The Burying Ground (21 page)

“And don't wait too long,” Lavinia said. “Phillip will be back for the rest of his money sooner rather than later. This is my best chance, Luke. Otherwise Cherub and I will never get away. I need you to find a way to get to the money.”

“I see,” he said. “And if I don't, you'll tell Dr. Christie all about me, is that it?”

“Well, of course I will,” she said in a low voice. “And I'll do worse besides. I'll take Perry down with you.”

Luke decided to start walking back to Yorkville, in spite of the fact that there was a fine mizzle in the air and that he had already been gone far too long. He needed the time to think through the bizarre conversation with Lavinia Van Hansel. His mind was in turmoil with the implications of what she had told him and what she had asked him to do. Her message was clear: figure it out, or both he and Perry would be dragged into the dirt. Maybe even end up in prison.
So you are in love
, Lavinia had sneered. Luke had thrown away any chance at that, but maybe he could at least manage to keep poor, feckless Perry from drowning in the mud.

And what would Luke himself do if he failed to deliver? He didn't know. But even more to the point, what would Hands do if he found out what his wife was up to? And that the Lewises were within such easy reach?
Hands doesn't like it when he's crossed. He'd hunt me down to the ends of the earth.
Lavinia was threatening exposure. She couldn't know that for Luke the stakes were far higher than that.

He was nearly at the city limits when one particular of her conversation struck him. At no point had she mentioned Thaddeus. This thought was enough to make him halt suddenly, with the result that a young woman carrying a basket of vegetables nearly fell in an attempt to avoid the suddenly stationary object in her path. He apologized profusely, but she only glared at him and went on.

He began walking again, slowly. Was it possible that Lavinia didn't know about Thaddeus? He supposed it was. Thaddeus was off on his circuit most of the time. He usually stayed at Christie's for only a day or two until he set off again. Even if Cherub had been sent to spy on Luke, her timing would have to be precise for her to realize that there was an extra occupant in the Christie house. And if Lavinia didn't know, Hands couldn't find out.

He felt a little better with this realization. At least he could be fairly certain that his father was in no danger, but how strange it was that Morgan Spicer's puzzle had led them straight into the very situation that Luke and Thaddeus wanted so badly to avoid. Luke was sure that solving the mystery at the Burying Ground was nothing more than an intellectual exercise for Thaddeus, a way to use his powers of observation and deductive reasoning as an antidote to the frustrating task of ministering to an unrewarding circuit. As a result Luke had not paid much attention to his efforts. In fact, he'd barely spoken to his father about it. The little he did know had come from casual mealtime conversations. Now he wondered if his father had uncovered anything that would prove useful to Lavinia. He needed to talk to Thaddeus.

Feeling easier in his mind now that he had determined a course of action, Luke boarded an omnibus that took him the rest of the way to Yorkville. Just as he disembarked at the main intersection the skies opened and the rain began to fall heavily. He ran for the nearby Keeper's Lodge, hoping he could wait out the downpour there.

“Oh, your father's in the kitchen,” Sally said when she answered his knock. “Come in out of the rain. Please, come back to the kitchen and have a seat.” She shooed a twin off one of the stools that had been pulled up to the table.

“Oh good,” Thaddeus said, when he saw who it was. “We need to talk to you.”

“And I to you.” Luke's eyes slid over to Morgan, who was looking even more unkempt and weedy than ever. Of course, Thaddeus said he had been staying up at night keeping a watch over the cemetery. “I'm not sure where to start.”

“First things first,” Sally said. “Would you care for a cup of tea?”

“That would be grand, thanks, Mrs. Spicer. I hope my father hasn't drunk up all your supply.”

“He's paid for it with his good company,” she returned.

And then, while he idly watched Sally refill the kettle at the kitchen pump, he found himself asking, “Where do you get your water, by the way?”

She looked puzzled. “A carter fills up the cistern every month or so. It comes with the house.”

“Forgive my curiosity. I'm just trying to figure out what caused all the sickness we've had.” The mind is an astounding thing, he thought. In spite of everything else he had to think about, it was still grappling with the question of what caused the typhoid outbreak in Yorkville.

“Our water must be fine,” Sally said. “None of us fell ill.”

Luke tucked this piece of information away to puzzle over later and returned to marshalling his thoughts into something coherent to say to his father.

