Mr William McAdam’s Anatomy School and Museum of Curiosities
Great Windmill Street
Soho
London
November 1792
It was still dark when Ezra woke. He could hear the city waking up down below in the street, the iron-wheeled carts trundling towards Piccadilly or the Haymarket, Mrs Perino’s chickens cackling across the street. The church bells of St Anne’s called the hour and were answered by those at St James’s and, in a duller echo, by St Martin-in-the-Fields’. Ezra dressed quickly; there was much to do and he wanted to get a letter to Anna before Mr McAdam’s students turned up for the lecture.
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.”
“But I need to earn now!” Ezra burst out.
“You are more than an apprentice to me, lad.” McAdam frowned. “The navy! Do not provoke me!”
Ezra turned away.
Mr McAdam put a hand on Ezra’s shoulder and gently turned him about to face him. “I need you, Ezra. There is none your equal, none in the whole of London who knows how I like things done.” He looked full into Ezra’s eyes. “You are of age. And you are free. I would never wish to constrain you, but I wish you would think on it.” McAdam looked away. “You know you are the son I never had. I beg you, think. Wait.”
Ezra went to speak. He wanted to say how he knew McAdam was a fine master but how he wanted other things too; he wanted Anna, and he wanted to be his own man.
“The navy will be a harder life than you have known. I cannot stop you, but you would not have my blessing. A sensible lad such as yourself would not be so stupid.”
“No, sir.” Ezra felt trapped. He did not want to go to sea. He tried to think of some crystalline clear argument to advance his case for a wage.
“Mr Lashley offered me a paid position only yesterday.”
“That fool? My boy, you are a better practitioner than him already. And he goes through apprentices the way the flux goes through a neighbourhood. You are too clever to work for him. Even if he paid you in Spanish gold!” Mr McAdam turned once again to leave. “I will have no more of this. Not a word. You have work to do and you will do it. And you can take a message to your Mr Lashley at Bart’s. I must have words with him – he thinks to charge the poor for the Monday surgeries. But before that I would have you boil down and clean off the tibia belonging to the child – the left is the more bent, I think.”
“Yes, sir.” Ezra sighed. For the first time in his life he felt a deep irritation with his master. He was as tall as him now, eye to eye. And though he admired the man, right now he longed to storm out of his house and into the world.
Mr McAdam pulled on his jacket as if nothing had happened. He paused. “I’ll ask Mrs Boscaven to make an Irish stew tonight. That is your favourite, if I am not mistaken.”
“Sir! Please!” Ezra snapped. “I am a man. Do not seek to mollify me with treats like some lapdog!”
McAdam stepped back and there was silence between them. Ezra could see the hurt in his face.
Ezra felt angry and ashamed; he should not have spoken back to the master like that. He ran out into Ham Yard, still in his stained apron. He wanted to yell and rant and break something; feel the pain in his heart made real. He kicked a flowerpot against the wall and watched it shatter.
“Ooh, still upset, are you, bone boy?” Henry Toms was leaning against the wall smoking a clay pipe. He must have heard the exchange in the anatomy room. He grinned and tapped the old tobacco out of his pipe onto the ground. “Why don’t you push off, like you want to? I’d be glad to see the back of you even if the master thinks you’re worth feeding.”
“Shut up, Toms.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, freak boy.”
Ezra knew better than to let Toms needle him. Instead he imagined unpicking the cadaver’s innards and flinging the three-day-old large intestine in the footman’s face.
“What’re you looking at now?” Toms said.
Ezra thought Toms was a lean streak of meanness and bitterness: why Mr McAdam kept him on was unfathomable.
“Nothing,” Ezra said. He picked up the copper to boil the boy’s bones and went back inside.
As he pared every scrap of flesh off the thigh bone he reflected that there was so much more trouble in the world than his own. This child, whose life had been brutal and short. The man, shot in his prime, perhaps for the price of his earrings. Ezra’s own blood family, somewhere in Jamaica, on the far side of an ocean, breaking their backs cutting cane under the lash.
He lit a fire under the copper. Anna was as good as gone. He would have to live with it. This world was made of suffering, and if he didn’t know that by now, he was no more than a child after all. The worst of it was, he knew McAdam was right. He would be better off in the long run if he stayed. He would never learn half as much with any other surgeon on earth. And he would be a good one. The best. That dream, at least, was still intact.
Ezra promised himself he would find the master as soon as he had completed his tasks, and apologize. But by the time Ezra went in to fetch the letter to take to Bart’s, Mr McAdam had already left in a chair for a dinner at the Company of Surgeons and would not be back till late. It would have to wait.
As Ezra walked eastwards through the city, he did wonder why Mr Lashley wasn’t going to be at the Company of Surgeons but surmised that any dinner he was at would be a much poorer and duller occasion.
