The Wages of Sin

by Kaite Welsh

  “You hardly need to be a doctor for that.”

  “I want to be a physician! If the professors at the medical school accept it, why can’t you?” It was only a partial lie—some of our tutors were sympathetic to our cause, it was true, and some even encouraged us. But the majority felt as my aunt did—that women had no place in a university, and even less in a hospital.

  I escaped to bed after an hour by pleading a headache. Changing into my nightgown, with a shawl wrapped tightly around me, I snuggled down under the blankets on my bed with a copy of The Lancet purloined from the university library. If only Aunt Emily would consent to reading this aloud, I thought with a smile. I yawned into my hot milk. Every part of my body ached, but I felt exhilarated. I remembered my life in London, an endless parade of visits and dinner parties and balls, cinched into a variety of uncomfortable but fashionable dresses and introduced to countless eligible young bachelors—and some not-so-young ones too, provided they were rich enough. I had thought, in those carefree days, that I knew what it was like to be exhausted.

  Gertie would be preparing for her first season by now, I realized. The idea of my shy younger sister making her entrance into society without me to hold her hand brought a lump to my throat. Gertie, I knew, was the real reason I had been sent away. My mother was convinced that my continued presence would lead her astray, and that my behavior had already damaged her chances of making a good match. She was forbidden to write to me, and although I had written to her every two weeks since I had arrived in Edinburgh, she had never replied. I suspected that my fortnightly letters to her were thrown into the fire, unopened. Without me at her side to tease her and whisper wicked comments in her ear, she would have only Mother to guide her.

  I had crumpled up the page I was holding, rendering it illegible. I cursed silently, and furiously blinked back the tears that threatened to fall. In one of my lonelier moments, I had written to Mother, begging her to send Gertie to Scotland—after all, if the supervision offered by my relatives was deemed strict enough for a lost cause like me, surely they would have no trouble with my impressionable mouse of a sister.

  I didn’t envy Gertie, not really. I’d been bored rigid ever since making my debut into society, longing for the intellectual stimulation of school and hiding myself away in the library of every house we visited. My throat constricted as I thought about the treasure trove in Lord and Lady Beresford’s London town house, how I had made myself scarce during a ball and spent the evening lost in Euclid. And then Paul Beresford had walked in, and altered the course of my life irrevocably.

  I could still feel his hand in mine, the warm pressure of his lips against my skin and my delight as he expressed an interest in what I was reading instead of staring at me like an exotic animal in a zoo—a woman who dared to have a brain and exercise it. In a way, I owed my life in Edinburgh to him. And yet I wished passionately that I had never met him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The body swayed high above the courtyard, its skirts lifting in the breeze to the delight of the jeering throng below. It cast a long shadow in the weak morning sun, and I shivered as I looked up.

  I wondered which one of the smirking onlookers had put it there, and how they’d managed to climb up. More likely whoever had rigged up the anatomist’s model—clad in an ill-fitting cap and gown and petticoats that looked as though they had been purloined from someone’s great-aunt Muriel—had been inside the building and had somehow managed it through a window. Meaning that one of the porters, or even a professor, had turned a blind eye if not helped directly.

  “Charming,” said a voice behind me, “It really makes one feel welcome, don’t you think?”

  Julia Latymer was glaring daggers at the crowd. If looks could kill, not even all their combined medical expertise could have saved the culprit.

  “It’s just a jape,” one of them—a pockmarked second-year by the name of James Ross—said. “If you ladies can’t take a joke, you won’t last a day inside a hospital ward.”

  “Some of us,” she snapped, “are here to study, not act the fool. And if I were spending my free time lynching dummies, then I’d probably be plowing my exams as well.”

  Some of the onlookers cheered, relishing the sight of Ross—hardly the most modest of gentlemen—being bested by a woman, and even his friends elbowed him in the ribs.

  “Oh, go back to your embroidery,” he muttered, red-faced.

  To the men’s delight, and my horror, Julia lunged forward, looking for all the world as though she was ready to fight him right there.

