Sawbones (3 page)

He dashed off the note by candlelight at his writing desk under the window. He told Anna that he could see her at lunchtime; they could meet in the porch at St Anne’s if it was very cold. He sealed it with a bit of wax and pulled on his jacket as he made his way downstairs. Then he was out of the back door, past Mrs Boscaven arguing with the milkmaid, and back to Lisle Street. The whole city was sparkling with frost, everything glittered and shone and Ezra had to watch his step, as the cobbles and the new stone paving sets were treacherous.

The newspaper boys were shouting about wars in far-off places, Sweden and Russia and Turkey, and about the king of France, who in the midst of the revolution had tried, and failed, to escape his own country. Ezra bought a copy of
The Times
for Mr McAdam and tucked it under his arm.

The shutters were up on the cloth warehouse, and the curtains were drawn upstairs. He knew the family would not be up yet, but Betsey would have cleaned the grates and laid the fires and would now be hard at work in the kitchen at the back of the house. Ezra slipped into Archer’s Mews and, seeing the candle lit, tapped on the kitchen window.

Betsey’s surprised face popped up on the other side of the glass, but when she saw who it was she shook her head, frowning, and gestured for him to leave.

“Betsey, please,” Ezra whispered urgently – she couldn’t hear him, he knew, but he dared not raise his voice. Betsey didn’t look convinced. “Please,” Ezra mouthed again.

Then he heard the bolts being drawn back, and Betsey ushered him in. She looked disapproving, but there was something soft in her expression.

To Ezra’s surprise Anna was there, sitting on a bench in the middle of the kitchen. When she saw Ezra she tried quickly to draw herself together and seem her normal, poised self, but Ezra could tell that she’d been crying. What was she doing awake so early?

“Five minutes,” Betsey was saying. “Five minutes is all I’ll give the two of you, and when I come back he had best be on his way.” She turned to Ezra. “If Mr David finds you he’ll skin you quicker than ever your Mr McAdam could!” And she bustled from the kitchen, leaving Ezra and Anna alone.

“Anna, what is it?”

“Oh, Ezra,” she said. “David is to be married!” Ezra shook his head. He didn’t understand. Her brother to be married – surely that would be good news? But Anna looked away, her brow furrowed. “He is getting married and we are going away, to Holland.”

“Holland!” Ezra stared at her. Was this what the argument had been about, last night? “But your shop—”

“Mother will stay,” said Anna, with a hint of bitterness, though she kept her voice calm. “But she is sending me with David, to the Hague, to live with my cousins.” Her hands bunched in the cloth of her dress. She looked tired – perhaps she had not slept at all.

Ezra felt a knot of pain in his chest. He would have said it was his heart breaking, but he knew, from the number of hearts he had seen in a variety of sections and cross-sections, that hearts were only pumps made flesh, and could not make you feel like this. “But surely, if you wanted to, you could stay?”

“Do you think I don’t want to?” Anna cried. “Do you think I wouldn’t sooner stay here? I love London.” And perhaps he was only fooling himself, but the way she looked at him then allowed him to hope it was not only London she would miss. “But Mother insists. She says my prospects will be better in Holland.”

Ezra had to look away. He knew what that meant. In Holland, Mrs St John was no doubt hoping, Anna would spend her time in the company of young men more suitable than a mulatto surgeon’s boy.

“When?” he asked, hopelessly.

“A week,” Anna whispered.

There was the sound of a door slamming somewhere up in the St John house, and Anna jumped.

“You have to go,” she said, and she looked close to tears again but Ezra knew she wouldn’t cry in front of him.

Ezra wanted to weep too.

He walked slowly home to Great Windmill Street. He would have to imagine a future without his oldest friend, Anna St John. She would be living a new life in Holland. Without him. He swallowed. He would have to immerse himself in work as throroughly as possible.

Back at the house, Mrs Boscaven had breakfast on in the kitchen. Though he was chilled to the bone, Ezra couldn’t stomach the porridge she had made, and sipped his coffee with the maid, Ellen, and Mr McAdam’s valet and footman, Henry Toms.

“I reckon,” Toms said, grinning as he helped himself to Ezra’s portion of porridge, “as you’ve just found out about the St John girl pushing off back to where she comes from.” Toms was only a year or so older than Ezra but liked to think it made all the difference as far as knowledge of worldly matters went.

