Beloved Poison

by E. S. Thomson

  ‘Two o’clock,’ muttered Will, as Dr Magorian and his followers walked on. ‘Two o’clock.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Still, it gives us a bit of time for me to show you the place.’ I looked about. Where should I start? The brewery? The laundry room? The cook house? Such dull places. The post-operative ward, with its stink of pus and gangrene? Or the general ward, perhaps? The general ward offered less of an olfactory assault than some of the other wards, though it was still suffocating with the reek of dirty bedding, recently emptied chamber pots and exhaled breath. As an apprentice on the wards I had quickly learned to breathe through my mouth, as one could hardly mince between the beds with a clove-stuck orange held to one’s nose, though I generally disliked doing this as there was always a risk of looking doltish. As for opening a window, I knew Mrs Speedicut shut them again the moment I left the place. There was the men’s foul ward . . . But he would never have the stomach for that. Granted, it would be dark – the foul ward was always dimly lit. Faces suppurating with chancres, teeth loose and black, all these might be less visible in the gloom. Nonetheless, the foul ward was, at times, unspeakable.

  On the far side of the courtyard I noticed Dr Catchpole standing in the shadows. He was joined by Dr Graves, and together they vanished into a doorway. ‘Come along, Mr Quartermain,’ I said, starting after them. ‘Let’s start over here.’

  The anatomy museum was on the top floor of a tall building, built during the reign of George I and accessed by a winding stone staircase. Above us, though out of sight, I could hear Dr Graves and Dr Catchpole still ascending.

  ‘Damn the man,’ I heard Dr Graves say. ‘Damn the man and his damnable arrogance. Speaking to me like that in front of Magorian. In front of students! Last week he wanted to coat the amputees’ stumps with tar. Tar! Magorian was all for it! Confounded arrogance. Can’t think why Magorian panders to him.’

  ‘Can’t think why anyone panders to him,’ replied Dr Catchpole. ‘Can’t see his appeal at all.’

  ‘There must be something we can do.’

  ‘I can’t think what.’

  ‘I can,’ muttered Dr Graves.

  ‘Hoots toots mon!’ said Dr Catchpole. ‘Will ye no try ma tarr mixture on yer amputations, the noo?’ He tittered. Dr Bain had done the first year of his medical education in Edinburgh. He had not the slightest trace of a Scottish accent, but Dr Catchpole seemed to think it witty to pretend that he had.

  Dr Graves said nothing.

  ‘Oh, come now, Graves,’ said Dr Catchpole. ‘Magorian is not as enamoured of him as you seem to think.’

  ‘Isn’t he?’ Dr Graves spat out the words. ‘He seems to be happy to accommodate Bain’s ideas, even if it means making me look foolish. I’ve not done Magorian’s bidding for all these years to be made to look stupid in front of my own students.’

  ‘You can’t blame him—’

  ‘I don’t. Bain chose the moment. He has a habit of humiliating his colleagues in the most unassuming ways. You know that much yourself.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dr Catchpole sighed. ‘I live with the consequences every day.’

  ‘You’re still suffering?’ asked Dr Graves.

  I did not hear Dr Catchpole’s reply.

  ‘There’s no shame in it,’ said Dr Graves. ‘What you did that night, Catchpole, you did for science. For medicine. You did it to find out the truth.’

  ‘I did it without thinking,’ said Dr Catchpole. ‘Just as Bain knew I would.’ His voice was bitter. ‘I made a mistake. He knew I would react as I did. He was so provoking! And now, now—’

  ‘Now he has ruined your life.’

  ‘And there is also the matter of my wife. She is besotted with him—’ Dr Catchpole broke off. I could hear the wretchedness in his voice. And, for all that I disliked him, I could not help but feel sorry for the man.

  The door to the library slammed closed, and they were gone.

  ‘It seems Dr Bain has something of a reputation,’ said Will. ‘I couldn’t help but overhear—’

  ‘Oh – yes,’ I said, embarrassed to be caught eavesdropping so blatantly.

  ‘Has he ruined Dr Catchpole’s life?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’ We entered the anatomy museum. The room was large, illuminated by a long glass skylight overhead. Before us stretched row upon row of bottles and jars, inside each, a flabby-looking lump of flesh – organs, limbs, heads, eyeballs, ears – growths and deformities of all kinds, all with that pale, uncooked look that all specimens get once they are bottled in preserving fluids.

