The Resurrectionist Read online

  ‘No doubt there is a gland somewhere, a fattened lymph or some such you have in mind. After all, were not toads said to have jewels set within their skulls in less enlightened times?’

  Reddening, Marshall looks about, perhaps hoping for some support from his companions.

  ‘I implore you, Mr Marshall, if you know where this gland might be, please do not hesitate in informing us.’

  Now there comes a chuckle. Marshall lifts his chin defiantly.

  ‘I cannot say,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ says Mr Poll, ‘I dare say you cannot.’ At last, laughter breaks out, unrestrained and contemptuous. In deference to this appreciation Mr Poll inclines his head, then, knowing better than to let the scene outplay itself, he lifts a hand for silence. Almost at once the laughter dies away, leaving an uneasy quiet. Setting down the brain, Mr Poll wipes his hand upon his apron, then with a showman’s poise produces a vial.

  ‘See here,’ he says, ‘in this hand I hold an ounce of iron filings.’ Next he takes his notebook and sets it down where the students may see.

  ‘Emptied thus upon a sheet of paper they are inert, their arrangement determined by the accidents of chance. Physics, sir, no less, no more.

  ‘But if a magnet is introduced, then something quite different can be observed,’ he says, drawing a small metal rod from a drawer in the cabinet against the wall and placing it upon the page. With a sudden rush the filings shift and slide, their motion almost audible as they skitter across the paper, marking out the lines of force about the magnet’s poles.

  ‘No agency is visible, no atoms collide, yet the filings move. But how?’

  ‘Magnetism!’ calls one of the students from the rear.

  ‘Your powers of diagnosis are as remarkable as ever, Mr Dawson,’ Mr Poll replies, turning back to the body on the table.

  ‘Consider, gentlemen, the man that lies before you here. Once …’ With a practised pause he looks down at the figure. In the light from the lamp that hangs overhead, the skin has already begun to mottle, as if fading bruises swam beneath the skin.

  ‘… perhaps not quite as recently as we might prefer, he lived. His heart beat, blood coursed in his veins, his body was racked by all appetites carnal and sublime. Yet now he is as clay once more, the motion of his heart and blood gone still, his body cold. Already this shell of flesh begins to spoil, a week more and it will be foul, a year or two but tooth and bone. How can this be, you ask, what has changed? What force that once prevented this inevitable decline has failed, what secret charge has fled?’

  ‘His soul?’ quips Hibbert, and though a smile flickers across my master’s face the others do not laugh.

  ‘Look more closely at these filings here, and observe the image that they make. Though once inert they now have both shape and energy. Yet we need not invoke the cant of priests to understand how this might be.’

  Pausing, he stares out across the silent room. None move, nor speak; they are his.

  ‘We are men of science, gentlemen, students of nature. It is our purpose to tear down the veil of superstition, to pierce the very fabric of our living being and elucidate the nature of the force which animates these shells we call our bodies. And we will find it here, in this cold flesh. For these tissues we will divine the shadow of that force which drove the fuse within, which set his heart to flicker and beat. Call it a soul if you wish, yet I promise you it shall prove no more mysterious than this magnet’s power to bend these filings to its will.’

  With the lecture done the students make their way from the house into the street. Outside the afternoon has gone while we laboured here, and overhead the sky is already pale. Whether Marshall will be back or not I do not know: at a guinea a time it is an expensive way to be made a fool. But if not there will be others to take his place, for while there are many in London who give instruction in the science of anatomy, there are none who can exceed my master in quality of mind. Although the great work that will form the cornerstone of his enduring fame remains unfinished, and he is a man no longer young, in the grim theatre of the dissecting room he plays his role as none other can. With Charles beside him he is fast, merciless, a man in total command of his art, with a wit as sharp as his knife.

