The Resurrectionist Read online

  Sometimes I wonder what would have come of me had he not spoken that day. An orphanage perhaps, maybe some farm if I were lucky. But instead I ate with him in the Rectory, and studied in the school he kept. But though he treated me as if I were his own I felt no love for him, only failure, as if some vital part had died in me that day.

  BY BARNARD’S INN I hear a shout, my name called loud amidst the racket of the street. Startled, I stop, and then it comes again, issuing from a coach on the road’s other side. Its window open, Charles within.

  ‘Is it not late for you to be about?’ he calls.

  ‘I have been with a friend of my guardian,’ I begin, but he cuts me off with a grin.

  ‘It was a joke, Gabriel,’ he says. ‘Where does this friend of yours reside?’

  ‘Camden –’ I begin again, only to be silenced by a shout from within the coach.

  ‘Boring!’

  I hesitate, but Charles is not to be deterred.

  ‘And now where are you bound?’

  ‘Home,’ I say, then correct myself. ‘Back to the house.’

  Inside the coach there is a groan, as if its utterer has been pushed beyond all endurance. Charles hesitates, glances over his shoulder, then with a look I do not fully understand turns back to me.

  ‘Come with us,’ he says.

  I shake my head.

  ‘I do not think …’ I say, but Charles waves me down.

  ‘Why ever not? Your work is done for the week.’ He opens the door so I may climb up. ‘Do not fear,’ he says. ‘We will get you home again.’

  The carriage is already full, Charles and another three I do not know seated two a side, so as I clamber in they must shift and squeeze to make room for me. The driver calls down a complaint that five is too many for his horses, but this only elicits a jeer from the one who sits opposite me. When the driver persists he rises to his feet and shouts a threat, and so the thing is ended and with a curse the driver cracks his whip. Falling back into his seat the man regards me scornfully.

  ‘What manner of bird is this?’ he asks of Charles, his face contemptuous. Though not tall he has a powerful frame and would be handsome, in a brutal sort of way, were it not for his nose, the line of which is broken, as if inexpertly set.

  ‘Gabriel Swift,’ I say, reaching out my hand. To my shame he does not do the same, just looks down at it incredulously. This insult seems to provoke his companion to great merriment, and all at once I realise that they are drunk.

  ‘His name is Chifley,’ Charles interrupts, ‘and he is an insolent cur for not taking your hand.’

  At this Chifley bellows with laughter. ‘I’d not shake hands with you, de Mandeville, were you not paying for my drinks.’

  Charles smiles at this, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘This is Caswell,’ he says, indicating the man who sits to Chifley’s left. Although he can be little older than Charles or Chifley his pale brown hair is already thinning. No doubt in an attempt to remedy this deficiency he has affected a style in which the sides are grown longer and swept across the crown. His face too is that of an older man, weak and plumpish, but kind enough. Unlike Chifley he extends a hand, which I take.

  Finally Charles turns to the figure beside me, who sits in silence. ‘And this is May,’ he says. May reaches out and takes my hand, clasping it in his and shaking it rather too vigorously. His face is gaunt, and has a strange pallor about it, but he smiles readily enough.

  ‘Where was it you said you had been?’ Charles asks. I had thought him drunk a moment ago, as Chifley and Caswell plainly are, but now he seems his usual self.

  ‘The home of a friend of my guardian,’ I say. ‘Mr Wickham, who has the parish in Camden.’

  ‘You go there often?’

  ‘I have been his guest three times.’ Thinking of the stultifying evenings I have spent there, listening to the droning voice of Mr Wickham and the tuneless warbling of his daughter, Georgiana, I hesitate. ‘They have been most kind to me.’

  Charles smiles gently. ‘It seems a poor way for a young man to spend his evening.’

  This is a talent of Charles, I have learned, to make those with whom he speaks feel he has understood the true meaning of their words. ‘I have few alternatives,’ I say, grinning. ‘My friends in London are not numerous.’

  ‘What of Robert?’

  ‘He is with his family tonight.’

