Sawbones

by Catherine Johnson

  “Goodbye, Ezra,” she said, and slipped away into the street.

  Ezra looked up at the heavy grey sky and the rain broke, cold, fat drops that ran down his face. He wiped them away. He had to be strong.

  The rain had turned the graveyard into a sea of mud. Ezra looked down into the earth at the coffin and wished a thousand times over that the master was still alive. Their last conversation had been a disaster, Ezra thought. He’d been a spoilt, sulking, stupid child. Ezra felt a prickling behind his eyes and breathed deeply. He was a scientist. Scientists didn’t make wishes. Scientists were rational. He sniffed. Since he could no longer speak to the master, he must live to make him proud. Become the best surgeon he could be.

  Before the service the crowd had buzzed with so much talk – the loss to the profession, the shock of Mr William McAdam’s death, that one of the greats should be felled and killed in his own home by a cracksman… Ezra said nothing. It was no cracksman or common burglar that had killed the master. He sighed, and felt his whole body shudder with grief and with the unfairness of it all.

  He forced himself to think of something else; he told himself it was an unfortunate soul who was in need of a surgeon this morning, as the entire Company were here. Dark-coated and hatted, feet yellow with London clay like so many blackbirds, they ranged around the grave of Mr William McAdam, Master Surgeon. There was Mr Gordon from the Middlesex, Mr Ramsay and Mr Hardy from St Thomas’s, Mr Franklin from Guy’s, as well as Mr Lashley and a good few others Ezra didn’t recognize. In the throng of students were a couple of young men who stood out in their manner and dress. These two were dressed in the French style with shortish hair, no wigs, and sombre jackets.

  Another stranger stood at the priest’s right hand: the master’s nephew, Dr James McAdam. Ezra had only met him once, a few years back, and would have been perfectly happy if their paths had never crossed again. He was a physician in Edinburgh whose one answer to all ailments was leeches and yet more leeches. In Ezra’s view an excessive reliance on those shiny bloodsuckers had informed the man’s character and bearing a good deal.

  Dr James had been staying in Great Windmill Street the past two days. In fact, he had settled himself comfortably into the master’s rooms on the second floor. His face, unremarkable and white as dirty snow, registered nothing of any interest at all, Ezra thought. He had taken over the running of the household and of the funeral, which Ezra knew for a fact was not what the master had wanted. If Ezra had believed in such things, he would have said the master was spinning in his grave this instant.

  As the coffin was lowered, the Company stood in line to walk past and show their respect. Ezra picked up a handful of mud to throw onto the grave, along with a handful of hellebores. The pain in his back flared up as he swung his arm, and he winced and cursed under his breath.

  Mrs Boscaven must have heard. She took Ezra’s arm and spoke softly. “Now then, Ezra, lad. Don’t let the circumstances get the better of you.”

  “He didn’t want this,” Ezra said, trying and failing to keep his voice in check. “He told me many times, Mrs B. He wanted to give his body to the science. To be anatomized. To show others there was no harm in it.” Ezra knew his voice was getting louder.

  Dr James McAdam caught his eye and shook his head at him as if Ezra were nothing more than a naughty child. The anger raged in him and he backed away through the crowd of mourners, out of the graveyard towards town. He would not cry.

  He would not cry.

  He ran back through the damp grey streets all the way to Great Windmill Street. No one noticed or passed comment. There were close to a million souls in the city, all with their own grievances, their own upsets. So many died every day, he told himself – babies, children – he knew that. He saw his own face reflected in the glass of a shop window on Long Acre. It stopped him short.

  There was the scar that defined him, there were his own features, his eyes redder than usual, but there was something else: there was that same madness he’d seen in Miss Loveday Finch’s face when he saw her that first time outside Bart’s. He rubbed at his eyes, hoping to even out his colour, and hurried home.

  “Good service?” Toms asked. He was in the kitchen drinking tea when Ezra came in.

  “Not particularly,” Ezra said shortly. “Not what the master wanted.”

