The Wages of Sin

by Kaite Welsh

  “In that case,” I smiled sweetly, “you’d better not tell him.”

  Grumbling but not explicitly forbidding me to follow him, he strode off into the darkness and I ran after him like a dog at the heels of her master, wondering if I had really been so wrong about him.

  We waited in the parlor, both studiously ignoring the artwork adorning the walls and the noises from the rooms upstairs as we waited for the girl to return.

  “She says you’re barred. Both of you. She disnae want you coming around upsetting the girls, no’ after the stooshie the other week.”

  Merchiston looked curiously at me, and I wished I could sink into the ground. Damn Julia Latymer and her proselytizing.

  “I kept Ruby McAllister in gin and clean bedsheets, the least she can do is tell me that to my face.”

  He went to push past the girl, who kicked him sharply in the shins and yelled as though all the demons of hell were attacking her.

  “It can wait,” I told him. “We can come back when she’s calmed down, but if Griselda Hartigan has any answers to give us, then we’d better hurry.”

  “And to think I worried you were too emotional to make a good doctor,” Merchiston said as he followed me back out onto the street.

  If the men at the police station were surprised to see Professor Merchiston accompanied by two women, one living and one dead, they had the sense not to say anything.

  I expected him to shoo me away as two porters placed the body onto a table, but instead he looked at me with a challenge in his eyes.

  “I’m going to need another pair of hands. Would you care to assist?”

  Had Griselda Hartigan been in any position to disapprove, she surely would have found my delight distasteful. “There’s nothing I’d like more, Professor.”

  The room that Merchiston was allocated to perform his autopsies was freezing cold. I shivered, and my companion glanced up at me.

  “You’ll soon warm up once we get to work. Take my coat for now, and sterilize those instruments.”

  Gingerly, I slipped his heavy black greatcoat about my shoulders and moved to the table where his knives were kept. I couldn’t help but be impressed—I knew some doctors who didn’t sterilize their instruments when the patient was alive and the fact that Merchiston did so when he was operating on a body beyond infection put him higher in my esteem. I undressed her, remembering the upright woman I had encountered and how horrified she would have been to see herself so degraded. When I had pulled away the last of her undergarments, Merchiston leaned on her chest and I looked away, embarrassed. A sickening, splintering crack sounded behind me as he fractured her rib cage with a grunt. To my astonishment, he handed me the scalpel.

  “Go on then,” he said, smirking. “Show me what you’re capable of.” With a brief defiant glare, I sliced confidently into Miss Hartigan’s torso with a clean, neat line. I glanced up. He nodded meditatively, his eyes on my work. “Carry on.” I widened the cut until I could see the purplish blue of the lungs. He made a noise that seemed to indicate I should continue, so I reached into the chest cavity and scooped out the left lung. I was aware of his presence behind me, perfectly still and silent but reassuring nonetheless. My hand faltered, distracted by his nearness. “Keep going, lass. Breathe.”

  “You make it sound as though I’m the patient, not the doctor.”

  “Please accept my apologies, Doctor-in-training Gilchrist,” he murmured, and without turning I could tell that he was smiling again.

  I pressed the tip of the scalpel to the tissue and cut firmly.

  “Burke and Hare: that was how they murdered their victims. Barely leaves a trace, unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. They sold countless bodies to the university for dissection and no one was any the wiser.” His voice was raspy with emotion, and I could see that he remembered how I had come to find Lucy’s body in the first place. “It happened just up the road from Ruby’s house, you know,” he continued. “People still tell stories about the demon doctors, on dreich, dark nights. Maybe that gave someone the idea.”

  The grandfather clock in the hall chimed eight o’clock and I froze in horror.

  Merchiston glanced at me. “What time is your aunt expecting you?”

  “Not until nine.” I sighed. It would take me an hour to get home, and I wouldn’t have time to dress for dinner. I prayed that this was one night where my uncle had chosen to stay at his club.

