Sawbones

by Catherine Johnson

  Ezra frowned. “It was the tongueless man they sought. When I first met Mahmoud he thought the Negro might have had a letter on him – perhaps it would have been important?”

  “I don’t think Mahmoud should be in this country at all.” Loveday was getting carried away, leaping from one thought to the next without provocation; it was as if Ezra hadn’t said anything at all. “That’s what he told me. His grandmother, the valide sultan, sent him here in secret, to go to school, to escape the fate of all those princes locked away in the harem. To escape madness.”

  Ezra shook his head. “Perhaps those princes do not have it all their own way,” he acknowledged.

  “They are only let out into the world once they become sultan. It’s to prevent intrigue. One party favouring one prince would poison all the others…” She trailed off. “Someone in the embassy,” she went on, “Ahmat, perhaps, must have found out that Mahmoud was here and not safely locked up in Constantinople.”

  “But why would the Ottomans want to kill one of their own?” Ezra asked.

  “This is intrigue of the highest order, don’t you see? The Russian Empire has been chipping away at its Ottoman neighbours for years. Turkey grows weak. The Russians, Pa told me, want the Black Sea, want the Bosphorus. They would do anything to have their man, a puppet sultan, on the Ottoman throne. Definitely not Mahmoud, a boy who has seen the world, grown up outside the Cage; who refused to be told what to do by another country.”

  Ezra smiled to himself at the idea of the imperious Mahmoud being told what to do by anyone. Then another thought occurred to him. “So that’s why Oleg is working with Mr Ahmat – a Russian and a Turk!”

  “Yes! If they kill Mahmoud here in London, no one will be any the wiser – after all, he should be at home in the Topkapi Palace surrounded by servants and flunkies. And Ahmat would have the rubies.”

  “So he hides on the streets…”

  They reached the doorstep of Mrs Gurney’s house. Ezra could see a light burning in the horrible yellow drawing room.

  “I would invite you in,” Loveday said, “but Mrs Gurney rather took against you. If I hear from Mahmoud I will send word. I have no doubt he will be in touch.” Ezra made a face. Loveday shrugged. “He is a prince.”

  “He is in hiding!” Ezra hissed.

  “He needs us. What can a street boy do with a handful of rubies?” She shivered. “I must go in and change. We can talk tomorrow if you like.”

  Ezra was exhausted, and the thought of going back to Great Windmill Street and all the uncertainty that awaited him there made him feel heavy.

  “I cannot say, Miss Finch. I do not know where or what I will be doing tomorrow,” he began, but Loveday had already turned the lock in the door and pushed it open.

  “Good night,” she said, and was gone.

  Ezra realized quite suddenly how cold he felt. The master dead. Anna gone. Was there any point to anything? He stood still on Miss Finch’s doorstep, listening to her call to Mrs Gurney that she was home then pull the bolt on the other side of the door. The church at St James’s on the green struck eleven. If he hurried, perhaps Mrs Boscaven or Ellen would still be up and able to let him in by the area door.

  The next morning, the jaunt in the graveyard seemed like part of a very strange dream, but there was still the remnant of the yellow London clay on Ezra’s shoes to prove otherwise. For a few seconds he had seen those rubies; felt them in his hand. He smiled. Anna would never believe the tale in a thousand years.

  When he sat up he realized Ellen hadn’t laid or lit the fire, which was strange, and when he opened the curtain he could tell by the height of the sun behind the cloud that it must be late. He listened for other sounds in the house but could hear nothing. He washed and dressed quickly, and went downstairs.

  In the kitchen there was no sign of anybody at all – the stillness was almost unsettling. It wasn’t until Ezra went into the hall that he found Dr James with Ellen and Mrs Boscaven and their bags, packed, ready to leave. Ellen was teary and clung to Mrs B, who patted her shoulder consolingly and looked at Ezra with regret.

  Dr James took out his pocket watch, eyebrows arched. “What time do you call this?”

  Ezra opened his mouth – what on earth was happening? – but Dr James shushed him. “I leave for Edinburgh in a while, and the house is to be shut up. Fetch your bag and come with me.”