He came to St Bartholomew’s from the Old Bailey, holding his breath as he passed the massive stinking hulk of Newgate Prison, then up Giltspur Street and through the old gate of the hospital. As he turned under the archway he noticed a girl: small, maybe fourteen from her face, with bright – no, flaming – red hair piled on top of her head. She sat on a stool by the gateway, her arms folded, saying, doing nothing, only glaring. She was dressed in mourning, and the black of her dress and shawl only seemed to make the colour of her hair shout louder.
Ezra followed her line of sight. She was staring straight at the Fortune of War public house, which sat almost opposite the hospital entrance.
“Are you quite well, Miss?”
The watchman in his gatehouse shifted and stood up. “That’un’s been there best part of the day. Not budged an inch,” he said.
She was very still. Ezra waved a hand in front of her face.
“I am quite well, thank you. Now if you will leave me alone,” she said, but did not look at him.
Ezra and the watchman exchanged looks. He tried again. “The Fortune of War is not a –” Ezra coughed, trying to find the word – “a very salubrious tavern.”
“I done told her that already,” the watchman put in.
At last the girl moved, turning her steely grey eyes on him. “Don’t you think I know that, sir?”
Ezra shrugged; the girl obviously did not want his assistance. He turned and, with one last glance over his shoulder, made his way through the arch into the courtyard of the hospital and into the west wing, where Mr Lashley had his office.
As he walked along the first-floor corridor he looked out of the long window, which gave a perfect view of the corner of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane – and the tavern. He couldn’t see the girl from here, but he was sure she was still there because, on the pavement outside the inn, a knot of men was standing, looking back towards where she had been sitting. Ezra recognized one of them as Mr Allen. Whatever the girl’s fight was with those men, it was terribly one-sided. From her dress, Ezra guessed she had lost a loved one – perhaps those gentlemen had sold him on to surgeons.
Ezra thought he should like to tell her the truth of it, how they needed the cadavers to do their work, to find ways of making the living live longer, live better. But he knew it would be a waste of his time. He had had that conversation so many times and people never listened.
Ezra paused. He took a moment to brush down his coat and pat his hair into place, then knocked twice on the door.
“Aha, Ezra McAdam! Changed your mind, I hope?” Mr Lashley sat behind an enormous dark wood desk. He was studying a jar containing an ear, and on his desk a pile of letters was held down with what looked like a twisted section of a human spine.
Lashley must have seen him looking. “Yes, rather fine, don’t you think? It shows excessive osteophytes, bone spurs and scoliosis.” He shook his head as if in wonder. “Quite remarkable.”
“I have not given your offer any more thought, sir. I am quite happy where I am.” Ezra kept his face blank. “My master sends you this.” He took the letter out of his jacket.
“Is there a reply, sir?” Ezra asked, when he felt Lashley had had enough time to read it over. He would rather not wait while Mr Lashley composed an answer.
“No, not now. Although I would change Mr McAdam’s mind. We do not operate for the good of the destitute!” Mr Lashley replied, waving him off as if he had more important things to do.
“As you wish, sir.” Ezra nodded and left as quickly as he could. The man was a penny-pincher and no mistake. He hurried back down the stairs two at a time, glad to be making his way home.
Ezra could hear the commotion as soon as he came out into the hospital courtyard. At first he assumed an ox had escaped from a pen in Smithfield market – it happened often enough. But as he stepped out through the gate he could see it wasn’t an ox that was being rounded up.
The men carried shovels and stakes. Allen was there, and a few of his company. They were chasing the girl, the one who’d been sitting stock-still – but she wasn’t still now, not at all. She had her black skirts up and was running for her life, in and out of the animal pens of Smithfield market, falling and getting back up and jumping hurdles as fast as possible in full mourning. All the while the men bellowing and hollering, the sound bouncing and echoing off the hospital walls.
Ezra watched as she was cornered by two thickset resurrectionists, each with a shovel. The girl was half their size, width and breadth. Why was no one helping her? Ezra ran as fast as he could across the empty meat market.
As he dodged animals, he lost sight of her for a few minutes, but he followed the sounds of her furious shouting. Then came a scream, a sound of intense pain – a mirror of the sound the boy had made in the operating theatre the day before.
She was on the floor; one of the stakes that made up the animal pens stuck out of her thigh. Blood, dark as ink, pooled beneath her on the straw-covered ground.
“Leave her alone!” Ezra tried to sound in charge. “I am Ezra McAdam, apprentice to Mr William McAdam of Great Windmill Street.” The men stepped back. He didn’t recognize either man in the twilight, but they knew his name.
“Tell this harpy to leave us be or she’ll get some more,” one of them said. “Tell her!”
Ezra nodded. The men melted away.
