FIFTY-SIX

he carriage bucked and rattled, travelling faster than it ever had before, faster than it was designed for, in fact. Raven heard crack after crack of the reins, Flint’s man showing no restraint as he urged on the horses, giving little consideration to the growing dark and fog. Many an unwary pedestrian had found themselves in need of Syme’s ministrations after straying into the path of a carriage when visibility was this bad, but at such speed it was unlikely any unfortunates would survive long enough to face the further ordeal of surgery.

Each corner threatened to tip the brougham, though it never quite came to that; more’s the pity, Raven thought, as it might have offered the opportunity to crawl from the wreckage and flee. He tried to estimate the damage should he throw himself from the carriage in order to escape, but it was as though his captors had anticipated such a manoeuvre. They were seated tight on either side of him, wedging him in place. One of them bore a scar from his forehead to his chin, as from a sword blow. The other was distinguished by a goitre so pronounced that he looked like a toad. They had said little, and Raven less.

He saw his foolishness now. He had come to believe he merely had to keep evading Gargantua and the Weasel, and had reserved his vigilance for his ventures south of Princes Street, as though the New Town was some protected kingdom beyond Flint’s reach. They had been lying in wait, apprehending him as soon as he stepped outside the door to 52 Queen Street. They had asked questions and tracked him down, and now he was being taken to his doom, a fate he had long tempted.

You have the devil in you.

He thought of the recklessness with which he had regarded his debt. He feared men such as Flint, but that did not leaven the contempt in which he held them, and sometimes the former was over-ruled by the latter. It satisfied that perverse and angry part of himself to defy them. Thus he had not merely evaded making repayment, but had insulted Flint in the way he resisted, and even injured his men.

As though mocking him, Dr Simpson’s bag sat upon the bench opposite, a totem of the future he dreamed for himself and which he would not live to see. It had been at the coachman’s behest that he leave it in the brougham between trips, Angus having too frequently been forced to double back mid-journey because Simpson had forgotten it in his haste to reach an urgent case.

Raven found it difficult to make out the buildings clearly in the gloom, but his sense of direction told him they were in Fountainbridge, on the outskirts of the Old Town. Tellingly, the carriage pulled up not in front of a building, but at the rear, where he was bundled out of the coach and marched into a back court, gripped either side by Scar and Toad.

The Weasel came scurrying from the close at the back of the building in response to the coach’s arrival. He gazed upon Raven with an ugly mix of anger and confusion at him being delivered thus. Raven wondered why he would seem surprised.

The Weasel was followed by a frightened young woman sporting the beginnings of a black eye, the skin around her right orbit red and swollen with a small amount of conjunctival haemorrhage. She looked drained and pale, with blood smeared about her clothes. Raven could barely guess at her role here, and wondered at the whereabouts of Gargantua.

The Weasel strode across and punched Raven hard in the stomach but was pushed back by Toad.

‘What the devil are you doing? This is Dr Simpson, whom Flint bid us fetch.’

‘No it isn’t,’ Weasel replied. ‘This is Will Raven, the whelp who near blinded me and who yet owes Flint two guineas.’

‘I assure you it is Simpson. Flint told us he lives at 52 Queen Street and is to be recognised by his black sealskin coat. We saw him leaving that very house dressed thus.’

‘And I’m telling you this one might be wearing his coat, but that’s as close as he will ever get to being Dr Simpson.’

At that moment, out strode the man to whom Raven owed the debt: Callum Flint himself. He was as Raven remembered: not the biggest of men, but lean and wiry, quick of mind and quick of movement. The build of a pugilist and the brain of a schemer.

He looked unlikely to be in a forgiving mood, as rather improbably, his nose was bleeding, the blood still dripping onto an already damp shirt. Some altercation had recently taken place. Raven could hear screaming from somewhere within, no doubt retribution being meted out to whomever had dealt the blow.

‘What in the name of God is this wee streak of piss doing here?’ he demanded. ‘Where is Simpson?’

The Weasel wore a look of satisfaction, enjoying the moment his colleagues had their mistake confirmed. It was like an overture for the symphony of vengeance with which he was about to indulge himself.

Flint wiped the blood from his nose with his sleeve. He had an overwrought look about him, a man at the end of his tether. A man in need of an outlet for his frustrations.

‘They lifted this skitter by mistake,’ Weasel said. ‘He owes you two guineas and me a debt of another kind.’

Flint looked at Raven with sparing regard, as though his true thoughts were somewhere else.

