The Angel of Highgate (33 page)

* * *

“Constance looked so lovely,” Aurelia said.

“Yes,” Thraxton agreed.

Both she and Thraxton were seated in the shadowy interior of his brougham. Both side curtains were tightly drawn to shut out the brilliant day. Thraxton cracked his curtain slightly and peered out.

Constance and Algernon were just climbing into an open landau outside the church and waving goodbye to the throng of well-wishers.

Aurelia drew in a shaky breath and then spoke in a trembling voice—a speech she had obviously practiced. “Geoffrey, I release you.”

He dropped the curtain and turned to look at her.

“Release me?”

“I… release you from any promise you might have made or implied… any obligation you may feel toward me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You belong in the light, with your friends. In the real world. I am condemned to live in darkness. I could never ask you to share my fate. I am sorry now that we ever met. It would have been better never to dream of happiness—”

Her voice strained to finish, but ended in a sob as her composure collapsed and she turned her face away.

Thraxton took her trembling hand in his.

“Until you came along, I stumbled in the darkness for years. Now, you are my light.” He pressed her hand to his heart. “For you burn like a candle… in here.”

After a few moments, she dared to turn her head to meet his gaze.

“Aurelia… you and I are all the world we need.”

“Really?” she asked in a tremulous voice.

Thraxton smiled. “Forever.”

* * *

Silas Garrette was full of smiles as he entered the room. “I understand you are ready to move forward with the lawsuit?”

Greenley shook his head. “There will be no lawsuit.”

Garrette’s face dropped in disbelief.

“I fail to understand. I received a communication from you just this morning—”

“Circumstances have changed.”

“Since this morning? How is that possible?”

“They are to wed. There will be no lawsuit.”

“Wed? We are talking about the same man? Lord Thraxton? The blackguard? The seducer?”

Mister Greenley did not answer. He opened a strong box atop his desk and counted out a stack of bank notes, setting them on the desk top. “You will find here full payment for all your time plus an additional sum for your inconvenience. Please consider this matter and our relationship at an end. I wish you a good day, sir.”

Garrette did not move. He had not worked so hard to have Thraxton slip the noose this easily. “You are pleased about this marriage?”

“My daughter’s happiness is my sole concern.”

“I do not understand. Just the other day—”

“My daughter carries his child.”

At the words, excitement stirred in Garrette’s heart.

“But your daughter’s condition…”

“An illness of the blood. Her mother suffered from the same malady. She cannot stand the touch of the sun and must live her life in a darkened room. In truth, she may not—” Greenley’s voice broke. He cleared his throat. “It is unlikely she will enjoy a full life.”

“I am familiar with such cases.”

Greenley glared suspiciously. “You cannot be correct, sir. I have searched all of Europe for such a doctor. None exist. The condition is exceedingly rare—”

“Not in some parts of the world,” Garrette interrupted. “I learned of the condition and of its cure while serving with the British army in Crimea.”

Greenley gasped. After years of disappointment, hope was extending a hand toward him, but he was almost too afraid to take it.

“If so, then this is miraculous news!”

“Yes, it is a condition caused by an imbalance of the humors, remedied by a simple operation. However, the procedure must be carried out as soon as possible—before your daughter’s pregnancy advances any further.”

For a moment, hope danced in Robert Greenley’s eyes before he reeled it back in.

“Operation? You speak of an operation?”

“It is a rudimentary procedure—one that requires no hospitalization—so simple it can be carried out in her room.”

He turned and strode toward the door. “I must fetch my medical instruments and some additional… apparatus. After I return, your life and your daughter’s will never again be the same.”

Silas Garrette showed himself out and hailed a cab. As he settled himself on the leather seat he wore an expression of smug pleasure. He was giddy with thoughts of the life forming inside Aurelia Greenley. What a child that might be. He imagined it even now, pale and ethereal as the mother, a ghost floating in its amniotic darkness. Fate had just delivered a new sibling for his children and an opportunity to teach the insolent Thraxton an excoriating lesson on the respect that death commanded.