  A voice roared from the echoing corridors within the building.

  “For the love of God, would someone tell me what the bloody hell is going on out here? I thought this was a place of scientific study, not a music hall!”

  Professor Gregory Merchiston strode into the courtyard. He looked like a crow, with his black frockcoat fluttering about him in the autumn breeze. He followed our collective gaze, spat out a curse, and whirled around to face the assembled crowd.

  “Who is responsible for this? Speak up now and I might not have you thrashed for sheer insolence.”

  Silence. Barely more than a decade older than his students, but what he lacked in seniority he made up for in temper. No one wanted to face Merchiston’s wrath, and certainly no one would own up to a vicious prank of this magnitude. But that wasn’t all that was stilling the tongue of whoever was behind it. Out of the shadows and into the cold, gray morning light, Professor Merchiston looked more like a patient than a doctor.

  Even from the back of the crowd, I could see the scabbed-over cut on his lip, the fading purple around his eyes, and the dark stubble on his jaw. He seemed to be favoring his left leg a little, and his movements were jerky, as though the only things keeping him awake were caffeine and adrenaline. Wherever he had spent the night, it certainly wasn’t in bed—or at least, not his own.

  “Hie, you!” He hailed one of the porters. “Get that thing down this instant.”

  His voice was icy as he turned to his audience.

  “I highly recommend that the perpetrator comes forward by the end of today. You know where my rooms are.”

  He disappeared into the cavernous building, and we stood in silence as his footsteps faded away.

  “I wouldn’t like to be in his lectures today,” one of the men murmured. “Who has him first?”

  I took a deep breath and pushed through the crowd, forcing myself not to turn on my heel and flee.

  “We do.”

  Merchiston began talking before we had finished filing into the lecture hall, ignoring the few brave students who dawdled by the podium to stare at him, and I frantically scribbled down everything I could catch. Unlike some of the more flamboyant lecturers, who appeared to take the infamous Dr. Bell as their role model, Merchiston kept the theatrics to a minimum. His voice, while not quite a monotone, was level enough that one could miss the dry humor in his words, and I was never entirely sure if he was sharing a joke with us or whether we ourselves were the joke. When roused, his soft burr became a harsh growl, and I had seen students do anything to avoid his ire.

  His dark hair was permanently ruffled and unkempt, his black clothes frequently stained and infrequently ironed. He was rarely clean-shaven. Curt and ill-mannered he may have been, but I supposed I could see the attraction. Somehow there was a spark to him, a sort of magnetism that made one want to overlook his shabby appearance and listen to what he had to say.

  Today, however, his temper was more brittle than usual. Up close, his clenched knuckles were white, but his hands too had taken a beating, with skinned knuckles only just starting to heal and yellow-blue bruises on the exposed skin of his wrist. Had this lecture hall been filled with the male students, where there were enough bodies to spill out onto the steps between rows of seats, whispers about his appearance would be buzzing. With so few of us, no gossip could go unmissed, but we all stared covertly over our paper and books, trying to diagnose his injuries. He was young
enough that a brawl in some public house wasn’t out of the question, but surely no man in his thirties would scrap like some callow youth. Perhaps it was a drunken patient from the hospital next door, or a frustrated student. Either way, speculation wouldn’t help me survive the onslaught of interrogation that he was known for.

  Sleep had done little to refresh me, and I sat in there feeling even worse than the night before. I shifted in my seat impatiently, craving the distance from my troubling thoughts that only two hours of taking notes on the virtues of quinine could provide.

  Any hope I had of fading into the background today was shattered five minutes into the lecture.

  “You,” he called, snapping his fingers impatiently, “Gilchrist. Administration of quinine.”

  I had read and reread the chapters in Thomson’s Elements on Materia Medica and Therapeutics, but after a sleepless night, my brain was slow to respond.

  “Crystallized sulfate given orally on an empty stomach,” Julia called out.