  “Way I see it,” Toms said, pouring himself another cup, “Master’s not here to give a tub of lard what happens to hisself or his house.”

  “You put it so delicately, Toms.”

  “I call a spade,” he said, looking at Ezra, “a spade.” He smiled. “Things will change round here, you see if I’m not wrong.”

  “Things always change, Toms,” Ezra snapped. “That is the nature of life.”

  “Not our nature, though, yours and mine. We’ve had the feather-bed life here – you, especially.”

  Ezra looked away. But Toms went on, “You could have been dead by now if it wasn’t for the master. Dead from slave work cutting sugar, dead from dragging a tumour as big as your head around all the day.” He paused, then added spitefully, “Although you might have made a deal of coin in a freak show!”

  Ezra should have been angry – he was angry – but not at Toms. If Toms thought he could get a rise out of him with the same old cheap jabs when the master lay buried in the ground.

  “Rest your chops for once, Toms,” was all he said, wearily.

  Not waiting to hear more from him, Ezra went upstairs, past the mirrors in the hall turned to the wall, through the museum, still shuttered, past the splintered wood and the wall weeping plaster dust where the bullets had done their damage, and into his room.

  Toms was right. Everything would change. Who knew Dr James’s plans? He might sell everything – the museum, the house. Then Ezra would have no job, no home. He knew his heart was hammering just as loudly as it had been the evening those men attacked.

  He didn’t have many belongings. A few clothes. The most important things were his set of knives and his study books. Ezra began to collect up his notebooks, every one, just in case Dr McAdam packed them away when he wasn’t looking. There were years of description of every sort of human body. Those riddled with pox, with palsy; those whose limbs had been eaten away by gangrene. He had seen them all. He tied the notebooks together, tucked them underneath his bed and sat down heavily. Just a few days ago he had thought the navy would be his future. He had never for one second imagined a future without the master.

  Before the master’s death he had been a child, chasing his own wants and desires. He could see that now. Choice and necessity were opposites indeed. How easy life had seemed such a short time ago.

  And money! What would he do to earn a living? He couldn’t go right into practice – he had no money for premises or equipment, even if he had more skill than most.

  He heard Ellen and Mrs Boscaven arrive back, and Mrs B came up with a cup of tea. She sat down opposite, on his chair, and sighed.

  “You away off too?”

  “I had thought of it,” Ezra said, wiping his face with his sleeve.

  “There’s no need, lad. Not yet. Nothing’s settled.”

  “Dr James wishes the house sold, does he not? It is as Toms said – we are all of us finished here. Whatever the master may have willed.” Ezra tried to keep his voice steady.

  “Best not to think too much of the future. Who can say what it might bring?” The ticking of the clock in the museum sounded loud even against the traffic in the street.

  “Ez, look, you drink your tea. You have an appointment. You need to get yourself out and off to the master’s luncheon.”

  “At the Company of Surgeons?” Ezra shook his head. “I will not be missed.”

  “Come now, I can hear the self-pity in your voice. That’s not like you, not at all.” Mrs Boscaven stood up. “What would the master make of you shut up in your room at a time like this? You owe it to him to go, whatever you might feel for yourself.”

  “I don’t know…”<
br />
  “Oh, I am right. And look at it this way, with luck and good grace you may even find a new master. If you want to pity anyone, pity Ellen and me, who’ll have to rely on Dr James for references.” Mrs Boscaven made a face. “The thought of that could make me weep until Wednesday! Get out and put your face about with those surgeons. Speak well of your master to whosoever asks. That’s only right. Folk like us cannot afford to weep and wail and gnash our teeth. He was a good man, your master – hold that thought.” She patted Ezra on the shoulder. “We must all put on our brave faces, and you must get to the Company before that luncheon is done.”

  As he left the house, Ezra noticed the strange boy – the dark-haired, dark-eyed boy – hiding in the basement area of Mrs Perino’s house. At least, it looked like him from the flash of a glimpse he’d had before the boy ducked down below the level of the street. “Hoi! You! Show yourself! What do you know about the master’s death?” Ezra shouted. But no answer came. Ezra opened the area gate and looked down, but the boy seemed to have vanished.