  Perhaps bored by our conversation Chifley begins to sing, and almost at once Caswell and May join him. Charles looks at them, then back to me.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

  Charles leans back, a secret smile playing on his lips. ‘Does it matter?’

  As the carriage jolts over the stones I look across at Charles. Three months I have worked alongside him and yet for all his humour and warmth I feel I have little grasp on who he is. A parson’s son, he trained first with Sir Astley and later on the Continent, earning fame for the steadiness of his hand and the swiftness of his work. Robert says that Mr Poll believed no man his equal in the skills of their craft, until he met Charles. It was Mr Poll then who petitioned for Charles’s admission into the College of Surgeons.

  Since then Charles’s reputation has grown to rival that of men twice his age, and his services are sought after by many of quality and influence. Yet a stranger might wonder at the closeness of the bond between Charles and Mr Poll, so different are their natures. Where Mr Poll holds himself always aloof, Charles has an ease which brings comfort to all he encounters, speaking not just as an equal but as a friend to those he treats, as at home in the rooms of the humblest as in the parlours of the powerful.

  The carriage delivers us to a low-ceilinged tavern just off the Strand. Inside it is crowded with a great many men and women who sit pressed close one against the other or swirl between the tables. Everywhere is talking and laughter and hilarity. Charles and Chifley lead us to a table by the fire and, calling for the owner, order veal chops. I hear this nervously: my first months in London have been expensive ones, and have consumed almost all of the money my guardian provided me. Although I have written to him seeking an advance upon the money for the next half-year, I am worried I will be unable to pay, and even more alarmed that I may have to admit it. Charles though sees my discomfort, giving me a confidential look and telling me not to concern myself, I shall celebrate as they do tonight. Confused, I ask what the occasion is, which provokes great amusement, but before I can get to the bottom of this, wine is brought, and glasses filled and raised.

  As we drink I try to divine what I can of my new companions. Chifley buys and sells horses, I learn, although he seems to treat his business as little more than an excuse to ridicule those who would use his services. By contrast Caswell, though amiable enough, appears to have no profession. And May calls himself an artist, although it is difficult to imagine him at the canvas, for he talks almost without stopping, breaking in and interrupting himself as he goes, as if humming with some mad energy. The effect of this is almost endearing, for he is utterly without malice, and laughs constantly, but there is something uncomfortably vulnerable in his guilelessness. He drums his fingers on the table in a rapid tattoo, and though I cannot feel annoyed, the habit angers Chifley, who several times demands that he stop, but each time he starts again, until at last he excuses himself and vanishes to the room Chifley insists on calling the thunderbox.

  The chops are very fine, and although I have dined already this evening I eat them hungrily. Chifley waves a hank of bread in my direction.

  ‘Do you starve this sparrow?’ he demands of Charles, who looks at me with a quizzical smile.

  ‘Do we starve you, Gabriel?’ he asks.

  I shake my head, telling him no, although this is not entirely true. At Mr Poll’s ruling, Robert and I eat mostly tripe and gruel, our master holding excess of meat a source of melancholy. For a few moments Charles contemplates me, then he splashes more wine into my glass and bids me drink.

  I am not sure when it dawns on me that I am dru
nk. Caswell is singing some song about a shepherd and a milkmaid, the detail of which I am having difficulty following, although I find it quite hilarious. On the crown of his head, what remains of his sandy brown hair has stood up in a kind of tuft, and his scalp shines pinkly beneath. But he sings in a fine tenor, eyes closed as if he is lost in his own voice, the rich sound incongruous from such a foolish, nervous-looking man. Charles has one of the women on his lap; for some time they have been engaged in a conversation in which he whispers things to her and she giggles, then whispers back. Where May has got to I am not sure, but Chifley is beating on the table, urging Caswell to sing again. A waiter is filling my glass, and I join in the cry that has gone up for Caswell to sing again, stamping my feet on the flags and pounding the table. Then, we are in the street and someone else is singing, not Caswell now but Chifley, I think; a face is pressed at the carriage window, leering, someone shouting from above us to be quiet. Sometime in this there is a moment when my gorge rises and, flinging open the door, I fall into the street, my stomach spilling its contents onto the cobbles like an upended wineskin, burning my throat and nose. When I am done being sick I feel myself lifted from behind, and my feet begin to move beneath me, then all at once I am on the doorstep of the house, and Charles and Chifley are thrusting me through the open door.