The girl was writhing in pain. Ezra knelt down, took off his neckerchief and tied it round her thigh. Then he put a finger into the pool of dark blood underneath her and sniffed. His face relaxed. It wasn’t hers. Just some cow, perhaps, that had met its end in the same spot earlier.
“You!” The girl tried to push him away. “You’re McAdam’s man! I’ve heard that name. That butcher!” She still had enough fight to spit at him and he caught it in his face. “You will not kill me!”
Ezra wiped his cheek with his sleeve. “Correct. I will not.”
“Then you’ll not take my leg! Away, you gullion, you rusticutter!” She tried to get up and floundered, falling to the ground, her skirts awry. “Help me! Help!” she called into the empty market. Her face burned with fury and pain.
“I am the help,” Ezra said. “And believe me, I have no wish to take your leg, or any other part of you.”
He looked at her. She was uncommon in many ways; she did not look like a shop girl or a servant – she was too fierce. Her dress, though once expensive, was well worn, almost shabby. Most intriguingly, she spoke the words of the gutter in the voice of a lady.
“You are a visitor to the city?” he said.
She glared at him. “Hah! I am less of a visitor than you, sir! My people have lived here for…” She stopped. Ezra had pulled the hurdle out quickly and cleanly while she was distracted.
The girl burned the air so blue and so loud, Ezra imagined they could have heard every word as far away as Leicester Square. He checked the wound: it was deep, the cut at least an inch long, but the skin was not jagged. He must take care there were no splinters left inside. He needed light. She could not walk on it, so Ezra carried her across the market, in and out of the hurdles, until they were almost under the main gate. “Not Bart’s, no!” the girl snarled. “My father went in alive and I never saw him again. I am not setting one foot inside!”
“Then truly,” Ezra said as calmly as possible, “if you do not, you will only have one foot.”
“Oh, I hate you!”
Ezra sighed. “I am not entirely well disposed to you either, though you are in need of help.” She made a face. “Let me make myself clear. I will take you into the receiving ward. I will stitch up your wound. You could get another to do it, but I can say, honestly, that there are not many who would do as good a job as me. You would only have a bigger scar, it would take longer and it would cost you. From your dress, I’d venture to say that although you may be comfortable, you’re not so wealthy you can afford a surgeon with stitches any better or neater than mine. I doubt you are swimming in cash. Or I could leave you here, and who knows? The wound might never close. The choice is yours.”
She looked at him, her lip trembling. She was truly afraid, all her bravery had gone. Ezra sighed; he should not have been so cruel. A surgeon needed a good manner as well as a steady hand. He softened.
“It will be all right,” he told her. “You did not lose so much blood. I think the larger measure was from an ox who’d had the stall before you. I will sew the wound. It will heal.”
The girl said nothing. Ezra nodded at the porter as they went under the gate towards the receiving ward. She wouldn’t need a bed, Ezra thought, just a needle and suture. It was busy, as usual, and the smell was close to that in the master’s anatomizing room. He saw the girl screw up her face.
“I think that is the smell of death,” she said.
Ezra knew she was right, so he lightened his tone. “What is your name?”
“Miss Finch. And I know yours!” She laughed, bitterly. “You have his name – a butcher’s name. A man known across the city for his anatomizing! If I were you I should change it.”
Ezra ignored her and put her down carefully. He was well known around the hospital; a nursing sister found him a chair and he begged some suture and a needle from Mr Lashley’s apprentice.
Miss Finch refused a draught of laudanum to calm her down. “On account that you’ll have put something in it and I’ll wake up on the table being dissected!”
“That will not happen. Unless you faint away through pain you will be quite awake – although I would advise you to look away. The thought of the deed is worse than the actuality.”
“I want my wits about me, thank you very much.” She glared at him.
Ezra had to tell her ten times to keep still, then, as quickly as he could, made four tiny stitches. Miss Finch bit her lip and looked away at first, but Ezra caught her watching and her face seemed to have changed from outrage to interest.
“There.” He stood back. “If you hadn’t wriggled so, I might have got in five smaller, but that will do.”
“Pleased with yourself, aren’t you?” she said. “I bet my stitches would be neater than yours.”
He smiled. “I’d like to see that.”
“I would say a human is no different from a smocked shirt. And I do the best smocked shirts – my pa said so…” Her voice tailed off.
“I’m sorry, Miss,” he ventured into the silence that followed.
“No matter,” Miss Finch said briskly, and got up to walk.
“No.” Ezra put a hand out to stop her. “No pressure on it. Not for a few days. Not at all!”
“So I mightn’t walk now?” She sounded worried.
“I’ll bandage it up, but you will need to use a stick or a crutch,” he told her. “Look, lean on me and we’ll see if we can find the stores – there is bound to be one there.” He stopped, seeing the shocked look on her face. “Just for a few days,” he added hastily, “until the skin knits back together.”
