by Tessa Harris
Chapter 29
The clatter of cups and cutlery in the drawing room greeted Thomas when he returned to Hollen Street. The sound, coupled with the low hum of conversation, told him that Dr. Carruthers and his brother were taking tea. Thomas put his head ’round the door to see the professor’s naukar, Sajiv, swathed in a cloud of steam, pouring boiling water into a teapot. It was not a ritual that was usually observed in the household, but Professor Carruthers had presented his brother with a canister of the most prized leaves from Darjeeling and suggested that Sajiv serve them. This the turbaned young man did with a calm and silent efficiency.
“Dear boy, do join us,” called the old doctor, sensing his protégé’s presence.
Thomas balked at the idea. He needed to pack, but felt he might appear rude if he refused.
“Thank you,” he replied, smiling at Professor Carruthers, who had already noted his hesitation. He settled himself into his usual chair as the professor addressed his servant in his native tongue, directing him to serve Thomas.
“So how did you find the famous Mrs. Hastings?” asked the old anatomist between slurps of tea.
“Most charming,” replied Thomas as the young naukar handed him a bowl. Patient confidentiality did not permit him to take the matter further, so he steered the conversation on a different course. He turned to the professor. “And I believe you continue to work on your translations, sir?” The thought of the gruesome images of torture in the folio had suddenly resurfaced to haunt him.
“That is so,” replied the professor with a sheepish smile. He let his gaze drop for a moment, then seemed to rally. “I fear I have neglected William. But I resolve to make it up to him and shall stay put for at least the next week,” he replied, reaching out and patting his brother’s hand.
The next five minutes were spent in idle, but polite, chatter, although Thomas was so keen to get away that he scalded his mouth on the hot tea. He downed it far too quickly, but was relieved to be able to relinquish his bowl and make his excuses.
“Gentlemen, I must not intrude on your company a moment longer,” he said, rising. He needed to pack quickly and head off as soon as possible if he was to make the overnight coach to Banbury. If all went to plan, he would arrive at Draycott House in time for the funeral. He had just made it into the hallway when there was a loud rap on the front door.
“Prick my liver!” he heard Dr. Carruthers curse.
Thomas turned. Mistress Finesilver was nowhere to be seen, so he strode to answer the call just as another thunderclap of knocking burst forth.
“Yes?” cried Thomas, flinging open the door.
A young messenger in the livery of the Westminster coroner’s office stood breathless on the threshold. His horse snorted at the foot of the steps.
“Dr. Silkstone?” asked the hollow-cheeked youth.
“Yes.”
“I am come from Sir Stephen Gandy, sir.”
Thomas could not hide his shock. He had not expected such a swift response to his letter sent earlier that same day. He held out his hand as the youth planted a note into it.
“I am to await your reply, sir.”
Thomas scanned the words quickly, then once more, only this time more slowly to make certain he had not misunderstood what he had just read. He lifted his gaze to the messenger, who suddenly straightened his back to receive his reply.
“Tell Sir Stephen I will be at the mortuary within the hour,” Thomas said. There was nothing else for it. This news would force him to miss Sir Montagu’s funeral. He would pen a letter of apology to Lydia and send it to Boughton Hall in the hope it would arrive before she set off for the service at Draycott House. All of a sudden there was another dead man who was vying for his attention.
Thomas fixed his gaze on the long, thin bundle that lay covered on the table. A pair of feet protruded from beneath the sackcloth. Even before the sheet was drawn back, he knew the dead man was not of European origin by the color of his skin. He could tell, too, by the soles of his feet, that he had spent many years without wearing shoes, so calloused and scarred were they.
Even though the mortuary was in the basement of the building, the sweltering heat seemed to have penetrated its walls. It was already working on the gruesome offering on the slab. The stench clung to the air, and although he was more used to it than most, even Thomas felt himself retch as the porter drew back the sackcloth and a waft of turning corpse assailed his nostrils. It hit him like a slap in the face. He turned away in an instant, composed himself, then turned back, and in that moment, he smelled something else, too: an underlying note, both sweet and exotic, of opium.