  “I wasn’t asking you, Latymer. Gilchrist, if you want to prove that your last essay wasn’t an uncharacteristic stroke of luck, then I suggest you answer. How ought this crystallized quinine make its way into the patient?”

  “Dissolved in water,” I managed. Julia could snipe at me in the corridors all she wanted, but I’d be damned if I let her best me in a lecture.

  Merchiston raised an eyebrow. “Not in tablet form?”

  “Only if the pills are less than fifteen days old, or they won’t be properly soluble. They should be mixed with tannic acid and cinnamon water to be made palatable, and the solution should be kept no longer than three days.” The words spilled out of me and I smiled triumphantly as he nodded, and I collapsed back onto the bench with relief.

  To my frustration, Merchiston called on the two of us almost constantly. Every time one of us paused for breath, the other would leap in to finish her sentence and some of the other students began to grumble quietly about getting the chance to talk. He clearly enjoyed pitting us against each other, and strangely enough I found myself enjoying it too. It did nothing to dissolve my pure, undistilled hatred of Julia—nothing could make that palatable—but it made me feel challenged in a way I hadn’t been in a long time. By the time the lecture was at an end, he dismissed us with a suggestion that we take any further altercation outside and settle it with fisticuffs like the men. I would have been tempted had the ever-faithful Edith Menzies not swept Julia away with a protective arm her friend slung off angrily. I contented myself with wishing a particularly bad bout of malaria in her future with as much unsweetened quinine as she could take.

  Merchiston glanced up as I passed by, frowning slightly.

  “The perpetrator of this morning’s little prank will be punished, I assure you. I’ll see to it personally.”

  Though his words were meant to soothe, I shivered. Merchiston was a dour, unnerving man at the best of times, but with his thunderous expression, he looked positively menacing.

  I smiled awkwardly. “Thank you, sir,” I managed. Under my breath, I added, “Just so long as you don’t challenge him to a fistfight.”

  As the door swung shut behind me, I thought I heard a soft chuckle, like dry leaves in the autumn wind.

  I didn’t have time to speculate on the cause of his injuries or whoever was behind the horrible prank this morning. I had an appointment at the morgue.

  The dissection room was quiet as I accompanied Professor Williamson into the draughty room, the only other occupant the shrouded body on the operating table. One of the chaperones followed us in soundlessly, her eyes sharp and her face expressionless. The thought that we might be engaging in any impropriety in the company of a corpse was distasteful enough to be absurd, but I was grudgingly impressed that a woman who looked like somebody’s maiden aunt was willing to watch an autopsy. She moved to sit in a chair in the shadows and brought out her embroidery, as though she were in her own drawing room instead of a chilly medical building.

  Williamson had initially refused to conduct seminars with female students “on grounds of decency,” but after the resulting fuss, he had backed down and now watched me with a quiet glee as I donned an apron and approached the table, ready to dissect the arm of a corpse who had, by the looks of her, already seen more than her fair share of student’s scalpels today.

  “Don’t be nervous, Gilchrist, it’s not like you can do the poor creature any more harm.”

  Blocking out his snide commentary, I yanked back the grubby sheet covering my “patient.” My stomach roiled at the sight, and I gripped the edge of the table so hard my nails made crescent moons in the wood.

  The face was blue and bloated, but before rigor mortis had set in it had been beautiful. It took little imagination to picture how the woman had once looked because, laid out in front of me with even less dignity in death than she had been afforded in life, was Lucy, the prostitute who had fled the infirmary in tears not four nights ago.

  When I was twelve, my paternal grandmother died. She had been a chilly, remote woman, although family history claimed that she had been a social butterfly in her youth. All I knew was a crabby old woman, clad in musty black even in my earliest memories, as though she meant to outdo the queen with her lengthy mourning period. I remember standing on my tiptoes to see the prone figure inside the casket, and thinking how much like a waxwork she appeared.

  Lucy did not share the suggestion of passive slumber. She barely looked human at all.

  “Is there a problem?” Williamson’s bored voice jolted me back to the present. I shook my head dumbly. “Then tell me what you see.”

  “I know her.”

