Martha Peake (19 page)

Drogo Hall was a house often permeated by strange smells. Later, in America, when the whiff of an unfamiliar nostrum or an exotic specific reached her nose, Martha was affected with all the strangeness and unhappiness of those dark days after she lost her father. But in Drogo Hall her inclination on detecting some rank incomprehensible odour, as she crept along an unfamiliar corridor, was to follow it to its source; which was not easy, rank incomprehensible odours being as a rule closely attended at source by adults.

On one occasion she penetrated from the old west wing into the main body of the house, where her nostrils were all at once assailed with a most peculiar smell, one that she associated with overripe fruit; and tracking it with no little curiosity, she suddenly found herself at the head of the main staircase, a sweeping thing of gray stone which descended to the entrance hall with its vast fireplace, its hanging arms and armour, its flagged floor on which the heels of a man’s boots could ring with a satisfying solidity. She crouched behind the balustrade, from which concealed position she peered down into the hall and identified the source of the horrid smell.

At the back of the hall a pair of tall doors stood slightly ajar beneath a shallow stone arch, and from beyond came a single voice, oddly amplified, and she knew the voice to be Lord Drogo’s. Down
the sweep of stone stairs she came. This was perilous now, for she had no place to hide herself should anyone appear. From the bottom of the stairs she must cross the hall to reach the tall doors out of which emanated both Lord Drogo’s voice and the smell.

Without a second’s hesitation Martha ran across the flagged stone floor and slid between the doors, so that she was neither in the hall nor in the room beyond, but in the shadow, rather, of the doors that stood ajar.

Ah, Drogo! In my mind’s eye I can see him now, as Martha saw him that day so long ago—not as he was at the end, no, but as he was
then
, when he was in full possession of all his diabolical powers! Physically he was unremarkable: not a tall man, but built firm and compact, with small hands, a large domed skull, and hair cropped to a gray-flecked stubble. A nose hooked and arched in the Imperial Roman manner, a prominent chin, an air of distinct forbidding authority even when, as now, he is without a wig or finery of any kind, and wearing a black leather apron, smeared and stained with the proud excrementa of a thousand operations, strapped on over a white shirt open at the throat with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. There he stands in the well of a crowded semicircular room of steeply tiered seats with a gallery above, preparing to lecture to the eminent men of medicine of his day.

This is Lord Drogo’s Theatre of Anatomy. As he stands there he does not meet the forty pair of eyes gazing down upon him with no little anticipation. This is a man acknowledged as one of the great surgeon-anatomists then at work in London, a man at ease in the company of Cheselden, Smellie, Pott, the Hunters—the giants. And his reputation he holds so dear that his every public appearance is a drama in which he must play his role to the hilt, and that role is—the great man of medicine!

Never married, and with no taint of scandal attaching, he possessed a capacity for hard work that was said to be extraordinary.
And his curiosity toward all forms of life was legendary: he could be found at his table at four o’clock every morning, they said, already hard at it dissecting, for instance, a beetle, for no other reason than to acquire knowledge of the creature’s anatomy. The fire in his eyes, his restless hands, his quick temper, the quickness of all his movements—he was in such haste—he had such
greed
—to know all that could be known, ignorance was to him anathema and he must overcome it through relentless application of reason to observed fact, and he disdained all that smacked of metaphysics.

Though he did not leave a book. He left a museum, but not a book. He collected abnormalities. He claimed that such phenomena, by displaying wrong action in a part, could illustrate normal function. Hence his interest in Harry Peake. Interest, I say—he pursued that man, dogged him to his death, ay, to his death, and beyond—!

So this is the man who stands now behind the table in the well of his crowded Theatre of Anatomy, and gazes down at a corpse fresh from Tyburn Field, courtesy of course of Clyte. He taps his knuckles on the table and the room falls silent. Without a word to his audience he touches the dead man’s belly. He then brings his face down close to the body. He sniffs the length of it, small precise twitches of that hawk’s beak of a nose. He then lays his ear upon the chest. He listens. As he listens he places a fingertip on the head of the penis. He remains in this curious position for several moments.

At last the great man of medicine lifts his head, and as he rakes the amphitheatre with a fierce stare that has several doctors shifting uneasily and turning their faces aside—Francis Drogo has friends here but he also has enemies, he knows who they are and they know he knows—he touches his fingertip to his lips, and registers the taste with a comical pucker.

“Gentlemen,” he says.

A pause. Utter silence. The voice is cultivated. Men strain to hear him.

“Let us cut this poor fellow open. Let us”—he pauses, he eyes the assembled doctors—“see what he is made of.”

With that he stretches a hand, palm open, toward my uncle William—who has been standing to one side all the while—and William gives him the knife. God help him if it is not sharp as Old Scratch himself!