  IN ITS WOMB of glass it hangs suspended, half-turned as if it sought to hide itself from the viewer’s gaze. Though it has but one set of legs, above the waist a second, smaller body grows, a chest and arm which emerge from the chest of the first, and though this second body is but half-made, on its top there is a head, as perfect as the body is grotesque. Half-hidden by its larger twin this smaller head seems to sleep, nestled close against its protector, the tiny form cradled by the larger’s arm.

  But while the smaller sleeps the larger is awake, or so it appears, for by some trick of the preserver’s art its eyes are rendered so they seem to follow the viewer to every corner of the room. The lids half-hooded over sightless orbs, their depths somehow malign, like those of a toad or some heavy, hateful thing, jealous of life and all its joys. But for the puckered stitches which run in a Y from their necks to their common nave, their skin is smooth, perfect as any child’s, yet pale and chill as marble or alabaster.

  On the shelves all about stand a hundred other jars, each filled with their own monstrosity. In some the limbs and organs of the dead preserved, hands and eyes, ears and feet, their flesh turned grey and horrible by the alcohol; in others different things, less easily recognised: a blackened lung, a massive heart, an eyeball trailing its white thread of nerve like a jellyfish. In one stands the head of a man neatly bisected with a saw, the face on one side perfect and unblemished, eyes closed as if but for a moment, the other half pressed close against the glass to reveal the layers of bone and brain and muscle, the delicate chambers of the nose, the tongue’s fat root. But here too are other things, less easy for the untutored eye to look upon, ones which draw their shapes from the shadowed realms of fevered sleep. Six-fingered hands, a scaled foot, the generative organs of an hermaphrodite, a half-grown cock and balls nestled in its vagina’s anemone folds. And in their midst a line of larger jars, each holding a child deformed in some dreadful way: one’s head an empty sac which billows on its neck; another made as a mermaid is, its back and legs disappearing into serpent coils; the head of the next turned inside out, the teeth growing in concentric rings through the exposed meat of the palate as if the inverted hole sought to consume the face in which it sits from chin to brow.

  Each is preserved through the work of Mr Tyne, by whose cunning hands these creatures and their skeletons are given this semblance of life. Once, long ago, he was apprenticed to Gaunt, who makes teeth for the rich. From him he learned the art of setting teeth with wire and horn, of carving palates and clamps to hold them tight in their new owner’s mouths. And from him as well he learned to find teeth, whether from the living or, more often, from the mouths of the dead. It was through this trade that he came to the attention of Mr Poll, who saw in him even then a talent for the craft, for the finding of the dead and the purloining of their riches. In time he bought Mr Tyne from his apprenticeship and took him as his own, setting him to work among the rookeries and slums, procuring the bodies of the dead as he once procured their teeth for Gaunt.

  In every way he is my master’s man, his faithful shadow, uncomplaining in his diligence, ruthless in Mr Poll’s interests. Throughout the city he has men and places that he goes, sniffing out cases in which my master might find interest, arranging for the delivery of those we cannot save to the house. His is a secret nature, prying and watchful, and though he has no power over Robert and me, we have learned to watch him well, and trust him not at all. For there is no trace of kindness in him, however these creations that he makes seem to show the stifling hand of a mother’s love, and he treats this house as if it were his own. But though he is my master’s man in every outward way, I have sometimes glimpsed another thing within, a hatred harboured deep inside, as if he bridled to be so possessed.

  AS THE DANCING PAUSES and she lowers her mask I feel myself tremble; in the hissing cast of the limelight her face shivers, as if she were at once real and insubstantial, a creature composed not of matter but of the substance of dreams. Marked out against the ghostly pale of the stage paint, her eyes look huge, liquid, her mouth wide as an ache.

