Sawbones

by Catherine Johnson

  There was a click. Ahmat squeezed again, another click. Ezra felt a wash of relief, and as Ahmat scrabbled in the drawer for bullets and began to load the gun, Ezra dragged himself upright – he had to get out, to find Loveday and run.

  Ezra hauled himself into the corridor and slammed the door shut behind him. He ran towards the servants’ staircase as fast as he could. His shin felt as if it were on fire.

  “Loveday!” He leant over the banister and shouted into the stairwell as loud as he could. “Loveday!”

  Three faces peered up, two servants and one very cross, brown-haired girl.

  “My name,” she hissed back from the floor below, “is Lily! Where have you been?”

  “He’s after me. We have to get out.”

  Loveday picked up her skirts and ran up to him.

  “He’s behind me, with a gun,” Ezra whispered urgently. Loveday frowned when she saw he was limping, but there was no time for questions.

  “Up. This way,” she said, “and I’ll have that back.” She took the rapier and pulled him along behind her, taking the stairs two at a time.

  They heard the door to the staircase push open and Ahmat yelling in what Ezra took to be Turkish. He fired the gun and they pressed themselves into the wall.

  “Keep going!” Loveday cried. “The way downstairs is blocked – there are too many people. We have to find another way down.”

  The top floor was a maze of servants’ bedrooms, empty for the most part, and Loveday tore through, looking for a way out. Ezra rested, leaning against the metal frame of a bed in one of the rooms, breathing deeply; he pulled back his stocking and saw a huge yellow-black bruise against the bone. Then he realized he was being watched. A small boy, dressed in full Turkish livery. Some kind of page, no doubt.

  From the foot of the stairs they could hear Ahmat yelling. “Someone is after you?” the boy said. His English was strongly accented. “Are you bandits?”

  “No,” Loveday cried, appearing at Ezra’s side. “He,” she pointed at Ezra with her rapier, “is Truth and I am Beauty and we are being threatened by the devil himself.”

  The boy gasped. More voices came from the stairs. “Ali Pasha, the devil…”

  Ezra crouched down to the boy’s level. “We need help. Please? Which way?”

  Loveday tried a door, but it only led through to another room. She swished her blade in irritation and the boy backed into the adjoining room, afraid of the sword.

  “It’s all right,” Ezra said. “She won’t hurt you. But the man behind us…”

  They could hear the thundering of footsteps coming up towards the attics.

  “Come on!” Loveday said impatiently, pulling Ezra away from the door.

  “No – this way is better.” The boy nodded them inside and opened the bedroom window. It led directly out onto the roof.

  “Of course!” Loveday wedged a chair under the door handle and climbed outside. The night seemed cold and dark and cloudy as soot.

  “There is a clear run across the roof,” the boy said. “You can get down to the park if you go quickly. We take the small ones to see the pelicans sometimes.”

  “Thank you,” Ezra said to the boy. Someone had begun banging on the door. “Thank you!” He looked out; he could just make out Loveday standing in the valley between the pitched roofs. He swallowed. At least, he told himself, the darkness was such that he couldn’t see where the roof ended and the night began.

  “Now where?” Loveday shouted, the wind whipping her voice away.

  The thumping on the bedroom door was as loud as cannon.

  “I can show you!” The boy squeezed out after Ezra just as the bedroom door flew open.

  “Stop!” Ahmat yelled. Ezra thought he could hear others with him, and imagined those Turkish guards with their heavy curved swords.

  “Get down!” Loveday shouted. Ahmat fired out of the window after them into the dark, once, twice, three times. Ezra heard one bullet whistle past his head, another slam into slate, shattering tiles, then he heard the boy gasp, as though surprised, and felt him fall against him, shuddering as the life left his body.

  Ezra cursed. If only he’d had the guts to kill the man when he had the chance.

  “You’re a murderer!” he yelled. “You’ve betrayed your whole country! Do you hear me?” He stood up, leaning against the roof and shouting into the wind. Another bullet whirred past and cannoned into the roof tiles.

  “Ezra,” Loveday hissed, “for heaven’s sake, let’s try and leave with our lives. Look, he’s reloading. Come on.”

  Ezra checked for the boy’s pulse, then when he was sure there was none, he laid the page boy’s head down gently.

  “Come on!”

  As the pair reached the end of the valley they heard Ahmat step out after them.

  “I think we’re trapped,” Loveday hissed into the darkness.

  “We can’t be! There has to be a way down. The boy said…”

  “Do you see one?” Loveday was angry again. “I can’t see a damn thing!”

  “Well, if we can’t, then neither can he,” Ezra whispered. “I have an idea. Give me your blade.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Loveday whispered back, handing it over.

  Ezra shimmied up the side of the valley roof. He didn’t really have an idea; his only thought was to finish what he should have done earlier and hope that Loveday would get away if he did not. If he could only get behind or above the man somehow.

