Chapter 14

I picked at dinner that night. I was not hungry for one thing. Secondly, Aunt Susan had hired a new cook and she wasn’t very good. After Martha, the previous cook, was fired for having let Sherlock into the house without consent, Aunt Susan hurriedly looked for someone else. Sherlock had persuaded Martha to give him a key to the servants’ door to let himself in as part of an elaborate ruse to catch out the British Museum murderer. She was tangled in one of Sherlock’s spidery webs and, ultimately, his plan had served to free my uncle from gaol and send the real killer to the gallows. But no amount of persuasion on his part, nor mine, would dissuade Aunt Susan from terminating Martha. The servants were permitted no visitors without permission; certainly no one was allowed to have a key to the house, not even Sherlock Holmes.

I stayed up long after Aunt Susan retired to wait for my uncle. I lit a fire, gathered an array of gas lamps, sipped port, and passed the time reading Effie’s journal, the one she had entrusted to her cousin Oscar Wilde to give to me when he saw fit. He’d done so a year after she passed away giving birth to my nephew. I had never been able to read all of it. I read it in fits and starts because so often the memories pressing into my heart were as painful as a bird savagely pierced against a long, sharp thorn. I turned now to an entry in what she called the Last Diary of Euphemia O’Flahertie Stamford. She’d made it early in her pregnancy.

6 October 1876

“I am puzzled - and frightened - by a dream I had last night. I was wading in the river... in Victoria Park, I believe. I was encircled by swans. So beautiful. White like those we would find in the shady woodlands and hedgerows near your parents’ home. They reminded me of enchanted nightshade - you know the ones with the little white flowers and the soft, downy feathers. Their wings were like that.

“Then, all at once, the swans surrounded me; their wings flapped violently and then they pounced upon me and one began biting me from the base of my neck to further down my spine. Savagely pushing me down further and further into the water though I tried desperately to get to the shore. Down, down. And suddenly my head went beneath the water. I would rise, gasp, make a mewing sound as the swan pushed me back down, beating me with its wings. But then another swan came, challenging my attacker. She was almost airborne as she attacked my assailant full from the rear, biting and beating him with her wings. Again and again with feet and wings and bill. I realized it was you, you who was saving me, circling around and around me to protect me like a warrior-maiden.

“But it was too late. I went limp and sunk down, deep, deep into the dark water. I saw faces. Hundreds of faces and dead eyes. No bodies, Poppy. Just heads, bodiless heads, bobbing about.

“I don’t know what it means.”

I shut the journal. Often Effie’s dreams manifested themselves in some kind of terrible and real event. Obviously, she had, in her own strange way, foreseen my involvement with the swan case that we were investigating. But there was more to it than that. These heads, these faces... I could not help but wonder if the swans were in some way connected to this dismembered body Wiggins had dug up.

It was close to midnight when Uncle came home. I heard him come in, latch the door, and call out to Aunt Susan. I shouted to him and he came to the library door. Though he was now in his early fifties, Uncle was still a very handsome man. He was athletic, fair-haired, but now sported a grizzled moustache and beard. Like Sherlock, Uncle had curious ways and eerie tricks of spotting details that others missed.

“Uncle Ormond, you’re very late. Aunt Susan is asleep.”

“He sighed. Very busy day. And night. A young woman came into the hospital just as I was leaving. She had tried to abort her child. She botched it and the uterus prolapsed. I was unable to save her.”

“I’m so sorry. Are you alright?”

“I am a surgeon. I suppose I should be used to it by now. But one never gets used to it. So, may I join you?”

“Of course.” I rose, poured some port into a glass and handed it to him. We sat down in the wing chairs that flanked the fireplace.

He swirled the wine so hard it almost splashed out of his glass. “I ran into two young men of your acquaintance today.”

“Who might they be?” I asked, knowing full well the answer.

“Sherlock, who at my friend Mycroft’s request is still investigating the swan case, and who is, to Mycroft’s consternation, in full pursuit of facts surrounding that poor fellow who young Wiggins disinterred.”

“Why does Mycroft wish him to stay out of the case, Uncle?”

“Because it could be quite dangerous. It’s for the Yard to sort out.”

“I also ran into Mycroft today. He said the man was a member of the Privy Council.”

“Yes, his identity is now known,” Uncle said. “I’m sure it will be in all the papers tomorrow. He has something to do with the Board of Trade at Whitehall Gardens. In the Railway Department, I believe. His name was Cecil Gray.”

“And what else is known about him?”

“Very little. He is - was - married. Had a daughter who died very recently. In fact, it was in her grave that Wiggins found the body.”

“His daughter’s grave? My God.”

“Yes, terrible circumstances.”

“Has he anything to do with Oxford? Was he interested in phrenology?”

Uncle cocked his head. “What makes you ask?”

“If you spoke to Sherlock, then you must know that we suspect that someone was funding an Oxford professor’s research in that regard. Wiggins was sending bodies by rail to Oxford. So I must wonder-”

“Stop wondering, Poppy,” Uncle said in a stern voice. “You - and Sherlock - must let the Yard handle this.”

