Ezra lifted the cloth he had rested over the man’s face.
“You will do us all a favour, sir, whoever you were,” he said aloud. “We will know more, thanks to you.”
The cadaver, of course, said nothing.
The face was clean shaven, with a good bone structure. Ezra lifted the eyelids; the eyes were clear and not bloodshot. He smelt the mouth – not a taint of gin or spirits – and his teeth were good and strong. His hands were a gentleman’s hands, manicured, clean. Not a soldier, then, and not one of the St Giles’ blackbirds, men who had been slaves and soldiers once, fighting for the British against the free colonials, but who now scraped a living on the streets. Ezra made a face, deep in thought. Perhaps this one had been the loser in a duel. But a Negro in a duel? With pistols? Surely it would have been common knowledge, sung by every news sheet singer from here to Stepney and back.
The wound was just below the man’s left ribs. Ezra knew Mr McAdam would be upset if the lungs had been damaged. He lifted the candle and brought it closer to the wound. It was like a dark red flower, black and foul in the centre, the skin forming red, petal-like fronds around it.
He hoped to God this wasn’t a gentleman, some sort of wealthy merchant. If he had been a man of quality, that could mean a world of trouble for Mr McAdam. No one was too bothered about the empty coffin of an ordinary Londoner – and in too many cases wives sold their husbands; fathers, their children – but a gentleman, and a Negro one at that … someone might be looking for him.
Ezra looked back at the face. There were no scars or marks such as he’d seen on visiting African royalty in Whitehall once. The hair on this one was cropped close, almost a shave, and there was a slit in both ears, as if Mr Allen or one of his kind had been in a hurry and pulled the earrings out. A sailor, then? But no sailor had hands like this, so little used to rough work.
The man’s arms were well muscled, so he could not have been a merchant or an ambassador who sat in a chair all day. On the inside of his left forearm there was a mark. A bruise? Ezra lifted the candle closer – no, a tattoo. It had a definite shape, a letter perhaps. If so, it was one Ezra couldn’t decipher. Possibly Arabic, he thought. Maybe a sea captain, an independent trader?
Ezra fetched a bucket of water to wash the body down carefully, the way, he told himself, he would like to be washed if he and the cadaver happened to swap places.
There were no more clues, save a lighter band on several fingers where there must have been rings. He turned the body over, and he could see the wound went all the way through to the back. The candle fizzed and guttered, and the room went dark. Ezra sighed. There was a stub on the shelf by the door, so he lit that and propped the cadaver on its side. Now he could see that the bullet wound on the back must be the entry wound. Of course! The flesh pushed in, the skin forced downward…
Ezra laid the body on its back again. The wound on the front was where the shot had left the body; when he looked closer he could make out tiny fragments of white bone among the pulverized flesh. This could not be a duel. This man had been shot running away. One shot from close distance – there were no other wounds. Whoever shot this man had either been close or had a good aim. Ezra thought how much more information he could have gleaned if he’d been able to see the man’s clothes.
The body’s mouth had fallen open as he rolled it over, and he was about to close it when he realized something. Or rather, a lack of something. In death the tongue sometimes swelled, he often had to tuck it in. But this time there was no tongue. He looked again. This man, when he had been a man and not a cadaver, had had his tongue cut out, and the wound had healed completely. It had been cut out many years ago.
Here was a puzzle, Ezra thought. How could a man run a ship, give orders, buy and sell, without a tongue? It was possible; Ezra had seen folk with no speech talk with their hands. The tattoo pointed to the cadaver being a foreigner, but even that was not certain. Whoever he had been, Ezra reckoned, a man like this would be missed. He would have to tell Mr McAdam. The decision would be the master’s.
Suddenly there was a three-beat knock on the yard door that set the glass roof rattling, as if the rain had turned from water to rock. Ezra, deep in thought only a moment before, nearly jumped out of his skin and almost dropped the candle.
It was Mr Allen, and he was alone, which was odd. It usually took two of them to bring the thing in off the pony cart. But Allen already had a sack hefted over his shoulder.
“Tell Mr McAdam it’ll be the usual plus a half, will you, lad.”
