigh. ‘We’ll get him on the cart and back to my house, then, and together we’ll begin the challenging task of finding out who he is and how he died.’
TWO
We were back at Theo’s house by early to mid-morning. He lives on the edge of the village of Withybere, towards Warleigh Point, which is on the river. He and his family inhabit the upper storeys of the house, and his three young children are under the strictest orders never to sneak through the door that divides the residence from their father’s official quarters. The work of the coroner frequently involves sights, sounds and smells – particularly smells – that are not suitable for the young, and the children, in particular the bright lad Carolus, Theo and his wife Elaine’
s firstborn, showed far too much curiosity and had been known to open the forbidden door unless carefully watched.
This morning there were no signs of the family’s presence. Perhaps the children were at their lessons, or maybe Elaine had taken them out. The corpse was lifted from the cart by two of the three men who had come out with Theo to fetch it – the weight was so slight that two could easily bear it – and, once it had been deposited on the trestle table in the cellar down beneath the house, Theo thanked them and accompanied them back upstairs to dismiss them. I was vaguely aware of their muttered conversation – somebody laughed briefly – but most of my attention was already on the pathetic remains lying on the boards before me.
Sunlight was streaming in through the series of narrow windows set in the south-facing wall up near the ceiling, so now I had plenty of light to work by. The men had laid the dead man on his back, and, before I did anything else, I spent some moments looking down into his face. I wanted to gain an idea of what he had looked like, before poverty, sickness, starvation and desperation had brought him to his solitary death.
I picked up a strand of the filthy, matted hair. He had lice. There was a bucket of water set beside one of the trestles, in it a wash cloth. I picked up the cloth and ran it several times along the hair. With the dirt removed, the hair revealed itself to be fair, stranded lightly with silver. It was the first clue to the dead man’s age: although people sometimes begin to go grey in their thirties, or even their twenties, normally the loss of hair colour doesn’t begin until the fourth decade.
I rinsed out the cloth and gently began to bathe the face. The skin was pale and fine; surprisingly smooth. I raised the right eyelid and saw that the iris of the eye had been light, clear blue. The other eye had gone, and I turned my thoughts firmly away from what had happened to it.
I stared into the dead face. Cleaned, I had a better view of those swellings, that I had originally taken for infected animal bites.
They were not.
They were firm, fleshy lumps, one on the end of the nose, a larger one obscuring much of the cheek beneath the left eye and some smaller ones distorting the lines of the face.
Several possible causes crossed my mind.
For now – until I could return home and consult my reams of notes and my small library of medical reference books – I would just have to go on with the examination.
I heard Theo’s tread on the steps down into the cellar. Theo is a big man, tall and broad, and although he can be light on his feet when need arises, people usually hear him approaching. He came to stand beside me, observing but not speaking. With an inward sigh – the next action is one that I always find a distasteful sort of intrusion when working on the dead – I began to strip off the tattered garments.
Coat, shirt, hose, a worn leather belt from which hung a purse, and a pair of soft shoes with holes in the thin soles and worn-down heels that had surely been inadequate for someone who lived on the roads. If he’d lived on the roads. I removed the garments and made a small pile of them on the second trestle table, beside the bottom of the steps. Theo went over and began turning them this way and that, looking, I imagined, for clues to the man’s identity.
I rinsed out the washcloth once more and began to clean away several weeks, or perhaps months, of accumulated filth from the naked body.
Presently Theo said, ‘The purse is empty of coins, much as you’d expect, but I found this inside his coat.’
I turned to see him unfolding and then holding up a small piece of heavy, artist’s paper on which there were dark lines. ‘What is it?’
‘I have no idea.’ He set it aside and returned to his task.
As I did to mine. We worked in silence. As always, Theo was the perfect companion, for, even though he didn’t speak, I was aware of his strong presence and it helped me; I felt almost that the power of his personality was supporting me. He is a good man; there’s no better adjective to describe him. He is, as Jonathan Carew might have put it, on the side of the angels.
Jonathan. I wondered, in a swift thought that momentarily took me away from the reeking cellar and the sad corpse before me, if Celia was even now knocking on the door of the Priest’s House, presenting her roses and the pot of Sallie’s strawberry preserve …
When the body was as clean as I could make it and I had examined it minutely, I said quietly, ‘I cannot be sure, Theo, but my initial thought is that this man died of natural causes.’
I sensed movement as Theo came to stand beside me. ‘Yes?’
‘He might have starved to death.’ I indicated the concave stomach and, just above it, the arch of the ribs, sticking out so starkly and stretching the skin. ‘But he was diseased’ – I pointed to the lumps on the face and to other swellings on his limbs and torso; to a distortion in the joints of his legs – ‘and whatever he was suffering from may have finally killed him.’
