The Wages of Sin

by Kaite Welsh

  In the harsh electric light—nothing but the best, the most modern inventions, for Edinburgh’s surgeons—the tray of instruments sparkled and shone. Mackay selected the scalpel with solemnity and, forever playing to his audience, pressed it with a flourish against the woman’s flesh.

  The lights flickered and the room went dark.

  “For Christ’s sake!” Mackay roared. “McVeigh, get the porters and find out what the hell just happened. If that had happened a second later, I’d have made the incision and she’d be bleeding out.”

  There was something unnerving about the darkened room and its unconscious occupant. The men were laughing and jostling one another, calling out to us with offers to soothe our fears that implied the opposite. Wordlessly we huddled closer together, less afraid of the nameless horrors of the dark than of what our male counterparts might do under its cover. I felt a presence pass by me, and although the room was stifling, I shivered.

  McVeigh returned, with lamps that threw eerie shadows across the room. Alison breathed a sigh of relief, and even Julia and Edith moved away from each other. I hadn’t thought Edith to be the skittish type. When a beam of oily light fell on the woman on the table, the room went into uproar.

  The sheets that had protected what little modesty she had been afforded were lying in a heap on the floor. Whoever had removed her sheets had also arranged her limbs, unresisting and pliant from the chloroform, in such a manner that one hand was resting limply on her breast and the other lay suggestively on the tangle of dark curls at the juncture of her legs.

  The anesthetist cursed and jolted back, the patient’s chloroform mask slipping. To my horror, the patient murmured before the anesthetist collected himself and submerged her in blessed unconsciousness again.

  “Quiet down, gentlemen,” Mackay roared above the din. “There are ladies present. May I remind you that the operating theater is not the place for foolish japes. Keep the horseplay to the cadavers if you must. Oh, for God’s sake, McVeigh, I cannot operate by lamplight! The surgery will have to wait. Take her away.”

  My palms were slick with sweat.

  “It’s disgusting,” Julia called out. “And I bet he won’t even punish the culprit!”

  “He doesn’t know who it was,” Edith pointed out reasonably.

  “He doesn’t care,” I corrected her. “It could have been any of them. It could have been him. They weren’t bothered about her dignity before they assaulted her.”

  The others drifted away, back to their cozy digs and an evening of unexpected freedom by the fireside. Too proud to ask even for Alison Thornhill’s company, I was left alone in the shadows.

  Eager to escape the taunts of the male students, I made for the back staircase and paused as the sound of murmuring voices reached me. Had both speakers not been unmistakably female, I would have thought I had stumbled across an assignation. A few more steps revealed the two people I least wanted to see at that moment. Julia’s expression was grim, her lips pinched together so tightly that they had gone white. In contrast, Edith was red-eyed and flushed—a striking contrast from the mousy girl I was used to.

  They looked up as they heard me approach—Edith defiantly, Julia with something that looked a lot like guilt.

  “Spying, Gilchrist?” she asked coldly.

  “I didn’t realize there was anyone here.”

  Julia tossed her head. “Well, go on then. It isn’t as though you were interrupting anything important.” She flounced back up the stairs, rejoining the throng and leaving her friend looking lost and abandoned. She was a bully. True, Edith was bad-tempered and snappish, and in other circumstances I would have little time for her, but her woeful expression tugged at my heart.

  “She’s a beast,” I said with feeling. Edith’s eyes flashed, as though she wanted to contradict me, but she stayed silent. “If this is how she treats her friends,” I continued, “then I’m glad that I’m her enemy.” This at least provoked a smile, or at least a wry quirk of her lips.

  “She’s not so bad.” Edith sighed. “The worst thing is, she’s right.”

  “Right or not, she shouldn’t speak to you like that.”

  “Whereas you stand up to her every time, don’t you, Gilchrist?” Her words may have been sarcastic but, for once, her tone wasn’t. When she followed Julia, I made no attempt to stop her.

