The Flesh Market Page 6

  Bill gaped. "But ... God's own sake, why would a man do such a thing?" William shook with silent laughter, and even with such disturbing images playing in his head Bill smiled along with him.

  "Good money in it. Put together a crew, run the gauntlet at the graveyard, and there's doctors and medical men give a nice price for your pound of flesh. They cut them up for practice at the University, let all the powdered students take turns until they're good at it."

  "That's ... barbaric."

  "You think so, Bill? If you ever had cause and money to look up a sawbones, do you want to be the first thing he's ever put a knife in?"

  "You've a point there William, no argument, but it's a tough one to swallow."

  "Each to their trade. Don't see why the dead have such a claim on their own rotted flesh, when somebody in the land of the living could make good use of it."

  "It's against God. Stealing the dead from hallowed ground must be."

  William nodded at the cadaverous grave robber. "Graveyard King looks like he's sweating coin, but I don't see the Almighty's wrath crashing down on him."

  Bill wasn't sure he agreed. The haggard, bony creature might not be covered in boils or transformed to a pillar of salt, but he wore his unlikely profession like a second skin. Even before he knew what the man did, he had sensed the wrongness in him. There was more than one way to curse a man. "You sound like you approve."

  "Not my place to judge how a man finds his way in the world."

  "Philosophy, William? You have hidden depths."

  William smiled. For a second, Bill saw his friend's true age. "Hidden shallows, more like."

  Bill chuckled, and drank, but the slight joke turned his thoughts over. There was a quality William shared with the gravedigger, an aura that put him beyond the reach of most men, and he wondered if that was all the two had in common. "So tell me then," he said, and smacked his lips as he put down his glass. "If the Almighty sees no wrong in it and the dead won't miss their bodies, and if you're right and there's money to be had ... well, have you never thought of striding forth with your shovel in hand and taking a piece for yourself?"

  William shook his head. "Dangerous."

  "The night watch?"

  "The families. Wise men watch the graveyards after they put their kin in the ground."

  "Wouldn't want a mob of shrieking aunties on your tail if you get spotted."

  "People have been killed. And since the cadaver riots last year ..."

  Bill sucked in a breath. "Ah. You'd never know what you were pulling up until it was too late. You're right, it would take a madman to take the chance." Finishing his beer, he scooped Tommy's pennies from the table. "One for the road?"

  "Not me, Bill. I need to be up at first light."

  "Ah." Bill looked at the money in his hand, and couldn't stop his gaze drifting to the bar. With Nelly still not with him, he felt the need for distraction more heavily than usual.

  "Don't mind me, Bill. Stay on, and I'll see you tomorrow." William scooted off the bench, and was out the door before Bill could make a show of deliberating about it. With a sigh, knowing he would lose his seat, he started to push to the bar, and then a more diverting thought struck him. If he could warm William Hare up with his charm and a few drinks, he saw no reason why Merry Andrew should be any different.

  This was a story he wanted from the horse's mouth.

  Chapter 6

  Robert Knox

  Tuesday, November 20th, 1827

  The human skeleton had always held a quality of rare beauty for Knox, and he let his oration pause a beat as he turned towards it, trying to recapture that precious rapture. Running his eyes up and down the collection of bones hanging from the frame, he felt only revulsion. Where once it had buoyed him up, giving him solid appreciation of the stability of science, now it offered only mockery.

  The subject had been procured at the start of May, from one of his several suppliers. While still wrapped in flesh, it had been a male in his mid-twenties, expired after a slow battle with cholera. It was a fortunate acquisition, for the bones had thus been preserved and were free from the taint of any pathological condition.

  The timing had also been perfect, allowing him to let the skeleton soak in a closed tub at the height of Scottish summer, one of the few periods of the Edinburgh calendar where reasonably consistent temperatures could be anticipated in the open air. Only through such consistency would the subject properly macerate, the skin, muscles, and associated tissue rotting evenly away, resulting in a clean skeleton suitable for tuition.

