LILLYPOT WAS A CHEERFUL ENOUGH PLACE, when John and Mrs Scott were gone and with Elsie back in situ. Elsie sang as she worked, or whistled, and she took Joanie under her wing and steered her about more kindly than Mrs Scott had done, so Joanie lost her nervous manner and proved very useful, especially with the children and for running errands. Mrs Foster came as she had come before and cooked for them, and she saw to any ordering that had fallen by the wayside was sorted, so they wanted for nothing.
They saw in the New Year together, by the fire with a bottle of Robert’s wine, Susan and Elsie and Joanie, with the children in bed and a great steak pie ready for the morrow.
Susan was very busy, now she had the keys, investigating Robert’s room. There was a cabinet of unpleasant things, which she did not yet wish to tackle, and the table was piled high with folders and papers. She ignored those at first and made a start on his desk, reading through the bills and invoices – Robert had paid some amazing prices for items, perhaps as exhibits for the museum. Susan cleared all of the receipts into a folder and gave them to Elsie to take home on her next leave day, thinking it might be of use to her to have Robert’s records in her possession. Towards the back of the desk, she found a thing that gave her both pleasure and pain – a large pile of letters from Lady Jane in Portnellan enquiring after Susan’s health and sharing her own news, such as it was in the quiet place where she lived. Mrs Scott or John had evidently intercepted these, and Robert had read them, and it seemed too that he had sent brief notes to Lady Jane explaining that Susan was indisposed and sending word of the births of the children, on which occasions Lady Jane had written with fulsome kindness and congratulation.
Susan took a pen and wrote a letter to Lady Jane there and then, telling her quite frankly that she had not received her letters, Robert had kept them from her. She wrote that soon Lady Jane would hear dreadful things of Robert, if she had not already, but not to worry on Susan’s account, Susan believed she saw a way through it all and expected she would be much happier going forward. She began to write about the children and their carryings-on, but then she put that aside, and took a fresh sheet and wrote down all that had happened, as best she could remember, from the marriage that was no marriage to her imprisonment here, the births and deaths of the children and all of the half-heard and half-remembered things she could muster. She sealed that letter and then returned to the first, completing the gladder tidings of the children and signing off with a note to Jane that she enclosed a sealed letter she hoped Jane would keep, and if anything befell Susan, then she would be grateful if Jane would make its contents public. She trusted Jane to decide whether she wished to read it immediately or simply put it away under its seal. She sealed the second letter within the first, then gave Joanie the necessary money to take it to Leith and post it, which she did immediately.
When Joanie returned, she brought with her a newspaper she gave to Susan, with a grave face. Susan took it back into Robert’s room and read the awful thing printed within, the confession of the man Burke who now admitted to the taking of sixteen lives. Her heart beat oddly as she read and she sat for a while after she had finished it, quite unable to stir, as the room grew dark around her. Then she felt a great wave of fury rise up in her chest and she lit the lamps and began to rake through the mess on Robert’s desk, looking for any papers that might relate to this horror, though she knew not whether she wished to find proof of his involvement, or the reverse.
Most of it was dry stuff, about the shelving in the museum and display jars, and suchlike, but then Susan opened a great box and found a folder of papers, and a book, with a letter tied round it with string. She cut the string and read the letter, and discovered the book was by the accoucheur who had been at Lillypot when the twins were born, and he was pleased to send it to Robert, with the original drawings as Robert had requested. She laid the book and the letter to one side and picked up the thick sheaf of drawings. The first few she could make no sense of, but then she reached the third and she almost dropped the pile.
It was a drawing of a woman’s body, from the breasts down. She was great with child, and the legs were splayed apart so that the sex was revealed. There was a red mark on the thigh, the same mark that Susan had had from birth, like a heart broken in two. It was her.
Very slowly, Susan leafed through the drawings. These must all be her body, her breasts, her sex, her very inner parts, for there were drawings that showed some metal thing that held her open and showed the structures inside. Some showed the delivery of the twins, and she realised the assistant had not been a medical man, he had been an artist, and she remembered all the rustlings and holding up of lamps, and that night when she seemed to half-remember being lifted and turned and woke uncomfortable and uneasy, feeling a stranger to her own body.
She turned to the book then and saw a great many of the drawings reproduced therein, although they were reduced to black and white engravings only. She could not read the text, as it was in a language she could not understand, but it seemed to be an account of the delivery of the twins. There were a great lot of instruments illustrated, and Susan felt clammy just thinking about those – thank God they had never used them.