Ezra nodded.
The sack was small. It must be a child.
Ezra sighed. He would have to harden his heart some more.
Chapter Two
Mr William McAdam’s Anatomy School and Museum of Curiosities
Great Windmill Street
Soho
London
November 1792
It was still dark when Ezra woke. He could hear the city waking up down below in the street, the iron-wheeled carts trundling towards Piccadilly or the Haymarket, Mrs Perino’s chickens cackling across the street. The church bells of St Anne’s called the hour and were answered by those at St James’s and, in a duller echo, by St Martin-in-the-Fields’. Ezra dressed quickly; there was much to do and he wanted to get a letter to Anna before Mr McAdam’s students turned up for the lecture.
He dashed off the note by candlelight at his writing desk under the window. He told Anna that he could see her at lunchtime; they could meet in the porch at St Anne’s if it was very cold. He sealed it with a bit of wax and pulled on his jacket as he made his way downstairs. Then he was out of the back door, past Mrs Boscaven arguing with the milkmaid, and back to Lisle Street. The whole city was sparkling with frost, everything glittered and shone and Ezra had to watch his step, as the cobbles and the new stone paving sets were treacherous.
The newspaper boys were shouting about wars in far-off places, Sweden and Russia and Turkey, and about the king of France, who in the midst of the revolution had tried, and failed, to escape his own country. Ezra bought a copy of The Times for Mr McAdam and tucked it under his arm.
The shutters were up on the cloth warehouse, and the curtains were drawn upstairs. He knew the family would not be up yet, but Betsey would have cleaned the grates and laid the fires and would now be hard at work in the kitchen at the back of the house. Ezra slipped into Archer’s Mews and, seeing the candle lit, tapped on the kitchen window.
Betsey’s surprised face popped up on the other side of the glass, but when she saw who it was she shook her head, frowning, and gestured for him to leave.
“Betsey, please,” Ezra whispered urgently – she couldn’t hear him, he knew, but he dared not raise his voice. Betsey didn’t look convinced. “Please,” Ezra mouthed again.
Then he heard the bolts being drawn back, and Betsey ushered him in. She looked disapproving, but there was something soft in her expression.
To Ezra’s surprise Anna was there, sitting on a bench in the middle of the kitchen. When she saw Ezra she tried quickly to draw herself together and seem her normal, poised self, but Ezra could tell that she’d been crying. What was she doing awake so early?
“Five minutes,” Betsey was saying. “Five minutes is all I’ll give the two of you, and when I come back he had best be on his way.” She turned to Ezra. “If Mr David finds you he’ll skin you quicker than ever your Mr McAdam could!” And she bustled from the kitchen, leaving Ezra and Anna alone.
“Anna, what is it?”
“Oh, Ezra,” she said. “David is to be married!” Ezra shook his head. He didn’t understand. Her brother to be married – surely that would be good news? But Anna looked away, her brow furrowed. “He is getting married and we are going away, to Holland.”
“Holland!” Ezra stared at her. Was this what the argument had been about, last night? “But your shop—”
“Mother will stay,” said Anna, with a hint of bitterness, though she kept her voice calm. “But she is s
ending me with David, to the Hague, to live with my cousins.” Her hands bunched in the cloth of her dress. She looked tired – perhaps she had not slept at all.
Ezra felt a knot of pain in his chest. He would have said it was his heart breaking, but he knew, from the number of hearts he had seen in a variety of sections and cross-sections, that hearts were only pumps made flesh, and could not make you feel like this. “But surely, if you wanted to, you could stay?”
“Do you think I don’t want to?” Anna cried. “Do you think I wouldn’t sooner stay here? I love London.” And perhaps he was only fooling himself, but the way she looked at him then allowed him to hope it was not only London she would miss. “But Mother insists. She says my prospects will be better in Holland.”
Ezra had to look away. He knew what that meant. In Holland, Mrs St John was no doubt hoping, Anna would spend her time in the company of young men more suitable than a mulatto surgeon’s boy.
“When?” he asked, hopelessly.
“A week,” Anna whispered.