  “You go,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “I’ll deal with Miss Hartigan. Did she have any family we need to notify?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve no idea. Someone at the reformatory must know, or maybe Fiona Leadbetter—she said the infirmary doctors helped them out from time to time.”

  I was at the door when he spoke again.

  “I’d been waiting for years for Lucy to show up on my slab. Then she died, and I didn’t even get that. You’ll forgive me if I hated you for it, Miss Gilchrist.”

  The door I closed was heavy and thick, but I knew that behind it, Gregory Merchiston was crying.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  I arrived early at the university the next morning and immediately went in search of Merchiston. Luckily, Professor Chalmers was nowhere to be seen, but neither was my unexpected ally.

  Returning to the courtyard, I saw a couple pressed together in the shadows, murmuring urgently. I could hear only the woman’s voice, low and passionate. Above us, a door opened and a shaft of light caught the edge of the woman’s dress. I gasped in shock as I recognized the chartreuse wool of Julia Latymer’s dress. Without thinking, I stepped closer, straining to hear the voice of her lover. I hoped to catch her out, humiliate her the way she had humiliated me, or at least have a little leverage to make her cease her campaign against me. As I edged closer, the murmuring continued, and I realized with a queer sort of feeling that the reason I couldn’t make out the man’s voice was because there was no man present.

  Pressed against the wall, her hair in disarray and her neck being covered in hungry kisses, was Edith.

  I stepped back with a gasp, and Julia’s head whipped around. I had seen her angry, I had seen her gloating, but I had never before seen her frightened. She pulled back from Edith as if the other girl had burned her.

  “Gilchrist,” she choked out. “I . . . we—”

  “Don’t tell anyone,” Edith interrupted, her voice raw. “You might not like us, you might have every reason in the world to run to the dean right now and get us sent down for immoral conduct, but please don’t. I’m begging you.”

  “Why not?” It took a moment before I recognized the cold voice as my own.

  “Because,” Julia said with a bitter smile, “you’re better than we are.”

  I looked at her silently, unable to speak for a moment. Then, without thinking, I raised my hand and slapped her soundly across the cheek.

  “You hypocritical bitch,” I said in a low voice. “How dare you flatter me when for months—for months, Julia!—you have been spreading lies about me to every single person who crosses our path. I have lost friends because of you. I can’t count the times I left lectures nearly in tears, vowing I’d never come back. And now you tell me I’m better than you. Well for once, Julia Latymer, I agree.”

  Julia and I had taken great care not to be alone since the first week we had met in Edinburgh. For my part, it was a deliberate effort to stop me from clawing her eyes out. What her reasoning was, I did not know. In fact, her behavior was a complete mystery to me, since I had done nothing to make her hate me.

  Now we met each other’s gaze, Edith all but forgotten.

  “You aren’t the only one who left London to escape gossip, Sarah. I was going to the London School of Medicine for Women. I had a friend, we were going to take rooms together.” Her breath hitched, and in the dim light I saw her already pale skin take on an ashen hue, but she still refused to meet my eyes. “I misinterpreted our friendship. She was disgusted, she threatened to tell everyone—” She broke off, and
for the first time I felt sorry for her. “You might have been reckless, Sarah, but at least everyone understood that. What would they have said if they’d found out about me?”

  “So why turn on me?” I asked, exasperated. “We both had secrets, why persecute the one person who was in the same position?”

  Julia laughed bitterly. “The same position? Sarah, men who love other men are thrown into prison. I’d be lucky if I escaped the madhouse. You’ve heard what the men say about us—if we respond to their flirting we’re immoral; if we don’t then we’re unnatural. Better to be a prig than an invert.” She spat the last word out, shaking. “And you know how fast rumor travels. I couldn’t risk you finding out about me and telling everyone.”

  “So instead you made sure no one would speak to me, much less believe me,” I finished. “That’s hardly sisterhood, Julia.”

  “That’s society,” she replied, and we both knew it was true.

  “Anyway, it didn’t work.”