Underneath the drawings were a smaller set, quite ordinary sketches, beautiful in their way, of Susan with young Robert, or walking in the garden. In one she was throwing hoops. The artist had watched her, it seemed, by night and day, always without her knowledge. And Robert had let him – no, invited him into the house to do this.
Susan returned all to the box, found a pen, and wrote another version of her sealed letter to Lady Jane, but with more in it than ever before. She put it in the box with the drawings and the folder of papers from Robert’s desk – the book she kept – and she sealed it all with string and wax. She gave the box to Elsie and bid her go home to her father and ask him to hide it somewhere safe. Elsie said she would go in the morning, but Susan told her to go to the Bower right now and ask for the pony trap, the lad would wait with it and bring her back by lamplight.
When Elsie was gone, Susan put the lamps on the table and turned to Robert’s cabinet of horrors, prising the doors apart with a letter opener so that the wood around the lock splintered and broke. It pleased her, that sound, after all she had read and seen; the great fury was building within her again and she was ready to cleanse the house of Robert’s filth.
It was worse than she had imagined. There was a blackened thing, wizened and desiccated, smaller than an infant, that appeared to be human from the waist up, and fish from the waist down. Robert had written on a card that this was a supposed ‘mermaid’, exhibited by a travelling showman for ha’penny a peek with the claim that it had been caught off Fiji, but in fact was the upper body of a juvenile monkey attached to the tail of a large fish. Susan set it aside with a shudder. She would ask Elsie to bury the poor creature – creatures – in the garden.
The next things were real enough, according to Robert’s cards. There was a skull with a round hole in it, and the card said it had come from a burial site where folk had been laid to rest thousands of years ago, and many had had such holes put in their heads while they lived, and apparently survived it, for the bone could be seen to have grown back some way in more than half of cases. Then there was a tiny head, the size of a poppet’s, only its face was that of an old man, and the leathery skin was blackened and shrivelled with the lips sewn together and glass beads where the eyes had been. Robert had labelled that one with a long explanation that it was a tribal token from the Pacific, the cut-off head of an enemy tribesman, and Robert had ascertained that the skull had been taken out, the head boiled until it shrunk, and stones put inside instead of the skull. She put it down quickly. Next, a box was labelled ‘Fleshed human hand found in a bog, apparently preserved by the peat.’ Susan chose not to open that. She placed the skull, the head and the box with the ‘mermaid’ for burying in the garden.
The other curiosities were less awful to handle, being made of wax and wood and other materials that didn’t make her wish to wash their dusty decay from her hands as soon as she had touched them. There was a little carved ivory woman, like the most precious child’s plaything ever seen, only her belly and torso lifted off to reveal all the organs of her body nestled inside, and an unborn child curled in her womb. These tiny carved items lifted out too, and all could be put back so she looked again as sweet and neat as a doll. Susan put her back in the cabinet, but a larger, wax version of the same, in which the woman lay splayed like a voluptuary, her hair curled, lips coloured red and pearls around her neck, went on the fire.
She spared a little bone skeleton in a wooden coffin that said it was made in memory of a lost loved one with the date 1797, and several other such things shaped like skulls or skeletons, some in gold and enamel or carved stone and made to hang on a chain; they seemed wrong-headed but also harmless, somehow. There was also a strange little model of what appeared to be a house, but inside there was a tiny skeleton and it said it was a model of the Paestum Tomb, whatever that was. Susan peered closer and saw that the little carved bones were surrounded by all sorts of tiny models of things – bowls and beakers and metal bits that looked like weapons, or perhaps some were implements for tilling the soil. She put that back too, it wasn’t haunted. Last on that shelf – and largest – was a wax model of a human face, horribly painted to Susan’s eye so that it looked almost frantic, and bearing a label that said it was a copy of the death mask of Mary, Queen of Scots. She consigned that to the fire, thinking the woman might not wish to appear so, hundreds of years after her death; or perhaps she would, she was of the old faith and Susan remembered learning that she had seen herself a martyr, and her supporters had wished to dip their handkerchiefs in her blood.
The wax head burned brightly for a time, and Susan felt a little frantic herself, so she fetched a glass of wine to drink before the flame. She mulled over the newspaper reports, and Robert’s collection, and after a while she saw something she might do to pay a tribute to the poor souls who had died, in her own way.
