The Wages of Sin

by Kaite Welsh

  “Which club is it?”

  She frowned. “The New Club. Why the curiosity?” She grinned impishly. “Is Mr. Greene a member?”

  I groaned. “Why did you have to mention him? I was having such a lovely afternoon.” I knew that I could only ignore his existence for so long when it was my aunt’s chief topic of conversation, but I relished the respite when I was out of the house. Before I had spoken to Alison, only Elisabeth knew of my unwanted suitor’s attentions and, despite all evidence to the contrary, held out hope that if a match was to be made it would be a happy one. I wished that I did not have to crush her romantic fantasies, but hearth and home could protect a woman from the harsh realities of the world for only so long.

  Plucking up all my courage, I spoke. “Elisabeth, how much do you know of where the professor goes in the evening?”

  She blinked. “He spends a great deal of time in his rooms at the university and in the laboratory. I’ve had to send one of the servants to collect him from the library because he’s forgotten a dinner engagement on more than one occasion. Sometimes he goes to the music hall and refuses to take me no matter how often I beg, but if he doesn’t come home, it’s because he works long into the night and stays at his club. I miss him greatly when he does, but it’s hardly unusual.”

  “And his health. It is . . . robust? In . . . um . . . all areas?”

  She laughed. “You’re starting to sound more and more like a doctor every day! He could do with drinking a little less claret and not filling his plate quite so abundantly, but otherwise he appears to be in perfect health. Why do you ask?”

  “And yours?” I persisted. “No discomfort? No infection?”

  She stared at me in confusion. “I cannot make you out at all. What on earth are you getting at?”

  My carefully considered words spilled out in a rush. “Elisabeth, your husband doesn’t spend all his time at the club or the library. He visits women, prostitutes, in the slums. I’ve seen him.”

  Silence hung heavy between us, and I wished more than anything I could take my words back.

  “I’m afraid you are mistaken,” she said coldly.

  “I’m telling you this because you have a right to know,” I pressed on. “If he shares your bed, he’s putting you at risk of all sorts of diseases.”

  “Whether my husband shares my bed is of no concern of yours,” she said, and I felt lower than a worm. “I regret, Sarah, that your experience of men has been so disagreeable. But to come into my house and make such accusations . . . Yours is a very ugly view of the world. I will not share it, and I will not have it under my roof. Get out.”

  I had expected tears, disbelief, perhaps anger at Randall. I had not expected this. I stood, trembling, and left her by the fireside. As the door closed behind me, I heard her begin to sob. Although I longed to turn back to comfort her, I knew that I would not be welcome.

  Stepping out into the bitter winter night, I felt my last connection to the woman I had once been fall away. The friendship, the endless hours gossiping by the fireside, none of that could exist in my new life. I was a pariah everywhere I turned, a fallen woman or a freak of nature. As I shivered through the streets, watching carriages deposit men, women, and families home for the evening, I decided to make my way to the one place I still belonged.

  The usually crowded Cowgate was quiet tonight, the streets only lined with those who, like me, had nowhere else to go. As I stepped into the infirmary, Matilda Campbell greeted me warmly.

  “Sarah! We weren’t expecting you tonight, were we? It’s Fiona’s evening off. Poor child, you’re a positive icicle!”

  She pulled off my cloak and led me through to the small office, draping my wet coat before the fire.

  “I’m sorry to show up unannounced,” I said through chattering teeth. “I found myself unexpectedly free tonight, and I thought you could use some help.”

  “We can always use that.” She smiled, unpinning my hair and rubbing it vigorously with a towel. She reminded me a little of the nursemaid I had as a child. “Still, I’m surprised your aunt and uncle agreed.”

  “I haven’t exactly told them,” I admitted. “I was supposed to be taking tea with Mrs. Chalmers, but then she had a headache and I thought I might as well make use of my evening.”

  Dr. Campbell frowned. “You know we can’t afford to anger your uncle, Sarah. Perhaps it would be best if you just went straight home, hmm?”