In his message, Sir Stephen Gandy had simply told him a man’s mutilated body had been found near the docks. He had not said he was an Indian. Nor had he warned him about the nature of his injuries.
“I thought he would interest you, Silkstone,” came a voice from behind. Sir Stephen, solemn and gray-wigged, stood in the doorway, a nosegay of fresh herbs in his hand. He inhaled a lungful of its scent before venturing farther into the airless room. “Found this morning. I was about to contact you in any case, then I received your timely letter.” The whites of the coroner’s eyes were as yellow as ever. Thomas had secretly diagnosed a problem with his liver months ago. Careful to keep a good distance from the corpse, Sir Stephen persisted, his gaze dancing around the room to avoid the gruesome sight. “You told me of your suspicions regarding a Captain Flynn in your letter,” he said. “Is this his Indian?”
The young anatomist studied the dead man’s face. At its center was a single black hole, obviously once graced by a nose. Remembering the words of Flynn’s landlady about the servant, he nodded. “It may well be,” he replied. He knew that she could be called upon to verify the man’s identity.
“The nose . . .” began Sir Stephen, shaking his head.
Thomas nodded. “Such a disability is common in India, I believe,” he replied. He opened his medical case to retrieve his magnifying glass.
“Oh?”
“Among thieves, or adulterers, or even those vanquished by marauders,” explained Thomas. He knew, too, that the frequency of such injuries had given rise to a particular form of reconstructive surgery, performed by the Kooma, a small caste of Hindu bricklayers. Using a long, thin strip of skin from the forehead, they turned it and sutured it onto the stump of the nose, like the handle on a pitcher, until new blood vessels grew back and secured it to the face. This man, this servant, had, however, not been so fortunate. His was an old wound. The edges of the nose stump were ragged and vulnerable, allowing all manner of detritus to pass into the nasal passages without the benefit of filtering nostrils. The Indian’s face was badly contorted into a grotesque mask, and his eyes protruded from their sockets. What Thomas found most strange, however, was the fact that much of the lower half of the face was covered in a sticky substance. There were odd dark specks dotted here and there that were stuck to the skin.
“Where was he found?” asked the anatomist, running his fingers around the man’s jawline.
“Some porters spotted him in a warehouse near the Fleet at first light,” replied Sir Stephen.
Thomas glanced at the man’s wrists, lacerated by twine, then moved down to his ankles to find the feet fixed together with more rope. “So he was tied down.”
“Apparently so,” replied Sir Stephen.
It was then that Thomas pulled away the hessian that covered the man’s chest and stiffened with shock.
“What is it?” asked the coroner, forcing himself to approach the slab.
Thomas looked up, his forehead puckered in a frown. “His chest,” he began. It was peppered with small red welts, but as well as these marks, there were other, more curious ones.
“What of it?” Sir Stephen’s eyes strayed reluctantly. “Good God!” he cried. It seemed that the man’s killer had carved strange symbols into the flesh of his chest. “What is that?”
Thomas was peering at them through his glass. They reminded him of
the symbols he had seen in Professor Carruthers’s notebook the night before. “A word, perhaps?” he suggested. Taking a pencil, he copied the symbols into his notebook. He would quiz the professor on their meaning later.
Leaning over the victim’s face, the anatomist remarked that a torn fragment of hessian had been stuffed into his mouth. And this sticky substance that coated his cheeks, chin, and neck seemed to have been applied deliberately.
“What are you doing?” asked Sir Stephen. He sounded almost cross.
Thomas drew back, then ran his fingers once more over the man’s jawline and neck. Sir Stephen, still awaiting a reply, watched, puzzled, as Thomas rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, then sniffed those, too. Finally he shook his head and said: “Honey.”
“Honey?” repeated the coroner. “What the deuce . . . ?”