The next day, Susan had Elsie cover the dining table and bring wood-working tools and a piece of wood from John’s shed. As she laid the tools out, she remembered Robert saying the man he had bought them from was a cobbler, and for a second, she wondered if that man had been William Burke, the murderer. But then she shook herself, what difference did it make if that man’s hands had indeed touched these tools? She had touched them herself dozens of times since then and felt no evil in them. Worse by far to think of Robert’s hands touching her, when they had cut up those poor folks’ bodies for profit, although perhaps even that didn’t matter – it was the man she hated, not the things he had touched before.
Next Susan fetched a set of wooden soldiers Robert had bought for young Robert, and scraps of metal, and her needlework tools, and then she opened the cabinet in Robert’s room – almost empty now as the remains of the poor creatures that had resided there were, even then, being laid in a grave in the garden by Elsie. She had taken the children out with her, the kind lass, and given them trowels and sticks to poke at the cold ground. They’d be more a hindrance than a help, but Susan could at least get on with her work. She took out the little coffin that said ‘1797’, for a pattern, and set it on the table.
She selected sixteen of the little soldiers, and set about dressing them in scraps of fabric from a sample book. When the first few were dressed to her satisfaction, she began to fashion a tiny coffin, from wood, with little metal fixings, based on the one from the cabinet. It was a difficult task and took a long time, but Susan was in no hurry, she would take as long as she required to make one for each of the figures. She scrutinised each newspaper article and scandal sheet as it appeared, writing a list, as best she could, of their names:
Donald, a retired solider, not murdered but his body stolen and anatomised
Abigail Simpson, an elderly salt-seller from Gilmerton
An Englishman
An old woman (unknown)
Mary Paterson, a young lass
A grandmother (unknown)
Her grandson (unknown), a boy about twelve
Joseph, a miller
An unknown woman lodger
Effy, a cinder-gatherer
A woman (unknown)
James Wilson, a young man with a limp, clever with numbers, daft in other ways
Ann MacDougal, a relative of Burke’s wife
Mrs Haldane, an old woman
Margaret Haldane, her daughter
Mrs Ostler, a washerwoman
Mrs Margaret, or, Mary Docherty, or, Campbell
Although the order of the killings seemed to change again and again with each fresh account, Susan decided to approach the little figures in the order she had written, so as to hold each clear in her mind as she worked. She placed a cross against each name as she completed its figure and said a prayer for the departed soul.
She had completed the first eight when at last Robert came.
She had moved her things from the dining room to Robert’s study, by then, so they could all eat together, and she was in there working when she heard the carriage outside. She sent Joanie to answer the door with some relish – two could play at the game of a deaf maid. Robert could catechise poor Joanie all he liked, it would not matter to her how he railed and ranted.
It seemed he was sufficiently shocked, however, to follow Joanie into the study quietly enough, although he visibly started to see Susan there. She laid the chisel she was using down. He buttoned his lip, sat down, and looked around.
‘Where are the things from the cabinet?’ he asked, after a moment, as though that could possibly be the most remarkable thing about the situation.
‘Gone,’ Susan said.
His lip twitched, whether in anger or amusement she couldn’t tell. ‘And John and Mrs Scott?’
‘They’re gone too,’ Susan said. ‘John is kin, it seems, to the Wilson woman whose laddie disappeared last year. “Daft Jamie”, they called him. Did you recognise him, Robert, when you dissected him? I hear he was quite the well-kent face in the town.’
Robert’s face was a picture but he answered light-heartedly enough. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t spend my time in the slums. I’ve read some of the poems written on him since, though; they’d bring tears to a glass eye.’
Susan kept her own voice light. ‘They are dreadful, those poems.’
‘More sentiment than skill, I agree.’
Susan nodded. ‘Speaking of sentiment,’ she said, ‘it seems the feeling in the town has fairly turned against you, Robert. Jessie came here, did you know that? She told me the mob had attacked the house and broken all the windows. That was the day John left. He said to tell you to go to Hell.’
‘I see,’ said Robert. ‘And Mrs Scott? Did she do likewise?’
‘She left the day Jessie came, or the next,’ said Susan. ‘By . . . mutual agreement. We reached an understanding, you see. She regretted what she had done to me. And helped others do to me.’ She reached into the pocket of her apron and brought out the accoucheur’s book, placing it on the table between them.