* * *

Silas Garrette clomped up the stairs carrying a large jar under one arm, an enormous bottle of chemicals under the other. He had to set everything down to unlock the door to his office. But upon turning the key in the lock, he was alarmed to find the door already unlocked. He entered and looked around, his spine stiffening as he noticed the door to the windowless room slightly ajar, and the glimmer of gas light within. He moved like a man walking against a hurricane as he approached and shouldered the door wide.

Augustus Skinner sat in the leather armchair. He was holding a black revolver, and now he leveled it at Garrette’s chest.

“Come in, Doctor Garrette… or whoever you are.”

Silas Garrette hesitated, then slid into the room. His eyes could not help but dart to one side, checking that his beloved brood still slumbered safely in their glass jars.

“Your so-called ‘children’ I take it?” Skinner mocked disdainfully.

Garrette said nothing. The Gladstone bag sat atop the bench. Inside, his medical instruments: bone saw, cleaver, and his wicked sharp scalpel. He eased a step closer. “I am a doctor. They are part of my studies—”

“Studies into what? Depravity? Tricksterism?” Skinner lifted his cane and pushed open the cabinet door. Inside, the two phrenology busts topped with theatrical wigs and whiskers.

“Wigs. Disguises. Who are you really?”

No response.

“I also found this pistol,” Skinner said, brandishing the revolver. “Hardly something I would expect a man in the medical profession to possess.”

“My army revolver. I was a surgeon—”

“In Crimea,” Skinner interrupted. “Yes, you have spoken of it. Or is that another lie?” He gestured with the pistol. “Take off the hat.”

Garrette seemed reluctant, so Skinner aimed the pistol at his face. “Go on.”

As Garrette removed the white top hat, he noticed that he had left the bottle of chloroform on the bench, loosely corked. Next it to it was a white handkerchief. He casually reached to set the top hat down on the bench, pushing the bottle with the brim of the hat so that it toppled. Chloroform gushed around the loose cork, soaking into the handkerchief.

“Now the wig.”

He eased off the wig, revealing a scalp traced with jagged red scars.

“And the rest—the full disguise.”

Garrette glared hatefully. He peeled off whiskers, eyebrows, mustachios. The creature named Silas Garrette evaporated before Skinner’s eyes, leaving a bald, gaunt face staring down at him.

“Doctor Garrette. My stalwart surgeon. You never did remove the pistol ball, did you?”

The doctor grinned morbidly. “No… and by now it is likely gangrenous.”

Skinner shuddered at the man’s venom. With his free hand he lifted a bottle of laudanum he had discovered, his hand tremoring as he fumbled it to his lips.

“You’ve imbibed a good deal of laudanum, haven’t you, Augustus? I can tell by your pupils. You probably could not shoot straight if you tried.”

Skinner flung the bottle at the doctor’s feet, smashing it, splashing laudanum across the doctor’s trouser legs. He drew the hammer of the pistol back and centered the muzzle on his adversary’s face. “On the contrary. I think I’ve had just enough to steady my aim. Shall we see if I can shoot straight?”

Doctor Garrette’s lips tightened to a slit. The sickly sweet odor of chloroform billowed in the air.

“How many atrocities have you committed under the guise of healer?”

“The public would not understand my work.” Garrette lifted one of the glass jars. Inside, his special child—Janus, the double-faced baby—nodded gently in its chemical currents. “As a surgeon in Crimea I probed the mysteries of death. With a scalpel I could tease apart the tissues of life until I cut away the fibers binding the soul to the body and liberate it. Now, I am probing the nexus where inanimate matter receives the quickening and is shaped by the forces of nature.”

Doctor Garrette’s voice trembled with passion as he spoke; his eyes gleamed in the flickering gas light.