  The downside of the preparation came, as always, when the tub had been opened in mid-July, at the start of a long, warm night. Even having moved the tub back inside the cool environs of one of the school's dissecting rooms, the stench had made Knox feel faint when the lid was cracked open. The putrid mess of sloshing rot had not been a prospect for the faint-hearted, providing a ghoulish few hours fishing out each of the two hundred and six bones that had made a man, cleaning them, and laying them out on the dissecting table in an approximation of their original positions in the body, the better to ensure everything was there before he resealed the tub and had it carted away to be dumped in the river.

  Had he been forced to dunk his face into that filth and search out each bone with his teeth, as though bobbing for apples, he would still not have felt the swamping nausea that the skeleton caused in him now.

  After cleaning came the reassembly, affixing the bones in their proper alignment through the use of brass wire and cork. Once complete, the skeleton was hanged carefully in the wheeled frame for display. It was artful, meticulous work, to be taken seriously. With competition so fierce among schools, any weakness shown by one master would reap derision from his fellows. A single bone, misaligned in a careless way, was enough to drive students away in droves if word spread. Knox had no such fears. His passion fuelled his attention to detail, his hubris ensuring a full display of anatomical perfection. His understanding of the human form was unparalleled, and he would die before he let another human being impugn him for a slip of the hand.

  That had been then. Now he knew his understanding of the body to be little better than an infant's stick figure scratchings. He was a sham, and the only thing preventing him from decrying himself a fraud was knowing that no other had more insight than his own pitiable offerings.

  As the skeleton hanging before him now formed the basis of his lectures to new students, it was especially important to him that they saw it as close to untainted as possible. The articular surfaces in particular, those parts of bones that made up the joints, were in immaculate condition, scarcely degraded at all, allowing the intricate and simple splendour of their workings to be clearly displayed. Unlike some of his less-considered contemporaries, who too easily confused effect and affect, Knox refused to artificially whiten or polish the texture of the bones. None of his students, who were mostly destined for surgery and other practical disciplines, would see clean and shining bone in the field, and he was staggered that some supposed authorities believed an illusion of sterility at the academic stage was at all useful. The maceration process tended to stain the bone brown, and Knox preferred this effect of rot and nature to some pious censorship of cold reality.

  Yet these days, reality was beyond cold. It was a frozen, featureless waste, in which he could no longer see the details that made science possible. The knowledge he sought was hidden beneath featureless ice, and none of his tools made a scratch upon it.

  Once there was little that gave him so simple a pleasure as appreciating the form and function of the skeleton. Now that was tainted by the memory of bones jiggling impossibly in a box, dead ligaments and tendons bashing against one another as though they might still reach out for him. He wanted to seize these bones, so carefully assembled into a full skeleton, and unleash his rage and incredulity, tearing them apart and crushing them to dust.

  With a sniff, he tried to swallow the frustration and fury boiling in him, turning back to t
he young men filling his lecture hall. Some glanced at one another, his pause noted. It was not the first time this had happened. Since being forced to accept his failure and burn the remains of the revenant--the only thing that stopped its endless jiggling--he had grown increasingly preoccupied. At home he could escape, burying himself in books while Mary and the children worried at his dislocation. At the school, where his every thought and action related in some manner to an understanding of the human body, he was faced constantly with his own failings.

  Concentrating on the lecture, he snapped his arm out, silently tracing the spinal column of the subject. So many of the ranked rows of students leaned forward in anticipation of his words that he wondered how the lecture hall failed to tilt forward and spill them over him. Perhaps being crushed from existence would be a better fate than struggling on in knowing ignorance.

