Sawbones

by Catherine Johnson

  Ezra watched as the black-clad crowd went in to eat. There was no way he could put on a brave face and make any kind of small talk now. He felt so sick he thought that if he had been anatomized at that moment his stomach and heart would have shrivelled down even smaller than crab-apples. His brain was buzzing in his head. The ground seemed to have shifted under his feet; the whole world had been tilted into wrongness.

  How could it happen that men like that walked and his master lay dead?

  Chapter Nine

  Mr William McAdam’s Anatomy School and Museum of Curiosities

  Great Windmill Street

  Soho

  London

  November 1792

  By the time he had reached Great Windmill Street Ezra felt numb, and not just with cold.

  But there was Miss Loveday Finch, standing on the step, tomato-soup-red curls escaping from her black bonnet. She turned and began speaking as soon as she saw him. “I have been waiting close to half an hour and no one is in. I was almost worried! I have made you an appointment with Mr Falcon. We should go there now.”

  Her chatter seemed to come to him as if muffled through a heavy cloth. Ezra shook his head. “I am in no fit state, Miss Finch.” He took out his key and unlocked the door. “Although you are obviously in the pink of health,” he observed. “I see you are not using your stick.”

  She stopped for a moment, her expression softening slightly. “I know your master died,” she said. She seemed awkward; perhaps she did not know what to say when someone else was in mourning. “It has been all over the newspapers. I suppose,” she went on, apparently unable to keep herself from talking regardless, “if you are shot with a gun then it’s so obviously murder that the world sits up and takes notice, as opposed to merely being poisoned. They have arrested one of the culprits, the gunman – a man by the name of Ahmat – have you heard? I expect they will call you as a witness.”

  “Ahmat,” Ezra repeated, interested in spite of himself. “That was his name. Is there a trial set?”

  She flapped a hand. “He is sure to hang! They say he is Turkish, formerly with the Ottoman ligation.” She leant close, lowered her voice. “Don’t you see how it all knits together? We have to go to the embassy, as you said. Something is rotten there, something that caused my father’s death and that of the tongueless man, which led to the murder of your master!”

  “It is possible,” Ezra said slowly, stepping inside. “But at present nothing much seems to matter.”

  Miss Finch put a gloved hand on his shoulder. “Listen to me, Ezra McAdam, I do understand how you must feel. And if there is one thing I have learnt from my own recent bereavement, it is that one should do everything one can to make oneself busy.”

  “It is not at all that simple,” said Ezra wearily, pushing her hand away.

  She was undeterred. “Mr McAdam, there is always something one can do.”

  She followed him inside and down to the kitchen, and against his better judgement he told her everything. Miss Finch was suitably shocked. She made tea while he spoke.

  “The master’s nephew is even selling his instruments – his knives,” Ezra finished with a sigh. “I know this sounds selfish, but I swear they were promised to me.” He shook his head. “As it is, he even wants his precious name back! Well, he can have it. I cannot think of anything worse than sharing a name with that snake. He has me in a corner and I can see no way out – if I wish to continue as a surgeon I must see out my apprenticeship with Mr Lashley.”

  “Is he quite as bad as you paint him?” she asked.

  Ezra gave her a look.

  Miss Finch was unusually quiet for some time. Then she finished her tea and looked directly at Ezra.

  “I understand how things must seem to you now, but –” Ezra went to interrupt but Miss Finch put her hand up – “people are strange things and often say one thing then do another. I was, if you will remember, the Spirit of Truth.” Ezra sighed but let her continue. “What you must remember is that however kindly Mr McAdam treated you when he was alive, he may not have thought as far ahead as his own death.”

  “But he did!” Ezra said hotly. “Have you not been listening at all? His legacy, his research – he made provision. I know it. He had lawyers, in Middle Temple Inn, and Dr James has never mentioned them once.”

  “There is little point in directing your fury at me, Ezra McAdam.” Ezra could see she was determined. “You are in a fix and, worse, you are laid low by grief. The only way out is for us to do something about it.”

  Ezra spluttered, his tea shooting out of his mouth. “Us?” he said. “In what capacity is there an us?”

