Beloved Poison (18 page)

I looked down at Dr Bain’s body with sorrow. Not two days ago he had been full of life and joy, enthralling the students with his new and peculiar ideas, laughing at Dr Catchpole and Mrs Speedicut, welcoming Will and me into his home. He had been, to me, a genius, a rogue, and a friend. Now, he lay naked before those same students, their knives poised to slice him apart. Oh, how blithely we go about from day to day, with little thought to the miracle of life that allows us to do so; and how little dignity there is in death.

‘The guts are the first to putrefy,’ cried Dr Graves. ‘We must remove them at once.’ He took up his knife and slit Dr Bain from throat to navel. The students leaned forward, the wooden benches creaking beneath them.

Dr Graves was both thorough and speedy. In no time at all Dr Bain’s head had been sawn off and set aside. The lips and tongue, still stained red with the sap of the bloodroot, gave it the appearance of a grotesque carnival mask. I noted down a number of interesting observations. Not least of them was the relish with which Dr Graves was undertaking his task. I had helped him at the dissecting table before – my knowledge of the human body, my attention to detail and my slim, strong fingers had been invaluable to Dr Graves in the preparation of numerous specimens. But today he worked like a maniac. It was as though he had resolved to obliterate Dr Bain, and was determined to slice him into his constituent parts as quickly and as definitely as possible.

I stepped forward. ‘Dr Graves,’ I said, hoping the interruption would stop his morbid gusto, at least for a moment. ‘Are you happy with the verdict of bloodroot poisoning?’

‘What?’ Dr Graves paused in his labours about the rib cage. Sweat dripped from his brow. ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Yes, bloodroot it is.’ He gestured at Dr Bain’s severed head with the end of his bloody knife. ‘There. You see? The tongue.’ He bent to his task once more. ‘The stuff is in the oesophagus too.’

‘May I look?’

‘By all means.’ I heard the sound of ribs splintering, and he stood back from the corpse. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and beckoned the students. ‘In fact, you may all come closer.’

One by one, Dr Graves asked the students to step forward so that they might peer into Dr Bain and admire the arrangement of his internal organs: the liver, heart, kidneys and spleen, the delicate bags of the lungs, the smooth slippery yards of intestines. Then, he selected certain individuals to remove those organs. The liver was placed in a bowl; the heart in another. The lungs, blackened with pipe smoke and years of city air, occupied a third. He asked them to touch and feel, to smell and taste. ‘Use every sense,’ he cried. ‘Only then can you truly understand.’ They gathered round to peer at the membranes, ligaments and musculature of the body cavity. Hidden from view for a moment, I slipped from my pocket a bundle of surgical knives Dr Bain had once given me. Removing the smallest and finest of these I set to work.

The heart was congested, choked with thick dark blood, which I knew to be a possible symptom of bloodroot poisoning. And yet still I was not convinced. There were other poisons that would result in the same congestion. And there was still the appearance of Dr Bain’s face when we had found him – the paralysis about the lips, the dark splotches in the eyes. I
had
to be sure . . .

‘Let us examine the brain,’ cried Dr Graves. ‘If we take the skull—’

I closed my eyes at the sound of the trepanning knife, trying to blot from my mind the knowledge of what was taking place at the dissecting table. While everyone was distracted, I slit open the pale muscular bag of the stomach.

They worked upon Dr Bain diligently. St Saviour’s anatomy museum was extensive, and there was little in Dr Bain’s corpse that was worth preserving for posterity. But his body parts were useful for the purpose of instruction and practice, and a number of students were keen to keep some of his organs for their own collections. Dr Graves wiped his hands on a dirty towel and rinsed his knives in a bowl of muddy red water as he handed Dr Bain over to the students. Soon, there would be nothing left of the man at all: the veins and arteries of his major organs would be injected with coloured wax; the flesh stripped from the muscles; the brain put into a jar of preserving fluid, or sliced up like a cooked cabbage and divided between the students so that they might each preserve a cross-section. Finally, his bones would be boiled in a gigantic copper vat Dr Graves kept for just such a purpose, and strung together with wire. I was glad not to have to stay in the place any longer. I had seen what I needed to see, had proved what I wanted to prove. I excused myself, and went to find Will.