  "First, consider the spine." It did. For Knox, the audience was always an it. Easier by far to address a vast, cumulative creature than worry about any of its component parts. That this was the opposite of the scientific approach he took to his anatomical subjects when breaking them down to minutiae, naming the parts and analysing their relationships, was an irony that did not escape him. "Be assured that were any of you to press me to name the quality in you I found most charming and favourable, I would assuredly declare the answer to be your spines." Chuckles drifted down to him. His saving grace was that these were students new to his lectures, and as such he could rely on the memory of better performances, that they had not witnessed, to guide him along.

  "Do not be fooled by the false rigidity inflicted on this subject by the wire and cork holding it together. Instead, observe how lightness combines with both solidity and flexibility in this architectural wonder. So many individual parts, and yet it serves to support the head and chest, which would otherwise collapse beneath their own weight. It is the seat of all the motions of the trunk, of which it transmits the weight to the cradle of the pelvis. It lodges and protects the spinal marrow and the membranes which invest it." He floated his hand back up the spine. "It gives passage to the spinal nerves and to many vessels. It affords insertion and lodging to numerous muscles and ligaments, both anteriorly and posteriorly. You need only stand from your seated positions to experience the elasticity and flexibility afforded you by the cartilage connecting your vertebrae." All accurate, were he to examine any one of his students in life. Were they to die and reanimate, the laws and logics he described, despite their self-evident truth, would cease to matter. That should not be, and he tried again to put it from his mind.

  "Alas, as our subject has discovered, cartilage is a connective tissue without the resilience of the bone it protects, and does not survive the maceration process."

  More chuckles, among them one he recognised. Without making a show if it, he slowly swivelled the subject's frame around a hundred and eighty degrees on its wheels to display it from the front, and this gave him chance to scan his eyes over the eager faces on the benches. When he peered casually to the very back of the hall, the top row of the seating bank, he found a familiar profile staring down at him. The features were in shadow, but he recognised the long shape of the face. James Syme, one of his most eager competitors.

  Keeping his own face blank, Knox let his gaze run past the man, as though merely surveying his eager attendees. Even from the depths of the depression that had swallowed him, he could not resist scoring a point. See how many have flocked here, his gesture sneered. See how long it takes me just to make brief eye contact with them all. Well, if the man wished to learn how knowledge was best imparted, he had come to the right school.

  "You, boy, front row there," he pointed at a young mop-headed man with one hand, and gestured to the chest of the skeleton with the other. "Assuming you've read a book or two, where does the classically trained anatomy lecturer next journey to in an opening descriptive such as I am imparting?"

  The boy shrank back, lips flapping while he sought some composure. "Sir, the thorax, sir!"

  Knox nodded. "Excellent! An inquiring mind for you each to take full note of. Were any of you expecting knowledge to leap from my mouth and bury into your brains with any permanence, cast such foolishness aside and revert to your reading. As the spine roots the body, your own reading will ground what you learn here."

  Pausing for a moment, long enough to turn his gaze to Syme, he drew a slow breath. "The first unique thing you will learn in my school is that classically trained anatomy lecturers, along with the writers of texts, are imbeciles who have pasted themselves so thoroughly with secondhand understanding, they advance the anatomical arts scarcely at all. You are fortunate to be attending 10 Surgeon's Square, and you must learn that knowledge is not static. It advances every day. The question," he smiled slightly for Syme's benefit, "is whether you can keep up with it. The very finest of you might even one day cause it to surge so far forward that others briefly lose sight of where it went. I am pleased to announce that I am one such."

  For a moment, despite his failures, he made himself believe it. Chuckles scattered again, respectful this time. He took a mock bow before continuing. "What you see here is not the thorax. It is but an assemblage of bones, and it long ago appeared to me that here is where the teacher is least aided in conveying to the student a proper idea of the thorax as a whole. See here, the ribs? What indication does their positioning give of the size, extent, or arrangement of the thoracic cavity?"

