NINETEEN

he following day Raven was granted respite from the chaos of the morning clinic, as part of his apprenticeship was to include regular duties at the Royal Maternity Hospital. Unfortunately, it would have taken a higher power than Dr Simpson to offer him respite from the piercing headache that was plaguing his every step. He would admit he had drunk of the professor’s claret with uncommon gusto in celebration of Beattie’s offer and the imminent prospect of making back the money he owed to Flint. However, the tolerable ill effects of this indulgence had been brutally compounded after breakfast, when Duncan compelled Raven’s assistance in his researches.

Raven was initially curious about Duncan shedding his reluctance to involve him directly in his work, and wondered whether his contributions the previous night had raised him in the young prodigy’s estimations. Then he discovered that Duncan had assembled a fresh batch of potential anaesthetic agents, and Raven’s role was little above that of poison taster; or poison sniffer, to be strictly accurate. Duncan had wafted various vapours beneath his nose, none of which precipitated any effect greater than mild dizziness and a cumulative pounding in his brain.

The maternity hospital was situated within Milton House on the Canongate, a Georgian mansion that had either seen better days or had been built with the intention of warning off unwanted visitors with the threat of impending collapse. He was due to meet Dr Ziegler, the hospital’s surgeon, and given the pounding in Raven’s head, he hoped the man was more a Simpson than a Syme.

The door was answered by a tall woman in a starched cap, who, on looking him up and down, gave the impression she was about to fetch a stick with which to chase him off. Clearly his beard was not growing thick or fast enough to effect the transformation he had hoped for.

‘Mr Will Raven. For Dr Ziegler. I’m Dr Simpson’s apprentice. I believe I am expected.’

Raven hoped that the mention of his employer would smooth his passage into the hospital, past its sullen gatekeeper. The woman made no reply but let her eyes drift downwards, where her gaze remained. Raven felt compelled to do the same and found himself examining his own footwear. His boots looked as they usually did, a thin layer of mud clinging to the sides: unsurprising as he had made the journey from Queen Street on foot.

‘Mrs Stevenson. Matron,’ she said. ‘I’ll thank you to wipe your feet before you come in.’

Raven wagered that she wasn’t the type to thank anyone for much else. She stood with her arms folded, watching as he applied his feet to the boot scraper at the door. Once satisfied with his efforts, she stood aside and let him enter.

‘Dr Ziegler is in the ward, making his rounds.’

She indicated a door to the left, then disappeared into a room on the right, closing the door to leave Raven alone in the hallway. He proceeded as directed, becoming aware of the faint aroma of lemons mixed with something earthier. It was a considerable improvement upon the foetid stink he associated with the wards of the Royal Infirmary.

A strong breeze was gusting through as all of the windows were open – an attempt to blow away the spectre of puerperal fever perhaps, the scourge of any such institution – and consequently the fireplace at the end of the room had a good fire going, helping to take the chill out of the wind. There was a row of beds against one wall and a large table in the centre of the room where a small, dark, spectacled man was writing in a ledger. Without lifting his eyes from the volume, he raised a palm as he heard Raven approach, by way of telling him to wait.

Raven complied silently, the question of a Simpson or a Syme now tipping towards the latter.

Ziegler finished what he was writing and looked up, a brightness about his features. ‘Keeping the casebook up to date,’ he said, closing the ledger and placing his hand reverentially upon it. ‘Every delivery must be entered. Accurate information is the key to unlocking many a mystery. Now, would you care to take a tour, Mr Raven?’

Ziegler proceeded to show Raven around, evidently proud of the small hospital and its collection of expectant or recently delivered mothers. To a woman they were poor souls whose personal circumstances made a home confinement impossible.

‘We do good work here,’ Ziegler said as he showed Raven into the empty delivery room, ‘but our funding is precarious. Charitable giving is frequently inhibited by moral concerns.’

‘Moral concerns?’

Raven was reminded of the pamphlet penned by the Reverend Grissom denouncing the use of ether in labour, but Ziegler was referring to a more general anxiety regarding the hospital’s attendees.

‘Our policy of admitting unmarried mothers provokes a deep discomfort in many a Christian breast. Some believe that it encourages immoral behaviour.’

‘What is the alternative?’ Raven asked.

‘A worthy question, young sir. In my opinion it is illogical to withhold care from someone who needs it merely because you disagree with the manner in which they conduct themselves. Judge not lest ye be judged.’

‘Quite so,’ Raven agreed, thinking again about Evie and the manner in which her death had been dismissed.

Another deid hoor.

‘I believe it is important to provide the best possible care for patients regardless of the manner in which they got themselves into their present predicament,’ Ziegler continued. ‘Desperate people are often driven to do desperate things. I have known young women to take their own lives because they could not face the consequences of being with child; and some because they could not face their families discovering it. Sometimes one has to contemplate which is the lesser of two evils.’