  Yet in truth his is not an easy disposition. For all his talent, he taunts those who would admire him. A miller’s son, sent to London to be made a clerk, who sought instead to be a surgeon – whose services now command a fee second only to that of Sir Astley of Guy’s, and who has attended the bedside of dukes and earls. A man who does not seek to hide his origins, nor the way they linger in his voice, but rather flaunts them almost as a goad, who keeps a carriage and fine house on Cavendish Square and whose daughter would be a prize for any man, were she not already being paid court by Charles de Mandeville.

  No doubt there are those with whom it rankles to be thus insulted, yet I do not think it is this alone which makes the students uneasy of him. For though as a surgeon and anatomist he has few peers, Mr Poll’s true achievements are greater, and deeper. From morning until long after dark he works, his restless energy filling the house, his curiosity often seeming more like a hunger, a monstrous appetite which will not be sated, probing always deeper, seeking to understand not just the structures of the body but the very essence of life itself.

  In this cause he has dissected all manner of creatures – crows and horses, fish and apes, insects, snakes, even a hippopotamus once, late of a menagerie in Chelsea – seeking to divine that which binds their being to the cage of their flesh. I have seen experiments too, things which amaze and horrify: a human tooth pulled still living from a harlot’s mouth, which took root and grew in a cockerel’s comb. The corpse of a newt given brief and slippery life by the application of electricity. A false womb, sewn from the bladder of a horse in which the blood-slathered foetus of a lamb swam briefly, struggling as if it were drowning in the air, before it grew still and died. In our work here, too, we seek out the monstrous and misshapen, those freaks in whom the script of Nature does not read true, for in the twisted mirror of their imperfections we might, he thinks, find the image of our own perfection.

  Nor is it just the dead who must bend to our will. I have seen Mr Tyne catch cats in a wicker trap of his own making, and more than once bring men and women here, bought for a florin in the ginshops of St Giles so they might sample some medicine or other and their reactions be measured and recorded. And a week after I came here I lured a dog to the house with a piece of meat so Mr Poll and Charles might open its chest, feel its living heart jump like a fish against our inquiring hands.

  As the lamps outside are lit the last of the students move away along the street, no doubt to some tavern, in which they will drink and laugh, and take their ease. Returning to the table I look down upon the opened corpse. It is a messy thing, to unstitch the dead, and it is my duty to ensure no trace is left in this room. Beside the basin which contains the heart, bisected to reveal its fat-clogged interior, the notebook Mr Poll used in his demonstration still sits where it was left. For all their theatricality his words have unsettled me, I think: it is a fearsome thing, this atheism of his; to put aside all belief which cannot be measured, to leave behind the strictures of what the world calls morality. Taking up the magnet I weigh it in my hand. Overhead the lamps hiss quietly, a steady sound, almost like rain. On the page the filings still mark out the ghost of the magnet’s presence; reaching down, I brush my hand across the page. The filings rustle, a sound like dead leaves, the lines broken where it has passed, the elegant whorls erased. Without the magnet the filings do not move to repair the pattern, instead they lie upon the page inert, unresponsive. They are such thin things, these lives of ours; cheap got, cheap lost, mere flickers against the ever dark, brief shadows on a wall. This life no more substantial than breath, a light which fills the chambers of our bodies, and is gone.

  IT WAS LATE that first night before I slept, summer heat giving way first to thunder, then to rain. High in my room I felt the night move by, m
y body restless in the dark. Outside the clocks chimed twelve, then one.

  Then all at once I was awake again. Overhead a cobweb turned, slipping in and out of existence as it moved against a draught; on the roof the rain still moved.

  I had been dreaming, though I did not know what of.

  As first I did not move, uncertain what had woken me. And then there came a knock, a second one I knew at once, louder and more insistent. In the black I fumbled for my boots, groping my way towards the door.

  The hall outside was empty, my movements loud in the unfamiliar space. About me everything silent, and still. The knocking coming again as I descended, making me jump.

  Pushing the grille aside I peered out, and a face appeared, pressed so close I could smell the gin’s sweet stink upon his breath.

  ‘It’s a great time you’re taking for such a night,’ said a voice, its accent Irish, and thick. Instinctively I recoiled.