  “What?” Ezra said. “Am I to go to Scotland?”

  “Don’t be an idiot, boy. I do not want you. You have a place with Mr Lashley. Though I doubt with all my heart that you deserve it.”

  Ezra knew his heart was still beating, but he felt frozen. Already?

  “Well, get about your business! I haven’t got all day, and if you think I am leaving you in the house to close up and to take still more liberties with the McAdam family, you are utterly and completely mistaken.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Surgeon’s Operating Theatre

  St Bartholomew’s Hospital

  Smithfield

  London

  November 1792

  The subject was a girl, not twenty, her face white as clean linen and her knee a mangled mess of bone and sinew. Ezra had asked the porter about her; he said she was a girl who cried apples and pears in the street who’d got caught under the wheels of a runaway timber wagon coming down Fish Street Hill.

  From the hallway outside the operating theatre Ezra could hear the cry of a baby. The porter said it had been strapped to the young woman’s back when it happened, and was lucky not to have been injured.

  Ezra had tied the tourniquet tightly around the girl’s thigh, and there was not so much bleeding. She had been strapped down to the table, and – poor thing, Ezra thought – was still completely conscious, even though she stank to high heaven of gin. She was mumbling prayers under her breath, and when Ezra came close she grabbed his wrist.

  “I have never seen so many gentlemen all in one place,” she whispered. “Perhaps there is one who’ll want to wed a one-legged maid?” Ezra looked at her properly. She was passing fair: dark hair, brown eyes – like Anna, he thought.

  “Perhaps,” he said, and looked away.

  “Sir, young sir!” she called him back. “Tell me, will I live?” Ezra could hear the desperation and fear cracking her voice.

  “Of course,” he said with as much warmth as he could muster in the cold room. He gave her a reassuring smile.

  He was lying. He could not know for certain; this was his first operation as Mr Lashley’s assistant. He had never seen the man’s knives go to work on living flesh, but having seen him ruin a cadaver the thought was chilling. Ezra hoped he had hidden those thoughts from her. He offered her some laudanum but she wanted only more gin. He sent a porter out for a quart and hoped it would come quickly. He wished that Josiah, Lashley’s old apprentice, was here, but Ezra had heard that he’d run off to join the army before Lashley could get rid of him.

  The operating theatre was filled to bursting. The noise of the gentlemen’s chatter and the smoke from their pipes rose up and gathered against the ceiling. Ezra laid out the surgeon’s instruments: flesh knives, bone saw, artery hook. Of course, they weren’t Lashley’s – they were the master’s, and consequently old friends. He had spent the morning sharpening and cleaning them, and they gleamed. Ezra checked and tightened the girl’s straps and laid out the padding and bandages for afterwards.

  The doors swung open and Mr Lashley entered, hat off, grinning. Ezra helped him on with his apron. He wasn’t certain, but he thought that Mr Lashley smelt of spirits too. The crowd fell into silence.

  “Gentlemen, scholars!” Lashley announced. “I am taking off the limb here, above the knee. I will be quick, and it will be efficiently and neatly done.” He waved a hand towards Ezra. “You may have noticed Ezra McWilliam, lately the apprentice of the most esteemed William McAdam.”

  Ezra looked from Mr Lashley to the crowd in surprise, and blinked. He still was not used to the new name. He had changed it as Dr
James had promised legal action should he not, and he thought it still reflected the high respect in which he held his old master.

  Whatever his name, he was not used to being made the centre of attention, not at all.

  “Gentlemen,” Mr Lashley said again, taking out his pocket watch and handing it to a student in the front row. “Your watches, if you please.”

  Ezra passed the flesh knives. Mr Lashley dropped one, which fell among the straw on the floor under the operating table. Ezra scrabbled about, picked it up and passed it back. There was a ripple of sound from the crowd. Mr Lashley coughed and set to work.

  The woman screamed. She screamed so loud and so high that Mr Lashley stopped cutting. The flesh was in ribbons, half hanging round the bone. Ezra looked at the woman, her face a mask of agony. Shouldn’t the man be working faster?