  “Finch and McAdam,” she said firmly, getting up. “As I said before. And it seems we have a deal of work: my father’s killers, the tongueless man – who, I think we both agree, is the linchpin to these strange events – the little boy who came looking for him… You know, I think I may have seen him on the green outside Mrs Gurney’s.”

  “You too?” Ezra was surprised. “I thought I saw him across the street this morning. I imagined I was seeing things.”

  “And now we have to deal with your master’s final will and testament, too.”

  Ezra frowned. “Do you honestly think…?”

  Miss Finch looked at him. “Yes, I do. Now, you will have to buck up, Mr McAdam – or whatever you choose to call yourself in future. You were right, you do need to quiz Mr Falcon. I saw him at Pa’s funeral and he looked very strange, not like himself at all.” She clapped her hands. “Come along, then, there is much work to be done.”

  Ezra followed her back out into the afternoon damp. Miss Finch spoke all the time of her theories on death and bereavement, which she had decided she would write down as a book and perhaps make her fortune. By the time they had reached the magician’s house on St Martin’s Lane, Ezra found himself smiling.

  Miss Finch knocked at the door of a thin, slightly run-down townhouse. “Are you laughing at me, Ezra McAdam?” she demanded. “If you are…”

  “No, absolutely not!” he said. “Not laughing, merely smiling. And you should be pleased – you have almost banished my gloomy spirits.”

  The door opened. “We are here to see Mr Falcon,” Miss Finch said.

  The landlady stood aside and let them in. “He’s on the second floor. But I’ve not seen hide nor hair of him since last night. I think he might have been entertaining, if you get my drift.”

  “What does she mean?” Ezra asked as they climbed the stairs.

  “Mr Falcon is fond of the ladies,” Miss Finch whispered back.

  The house was clean but shabby, and Ezra wondered why Mr Falcon, without the financial burden of a daughter, should live in lodgings so much poorer than those of Mr Finch.

  “Here.” Loveday Finch knocked at the door. There was no answer. She knocked again and called out, “It’s Loveday, Mr Falcon, sir!”

  Still nothing. She turned to Ezra. “He promised me he would see us at two o’clock.” Her face looked suddenly pale, bloodless.

  Ezra knocked this time, and much harder, but there was still no reply. “Perhaps he has gone out,” he said. “Perhaps he had other business to attend to?”

  Miss Finch shook her head. “The landlady said he has not been seen at all. I will go and speak to her. Perhaps she will let me have a key.” She disappeared down the stairs before Ezra could protest, leaving him alone at the door. Ezra hoped the man had not been entertaining; he could not think what he would do if they opened the door and Mr Falcon was not alone. He knocked again, for good measure – still nothing.

  Miss Finch returned triumphant a few minutes later, the key gleaming in her hand. “I gave her a shilling for it.”

  The room was dark, the curtains not drawn; there was a smell, the rancid, sharp smell of stale vomit. The bed, at first, seemed an untidy pile of coats and clothes. Loveday Finch gasped.

  “Oh Lord! He’s here!”

  Ezra pulled the curtains, and there on the bed, mouth open as if dr
owning in air, lay the blanched corpse of Mr Edward Falcon.

  Chapter Ten

  Mrs Carradine’s Theatrical Boarding House

  St Martin’s Lane

  London

  November 1792

  “You sure he’s dead? He was as well as a body can be only yesterday!” The landlady stood at the side of Mr Falcon’s bed, hands on her hips. “Who’s to deal with the man now? Are you family? If you are, you had best get him out before nightfall, I don’t fancy as having a dead man as a lodger. As far as I know, dead men are particularly bad at paying rent.”

  “I…” Ezra glanced at Loveday, but her eyes were fixed on the bed, on what had been Mr Falcon, and she did not hear him. “Madam,” he asked, composing himself a little, “did you see any other person enter or leave Mr Falcon’s rooms? You said he might have had company?”

  The landlady made a face. “I never actually saw the girl – if it was a girl, you understand. I just heard footsteps, heard all sorts of bangings, I did, but I keeps my mouth shut and my eyes closed I do.”

