4.

Jenny Diver was only too happy to have a moment of Relief.

Thank God, she mouthed from the bed, amidst a tumult of whalebone-stiffed petticoats edged with violet lace. Her breasts were purpl’d with thumb-marks—teeth marks?—marks of overly much Attention, whatever the case.

Evans was indeed an oddly complexioned man, with a giant, blindingly white wig. He perched atop the coverlets at Jenny’s side, his limbs as white as his wig, and his face pink as a raspberry.

Regarding him, Jack was quite sure that no matter how blood-rich his arborvitae might be, it couldn’t surpass the displeasing nature of the rest of him.

“I was curious if you had a moment to discuss—” He display’d the book.

Evans reached for his Monocle, throwing coverlets about. He rais’d the Glass to his eye. “What did you say your name was?”

“Hadn’t.” Jack coughed. Then, into the ensuing silence—“Jack.”

“Jack”—Evans peer’d at him—“let’s discuss this over some tea.” He stood—his undergarments flowing about him in an unappetizing Cloud—and linked his arm through the crook of Jack’s elbow, leading them out of the room, towards the hearth.

“Some say that a chimera pollutes all that it touches,” Evans proclaim’d as they walked. He spoke as if he were writing a Decree. It was off-putting. “And yet my experience doesn’t accord with this fiction, nor do my Affections resonate with the sentiment of fear ’roused in some hearts by the mere suggestion of a chimera in proximity.” They had reached the hearth—a particularly unclean area with scumm’d bowls lying about on cabinets, and a pot of water burbling over a fire. The remnants of the mollies’ birthing theatrics were strewn—a wooden baby leg on a table, a dislodg’d button-eye lying cracked on the floor.

Evans cleared his throat. “I’m writing a lengthy Disquisition on Sexual Chimeras.”

Jack nodded vaguely.

Evans had not released Jack’s arm.

“I should say that I do not take the supernatural View. Some—like Diemerbroeck—believe chimeras to be monsters. I, however, believe them to be an Illusion. A category of creature, quite frankly”—here he narrow’d his eyes at Jack—“that does not, strictly speaking, exist. My view is that chimeras are persons afflicted with Macroclitoradeus—my term!—as the result of morbidity or disease. And my goal—against earlier theorists—is to support the possibility of disease-correction.” He pursed his lips. “So to speak.”*1

Evans dropped Jack’s arm and began to busy himself with water and some mildewed buds of chamomile that he produc’d from the Pockets of his robe.

He continued his discourse throughout. Speaking in technicalities, he catalogued chimera-myths across a variety of cultures. “Some deny their existence, some revere them, permitting them to walk among the dead as women—”

Jack allowed Evans’ voice to dim to a blur of sound. His Somethingness was nothing like this roster of examples.

But then Evans said something that jolted him.

“—And while the Romans decreed that all chimeras be placed into tiny coffins at birth, nailed shut and thrown into the Sea, the Greeks thought them a charmed species. Simply a human of both sexes, although often with one part more luxuriant than the other.”

Luxuriant.

His Something—Jack thought—was luxuriant. It blossom’d luxuriant in Bess’s hand. Sprang into luxuriance when they touched, throbbing against his breeches, or the Horn. He luxuriat’d in her Presence.

The steam from the teapot evaporated against Evans’ hands, raising a red welt along the crook of his pointer finger.

Evans dropp’d the kettle on the side table and locked eyes with Jack. “I’ve been laboring on an Idea. Combining the classical Greek attitude towards luxuriance with the newest methods in scientific Management of the body.”

“Management?”

“Management.” Evans nodded. “I regard chimeraness, frankly, as a kind of hurricane—a weather system of extremes. My research has demonstrated that a chimera is a thing of both misery and shocking pleasure. A thing of intensities. I believe we can—hm—let’s see—how to put this—accelerate, emphasize—certain of those intensities.” He leaned in, studying Jack’s face. “I can help you.”

“H-how did you—”

Evans look’d at him pityingly. “Really, it’s quite obvious.”

Jack spent the entirety of the next day staring out the window, itching and gasping in his boiling smish. He wanted only to take it off, to breathe free of the tight jerkin.

But what he had to get through in order to luxuriate.