  ‘Who are you?’ I demanded, keeping my voice low. There was a moment then in which I felt him watching me. When he spoke again his voice was harder.

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said, ‘just open it.’

  ‘Not without a name,’ I insisted.

  ‘Get Tyne, or the prentice, they’ll know.’

  I hesitated, but as I did I heard a step behind me and, turning, saw Robert there, a lamp held in his hand.

  ‘No, Gabriel,’ he said, ‘do as he says.’

  The owner of the voice was small, and slight; behind him stood a cart, its shape outlined in the rain, another figure holding the horse’s head cradled to his chest. Then Mr Tyne at my elbow, his voice sharp in my ear.

  ‘Help them; there’s been enough noise already.’

  I pulled away, stepping out into the rain. In the doorway Mr Tyne watched, his eyes scanning the length of the sleeping street. Seeing me looking back he smiled, a thin thing of pleasure at my discomfort.

  The rain spilled downwards, cold wires descending to strike our faces and cheeks. In the cart the Irishman was lifting something from the straw, a bundle shape, swinging it towards me, and then it was on my shoulder, heavier than I had expected, its bindings wet and thick with the scent of earth. Staggering, I felt the weight within begin to shift, a loose collapsing motion, as if it were soil it held, or stones, cold water running from the sacking and down my neck. And as it did I understood what it was I held, the shock sent me slipping on the oily cobbles. But then Mr Tyne was upon me.

  ‘Sweet Jesus, boy,’ he hissed, grabbing me by the arm and pulling me upright, ‘would you have the beaks upon us?’

  Their names were Caley, and Walker. In the dark one might have taken Caley for a boy of fifteen, so slight was he. But by the lights in the cellar he was clearly as old as Robert or I, his slightness not that of youth but of poverty – though with his kissing lips and too-pretty face, there was something of the child about him all the same, callow and cruel, an abruptness in the way he moved which made me uneasy of being close to him.

  Once they were gone we unbound the bodies they had brought, began the washing. I should have been repulsed, I thought, as we worked, but I was not, nor was I afraid. Rather, I watched my hands upon their skin move as if they were not my own, as if I were outside myself, my body distant.

  I did not sleep again that night, images of those faces and bodies rising unbidden in my mind. On my fingers the smell of the vinegar still lingered, and on my arms and neck I could feel the memory of their touch. With the first light of the dawn I rose, taking myself down, back into the yard, and there I ran the butt, watching the water break onto the stones. Slowly I drew up my sleeves, lathering higher, but still I felt them there, and so at last I pulled off my shirt, and leaning forward let the water run across my hair and down my back, knowing even as I did it would not wash their presence from my flesh.

  MY FATHER DIED when I was twelve. We found him half a mile from the house, huddled in the wall’s low lee. His face turned away from the world, into the dark stones, his body half covered by the snow. The sky overhead as fragile as an egg.

  It was our neighbour, Tobias, who first noticed he was gone. January, the new year scarcely begun. I saw Tobias coming, from where I sat in the window above the kitchen. As he climbed he stared ahead, his head held stiff and straight; only rounding the last bend did he seem to look up, his eyes passing over the ruin of the yard, the broken gig and abandoned furniture.

  I had opened the door before he knocked, and he peered past me into the darkened room.

  ‘How long has he been gone?’ he asked. I bit my lip. For as long as I could remember I had been forbidden to tell any visitors who should come calling where my father was.

  ‘Three days,’ I said at last. Tobias nodded, looking me over, no doubt considering whether he should take a starving boy with him on the hour’s walk into the town.

  ‘The dog is his?’

  As if knowing it was she of whom we spoke she pressed her nose against my hand.

  ‘Bring her,’ he said.

  Although the blizzard had passed, leaving the sky clear and empty, the air outside was cold, our breath rising in clouds. Tobias did not speak as we made our way down the high road, and so I was aware mostly of the silence that surrounded us, the way the lonely cries of the crows echoed out across the empty hills.

