Nature of the Beast

by Hannah Howell

  Though she understood the logic, the thought of seeing Mr. Scully—or any patient—subjected to such horror merely as a teaching tool revolted her.

  As Mr. Scully raised his hand from the mattress, the limb shaking wildly, Mr. Thayne grasped it, his gaze never leaving the man’s face. Sarah held her breath, waiting for his answer, wondering what he would say, for she suspected that he thought as she did, that it was far too late.

  Mr. Simon and Mr. Franks were spluttering and interjecting, but it mattered not. The patient’s entire focus was on Killian Thayne’s eyes.

  “You say that you fear you will die regardless, but is it death you fear, sir?” His voice was low, smooth. Enticing. Luring the true secrets of the patient’s deepest deliberations.

  Sarah thought that should Killian Thayne ask her a question in that tone, with that intent look fixed upon her, she would surely bare the entirety of her heart and soul.

  “Fear death?” Mr. Scully frowned, and pondered that for an instant; then he went on, speaking with unexpected eloquence for one who had been mired for days in the depths of delirium. “No. My wife has gone ahead of me, and my three sons. I’ve little left here, and I suppose”—he shot a glance at Mr. Simon—“that no matter where they make their barbarous cut, I shall die regardless. I can feel the weight of death’s touch on my shoulder.”

  Sarah swallowed, strangely unnerved, for it was Mr. Thayne’s free hand that rested upon the man’s shoulder.

  “Yes,” Mr. Thayne agreed. “Death’s touch is upon you.”

  The gaggle of murmuring apprentices fell silent at the low-spoken pronouncement.

  “I do not want the surgery. Let death come,” the patient said, vehement. “You asked if it is death I fear? Not at all. I fear they’ll cut me in bits and pieces until there’s no more of me to cut. But I am already dead. There’s just the shell of me what’s got to give up the spirit. I feel it inside me, the poison. I feel it.”

  His words were clear and certain, and again Sarah could not help but wonder at that, at his lucidity of the moment. He had been nothing of the sort for days now, instead rambling and moaning and insisting he saw his wife sitting at the foot of his bed, talking to her, though she had been dead these past four years.

  She had the unexpected thought that it was Mr. Thayne—his touch on the man’s shoulder—that steadied him. Rationality argued against the possibility, but Sarah could not discount it.

  “You have no say here, Thayne,” Mr. Simon interjected, spittle flying from his lips as his agitation spurred his words. “The patient is not yours, and I will thank you to mind yourself.”

  “And the leg is not yours,” Mr. Thayne replied, unperturbed. His lips were faintly turned, as though he found Mr. Simon amusing or, perhaps, contemptible. “We both know that your proposed intervention is more likely to kill than to cure. The patient has said he has no wish for your further surgical involvement, and I am of the opinion that his decision is wise.”

  Mr. Simon made a sound of dismissal, but Mr. Thayne quelled him with a look.

  “Were you the one dying on this bed, you would surely prefer the route of least pain rather than most,” he continued. A silky threat. Sarah’s gaze slid back and forth between the two; then Mr. Thayne made a smooth gesture of dismissal. “Offer him as much gin as he can swallow. Laudanum, if you have it. Dull the pain as best you can, and let him make this journey in whatever peace he can find.”

  With that, he returned his attention to the man on the bed, leaning low to say something near his ear. Sarah could hear none of it, and from the expressions on the faces of the group of apprentices and surgeons, they could hear nothing of the exchange, either. It irked them. That much was obvious.

  Whatever quiet words Mr. Thayne offered, they had an immediate further calming effect on the patient, a lessening of visible agitation. Mr. Scully’s eyes slid shut and the tension in his body eased.

  Surprised, Sarah wondered if Mr. Thayne was a mesmerist.

  Before his death, her father had taken her to see a public demonstration put on by the mesmerist John Elliotson. He had laid his hands upon a woman and sent her into catalepsy from which loud noises and even needles poked into her skin had not roused her. Now Sarah could not help but note the similarities between Elliotson’s display and the way that Mr. Scully eased so completely from distress into relaxation.

