Beloved Poison (8 page)

‘Not much,’ I said. The sack containing the coffins lay on the table beside us. The crude, lumpen bulk of the thing unsettled me, so I turned my back on it, stretched out my legs towards the fire and pulled out my pipe. On the other side of the room Dr Bain was talking to a group of students. Every now and then there would be a burst of laughter. I felt sure they were talking about the day’s events, about Dr Graves as much as about the rationale behind Dr Bain’s experiment. But when I thought of Dr Graves’s face as he left the operating theatre I could see no cause for laughter.

‘So, your father was one of Dr Magorian’s patients?’ I said.

‘Yes. My father was a stonemason. There was an accident, his leg was crushed and he was taken to St Saviour’s. Until today I had no idea what he had actually endured on the operating table.’ Will closed his eyes. ‘Perhaps the ordeal turned his mind – I would not be surprised – but his wound did not heal and he said he’d sooner die at home than in a stinking hospital bed. Apparently they were quite happy to let him go.’

‘The governors don’t like the patients to expire on the wards,’ I said. ‘It affects the subscriptions.’

‘Yes, well, he died a week later.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I had seen death by septicaemia and gangrene a hundred times and it was both brutal and wretched.

‘Thank you. I was just a boy, of course, but I remember it clearly. How could I forget? Afterwards we went to stay with my mother’s family in the West Country, though I always knew I’d come back to London. I’m not sure why – the place is far less pleasant than I remember it – colder, dirtier. More cruel.’ There was a moment’s silence. I found I could not disagree. Then, ‘And what about
your
father? What ails him?’

‘Mine?’ I blew out a thin plume of blue smoke, watching as it curled and eddied into a hazy question mark. ‘I don’t know. He’s been sleeping badly these last weeks but won’t say why.’

‘Have you asked?’

‘Yes, but he won’t tell me. Something is wrong, though.’ I leaned forward. I knew Will would not have any answers for me, but was simply sharing my troubles – ‘He goes out,’ I said. ‘At night. Two nights ago I followed him.’

‘Where to?’

The story, as I told it then to Will, did not show me in the most positive light. Spying on my own father? I had told myself that I was staying up that night so that I might write up the prescription notes – a job I always found tiresome. But I knew I was waiting for him. I was sitting in the old wing-backed chair, Culpeper’s
Herbal
open on my lap, when I heard the scuttling of mice. Something must have made them run, and I was sitting too still and silent to disturb them. From behind me came the faint creak of the wooden stair. The embers in the grate flared briefly and a shadow leaped against the wall, a giant spindly-legged golem, poised as if to spring. I held my breath. The latch made a faint ‘clack’ in the darkness as the door opened . . . then closed.

Peeping out of the window, I saw my father. He was walking towards a cloaked figure waiting beneath the archway that led through to the infirmary’s main gates. The two of them disappeared without even a word or a nod of greeting. I opened the door a little and sniffed the night air. Beneath the familiar reek of the tannery and the hospital latrines, I could distinguish the faint aroma of lemon geranium. Dr Hawkins, superintendent physician at Angel Meadow Asylum often smelled of lemon geranium. He said it reminded him of the warmth and brightness of India – a necessary antidote to the stinking squalor of the infirmary – though I found it hard to believe that the sun-baked hospitals of Calcutta were any less foetid than ours. Should I follow them? Why else had I been waiting?

By the time I emerged from the infirmary gates my father and Dr Hawkins were already half-swallowed by the dark, and the rising fog. They walked briskly, heading north without once looking back, so they had not noticed me stealing through the shadows behind them. Soon, a towered and crenellated building, tall and dark as Newgate, rose up before us. I heard the dull rap of the doctor’s stick against the wooden panels of a door. A grimy smear of yellow lantern light flickered through the fog as the door opened, and then they were gone.