Ziegler fixed Raven with a piercing look. Raven sensed that he would be evaluated according to his response, beginning with whether he even understood what Ziegler was talking about.

‘You mean abortion?’

Ziegler nodded solemnly. Raven hoped he had passed.

‘Abortion, infanticide. These things happen more frequently than we would like to admit. When no records are kept, there is no way of knowing with any degree of certainty.’

‘There have been two cases recently at the Infirmary. Perforated uterus and peritonitis in each instance.’

‘Fatal?’

‘Yes. Tantamount to murder.’

‘When you deliberately inflict such damage and are only interested in the fee, then it is murder, plain and simple. And the culprit?’

‘Hasn’t been identified.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me. It is a relatively easy thing, getting away with murder, especially when the victims are deemed to be of no consequence.’

‘Do you know anything about it?’ Raven asked.

‘Me?’ Ziegler replied, his curious look making Raven fear for a moment that the man thought he was being impugned.

‘I only mean that the women must talk about such things. Perhaps you have heard something.’

‘I can’t say that I have. The women don’t tend to confide in me and I disregard anything I hear from them during labour. Perhaps matron might have heard something, though. Women seem to be more at ease discussing such things with each other.’

Ziegler led the way back to the small room Mrs Stevenson had retreated to after letting Raven in. Given his introduction to the woman, he was sceptical as to whether an interview with the gatekeeper would yield much. The matron was seated behind a desk, totting up a row of figures in an account book when they entered.

‘Dr Ziegler,’ she said, smiling as she looked up from her calculations, her affection for the little man quite evident.

‘Mr Raven tells me that someone’s practising the dark arts again,’ Ziegler said, sitting on the edge of her desk.

Mrs Stevenson sighed and put down her pen.

‘Heard any tales?’ he asked.

Raven was surprised at the ease with which such a delicate subject was raised.

‘About the dark arts, no,’ she said. ‘Though I have heard talk about some new secret remedy to “restore regularity”.’

Raven did not follow. ‘A laxative?’

‘To the monthly cycle,’ Ziegler explained.

Raven smiled at his own misapprehension, but the grave expression on Ziegler’s face told him he was still missing something.

‘A euphemism,’ Raven acknowledged.

‘Indeed. Sometimes such remedies are advertised as “for the relief of obstruction”, but it is the same thing.’

‘And is this new secret remedy reputed to be successful?’

‘As successful as any before it,’ Mrs Stevenson said, by which she meant not at all. ‘We deliver the obstructions here all the time, whereupon the monthly cycle is restored to regularity.’

‘There has long been a trade in such quackery,’ Ziegler explained. ‘Pills and potions with no effect. Cheap tricks and empty promises.’

‘Oh, they’re never cheap,’ the matron stated, ‘for that’s the hook. The more expensive the remedy, the more a desperate woman is likely to believe the rumours of its efficacy and part with her coin.’

‘Rumours no doubt sown by the same rogue who is rolling the pills,’ Ziegler added.

Raven thought of the discussions the previous evening. The principle was the same, but there was a greater dishonesty here, for the patient’s belief that the medicine was working would make no difference in this case.

‘Charlatanry,’ he observed.

‘Aye, though there is worse,’ said Mrs Stevenson. ‘More dangerous than the mere charlatans are those attempting to concoct genuine medicines. I’ve seen girls become horribly sick after taking such remedies, without any relief of the “obstruction” they were intended to remove. Wracked with pain, they were. God only knows what they ingested, believing it would lift their burdens.’

Her words called up Evie’s contorted posture, her agonised expression, as well as the brief glimpse he had been afforded of the woman pulled from the water yesterday. But there was more than the usual regret and anxiety attending his memory of finding Evie. Her urgent need of money and her reluctance to say what for might finally have an explanation.

For the first time, it struck him that she might have been pregnant.

Raven was turning this new possibility over in his mind as he made his way back along the Cowgate in the gathering darkness, trying to calculate the implications and reliving some of the last conversations he had had with Evie. Belatedly he realised that if she had been pregnant, then she must have known there was no future for her in a job as a maid, even if there was a house that would have her. She had been stringing him along, knowing it couldn’t happen. Raven had always been a little blind when it came to her, willingly so. This dream of her raising herself up had been no more than that: a dream, a fantasy. And he understood now that it had been a fantasy to entertain him rather than one genuinely held by her.

So lost was he in this reverie that he failed to notice a distinctive shape approaching him until it was almost too late. The unmistakable silhouette of Gargantua was emerging through the fog, lumbering down the hill from the High Street.

At this distance, in the gloom of the narrow channel, Raven could not be sure whether he had been seen. There was little chance of passing Gargantua unnoticed, however. Raven had no option but to duck through the doors of the nearest tavern and hope for the best.