“With those abominations? You truly are deranged!”

By now the aroma of chloroform, slightly sweet in small quantities, soured the air.

Skinner gasped, suddenly breathless. “What is that infernal smell?” He tried to rub his face with a clumsy hand but missed.

“The smell is chloroform. I tipped the bottle over and it is dripping into the white handkerchief next to where you sit. I am quite inured to breathing chloroform—a result of my addiction these many years—but I am sure that you are feeling its effects quite strongly.”

Garrette’s words seemed to rattle down a tin chute into his mind. Beneath it, Skinner became aware of a deep susurrant respiration—his own breathing. His eyelids seemed suddenly heavy and he realized with terror that he was on the verge of lapsing into sleep. He fought to stay awake, but found himself gripped by a dreamy paralysis. Although he fought it, the hand holding the pistol sank slowly into his lap. His eyelids drooped shut for what seemed like a moment but when he opened them he found the gun had magically vanished from his hand. His eyes fluttered and closed again. And this time when he opened them Doctor Garrette was seated on a stool in front of him, a scalpel clutched in his hand; unrolled on the bench next to him the leather holster of surgical instruments.

“To a surgeon,” Garrette said in an echoey, underwater voice, “the human body is little more than a puppet made of meat: a collection of sticks, the skeleton, animated by the contracting forces of muscles working against ligaments and tendons. For example, if I sever the tendons behind your knees…” He leaned down, drove the scalpel into the back of Skinner’s right knee and sliced upward, severing the tendons, and then did the other leg. “…you lose the ability to stand up.”

Skinner’s eyes widened. He realized with horror what was being done to him. He could feel pain, but only distantly. The outer limits of his body had dissolved, leaving him a passive observer—a balloon floating in a cloud of chloroform.

“And lastly, there’s that tongue of yours, which is sure to begin wagging.” The gaunt face swam up close, filling his vision. The reek of chemicals was gagging. He felt his jaws being spread as Garrette reached in and seized his tongue, drawing it out of his mouth, stretching it.

“Yes,” Doctor Garrette said. “I’m afraid it’s going to have to come out.”

He caught the glitter of a scalpel and then his head jerked as the doctor sawed away at the meat.

Unfortunately, Augustus Skinner remained conscious, his soul trapped in its prison of suffering flesh for the duration of what proved to be a long and horribly tedious operation.

T
he fist pounding on the front door launched Robert Greenley out of his chair. Despite his soreness, he rushed through the hallway, growing angrier with each painful step over the impudence of that impatient banging.

When he snatched the front door open, Doctor Garrette stood on the front step, the black Gladstone bag clutched in one hand. He held a large jar filled with a clear liquid beneath his free arm.

Greenley hesitated, then stepped aside and let the doctor in. As he brushed past, Greenley caught a whiff of the strangest odor clinging to the man’s clothes, but assumed it was something related to his profession: powerful disinfectant, perhaps.

“I think it would be prudent to first consult with Aurelia’s present physician, Doctor Fuller.”

“That would merely delay things. To be effective, the procedure must be carried out immediately.”

“What exactly is this procedure—?”

But the doctor was already climbing the stairs. “I am a very busy man. Your daughter is upstairs?”

Greenley followed the doctor up the staircase. The odor really was quite overpowering. He knocked twice on the bedroom door before showing the doctor in. The room was dark apart from a single candle burning on the bedside table. Aurelia stood up from a chair, the novel she was reading clutched in her hand.

“Father?”

“This is Doctor…”

“Garrette.”

“Doctor Garrette. You have already met my daughter, Aurelia.”

The doctor stepped to the bedside and looked down at Aurelia, then took hold of her chin and turned her face first this way and that. In the quivering candlelight her skin shone luminous and pale, the eyes all pupil and uncanny. Silas Garrette shivered in anticipation: the unborn child she carried must be near translucent. “I will need to give your daughter a thorough examination.”