There was the sound of a door slamming somewhere up in the St John house, and Anna jumped.
“You have to go,” she said, and she looked close to tears again but Ezra knew she wouldn’t cry in front of him.
Ezra wanted to weep too.
He walked slowly home to Great Windmill Street. He would have to imagine a future without his oldest friend, Anna St John. She would be living a new life in Holland. Without him. He swallowed. He would have to immerse himself in work as throroughly as possible.
Back at the house, Mrs Boscaven had breakfast on in the kitchen. Though he was chilled to the bone, Ezra couldn’t stomach the porridge she had made, and sipped his coffee with the maid, Ellen, and Mr McAdam’s valet and footman, Henry Toms.
“I reckon,” Toms said, grinning as he helped himself to Ezra’s portion of porridge, “as you’ve just found out about the St John girl pushing off back to where she comes from.” Toms was only a year or so older than Ezra but liked to think it made all the difference as far as knowledge of worldly matters went.
Mrs Boscaven tutted. Ezra gritted his teeth; it was all he could do to keep his face from betraying his feelings.
Toms went on, “Going away with her brother, I heard. Didn’t want no brown babies! ’Specially not ones whose daddy might have been in a freak show!” He tipped his head on one side and held a breakfast roll up as if it were attached to the side of his face like a tumour, and laughed. “Or worse, someone who’s only worth tuppence and should be sold back to the West Indies where he came from!”
Ezra pushed his chair back and got up, fists ready. He was going to punch the idiot into next week. Mrs Boscaven put a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t you dare talk that way, Henry Toms!” she said sharply. “Or I’ll make sure the master knows what happens to the ends of his candles, and his soap. And that pair of breeches you swore blind went missing.”
Toms looked shifty. Ezra didn’t sit back down. He took his coffee and left.
It was light in the anatomy room. Ezra had covered both cadavers with a sheet the night before; they lay side by side on the dark, stained table. Ezra sipped his coffee. He was not a slave and he was not a freak. He pushed Toms’ words away – he had work to do. Outside he could hear the first of the students queuing up in the cold. He reminded himself he had to see Mr McAdam before the lecture began, tell him about the tongueless man, the gunshot and the tattoo.
Ezra looked up through the glass roof to the iron-grey sky. He sighed and wished he were somewhere else.
“Ah, Ezra, here all ready!” Mr McAdam swept into the room. “Open the doors and let the poor frozen truth seekers in, lad.”
Ezra put down his coffee cup and tied on his apron. “Sir, please. There’s something I need to show you first.”
“The child? Has putrefaction set in?” The surgeon took a deep breath in. “Aah! You’ve made good with the rosemary. It smells more like a herb garden than an anatomizing room.”
“Thank you, sir. No, sir. It’s the man.” Ezra lifted up the sheet. “It’s a shot wound. And not a duel with pistols. He’s a Negro, and the word of such a fight would have been all over the city.”
“You’re right, lad. Well spotted. What else?” Mr McAdam took his glasses out of his waistcoat pocket and put them on.
“His hands, sir – a gentleman’s hands. He must be wealthy, sir. And, by the look of things, shot in the back.”
Mr McAdam raised an eyebrow.
“One more thing, sir,” Ezra said. “He’s had his tongue cut away.”
“Recently? In death?”
“No, a long time ago. See? Oh, and sir, you see this mark, on his forearm, I couldn’t…”
McAdam leant closer and picked up the lifeless limb. “Arabic. Could be Persian. Makes sense. The rulers of those houses often cut the tongues of their servants.”
“But his hands, sir…”
“There is more than one kind of work, Ezra.”
Mr McAdam said nothing for a long time. He looked again in the man’s mouth, then at where the earrings had been pulled out of his ears, and at the gunshot wound. Finally he looked up. They could hear the crowd waiting on the other side of the door, shuffling and stamping their feet to keep warm in the cold.
“This is an odd fish and no mistake,” he said at last. “Belonged to someone important, no doubt.”
“Belonged? He was a slave?”