He was standing on the top of the brewhouse, looking out over St Saviour’s churchyard, watching the excavations. I climbed up to stand beside him. ‘Dr Bain’s lips and tongue were stained with bloodroot tincture,’ I said. ‘The tumbler at his side suggested that it was the last thing he had touched. And yet, Dr Bain and I had already tested the actions of the bloodroot. Why on earth would he choose to test it again, and do so when he was alone? Last time he tried it the stuff had almost killed him.’

‘But he was
not
alone,’ said Will. ‘There was another person with him.’

‘Nonetheless,’ I said. ‘It still doesn’t explain why he would down a tumbler of bloodroot tincture all over again. Besides, although it was on his lips and tongue, and from what I could see it was also present in his throat and the upper part of his oesophagus, I detected none of it in the stomach. The stuff is clearly visible. I would be able to see it if it were in the stomach.’

‘Meaning what, exactly?’

‘Meaning he did not
swallow
it,’ I said. ‘It was
introduced
into the area – presumably by his executioner. Bloodroot is highly visible. It would look like accidental death – accidental bloodroot poisoning – if it were found in his mouth and throat. After all, the last notes Dr Bain made in his ledger were about the actions of bloodroot. But it was not accidental at all.’

‘You mean he was already dead when the bloodroot was poured down his throat?’

‘Dead or paralysed.’

‘Paralysed?’ Will looked alarmed. ‘By what?’

‘Something fast acting. Something that would have rendered him insensible, or at least unable to move or call out. Cyanide, perhaps, though I could smell nothing of bitter almonds when we found him. Aconite is more likely. It has no smell. It causes paralysis. It kills as soon as it is ingested and one doesn’t need a large quantity of the stuff to achieve a result. It can even be absorbed through the skin.’

‘And who might have access to such a substance?’

‘Anyone, of course. This is a hospital. We’re surrounded by surgeons and physicians, all of whom have access to it and are aware of its uses and applications. The apothecary, the herb drying room, the physic garden . . . it might have been got from any of those places, by almost anyone who was of a mind to find it.’

‘Why on earth do you keep it,’ said Will, ‘if it’s not a medicine?’

‘But it is a medicine,’ I said. ‘In small doses, at least. Medicine and poison, life and death, the point at which one becomes the other isn’t always easy to command.’

‘Though there are plenty here who claim to have that skill,’ said Will. He looked out at the graveyard once more. Already, the excavations had produced a great many corpses. How glad I was that the wind was blowing from the east that day. ‘All these bodies,’ he muttered, shaking his head. ‘D’you think most of them spent their last days in St Saviour’s Infirmary?’

‘A good many.’

‘Makes me wonder how many of them were killed by your so-called doctors.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As for our murderer, well, we are looking at the work of a doctor there too, I’m certain. The whole crime is too methodical, too clever, the knowledge required to kill, and to deceive in the killing—’

‘Can we find out who? And why?’

‘I’m sure we can,’ I said. ‘We are dealing with someone quick and clever, but they’re not as quick and clever as you and I.’ I meant what I said. And, even now that everything is over, and despite the terrible events that occurred, I still believe I spoke the truth that day. But confidence breeds complacency, and my assumption that we could not fail to uncover the truth, that we could outwit anyone, was callow and foolish. What a price I was to pay for my arrogance.

D
r Bain’s will was simple and straightforward: his property should go to Gabriel, once the lad was of age and had finished his apprenticeship; his library, and his anatomy museum, was left to me. But what was I to do with such a superabundance of medical books and museum pieces? I had no room for them at the apothecary. In the meantime, everything stayed where it was.

I went to look for Gabriel. I found him in the herb drying room, curled up on a blanket on a high shelf amongst the hop sacks, his face turned to the wall.

‘Gabriel.’ I put out a hand and touched his shoulder. He shuffled forward, moving away from me. ‘I’ve brought you some food. Bread and cheese. And some of those pickled oysters you like from the whelk stall on Fishbait Lane.