  We both turned to look at Edith. Blushing and awkward, she kept her eyes fixed on Julia, and I wondered how I had ever mistaken her affection for blind admiration. “I knew. I knew from the way she looked at me.” She flashed me a wry smile. “It’s exactly the way Professor Merchiston looks at Sarah.”

  “That’s not true!” I protested hotly, my cheeks flaming. “After everything you’ve just told me, how dare you imply—”

  “I didn’t say you looked back,” Edith said innocently.

  “Anyway,” Julia pressed on. “Now you know the truth. It’s up to you what to do next.”

  What was one more secret in the mass of knowledge I had gained these past few weeks?

  “Nothing,” I told her firmly. “You have my word. I promise, I don’t care that the two of you are close. I know what it’s like to keep secrets. I won’t tell a soul, I swear, but for God’s sake, Julia, try to show the same compassion to me. We don’t have to be friends, but I’m tired of having enemies.”

  She nodded, and the sound of footsteps echoed on the stone flags. “Shall we join the others?” She looped her arm through Edith’s, shooting me a defiant glare that faded into the beginnings of a real smile when I merely shrugged. Together, we moved out of the chilly shadows and into the morning sunlight.

  I spent the morning trying not to stare at them, wondering how such an unlikely relationship had blossomed. The day dragged, and my impatience to seek out Merchiston and find out what Miss Hartigan’s postmortem had revealed warred with Edith’s earlier words and I wondered how I could possibly face him.

  One other person I had to face was Professor Chalmers. The apology I owed him would not be an easy one, and I doubted that my friendship with Elisabeth would ever fully recover.

  Any thoughts I had had about delivering that apology in person were diverted when McVeigh interrupted our lecture. He lingered in Randall’s eyeline, reluctant to even step over the threshold into our presence until he was ushered over.

  He handed him something and Randall frowned.

  “Miss Gilchrist? A note for you.”

  The note was scrawled, misspelled, the paper stained with blotches of ink and other things I preferred to not to think about. It instructed me very clearly that should I wish to learn more about Lucy’s death to attend the mortuary after my last lecture.

  I prayed that the hastily dashed-off missive to my uncle would halt the carriage’s arrival at four o’clock. My good behavior had earned me a loosening of the reins of late, and I hoped my claim of an extended session in the library would result in nothing more than a lecture on the dangers of too much reading on the delicate female brain.

  My heart thumped as I descended the staircase down to the dissection rooms. Voices echoed as the students joked over their macabre work, and I realized that I had never been down here in the presence of the male students. The university, with its quixotic notions of propriety, preferred its lady students not to dissect their corpses in the presence of the opposite sex, presumably because the known aphrodisiac effects of decomposing would send us all into paroxysms of ecstatic immorality.

  They fell silent, and I felt their eyes upon me, a lone woman wandering the halls without a chaperone.

  “Can I be of assistance?” The speaker’s tone dripped with concern, but his smile made my skin crawl.

  “I have a meeting with Mr. McVeigh,” I stammered.

  “The porter?” An eyebrow rose. “Without your chaperone? Isn’t that a little . . . against the rules, Walker?”

  His friend furrowed his brow. “I’m sure the dean would be very interested to hear how one of the female students is meeting a man alone on university grounds.”

  “You might not want me here,” I spat, “but here I am. Now will you kindly direct me to McVeigh, or would you prefer if I just screamed for help?”

  I turned to leave, and froze as I felt something caress my back, and move lower. I turned to face my molester and found myself mere inches from the bobbing grinning face of a skeleton. On instinct, my hand had grabbed the wrist, and I felt the dry, sticklike ulna crack between my fingers. I jolted back, but not before I realized that the body was not entirely decomposed.

  “He’s just being friendly, Doctor.” Walker leered from behind his cadaver. “We’re all very friendly here. Especially McVeigh. You know, he normally has to pay for his company, but it seems that here he’s getting it for free. Tell me, is this in exchange for your tuition, or do you just want your pick of the fresh bodies?”