At night he dreamt he was stripped bare, strapp’d to the saddle of a cantering horse, paraded through the town under the blazing sun. The jolt of hooves on cobblestones ached his back—clusters of branches threw shade across his face— He became desperately thirsty— The horse was driving him towards someone—some cruel power— Then the horse stopped. There was a Figure near but unseen— The Figure said something—garbled words. Incomprehensible and not reassuring. He tried to lift his head and look—Sunspots filled his eyes.

Then something cut the golden light in two. A flash of steel, and a white-hot pain flew through his chest. A line of fire licked his ribs, and gouts of blood burst up over his rolling eyes as he lay against the horse’s rump— The bright sky swam above him, dappled with bloody fireworks. Then the fireworks were falling— His own blood blanketed his pupils, sending him deep under water to a purple dark sea. The sun gray’d to a speck, and his horse dove down into this darkening sea—rocking him on hood waves. And he was drowning.

—He awoke shivering, his heart racing. His smish was soak’d. His teeth hurt from Clenching.

Bess was blinking in the sun, reaching her hand out sleepily.

“Night terror?”

“Yes. And no.”

He told her the dream—the hot feel of his own Blood pouring over his ribs. The horse-ship swimming down, down under dark water. It had been a terrible dream, but then, on waking, it had oddly left him with a Light Feeling where his breasts were—some anticipation of—something.

Bess traced around his ribs, careful not to touch anything but bone.

“Here? Light here?”

He nodded. “And all here—” He waved his hand in the air above his chest. Then told Bess of the caterpillars he used to catch at the Thames shore in summer. The tiny pocks where their skin opened to the air. Caterpillars didn’t gasp at air as he did. Rather, air fizzed through their trunks to fill their Bodies. And the feeling he had about the Dream was that he’d become—through a course of great and terrifying Pain—a creature whose Body, for once, and to his great relief, began to breathe.

“We’re simply removing the non-luxuriant bits,” Evans said, swinging wide the door to Jenny’s room. “Perfectly safe.” He pursed his lips. Paus’d. “Well, by and largely safe.”

Bess clutch’d a decanter of brandy, which she regularly brought to her lips.

“Do reserve some liquor for the patient,” Evans mutter’d, as he bustled about, yanking the coverlets off Jenny’s bed. He led them into the kitchen, where he laid the fabric on the table to create a makeshift operating theater.

Jack began shaking.

Evans had become a kind of bureaucratic Husk. He whisk’d about, readying his Instruments, dipping them in jugs of wine and then laying them, dripping, upon a series of assembled side tables and stools.

The Gleam he had in his eye—the thrill of scientific experiment—Bess had a bit of too. Jack grew nervouser and nervouser the more excited the two of them came to appear. He told himself the operation would intensify the luxuriant parts of him. Once it was done—he reasoned—he would never have to see Evans again. Never have to hear him discoursing further about chimeras.

But what he had to get through first.

Jack did not know what was worse: the anticipation of the Pain or the Gulf that was opening between himself on the one hand and Bess and Evans on the other. Evans bloating with power; Bess at his side, looking down with a mix of anxious kindness and interest.

Evans instructed Bess to find a “Blood bucket”—terminology that made Jack tremble. When she turn’d to seek the item, Evans reach’d into his cloak pocket and leaned in, bringing his fingers to Jack’s nose. An awful, oily Smell bloomed from his fingertips. He held a pinch of something that looked like dirt but the grains were larger, and tawny. He press’d the Grains to Jack’s nose, holding him at the back of his head.

“Snuff it. Helps with healing.” He paus’d. “Helps with—after.”

Jack’s arms were jellied with anxiety. He snorted the Grains back as directed; they burned his nostrils, and filled his lungs with the scent of something rancid. He cough’d, and a warmth filled his body. It was good, in fact. The warmth reminded him of when Bess had said his name for the first time in the Black Lion. That moment when he fell from the ceiling into his own skin.

“Good,” said Evans. “Easy now.”

When Bess return’d with the Blood bucket—“Can we call it something else?” shriek’d Jack from the table; “How about Blood basin?” she suggest’d. “Something without the word ‘blood’ in it!”—Jack let Bess, at Evans’ direction, take off his smish and sponge down his sweat-gritted chest and arms. They shared copious amounts of whiskey. It was warm near the hearth, but even so, Jack was shivering with his shirt off. Then Evans instructed him to remove his breeches as well. Why?! he gasped. And Evans mumbl’d something about ’fections and Cleanliness. So, with Bess’s hand on his shoulder, he slipped out of his breeches and stockings too. After what seemed a too-long pause, Evans covered his Nethers with one of Jenny’s sheets, then produced some Volume from one of the stools. He mouthed to himself while turning pages.