  “I can hear you,” Mr Ahmat said.

  His voice was cold and hard as ice. The man would kill without a thought. They were both as good as dead.

  “You are cornered. There is no way down – although you could save me some ammunition and dash your brains out.”

  Ezra felt the wind whip past him. He did not want to die; he would not die, not at the hands of this monster. He felt the anger boiling up inside and picked up a roof tile and threw it in the direction of Ahmat’s voice. He heard it break and shatter. He threw another and another, then Loveday started the same thing until the night was filled with the sound of slates breaking.

  “You cannot kill me with roof tiles,” said Ahmat scornfully.

  Ezra slid down towards the man’s voice, saw his shadow against the charcoal sky, and slashed with the blade. Then he saw the flash from the gun as it fired – he smelt the gunpowder before he felt the burning as the pellet drove into his shoulder and forced his arm out and back. The pain was intense. He lost his grip on Loveday’s rapier and dropped to his knees.

  Then he was aware of a flurry of black cloth and some kind of scuffle. There was the sound of a blade slicing flesh and Ezra saw someone stagger back – the gun went off again, a bright orange flash and a loud crack, and then the sound of someone falling, slumping down.

  “Loveday? Loveday!”

  “I think,” came her voice out of the darkness, a little out of breath, “the man is dead.”

  Mr Ahmat lay on his back, his hands both at his neck, the blood still frothing around his splayed fingers. She had killed him, sliced him ear to ear.

  “Am I dying?” Ezra said.

  Loveday wiped the blood off her sword and cut his shirt away from his shoulder, and began to laugh. She put her face close to his. “A flesh wound! You are no more going to die than I am the Emperor of China. Come on, Ezra, get up. We have to go home.”

  “But you killed him, Loveday. You killed a man!”

  “For heaven’s sake, Ez. How can I have killed a man who was already hanged and dead, close to a week ago?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The McAdam Memorial Anatomical Lecture Theatre

  Great Windmill Street

  Soho

  London

  1 March 1793

  “Gentlemen! Your watches, please!” Ezra looked round the room at the expectant, anxious faces gathered there. The theatre was packed. Ezra made sure to look into the eyes of each and every one of those present, or at least as many as he could, before he set the timer o
n his pocket watch. Well, he called it his watch, but he always thought of it as the master’s.

  “I begin!” he said. “Flesh knife, Jos.” Josiah passed him the flesh knife. Ezra had paid to buy him out of the army, and was sure he’d have found no better assistant in the whole city.

  The man on the table screamed as Ezra cut away the stinking, gangrenous flesh around his forearm. There was not enough skin to make a flap, but he had done this before, he could improvise; he would just have to cut the bone slightly higher up.

  “Bone saw!”

  This time there were no mistakes. The operation may have taken a good thirty seconds longer than the master’s record, but Ezra was happy.

  “Good job, Ez,” Jos said. “Your master’d be best pleased.”

  “Yes.” Ezra smiled. “I do believe he would.”

  They both admired the bandaged stump. Its owner, a boatman who’d been crushed by falling barrels, said nothing; he had passed out a good three minutes ago with the sound of metal on bone.

  Ezra accepted the congratulations of various students, untied his apron and went back into the house. He had to pinch himself, his life could not be in any way more perfect than it was right now. In fact it could only have been better if the master had still been alive – the house was not the same without him, and Ezra often found himself wishing he could have asked Mr McAdam for his advice or assistance. But he had a fine library, and down in the kitchen he could smell the coffee Mrs Boscaven was brewing up. Ezra went into his office and began to deal with the post.

  He sat down at his desk and sighed. Last winter seemed to belong in a different century – Loveday Finch and Mahmoud, fifth son of the Ottoman sultan, eating a picnic of hot pies on the floor. Performing magic at the Ottoman Embassy, and escaping – narrowly – with their lives.

  They were lucky that the ambassador had faith in Mahmoud’s assertion that Izmet Ali Pasha – the man Ezra knew as Ahmat – had indeed been in league with the Russians. And the fact that he had killed one of his page boys counted against him too, of course.

  Loveday and Ezra had been allowed to leave – surely, Ezra had told her, the only girl to have admitted killing a man and to have walked free. Loveday said she had every right to do so; after all, she was, at the very least, avenging her father and her father’s friend, and Ezra’s master to boot. And anyway, she said, it was a fact that Mr Izmet Ali Pasha, under a different name, had already been sentenced to hang, so all she had done was carry out the letter of the king’s law.

  Loveday and Mahmoud had left London soon after the incident at the embassy, with two of the Cherries of Edirne exchanged for cash, and taken a stagecoach to Dover. Although Mahmoud had insisted that he could travel across Europe quite safely alone, Loveday had said she would escort him back to Constantinople. Ezra agreed that Loveday made the best sort of bodyguard.