  He looked startled.

  My words stumbled over themselves. “From my charitable work at the Saint Giles’s Infirmary. I recognized her . . .”

  “I see. Yes, very sad business. I’d say she’s in a better place now, but given her line of work I rather doubt it. Laudanum overdose, according to her stomach contents. Strong stuff, too. She must have been earning a pretty penny.” He flushed as he remembered his company.

  Bile rose in my throat at his words, and my palms itched to strike him. Struggling to keep my voice calm, I requested a moment alone to pay my respects.

  He sighed in irritation at my inconvenient feminine emotions. “Very well. There’s no use getting you to work in this state anyway. Say your prayers and then finish the session in the library.”

  He motioned for the porter standing in the corner to leave and, after gazing at me speculatively for a moment, followed suit. As the heavy wooden doors swung shut behind them, I forced myself to move closer.

  Death had not been kind to Lucy, but then neither had life. Although she had given her age at the clinic as nineteen, she looked older now, worn by the ravages of walking the streets. Pox hadn’t marred her skin yet—she had been lucky to avoid more serious venereal disease. I remembered how time had stood still for her before I could confirm her pregnancy.

  I pulled the sheet back, shuddering at the ugly Y-shaped stitches that marked the place where she had been cut open, chest cracked like an egg, to pull out her innards. Tears blurred my vision, safe to shed now that Williamson had gone. She looked angry, somehow, as if her end had not come easily. It should not have come at all, not so soon. I tugged down the sheet and placed my palm on her stomach. Life as a prostitute’s child would have been grim, and an orphanage probably worse, but Lucy had been too canny for that.

  Surely she must have known a woman who could have taken care of such things, someone with a plentiful stash of gin to hand, or knitting needles that were sterilized if one was lucky, or rusted if one was not. Backstreet butchery yes, and far too often fatal, at the hangman’s noose if not an incompetent doctor—but better that than the certainty that lay at the bottom of a bottle of laudanum. Perhaps the thought of a bloody, illegal operation scared her, when she was little more than a child herself.

  I wiped my eyes, allowing the gruesome, sorry scene before me to move back int
o focus, revealing what I had missed in the first shock of grief. Bruising to the neck—not enough to have killed her but enough to make me wonder if it was just against life that she had been struggling. I took her cold hand in mine. Her nails were torn, her wrists bruised. She had fought, and against more than simply the injustice of her situation.

  I knew what that kind of bruising looked like: the kind where your wrists were pinned above your head till your arms ached; the fingerprints that took a week to fade. And I knew what restraints looked like too, heavy leather that pressed down against already sore wrists.

  But by whom? A gentleman who got his thrills subjugating women who had nothing left to strip away but the last vestiges of dignity? Or someone who had provided the laudanum and intended to be sure that she drank it?

  A scuffle of footsteps and a monosyllabic grunt startled me, and I spun around, my heart pounding.

  McVeigh had come to cover her up. She would be left in the dissection room until there was nothing left to cut or remove, and there was little I could do now but let her go. I fled the room, a sob wrenched from my throat, my head reeling.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I staggered out into the misty courtyard, where the cold autumn air revived me a little, and if nothing could erase the image of Lucy’s corpse from my mind, at least the stench of embalming fluid, laudanum, and decomposing flesh was replaced by the sour tang of hops that settled upon Edinburgh like a shroud. The grisly mannequin still dangled from the window, swinging gently in the breeze. My guts clenched and something hot and sour rose in my throat. I doubled over, vomiting into the gutter. Tears streaked my cheeks as I heaved, kneeling, the damp from rain-slicked cobbles seeping through my skirts.

  I remembered the misery in her eyes as her worst fears were confirmed. I remembered the same dread twisting inside me during that cold, bleak time as I waited in the sanatorium for my monthly courses to appear. Whether I escaped my ordeal without bringing a bastard into the world or whether my unborn child felt as dreary as I did about life and abandoned any hold on it I didn’t know, but eventually I felt the familiar cramps and could have cried with relief.