Miss Finch leant her shoulder against his and hobbled down the corridor past the medical wards. The lamps were all lit now, but it was a gloomy place, Ezra thought. There was crying and moaning, and perhaps the remembrance of hundreds of years of crying too.
“So many people have died here,” Miss Finch said, as if reading his thoughts.
It wasn’t long before they came to a cupboard full of sticks and trolleys and crutches. Ezra found her one of a suitable size and they left the hospital via the north gate.
“So you have no further opportunity to stir up the drinkers at the Fortune of War,” he said.
“Those men are not ordinary drinkers.”
“I know.”
“And I know I have accomplished nothing with my vigil.” She sighed. “I had hoped to make them feel something. Guilt, perhaps.”
“The resurrectionists are not known for their tender feelings,” Ezra said and she almost laughed.
“I have been an idiot. But since Pa died…”
“I am sorry. For your loss,” Ezra said, thoughtful. “But in my line of work death is common; everyday. Sometimes I think it is more ordinary than life.”
“Then I pity you. A life amongst the dead! No wonder you speak like an old man, though I swear you cannot be more than seventeen.”
Ezra said nothing, he was pleased she thought him slightly older than his years.
“I know I said some terrible things to you, but you should know my reasons.” She took a deep breath. “My father sickened and died within three days. It was so sudden. He was quite well until we returned home, the performance had been a complete success—”
“Performance?”
“We work as magicians. Falcon and Finch,” she said. “My father is – was – Mr Charles Finch.”
“Falcon and Finch!” Ezra smiled. “I saw you at Vauxhall last summer. Of course – and you are the Spirit of Truth! You could tell when men lied or spoke true. You and Mr Finch were a marvellous turn. Now I think of it, I even recall the hair. Anna thought you were quite splendid.” Ezra paused, made a face. “Mr Falcon and his Italian cards, less so. I should so like to know how it all works.”
“I cannot tell.” Miss Finch’s eyes sparkled with something like mischief. “Not on my life. Conjuror’s honour. But thank you,” she added. “I quite enjoyed being the Spirit of Truth. We haven’t done that turn since last summer, we were thinking of ways to better it, improve on it.” She sighed. “That will not happen now. I suppose my life will change more than I can know.” She stared into the distance and Ezra thought she might cry. They walked on in silence. Ezra looked sideways at her. A performer. No wonder she had not fit into any of the categories he could think of. A magician’s assistant! He had always wondered how those deceptions worked. Still, she looked sad now, and Ezra decided he preferred to see her fierce than sad. He should say something.
“So will you not continue to work with Mr Falcon?”
“Perhaps. He has been good to us. To me. He was a friend of my father’s since before I was born. He has many contacts. I might go abroad, or work up my own act. But without father…”
“Tell me what happened to your father,” Ezra said.
“He woke up poorly last Thursday, pale as…” She paused. “He was sick, vomiting all morning. I took him to the hospital. I should have stayed with him but I left him there – here. He told me he would be all right. And then he wasn’t. I knew it was not natural, I would swear on all God’s creatures above and below. But not a soul would listen. The final straw was that someone else came and claimed the body for burial! A woman, who said she was his sister. My father has no sister! Mrs Gurney, my landlady, said I should leave things be, but I cannot!” She was getting agitated again. Ezra thought of his stitches and sat her down on a bench in the courtyard.
“Oh, I know a thing or two about resurrectionists,” Miss Finch went on. “I have heard what they do. I would give two guineas to prove that my father was murdered, and that he lies in the cellar of the Fortune of War.”
“Two guineas?” Ezra’s mind was racing. That would be more than enough to travel. His own funds. He could get a boat to Holland and back with that! He began to map out a plan of action. Why, he could walk across the road this minute and check to see if her pa was there, in the cellar.
“I have the money,” the girl continued. “Well, I have Father’s clothes and props. He will not need them now. The mad thing is,” she said, looking at Ezra, “if they’d have asked me – once he was dead, that is – if your lot had come and said nicely, ‘Look, Loveday, we can help you, we can tell you why your Pa died,’ I’d have said, ‘You know what? The man’s dead, so, yes, why not?’” She took a breath. “Pa loved science, he wouldn’t have minded being sat next to the Irish Giant, up in your man’s museum, with a little sign round his neck saying Skeleton of the World’s Greatest Magician.”
“Your name is Loveday?”
“What of it?”
“Nothing. Unusual.” Like its owner, Ezra thought. He turned to her and declared, “I will take the job. I will find your father’s corpse, and I will find the cause of his death.”
“You could do that?” She smiled – properly this time, her eyes alight with new hope. Ezra looked at her. He remembered her all in white, almost like a Grecian, on stage as the Spirit of Truth in Vauxhall Gardens.
He smiled back at her. “Yes,” he said. “I think I could.”