“Sometimes they are out of their depth.”

“You parrot Sherlock.”

“Perhaps he is right. You should know that first hand.”

He knew I was referring to the British Museum murders Sherlock had solved the previous year, the false accusations against Uncle which were part of a ruse concocted by Mycroft to flush out the true criminal. It had nearly ended very badly.

“The second young man I spoke with today was Jonathan Younger,” he said to change the subject.

“Yes, I ran into him today also.”

“He wanted to know if he could take you to dinner tomorrow night.”

“Dinner? No, I told him perhaps lunch. Actually I have plans with Sherlock tomorrow evening.”

“You are not still pining for Sherlock, are you, Poppy?”

I felt my face flush and momentarily turned away. Then I faced him squarely. “Pining,” I sneered. “I do not pine.”

“Hanging on to a scrap of hope then?”

I looked down, into my glass, and swirled the crimson liquid myself this time. I looked back at Uncle and asked, “Do you remember the young man I told you about, the poet I met at the British Museum? The one from India?”

He nodded.

“He told me once that a mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it. I have come to agree with him.”

“I see,” he said, but his eyes betrayed his skepticism. “So then... Jonathan Younger.”

“What about him?”

He smiled. “I told him that I place no restrictions on my very intelligent, educated, logical, independent, willful niece.”

I laughed. “I take after my uncle.”

“And so he would like to take you to lunch tomorrow at noon at The Criterion. I suggested the Holburn. Aunt Susan and I were there the other night for dinner. We had fish, sweets, ices and cheese - wonderful bread, as well. All for three shillings and six pence. Quite good.”

“Did you tell Jonathan that I would meet him there?”

“I advised him to send a page to confirm all this. And I told him that if you had not arrived by half twelve, he’d best have something to eat by himself or go back to Bart’s hungry.”

“All right then,” I said with a smile.

He finished his port and said, “I’m going to get some sleep. You should, too.”

He started to rise but I reached out to touch his elbow. “Uncle.”

“Yes?”

“I heard something... I heard something quite despicable about St. Bart’s today.”

He settled back into the chair. “What was that?”

“Sherlock said that they used to... well, he told me that at a public house there was a room in the back with benches with the grave robbers’ names who waited there with specimens for the surgeons at St. Bart’s to appraise and purchase.”

His face fell. “The Fortune of War public house on Pie Corner. Yes, Sherlock is correct.”

“It’s true then,” I said, heaving a loud breath. “And so, despite acts of Parliament and the Poor Laws, grave robbing still occurs.”

“Yes, it does, because there has been such an influx of medical students that there are not enough bodies for dissection. This has to do with this Wiggins thing, doesn’t it, Poppy?”

“Yes.”

“Poppy, I urge you not to-”

I interrupted him mid-sentence. “Uncle, in a very twisted way, I do see why the purchase of cadavers, this black market is on-going.”

“Oxford is still a somewhat marginalized medical school, Poppy. A lot of the metropolitan medical schools at the hospitals are booming. And we don’t get enough bodies to meet the needs of the medical students. So we still resort to finding beggars, and homeless and prostitutes and poor people who are willing to contract away their dying relatives. Brokers, undertakers, and others still pay the poor to give up their dead or simply help themselves and lie to relatives who want to at least give the deceased a pauper’s funeral. Still, to this day, body-dealers and those who specialize in body parts pick up corpses and sell them for profit... for a sixpence or a few shillings. The price of a meal at the Holburn,” he choked.

“And they are transported to various places on the railway?”

“On what they call dead trains.”

“My God. Uncle, this is-”

“Despicable. Nothing of which the medical profession can be proud. There are those who fight for the poor and unsuspecting. People like Hussey in Oxford.”

“Hussey? I thought he was something of a dolt.”

“Do not believe everything you hear, Poppy. He trained at St. Bart’s. He is the coroner in Oxford now, elected by the town council a couple of years ago. He has refused to provide any unclaimed bodies to Radcliffe Infirmary and he has lobbied against guardians selling the bodies of the poor for dissection. He constantly wages a war against people selling their loved ones.

“Poppy, there are dealers who employ go-betweens, like porters at hospitals and workhouse masters and undertakers. Of course, young medical students must learn all they can about the human body, but this trafficking of bodies and body parts...”

His voice trailed off. I simply nodded. It was exactly what Sherlock had been telling me earlier.

“Poppy, I don’t know what kind of scheme young Wiggins involved himself in. I don’t know if this Cecil Gray he dug up has anything to do with this at all. But stay out of it, will you? Promise me?”

Uncle had asked me this before. His concern for me was always at odds with what Sherlock asked this of me. He had frequently cautioned me to check my feelings for Sherlock and to disentangle myself from Sherlock’s detective pursuits. But it was a tug-of-war - complying with Uncle’s caring requests or submitting to Sherlock’s urgent entreaties.

Uncle always lost.