  Regardless of the reason, she was glad that Mr. Thayne’s presence offered some relief for the patient’s suffering, and she was glad, too, that he was here to speak against the futile amputation of the remainder of the limb. There was no hope for this man’s survival, certainly no hope in further surgery. If he was destined to live, it would not be a mortal intervention that would decide it.

  Again, Mr. Thayne’s gaze slid to hers, and he made a small nod, as though he knew and understood her thoughts. As though they shared some sort of collusion.

  Awareness shivered through her, an instant of connection. On several previous occasions there had been such moments in the ward, when Mr. Thayne walked his rounds and Sarah came to be in his path. To her befuddlement, he had deigned to speak with her, to ask her opinion of the patient’s progress, to note her responses with interest and grave attention.

  Once, he had even followed her suggestion, refusing to allow a patient with an open wound to be placed in a bed until the linens were removed and exchanged for clean ones. Thereafter, he had insisted on clean linens each time a new patient entered the ward, and Sarah had understood it was because he took her opinion as one of value.

  It was a gift he offered her, one that meant a great deal.

  In this moment, she thought that were it not for the mass of men and the likelihood that discourse with her would adversely affect her position here, he would ask her opinion of this case.

  And he would find it in agreement with his own.

  Losing interest in Mr. Scully when their efforts to bully him produced no result, Mr. Simon and Mr. Franks moved on, followed by their entourage.

  Sarah took the opportunity to sidle closer.

  Stirring a little, Mr. Scully opened his eyes and murmured languidly. “Sit with me for a bit, Martha. Sit with me for a bit and sing to me the way you sang to our babes when they were small.”

  He shifted restlessly and scratched quite vigorously first at his neck, then at his arm. “Itchy,” he muttered, then made a watery laugh. “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  She raised her gaze to Mr. Thayne and found him watching her with those amazing gray eyes. She had never before seen them unobscured by his tinted spectacles, never seen the myriad colors swirling in their depths, variegated shades of gray and silver and icy blue.

  His eyes were as extraordinary and beautiful as the rest of him. She ought to have expected that.

  “’Tis the fever that makes his skin itch,” she murmured, compelled to fill the silence. “Or the bedbugs.”

  Slowly, his gaze slid across her features, and his straight, dark gold brows drew together, as though he puzzled through some particular matter. She felt undone by that look, felt that with it he reached beyond her skin and looked deep inside her heart and soul.

  With a faint smile, he inclined his head.

  “I leave the patient in your most competent care, Miss Lowell.”

  His words shimmered through her, and she wondered if he knew how much she valued that, his acknowledgment of her competence. To have her work recognized was a warm and pleasant thing.

  In that instant, the man on the bed lurched up and caught hold of Mr. Thayne’s frock coat, fisting his fingers in the material so tightly that his knuckles showed white.

  “Please,” he begged, his voice slurred, as though he had already been dosed with the gin and laudanum Mr. Thayne had recommended. “Please do it for me. Do it quick. With poison or a knife. This is a terrible suffering, and we both know they’ll only come again. What if you are not here to speak for me? What if they drag me to that table and hold me down and cut my flesh? I do
not want to die that way, sawed into sections like wood for a fire.” He paused, and then said in a clear, ringing voice, “Kill me and be done with it.”

  In that instant, Sarah felt the heavy hush that fell on the ward. She glanced about and saw that many eyes watched the scene unfold and many ears listened. A chill of premonition crawled across her skin, and she jerked her attention back to the scene before her.

  Mr. Thayne held the man’s gaze for a moment, his expression ruthlessly neutral. Then he reached into his pocket, withdrew his bottle-green spectacles, and slid them on to hide his eyes.

  A mask, Sarah thought. A wall.

  At length, Mr. Scully loosed his hold and dropped his hand back to the sheets. It slid down to hang at an uncomfortable angle, and Sarah moved forward to set it back on the bed.

  When she looked up once more, a single shaft of light broke through the grime of the window to cut across the floor exactly where Mr. Thayne had stood.