The dark walls of Angel Meadow Asylum gave nothing away. The door they had entered was tightly locked, and no window looked out. I had tried to stay close as they hurried along, desperate to catch the odd word from their whispered conversation. Now, as I told the tale to Will, I wished once more that I had crept closer. Might I have discovered what terrors made my father so lean and fearful? What compulsion drove him to sneak out at night to attend someone, or something, inside that terrible Bedlam?

The following morning I asked him myself. For a moment he looked at me, appalled. ‘You followed me?’

‘You and Dr Hawkins.’

‘And you heard us? You heard—’

I hesitated. ‘I heard nothing.’ He sighed then, as if he had been holding his breath, the expression of horror on his face dissolving into relief. ‘But you must tell me,’ I said.

‘Not now.’

‘Then when?’

‘Soon.’

‘When?’

Will was sitting forward in his chair, listening. His gaze was fixed upon me, his eyes grave. ‘And he would not say?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He will not admit to being ill; he will not tell me what business he has with Dr Hawkins, and he is silent about whatever reason he has to go up to Angel Meadow at night. When I pressed him he said that it was better that I didn’t know. That hopefully I would never
have
to know.’

‘And Dr Hawkins has said nothing?’

‘He would not break a confidence.’

‘Then you can do nothing but care for your father and be patient, and hope for the best.’ Will took up the sack of coffins. ‘I was going to suggest that we showed these to him—’

I shook my head. ‘I think not. He is not . . . not what he was.’

‘It might take his mind off his troubles.’

‘I fear it would only add to them,’ I said. ‘Hops, wormwood, rue . . . The only place where all three might be found is the apothecary.’

‘But anyone at St Saviour’s might have access to that place. And what of the black rose?’

‘I don’t know. But there’s something else too. You recall the material they’re made from—’

‘Thick board, covered in a fine, grey-coloured fabric.’

‘I didn’t mention it earlier,’ I said. ‘But I recognised it instantly.’ Even as I spoke I wondered at the wisdom of sharing what I knew. Will was right, anyone with regular access to St Saviour’s might be able to procure any of the materials that had gone into the making of those six small coffins. Was it absurd to be concerned that those materials pointed to the apothecary? In reality they were no more than a collection of poorly executed boxes, foolish totems that may well have been made and hidden away by a child, their significance at best random, and most likely meaningless. And yet I knew, in my heart, that these were spurious arguments. ‘That grey-coloured material, Will,’ I said. ‘The stuff used to construct those coffins, it comes from the apothecary too.’

Gabriel was surrounded by an explosion of chalk dust, senna leaves and cochineal powder. There was a sticky pool of glycerine oozing from beneath one of the ward ledgers, and iron tonic was splattered down his apron front and across the apothecary table. The air reeked of sulphur, and I could see a broken bottle of the stuff beside his feet. The prescription ledger stood open in the middle of the table. I reached out and closed it, running my hand over its dull, grey-green binding.

‘Look,’ I said to Will. ‘You see? It is the same.’

‘See what?’ said Gabriel. ‘Same as what? I ain’t done nothing to that ledger, Mr Jem. Them stains were already there!’

‘Where’s my father?’ I said, looking round for him.

‘Dr Hawkins came,’ Gabriel wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘I don’t know where they went. I’ve been on my own for ages.’ He blinked at us, his gaze lingering on the sack I held, his expression wary. ‘What you got there?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. I put the sack onto the table. ‘Can’t you clear up as you work?’ I said. ‘My father hates this mess.’

‘He ain’t here to say anything,’ replied Gabriel.

‘Have you taken the medicines up to the wards?’

‘I ain’t had time.’ Gabriel sounded tearful. ‘And Mrs Speedicut came. She said she’d be back later.’ He looked up at the clock fearfully. ‘It’s almost time!’

As Gabriel spoke there came a thump at the door. I turned, expecting it to crash open, and a furious Mrs Speedicut to burst in – she hated it when we were tardy with the ward rounds. Nothing happened. I clicked my tongue. Could the woman not just come in, like everyone else, and say what she had to say? I marched across the apothecary and flung open the door.

