The Mourning Bells (23 page)

Sam frowned. “Why would a body go to a hospital instead of a cemetery?”

“Some hospitals conduct anatomical research, although the government has implemented many restrictions on the practice since the days of Burke and Hare.”

“Who?” Sam asked. Violet kept forgetting that he didn’t know her country’s history that well.

“Two men who were murdering people to obtain bodies for sale to anatomists. Today, anatomists have access to the workhouse dead for experimentation.”

“Therefore, these are certificates for workhouse dead? Good Lord, Susanna’s birth mother might have ended up with an anatomist.”

Quite possibly. The woman had died of illness inside the St. Giles-in-the-Fields workhouse where she had been living with Susanna eight long years ago. The tragedy had created the happy circumstance of Susanna coming to live with Violet.

“Most bodies that go to the anatomists are the workhouse dead or people who couldn’t be identified: the indigent, prostitutes, and the like.”

“How do they come to Crugg? You don’t trade much in workhouse bodies, do you?”

“No, just occasionally will someone alert me to a person who has died without relatives to care for him. Crugg may have come about them in different ways. He might have an arrangement with a workhouse to take away bodies, or he may simply have been well known in his neighborhood for taking care of these sorts of deaths, although Mayfair isn’t exactly teeming with indigents.”

Sam examined the three certificates Violet had pointed out. He picked up one to scrutinize it closer. “Harold Herbert Yates.” Sam paused, as if rolling the name around in his mind. “This is familiar. Where have I heard of him before?” Sam straightened, all perplexity gone. “Wait, I know. Sweetheart, this is the name of one of the dodgers Mr. Hayes told me about. He supposedly fled somewhere north.”

Violet took the death certificate and read it again. “ ‘Mr. Harold Herbert Yates, aged thirty-one, of Bedford Street off the Strand. Primary cause of death, unknown. Secondary cause of death, unknown. Body sent to Royal Surrey County Hospital.’ ” She read it aloud once more and shook her head. “This makes no sense. How could he have escaped up north to avoid his debts and at the same time have a death certificate ascribed to him?”

Sam pushed aside some of the certificates and sat down as Violet paced the room with Yates’s certificate in her hand. Suddenly, she stopped and looked at it again. “This shows his date of death as the thirtieth of July.”

“Is that significant?” Sam asked as he stretched out his battle-injured leg, raising his trouser leg and kneading his knee. He must have walked too far today.

Violet went to her dressing table and pulled a bottle of Mr. Johnston’s Essence of Mustard from a drawer. She handed the certificate to Sam and then poured some of the pungent oil into her hands and rubbed it on her husband’s knee. He grimaced at how the combination of rosemary, camphor, oil of turpentine, and mustard flour felt on his skin but didn’t pull away.

“Yates’s date of death is three days before I saw the first body come out of its coffin at Brookwood. The timing is right for Yates to have been that body.”

Sam covered her hands with one of his own. “
If
Crugg was responsible for those living bodies you saw.
If
the body traveled the third day after death. I think you’re putting together too many coincidences, Violet. You’re forgetting a crucial point, too.”

Violet withdrew her hands from his and rolled down his trouser leg. “What is that?”

“Yates was seen on a northbound train. Mr. Hayes is under the impression that Yates is living under an assumed name in Northumberland, or Durham, or perhaps Cumbria.”

“But that’s impossible. I’m holding the man’s death certificate right here.” She took it back from Sam to read it yet again, as though concentrating on it more would somehow cause it to show her something new.

“Moreover,” Sam continued, “why in tarnation would a prominent man—no matter how indebted he was—commit his body for dissection? It’s unthinkable.”

Violet was utterly deflated. Sam was right, of course. She returned to pacing, trying to make sense of so many watch parts that she simply
knew
must fit together into a fully functional timepiece, even though they seemed to be just a jumble of wheels, pinions, and springs on a table. If only she could pick out the central piece around which the others would logically and quickly fit.

She mentally reached out and selected a new part. “I have an idea,” she said, pausing.

Sam smiled. “Of that, I have no doubt. What is it?”

“It seems to me the next logical step is to visit Royal Surrey County Hospital.”

“I don’t suppose you can get into too much trouble there. What do you hope to accomplish?”