Thomas stood back from the corpse a little. “The man’s face and neck have been smeared with honey. And these dark specks,” said Thomas, peering at the curious dots through a magnifying glass, “are ants.”
“Ants!”
“I’ll wager he was deliberately placed near a nest. Warehouses are full of them at the moment. And those red marks are bites. ’Twas no coincidence that the ants found him.”
“What in God’s name . . . ?”
Thomas sighed. “I shall need to pry more deeply,” he said pointedly. Sir Stephen took his meaning.
“Then I shall wait outside,” he said, slightly relieved that his own personal ordeal was coming to an end.
Thomas turned to stare at the dead man’s agonized face. Dr. Carruthers had an expression for it. He called it the “grotesque pantomime of death,” but it never became any easier to stomach. Over the years Thomas had forced himself to become inured to the hideous expressions that froze themselves upon corpses’ faces in their last agonal throes. Eyes often bulging from their sockets, mouths twisted in a scream—the image was always unsettling, but he never failed to overcome his feelings of revulsion to conduct a postmortem. This corpse, however, was unlike anything he had ever seen before.
As soon as Sir Stephen was out of the room, Thomas began his preliminary examination, looking for a likely cause of death, a stab wound or a blow to the head. Yet apart from the lacerations where the rope had cut into the flesh, there seemed no obvious explanation on the torso. The cause, he reasoned, must lie in the region of the face and neck.
The room was designed to store the dead, not to conduct postmortems, and the light was exceedingly poor. What little daylight there was shone in through a window grille. Thomas laid out his instruments in order and took up his magnifying glass. Holding it over the large black cavity in the Indian’s face, he noted it was bordered by a thick crust of scar tissue. Taking a pair of tweezers, he thrust them into the hole in the center of the corpse’s face and peered into it with his glass. As his eyes focused into the darkness, he could just make out a foreign body that should not have been in the nasal cavity. He probed and picked it out, then held up the object to the light.
“Myrmica rubra,” he muttered under his breath as he inspected the creature caught in the pincers of his tweezers.
“What’s that you say, Silkstone?” Sir Stephen had been hovering in the anteroom outside, happy to leave Thomas to his grim task. Now he appeared on the threshold, keen for news. “You have found something?” The coroner shuffled reluctantly toward the mortuary slab.
Thomas felt his breath quiver. “I have, sir,” he replied as the coroner drew level with him, although still keeping his eyes away from the cadaver. He held up the tweezers that had within their grasp a small dead ant.
By now Thomas had returned to the table. Prizing open the cadaver’s mouth with a spatula, he peered inside and reached once more for his tweezers. He took out another ant, followed by another and another. “His mouth is full of them,” he said, his voice tinged with amazement. “His ears, too,” he added, retrieving another dead creature from the auditory canal.
“But surely a man cannot be killed by ants?” Sir Stephen’s face crumpled into a horrified scowl.
“Not normally, sir. But this victim was tied down and his face smeared with honey to attract them.” Thomas had heard tales—he did not know if they were true—of cases where Indians in his homeland had tortured white settlers in this manner. Particularly vicious fire ants were allowed to tear through the fabric of their victims’ tissues, chomping away at lungs with their razor-like pincers, thereby causing suffocation in a most brutal and agonizing fashion. Sir Stephen bit his lip as if to stifle a yelp.
“The insects have entered the man’s body through his orifices, as you see, and then gained access to his lungs.”
“His lungs?” repeated Sir Stephen, clamping his kerchief over his mouth to suppress a sudden cough.
Thomas knew what he was saying seemed far-fetched in London, but the evidence lay plainly before him. “These are common red ants. Normally they present no danger, but the man’s face was smeared with honey. They managed to enter his respiratory tract via his large nasal cavity.”
A dark shadow crossed Sir Stephen’s expression as he realized what he had just been told. “Sweet Jesu. You mean to say . . . ?”
Thomas nodded. “Of course I shall need to open up the chest to confirm my theory, but I believe he was asphyxiated.” The coroner remained glued to the spot, but Thomas was eager to proceed. “You would like to watch, sir?”