Mrs Boscaven tutted. Ezra gritted his teeth; it was all he could do to keep his face from betraying his feelings.

Toms went on, “Going away with her brother, I heard. Didn’t want no brown babies! ’Specially not ones whose daddy might have been in a freak show!” He tipped his head on one side and held a breakfast roll up as if it were attached to the side of his face like a tumour, and laughed. “Or worse, someone who’s only worth tuppence and should be sold back to the West Indies where he came from!”

Ezra pushed his chair back and got up, fists ready. He was going to punch the idiot into next week. Mrs Boscaven put a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t you dare talk that way, Henry Toms!” she said sharply. “Or I’ll make sure the master knows what happens to the ends of his candles, and his soap. And that pair of breeches you swore blind went missing.”

Toms looked shifty. Ezra didn’t sit back down. He took his coffee and left.

It was light in the anatomy room. Ezra had covered both cadavers with a sheet the night before; they lay side by side on the dark, stained table. Ezra sipped his coffee. He was not a slave and he was not a freak. He pushed Toms’ words away – he had work to do. Outside he could hear the first of the students queuing up in the cold. He reminded himself he had to see Mr McAdam before the lecture began, tell him about the tongueless man, the gunshot and the tattoo.

Ezra looked up through the glass roof to the iron-grey sky. He sighed and wished he were somewhere else.

“Ah, Ezra, here all ready!” Mr McAdam swept into the room. “Open the doors and let the poor frozen truth seekers in, lad.”

Ezra put down his coffee cup and tied on his apron. “Sir, please. There’s something I need to show you first.”

“The child? Has putrefaction set in?” The surgeon took a deep breath in. “Aah! You’ve made good with the rosemary. It smells more like a herb garden than an anatomizing room.”

“Thank you, sir. No, sir. It’s the man.” Ezra lifted up the sheet. “It’s a shot wound. And not a duel with pistols. He’s a Negro, and the word of such a fight would have been all over the city.”

“You’re right, lad. Well spotted. What else?” Mr McAdam took his glasses out of his waistcoat pocket and put them on.

“His hands, sir – a gentleman’s hands. He must be wealthy, sir. And, by the look of things, shot in the back.”

Mr McAdam raised an eyebrow.

“One more thing, sir,” Ezra said. “He’s had his tongue cut away.”

“Recently? In death?”

“No, a long time ago. See? Oh, and sir, you see this mark, on his forearm, I couldn’t…”

McAdam leant closer and picked up the lifeless limb. “Arabic. Could be Persian. Makes sense. The rulers of those houses often cut the tongues of their servants.”

“But his hands, sir…”

“There is more than one kind of work, Ezra.”

Mr McAdam said nothing for a long time. He looked again in the man’s mouth, then at where the earrings had been pulled out of his ears, and at the gunshot wound. Finally he looked up. They could hear the crowd waiting on the other side of the door, shuffling and stamping their feet to keep warm in the cold.

“This is an odd fish and no mistake,” he said at last. “Belonged to someone important, no doubt.”

“Belonged? He was a slave?”

“I would think so. We must hope his master doesn’t miss him. I could make enquiries at the Ottoman Embassy. Met a fellow at a surgeon’s dinner, can’t for the life of me remember his name. Ali? Aziz? Worked as a surgeon for the sultan, apparently. Perhaps our man here is one of theirs. How’s the child?”

“Nothing unusual there, sir,” Ezra said. “Drowned, I reckon. Five, six days ago. Some putrefaction in the eyes. The skin on the hands and fingers is beginning to slip. Signs of the rickets. If he’d not drowned I don’t think this one would’ve been long for this world.”

McAdam nodded. “Good, good.” He frowned thoughtfully. “If anyone asks, we’ll say the man died on a boat come in from the West Indies. Ezra, fetch the bone saw. We’ll open him up before they come in and the students will be too busy swooning at their first sight of a man’s heart
in situ
to see the gunshot or the tattoo.”

“As you wish, sir.”

“Oh, and buck up, lad. Your face is a mask of sorrow.” Mr McAdam began to saw through the man’s sternum. He spoke up to be heard above the noise of metal on bone. “Mrs Boscaven has told all, and I assure you, I too know the pangs of first love. The trick, my boy, is to kill your feelings, just as we do every day in here. Dispatch those tender emotions just as swiftly and cleanly as one would a sick horse. Brooding is neither healthy nor productive.” Mr McAdam smiled. “Unless, perhaps, one is a poet!”