“Find out whether Yates actually ended up there. You know, perhaps he escaped north and a substitute body was put in the coffin to make everyone—including all of his creditors—think he was dead.”

“Do you realize what you’re suggesting, Violet? That Yates murdered someone to have a ready body for his coffin after faking his own death?”

“Or he found a workhouse body that died with good timing.”

“But that means . . .” Sam couldn’t finish the thought.

“Yes. Julian Crugg used his relationship with a workhouse to obtain substitute bodies for various men fleeing the country. Except his plan went terribly wrong on two occasions.”

“But how does that explain his own murder?”

Violet paused and sat on the bed at Sam’s feet. “I’m not sure. I expect that if he was supposed to be sending substitute bodies and they kept popping up alive, someone might view him as incompetent and a threat of some sort.”

Sam leaned back heavily against the bed frame, causing the fringed canopy over them to briefly sway back and forth. “This theory in no way solves the main problem, though, does it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Roger Blount did actually die, as did his fiancée. How do you connect that to your solution?”

Violet sighed. “I have no idea.”

F
ortunately, the staff of Royal Surrey County Hospital did not view Violet’s visit with suspicion when she announced that she was an undertaker come to see about a couple of bodies they might have.

She was ushered into the office of Mr. Nathan Blackwell, the superintendent of the hospital. The room was a strange cross between a museum and a laboratory. It was cluttered with jars containing organs floating in sickly brown fluid, as well as trays of bones presumably belonging to men, women, and children. One contained all the pieces of a foot, another a rib cage, and yet another an arm and a hand. Many other trays were stacked up in haphazard piles on the floor.

Violet knew that medical science was advanced in this way, but her stomach constricted at the thought of what must have happened to the bodies in here to get them into jars and trays.

Mr. Blackwell was pleasant, if a bit mad-looking, with wiry red hair exploding everywhere from his face and head. Small, unruly bushes protruded from his ears, eyebrows, nose, and a small wart that had sprouted near his left eye. The man desperately needed a wife to see to his grooming.

However, Violet supposed she might be a bit uncivilized-looking herself if she were cutting open bodies all day long. Caring for them whole seemed an acceptable service to society. Chopping them up for experimentation was rather . . . repulsive. Violet shuddered.

“How may I help you, Mrs. Harper?” Blackwell asked, one hairy eyebrow raised in curiosity.

“I am wondering about some bodies that you may have received for dissection,” she said, pulling the certificates of bodies bound for Surrey from her reticule and handing them to him.

“Indeed? What of them?” he replied, looking through the papers and nodding.

“If you are done with them, I would like to do my own personal identification of them.” Violet wasn’t sure she would be able to keep down her breakfast when she saw them, but she would do whatever it took to solve this matter.

Blackwell looked down at the certificates. “These are Julian Crugg’s bodies. What is your interest in them?”

“I am . . . was . . . an acquaintance of Mr. Crugg’s until his recent untimely death.”

Blackwell nodded. Crugg’s death was clearly of no surprise to him.

She continued. “I am simply following up on some documents that have been entrusted to me from his shop.” That was the truth, wasn’t it?

Blackwell shrugged. “These are the three you wish to see?” he said, rising with the certificates in his hand. “I’m not sure what their conditions are or if the students are even done with them, but please follow me to the dissection classroom.”

Violet dutifully followed behind him, her heels clacking along the wood floorboards, which creaked in a variety of places. Patches of blackened flooring indicated where rushed surgeries had taken place in the long hallway. Violet couldn’t help but envision surgeons, aprons covering the lower halves of their own bodies, standing over eviscerated, anesthetized patients, whose blood dripped to the floor in a predictable half circle in the shape of the surgeon’s apron.

The hallways reeked of bodily odors and ether, which she supposed was to be expected. She ignored the smell and concentrated on the walls, which were painted a sickly, pale green.

They ended up in a room in the basement. The cavernous room, which reminded Violet of the interior of a railway station, had white tiles on the walls about halfway up from the floor, and the remaining were painted the same feeble green as the hallways.