  But he was gone. Disappeared. His passage silent as the mist.

  Early the following morning, well before the dawn, Sarah arrived at the hospital. The chill of the night air clung to her clothes and a strange wariness churned in her belly, though her walk from Coptic Street had been calm and undisturbed, with no hint of someone watching her from the shadows.

  That was a boon to her frayed nerves.

  As she made her way down the corridor, shadows and moonlight crept across the floor in an alternating pattern of light and dark stripes. Her steps were quick and sure as she made her way directly to the surgical ward, anxious to check on Mr. Scully. He had clung to life throughout the previous day, growing increasingly ill, feverish, and lost in a world of his own making, crying out, moaning. Each time Sarah had looked in on him he had not recognized her, and had mistaken her for his dead wife.

  Now she wondered if he had lived through the night.

  Reaching the surgical ward, she paused in the doorway, her gaze sliding to Mr. Scully’s bed. She took a single step, then froze and made a startled gasp.

  There, outlined on the far wall, was a looming shadow in the shape of a man, his height and breadth exaggerated and magnified.

  Her blood chilled and her gaze skittered about the room, returning in horrified dismay to the shadow cast upon the wall.

  A shadow with no source.

  She was the only upright person in the ward. Everyone else was supine on their beds.

  A shiver crawled along her spine. She whirled to look to the windows at the far end of the ward, then turned once more to face Mr. Scully’s bed and the wall beyond.

  Her heart jerked and danced an uneven jig.

  The shadow was gone, disappeared.

  But the fine hairs risen at her nape and the clammy fingers oozing across her skin made her certain that she had not imagined it, and that whoever—whatever—had cast the dark silhouette yet hovered, unseen, in the gloom.

  Pressing her palm flat against her breastbone, she tried to will both her racing pulse and her galloping imagination under control.

  “Mr. Scully,” she whispered, walking forward. “Mr. Scully, how do you this morn?”

  He lay quiet and still, his head lolling to one side, his arm hanging over the far side of the bed.

  Alive still? She did not think it, and that came as no shock. But there was something about the way he was arranged on the bed…something both macabre and familiar.

  Breathing too fast, she crept forward, closer to the silent, still man.

  A patient called out to her, but she did not so much as turn her head, for her entire focus was on the sight of Mr. Scully’s form, a lump beneath stained and frayed sheets. Not moving. Not breathing.

  The smell hit her first, a heavy slap of urine and excrement.

  Dead. He was dead. Released from his pain.

  She reached the bed and stared down at him. His eyes were closed, his arms arranged in an odd position, hanging over the edges of the mattress. And his wrist was torn open, a jagged, gaping wound.

  For a moment, she could not breathe, could not think, and then she forced herself to sharpen her attention, to determine exactly what it was that gnawed at her with vicious little teeth.

  There was no blood.

  Despite the torn edges of the hole at his wrist, there was not a single crimson drop upon the sheet or the floor beneath.

  Slowly, she walked all the way around the bed, aware that the patients on the ward were stirring, asking for water, for food, for a moment of comfort. Soon, someone else would hear the commotion, and they would come, they would see…

  What? They would see what?

  The body of a man who had been destined to die? Only, the manner of said death was both bizarre and disturbing.

  And it was the fourth such death here at King’s College.

  She shivered.

  “Miss Lowell? Is aught amiss?”

  She heard the voice as though through a long, narrow tunnel.

  Turning, she faced him, Killian Thayne, tall and broad and unsmiling. He stood close enough to touch, dressed all in black, like a shadow.

  “He is dead,” she murmured, her tongue like leather in her mouth. “Mr. Scully is dead.”

  “An expected outcome”—he paused—“yet you are distressed by his passing.”

  “By the mode of his passing,” she whispered in a rush, then wondered that she could be so foolish.

  Someone had been here earlier, beside Mr. Scully’s bed. She had seen the shaded outline of his silhouette cast against the pale wall.