  Several hands went up, and he pinched the bridge of his nose. Having been impressed by him, several of his students were now too eager to impress him in return, little knowing that it was a fool's cause. "A second understanding that you should quickly come to if you wish to advance in my classes is that of the difference between a rhetorical question and an actual one." The hands vanished. "Thank you. As I was attempting to highlight, the articulated skeleton conveys an erroneous idea of the physiology of the region, and the form alone is represented. You will understand the thorax only when you are wrist deep in it, and as my classes have cost you each in the purse I shall not waste your time prevaricating about it here. Your fellows attending lesser schools than this are not so fortunate."

  Finding his rhythm, he allowed himself to talk on, moving to the skull, through the pelvis, across the whole body in summary. There were many lectures to come in which he would expound in detail on each part he moved so quickly past now, but he knew that the academia he spouted was of little worth to these students. Some would retain key points of interest, but many, if not most, would be lost until they had a cadaver before them. There was a world of difference between understanding the structure of the body, and having a subject on a table, its cold flesh waiting for your knife. Only in the practice did true appreciation come.

  That was how the revenant had defeated him. With fresh subjects, he could work. The one he had already used, the only one he had been offered, was already decayed when it was brought to him. He had struggled to make best use of it. Only having materials as close to their formerly living state as possible would enable him to map the changes as the body degraded, pinpoint what had so altered in those first hours as to make it rise and feast.

  Clenching his fists, he ploughed on with the lecture in distracted fashion, his attention divided between self-flagellation and knowing that Syme was still up there, watching all.

  His competitor, a man he struggled not to simply declare his enemy, waited patiently until the lecture hall was dismissed, allowing the students to file past him, the hushed, animated whispers to roll over him. Knox gripped the side of the lectern, eager to discover what had initiated this trespass, but also afraid to find out. Dark imaginings filled him, of Syme having somehow, for all his inferior ability, divined the secrets of the creatures that plagued the shadows of the city. Were such the case, the visit would be for the sole purpose of gloating, of letting Knox know that the race was done and the balance of power among the medical elite had shifted forever.

  Finally the last boys were gon
e. Syme stood, a slight, sad smile on his long, thin face as he descended the central aisle. Knox's heart beat twice the time of the approaching footfalls, and he had no idea how he would react if his worst suspicions proved true. A murderous, preparatory rage seized him, and he gripped the wood tighter, suddenly scared of his own capacities.

  Syme stopped at the bottom step, his temerity insufficient to carry him onto the stage. Some things were sacrosanct. No doubt he imagined for himself how he would react were Knox to dare such a thing in his own school.

  "Fascinating work, as ever. A little flamboyant for my own tastes. Have you ever properly considered the difference between purposeful academic presentation and bawdy theatrics?"

  "With every bit the careful thought you have applied to the gulf between an attentive student, and a slumbering one."

  "Hm." Syme chuckled. "Indeed. I hope you'll forgive this intrusion."

  "Students of all ages and abilities are welcome here, though there is usually the matter of advance payment involved.

  You may consider this a free sampling. Be sure to formally enrol, should you plan to return."

  For a second, Syme's half smile blossomed, splitting his face in a grin. "Really Robert, is the jousting necessary every time we meet. Can we now dispense with it for a moment? There's no public gallery to choose a winner. They've all gone home."

  Grudging that he had not made the concession first, Knox nodded. "Of course. What brings you here James?"

  "Why revenants, of course. What else could drive me through your doors?"

  Knox felt the world shift, tilting on an angle as the blood drained from his face. Somehow, he kept the horror from his voice. "You've ... discovered something?"

  Syme failed to notice the impact his casual proclamation had wrought, and practically spat his next words. "Pah! How can I? How can any of us? While our hands are tied by fear and prejudice our science remains inadequate to the task. How can I theorise the unknowable? Yet that's what the great and the good would have me do, all the time withholding the very thing that can provide us answers!" Knox's head swam with relief, and he closed his eyes to let the faint pass. Syme was not finished. "I came to entreat you, Robert. Your arguments are faultless. We will understand these things only when we open them up and spread them before us, and that cannot happen without samples."