On the ground, not two steps from the threshold, lay my father. All at once Gabriel was clinging to my arm, crying; Will was kneeling beside me as I pressed my fingers to my father’s neck. The pulse was no more than a flicker. ‘Father!’ I said. ‘Father!’

‘Jem.’ Will’s voice was calm. He laid his hand on my shoulder. ‘I’ll help you to carry him.’

We laid my father on a blanket before the fire. Between us, Will and I removed his coat. When I saw what lay beneath, I could not help but draw back.

‘Blood!’ said Will.

‘Who did this?’ I whispered.

My father’s eyes flickered open. ‘Nathaniel?’

His mind was wandering. ‘Uncle Nathaniel has gone,’ I said. ‘It’s Jem.’

We had no family, my father and I. My mother had no relations; my father one brother, a surgeon on board an East Indiaman. I met him only once, when I was no more than eight years old – a tall thin stranger who looked just like my father, but for his neat brown beard and his weathered face. ‘Are you a pirate?’ I had asked, my imagination excited by his nautical appearance, his tales of wild weather and strange cargos.

‘Would you like it if I were?’ My uncle’s eyes had twinkled. My father’s never did.

‘Yes!’ I cried.

‘Well then, so I shall be!’ He slapped the table top. ‘Nathaniel Flockhart, Cap’n o’ the
Bloody Hand
, forced to roam the seven seas for ever and a day.’

‘Why?’ I had asked, jumping up and down beside him. ‘Why, “forever”?’

‘Why?’ He lowered his voice to a whisper, and leaned close. ‘Because o’ the curse o’ the Flockharts, that’s why, my lad!’

I thought he was going to wink, but he didn’t. I thought he would give me a grin, but he didn’t do that, either. In the silence that followed, I laughed, and looked at my father. But my father was not laughing.

My uncle left that afternoon. He never returned. I wondered why my father chose to remember him now.

We pulled off his shirt. The crooks of his arms were bandaged; the bandages too were soaked with blood. ‘Jem?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Don’t speak of this to anyone.’

I was prepared to say anything to keep him calm. To excite him, to stir his pulse now, might be fatal. I nodded.

He closed his eyes. ‘Good. Now, let me sleep.’

I unwrapped the bandages. Beneath, at the bend of each elbow, was a hole. Blood oozed out, the way a leech bite seeps long after the leech has been removed. And yet I could not detect the characteristic three-sided bite of the leech, nor the tell-tale cut of venesection. It was as though he had been punctured, and the blood drawn off.

‘He’s been drained,’ whispered Gabriel, his eyes wide with horror. ‘Drained of blood.’

‘But who, or what, would do such a thing?’ said Will.

I was about to speak, when I noticed something amongst the folds of my father’s discarded shirt. It was bright, almost luminous, against the white cotton. I held it up between finger and thumb: a single yellow rose petal.

‘Dr Hawkins,’ said Gabriel. ‘He always wears a rose. But he’s kind. He’d not do this.’

‘Whatever happened here was by consent, Gabriel,’ I said. ‘See how tranquil he is? How at peace? If this had been the work of a fiend he would most likely be in a state of terror.’

‘A fiend?’ whispered Gabriel. ‘At St Saviour’s?’

‘You read too many penny bloods,’ I said. Poor boy. He would be little use to me amongst the powders and pills that evening. But there were tasks he could do, and I knew the familiar would be comforting. I patted his head. ‘Make us some tea, Gabriel, there’s a good lad.’

I bandaged my father’s arms once more and dressed him in a clean nightshirt. I made him comfortable beneath a blanket in his chair beside the fire. Behind me, I could hear Will sweeping up the mess. He worked with Gabriel, setting bottles in their rightful place, clearing up spilt tinctures and powders, following the lad’s instructions to keep his mind occupied. ‘Where does this go, Gabriel?’ and ‘Can you show me how to tidy these away?’ But I saw the boy peep in the sack where the coffins were hidden, and his cheeks turned paler still. ‘The work of a fiend,’ he whispered. His hands trembled as he placed the jar of burnt alum back onto the shelf.