  I stood in the freezing evening air, watching my breath hang like mist.

  “You shouldn’t be out here alone, Miss Gilchrist.”

  I turned to see Professor Merchiston standing there.

  “I was just going to send a note to my uncle,” I told him, my posture stiff and unwelcoming.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, you can’t wait outside on a night like this. I’ll call a cab and escort you home.”

  “I hardly think that would be proper. Perhaps if we can find a chaperone . . .”

  “I won’t step foot outside the cab, so no need to worry about what your aunt might say. Besides,” he added with a wry grin, “it isn’t as though you haven’t been in a cab unaccompanied with me before.”

  “You were drunk,” I replied tartly. “The only thing you could have managed was an assault on my reputation—and it’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”

  We stood in awkward silence for a moment.

  “Miss Gilchrist, when you came to my rooms, I said something unforgivable. I will not pain you further by mentioning it again, but please believe it was said in the heat of anger, and I have regretted it ever since. At least let me do the service of escorting you home.”

  His words touched me. I wanted more than anything to reply in kind. I looked at him, half-cloaked in shadows with a tired, sad face, and wondered if he was really capable of murder.

  “That is a very kind offer, Professor Merchiston, but I couldn’t possibly accept.”

  In the dim light, his expression was unreadable, but I felt a strange stab of guilt.

  “I’ll hail you a cab,” he said stiffly. “But I shan’t accompany you. I’m sorry for any offense caused.”

  Within moments I was ushered into a waiting hansom cab. Alone with my thoughts, I found my hand creeping toward my belly, where, beneath the layers of fabric, a pale, jagged scar marred my skin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Acure for hysterical, melancholic women” indeed.

  The doctors at the sanatorium had promised my father that it would cure my ramblings about Paul Beresford, about education and becoming a doctor. When cutting had failed, restraints and the sweet release of opiates had dulled me into submission, but the legacy of the surgery lingered. If my aunt’s plans came to fruition, I would be a barren wife, a woman whose flat belly would be forever traced with the scars from surgery and would never swell, never fulfill the one task society asked of me.

  I had still been hazy with laudanum when my mother had bundled me into the carriage, and she and Father had sat opposite me, purse-lipped and not speaking, refusing to tell me where we were going until we were alighting at a large house an hour outside London. “A rest,” they had called it; I was “overwrought.” This was what came of indulging my foolish notions of an education. They had not lingered—satisfied that my temporary retreat from the world was as civilized as Dr. Waters had promised, my mother gave me a chilly kiss on the cheek and bid me farewell. My father did not look at me. I had been shown to a room—airy, light, comfortable, but a prison nonetheless, with a door that locked behind me.

  It was to be a chance to reflect. I was not to read, or to dwell on the events of recent days. I was to pray, to sleep, to refocus my mind toward healthier topics than medicine. I could sew, but only in the company of one of the nurses. I was too frightened and confused at first to appreciate the harm I could do to myself even with an embroidery needle, but their fears would be justified and I had the scars on more than just my stomach to prove it.

  Three months it took for them to return. Three months without so much as a letter, until I thought I had been abandoned the
re forever. Then my father arrived to take me home, to tell me that a solution had been found, that I was going to Scotland to study, if that’s what I wanted, but I was not to come home again. That my relatives would care for me, but I would be left to make my way in the world and to expect nothing from him or my mother but the kindness they had already shown me. I had heaped too much shame on the family—first by my hoydenish ways, my suffragist leanings, my obsession with a university education, and now this. A reputation in ruins, and our family name dragged through the dirt. I was lucky, he told me, to be allowed to keep it. As far as he was concerned, he now had only one daughter.

  Compared to that, Aunt Emily was positively maternal.

  “Sarah! What a pleasant surprise to see you home at a reasonable hour.”

  If I looked as bad as I felt, she made no comment.

  “The lecture finished earlier than I expected.” I forced a weak smile. “I didn’t want to trouble you by sending for Calhoun, so I had the porter call me a cab.”