Wood tables, with small chalkboards dangling from hooks at one end of them, dotted the room. Each table had a crank enabling it to be raised or lowered according to the anatomist’s needs, and a body was laid out on each one. The bodies ranged in shade from a mottled white, like dirty snow, to a laundry-water gray. Several young men, whom she assumed were anatomy students, stood over tables with instruments. At one end of the room was an older gentleman instructing them. He stood before his own table with a saw in his hand. Violet blanched.

It just seemed such a disrespectful way to treat the dead.

The professor’s voice was deep and authoritative. “. . . end of this week we will have finished with examination of the brain; then we will move on to—”

Blackwell cleared his throat, and the sound reverberated through the room, causing the professor to stop what he was saying. Blackwell introduced Violet to the room in general, and she found them all looking at her curiously, as though she were the one with a vicious tool in her hand ready to hack through dead flesh!

Blackwell explained what Violet wanted and held up the three death certificates. “Is Harold Yates, Raymond Wesley, or Jeremiah Dormer among the corpses you are working on?”

Each of them, including the professor, examined his table’s chalkboard and shook his head.

Blackwell nodded. “Thank you,” he said, before escorting Violet out. “These dates of death are far enough back that I assumed they would have already been examined, but I wanted to be sure for you. We’ll go to the disposal room.”

Violet liked the sound of that even less.

This was an even gloomier room, where dissected bodies were stored in canvas shrouds in a dizzying array. Some lay on tables; some sat upright on the floor along the walls. It was a smaller room than where the dissections were performed, and there was only one gas chandelier in here. Violet felt as if she were in an old church, surrounded by spirits who had been unable to ascend or descend.

Spirits who reeked of earth and decay and desolation.

“I’m afraid your best chance of finding any of the three is in here,” Blackwell said, handing the certificates back to Violet.

How would she even begin?

“Mr. Blackwell, are all of these bodies from a local workhouse?” It was beyond Violet’s imagination that this many people were dying there, despite how deplorable their conditions could be.

“Many, but not all. The hospital produces its own cadavers, of course. We have a small burial ground here for patients who died but were never claimed. Some are exhumed for skeletal examination and then reburied.”

And Violet had foolishly thought that remains were safe after the Anatomy Act of 1832. “Is this legal to do?”

“It is. In fact, at one point, Royal London Hospital’s school was almost entirely supplied by subjects which had once been the hospital’s own patients.”

“That is very interesting,” Violet said politely, wondering how many bodies were never left to rest in peace.

“Of course, not all of our surgeons want real bodies because of the, er, troubles associated with them.”

Violet had dealt with enough putrefaction to know what Blackwell implied.

“Some of them prefer artificial facsimiles, plaster casts, wax models, and sometimes even animal carcasses, although rounding up the beasts has its own problems. It all depends on what is being studied and what the surgeon prefers. Now, if you’ll excuse me just a moment . . .”

Blackwell disappeared for less than a minute and returned with an oil lantern, already aglow with light. “I think this might help you.” He then exited the room, pulling the door shut behind him and leaving Violet alone to figure out whether Yates, Wesley, or Dormer was in here.

Violet removed her gloves and went to work. Some of the bodies had names pinned to their canvas wrappings; some had a meager description, such as “female, middle-aged, white plague.” “White plague” was a nickname for tuberculosis. Some of the bodies had no identification at all. Violet was indignant to think that these people had been unceremoniously buried in unidentified graves, dug back up and mutilated, and would be dumped back into anonymity.

The condition of the bodies also varied. Violet wouldn’t be able to stay in here long before the odors she was unwrapping would begin to overwhelm her. She had to be methodical. First, she examined all of the bodies with external identification. None of them matched Yates.

She thought back. How tall was Yates when he came out of the coffin? Making her best estimate, she dislodged the fabric from the heads of those bodies who appeared to have male builds of the right height. Some of their faces were so decomposed that it was impossible to know whether they were the men she was looking for. Violet was despairing of finding anything of promise when she unwrapped a man who was laid out on one of the wood examination tables, which had been shoved to one side of the room.

Pinned to his shroud was a label: “Raymond Wesley.”

She hurriedly freed the man’s head from the shroud and gasped aloud. This was
impossible
.