  ‘How?’ whispered Will, staring round in disbelief at this silent, globular audience. ‘How has he ruined Dr Catchpole’s life? Is it because of Mrs Catchpole’s infatuation?’

  ‘Partly,’ I said. But Dr Graves had also been referring to something other than Dr Bain’s dalliance with Mrs Catchpole.

  It had occurred at a meeting of the St Saviour’s Medical and Chirurgical Society. The society met once a month, in Dr Magorian’s anatomy museum, lecture theatre and meeting room – a suite of chambers on the top storey of Dr Magorian’s town house. One evening, some two years ago, I had been helping Dr Bain prepare a specimen – a two-headed puppy which the dog catcher (knowing Dr Bain’s interest in the macabre) had brought to the doctor’s house.

  ‘Well,’ Dr Bain had said, once we had prepared a satisfactory cross section of the beast. ‘Shall we take the product of our labours to the Society tonight?’

  The place was lively. All St Saviour’s physicians and surgeons were present that evening, as well as a number of students, and the two-headed dog we had brought was admired by everyone. But the main debate of the evening had concerned venereal diseases. Dr Catchpole had prepared a specimen of a severed finger blighted by a large syphilitic chancre. He had also brought with him a monkey with a globular sore upon its testicles, and a costermonger exhibiting the first signs of syphilis. The question being addressed was whether it was possible to inoculate against the pox.

  ‘Dr Hunter’s ideas concerning syphilis have long been discredited,’ Dr Bain remarked. ‘There’s no link between pox and clap. The one is unrelated, as a disease, to the other. Ricord’s ideas on the matter were little better. Inoculation is impossible – it cannot be done.’

  ‘Perhaps you should try it for yourself?’ Dr Catchpole’s voice had a mocking edge to it, but Dr Bain remained unperturbed.

  ‘We stand on the shoulders of giants,’ he replied. ‘But I don’t claim to be a giant myself. I’m not heir to the likes of John Hunter.’

  ‘And you, Dr Catchpole?’ cried a student. ‘Do you follow Hunter’s methods of experimentation? You knew him, did you not?’

  ‘I’m not that old,’ cried Dr Catchpole.

  ‘But your ideas are,’ said Dr Bain.

  The students had sniggered. The doctors had smiled. The monkey had screamed and bounded up and down in its cage, rattling the bars and showing its teeth, as though it too were laughing. All eyes had turned to Dr Catchpole. His face was furious. ‘You, sir, would do well to listen to those with experience. I have seen inoculation against syphilis with my own eyes.’

  ‘Then your observations are flawed,’ said Dr Bain. He sat back in his chair and folded his arms. ‘You may well have mistaken a chancrous lesion for true syphilis. Your reasoning is logical, but it is unsound.’

  ‘Unsound?’ Dr Catchpole’s countenance turned thunderous. Before us, the syphilitic patient was still sitting with his genitals exposed. All at once Dr Catchpole snatched up a surgical blade from the table top and sprang towards him. Before the man could react, Dr Catchpole had seized the fellow’s penis between his finger and thumb and scraped the side of the blade against the moist and seeping chancre that blighted the soft skin of the glans. Holding the scalpel, glistening with the offending matter, between his teeth, Dr Catchpole unbuttoned his own trousers.

  ‘There is but one way to prove the truth,’ he cried, now waving the blade in the air. ‘As you rightly say, Dr Bain, the way forward is through e
xperiment and observation.’

  ‘But, sir—’ Dr Bain raised his hands. ‘As cowpox may be used to inoculate against the small pox, it may be that a similar, chancrous disease from an animal might cause an inoculation against syphilis. But directly from the human chancre? It’s not possible. It’s the monkey, Dr Catchpole. We might use matter from the sores of the monkey—’

  He leaped forward to seize hold of Dr Catchpole’s wrist, but Dr Catchpole danced free.

  ‘I apologise, sir, if my humour was misplaced,’ said Dr Bain. ‘It wasn’t my intention . . . Please, Dr Catchpole, think what you’re doing!’

  ‘Ha!’ cried Dr Catchpole. He pulled out his penis, and stabbed the blade bearing the syphilitic matter into the end of it. There was a gasp, as everyone in the room drew a sharp breath, and then complete silence. The students exchanged appalled glances. Dr Graves and Dr Magorian stared at Dr Catchpole in disbelief.