‘Do you have the two guineas?’ he asked.

Raven could not speak to answer, such was his fear.

He heard another scream, thinking for a moment it was a foretaste of his own. Then he realised it was a woman’s scream, and deduced what was going on.

‘Mr Flint, you sent for Dr Simpson. Is your wife in labour?’

‘Aye,’ said the young girl with the black eye, hurried and imploring. ‘She is, these fourteen hours. Blind and insane in her agonies. Lashing out at those who would try to assist her.’

‘I can help.’

‘What know you of such things?’ Flint demanded.

‘I am Dr Simpson’s assistant. A man midwife.’

‘I want the professor, not his student.’

‘But I am here now, and Dr Simpson yet at Queen Street.’

At that moment, there came another scream from inside the building.

‘Bring him forth,’ Flint decided.

‘I need the bag that sits inside the carriage,’ Raven said.

‘Fetch it,’ Flint commanded Scar. ‘And see to it that this time you don’t bring a hat or a horse-turd by mistake.’

Raven was escorted into the building and led to a room on the first floor, where he was confronted by a scene that immediately brought to mind the Simpsons’ dining room on the night of the chloroform discovery. Several pieces of furniture were upturned and a ewer and basin were in pieces upon the floor. The smell was reminiscent of a tavern at the end of a busy night, a noxious mix of stale alcohol fumes combined with various bodily odours and the very distinct tang of blood.

Flint’s wife was being forcibly held in the bed by a number of persons including Peg and Gargantua. They were all in a state of dishevelment and perspiring almost as much as the patient herself. Gargantua looked at Raven with confusion and growing rage, but did not abandon his post.

Among those around the bed was a midwife, sporting a bruise to her cheek. She looked upon Raven with almost as much disdain as the giant. Midwives had little love for their male competitors, and that she was being asked to defer to one as young as him would be all the more galling. That said, like everyone else present herein, she looked desperate. This was one occasion where Raven felt sure he couldn’t make the situation any worse. However, his only chance to avoid being murdered was if he could make it better.

‘Tell me what has gone on and make it quick,’ he said, his commanding tone a means of disguising his fear.

‘The membranes ruptured in the early hours of this morning and I have been dosing Mrs Flint regularly with brandy and water,’ the midwife said.

The woman was writhing and thrashing, trying to free the arm the midwife clutched.

‘However, she became delirious and increasingly restless. I administered several doses of laudanum but to no avail; her delirium only worsened, and as you can see, she became most violent in her agonies. If you believe you can restrain her where all of us have failed, then I would welcome the chance to watch you attempt it.’

With that she let go of the arm she was holding, all the better for Mrs Flint to lash out at Raven with it, and stepped clear of the bed.

Raven delved into Dr Simpson’s bag, struggling initially to see into it in the dim gaslight. For a heart-stopping moment he could not find the bottle he sought, but then there it was.

Raven put about twenty drops of the chloroform onto a pocket handkerchief, which he rolled into a cone shape as he had been taught. Mrs Flint bucked and screamed, swiping an arm at him as he approached. Raven blocked the blow with his forearm and held the moistened handkerchief about an inch from her face before bringing it closer until it covered her nose and mouth. Within about a minute, her writhing ceased and her attendants were able to release their hold of her, though they appeared wary that she might resume.

‘He has poisoned her!’ the midwife cried. ‘Mr Flint, this man has murdered your wife!’

‘This is chloroform, a new drug,’ Raven retorted, looking Flint in the eye. ‘She will sleep and feel no pain until I revive her.’

With the patient now at rest, Raven was able to perform an examination, upon which he ascertained the position of the infant and the reason for the lack of progress. He felt a knot tighten inside him. He had been wrong in his impression when he first entered the room: there was a way he could make the situation worse, if only for himself.

His examination had identified not the head of the infant in the birth canal but its arm. The mother and baby could both die here. He had administered chloroform, and though it would not be what killed her, if Mrs Flint never regained consciousness, he would be blamed. The midwife would make sure if it.

Raven could not afford to think what would happen after that.

He would have to turn the child in the womb before he could attempt to deliver it, a manoeuvre he had never performed. If he failed, he would certainly be killed. Even if he succeeded, his fate was far from certain.

Raven closed his eyes a moment and took himself from this place. Not far, perhaps a little more than a mile, to a room above the Canongate: the first case he had visited in the company of Dr Simpson. He pictured the diagram the professor had sketched on a sheet of paper upon a wax-spattered table in that hot and foetid room. The whole child can be considered to be cone-shaped, the apex or narrowest part being the feet. The skull can also be thought of as a cone, the narrowest part of which is the base.