Jack pivot’d his attention back to Bess.

She was reddening at her cheeks from the whiskey, her eyes sparkling with concern or drink or both.

“I once met a bat who’d had a similar procedure for cancers and lived to tell of it. She said the worst part was not the cutting through the veins, arteries, muscle and fat. The worst part was the ‘scraping’ after the main incisions.” She paused. Elaborated. “The relentless Neatening.”

“Scraping?? Neatening?! Just tell Evans to l-l-leave whatever’s there,” Jack said frantically, his eyes staring up at her from the table. “No scraping!” he shouted to the room. “No scraping!”

And then Evans was there, having put the book aside, standing with his scalpel poised at Jack’s ribs. Jack was looking at Bess, and he could feel the point breaking his skin. He remembered his underwater trick, and he imagined himself descending into the muffled Deeps, cool water lapping at his temples in perfect silence. He was still shouting “No scraping!” though he could hear the words less and less. He felt his mouth moving, begging Bess about the scraping, and, then, at what must have been the umpteenth repetition of the word “scraping,” the scalpel dragged lightly down the side of his ribs—he looked over—and Evans’ eyes had gone very wide. Then they rolled back, and Evans descended to the floor like a marionette whose Strings had just been cut.

Bess and Jack stared at each other. Jack leaned up, peer’d over the table.

Evans was in an unnatural Slumber, his limbs laid out in hectic arrangements on the floor. A small stream of Blood dripp’d from Jack’s ribs where the incision had been abruptly aborted.

“Fainted dead away,” Bess appris’d. “It may be, in fact, that this was his first surgical operation,” she continued.

“His first?! When were you going to tell me that!”

And now Evans was urgently garbling from the floor.

“What?” said Bess, bending.

“Snotmie urst.”

“Snotmie urst?”

“Snotmie urst!” he yowled.

“He’s saying ‘It’s not my first,’ ” Jack snapped from the table.

“Yesh, yesh,” said Evans. “Not me ursh.” There was something extraordinarily pathetic about a Reputation defended from the floor.

“He’s quite mad,” assessed Bess, standing up. “And in any case”—she looked down—“he’s unconscious again.”

“So you had turn’d me over to someone who as far as you knew had never done this before.”

“He’s study’d it quite a bit.” Bess looked contrite.

“So have you!” Jack shouted. He meant, by this, that Evans was about as qualified to slice him open as was any untrained person—which was to say, not at all. But Bess took this to mean something else. She bent again over Evans’ form, and this time she slipped the Scalpel from his hand. She picked up the book from the stool where it had been placed.

She righted herself. Look’d Jack in the eye. A negotiation of glances. Bess appear’d utterly calm and at home with a small weapon. Focused.

“Good point,” she said. “I can do it.”

He swallow’d down the rest of the whiskey, then Bess shook out the remainder of the flask over his ribs and chest. The world began to spin.

Bess laid her hand on his sternum. Her hand was warm.

“Mm-hm,” Jack burbled. He realiz’d he was extraordinarily drunk.

And then she was doing it. He went somewhere mostly else. There were Thames-waves rising and falling over his head and in the far-off distance something was happening to his Body. He could feel the tissue come away from his chest under Bess’s strangely expert hands. Blood ran down his ribs and pooled in the Crease between his back and the table. Her ability with the knife was wonderfully sure and smooth. His terror had loosed some part of him from himself, and he was startling into each Moment as if waking from a dream—each second had no relationship with the one just prior. He dipp’d in and out of time.

Bess’s face was just above his. “Are you fainting?” she asked. “The bat with the cancers fainted twice during her operation. She said there were ‘Chasms’ in her mind. Periods of time she could not account for.” The words floated over Jack’s face. He tried to speak, but couldn’t.

There were Chasms in Jack’s mind too, but they had nothing to do with the operation. He had them before the operation—had always had them, in fact. It had to do—he floatingly thought—with his Somethingness. His whole life was a Chasm. But perhaps if he and Bess could dive to the bottom of this one—the Chasm of his chest—they could come out whole somehow, and together.

Bess kept talking to him, telling him what she was doing. Her Words became all of time and space; his own body seemed less real than her Voice.