“I would think so. We must hope his master doesn’t miss him. I could make enquiries at the Ottoman Embassy. Met a fellow at a surgeon’s dinner, can’t for the life of me remember his name. Ali? Aziz? Worked as a surgeon for the sultan, apparently. Perhaps our man here is one of theirs. How’s the child?”
“Nothing unusual there, sir,” Ezra said. “Drowned, I reckon. Five, six days ago. Some putrefaction in the eyes. The skin on the hands and fingers is beginning to slip. Signs of the rickets. If he’d not drowned I don’t think this one would’ve been long for this world.”
McAdam nodded. “Good, good.” He frowned thoughtfully. “If anyone asks, we’ll say the man died on a boat come in from the West Indies. Ezra, fetch the bone saw. We’ll open him up before they come in and the students will be too busy swooning at their first sight of a man’s heart in situ to see the gunshot or the tattoo.”
“As you wish, sir.”
“Oh, and buck up, lad. Your face is a mask of sorrow.” Mr McAdam began to saw through the man’s sternum. He spoke up to be heard above the noise of metal on bone. “Mrs Boscaven has told all, and I assure you, I too know the pangs of first love. The trick, my boy, is to kill your feelings, just as we do every day in here. Dispatch those tender emotions just as swiftly and cleanly as one would a sick horse. Brooding is neither healthy nor productive.” Mr McAdam smiled. “Unless, perhaps, one is a poet!”
“No, sir,” Ezra said, taking the saw and wiping it clean. It seemed every soul in the parish knew his business! Why, he would not have been surprised if the man on the table had piped up to offer advice, even with only half a tongue.
The students had gone. Ezra was sewing up the cadavers, ready for Mr Allen and his company to come and dispose of them once darkness fell. He had cleaned the sawdust and removed the bucket of vomit that one would-be surgeon had filled on discovering the contents of the adult cadaver’s stomach. The smell of partially digested food, which Mr McAdam had eagerly shown his students, had obviously proved too much.
Ezra, having seen the insides of man and boy many times over, had spent the lecture trying hard to think about anything other than Anna. Holland was not so far away, he told himself. After all, this man on the table had travelled twice as far at least. As, of course, had he, from Jamaica to England, a long time ago.
She would write. She would write. He sighed and looked down at the tall man on the table, sewn up smartly; imposing even in death, but in life, slave, subject to another’s orders with no independence of thought or action. Ezra felt powerless. He was no better, he reasone
d, than a kind of slave. He had no money of his own, made no decisions. How would he ever travel to see her?
Ezra finished his work and covered the cadaver before moving on to the child. Of course he didn’t have to sew them up: the paupers these two corpses would be sharing graves with would not care whether or not the contents of their winding sheets were intact. No, but it was good practice. Ezra wanted his stitches to be as good as his master’s. Small, neat, perfect.
“Aha, Ezra. Still hard at work.” Mr McAdam looked over his stitches. “You have a good hand, lad. A good hand. You will make a fine surgeon.”
“Thank you, sir.” Ezra looked up; the master was smiling. Perhaps there was a way around his current problem. “Sir, if you please, I would ask you a question. If you have a moment.”
“Of course,” Mr McAdam said. “Ask away.”
Ezra put down his needle. He took a deep breath. “I was thinking. I was sixteen this autumn and come of age—”
The master butted in. “Only God knows your true age, Ezra. It was an estimate, from your height and the length of your bones, and how your teeth had come on. Birthdays are a luxury for the rich or for those with the comfort of family. When I bought you in Spanish Town you had neither.”
“I know that, sir. I have heard the story very many times. I do wonder that I can’t remember my life before, not one single thing, not any sale or any transaction. Nothing.”
“It is not unnatural. We tend to bury bad experiences, memories. Otherwise they can hurt us, make us bitter.”
Ezra nodded. “I wanted to ask…”
“Is this about your people? We all want to know our provenance, lad. I wish to God that I could tell you more.” Mr McAdam shook his head. “I doubt whether your mother would be alive. Those plantations work a man – and woman – to the ground.” He sighed. “Why society believes it allowable to treat the living as disposable but thinks our quest for vital knowledge akin to devilry is beyond—”
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