  Ezra had never been inside the Company of Surgeons’ hall before. He was an apprentice, and on previous visits, delivering messages and suchlike, had had to wait for the master outside. The Company was relatively new, not quite fifty years old, nothing like the medieval wool staplers’ or drapers’ guilds. The master himself had trained under one of the founder members – a man who had helped set up the Company as separate from barbers and teeth pullers.

  “Ours is a new trade,” the master liked to say, “at the edge of science!”

  Ezra took a deep breath and stepped inside.

  Evidently the luncheon had not even begun: he could see the tables set out in the large hall. The party was standing in the lobby drinking wine and talking. Mr Lashley and Dr McAdam appeared very friendly in one corner, the surgeons from Guy’s and St Thomas’s arguing over knives in another. The two young men in plain jackets and odd haircuts stood on their own.

  Ezra walked up to them, his hand out to shake theirs; he hoped his face looked braver than he felt.

  “I am Mr Ezra McAdam. I was Mr McAdam’s apprentice.”

  “Ah yes, we have seen you.” The shorter man spoke, the accent was French. That would account for their revolutionary hairstyles.

  “We were students of Monsieur Desault. I was in London a year ago, for some of his lectures.”

  “Of course! Last winter. Monsieur Desault.” Ezra remembered the name. “The expert on nervous systems. Consciousness and such. The master is – I should say, was – such an admirer of his work! You are both surgeons now?”

  The two men nodded.

  They seemed quite young, Ezra thought, only a few years older than himself. Perhaps there was hope for him, too.

  “Sadly, Monsieur Desault is not well enough to travel.” The shorter man paused. “There is a lot of upheaval in France. The revolution, it makes things change quickly, suddenly.” He waved his hands. “It can be dangerous, but it is also exciting, yes. Monsieur Desault would have given, how do you say, his whole arm, to pay his respects, to be here.”

  “You are lucky, I think,” the taller man agreed, “to work for Mr McAdam.”

  “Yes.” Ezra swallowed. “Yes, I was.”

  “Allow me to introduce my colleague, Monsieur Figaud. I am Monsieur Bichat. If ever you are in Paris, we both practise at the Hôtel-Dieu – we would be delighted if you would visit with us, exchange ideas. Surgery is moving so fast in Paris, as is our work on nervous systems – indeed, on the very nature of existence, of life!”

  The other man nodded. “We have been experimenting with extending life and consciousness, awareness, with transfusions of blood. We are lucky – or unlucky – to have many, many subjects on which to carry out our experiments.”

  “Transfusions?” Ezra looked from one man to the other, interested. “I do not think I have ever seen that before.”

  “You must visit, Mr McAdam,” said Monsieur Bichat warmly. “You would be most welcome.”

  “Thank you, sirs,” Ezra said, smiling despite himself. “It sounds most fascinating. Now you must tell me more about your experiments.”

  The French surgeons were pleased to oblige, and Ezra found their excitement infectious – Monsieur Figaud’s eyes lit up as he spoke and Monsieur Bichat displayed an excess of enthusiastic hand gestures. Ezra could not blame them. The thrill of discovery was one he understood only too well. But he kept thinking of the master, how pleased he would have been to hear about this progress … and how much more eagerly he himself would have anticipated a trip to Paris if the master had been coming too.

  A waiter brought glasses of wine out on a tray. Ezra took one; he didn’t normally drink, but the wine burned his throat and warmed his insides.

  “It was a good funeral,” Monsieur Bichat said. “I only wish there could have been no funeral at all.”

  Ezra nodded, staring into his glass.

  “But the work must go on,” said Monsieur Figaud. “Mr McAdam was a genius. I wish I could have spoken with him about blood supply. We are doing some interesting experiments concerning the exact moment of death and how long the brain remains active.”

  “Perhaps we could meet again before we leave London?” Monsieur Figaud asked. “We could discuss developments, and visit Mr McAdam’s museum, yes?”