The offer to allow him to observe the procedure seemed to stir the coroner to action. “No. No. Carry on without me, Silkstone,” he told him, waving his kerchief and beating a hasty retreat toward the door.
Left alone once more, Thomas took his knife and opened up the chest cavity. The lungs lay resting like great bellows below the rungs of ribs, and several ants had managed to find their way into the bronchial tubes. It would have been a slow and excruciating death, thought Thomas. When it finally came, it would have been a great relief for its victim.
Chapter 30
Bibby Motte winced suddenly and made an odd hissing sound as she sucked in air through her clenched teeth. A ruby-red droplet of blood was blooming on her forefinger, and she thrust it into her mouth.
“My dear Bibby,” exclaimed Marian Hastings, seated opposite her. “But you have pricked yourself.” She laid down the embroidery she was working in a frame and patted her companion’s skirt.
Bibby Motte, sucking at her finger, tried to make light of it. “’Twas my own fault, Marian.”
Her companion looked sympathetic. “You are distracted,” she told her. “I can tell you are not yourself zese days.”
The two women sat by the window of the upper drawing room in the South Street residence to catch the late-afternoon light. The sun had, however, long dipped below the roofline of the elegant mansions, sending deep shadows onto the wooden floor. On the thoroughfare below, carriages and sedan chairs rushed hither and thither along the Mayfair street. Observing such activity through the large casements provided the occasional welcome distraction for the ladies.
“You have heard news of your husband?” asked Marian Hastings after both had resumed their embroidery.
Bibby Motte sighed deeply and rested her needle again. “It has been four months now. All I know is he must be growing weaker and more despondent every day in that terrible place.”
Marian Hastings shook her immaculately coiffed head. Even during the day, her hair was studded with sapphires and diamonds. “But you must be strong for him, my dear. Our sex must bear the veight of a thousand hardships so often.”
The younger woman’s back stiffened as she shifted in her chair and her eyes fell to the floor. She suddenly looked even more vulnerable.
“Zere is something you vant to tell me, dear Bibby?” asked Marian, ducking her head slightly so that she could catch her companion’s attention. She had not spent the last six months on board ship with her not to know when she was deeply troubled.
Bibby Motte nodded with the look of a penitent about to confess to a priest.
“The other day I went to East India House,” she blurted.
At this news the governor-general’s wife set down her embroidery on a nearby chair as if such a revelation required her undivided attention. “To inquire after Captain Flynn?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Apparently he resigned from the company soon after he came ashore. They have no record of him.” She lifted her palms from her lap in a gesture of both acceptance and despair.
Marian Hastings’s lips tightened into a flat smile. “It vould seem he is trying to avoid his creditors,” she ventured. But the younger woman’s expression suggested there was more and the older woman picked up on it, like a seamstress on a bad stitch. “You know something?” She leaned forward conspiratorially.
Bibby Motte glanced over to the door to make sure they were not overheard. “One of the sepoys brought me news. There is a tavern by the docks, frequented by the lascars. There is talk that Flynn is trying to sell the diamond.”
Marian Hastings leaned back. “Vell, vell,” she muttered to herself before addressing her friend once more. “Zat could prove most useful to you, could it not?”
“I am hoping so. The word is out that I wish to see the captain.”
“To negotiate with him?”
The younger woman hesitated. “I am not sure ‘negotiate’ is the right word.” A steely expression suddenly crossed her face. “’Tis because of him that my husband languishes in jail. He owes him not just money but his reputation, too.”
“So vat do you propose?” asked the older woman, intrigued.
Bibby Motte took a deep breath, as if to gird herself for battle. “I have put a price on his head,” she said emphatically. “Two guineas to the man who brings him to me.”
Marian Hastings lifted both brows simultaneously, but before she could say a word, there came a knock at the door. She tutted, annoyed at the interruption, but called out: “Yes.”
