The Fiery Cross (108 page)

“It’s ill luck to touch grave goods.”

“I’m sure it’s only ill luck to take them,” I assured him, low-voiced, though I crossed myself before taking the objects and putting them on the ground in a corner of the shed. “I’ll put them back when I’ve finished.”

“Mmphm. Wait just a moment, Sassenach. Dinna touch her yet.”

He dug in the recesses of his cloak, and emerged with a tiny bottle. He uncorked this, and putting his fingers to the opening, poured out a little liquid, which he flicked over the corpse, murmuring a quick Gaelic prayer that I recognized as an invocation to St. Michael to protect us from demons, ghouls, and things that go bump in the night. Very useful.

“Is that holy water?” I asked, incredulous.

“Aye, of course. I got it from Father LeClerc.” He made the sign of the Cross over the body, and laid his hand briefly on the draped curve of the head, before nodding reluctant approval for me to proceed.

I extracted a scalpel from my bag and slit the stitching on the shroud carefully. I’d brought a stout needle and waxed thread, to sew up the body cavity; with luck, I could also repair the shroud sufficiently that no one would realize what I’d been doing.

Her face was almost unrecognizable, round cheeks gone slack and sunken, and the soft bloom of her black skin faded to an ashy gray, the lips and ears a livid purple. That made it easier; it was clear that this was indeed only a shell, and not the woman I had seen before. That woman, if she was still in the vicinity, would have no objections, I thought.

Jamie made the sign of the Cross again and said something soft in Gaelic, then stood still, the lantern held high so that I could work by its light. The light threw his shadow on the wall of the shed, gigantic and eerie in the wavering flicker. I looked away from it, down to my work.

The most formal and sanitary of modern autopsies is simple butchery; this was no better—and worse only in the lack of light, water, and specialized tools.

“You needn’t watch, Jamie,” I said, standing back for a moment to wipe a wrist across my brow. Cold as it was in the shed, I was sweating from the heavy work of splitting the breastbone, and the air was thick with the ripe smells of an open body. “There’s a nail on the wall; you could hang up the lantern, if you want to go out for a bit.”

“I’m all right, Sassenach. What is that?” He leaned forward, pointing carefully. The look of disquiet on his features had been replaced by one of interest.

“The trachea and bronchi,” I replied, tracing the graceful rings of cartilage, “and a bit of a lung. If you’re all right, then can I have the light a little closer here, please?”

Lacking spreaders, I couldn’t wrench the rib cage far enough apart to expose the complete lung on either side, but thought I could see enough to eliminate some possibilities. The surfaces of both lungs were black and grainy; Betty was in her forties, and had lived all her life with open wood fires.

“Anything nasty that you breathe in and don’t cough up again—tobacco smoke, soot, smog, what-have-you—gradually gets shoved out between the lung tissue and the pleura,” I explained, lifting a bit of the thin, half-transparent pleural membrane with the tip of my scalpel. “But the body can’t get rid of it altogether, so it just stays there. A child’s lung would be a nice clean pink.”

“Do mine look like that?” Jamie stifled a small, reflexive cough. “And what is smog?”

“The air in cities like Edinburgh, where you get smoke mixing with fog off the water.” I spoke abstractedly, grunting slightly as I pulled the ribs back, peering into the shadowed cavity. “Yours likely aren’t so bad, since you’ve lived out of doors or in unheated places so much. Clean lungs are one compensation to living without fire.”

“That’s good to know, if ye’ve got no choice about it,” he said. “Given the choice, I expect most folk would rather be warm and cough.”

I didn’t look up, but smiled, slicing through the upper lobe of the right lung.

“They would, and they do.” No indication of hemorrhage in either lung; no blood in the airway; no evidence of pulmonary embolism. No pooling of blood in the chest or abdominal cavity, either, though I was getting some seepage. Blood will clot soon after death, but then gradually reliquefies.

“Hand me a bit more of the wadding, will you, please?” A little spotting of blood on the shroud likely wouldn’t worry anyone, given the spectacular nature of Betty’s demise, but I didn’t want enough to make anyone sufficiently suspicious to check inside.

I leaned across to take the lint from his hand, inadvertently putting a hand on the corpse’s side. The body emitted a low groan and Jamie leaped back with a startled exclamation, the light swinging wildly.