  “Your uncle is still at his club,” my aunt replied, a trace of disapproval in her tone. “Shall I ring for some supper?”

  My stomach roiled at the thought of food, the smell of sweat and antiseptic clinging to my nostrils and the patient’s moans still fresh in my mind.

  “Perhaps just a pot of tea then,” she said as I grimaced. “I’m writing to Margaret—I’ll send your regards.”

  Mother. After tonight’s debacle and the memories it had prompted, I didn’t know if the thought of her was soothing or heartbreaking. I knew that I wanted her—her presence, her comfort—but just as the daughter she had loved no longer existed, the mother I craved was gone forever. I looked over at Aunt Emily, seeing echoes of her sister in the set of her mouth, the firmness of her chin, and I suddenly felt more homesick than I ever had.

  “Give her my love,” I said softly. “Forgive me, Aunt Emily, I’m very tired. I think an early night may be in order.”

  In the months I had been apart from them, the emotional wounds had begun to close. I suspected they would never fully heal, not even if I redeemed myself by marrying Miles and being brought back into the familial fold. As for the woman I had become, a student, a bluestocking, a woman who associated with prostitutes and policemen and accused her professors of murder—they would have me locked up, and this time no one would come to my aid.

  If Aunt Emily discovered that my interest in Edinburgh’s unfortunates went beyond the infirmary doors, I did not know what she would do. Would it be better to be thrown out onto the streets or to be confined to my room until some suitable marital transaction could take place? It wasn’t a choice I cared to make.

  When I was qualified, I told myself, as Agnes slipped the nightgown over my head. When I was out from my aunt’s protection. When I could do as I pleased. Then I could champion the rights of girls like Lucy, then I could right a dozen wrongs. I simply had to bide my time. The maid bobbed a curtsy, dimmed the lights, and left me to my thoughts. My conscience shifted and stirred, uneasy. There would be other helpless girls crossing my path in the future; the world had no shortage of them. But Lucy had come into my life now, and powerless as I felt, trapped as I was, I had to do something. Justice had to be done, at least once, at least for her. How many people had turned from me with a flicker of guilt, believing me but absolving themselves of responsibility? As Julia Latymer reminded me on a daily basis, I was not like the others. I knew how the world worked: I knew it could be cruel, and I was not content to let it remain so.

  My sleep was fitful and full of disturbing images, the way sleep always was now. After the incident at the ball—and how was it, that even I could not refer to it by its proper name?—I stayed awake for three nights, terrified that if I closed my eyes for even a moment, all the memories I was fighting back would come flooding over me. And on the fourth night, they did. I think it was the screaming that first alerted my mother to the fact that something seriously untoward had occurred, that it was more than a cheap seduction at a ball. But I remember my bedroom door opening, and her figure silhouetted in the doorway. She stood there, silent, and never came in even after I called for her. I remember her hushing Gertie and sending her back to bed, and dismissing the servants in their turn. I spent that night, and so many subsequent ones, alone, too frightened to go back to sleep because I knew that if the nightmares came, once again no one would come to rescue me.

  Was that how Lucy had felt? I wondered. When had she first taken to the streets? Had she been protected until then, or was that the only life she had ever known? I suspected not, because she still looked young and fresh, still a bloom of health on her cheeks unlike the wretched whores who prowled the slums with wigs and false teeth and diseases beyond cure. So she must have known comfort once. How did she survive the degradation, knowing that there was no one there to care for her, to rescue her when she cried out? Even if Ruby McAllister protected her girls like a lioness with her cubs, I knew that profit would win out. I could understand fear, but to allow such wicked things to occur and to merely stand by and pocket the money was insupportable. But then, fear of poverty was a powerful motivator. Who was I to judge her, when I knew so little of her life?

