The Physic Garden (22 page)

‘I could kill her cousins with my bare hands for the cruel and greedy souls they are.’

‘Why did they offer to take her in the first place?’

‘Exactly what I’ve been asking myself.’

‘They seem to be wretched hypocrites, that’s for sure. But perhaps they wanted to make use of her skills for their own ends and cared not what became of her.’

‘Despicable creatures.’

‘What does her father say to all this?’

‘Not a great deal. He blames himself and yet his intentions were all for the best. I know only that she has never been near her father’s door since she left Dumfries, and that worries me beyond everything.’

‘It looks very grave.’

‘She might avoid me out of shame. But he knew fine what her condition was, and I would have thought that she would return there if anywhere. There has been not a word of her in the village either.’

‘I could make enquiries, you know. Careful enquiries.’

‘Do you think that wise?’

‘There are discreet people. A scant handful who are known to help poor women in her condition. As a doctor, I am aware of them, and I could ask, if you think it might help.’

‘Anything might help, Thomas, anything at all. Her father is wandering the streets in search of her to the neglect of everything else. God knows what he has told Anna about the whole affair. I would spend my time looking for her as well, but I have my work and I have tried the patience of Faculty for long enough. I will go when I can, but I thought that perhaps you might be able to narrow the search in some way.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’ He sighed heavily, shaking his head. ‘In fact, I’ll go now, this minute. Courage,’ he said, as he left. ‘Courage! We’ll find her yet.’

He did what he could. Made discreet enquiries. Sent me here and there, to this or that house. And went himself, I suppose. I think he did that for me as much as for Jenny. Once, I found myself in a poor hospital, the rooms filthy and smelling of a terrible mixture of blood and vomit and worse, hellish with the moans and groans of the sick and dying, for whom almost nothing could be done. She was not there, nor had she been, thank God. There was no
sign of her. A wheen of filthy houses and streets had sprung up in the town over the past few years in response to the demands for housing for the vast numbers of people who were employed in the new manufactories, incomers from the Highlands and Islands, and from over the water in Ireland. Sometimes, when I found myself peering into rooms that never saw the light of day, stinking, bug-ridden rooms and passages that led from other windowless rooms and passages in a drab and deadly succession, all leprous with damp, I thought that I had found myself in some hellish
labyrinth
, an underground warren where only troglodytes might live. A vulnerable lassie might go missing in this maze and never be found again.

Days passed and then weeks, and still there was no sign of her. I grew weary and her father grew wearier. He looked terrible. He seemed to have aged ten years in the space of a few weeks. Anna said hardly a word about her sister. To our surprise she was often to be found in the weaving shed, keeping Gilbert and another lad, a new younger apprentice called Allan, hard at work, so that the business should not be neglected in her father’s absence, showing a capability that we had not suspected she
possessed
. I think Gilbert had a soft spot for her, but she treated him briskly enough, making it clear that she would stand no nonsense from him. She seemed to have grown up overnight. When she was not supervising the lads, she cooked and cleaned, washed and kept house, making things as easy as possible for her father. From time to time, he returned, sick and heart sore, only to go out again after dark and trawl the fetid streets, taking nothing with him lest he should be robbed, always a danger for an older man going into places where his face was unknown.

It was easier for me. I think I looked what I was: young and strong and well able to take care of myself. All my years as a gardener had lent me a certain wiry presence and I thought that I was not in any great personal danger, particularly since I took James’s dog, Queenie, with me, a great, grey, shaggy beast – a poacher’s dog, I suppose, although I did not like to enquire too
closely what my brother did with her on those occasions when he would venture out into the countryside. Often he would return with a rabbit for the pot and sometimes a pheasant and we did not question that either. I had confided in him to some extent, telling him that Jenny had gone missing and I must search for her.

‘You’ll tak’ Queenie then,’ was all he said, and she would accompany me, walking at my heel with her long-legged, rolling gait. She was a gentle creature, so long as she knew you, but with a look of something savage about her and a mouthful of
yellowing
teeth, which she was not above baring at suspicious strangers. Once a couple of men edged too close to me with menace in their manners, but when Queenie slunk out of the shadows, growling low, ears laid back, her hackles bristling, her lip curled and all her teeth showing, they raised their hands and moved off, backwards.