  “Is that really all you have to say about it?” Loveday burst out, finally tearing her gaze away from the body, her face flushed with indignation. “This was murder!”

  “Whatever it was, I want nothing to do with it,” the landlady sniffed.

  Loveday opened her mouth again but Ezra held out a hand and shook his head. She subsided, looking miserable.

  Ezra ushered the landlady away with promises that they would deal with Mr Falcon’s rent and his belongings, and gave her instructions to send a boy to fetch the local coroner at Covent Garden. Loveday sat down in the one chair, set in front of a mean little writing desk. She looked numb with shock. Ezra thought it best to let her be, and checked the corpse’s pulse just in case. He stood back, then regarded in close detail what had once been a man.

  The body lay fully clothed on top of the bed, still in mourning from Mr Finch’s funeral by the looks of things. A hat was thrown down upon the floor; a bottle of second-rate gin and a plate of half-eaten pastries stood on the bedside table.

  “Honey cakes.” Ezra picked them up and smelt them.

  Loveday Finch sniffed and wiped her tears away. She looked at them and then at Ezra. “Baklava.”

  Ezra nodded, wrapped them in his handkerchief and tucked them into his jacket pocket. “I’ll take them back to the laboratory.”

  Although he was pretty sure of the cause of Mr Falcon’s death, Ezra rolled back the corpse’s shirt and looked for wounds or bruising at his wrists, or on his neck or torso. Nothing. Only crumbs across the man’s waistcoat and the smell of spirits on his breath. Ezra sniffed the gin, too, but there was nothing out of the ordinary there.

  “Poison!” Miss Finch declared. “In those cakes, no doubt, like with Pa. Yesterday he was alive and well – he walked, he talked. He spoke the eulogy at Pa’s funeral!”

  “Poison, yes. I would put money on it,” Ezra said. “Miss Finch, please look round the room. Does anything seem different? Is anything moved, or out of the ordinary? We must look hard.”

  Miss Finch shook her head. “I cannot say. I never was in his lodgings before, not in London – although,” she added, “it always struck me, when we were travelling, that he was most fastidious, most tidy.”

  “Then someone has already been through his things,” Ezra said.

  “I think they might have been,” Miss Finch agreed thoughtfully, getting up at last.

  “Look in his coat pockets and in his drawers – let us see if anything will put us on the path towards whoever may be the cause of this disaster.”

  Loveday nodded and began to search.

  In the chamberpot underneath the bed Ezra found the vomit. The man had been sick, and with no one to care for him or call a doctor, he had died alone. Ezra picked up a pen from the man’s writing desk, then bent down and poked at the vomit with it – there were the tell-tale green flecks of pistachio nut. Where in heaven’s name had he got the honey cakes? Had someone delivered them? Had he called on the embassy?

  Miss Finch had opened the top drawer of the chest of drawers. She pushed aside the socks and underthings and pulled out the paper that had been used to line the drawer. There, at the back, was a small square of writing paper, folded over four times.

  She smiled triumphantly. “It was where my pa hid things too,” she said, but when they unfolded it they found it was only notes for a new trick: a diagram of a box with a false wall that could be used to make things vanish. There was nothing else in any of the other drawers but in Mr Falcon’s jacket pocket she found a small notebook containing addresses of various patrons they had worked for in Vienna and Paris and Constantinople. In a trouser pocket Ezra found a receipt from a chop house in Long Acre, the business card of a Russian fur importer near London Bridge and a folded-up letter addressed to Mr Edward Falcon.

  “This is Papa’s handwriting!” Loveday opened it quickly and then sat down again, deflated. “It is in Arabic,” she said.

  “Did your father speak Arabic?” asked Ezra, looking at it over her shoulder. “Or Mr Falcon?”

  “A little – please and thank you. Mr Falcon could not manage even that. I never saw my father write it, though.” She sighed. “Why on earth should he write to Mr Falcon in a language neither of them could understand?”

  “It might tell us something of use,” Ezra mused, “if only we could read the thing. Nothing seems clear at all!”