  “I’m sure we can help with that.” Anderson smirked. “You must get tired of examining corpses—wouldn’t you like to practice on a patient who’s a little warmer?”

  He was close enough that I could feel his breath on my cheek. I stumbled backward until my back met the wall and I closed my eyes in desperation.

  “Now you can’t possibly examine someone dressed like that,” he murmured. “At least take your coat off.”

  “It’s a little cold for that, don’t you think?” I asked through chattering teeth that had very little to do with the cold. My shaking hands reached up to remove my hat.

  “That’s it,” he praised encouragingly, as though I were a child that had performed a clever trick. The smug satisfaction on his face crumpled into pain a moment later.

  “You fucking bitch,” he snarled, lapping the blood from his hand where my hatpin had pierced the flesh. “You’ll pay for that.” He lunged forward again, only for my knee to meet a part of his anatomy my education to date had taught me was on the sensitive side. He collapsed, grunting in pain. His companion looked less than eager to confront me.

  “Unless you’d like to find out just how good I am with a scalpel, I suggest you go back to manhandling your corpses,” I spat.

  “You’re all the same,” Anderson called after me. “Frigid bloody spinsters who can’t take a joke.”

  With the door safely closed between myself and the anatomists, I leaned against the cold stone wall, breathing heavily. My legs were shaking and I felt sick. The memory of Paul’s hands on my skin, pushing up my skirts, pinning my arms against the bookcase, threatened to overwhelm me.

  His words rang in my ears. Don’t struggle, Sarah, I’m just being friendly. I thought you wanted to be a doctor. You can’t be such a prude with your patients.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  I forced myself to stand up. I wanted nothing more than to run up the stairs, into the comparative light and warmth, and wait for my uncle’s carriage far away from Walker and Anderson and their “little jokes.”

  But McVeigh’s note had my interest piqued. He certainly hadn’t shown any desire to help me the other day, but clearly something had happened to change his mind. I recalled with a shiver Walker’s comment about McVeigh paying for his company. Was the information he wanted to relay found at a brothel?

  It didn’t matter, I told myself. I couldn’t afford to choose who assisted me in this endeavor. And if McVeigh had a preference for tarts, he might be persuaded to show a little sympath
y for Lucy. Still, it didn’t make me any happier about visiting him alone, and I wondered if I should have found some flimsy pretext to lure a chaperone along with me. If Merchiston had known what I was about, he would have gone in my place, and perhaps I should have let him. I had walked blithely into my own destruction once before, thanks to Paul Beresford and that blasted deserted library, and with my newfound knowledge of the horrors of the world, I should have turned back.

  Like a fool, I didn’t.

  Moving along the corridor with its flickering gas lamps, I heard the low murmur of a voice and hastened my steps toward it.

  “Mr. McVeigh?” I called out. “It’s Miss Gilchrist. You said you wanted to see me.”

  I turned the corner only to find the corridor deserted. There were no footsteps now, and yet I had the unshakable feeling that someone had stood in my place only moments before.

  A noise from behind me made me jump, and I turned, hair standing on end, before I realized it had come from one of the dissection rooms. Turning back, I saw a flash of red before a pair of large hands grabbed me, and before I could cry out, something damp covered my nose and mouth and everything else faded away.

  When I opened my eyes I found myself sprawled in a heap on the stone floor. It was cold, and the sour tang of day-old sweat hung in the air. My mind felt cloudy and my head throbbed. As memory returned, I felt my blood turn to ice. Heart hammering in my chest, I remembered the men in the dissection room. Had they followed me, overpowered me, taken what I would not freely give? I didn’t think so—I felt sore but not violated, and a cursory glance at my watch revealed it was little over ten minutes since my last lecture had ended. They had meant to scare me then, not hurt me.

  Wincing, I stood and noticed the instrument of my assault at my feet. A handkerchief, soaked in chloroform. Feeling shaky, I forced myself to go back the way I had come and return to Walker and Anderson what they had mislaid.