‘And look,’ I said. ‘I’ve brought you a treat.’ I produced a large orange from my pocket. I pulled out my knife and began to peel the thing, slicing the skin from pole to pole. The oil burst from the ruptured pores in a zesty mist.

Gabriel sat up. His face was red and puffy, his eyes bloodshot. He sniffed, and wiped his nose with the cuff of his coat. His nose was raw from the piece of sacking he had been using for the same purpose. ‘Don’t you have a handkerchief?’ I said. Standards had to be maintained, despite the forces of grief overwhelming us. I handed him mine. ‘Keep it.’

We ate the orange sitting side by side, looking out of the gabled window at the city. The sky was an inky blue-black, flat and featureless. Before it, illuminated by a shaft of sunlight, the roofs shone black and silver, picked out sharply against the lowering rainclouds.

‘You know you will still be our apprentice, Gabriel,’ I said. ‘You’re part of our family. You always were, you know.’

Gabriel sniffed. ‘Is it true what ol’ mother Greedigut said? Is it true that Dr Bain was my father? I always thought he was, but I never liked to say it.’

‘I think there’s little doubt about it.’

‘And about my . . . my mother.’

I could think of nothing to say. ‘Well,’ I said, hoping comradeship might serve, ‘I didn’t know my mother either.’

‘But mine’s all cut up,’ said Gabriel. ‘Mrs Speedicut said. How will God know where to find her, when the trumpet sounds, if she’s all in bits in jars?’

‘Look,’ I said, wondering where on earth he had got such nonsense – the lady almoners, no doubt, ‘everyone’s in bits in the end. D’you think they’re all waiting below ground, nice and clean in their Sunday best?’ I shivered at the thought of that growing mound of stinking corpses excavated from the churchyard. ‘She’s better off in bits in jars, if you ask me.’

For a while we sat in silence. ‘I saw the Abbot, you know,’ said Gabriel. ‘I saw the Abbot and I knew Dr Bain was goin’ to die. I told him too and he took proper fright.’

‘What?’ I turned to the lad and seized him by the arm. ‘What did you say?’

‘I went to speak to Dr Bain after ol’ Greedigut said those things,’ said Gabriel. ‘I tried to forget what she’d said, but I couldn’t. I pretended I didn’t mind, but I did. I wanted to know about my mother, what were she like? Did he love her? Did he care about her? Greedigut said he didn’t care. I just wanted to know. So I went out when you and Mr Quartermain came back that night. It was late, but I knew Dr Bain would be back too. I was going towards Dr Bain’s house when I saw this man—’

‘Man?’ I said. ‘How do you know it was a man? Did you see his face?’

Gabriel shrugged. ‘Who else might it be? You don’t get women out at night in St Saviour’s Street, leastways not respectable ones. Not when the fog’s up neither. I didn’t see his face, but I knew it was the Abbot – the one what Mrs Speedicut talks about.’

‘That’s a ghost story.’

‘Is it?’ Gabriel turned to me with sorrowful eyes. ‘Well, I saw someone in a cloak and a hood in the fog. Standing outside Dr Bain’s house. Still, and quiet. Just looking.
Watching
.’

‘And then?’

‘Then nuffink. I came along and he just vanished.’

‘Vanished where?’

Gabriel shook his head. ‘I didn’t see.’

‘And you saw Dr Bain? You spoke to him?’ My voice was sharp, almost accusatory. Poor Gabriel, he was no longer enjoying the interview, but I could not stop now. ‘Did you see Dr Bain the night he died?’

‘Yes, yes, I saw him.’

‘Did you go inside?’

‘He wouldn’t let me in. Said he didn’t have time. Said he would talk to me in the morning, and I was not to listen to what Mrs Speedicut said about anything. Then I told him about the Abbot. Proper angry I was, and upset. I was
glad
to tell him the Abbot was watchin’ him.’ Gabriel looked at me, his face awash with tears. ‘I told him he would die. That the Abbot was after him, and that meant he were a goner. I said I were
glad
—’ he gave a muffled sob.