  “One thing is clear,” Loveday said quietly. “Mr Falcon is gone. He was like an uncle to me, and now he is dead. I have no family, no work now, nothing at all!” She sat in the chair, her hands folded uselessly in her lap, the very picture of misery. Then suddenly her eyes grew wide and she leant forward. “Who’s to say that I will not be next? That someone will not poison me?” She gasped. “That they have not already set the hour of my death!”

  Ezra grimaced. She was over-dramatic, but she was right. “Miss Finch, I’m sure—”

  “How can you be sure of anything any more? Oh, I wish I had my blade!”

  Ezra did not think her blade would be much good against poison, but he did not say so. “We need to find out who did this and why,” he said firmly. He cast around the room. “There must be something here.”

  “We have looked! We have looked everywhere. We are magicians, Ezra, that’s all. Why poison magicians?”

  “The coroner’s men will be here soon to collect the body. We already have an idea of how the death was caused, just not why. If we can only find the why…”

  “We?” she said, a little hope breaking into her voice.

  “Yes,” Ezra said with a smile. “We, Finch and McAdam – or Finch and whatever my new name will be.” He looked at her. She was smiling a little more. Good.

  The coroner’s men came swiftly and bore the body away to the crypt of St Peter’s. Ezra thought he should like to be present at the post-mortem, to take a good look at the man’s heart. Miss Finch told the landlady she could have Mr Falcon’s good cloak and boots to pay for another week’s rent. Then she and Ezra would go through the man’s rooms with a fine-toothed comb.

  They went and sat together in the tea rooms in Panton Street, Ezra with his notebook, Miss Finch with a battered leather-bound book that had belonged to her father. It was best to do this methodically – and Ezra was aware that his own future was far from clear at present, so they may as well get as much as they could done while they could.

  They went over the events of the past few days again and again. The tongueless man, the honey cakes, the master’s killer, the Arabic letter.

  “There is a definite Ottoman connection but it still doesn’t make sense,” Ezra said. “I swear the man Oleg is Russian, but a Russian working with the Turks? I thought those two countries were enemies.”

  “He may have his own reasons for all we know.”

  Ezra looked at Loveday. She was right. “There must be something we are missing. The master used to say violent death was either within families or to do with mo
ney.”

  “My father and I had no money problems,” Loveday said, “and I have always done the accounts. I would have known.”

  “What about Mr Falcon?”

  Loveday shrugged. “They shared all income.”

  “Equally?” Ezra asked.

  “Yes, down the middle. If anything he should have been better off than us.”

  Ezra asked Miss Finch to find and check Mr Falcon’s accounts and to write as thorough and complete a memoir of their time in Constantinople as possible; there may have been someone offended somehow, perhaps. If she wrote the memory down, start to finish, something might turn up.

  “And the translation, of course – we need to read that letter,” Ezra added. “Perhaps someone at the embassy could translate it for you. Who was it you performed for?”

  “A Mr Ali Pasha. Father was on good terms with him. Perhaps…” She frowned, firm with a sudden resolve. “We should speak with him. As soon as possible – today.”

  “Miss Finch,” Ezra began, but he could see she was already set on it.

  Oh well. It could not be so difficult, he thought; and it would do them both good to get some answers for once.

  The embassy building was a brand-new white-stuccoed palace in the grandest part of town. As they crossed the street Ezra could feel his resolve fading, but he steeled himself and made for the entrance.

  “Ezra, wait!” Loveday grabbed him by the elbow before he could reach the door. “The tradesmen’s entrance,” she said, “not the main one. If anybody here is to recognize me it is far more likely it will be there.”

  “If?” Ezra hissed. “You never said if before, Miss Finch! If this is some wild-goose chase—”

  “Then neither of us will have lost anything by it! And in any case someone is bound to know me. I am very memorable.”

  Ezra couldn’t argue with that, at least.

  The porter did not know Loveday.

  “Of Falcon and Finch,” she clarified when he simply shook his head at her. “We performed for Mr Ali Pasha.He was in correspondence with my father, who has been murdered. It is most urgent we speak with him.”