Beloved Poison (13 page)

‘Of course it’s a brain,’ I replied.

‘Whose?’

‘It belonged to the last person who looked through Dr Bain’s things, and asked too many questions.’

‘Ha ha,’ said Will. He put the brain back on the shelf. He crouched down, and lifted a flap of old sacking. The sack had been on the bottom shelf of the cupboard for as long as I could remember. I never looked at it. I was always too busy. But now Will had extracted from it something I had never seen before – at least, not in a doctor’s rooms.

It was a large curved hook, smooth and sharp, the handle ending in a rounded, wooden ‘T’ shape. ‘What’s this?’ A long iron jemmy followed it, black and oily looking in the lamplight. There was also a mattock and a thick coil of mouse-nibbled rope. ‘And these? What are these for?’

I ran my hand across the cold iron of the hook. The worn wooden handle fitted comfortably against my palm. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

‘I’ve seen hooks like this before,’ said Will. ‘Butchers use them to haul carcasses.’

I had seen them too, but I didn’t acknowledge it. ‘Well.’ I took the hook and the jemmy and put them back on the bottom shelf. I covered everything with the sack, just as it had been. ‘That sack has not moved from that spot for ten years, at least. The dust down here tells us as much. I imagine Dr Bain can hardly recall what he used these things for.’

I dusted my palms and stood up, just as we heard Dr Bain’s boots upon the stair. ‘And we’ve more interesting things to attend to this evening than to waste our time speculating about Dr Bain’s gardening tools.’ But I knew, in my heart, that those tools were not used for gardening. I glanced at Will out of the corner of my eye. I was sure, almost, that he too knew their purpose.

Dr Bain appeared. He was holding a small, circular mirror, edged in gold and backed with mother of pearl – the kind a lady might carry in her reticule. It was quite at odds with the brutal, iron instruments we had just been looking at, and it appeared small and fragile in Dr Bain’s large brown hand. The hook, and mattock, I could imagine would look far less incongruous.

‘This mirror belongs to Mrs Catchpole,’ I said. I had seen it in her hand many times, as she pored over her complexion when she thought no one was looking.

‘Does it?’ Dr Bain grinned. ‘Never mind. I’m sure she has others. Now then, let’s get on with it, shall we?’

I looked down at the six rectangular boxes, lined up before us on Dr Bain’s work bench. ‘“
These six things doth the Lord hate:
”’ I said, ‘“
yea, seven are an abomination unto him. A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood
—”’

‘You sound like a lady almoner,’ said Will. He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Shall we continue?’

I sucked a droplet of turpentine into the pipette and held it over the corner of the coffin where the writing was faintly visible. Slowly, gently, I squeezed the rubber teat. For a moment a muddy golden tear hung from the crystal tip. It swelled and trembled, and then it fell, spreading a perfect circle of oil into the parched paper lining. ‘Pass me the mirror,’ I said. ‘Quickly now. And the magnifying glass.’

The coffins yielded no more to us that evening. The bandages remained nothing other than strips of dirty cloth; the boxes that held them no more than a crude assemblage of roughly cut boards; the dolls slivers of kindling wrapped in string. Once we had read the words, revealed by a single droplet of turpentine, I had not the heart to look at them further. Dr Bain seemed relieved; Will perplexed.

‘But there’s another box,’ he said. ‘Another box with writing inside. Fragments, admittedly, but words nonetheless. Aren’t you curious?’

I shook my head. ‘Not now, Will.’

‘I think it’s time for Sorley’s,’ said Dr Bain briskly. ‘Come along, gentlemen.’

I nodded. My mind was filled with only one thing: the name, and the date, which we had found in the coffin.

‘
Elizabeth Maud
,’ said Dr Bain, pulling his coat on. ‘Who might that be?’

‘And the date,’ said Will. ‘
18th July 1822
. I can think of no significant event that occurred on that day. Does it mean anything at the hospital? Or would we be correct to assume that it was torn from some old case notes?’

‘The latter, I think,’ said Dr Bain.

‘1822. That was a long time ago.’

‘Twenty-four years.’ I was determined to say something, even though my throat was dry, and my words felt strange in my mouth.
Elizabeth Maud. 18th July 1822. Elizabeth Maud . . .
I could sense Will’s gaze resting upon me and I glanced up. He smiled, his blue eyes grave, worried. I looked away and caught sight of myself in the over-mantel mirror. My eyes were bloodshot, my cheeks like whey, my birthmark a gash of strawberry-coloured skin about my eyes. Once, when I was young, I had tried to rid myself of that hideous stain. Whilst my father was on the wards I had attached half a dozen leeches to my face in an attempt to drain the area white. He had returned to find me crouched behind the apothecary table. The leeches, speedily engorged, had slipped off. But the bites had continued to ooze, as they always did, so that the blood ran in thick crimson ribbons down my cheeks, over my fingers and onto my collar.

My father’s expression was stony. ‘Clean yourself up, Jem,’ he had said. ‘Before someone sees you.’