“No, sir,” Ezra said, taking the saw and wiping it clean. It seemed every soul in the parish knew his business! Why, he would not have been surprised if the man on the table had piped up to offer advice, even with only half a tongue.

The students had gone. Ezra was sewing up the cadavers, ready for Mr Allen and his company to come and dispose of them once darkness fell. He had cleaned the sawdust and removed the bucket of vomit that one would-be surgeon had filled on discovering the contents of the adult cadaver’s stomach. The smell of partially digested food, which Mr McAdam had eagerly shown his students, had obviously proved too much.

Ezra, having seen the insides of man and boy many times over, had spent the lecture trying hard to think about anything other than Anna. Holland was not so far away, he told himself. After all, this man on the table had travelled twice as far at least. As, of course, had he, from Jamaica to England, a long time ago.

She would write. She
would
write. He sighed and looked down at the tall man on the table, sewn up smartly; imposing even in death, but in life, slave, subject to another’s orders with no independence of thought or action. Ezra felt powerless. He was no better, he reasoned, than a kind of slave. He had no money of his own, made no decisions. How would he ever travel to see her?

Ezra finished his work and covered the cadaver before moving on to the child. Of course he didn’t
have
to sew them up: the paupers these two corpses would be sharing graves with would not care whether or not the contents of their winding sheets were intact. No, but it was good practice. Ezra wanted his stitches to be as good as his master’s. Small, neat, perfect.

“Aha, Ezra. Still hard at work.” Mr McAdam looked over his stitches. “You have a good hand, lad. A good hand. You will make a fine surgeon.”

“Thank you, sir.” Ezra looked up; the master was smiling. Perhaps there was a way around his current problem. “Sir, if you please, I would ask you a question. If you have a moment.”

“Of course,” Mr McAdam said. “Ask away.”

Ezra put down his needle. He took a deep breath. “I was thinking. I was sixteen this autumn and come of age—”

The master butted in. “Only God knows your true age, Ezra. It was an estimate, from your height and the length of your bones, and how your teeth had come on. Birthdays are a luxury for the rich or for those with the comfort of family. When I bought you in Spanish Town you had neither.”

“I know that, sir. I have heard the story very many times. I do wonder that I can’t remember my life before, not one single thing, not any sale or any transaction. Nothing.”

“It is not unnatural. We tend to bury bad experiences, memories. Otherwise they can hurt us, make us bitter.”

Ezra nodded. “I wanted to ask…”

“Is this about your people? We all want to know our provenance, lad. I wish to God that I could tell you more.” Mr McAdam shook his head. “I doubt whether your mother would be alive. Those plantations work a man – and woman – to the ground.” He sighed. “Why society believes it allowable to treat the living as disposable but thinks our quest for vital knowledge akin to devilry is beyond—”

“I know, sir,” Ezra cut in. “I know I had a lucky escape. It could have been worse for me in very many ways.” He thought of his scar and the tumour on the shelf in the master’s museum. “It is something else.”

“Out with it, then, lad!”

“You have done so much for me, sir. But I think it is time I was independent. I have no means…”

“Ezra, lad, your skills will be your means. Don’t you see that? Once you are fully trained—”

“But sir, you said I was better than most trained surgeons already!”

“Perhaps your head has swollen, Ezra, and I am to blame for it with too much praise.” The master started towards the door that led back to the house. “Enough of this talk.”

Ezra followed. “But sir! I am an adult! I need my own…”

“You will have in time, lad. Your impatience does you no favours!”

Ezra scowled at the master’s back. He called after him, “I swear I have more than enough skill to work for the navy.”

He should not have said it. The master turned round, furious, and strode back towards the table.

“The navy? I did not train you for butchery!” McAdam thumped the table and the body on it almost jumped. Ezra had heard him run down drunken navy surgeons over many dinners. It was the one thing guaranteed to draw a reaction. Now he wished he hadn’t.

“No, sir.” Ezra didn’t look at him.

“Those navy sawbones! How many times have we seen how their work ends? Gangrene, stumps splintered and filthy. You are better than that! In a few years you will be a surgeon – I grant the mood these days means a mulatto surgeon may not raise the same fees as a white one, but, with my name, lad, you will be your own man.”