It seemed he would make the first cut now. But he paused, even as the tip of the knife sat snug in the notch in the dead man’s sternum. Again he looked up at his audience.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “I beg your leave. You came to see a man cut open, and cut open he shall be, and his every organ inspected as to its size, shape, situation and structure. Then we shall have the facts. But perhaps we are already in possession of facts relating to this man, and it is those facts we first should examine.”

There was some murmuring among the medical men. What new tack was this? These perorations of Lord Drogo were warmly anticipated by those who loved him. Others suffered silent resentment. Drogo put down his knife and examined the cadaver.

“We have lividity and swelling of the face. The eyelids are swollen and blue. The eyes themselves, gentlemen, are remarkable. They are red, and they protrude from their cavities. There is a bloody froth at the lips. The fists are clenched. There has been expulsion of faeces and urine. And one thing we would be foolish to overlook. There is a deep wound to the neck extending from below the left ear and under the chin. So deep is this wound that the vertebrae are exposed.”

Lord Drogo delicately peeled back the torn flesh and probed the wound with his fingers. Again there was some sniffing.

“Is it not a fact that a month ago this man rode a horse? I am aware that the horse was not his own, but we are not here to dissect his morals. That is the prerogative of a power superior even to that of Surgeons’ Hall.”

Uneasy laughter here; Drogo was indulging his famously sardonic sense of humour. Why did he not cut? He had set down the
knife and was leaning on the table on his palms and gazing frankly at his audience.

“A month ago he rode a horse. A week ago he entertained a certain lady in Newgate Gaol.”

All eyes shifted to the cadaver’s genitalia.

“Was the lady sound?” said Drogo, laying a hand upon the private parts, not so private now. “We shall see. But the point is, gentlemen, that he showed no sign of any sickness to suggest that within the week he would be—as we see him now.”

He lifted his hand and there was a brief murmur as every doctor in the Theatre of Anatomy contemplated the malodorous body on the table, whose pallor had assumed a distinct tinge of green.

“I employ a sensitive instrument, gentlemen.” He held up his hand, palm outwards. He laid it on the dead man’s forehead. He said: “Cold.”

He stood nodding at his audience, who now shuffled with some discomfort, suspecting themselves mocked.

“Cold. Gentlemen, this man has lost his vital heat. The loss of vital heat can have only one consequence.”

More nodding, more shuffling. Then a cane was tapped smartly on the floor and a voice from high in the amphitheatre, up in the gallery, an amused voice, a voice quite as cultivated as Drogo’s, said: “Come, my lord, do not tease us. Tell us what you mean to say.”

“Ah. Mr. Eliot. You would have my meaning, would you? Well, I tell you, sir: the man is dead.”

Laughter here.

“The fact is self-evident, my lord.”

“And the cause of death? That too?”

“He’s had his neck broke at Tyburn Tree.”

“But he has lost his vital heat. Now blood, surely, is responsible for the body’s natural heat. Deprive a body of circulation and the external parts become cold. Ergo, the man is dead. What tree, sir?”

“You jest too subtle for me, my lord.”

“I only say, that to speak of a principle of vitality is a nonsense,
when a fact is before us. He is cold. His neck is torn. So it is safe to infer that he has been hanged, and being hanged, asphyxiated. I reason it thus, from the use of these instruments”—he touched his eyes—“these”—he lifted his hands—“I have employed this”—his nose—“these”—his ears—“I have even used this”—he stuck out his tongue. “Gentlemen, there are no vital principles here. The evidence of our senses, this is enough. The body is cold. It is dead. There is a severe wound to the neck. Modest things, gentlemen. Make no assumption. Question all theory. Above all, be skeptical.”

The expression on the faces of a number of men present suggested that this last advice had been heeded already.

“I am told that this man was sprightly over his last few days of life, but given to periods of anxious introspection. I am told he was prone to outbursts of sudden anger. No doubt a superfluity of the cold wet humor. Too much black bile discharging from the spleen. Best stick a clyster up his arsehole.”

This last was said with such ponderous gravity that the entire room roared, even those from whose lips the same words might have slipped easily but the day before. Many now warmed to Lord Drogo’s theme, for it was at last becoming clear where he steered them.

“I should have liked to see his urine.”

The laughter is uneasy this time. These doctors take their urine seriously.

“Nonsense! The man was to be hanged and he knew it. This much we know. This is his
history
. This we remember, but nothing more, as we enter the chambers and alcoves”—here growing ironical once more—“of the human mansion. So let us examine the organs within. Let us know their design, and infer their function. For if they exist in Nature, they must have both design”—and here he picked up the knife once more—“and function.”

And thus the meagre philosophy of the great anatomist. No vital heat indeed! What then of passion? What of the flaming heart,
le coeur flamboyant
?