  My heart sank. “And spend the evening reading conduct books and listening to my aunt extol the virtues of marriage and motherhood that an overeducated spinster will forever be deprived of? I’d rather empty bedpans. I mean it!”

  She laughed. “You’re a strange one. But no stranger than the rest of us, and if it’s bedpans you want, girl, then it’s bedpans you’ll get.”

  On my knees, clearing up the pungent mess made by a woman crying out in pain from the aftereffects of a tumor removal, I wondered if I should regret my offer. But the work, unpleasant though it was, kept my mind off the look in Elisabeth’s eyes when she had ordered me out of her house. There was a girl in the bed opposite, little more than fifteen, whose stillborn child, six weeks premature, would have likely been severely disabled if he had lived, thanks to his mother’s syphilis. The thought of that happening to Elisabeth when I could prevent it was unthinkable. Far better that I lose her by revealing the truth than stay silent and wait for some virus or other to take hold and ruin her life.

  For the next two hours I stitched up wounds, helped set broken legs and watched, fascinated, as Dr. Jemima Bourne removed a laundrywoman’s inflamed appendix. I scrubbed my hands clean with carbolic soap while every part of my body ached, surrounded by people whose lives were so unimaginably wretched that my troubles paled in comparison. Beggars and streetwalkers, guttersnipes, honest workingwomen, and pickpockets—they couldn’t have cared less about my morality. Perhaps the women I worked alongside would have, had they known. Perhaps they would have taken a more enlightened view. All I knew was that they shared my anger at what this world reduced women to, and I was grateful to do what I could to help.

  Dr. Campbell entered the sluice, worry written all over her face. “Sarah, you didn’t move any of the laudanum bottles from the cupboard, did you?”

  I shook my head. “I helped Dr. Bourne administer some to a few of the patients, but that’s all. I don’t think I’ve even seen the key all evening.”

  She sighed. “Then our thief strikes again. I’ve just counted, and there are two missing.”

  “You have a thief?”

  “Drugs do go missing from time to time—no matter how careful we are, some of our patients are canny. And those who are addicted can be very clever indeed.”

  “Is it just laudanum?”

  “Not always. The strangest things. We’ve had soap, bandages—things we’d give away freely, if we could afford to—but it’s usually medicine. Normally anesthetic, something to dull the pain when the gin stops working. I honestly can’t say I blame the people who take them, but it’s hardly something we can afford. Especially not when they steal instruments. I sometimes wonder how often we mend the injuries caused by our own supplies.”

  I had seen the streets outside the infirmary doors, and I didn’t like the thought of some of our patients wandering around wielding scalpels.

  “Poverty,” Dr. Campbell continued. “That’s what’s to blame. If you’ve got a sick child at home, or an infection that’s gone septic, and you see something that will help just lying around, in seemingly unlimited supply, why not just take it? We can’t help everyone, and our patients know that.”

  I closed my eyes, hating the picture of the world that she presented but knowing that communities like the Cowgate were rife across Edinburgh, lives being eked out on a few mouthfuls of stale bread a day, families living in one filthy room they could barely afford. Perhaps Fiona had been right. Perhaps girls like Lucy were the lucky ones.

  “You need to go home,” Dr. Campbell told me firmly.
“Lie to your aunt and uncle all you will, if you’re late and they find out where you were it’ll be our heads on the block, not yours.”

  She looked around for the porter, but he had his hands full restraining a drunk woman threatening violence to everyone around her.

  “I’ll walk up and hail a cab by myself,” I told her. “I’ll be perfectly safe.”

  It was against her better judgment, but she relented. “Well at least go up by the Royal Mile then, not the kirkyard,” she said tiredly. “Otherwise you won’t make it out in one piece.”

  I gathered my things, promising to be careful, and exited into the cold, but no less malodorous, night air.