Inside the shroud lay the second man who had arisen from his coffin in Brookwood. Violet was reeling not only from the odors drifting upward from the dead man but also from the implication of his discovery as she put the facts together in her mind. Raymond Wesley had apparently died, and Mr. Crugg had written a death certificate for him. He was sent to Brookwood, turned out to be alive, but now here he was, stacked among a cluster of workhouse and hospital dead. He was dead, then he wasn’t, now for certain he was.

Provided this really was Wesley.

She untied the rest of the cords that loosely held the shroud around him.
This is odd.
Wesley was still clothed. If he had been subject to anatomical experimentation, why was he dressed? He was fully clothed, in fact, down to his shoes. Were these the clothes he was wearing when Violet saw him at Brookwood? It was hard to remember as it had all happened in such a blur, but it was certainly possible. He now wore an inexpensive Chinese silk vest of emerald green. It wasn’t the sort of somber color or high quality that a man of society would be buried in, but perhaps Violet was making an assumption about him.

She checked Wesley’s death certificate. No, he was from Piccadilly. He should have been buried in a much fancier suit of clothes.

Unless he was one of the dodgers running away from his debts. But they were all going north, weren’t they? The banker said so, had even said some of these dodgers had been spotted on trains up north.

Violet wondered if anyone except the banker could attest to these sightings. She felt an uncomfortable flutter in her chest as a sudden thought struck her. Was the banker guilty of something?

What possible interest could a banker have in murdering a debtor who had abandoned his responsibilities? Surely the loss to the bank wasn’t devastating enough for the banker to actually kill such a man. However, such a theory might explain why there was a claim that the debtors were going north when in reality they were merely being dumped at Brookwood for Julian Crugg to dispose of them with Royal Surrey County Hospital.

Violet wondered if she could determine Wesley’s cause of death.

“Forgive me, Mr. Wesley,” she said softly. “I must inspect you, and I don’t wish for you to feel too terribly violated. I promise to be quick about it.”

She unbuttoned his jacket and shirt and struggled to remove them. It was always difficult to remove clothing from dead bodies. Violet ran her hands over his skin gently, as it was decomposing and she didn’t want to accidentally damage his skin by pressing too hard. She found nothing on his torso or arms to suggest his manner of death.

With even more struggle, she removed the dead man’s trousers. “I’ll just be a few more moments, sir; then I’ll return you back to your coverings. I’m sorry for this disturbance.”

She continued talking as she examined his legs. “It’s a tragedy, Mr. Wesley, that you will not have a proper funeral, and I’m so very sorry for it.” There was nothing obvious on his legs, either.

She stepped back and examined the entire man, trying to see past the eerily pale skin mottled with purple, green, and brown patches. His stomach was swollen, but that was perfectly normal. No, there was nothing out of the ordinary to suggest a particular disease or illness that would have put him in the hospital.

Moreover, he had obviously not been eviscerated by the anatomists. Why, then, was he here?

Violet bolted upright. Wait, if Mr. Wesley was here among these bodies, he ought to have been a hospital patient who had been exhumed. Yet here she had his death certificate, signed by Julian Crugg, with the cause of death noted as “unknown.” How had Wesley gone from being in Crugg’s custody to becoming, ostensibly, an unearthed hospital body? Had Mr. Blackwell accepted him from Crugg, then had him thrown in here? But if so,
why?

Violet redressed and reshrouded the body, running through the possibilities in her mind, not liking where her thoughts were ending up. Was Royal Surrey County Hospital paying undertakers like Crugg to bring in bodies for them? Were they running out of bodies in their own graveyard and from the workhouse? If this was true, it was no wonder Crugg was so nervous and tightly strung. It was despicable for an undertaker to be involved in such an effort.

So perhaps Mr. Blackwell was not the innocent, if exceedingly hairy, superintendent he had seemed to be when she arrived at the hospital. It was time to confront him.

 

Nathan Blackwell wasn’t as pleasant the second time when Violet asked him if the hospital was practicing resurrectionist activities. Blackwell’s thick eyebrows shot upward as he jumped out of his chair at the accusation and demanded that she leave the building.

Realizing that her direct approach—which consistently failed her, making it inexplicable why she continued using it—was not working, Violet immediately adopted a conciliatory tone. “My apologies, sir. You must understand that seeing all of those unloved bodies made me a bit irrational. Please, I didn’t mean what I said. Perhaps I could just ask you a few more questions . . . ?”