  Amidst the swirling colour of the ball upon the stage she stands like a point of stillness, and I stare at her, hungry, frightened she might somehow evaporate or I might wake, losing the sense of her lines in the urgency of this feeling. In the pit the orchestra is playing again, the audience laughs, then she replaces her mask and steps aside so her companion might speak once more.

  The play is a drama, a thing of pirates and Turks set in a Venetian palace. She plays not the heroine, but a smaller role, a friend, and as the play proceeds she comes and goes, sometimes lingering with the heroine or the man who would be her lover, sometimes with the actor who plays the man that she herself desires. Her largest scene is the attempted seduction of her by the villain of the piece, which she plays with a strange kind of resignation, as if she has already lost herself to him in her mind, and her own lover’s rescue of her, when it comes, is already too late. Each time she appears she takes the audience’s attention, all of us, even the murmuring crowd in the stalls below falling quiet when she speaks. Why this should be is not clear, for she does not play to them as the others do, nor does she invest her lines with great drama. Indeed the part seems no more than a semblance, meant to disguise something else, something unrevealed and unsaid, an illusion within an illusion.

  Later, in the rooms to which we repair, I see her pass through. Her face is clean of the paint, and she seems smaller, almost fragile. She walks with a pair of men and a young woman with blonde hair. She does not look our way as she moves through the room, but I cannot help but tense. May’s mouth comes close to my ear.

  ‘What is it you see, my little bird?’

  ‘That woman, she was in the play,’ I say, not sure whether it is a question or a statement.

  ‘She was,’ May says. His breath is hot. ‘You think her beautiful?’

  I nod, and May chuckles. Chifley too has seen me looking at her.

  ‘Your prentice is learning your habits, de Mandeville,’ he declares. There is laughter then, but also the look in Chifley’s eye as he laughs, the chill of his appraisal.

  THE KNOCK COMES unexpectedly, loud in the empty house. As the door opens, there is the noise of the street, a voice, the words inaudible. Then, sure and steady, the sound of a man’s boots, overhead, moving closer.

  Uneasily I rise, turning to face the figure who descends the stairs. He is tall, and powerful, and though no longer young moves with the tread of a man aware of his own strength and unafraid of it. By the fire he stops, opening his hands to warm them.

  ‘A wet night,’ he says. His voice is deep, its tones those of a gentleman.

  ‘Indeed,�
�� I say, glancing towards Mrs Gunn, who stands on the stairs behind him. She does not speak, just shakes her head, her face communicating some warning I cannot understand.

  ‘They say a child was taken down a drain in Finsbury and drowned,’ he says, looking at me as if to see how I will respond.

  ‘What is your business here?’ I ask. ‘Whom do you seek?’

  He smiles at this.

  ‘Your name is Swift, is it not?’ he asks, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘It is,’ I say carefully. He nods, his gaze straying to the books spread upon the table. On one page is a diagram, a picture of a child still huddled in its mother’s womb, the image engraved with terrible precision. Reaching down he lets his fingers stray over it, then turns the page so he may see the next.

  ‘You are apprenticed here, they say, bound by your guardian, your master’s cousin.’

  It makes me uneasy that he should know such things. In the silence he looks up again.

  ‘Who are you?’ I ask, and he laughs, a curiously silky sound.

  ‘You mean they have not told you?’ he asks, watching me. ‘Lucan, my name is Lucan.’

  I do not reply.

  ‘Perhaps there are things they think it better you not know,’ he says, and turns another page.

  In the fire’s light his wide mouth and hooded eyes lend something sensual to the too-brutal line of his jaw and his crooked nose. Not handsome, but something else, less easy to describe.

  ‘Your master, Swift, where is he?’ he asks, his voice lingering on my name as if tasting it.

  ‘Not here.’ The edge of the table is hard against my thigh.

  ‘And de Mandeville?’

  I shake my head. For a long moment he stands, unspeaking, his eyes not leaving mine. I feel the power of him, almost like a desire it trembles in me.

  ‘If you have a message for my master or Mr de Mandeville I shall ensure they receive it.’