  As we came about the bend in the road from which the town became visible, the dog lifted her head, her ears rising and tail quivering, as she would each time my father approached the house. Tobias glanced at her, perhaps thinking to tell me to catch hold of her, but she was too quick. For a hundred yards she hurried on, stopping at last before a low drift of snow which had gathered by the wall. For a few seconds she hesitated, emitting a plaintive, confused whine, then lifting her head she yapped twice. Tobias placed a hand upon my shoulder.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said, and still not altering his pace he continued on to where the dog stood, pawing at the snow. I watched him stop, and kneel. From the top of the drift a dark shape could be seen; reaching out a hand Tobias touched it, then he stood, and turned to me.

  His body bore no sign of any violence. Indeed his face, rimed and blue with ice, seemed almost at peace. It is possible he was taken suddenly by a seizure of the brain or of the heart, but more likely he had grown tired and confused in the falling snow, and fuddled by the drink and the cold had decided to rest awhile. Save for where the dog had scratched at him, nuzzling his frozen flesh as if she might warm it back into life, the snow was untouched, broken only by a long line of bird tracks, which ran across the road towards his form, then turned aside and ended, the bird having taken flight once more, lost to the air and the sky.

  I remember my father as a restless, unpredictable force, a man possessed of a careless charm and great enthusiasms as well as fits of despondency and impotent rage. He was never violent with me, nor was the harm he did me done with any calculation, it was simply that he lived too much at the mercy of his own nature. Indeed, most often I seemed barely to exist to him, then, as if remembering me, he would seek to force upon me an intimacy we did not share. Had he lived even a few years longer I might have seen in him what I now guess he was, a man too fond of drink and cards, unhappy somewhere deep within himself, whether from some harm done him long before or by natural inclination, and possessed of the gambler’s temperament, with its wild vacillations and capacity for self-deception. Yet to me he was simply my father, a figure I desired to be close to but had learned through experience not to trust.

  Even from this distance though I can see something of the man he was when young. Handsome, charming, filled with wild energy and a sense of his own possibility. His father managed the manor farm, and yet it was his father’s employer who took an interest in him and saw he got his letters, that his rough edges were smoothed away so he might find a place in the world. It was a fine figure he cut, I am sure, for he rode as if born to the saddle, and even near the end, when his looks had blurred and his clothes were ragged, he could still charm a maid or a passing lad
y with some show of gallantry.

  Full of gin and regret, he would sometimes speak of those early years, not with the bitterness I might expect but with something like fondness. Disowned when he eloped with his benefactor’s daughter, then left a widower with a child to raise before six months were up, he soon found the manners and the charm that had sustained him wore thin under the weight of his gambling, and so began the long, slow slipping down that was to be our life together. From London to Bath, from Bath to Liverpool, from Liverpool to York and finally to the road where he died, high in the hills above the city, only a few miles from the town in which he was born.

  I waited by my father’s corpse with the dog for company while Tobias walked the last mile or so into town. The day was still, and all about the snow glittered in the sunlight. I remember looking down at him, the dull presence of his silent form. No doubt it came as a shock, but I do not remember feeling surprise or even grief, only a kind of dullness, as if this discovery were somehow always waiting here to be made by me, in this moment. This is what the world is, I remember thinking, a place of absences, and leavings.

  On the day of the funeral Tobias walked with me into the town. He was a Methodist, as many were already in those parts, and so would not join me by the grave, but he stood close enough for me to see him, his hands crossed before him, his hat held in them. I do not doubt my father would have liked to have been remembered as a popular man, yet his passage that day was marked by his son, the priest and two men who would not again see the money they had lent him.

  Once the ceremony was over the rector took me aside. He was a small man, running to fat, and though I did not know him I had heard from one of the children of the town that he had had a son who died of a fever the summer past, a sickly child who had never prospered.

  ‘Tobias says you can read,’ he said.

  I did not reply, just stood.

  ‘I could use a boy in the classroom,’ he said, ‘to help me with my teaching.’