  Dr Catchpole flung down the knife and dabbed at his bloody genitals with his shirt tail. ‘I shall report my findings regularly to the society,’ he said. ‘And you’ll see that I’m right. The matter from the primary lesion will inoculate me from the disease.’

  In fact, as Dr Bain predicted, we saw no such thing. I did not attend subsequent meetings of the society, but Dr Bain informed me that a week later a large globular gumma had appeared at the site of infection. Some weeks after that, Dr Catchpole vanished from public view. He was attended by Dr Graves, I assumed to be dosed with mercury until his symptoms had abated.

  I told Will this as we slowly circled the exhibits in the anatomy museum. Will’s eyes were glazed, his face drained of colour, though whether it was from the tale I had told, or the sight of so many anatomical specimens, I had no idea. We walked over to the window and looked down at the courtyard, the statue of King Edward, and the grey walls of the ward building opposite. At first, Will said nothing. He opened the window and breathed in the cold damp air. Then, ‘This is a most peculiar place,’ he said. ‘And the people in it are driven by the most extraordinary motives to do the most deplorable things.’

  Later, when the storm was upon us, I had cause to remember his words. The time was soon to come when I would wish with all my heart that we might return to such innocent times.

  I took Will to the counting house, the governors’ hall and the out-patients’ waiting room. He wandered about, his hands in his pockets, clearly relieved to be away from the rows of pickled organs and bobbing chunks of diseased viscera. Occasionally, he ran a hand across the lime wash, or tapped and pulled at a section of wooden panelling. He poked at damp patches in the wall of out-patients with his pen knife and dug out a lump of plaster.

  ‘You can’t do that!’ I said, alarmed that the place appeared to have no more structural integrity than a piece of rotten cheese.

  ‘Damp,’ he replied. ‘And evil-smelling damp, at that. What runs beneath?’

  ‘A watercourse.’

  ‘A sewer, I should think. A brook once, but culverted, built upon, and now so full of effluent that it is fit to burst.’ He sniffed, and wrinkled his nose.

  Beside us, the patients waited, sitting side by side on long wooden benches. The air was warmed by the dismal smouldering of cheap coal in the grate, and by the great mass of people crowded together in so small a space. The place was so damp and vile it would have been impossible to detect the smell of bubbling sewage, even if it had risen up through the cracks in the floor boards and lapped about our toes. I sighed. I could remember when the air was sweeter, the roof tops that surrounded us were fewer and less ramshackle. Time brought change, and St Saviour’s had lurched along in the wake of progress like an old woman trying to pursue a wayward child. Her wards were filthy and crowded, out-patients packed to bursting, the mortuary, dissecting rooms, lecture theatre, all too small and cramped for the requirements of the times. Beside me, an old man coughed, and spat onto the floor. The phlegm quivered beside my boot like a great blob of raw egg.

  ‘For God’s sake, man.’ I pointed to a sign on the wall. ‘Can’t you read?’

  ‘No, sir,’ he said. He drew a hand across his glistening nostrils and sniffed.

  I could bear it no longer. ‘The chapel,’ I said to Will, ‘and the herb drying room will clear our heads.’

  I led him across the courtyard. ‘Five hundred years ago we were surrounded by gardens and small holdings,’ I said, as if talking about it might somehow invoke the fresh scents of the countryside. ‘Originally we were a part of the Priory of St Saviour’s. London was miles away, though it’s hard to imagine as we are suffocated by it now. There’s little left of the medieval religious house other than the crypt of the old church – which now does office as a mortuary – and the chapel. No one uses the chapel now; they go to St Saviour’s parish church, which is just beyond that wall.’ I pointed. ‘Your work lies that-a-way too. You can see the place more clearly from the herb drying room, upstairs.’

  The door of the chapel swung closed behind us. It had not been used for prayer for decades, and was now little more than a store room, filled with the accumulated lumber – chairs, bed frames, old account books – of St Saviour’s long existence. A battered human skeleton minus its arms stood in one corner, a wooden coat-stand in another. The place was no more than thirty feet by forty, its ceiling curved in a barrel-shaped vault.

  ‘We have a ghost, you know,’ I said.

  Will dusted a veil of cobweb off the brim of his hat and peered into the gloom. ‘A ghost? I’m surprised you give such tales credence, Jem.’