  “I am not sure if that will be possible,” Ezra said. “There was some damage. Some specimens were lost.” And, he thought bitterly, I cannot believe Dr James will permit callers.

  “Quel dommage!” The taller man looked crestfallen.

  “Mr McAdam’s museum is very famous in France,” Monsieur Bichat declared. “Very famous.”

  Ezra looked over to where Mr Lashley and Dr James were still deep in conversation, heads so close together that he could not help thinking of the double-headed foetus.

  “We will not be staying for the luncheon.” Monsieur Bichat took out his card. “We have business in town, and then we are leaving for Paris at the end of the week.”

  Ezra promised to contact them at their hotel if he could arrange a tour of the museum, and he shook their hands as they took their leave. He felt suddenly more terribly alone than ever.

  He looked around the room. Mrs Boscaven was usually right. If there was a marketplace for those with his skills he was right at the centre of it now. His eyes lit upon Mr Gordon from the Middlesex Hospital. They had just installed a brand-new theatre for surgery there, and Mr Gordon’s reputation was close to the master’s. He might make a decent employer. Ezra drank another glass of wine quickly, in two gulps, and started across the room.

  “Ah, Ezra McAdam.” Ezra turned round. “Just the young man.” Dr James was smiling at him. It was not a pleasant sight. Mr Lashley was at his side. On the far side of the room Ezra could see Mr Gordon striking up a conversation with some students. The moment had been lost.

  “Dr McAdam, Mr Lashley,” Ezra said politely.

  “We were just commenting on the funeral service, weren’t we, Mr Lashley?”

  “Indeed we were, Dr McAdam.”

  “A fine send-off,” Dr James said.

  “For a fine surgeon,” Lashley added.

  Ezra bit his tongue. The way Lashley said it, it sounded like an insult.

  “And the memorial will be astounding: Scots granite,” Dr James went on. “The Company of Surgeons has got up a subscription.”

  “I am so glad Dr McAdam is here to see his uncle’s estate in order,” said Lashley, and Ezra thought the two men ought to compete for the title of oiliest human being in the city of London. “He’s been most generous with the contents of the museum. We look forward to finding a home for some of it at St Bartholomew’s.”

  Ezra felt a jolt of shock so real he was sure he must have blanched. “Some of it? Excuse me? I thought the master’s will…”

  “Don’t you worry your woolly head about wills, lad.” Dr James turned to Lashley. “I am needed back in Edinburgh – my practice there is among the very best, and it cannot run
without me. My uncle would understand.”

  “Understand what, sir?” Ezra’s head was thumping. Perhaps he had drunk the wine too hastily. “His life’s work ruined? His wishes for his own death ignored?”

  “Do not be impudent with me,” Dr James snapped. “Lashley, why you choose to take this boy is beyond me. He can be left out of the settlement if you wish it. You may just take the instruments and the knives—”

  “Take? I am not a thing!” Ezra exploded. “What settlement is this? Tell me, now!”

  “Such a hot head.” Lashley tut-tutted. “But he has much skill, Dr McAdam. Your uncle trained him well. He will be a welcome addition to St Bartholomew’s.”

  “What have you done?” Ezra felt his hands balling into fists. He did not know who he wanted to hit first, Dr James or Lashley.

  “I do not think this is the time or the place,” Dr James hissed. Lashley was smiling. A footman announced that luncheon was served.

  Dr James took Ezra’s arm and held it tight. “I will see you back at Great Windmill Street,” he said, close to his ear. “You may have milked my uncle for all he was worth, inveigled your way into his household and bled him dry all these years, but I assure you I am of a different stamp. He may have been so soft-headed as to have given you his name, but I will have it back.” With that he shook Ezra off, turned round and walked away into the dining room.

  Ezra was gasping, as stunned as if the blow had been physical. “You can’t do this!” He was shouting now, shouting and making a scene in front of every surgeon in the city. “You cannot do this!”

  Lashley paused, leant in to Ezra and said quietly but firmly, “You would do well to remember that without your master, a boy like you is so much less than nothing.”