It was a sad and sorry business, and I think that for all that I had lived in Glasgow for so long, I had not been aware before just how many lassies, some of them little more than children, lurked on the streets of this city, displaying their borrowed or stolen finery, foolish clothes that showed their breasts and their ankles to passing strangers, all of them willing to sell themselves for a wee bit siller, or even for a drink or a loaf of bread. But then most likely they were not willing at all. Most likely some man lurked in the background, forcing them to do it. Or the grim prospect of
starvation
offered them no alternative. And there were always other men willing to take advantage of their desperation in return for a few moments of pleasure, cheaply bought, soon forgotten. We do not see until our eyes are opened, do we? We hurry on by and never notice, until something changes our perspective.

Even now, looking back on it, I am not entirely sure why Thomas took me to that place at that particular time. For sure, our debate about the respective merits of physic and surgery (with its necessary adjunct of dissection) had rumbled on for a little while, but without ever causing us to quarrel as we had once quarrelled over Hunter’s book. Thomas knew how I felt about Professor Jeffray and his inherent showmanship. He knew I was all for physic – even after my own failed apothecary venture – and so was he, otherwise he would not have been lecturing in botany, would not have been so interested in the medicinal properties of plants.

So many hours in Jenny’s company had only served to reinforce my preferences. She had a hundred remedies, most of them distilled from the contents of her garden, and she had instructed me in their use. In fact, some of them had been put to very good use indeed for our Rab. I would almost go so far as to say that they had been instrumental in his survival: the poultices and the potions she and Thomas brought for him, the medicines that seemed to loosen the tightness in his chest and bring his fever down. He would never be robust, but we had great hopes of our move to the country, great hopes that the fresh air and good food would finish the work that Jenny’s and Thomas’s
medications
had begun.

Over the years, we had indulged in many friendly debates, Thomas and I, about the possibility of repairing the human body as one might fix some complicated machine, as Jenny’s father repaired his loom, making parts for it, oiling this or that component, carefully watching the way it worked and making sure that all was in good order. Thomas believed that, in time, this would be possible for the human body as well. But, so he said, the medical men had to know what went on beneath the skin, how all these processes worked.

I found myself acknowledging the truth of it. I can still acknowledge it now, when such things have become fairly
commonplace
, but there was something in me that shrank from it all the same. It seemed to discount something else, something vital. Lord knows I have never been a passionately religious man. I had gone to the kirk on the Sabbath, right enough, because I had no choice but to sit shivering and yawning through interminable sermons. My daughter-in-law would still have me go and
threatens
now and again to set the holy beagles on me, but I plead the infirmities of old age, my rheumatism which prevents me from attending. To tell you the truth, I am but rheumatic north north west as the melancholy Dane might have put it, but the excuse serves me well enough.

It has aye struck me that God, if he exists, has done me and mine few favours. My successes have mostly been earned by the diligent work of hands and mind together. But all the same, whenever Thomas and I were discussing these things, I could not help but think that perhaps in examining the processes which animated the human frame, the surgeons failed to realise – or perhaps too easily forgot – that there was something else, some spirit that enlivened and illuminated this piece of walking, talking meat.

I suppose that was one reason why Thomas had almost persuaded me that dissection was permissible, if only as a means to a desirable end. He never failed to remind me that he too believed in the existence of that same spirit. He had told me one or two stories about the value of surgery, without ever going into any of
the more gruesome details, but he always stressed his own belief that some synthesis of the two, surgery and physic, might be advisable, that perhaps surgery should be attempted only where physic had failed.