  ‘But St Saviour’s is ancient. It was here during the Black Death, the Reformation, the Civil War. Can you not imagine a Protestant martyr burned alive, who cannot rest? A medieval prior done to death by drowning in mead? Did you never read the penny bloods when you were younger?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I read Richmond’s Elements of Surveying.’

  ‘Much more edifying, though not half as exciting.’

  He sat down on a dusty pew and held his arms wide. ‘Go on then. Entertain me!’

  In fact, I had not thought about it since I was a child – my father always dismissed such stories as the idle chatter of credulous simpletons. I had to agree, though there was some amusement to be found in the tale. I lowered my voice, so that it caught the chapel’s echoes in a conspiracy of whispers. ‘So, you have never heard of the Abbot?’

  Will shook his head. I saw him shiver as a draught blew under the door. ‘You see?’ I said. ‘You feel him pass this way!’

  He laughed. ‘Get on, Jem. Who was the fellow?’

  ‘No one knows. They say—’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Mrs Speedicut for one. And the man at the pie shop on Fishbait Lane, Mr Sorley from the chop house, the nurses – all the most rational and reliable of witnesses . . . They say the Abbot is only abroad when it’s dark and foggy – a shadow in a hood striding down St Saviour’s Street. No one knows who he was – perhaps one of the medieval monks of St Saviour’s who sold his soul to the Devil. They say he wanders the streets around the infirmary. If you see the Abbot, you don’t have long to live. Mrs Speedicut’s husband saw him—’

  ‘And died soon after?’

  ‘Apparently. But I would doubt the existence of “dear Mr Speedicut”, as much as I would doubt the existence of a ghostly abbot.’

  ‘Where did he see it?’

  ‘Heading into Wicke Street.’

  ‘Wicke Street!’ Will grinned. Wicke Street was infamous, even to an incomer like Will. ‘Perhaps he was looking for a trollop.’

  ‘The Abbot or Mr Speedicut?’

  ‘Both!’

  We laughed. ‘I’m afraid I’m not much of a storyteller,’ I said. ‘There’s little call for ghostly tales at the apothecary – so my father says at any rate. He used to throw my penny bloods onto the fire. He does the same to Gabriel’s – that’s until I told the lad where to hide them.’

  ‘You just need to learn how to embellish,’ said Will. ‘That’s all.’

/>   He climbed onto a tea chest and smoothed the building’s great pale stones with his hands. Painted corbels studded the seam between walls and ceiling, onto which were carved the wings and faces of angels.

  ‘This one is sad,’ said Will. He put up a finger, as though to brush a tear from its cheek. An ancient fleck of white paint drifted to the floor. ‘And that one is singing. See the lute below?’ The colours were faded but beautiful, ghostly against the dim diamonds of light that filtered through the harlequin windows.

  He jumped down and came over to me. His face was suddenly serious as he put out his hand. ‘Thank you, Jem,’ he said. ‘Thank you for bringing me here, for showing me everything. For being my friend, despite the task I’m here to complete.’ His fingers were warm against my own, his grasp firm, reassuring.

  We grinned at one another as we shook hands. ‘It’s a pleasure,’ I said. And I meant it too.

  I turned to leave; the cold of the place was eating into my bones. But Will did not follow. ‘What’s this?’ He was pointing to a wooden panel, no more than eighteen inches square, that was embedded low in the wall beside the altar. It looked to be made of oak, and was dark and pitted with age. It had slipped a little in its casing, and behind it we could glimpse a dark, rectangular space. Other than a small cross-shaped hole cut into its centre, it was quite unmarked. I had never noticed it before. ‘May I?’ Without waiting for an answer, he hooked his finger into the cross and gave a tug. It lifted out easily.

  Within was a cavity, dark and cobwebbed. I crouched down, and squinted inside. ‘There’s something in there,’ I said.

  As I crouched in the dusty stillness of St Saviour’s derelict chapel, peering into the shadows of that dusty hole, an icy dread seemed to grip my heart. I could not account for it, though after the bustle and din of the infirmary the air of the place felt dead, its silence and shadows oppressed me, and its atmosphere was as cold as the grave. It was a building I rarely entered, and one in which I never lingered. But we had started now, and there was no going back. I stretched my hand into the cavity. Something wrinkled and papery shifted beneath my fingertips. Was it parchment? Dried flesh? I could not quite get a purchase on it, and it moved away from my grasp like a live thing recoiling from the light. But I was curious now, and I thrust my hand in further.