  I kept my head down and walked briskly through the streets, wanting to be home and warm as much as anything else. Now that the sleet had eased off, the streets were more crowded and I had to move swiftly to avoid being jostled, or worse. As I reached the mouth of the Cowgate, where Candlemaker Row became the Grassmarket, I caught sight of a tall, familiar figure making his way down from the civilized world of the streets above to the noise and violence of the stews, and I found myself following Gregory Merchiston for the second time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  This time, he did nothing more than glance at the narrow wynd that Ruby’s dwelling resided on, his attention clearly on a more pressing engagement. I wondered if he was going to meet Randall Chalmers, and I found myself treading quietly a few yards behind him, all thoughts of home forgotten.

  He joined a throng of men standing outside an unmarked building, one of whom greeted him by name, slapped his back, and let him enter. Seeing that it was not only men who entered made me gather my courage and follow him in.

  I edged closer to the crowd, praying that I didn’t look as out of place as I felt. The men who had greeted Merchiston eyed me but didn’t move to let me pass. Gingerly, and with considerable reluctance, I squeezed between them, trying not to inhale the scent of stale beer and tobacco mixed with rank sweat.

  “That’ll be a shilling, hen,” the woman at the door said, sucking what remained of her teeth. I handed the coin over, still no clearer as to what I was paying for. The fact that they admitted me at all ruled out one sort of entertainment—at least, I hoped it did—but when I entered the dark, dank corridor, my heart pounded at what lay behind the door.

  A rush of hot air, light, and noise assaulted my senses and I found myself stumbling into a large crowded room. Drunks, prostitutes, and hawkers jostled one another, and buxom women with tankards of ale competed with florid men selling hot meat pies for a penny each. At the center of the room was a square, cordoned off from the throng by a length of dirty, fraying rope.

  “Who’s on tonight?” I heard the man next to me say, through a mouthful of gristle and flaking pastry.

  Before he could answer, a man entered the ring and the crowd calmed enough for him to be heard.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he called out, although I highly doubted his audience included either. “Place your bets and dinnae be stingy, because tonight we’ve got a real beauty. Back in the ring after a wee spell at Her Majesty’s pleasure, Billy Reid. And his opponent, seeing if he can repeat last week’s victory, Gregory Merchiston.”

  To the roar of the assembled crowd the two pugilists entered the ring. The room swam in front of me, the only thing remaining in focus the figure of Gregory Merchiston. A figure lacking not only the greatcoat and hat he had been wearing when I lost him in the crowd but also his shirt.

  The room seemed unbearably warm. My corset felt too tight, and I fought for air. Blood thrummed in my veins, and I felt my cheeks burn. There was something undeniably indecent about seeing my professor this way, stripped to the waist. If ever I had doubted his physical strength before, I didn’t now.

  His everyday garb, I was forced to acknowledge, didn’t do him justice. Tailcoats, top hats, and academic gowns made him look gaunt, but even under the flickering gas lamps I could see that he was wiry, not lanky. The ridges of his muscles, the coarse dark hair on his chest making his skin look even paler, the starburst of scar tissue that scattered his torso and back like constellations.

  As his fist swung to make the first punch, bone connecting with bone in a strangely balletic movement, I forced my thoughts along more scientific lines. As the two men grappled in front of me, I imagined the sweat-slicked skin stripped away and the taut muscle beneath exposed to my gaze. I recited the name of each muscle under my breath, and mentally splinted every bone that cracked. It didn’t work. Already, my clothes stuck to my skin with perspiration, and I was sure I was blushing. My mouth was dry, as though all the liquid in my body had pooled somewhere else entirely.

  With a sudden surge of the crowd, I found myself at the front, so close I could see every inch of them. A shove from his opponent sent Merchiston reeling in my direction, and, as he hit the floor with a sickening thump, our eyes locked. While the crowd cheered Reid’s victory and goaded the loser, Merchiston sat up, wincing in agony, and spat out phlegm and blood onto the floor. His lips were dotted with blood, and bruises were starting to blossom across his rib cage. With a last long, searching look at me, he scrambled to his feet and shook his opponent’s hand with a dignity that surprised me—if Reid had given me the thrashing Merchiston had received, I would have spat in his eye. I shrank back into the crowd, praying his gaze wouldn’t find me, and when he turned to mop his brow, I fled.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Outside, the cold air hit me like a slap, taking my breath away. My legs felt decidedly wobbly. I had no other thought in my mind except to get away, and I broke out into a run that left me breathless as I scrambled to the top of Candlemaker Row.