He heard himself remind her not to scrape. She shushed him and kept cutting, and there was a lot of Blood. Delirious and babbling, he told Bess to lick the Blood up, like a cat. He wanted this Proximity to her, wanted her spit inside him, sewed up inside him, like a watery Organ.

Bess said that was “bird-witted” and “not clean.” She called him “paagal.” Her father’s word.

“It’s not crazy,” he object’d. “It’s like a hug,” he said, delirious. “An inside hug.”

As Bess sewed him up—which the bat had not mentioned also hurt an awful lot (by then Jack was sobbing and had shite through his teeth^*2 twice)—they heard banging on the outer door of the house. Loud calls from the street.

“Centinels,” hissed Bess.

“How d’you know,” slurred Jack, wiping vomit from his mouth with the back of his hand.

“The Knock.” Her lips were set. She began tidying the surgical area more quickly.

The outer door clicked open. He heard the Lady Abbess say, “But how do I know you’re really centinels?”—and then a Slam as the door was shoved open roughly, banging the wall behind, and a squeaky, full-body Hiccup from the Lady Abbess who—from the sound of it—had been thrown across the room.

Boots.

Several more pairs of boots entering the foyer.

“Do you have any prohibited doxies in here?”

“We keep a clean establishment here, a place for coves to exchange bitter for sweet Humours.”

“Certain doxies are now prohibited by order of the Lord Mayor,” the centinel continued, “on account of the Publick’s Health.” The flap of a broadside being opened. “ ‘As it is thought that the plague travels in East India Ships, we recommend that the city authorize centinels to question and—if necessary—quarantine any lascar and Levantine persons suspected of Contagion.’ ” Snap of a finger punching at paper. “By mayoral Decree. Now”—Boots turn’d slowly, heels scraping in the floor-grit—“we’ll inquire again. Do you have any prohibited doxies on the premises? Doxies who could be contagious to an innocent cove just looking to exchange the Humours.”

Bess stopped tidying and stood still against the sideboard. The only sound was Jack’s Blood dripping down his ribs, plinking against the floor.

Just then, Evans began to stir. Murmuring, rustling his coats, garbling like a wing-shot duck.

“We don’t have any prohibited doxies here, sir, this is a place of great repute,” the Lady Abbess said.

“None? Not a one? Not even a one for especial pleasures or particular Fancies? Coves like that sort of thing.”

“Only Anglo-English girls here.”

Evans’ garbles were getting louder. Bess’s eyes search’d the back of the kitchen. Exit through a window? The glazes were small and tight—deliberately designed to prevent Peeping Toms and unpaying customers. It was unlikely she could squeeze through quickly, and being caught half in and half out of the bat house was—well—a magnificently stupid Plan.

“Have you ever had a prohibited doxy here?” The interrogation continu’d in the foyer.

“By what you’re telling me, such doxies only became prohibited tonight. Even if I ever had had one ‘prohibited’ one—as you say—she wouldn’t have been exactly prohibited then, now would she?”

Evans emitted a snarled honk from the floor. “EEEEEERE!”

“Oh, God,” Jack whispered, seeing Bess’s stricken face.

Before he could think further—and clearly under the influence of alcohol and the shock of the procedure—Jack leapt from the table, grabbing the pillow from under his own head, and throwing himself and the pillow upon Evans. Every nerve in his rib cage shrieked, but in his overwrought state it did not produce an immediate reaction. Pain simply rippled through his already wracked Body, unable even to elicit the usual counterflinch.

He was on top of Evans, bleeding onto Evans’ jacket and shirt, struggling the pillow over his face.

“Shhhhh,” he hissed. “For God’s sake, you hateful beet, shhhhh.”

Evans grabb’d up at him, his soft ash-white hands flailing, ripping at the air. His hands spasm’d, dragged along the ground, collecting dust. Evans clawed upwards, around the pillow, spearing his Nail into Jack’s cheek, drawing Blood. Jack threw his chest on top of the pillow, his entire body weight on Evans’ face. His chest fired from the pressure of the Stitches against the rough pillow, and the sharp bones of Evans’ nose and brow beneath that. He heard himself wheezing and sobbing. Tried to stifle the Sound of it. There was spittle running from his mouth. He cry’d out in pain, and cry’d with effort and fury.

“Jack!” Bess whispered. “Jack, you’re going to—”

And then he pass’d out.^*3