I had jumped, myself, but quickly recovered.

“It’s all right,” I said, though my heart was racing and the sweat on my face had gone suddenly cold. “It’s only trapped gas. Dead bodies often make odd noises.”

“Aye.” Jamie swallowed and nodded, steadying the lantern. “Aye, I’ve seen it often. Takes ye a bit by surprise, though, doesn’t it?” He smiled at me, lopsided, though a pale sheen of sweat gleamed on his forehead.

“It does that.” It occurred to me that he had doubtless dealt with a good many dead bodies, all unembalmed, and was likely at least as familiar with the phenomena of death as I was. I set a cautious hand in the same place, but no further noises resulted, and I resumed my examination.

Another difference between this impromptu autopsy and the modern form was the lack of gloves. My hands were bloody to the wrist, and the organs and membranes had a faint but unpleasant feel of sliminess; cold though it was in the shed, the inexorable process of decomposition had started. I got a hand under the heart and lifted it toward the light, checking for gross discolorations of the surface, or visible ruptures of the great vessels.

“They move, too, now and then,” Jamie said, after a minute. There was an odd tone to his voice, and I glanced up at him, surprised. His eyes were fixed on Betty’s face, but with a remote look that made it plain he was seeing something else.

“Who moves?”

“Corpses.”

Gooseflesh rippled up my forearms. He was right, though I thought he might have kept that particular observation to himself for the moment.

“Yes,” I said, as casually as possible, looking back at my work. “Common postmortem phenomena. Usually just the movement of gases.”

“I saw a dead man sit up once,” he said, his tone as casual as my own.

“What, at a wake? He wasn’t really dead?”

“No, in a fire. And he was dead enough.”

I glanced up sharply. His voice was flat and matter-of-fact, but his face bore an inward look of deep abstraction; whatever he’d seen, he was seeing it again.

“After Culloden, the English burned the Highland dead on the field. We smelled the fires, but I didna see one, save when they took me out and put me in the wagon, to send me home.”

He had lain hidden under a layer of hay, nose pressed to a crack in the boards in order to breathe. The wagon driver had taken a circuitous route off the field, to avoid any questions from troops near the farmhouse, and at one point, had stopped for a moment to wait for a group of soldiers to move away.

“There was a fresh pyre burning, perhaps ten yards away; they’d set it alight no more than a short time before, for the clothes had only just begun to char. I saw Graham Gillespie lyin’ on the heap near me, and he was surely dead, for there was the mark of a pistol shot on his temple.”

The wagon had waited for what seemed a long time, though it was hard to tell, through the haze of pain and fever. But as he watched, he had seen Gillespie suddenly sit up amid the flames, and turn his head.

“He was lookin’ straight at me,” he said. “Had I been in my right mind, I expect I would ha’ let out a rare skelloch. As it was, it only seemed . . . friendly of Graham.” There was a hint of uneasy amusement in his voice. “I thought he was perhaps tellin’ me it wasna so bad, being dead. That, or welcoming me to hell, maybe.”

“Postmortem contracture,” I said, absorbed in the excavation of the digestive system. “Fire makes the muscles contract, and the limbs often twist into very lifelike positions. Can you bring the light closer?”

I had the esophagus pulled free, and carefully slit the length of it, turning back the flabby tissue. There was some irritation toward the lower end, and there was blood in it, but no sign of rupture or hemorrhage. I bent, squinting up into the pharyngeal cavity, but it was too dark to see much there. I was in no way equipped for detailed exploration, so instead returned my examinations to the other end, slipping a hand under the stomach and lifting it up.

I felt a sharpening of the sense of wrongness that I had had through this whole affair. If there was something amiss, this was the most likely place to find evidence of it. Logic as well as sixth sense said as much.

There was no food in the stomach; after such vomiting that was hardly surprising. When I cut through the heavy muscular wall, though, the sharp scent of ipecac cut through the reek of the body.

“What?” Jamie leaned forward at my exclamation, frowning at the body.

“Ipecac. That quack dosed her with ipecac—and recently! Can you smell it?”

He grimaced with distaste, but took a cautious sniff, and nodded.