  I hailed the first cab that passed and spent my journey home in a daze. Claiming a headache, I sank into the hot bath Agnes had poured for me, gratefully sipping a cup of tea she’d also provided.

  I wondered how I had ended up here. Once a respected, if rebellious, daughter of a financier, now I was a fallen woman in the eyes of society, a moral degenerate who aped men by studying medicine, and the kind of woman who followed a man through the slums and watched, openmouthed and wide-eyed, as he fought half-naked in a room full of whores and criminals. I shook my head. I should study, and go to church more. Take my aunt’s advice before I lost what was left of my reputation.

  And yet, I could not pretend to be only the girl who raised eyebrows by attending lectures and arguing with learned gentlemen over the dinner table. That was no longer my world, no matter how much my aunt tried to rehabilitate me. Even if I married Miles Greene, I would be only a pale imitator of the women in his circle, and I knew that I could not keep up the pretense for long. Like Fiona Leadbetter, I was more at home in the Cowgate slums than in a New Town drawing room. I could not enjoy the life I used to live, not now that I knew what it was based on—the exploitation of women. I saw how the factory workers lived so that the fabric of my bonnet and coat were made to society’s satisfaction, I knew how easy it was for a woman to slip through the cracks of the civilized world and end up like Lucy.

  Had she seen him like this, fierce and animalistic, every last shred of his respectable daylight self discarded? Had she been frightened or drawn to him?

  It did not matter how striking he was, I told myself sternly. He had been accused of one murder and I suspected him of a second, so his physical appearance mattered not a jot. But the more I tried to put the image of his shirtless figure from my mind, the more it tormented me. He had been, I was forced to admit, devastatingly handsome. The warmth that suffused me was not entirely an unfamiliar sensation, which was why it bothered me all the more. I knew where these feelings led—to ruin and shame. And surely that pointed even more to Merchiston’s guilt? If he could overwhelm me with his presence, then what could he have done with a look, or a word, or a touch?

  My dangerously seductive train of thought was broken by the scalding sensation of spilling hot tea against my hand. I cursed, and decided to blame Merchiston for that as w
ell. Dratted man, I wished I had never met him. I pitied his late wife with a passion—I could only imagine how she must have been enthralled to him. And if my suspicions about the nature of his dalliances with poor Lucy were indeed accurate, who knew what horrifying perversions she had submitted to behind the bedroom door?

  It was rapidly becoming clear that I read too many novels—I was beginning to entertain thoughts that would have made Catherine Morland blush. At least part of the blame, I thought, lay with the puritanical faculty who, for reasons of their own, linked female study of medicine with a predisposition for amorality. Either they were right—which was manifestly nonsense—or they had given me ideas I was better off not having.

  My dreams, such as they were, were fractured and strange. Memories of Lucy’s corpse resurfaced, and I dreamed that Merchiston’s breath was warm against my neck as I sliced into her torso. He ran his hand tenderly across her breasts as I cut, and somehow I could feel his touch as though it were my body his hands were caressing. And then it was—his lips hard against mine, the stench of formaldehyde mingling with his cologne. I felt every inch of him straining against me, and I kissed him back with a fervor that unnerved me even in my deep sleep. As I lay back on the bed, urging him to take his pleasure with me, part of me realized that it was still Lucy’s body he was touching, but it was now very much alive. The memory of his naked body assailed me—because I had looked, of course I had looked—and I ached with a longing that even Paul, in the weeks before he had followed me to the library, had never provoked.

  The next day was purgatory. The man who spoke from the lectern at the front of the room was almost unrecognizable as the feral fighter from the previous night. I found my eyes tracing the way his clothes draped across his frame, remembering the taut muscle beneath. I felt my cheeks flame, and when he caught my eye my breath stuttered. Afterward, I stood to leave on legs as wobbly as they had been last night, but he stopped me.