For myself, I could not look impartially on these things, could not see the blood and bones without thinking of all the other things that made up a man or woman, the hopes and dreams and fears that constituted the experience of each of them, the friendships, the affections and enmities. When Thomas talked of this or that cadaver, I could think only that it had once been a living, breathing person who ate and drank, who walked and slept, who kissed and danced and wept and perhaps dreamed of a better life. Could not even these, the lowest among the low, once have had hopes for a better life? And were they not, each man or woman, and no matter how abased at the end, still unique in the world, and different from all others? But Thomas told me that he agreed with me in all particulars save one. You must remember that I was young and reasonably unfamiliar with the sight of death at close quarters. To be sure, I had observed the deaths of my father and my baby sister, but that was all. It strikes me that Thomas had sat at many a bedside to see the soul slipping away from the body, as I myself have done since. Oh, it never becomes commonplace. Familiarity does not breed contempt. But you grow accustomed to such things and doctors sooner than most.

‘The difference between life and death is profound,’ he would say. ‘It is one thing to respect the remains because of what they were in life. To give those remains a decent burial wherever possible. But the body, the cadaver, is a shell. The spirit no longer has need of it. And that being the case, why should we not investigate its inner workings, if it may help others to survive and thrive, like your Rab and so many others? Who knows when poor souls like him may have need of treatment while they are yet in life? Isn’t that true, William?’

I could not disagree with him.

And so it was that when he came to the garden on that chilly afternoon – a clear, cool day it was – and carried me off with him to Professor Jeffray’s dissecting rooms, to see the chain saw in use, I went with him. All reluctantly, but I went with him. I had never yet been to view a dissection, although he had tried to persuade me from time to time. ‘You will see if you come, William, that it is by no means so dreadful as you believe it to be. We should all face our fears. And then they will lose the power to harm us. Besides, I have a great wish that you should see the chain saw. It is a very fine and humane invention.’

He thought it might very well, in modified form, be of some use in the Ayrshire gardens where he expected me soon to be working, but his real interest lay in its potential to ease the suffering of patients that might become so acute that they died under the blade, especially those wounded in war.

‘I am told that Jeffray intends to use it today. I have his express permission to attend and bring you with me. It will be a popular event. If the saw can cut through bone, then it can cut through green wood as well.’

‘But you could have told me all this without taking me along to see it for myself!’

‘You can have one peep at it, Thomas, and then, if the whole process still revolts you, I promise you that you can be out of the viewing gallery faster than you can say knife.’

He could see that I was wavering, as I invariably did when he set his mind to persuade me of something.

‘Come. We shall both lurk near the back, and then you can go and I can stay, as we both please. But I would certainly like you to see this machine, because I feel it has very many uses other than the rather grisly reason for its invention!’

The professor had indeed designed the chain saw (one of two such saws which were invented at precisely the same time in the later years of the last century) with a very specific kind of operation in mind, but when Thomas had told me about it, I had thought how useful it might be to have such an instrument, in order to
trim awkward branches or clear persistent undergrowth.

Many years after the events I now relate, I came across Jeffray’s own account of his invention and a fascinating document it was too, although even reading it at that distance in time set my teeth on edge somewhat.

‘I had an opportunity,’ Jeffray wrote, about a particular amputation that he must have been observing, ‘of seeing an attempt made to cut out a piece that was diseased, near the middle of the thigh bone. To do that with the common saw was next to impossible. A saw, therefore, was prepared, of a different kind, to rasp the bone across, without hurting the flesh; but the difficulty that attended the execution of this operation, the time spent in performing it, and the pain which, notwithstanding all the care that was taken, the patient seemed to suffer, made such an impression on me, that I could not rest from thinking of some method by which bones might be cut out more easily.’

When I read that, I think I revised some of my ideas about the professor. While the very idea of cutting out bones with ease from the living flesh still revolted me, his intentions seemed wholly admirable. He wished to alleviate the suffering of his patients and so he made a drawing of a chain saw that he thought might be useful in speeding up the whole process. As soon as he could afford the venture, when he was first appointed to the chair of Anatomy and Botany, he had a specimen of his design manufactured by a London jeweller and it was this instrument he wished to demonstrate in Glasgow. I have pondered long and hard about this over the years. Did Thomas want only to show me the new saw? Did he want to take my mind off my own troubles for an hour or two? Was it some failure of his imagination? And then I ask myself, was there some less straightforward motive? Did he still remember what he thought of as my over-reaction to the Hunter book, the book with those distressing illustrations that I had found in his library? We had agreed to disagree about it and move on, which is what I sincerely believed we had done. But now, looking back on it, I wonder if it rankled with him just a little, wounded his
intellectual pride, that his friend with whom he was in such
concordance
about all else, still, to some small extent, disagreed with him upon this one matter, a matter, moreover, about which he was confident that he was right. But I see that I must give him the benefit of the doubt and perhaps he simply wanted to persuade me once and for all of the gravity and value of surgery. I cannot fault him for that. He believed in it. Perhaps he thought that I would be persuaded and then we would be in agreement on this, as in so much else.