Theo suppressed a gasp. ‘Is it leprosy?’ he whispered. Brave man that he was, he had managed not to obey the instinct that must have been yelling at him to take a step back. Take two steps, five, ten, get out of the cellar and away from the corpse.
‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘If so, there is no danger to you, or even to me, and I’ve just been handling him.’ I heard the question Theo hadn’t asked. ‘Leprosy is infectious, or in fact I should say contagious’ – I decided to answer it anyway, to set my friend the family man’s mind at rest – ‘but contact has to be over a long period of time. People habitually living in close quarters with victims catch the sickness, which is why lepers are removed and kept apart. But a swift, casual encounter offers no danger.’ Or at least, I thought but didn’t add, I’m fairly sure it doesn’t …
‘Should we arrange for a quick burial?’ Theo suggested.
I was on the point of agreeing, but something stopped me.
‘Have you still access to that crypt you found for me last year?’ I asked him. We’d had need to store a particularly malodorous corpse, and, exhausted by the perfectly understandable complaints of his agents and his wife, Theo had found somewhere other than his own cellar in which to keep it: the crypt of an empty house close by.
‘Yes, indeed,’ Theo said. ‘I had been using the crypt from time to time, and a while ago I thought it was time to see about obtaining formal permission.’ He made a faint grimace. ‘Which, at a price, I have done. I contacted the owners, and they’ve let the crypt to me in exchange for a monthly rent.’
Men will always make a few coins where they can, I reflected. ‘Then I will wrap our dead man up tightly in a clean binding, if such a thing can be found?’ Theo nodded. ‘And we’ll take him there, straight away.’
Theo hurried off, returning with a bundled-up sheet. ‘This was put out in the rag bag,’ he said. I could see that it was worn very thin in places. ‘It’s a bit stained, but it’s all right for our purpose.’
I wrapped the body, rolling the cloth a couple of times round. I refused Theo’s help: even though I knew that any risk was minuscule, I’d touched the naked body already and he hadn’t. Then, when every piece of flesh was safely covered, I picked up the dead man – he was even lighter than I’d imagined – and followed Theo up the steps, out of the house and along to the empty dwelling and its crypt.
We left him there, our unknown dead stranger.
But I didn’t believe for a moment that I’d seen the last of him.
I went home.
I was so eager to get to my books, my shelves of notebooks and my papers that I barely answered Sallie’s cheerful greeting. I was intent upon laving my hands out in the yard, over and over, the stench of the corpse still in my nostrils even after all trace of it had left my skin, and it took a couple of repetitions of her remark before I took in what she was saying.
‘Mistress Celia has eaten an early dinner and gone out again,’ my housekeeper said once more with the painstaking slowness and clarity of one speaking to the deaf or the slow-witted, ‘and I’m wondering, Doctor, if you wish me to prepare something f
or you?’
I finished my washing and turned to her. ‘Thank you, Sallie, I’ll have bread, cheese, ham and pickles up in my study. And a mug of ale,’ I added as she hurried off.
‘Big or small?’ she asked without turning round.
‘Big.’
My study is probably my favourite room out of all of them in this house, Rosewyke, that I love and that has come to feel so thoroughly like home. I found the place when I was at my lowest ebb. I’d been a ship’s surgeon, a sawbones serving in the magnificent vessels of the late queen’s navy, but an accidental blow to the side of the head had left me with acute, permanent, debilitating and agonizing seasickness. Being forced to give up the life I’d loved broke something inside me that I had despaired of ever mending. But then one day I came across Rosewyke, empty, unloved, beautiful, and, it seemed, waiting for me to find it. From the moment I first set eyes on the place, I began to heal.
My study is up on the first floor, adjoining my bedchamber, and faces out to the front of the house, roughly south-westwards over the thicket of soft fruit bushes and small trees that stand on the top of the higher ground above the Tavy river. The big oak table that serves as my desk is placed in the window, either side of which are the shelves where I keep my books, notebooks and papers. My doctor’s bag is always stored in the same spot: on a small table beside the fireplace.
I barely noticed Sallie coming in and depositing the tray with my food and my mug of ale – she’d take me at my word regarding the ale, I saw when she’d gone, and filled a vast pewter tankard that probably held almost a couple of pints and might actually have been a jug – because I was already engrossed in the reference work I’d been thinking about all the way home.
The one that included a treatise on leprosy.
Since I’d stared down at those swellings and distortions on the dead man’s thin, malnourished body, I’d been unable to escape from the awful thought that Theo and I had between us unleashed that dreaded horror from biblical times not only on ourselves and the three men who had brought back the corpse but also on Theo’s unsuspecting wife and children. Before I began on any other branch of investigation – and I had several in mind – I had to reassure myself.