But no one had seen me. No one ever saw me. I was hidden from the world behind that birthmark as surely as if I had died on the day of my birth and someone other substituted in my place. My nativity was a source of sorrow and regret, never to be acknowledged or noted. But I knew its date, and I alone had marked its passing for twenty-four years. The 18th of July 1822 was a day I would never forget. It was the day I killed my mother; the day she exchanged her life for mine. Her name was Elizabeth Maud Flockhart.

I had no memory of my mother, and there was no portrait, no miniature or sketch, to allow me to trace my features in hers. But where art failed, science succeeded: an image of her pregnant belly graces the pages of Dr Sneddon’s anatomical paper on the
gravid uterus
like a ripe pear in a recipe book. Sliced open, a dead baby is visible curled within. She was sketched by Dr Sneddon himself – a fat apoplectic surgeon with meaty fingers and a surprisingly light touch with the ink and watercolours – and published for all to see in the
London Chirurgical Review
the autumn after she died.

The babe in her womb was my brother. No one could say when, or why, his tiny heart stopped beating, but it was clear that I had grown alongside his corpse for months. Beside my brother, who looked as pale and shapeless as a nub of coral, the doctor had drawn a large tear-shaped void. This space
I
had occupied, lying back on crimson cushions getting as fat as a grub.

Appalled by the living succubus fate had handed him in exchange for his wife and son, my father sent me to a wet nurse in the country. The woman looked after me well, and the time passed quickly enough. When I returned some seven years later, Dr Sneddon was dead. In my absence, I had been referred to only as ‘the child’, so that no one could remember which of us had survived, or what my name was.

‘Jem,’ my father said when, at last, he summoned me home. ‘That’s your name.’

‘Jemima,’ I corrected him. ‘
You
are Jem. Mr Jeremiah Flockhart, Apothecary to St Saviour’s Infirmary.’

He shook his head. ‘Jem,’ he repeated. ‘
That’s
your name now, mind you remember it. It takes a man to run this apothecary, and man you must be. You’ll have cause to thank me one day.’

Apart from my eyes, which they say are green like my mother’s, I looked just like him – I had his coarse hair, large bony hands and square shoulders. Over time I developed his mannerisms – if I was anxious I tugged my ear as I talked; I stood straight as a reed and walked with a long stride; and in the evening I sat before the fire with my legs stretched out before me. I became tall and lean. I was without grace or beauty; I had no use for the former, and the latter was never my prerogative.

Why did my father not marry again? Why did he not start another family to get the male heir all men want? I asked him many times. The answer, when he gave it, was always the same, though I could make no sense of it. It was because he was afraid. I should be afraid too, he said, though he would never tell me what I should fear, or why.

Walking to the chop house on Fishbait Street I had little to say. Dr Bain too appeared preoccupied. He seemed nervous, repeatedly glancing back the way we had come as though expecting at any moment to feel a hand upon his shoulder. I saw him put his fingertips to his forehead, gingerly touching the moist cut at his hairline and its surrounding bruise. No doubt his run-in with Dr Catchpole and Dr Magorian had unsettled him. But his uneasiness was infectious, so that in the end I too turned and looked back. I stopped. Was that a shadow I could see at Dr Bain’s door: tall and black and hooded with darkness? But then the fog ebbed and billowed, and the shadows swirled – and dissolved.

Dr Bain and I exchanged a glance. ‘Were you expecting someone?’ I said.

He shook his head.

We passed the wrought iron gates to the hospital, the grubby yellow glow of a candle visible through the window of the porter’s lodge. Further along, a line of ragged children were huddled together against the infirmary wall, beneath them the iron ventilation gratings of the furnace room. There were often children lying on the gratings. They slept there, wrapped up in sacks and old newspapers like bundles of rubbish. The porter tried to move them along, but they always came back again. Dr Bain knew each of them by name. He was often seen with a line of them following him down the road to the pie shop at the end of St Saviour’s Street. Dr Magorian was not so charitable. It threatened to engulf us all, he said, that tide of human misery and degradation. To leave them to die of cold and hunger would be a kindness, as the poor were so numerous that it was impossible to go anywhere without, quite literally, falling over them. Not two streets away from St Saviour’s lay the children’s neighbourhood: Prior’s Rents, a savage colony of blackened decayed tenements teeming with the most wretched examples of humanity. Their corpses filled St Saviour’s churchyard to bursting, and provided Will Quartermain with his ghastly work.

The children’s ringleader was a lad called Joe Silks – a snitcher of handkerchiefs by trade. He had appeared amongst the ragged children about two years earlier, and, after a series of scraps and brawls, had succeeded in assuming a leadership role. ‘Dr Bain!’ Joe’s rough-edged voice cried out from amongst a mound of greyish rags as we drew close. ‘Dr Bain, there’s a man what’s lookin’ for you.’

‘But I’ve been in all evening, Joe,’ replied Dr Bain. ‘I didn’t hear anyone at the door.’ He rooted in his pocket and tossed a shilling towards the bundle of rags. For a moment it glittered as it spun, caught in the lamplight like a moth in the moonlight. And then a bruised and bony arm flashed out, and deftly snatched the coin from the air.

‘No,’ said Joe, more vocal now that he had been rewarded. ‘No one
knocked
on yer door. But ’e looked. Looked right in! I seed ’im with my own eyes, just
lookin’
.’