If so, he over-reached himself. Whatever goddess watches over such things, Nemesis herself, perhaps, gazed sternly down at him, smiled her thin smile, and pointed her finger directly at him. Never in a million years could he have foreseen the consequences of his decision to carry me off to the professor’s dissecting rooms in College Street on that cool winter’s day.

These dissecting rooms, by the by, had long assumed a kind of notoriety in the mind of the public, the mob, I suppose you would call them. The unpredictable masses, composed of men and women very like myself, were as suspicious of them as I was, more so perhaps. On various occasions then, and in the future, the superintendent and a number of tall mounted police officers, with their swords much in evidence, had to be called into attendance to prevent the common folk of the town from entering the dissecting rooms and destroying them and everything contained in them. There was a certain amount of horrified censure expressed in the drawing rooms of the gentry about all this, but I had a deal of sympathy with the general outrage. It was a popular superstition – and I think remains so to this day – that the sawbones, as the surgeons were called, would seek live victims for their dissections and that there were many unscrupulous people who were in their pay and who would look for helpless victims, those poor souls who could be entrapped, carried off and dispatched, and all for the convenience of some distinguished professor of surgery and his rabble of students.

Bodysnatching was widespread and, worse than that, murder
has certainly happened since then in Edinburgh, with the case of the notorious Burke and Hare. When bodies were in short supply, the pair seemingly decided to take things a step further and manufacture the goods themselves. I suspect it may also have happened more than once in Glasgow, although there is no proof of such a crime occurring here, and I would certainly never go so far as to accuse Jeffray of such a thing. But it is on record that the resurrection men would cast their net very wide, travelling out to remote Ayrshire villages where folk might be less cautious and more trusting than in the town.

I think at heart Jeffray was an honourable man, according to his own beliefs, if a trifle over-enthusiastic in the pursuit of knowledge. But then, what good scholar is not over-enthusiastic in this way? What good gardener too? Or bookseller for that matter? So as you see, time has mellowed me, save in one particular only. But that single thing I could not forgive. It was not Jeffray’s fault. But I must needs lay the blame somewhere, and I was not at fault either. I run ahead of myself only because I cannot bear to think about what happened next. But I see that I must. And so I can only tell it plainly and baldly as it happened, neither seeking to embellish it with spurious emotions, nor reducing it to less than the horror it undoubtedly was.

The dissecting rooms were wicked cold. The stone itself seemed to exude a chill that had nothing fresh about it, but more the quality of a subterranean cavern where the air had lain stale for many years. There were no fires to lighten the atmosphere, for the cadavers demanded cold conditions for their preservation if they were not to stink to high heaven with the stench of their own corruption. There were the surgeons, the professor and his assistant, all in their long aprons that reminded me oddly of the aprons we gardeners wore, but smeared with the rusty brown of dried blood, rather than the deep brown of dried earth. There was the
smell of blood in the air. I remember that. A faint, sickly scent of blood, like a flesher’s shop.

The gallery was full, mostly of students, a rowdy crowd and much inclined to jeer, although the professor quelled them with a glance. I saw that Thomas’s presence helped to quieten them, because most of them attended his lectures and he was as popular as ever. There were, besides, various gentlemen of the town for whom this was something of an event, a rite of passage into adulthood. If you could watch a dissection without swooning like a woman, then you were a man indeed. It had become a popular pastime, like going to see a play I suppose, but more masculine and robust than such feminine pretences.