Robert’s face was white as bone.
‘I think there is quite an appetite for scandal involving you, at the present time,’ Susan said, ‘and so I have placed the letter and drawings I found with this book with a friend, for safekeeping. Another has a letter, with an account of our life here, and my request that she publish it, should anything befall me. The other friend knows to do likewise with the drawings.’
‘What did you think might befall you?’ Robert asked, as though he had not kept her imprisoned here for years.
‘Och, admission to an asylum or the like,’ Susan said. ‘Mrs Scott promises to vouch for the truth of it all, too, should it prove necessary. I am to send word to them regularly that all is well – personally, mind – and they will know to do nothing with the letters and papers.’
‘I see,’ said Robert. ‘So . . .’ He tailed off, apparently at a loss for what to say next.
‘I think, Robert,’ said Susan, ‘that I will stay here at Lillypot, with the children, and I would like it if you would arrange for me to receive enough money to live here comfortably, no more and no less. I have two lasses working for me – Joanie and another – and I need enough for their wages, and food and fuel. The cook still comes as before and I will need to pay her too. I would wish to have use of the pony trap as it suits me, and a man now and then to attend to the heavy tasks in the garden. Beyond that, there is just clothing for myself and the children, and books and the like for them. I can entertain myself well enough, with what remains of your library and my dolls’ house.’ She picked up the chisel and examined it. ‘These are Burke’s tools, are they not, Robert? I certainly said so in my letters. It seems to me that you must have had a fair number of dealings with him, to discover he was a cobbler and commission my little toys. Davie Paterson would be glad to know it, I think; from what I read, he is furious that he is to carry the guilt of it all as you insist you never met them.’
Robert’s eyes flashed at mention of Paterson, but he held on to his temper. ‘What of the children?’ he asked. ‘May I see them?’
‘Yes,’ said Susan, ‘I suppose you may see them. It would be my preference that you visit them here, at least until they are older, and then we can discuss the matter again. I’ll need notice of your coming, none of this disappearing for months and then turning up on a whim. You can write to me so I can make plans.’
‘What of their education?’ Robert asked. ‘May I have a hand in that?’
‘Of course,’ Susan said. ‘Although I think we will need Masters to come here. I cannot think they will be able to attend any school in this town, they would be unfriendly places for “Nox-i-ous” children, don’t you think?’
Robert looked pained at that – of course he had planned the best of schooling for his sons – but he said nothing.
‘Will you stay in Edinburgh, do you think?’ Susan asked. ‘Can you?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Robert said. ‘My classes are as popular as ever. More so, even. Notoriety does not seem to suppress interest – quite the opposite, in fact.’
Susan could well believe it. ‘Perhaps they are hoping to see some interesting cadavers,’ she said.
Robert snorted. ‘There are “interesting cadavers” in every theatre,’ he said. ‘I’m not the only one to turn a blind eye, though I may be the only one who has such an organ naturally. The killers have said themselves they were looking for Monro when they came to sell the first of their subjects. But they didn’t find him, so he will be the one to dissect Burke while I am put through some pretence of a disciplinary committee at the Society. They won’t find against me, it’s all for show – let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and all that – but I may have to resign from the museum. The College of Surgeons are already pressuring me, but I won’t make it easy for them. None of them ever wanted me, you know, they only took me because Barclay made it a condition of his will that I be curator, and they wanted his collection.’
Susan heard the bitterness in this, the schoolboy of no great family chafing at the ease with which others claimed titles and appointments with little or no effort while he strived and struggled, but she could find no pity in her heart for him.
‘Well then,’ she said, ‘you will still have an ample fortune, and you will hardly miss what I ask of it. Jessie spends more on her wardrobe, I think, even if she is afraid to go abroad in it.’
She stuck out her hand then, like a man agreeing on a deal, and Robert looked at it for a moment, eyebrow raised, before he shook it.
‘Will six-monthly payments suit?’ he asked.
‘Very well,’ said Susan.
Then Robert lifted his hat and cane. Susan rang the bell and Elsie came. Robert stared, but he said nothing, following her out of the room. He paused at the door.
‘Give my regards to the children,’ he said, and then he left. Susan heard Elsie close the door after him and she crossed to the window to watch him make his way across the garden and out the gate. Then she sat down at the table and carried on with her work.