  This strange new world I had stumbled into had rules I could barely comprehend. Heaven knew that the regulations of polite society were beyond me half the time, and I was raised with them. But the connections, the unspoken arrangements, all these things that would have helped me make sense of Lucy’s life, and perhaps her death as well, were barred to me. I knew what Ruby and women like her thought of me. I saw the way they looked at Fiona and her colleagues—sad spinster women on errands of mercy, swooping in and telling them how to live their lives. I couldn’t blame them, somehow. And how they saw me must be far worse. At best, I was a foolish girl playing in the slums like Marie Antoinette and her shepherdess games in the dying days of Versailles. At worst . . . what? Did they think I took some kind of depraved enjoyment, some illicit thrill in all this?

  And perhaps they were right, in a way. Advocating for Lucy had made me feel better about my own predicament—in my way, wasn’t I using her just as the fine gentleman from the New Town did, as an escape from my dull, privileged life? My problems, though they seemed insurmountable at times, were nothing in comparison to the lives of these women. Worn out before they were thirty from too many children and too little money to feed all of those hungry mouths, turning to prostitution to make the week’s rent here and there, when work at the factories or taking in mending was hard to come by. And in an overcrowded city like Edinburgh, it was always hard to come by. The salubrious air of the New Town was far away from that stinking hellhole. I had little to complain about. I had a roof over my head, food in my belly, and I was training for a profession that, although it might not have welcomed me with open arms, would eventually ensure that I was able to keep myself with a measure of independence unknown to women like Lucy and Ruby.

  I had told myself I would put away these thoughts, but I had entered that world and it wasn’t willing to let me go that easily. And even if I abandoned my investigations entirely, gave myself up to my studies and the promise of marriage to a man who bored me to tears, I would only ever be pretending. The scars from the months I had spent locked away had all but faded away, but I still felt the wounds as fresh and painful as always.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The sheets of paper lay on every desk, positioned precisely. I groaned aloud at the thought of an unexpected test for which I was in no way prepared, but as I read the page I realized it had nothing to do with the skeletal system.

  “The Edinburgh Women Students’ Morality Union?” Whatever it was it sounded dire. Worse than that—it sounded compulsory.

  “Julia’s latest hobbyhorse.” Alison grimaced. “It’s a temperance movement, of sorts.”

  “Oh, it isn’t just a temperance league!” Julia Latymer’s eyes glittered with missionary zeal and not a little bit of malice. “The Women’s Morality Union is dedicated
to not only upholding standards here at the medical school but also improving the lives of women throughout Edinburgh. After all, as doctors, moral well-being must be as important to us as the physical health of our patients. I hope you’ll consider joining us, Sarah. They do say that charity begins at home.”

  With her hand on my shoulder and a mock sympathetic look on her face, she sounded exactly like nearly every doctor I had ever met, more interested in judging me than in any diagnosis. I was only surprised she wasn’t puffing on a cigar and reading the racing papers in the university club.

  “Are you so desperate to ingratiate yourself with the gentlemen that you’re willing to act like one?”

  Julia’s lips thinned and she stepped back with a scowl, as though my very presence was infectious.

  “I’m doing you a favor.” She sneered. “The whole university whispers about you. Parading yourself around all high and mighty when you’re no better than the whores in that ramshackle infirmary that calls itself a hospital. One more fallen woman who couldn’t make respectability stick.”

  My fingers itched to slap her, and I twisted them in the fabric of my skirt in an effort not to strike.

  “Direct your morality lecture to the men, Julia. They can drink and carouse until morning while we have to be paragons of virtue, and you don’t think it the littlest bit unfair?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think! It doesn’t matter what any of us think. If we want to study medicine, we have to be above reproach. Do you think I give a damn about your hurt feelings, Gilchrist? The only reason I care what they say about you is because it makes it easier for them to say it about the rest of us. I have fought tooth and nail for this, and you’re ruining it. You’ll ruin us all. One bad apple in the barrel and suddenly the whole damned experiment is over, we’re back in the drawing room hoping some man takes a fancy to us! I won’t lose this chance because some spoiled society slut couldn’t keep her legs closed.”