Raven took a breath and began. His hand passed easily into the uterus and found the infant’s knee without difficulty. From there he found both feet and pulled them down, firmly but gently. The chloroform had relaxed the maternal muscles and the delivery was completed some five minutes later; a male child, born alive, although the arm which had been residing in the birth canal for some considerable time was almost black in colour.

The placenta followed shortly after the child, and there was little bleeding. The child was swaddled by the girl with the black eye, whose name turned out to be Morag.

Flint took the baby from her, holding his son in his arms quite jealously.

His wife awoke shortly after, her face a study in disorientation and confusion, as though rousing from a dream. Flint offered her the child, which she regarded with disbelief for a moment before hugging it to her breast.

‘I thought myself in the throes of death,’ she said. ‘Yet here is the bonniest wee thing. How can this be so?’

‘It was the young doctor, ma’am,’ said Morag.

Flint walked Raven out to the back court, Peg and Gargantua at their backs. The Weasel, the Toad and Scar awaited, accompanied by the man who had so terrifyingly driven the horses. He was a gaunt and ancient thing, looking like his bones ought to have crumbled from the shaking. Evidently he was made of sterner stuff than he appeared, inside and out.

The Weasel was sharpening his knife by dragging it across the stone of the building, eyeing Raven with a purposeful stare. They were all five at their boss’s command, which Raven was also waiting for, upon tenterhooks.

‘I remember you now,’ Flint said. ‘When you came to me for money, you said you might not be able to pay it back swiftly, but that you were a man of some prospects. I can see that to be true. That stuff you used was quite miraculous. What was it called again?’

‘Chloroform,’ Raven replied.

‘Where might a man procure this wondrous liquid?’

‘From Duncan and Flockhart, on Princes Street.’

‘Hmm,’ Flint mused. ‘A business such as that is liable to take note of who is purchasing their wares. Might one acquire it otherwise? Through an intermediary, perhaps?’

Raven could see where this might lead, but was in no position to refuse.

‘Perhaps.’

The Weasel continued to scrape his blade, impatience writ upon his face as he became concerned that the evening might not reach the conclusion for which he hoped.

‘Put that damned knife away,’ Flint commanded, as though irritated by the sound.

The Weasel complied with a sigh.

‘Mr Raven here is to go about his business unmolested from here on,’ Flint announced to the ragged assembly. ‘I am the one in his debt tonight.’

‘He’s still in mine,’ the Weasel protested. ‘He near took my sight.’

‘You seem able to see well enough,’ Raven retorted.

‘Aye,’ Flint mused. ‘I gather you bested this pair single-handed a wee while back.’

‘He blinded me with a powder,’ Gargantua grumbled.

‘Exactly,’ said Flint. ‘You strike me as a man of some resource and gumption. I wonder if in lieu of your debt, you and I might reach an understanding.’

Flint looked him in the eye. Raven knew he was doing a deal with the devil, but it was better than having the devil on his back.

‘We might.’

‘And is there something I can offer you, by way of thanks?’

Raven was about to politely refuse, not wishing to delay his departure, when it occurred to him that this was a man with an ear to the underbelly of the city, and many eyes reporting back to him.

‘Only information. There is someone I seek. Perhaps you might get word to me if you or your men should encounter her.’

‘A woman? Who?’

‘She is a French midwife who goes by the name of—’

‘Madame Anchou,’ said the Toad. ‘Sells pills and potions, at quite a cost.’

‘Aye,’ said Scar with a chuckle. ‘He bought one from her that was supposed to help him stand proud, if you take my meaning. Suffers from brewer’s droop.’

‘Didn’t bloody work, did it?’ the Toad moaned bitterly.

‘What did you expect?’ asked Scar. ‘There isn’t a potion known to Merlin could make a man’s cock stand tall at the prospect of any woman would have you.’

‘Where did you see her?’ Raven demanded, his urgency cutting through the growing levity.

‘In a tavern off the Canongate. I was given her name by a Mrs Peake, runs a whorehouse nearby.’

‘What do you remember of her?’

‘Not much. It was dark and she had on a cape and a hood. I recall that she had a smell about her, an exotic scent. So strong it would have choked you.’

Raven felt his skin prickle, cold even beneath Dr Simpson’s troublesome coat.

‘What was it like, this scent?’

‘Oranges.’