  “Someone shut her up!” Lashley hissed, and one of the porters took a pad of leather from his pocket and made the girl bite down on it. “Thank God!” Mr Lashley went back to work. Ezra had counted a minute and a half gone already – but the bone was not exposed cleanly, and he had left no flap of skin to close over the stump.

  “Artery hook, sir?” Ezra said, keeping his voice calm and low. Mr Lashley needed to cauterize the femoral artery. Right now.

  “Can’t you see I’m busy?” Lashley snapped.

  From outside Ezra could hear the baby yelling louder than ever.

  It was another thirty seconds before the surgeon was ready for the artery hook. The woman’s eyes were round in agony. Her face was wet with tears.

  “Bone saw!” Lashley barked.

  Ezra passed it over and Mr Lashley began sawing. Time seemed to have slowed into eternity. Another minute and a half and he was through; the ruined stump dropped to the floor.

  At last the woman faded into unconsciousness.

  Ezra looked from the surgeon to the stump. It was not a clean cut. The audience were nudging each other, speaking low; the whole room was thinking the same thing. Ezra had to say something. Surely Mr Lashley couldn’t leave it at that?

  “What would you have us do, sir?” Ezra asked.

  Mr Lashley looked at him with an expression that seemed to be pitched between fury and panic. Then, in a flash, his face changed. He smiled, turned to face the crowd.

  “Gentlemen! Scholars! I have decided you shall witness young McAdam’s – I mean, McWilliam’s – first surgical operation!” He turned back to Ezra and began untying his apron. “Finish up, boy.”

  “But sir, the cut’s not ready to close up.”

  “I thought I would see how McAdam’s boy might do it,” Lashley said with a sneer.

  Ezra swallowed. “But…”

  “No buts. Let’s see if you can follow in your master’s footsteps.”

  Ezra stared at him. What was Lashley doing? Of course – he meant to show Ezra up.

  He looked at the leg. It was a worse mess than before. And it had been close to four minutes since Lashley had begun his butchery. The woman was now a pale pearly grey, not unlike a fresh cadaver. Ezra felt for a pulse – she was still there, just.

  What would the master do? He would have to take some more leg off. If there was a choice between being alive with a shorter stump and dead with a longer one, then there really was no choice at all. But time was running out. The longer an operation took, the less chance the patient had of being alive at the end of it.

  Ezra took the bone saw and cut – long, strong, sweeping movements, that’s what the master would have said. His heart was pounding, his blood thundering in his ears, but he kept his hands steady – he couldn’t afford to waste a second. He cauterized the artery as he’d watched the master do so many times before, then flapped up the skin, careful but quick. Then, as fast as he could, he wadded and bandaged the stump. When he finally let himself wipe his face, he realized he was running with sweat. But he had done it; he had really done it. His first amputation.

  That was when he realized the crowd was on its feet, whistling and cheering. The men in the front row leant forward to shake his hand; there was an avalanche of applause, of Well dones, and Good shows, and The old man would be prouds. Lashley was scowling but Ezra didn’t care. He could do this! He could do it well. In fact, Ezra felt at that moment that there was nothing in the whole world he could not have done.

  From beyond the noise and celebration of the operating theatre there was still a thin high cry, the woman’s baby. Ezra looked back to the table, where a porter was loosing her straps. Another had brought a stretcher, and together they manhandled her onto it like a piece of meat.

  “Please! Be careful!” Ezra squeezed back through the crowd. Mr Lashley was there already, looking down at the young woman, a thin smile on his face.

  “Take her to the mortuary,” he instructed the porters.

  “What?” Ezra looked from Lashley to the girl on the stretcher. Her mouth was slack, her eyes staring, open.

  “She’s dead.” Mr Lashley was pleased at last. “No one could survive all that.” He looked at Ezra. “You still have a lot to learn, boy.” Lashley followed the porters and the body of the dead young woman out of the theatre.

  In the hall there was a girl holding the baby, still desperately trying to shush it. She came up to Ezra, her face red and streaked with dirt.

  “Oh, sir! Is our Nelly all right? Is she, sir?” she asked.