The place was crowded, which was a blessing, its warmth welcome on a chill evening. The fug of smoke and the smell of spilled ale instantly wrapped around him like an old friend’s embrace. He only wished his pockets were not so empty.

Raven made his way towards a dark corner to wait it out. He had barely pulled up a stool when he saw the doors swing and the giant thrust himself through them, bowing down so that his head would not strike the lintel.

Raven pressed himself against the wall as Gargantua approached, the monster’s gaze fixed intently upon him. Raven looked about the room but saw no faces he recognised, no stalwarts who might come to his aid. He had no friends here, but realised strangers might still be his salvation, for surely the man would not carry out an attack in front of so many witnesses.

The comfort of this thought lasted as long as it took to wonder how many men might be prepared to stand and testify against this creature in court.

‘I will have money for you soon,’ Raven pleaded, feeling the scar upon his cheek tingle afresh as the giant drew within feet of where he stood.

‘Sit,’ Gargantua ordered.

Raven complied, though it pinned him in a corner with Gargantua blocking the route to the door. He was a conspicuous sight, and yet he drew few direct looks, Raven noticed: only stolen glances. They wanted to gawp at him, but not to meet his gaze.

‘I will be carrying out well-paid medical work in a few days with a wealthy patient of the New Town,’ Raven told him, quickly and quietly. ‘I am apprentice to Professor Simpson, training to be a doctor, and—’

Gargantua held up a huge hand by way of silencing him. His face was all the more disturbing now that Raven could see it in indoor light. Its proportions were wrong, the flesh loose in places, stretched in others. He was sweaty despite the cold outside, a sickly pallor about his skin.

‘I know what you are training to be. That’s why I followed you in here.’

Raven saw a glimmer of hope and struck out for it. ‘Is there something I can assist you with?’ he asked as brightly as his fear would allow.

Gargantua’s expression darkened. ‘You misunderstand. I wanted you to know that I despise your profession.’

Raven could barely find the breath, but somehow managed to reply, as he felt the question was being invited.

‘Why?’

‘Because of your attitude to people like me. Freaks of nature.’

‘I assure you, we only wish to understand any unusual medical condition, and by that understanding to assist those afflicted.’

‘Tell that to Charles Byrne,’ Gargantua said, the words grumbling across the table like thunder at the head of a storm. ‘Have you heard of him?’

Raven nodded. Much had just become clear, none of it good.

‘A man like me. Even bigger, though. The Irish Giant, they called him. He came here to Edinburgh once. Lit his pipe from one of the lamps on the North Bridge without even standing on his toes. Aye, you medical men all wanted him, but not to “understand”, or to “assist”. The shameless maggots were offering him money for his corpse while he was still alive.’

Raven knew the story, as any medical man would. Byrne had refused their advances, no matter how much coin was offered. He believed in the resurrection, that the Lord was going to raise him up when Judgment Day came, and for that he would need his body. But the anatomists had plans for their own resurrection, and when Byrne died in June of 1783, they were fighting each other for the spoils, heedless of the man’s own wishes.

Byrne’s friends rallied to protect his corpse. They exhibited his outsize coffin to help raise funds to charter a boat and saw that he was buried at sea in accordance with his will. But with a vast bounty being offered for the body, there was always a danger of treachery, and unbeknownst to the burial party, it was a coffin full of stones that they tipped into the water. Somewhere on the way to Margate, a switch had been made and the body stolen. Inevitably, it found its way into the possession of the man who had prized it most, the esteemed surgeon and anatomist John Hunter.

News of the theft made the papers and raised a scandal, which was why Hunter never dissected the body as he planned, instead swiftly chopping it up and boiling it down to bones. He kept his possession of the remains secret for several years, but in time reassembled the skeleton and put it on display. Perhaps the worst of it was that Hunter thus learned nothing from the corpse. He spent a great sum to acquire not a crucial specimen but a mere trophy, like an organ in a jar.

Gargantua’s eyes flashed and he leaned forward, gripping Raven’s neck and pulling their foreheads together, the giant’s foul breath engulfing his face.

‘Eight hundred guineas, Hunter paid. Do you think Charles Byrne earned a fraction of that his whole life? Men like you see men like me as worth more dead than alive. And that is why, should Mr Flint give the command, it will not merely be my duty to rip you apart, but my pleasure.’

Gargantua let go and stood up, the throng parting before him as he walked to the door.

Raven sat there trembling, his mouth as dry as he could ever remember, his drouth all the more a mockery for him sitting here in a tavern.

Charles Byrne died at the age of twenty-two. Raven wondered if Gargantua understood the implications for himself. He had not seemed well, and was unlikely to live long, but he might yet outlast Raven.

Beattie’s commission was now a matter of life and death.