  And here was Killian Thayne standing before her, just as he had been there by another patient’s bedside on a morning two weeks past—another patient who had died with the same strange and inexplicable wounds.

  “Let me see.” Mr. Thayne stepped around her and then around the bed to the far side. He stared at Mr. Scully’s sprawled form for a long moment.

  Wrapping her arms about her waist, Sarah turned and watched him. His expression was unperturbed, his posture relaxed, but something felt off. Then she realized his lips had drawn taut, as they had the previous day when he confronted Mr. Simon. That was the only sign of his displeasure.

  “Fetch a stretcher,” he instructed, his voice ever soft. “I shall wrap him in a sheet.”

  “I can summon one of the other nurses to help me.” She wondered why he offered to do this chore himself. Surgeons were not responsible for wrapping the dead.

  Only for killing them.

  She shuddered at the thought. What was it about Mr. Thayne that made her mind travel such a path? She knew that the physicians and surgeons at King’s College did the best they could, that their efforts were based in genuine desire to cure, to save lives. That more than half the surgical patients died was a fact indisputably assigned to every hospital in the city.

  But as she looked at Mr. Thayne where he stood looming over Mr. Scully’s pale form, she wondered how it was that he had been present at two such similar deaths. No…not two. Four. He had been present when all of the four patients had been found with their wrists torn open, and the bloody pool that ought to have accompanied such injury inexplicably absent.

  What was she thinking? He was a healer. She had witnessed his care and kindness to many patients in the months she had worked these wards. Was she now to imagine that he had killed four people by slashing their wrists? To what purpose? What end?

  And where was the blood?

  Confusion buffeted her, and she was appalled by her own thoughts, disdainful of them. She could not think why she allowed her mind to travel such a path.

  Sarah steeled her nerves, wanting to ask him all manner of questions, but in that instant came a shocked cry that made her turn quickly toward the sound.

  “Oh my word. Another one with his wrist looking like he’s been chewed by a beast,” Mrs. Bayley exclaimed, bustling closer and leaning in to peer at Mr. Scully’s lacerated flesh. She reared back and looked about, her gaze pausing first on Sarah, then on Mr. Thayne. She paled as she looked at hi
m, and blurted, “You were here. When Mrs. Moldaver died, and again when Mrs. Barr’s body was found….”

  “I was, yes.” He made no effort to disagree, his tone calm and even. “I am a surgeon in this hospital”—he made a small, sardonic smile and cast a glance at Sarah—“and am expected to attend on occasion.”

  She wondered that he took no umbrage at the woman’s accusations, that he bothered to explain himself to her at all.

  “But you were there each time. No one else. Only you,” Mrs. Bayley whispered in horror, and the patients in the neighboring beds began to pick up the words and repeat them anew.

  For an instant, Sarah felt a dizzying disconnection at the oddity of the situation. Here they stood among beds that held people whose limbs had been hacked away, yet the sight of a torn wrist elicited such horror and dismay.

  Because there was something sinister about Mr. Scully’s wound. It was not clean. As Mrs. Bayley had said, it did look as though an animal had chewed it open and lapped up all the blood before going on its way.

  Uncertain from where she dredged her temerity, Sarah turned her gaze to Mr. Thayne and said, “Please do not let us delay you, sir. Mrs. Bayley and I can see to Mr. Scully. I am certain you have other things to occupy your attention.”

  One straight brow rose in question, and again, his lips curved in a hard, sardonic smile. He inclined his head and strode away, his long limbs eating the distance to the door. Sarah could not stop herself turning her head to watch him go.

  And all around her, the whispers continued.

  Leaving Mrs. Bayley to wrap the body, Sarah went to fetch a stretcher. When she returned, she found both Mr. Simon and Mr. Franks standing by the edge of the bed, along with the matron. All three were involved in an intense whispered discussion with much gesticulation and wary glances cast about. Mr. Simon rounded the bed, lifted Mr. Scully’s savaged arm, and spoke in a low, fervent tone. The content of his comments was lost to Sarah’s ears, obscured by the general hubbub of the ward.