  Ezra felt his mind seize up. He could think of nothing. All the joy and elation he had felt only moments before had vanished. The theatre audience swarmed out past him into the courtyard beyond. Some of them slapped him on his back as they left, told him what a fine fellow he was. One of the students saw the look on his face and told him not to worry. “People die on the table every day, you know that.”

  He did. He’d seen it many times. But it had never been under his own knife. He wondered when she died exactly. Was it when he cut the bone off, or before? Why hadn’t he noticed? Ezra cursed. He should have known better than to try and clean up Lashley’s mess.

  The girl holding the baby was crying too now, sobbing as the little one screeched. Ezra dug deep in his pockets and pressed the half-shilling he found there into the girl’s hand. He was still wearing his apron, stained with blood. What use, he thought, was a surgeon? If someone he cared for – Anna, Mrs Boscaven – got caught in some kind of accident, would he take them to the table, put them through the pain and trauma of an operation? Would it not be kinder to fill them full of gin until they slept and then hold a pillow down hard over their head? Perhaps he should give up now before he killed anyone else.

  This was, Ezra was sure, what Lashley had wanted – he was letting the man get to him already! Mr McAdam would never have done that, pitched him in halfway through a procedure. Ezra would not let Mr Lashley’s inadequacies as a surgeon ruin his own practice. He would not.

  It was grey outside the hospital, the clouds low and dark, and he turned, unconsciously, towards Great Windmill Street – but of course there was only the shut-up shell of a house there now. No Mrs Boscaven making rice pudding, or Ellen to build and light the fire before he woke. Ezra sighed. He had been featherbedded in every sense. He’d had a laboratory and all the books in the world at his disposal, but now… For the past three nights he had shared a tiny garret with Lashley’s footman in the man’s cold house in Brunswick Square. Ezra imagined that after another few days in those lodgings he might conceivably even miss Toms.

  He hadn’t seen Loveday Finch since the night in the graveyard and she had sent no message. But she could find where he was simply enough if she wanted to. Those things he’d taken out of her father’s head… He closed his eyes and tried to shake the memory away.

  Grave-robbing – Anna would think him a prize idiot for agreeing to anything so low. How he would have loved to talk to her now. He tried to imagine sitting down next to her on the bench in the churchyard at St Anne’s and explaining all that had happened – four murders in such a short period of time, all of them somehow bound up with a my
sterious boy who claimed to be a prince. About Dr McAdam selling the museum and the house, selling him – as good as – to Mr Lashley. About the politics and the Ottoman prince – she would never have believed that. About losing the girl on the operating table… He sighed. Anna would tell him to go back and bear it, work through it. She would have said the girl’s death was God’s will, that no man could have changed a thing. Ezra smiled. He should have liked to see Anna in argument with Monsieur Bichat and his kind, those who saw surgery in the future able to extend knowledge, perhaps extend life, in ways they could only dream of. And Ezra knew he wanted to be a part of that – whatever else happened on the way.

  The surgery had been a mistake, he said to himself, and next time he would make sure things were different. Better. Ezra found himself back outside the hospital and went inside, he had work to do. He began to change the blood- and bone-spattered straw that lay on the floor of the theatre. Then he sat close to the brazier and ate his lunch of bread and cheese that had been wrapped up in his apron pocket all morning. He rested his feet on the edge of the stove and enjoyed the feeling of the heat seeping up through the soles of his boots. He drifted off into sleep for a moment. In his dream the baby cried and the girl was dead on the table. Then his boots slid off the brazier and landed with a thump on the floor, jolting him awake.

  At that moment the theatre doors swung open and the small figure of Miss Loveday Finch, wearing a black floor-length cloak and a black bonnet, swept in.

  “Mr McAdam, I have found you at last!” She was out of breath, her grey eyes shone. “I have so much to say. We are so close to making sense of everything!”

  “Then truly I am glad for you.”

  “Don’t mock me! It was just as I said: the boy was the key. I have written it all down, everything he said, everything that happened in Constantinople, and everything that was in father’s letter.”

  “You had it translated?” Ezra sat up.