  The will had been like some kind of blessing. A complete and utter reversal of fortune. Dr James’s actions had been illegal. The house was not for sale: it had been left, title deeds and all, to Ezra McAdam, free man of property – along with the chance to complete his apprenticeship with occasional lessons from Mr Gordon at the Middlesex hospital. The museum had been gifted to the College of Surgeons with Ezra as a nominated curator, able to arrange and take care of the exhibits just as he had done in the past.

  Ezra could never have imagined a better outcome. The fire was roaring as he slipped off his boots and rested his stockinged feet against the guard. There was a long letter from Monsieur Bichat – a continuation of a discussion they’d been having in letters since the New Year. His thesis was that the brain could exist independently of the body. He should know: the guillotine was very busy in Paris at the moment, Monsieur Bichat wrote, and they had a bounty of decapitations to experiment on. One of his colleagues swore he had seen a head speak, seconds after being parted from its body. Ezra almost laughed as he finished reading.

  There were a couple of other letters, but they looked uninteresting. One small square of paper, however, did catch his eye. He knew that curved hand.

  He looked up at the calendar. It was over two months since they’d left. According to the journey they had mapped out together, the pair should be in Italy by now, at least, catching a boat from Naples or Genoa east across the Mediterranean and, given a good crossing, back to Constantinople by April.

  He tore the letter open. It was dated January the twentieth, why had it taken so long to reach him?

  20th January 1793

  Dear Ezra,

  Bad news, the worst. I have lost Mahmoud in Paris. The Russian was in the city already and by now the dye has washed out of my hair. We were trying to get a coach south out of the city but it is hell; the mob is on the street and nothing – nowhere – is safe.

  I am sorry to write to you but there is no one else. I go out every day and scour the streets for him but am worried it may be too late.

  Your friend,

  Loveday

  Ezra put the letter down. He pushed his feet back into his shoes and stood up.

  “Mrs B!” he called down to the kitchen. “I am going away. I think I shall be a couple of weeks.”

  Acknowledgements

  Books are a bit like children in that it takes so many people to actually help them into the world. The people below are my book midwives – and thanks to all of you for a smooth and stitch-free delivery.

  A huge thank you to everyone at Walker. I had always wanted to be published by Walker because they have lovely books and a lovely building, and I have not been disappointed. Thanks to the design team, Jack and Royston, for my best cover ever, and to Emma for being fantastic – what would books do without editors!

  I also have to thank my daughter, Harry. I know she gets a dedication but she loved the story right away and every day after I’d finished writing she would check it over and query some of the more ridiculous stuff I’d come up with and make it better. She’d supply answers when I got stuck, and this would be a much poorer book without her.

  Also friends and fellow authors for listening to moans (see, it is like childbirth!) and finally Stephanie, my long-suffering agent and Fritz, my even longer-suffering boyfriend, partner and husband.

  Catherine Johnson is an award-winning writer of Welsh/African Caribbean descent, now living in Hastings in East Sussex. Her novels for children include Stella, The Dying Game, Arctic Hero, which was selected for Booked Up 2009, and A Nest of Vipers, shortlisted for the UKLA Award 2009.

  Of the inspiration for Sawbones, Catherine says, “This book initially grew very, very quickly. A couple of years ago when my grown-up son was still living at home we would go on trips to places we’d never been. My daughter recommended the Hunterian Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. If you have never been and have a strong stomach, go! It is brilliant. John Hunter was a pioneering surgeon and anatomist who lived in Soho at the end of the eighteenth century. He loved dissection and his collection holds lots of macabre but interesting stuff, including the skeleton of the “Irish Giant”, Charles Byrne. There was also a tumour that had been removed from a boy’s face, and that was what started me off with Ezra. What if a surgeon like Hunter had taken the boy as a subject – a slave, perhaps – bought him as an oddity, removed the tumour and trained him up? I wrote the first draft faster than I had written any book in my life!”

  Catherine also writes for film and TV, including Holby City, and her radio play Fresh Berries has been nominated for the Prix d’Italia. She works regularly with children and teachers in primary schools and libraries across the UK. To find out more about Catherine and her writing, go to:

  www.catherinejohnson.co.uk

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. All statements, activities, stunts, descriptions, information and material of any other kind contained herein are included for entertainment purposes only and should not be relied on for accuracy or replicated as they
may result in injury.

  First published 2013 by Walker Books Ltd

  87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ

  Text © 2013 Catherine Johnson

  Cover illustration © 2013 Royston Knipe

  London map reproduced with permission of the Mary Evans Picture Library

  The right of Catherine Johnson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, taping and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

  a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-4063-4924-5 (ePub)

  www.walker.co.uk