“Would that not be a proper thing to do, when you’ve a person wi’ a curdled wame? Ye gave wee Beckie MacLeod ipecacuanha yourself, when she’d drunk your blue stuff.”

“True enough.” Five-year-old Beckie had drunk half a bottle of the arsenic decoction I made to poison rats, attracted by the pale blue color, and evidently not at all put off by the taste. Well, the rats liked it, too. “But I did that right away. There’s no point in giving it hours afterward, when the poison or irritant has already passed out of the stomach.”

Given Fentiman’s state of medical knowledge, though, would he have known that? He might simply have administered ipecac again because he could think of nothing else to do. I frowned, turning back the heavy wall of the stomach. Yes, this was the source of the hemorrhage; the inner wall was raw-looking, dark red as ground meat. There was a small amount of liquid in the stomach; clear lymph that had begun to separate from the clotted blood left in the body.

“So you’re thinking that it was maybe the ipecac that killed her?”

“I was . . . but now I’m not so sure,” I murmured, probing carefully. It had occurred to me that if Fentiman had given Betty a heavy dose of ipecac, the violent vomiting provoked by it might have caused an internal rupture and hemorrhage—but I wasn’t finding any evidence of that. I used the scalpel to slit the stomach further open, pulling back the edges, and opening the duodenum.

“Can you hand me one of the small empty jars? And the wash bottle, please?”

Jamie hung the lantern on the nail and obligingly knelt to rummage through the bag, while I rummaged further through the stomach. There was some granular material forming a pale sludge in the furrows of the rugae. I scraped gingerly at it, finding that it came free easily, a thick, gritty paste between my fingertips. I wasn’t sure what it was, but a suspicion was growing unpleasantly in the back of my mind. I meant to flush the stomach, collect the residue, and take it back to the house, where I could examine it in a decent light, come morning. If it was what I thought—

Without warning, the door of the shed swung open. A whoosh of cold air made the flame of the lantern burn suddenly high and bright—bright enough to show me Phillip Wylie’s face, pale and shocked in the frame of the doorway.

He stared at me, his mouth hanging slightly open, then closed it and swallowed; I heard the sound of it clearly. His eyes traveled slowly over the scene, then returned to my face, wide pools of horror.

I was shocked, too. My heart had leapt into my throat, and my hands had frozen, but my brain was racing.

What would happen if he caused an outcry? It would be the most dreadful scandal, whether I was able to explain what I was doing, or not. If not—fear rippled over me in a chilly wave. I had come close to being burned for witchcraft once before; and that was one time too often.

I felt a slight movement of the air near my feet, and realized that Jamie was crouched in the deep shadow below the table. The light of the lantern was bright, but limited; I stood in a pool of darkness that reached to my waist. Wylie hadn’t seen him. I reached out a toe and nudged him, as a signal to stay put.

I forced myself to smile at Phillip Wylie, though my heart was stuck firmly in my throat, and beating wildly. I swallowed hard and said the first thing that came into my mind, which happened to be “Good evening.”

He licked his lips. He was wearing neither patch nor powder at the moment, but was quite as pale as the muslin sheet.

“Mrs. . . . Fraser,” he said, and swallowed again. “I—er—what
are
you doing?”

I should have thought that was reasonably obvious; presumably his question had to do with the reasons why I was doing it—and I had no intention of going into those.

“Never you mind that,” I said crisply, recovering a bit of nerve. “What are
you
doing, skulking round the place at dead of night?”

Evidently that was a good question; his face shifted at once from open horror to wariness. His head twitched, as though to turn and look over his shoulder. He stopped the motion before it was completed, but my eyes followed the direction of it. There was a man standing in the darkness behind him; a tall man who now stepped forward, his face glimmering pale in the glow of the lantern, sardonic eyes the green of gooseberries. Stephen Bonnet.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said.

A number of things happened at that point: Jamie came out from under the table with a rush like a striking cobra, Phillip Wylie leaped back from the door with a startled cry, and the lantern crashed from its nail to the floor. There was a strong smell of splattered oil and brandy, a soft
whoosh
like a furnace lighting, and the crumpled shroud was burning at my feet.

Jamie was gone; there were shouts from the darkness outside, and the sound of running feet on brick. I kicked at the burning fabric, meaning to stamp it out.