Thaddeus jumped in before he could get the first word out. “I need to talk to you about Christie. I think he may have something to do with the graves being opened.”

Sally frowned at him, indicating the children with a nod of her head.

“Matthew, Mark, Ruth, Rebecca, I think you should go play in the parlour now,” Morgan said.

One of the girls removed her thumb from her mouth. “But we want to play with Mr. Lewis,” she said.

“Go on now,” Sally said. “Do what your father says. You can look at the big Bible with the pictures in it if you like.”

The twins crowded down the hall. Looking at a picture book was evidently a great treat.

“Remind me to bring some books down from Christie's for them,” Thaddeus said to Luke. “He's got more than he knows what to do with. I'm sure he won't mind if I borrow a few.”

“I'm sure it would be fine,” Luke said. He was grateful for the interruption in the conversation. He'd forgotten that he, too, had briefly, if not seriously, wondered if Christie was involved. But he wasn't sure how to respond to his father's statement.

“I went through to the kitchen, to get something to eat,” Thaddeus went on as soon as he was sure the children were out of earshot. “There was a skinned marten carcass on the table. Mrs. Dunphy came in while I was there, but she didn't seem to think there was anything out of the ordinary about it. She told me he boils things down, for the bones.”

“Well, that would explain the fumes that stink up the house sometimes,” Luke said. “But I can't imagine that he would go so far as to exhume bodies just to get bones.”

“But what about the skeleton in the consulting room? Where did that come from?”

“He's had it for years. He got it in Edinburgh.”

“Are skeletons things that are easy to come by there?” Morgan asked.

“Well, no,” Luke replied. “He did boil it down himself, but he told me that he took it from the medical school. It had already been well-dissected and they were done with it.”

“Well, there you go,” Thaddeus said. “He obviously has no qualms about working with old bodies.”

“But if he boils down old bodies, what's he doing with the bones?” Morgan asked.

“Maybe he wires them together like the one in the office and sells them,” Thaddeus said. “He can't be the only doctor who wants a skeleton. And he's always complaining about money.”

Luke hadn't expected to defend Christie. The old doctor's activities might be very strange in nature, but they had nothing to do with what was happening at the Strangers' Burying Ground. But Luke could think of no way of convincing Thaddeus of Christie's innocence without disclosing his source. Finally he said, “I really don't think it was Christie. How would he have managed it? And he hates leaving the house.”

“We're working on a theory that Mrs. Dunphy is involved,” Morgan said.

“She is rather a large woman,” Thaddeus pointed out. “She could easily be mistaken for a man, especially if she dressed as one. It wouldn't be the first time we know of that someone has masqueraded as the opposite gender.”

“But …” Luke said. He was desperate to turn this conversation away from the preposterous notion of Christie as grave robber and toward any other clues that Thaddeus had uncovered, but Spicer and his father had seized on their explanation with far too much enthusiasm to let it go easily. “I'm sure it's not Christie,” Luke said again. “Have you found any other avenues to explore? You were off to see the coffin at St. James-the-Lesser, if I remember correctly.”

“Ah yes, the double burial,” Thaddeus said. “Well, we know who's responsible for that, don't we? We went over to the cemetery at St. Paul's as well, but we found nothing that would tie the gentleman in question to the disturbances that took place here.”

Luke's eyes widened at the casual, albeit anonymous mention of Hands in front of Spicer. Thaddeus noticed his look.

“Oh, it's all right. I filled Morgan in on the general thrust of the story. And as it turns out, there's little evidence that the man is involved anyway.”

“I'm not so sure,” Luke said. “I don't understand who else could be bothered to dig up the double graves.”

“But that doesn't explain what's been happening here,” Morgan said. “My bodies were buried by the county and there's only one in each grave. Unless …” he stopped for a moment to think and then he said, “unless the coffins came from the same place and that's the connection.”

“Who has the contract to supply coffins to York County?”

“Several of the cabinetmakers. It depends on where the bodies are coming from. Sometimes it's Williams, sometimes it's Striker and Plews. Other times it's Fraser and Hess.”

“We followed the wagon to a cabinetmaker's that night,” Luke said to Thaddeus. “Wasn't the name on the gate Fraser and Hess?”

“It was somebody and somebody,” Thaddeus said, his eyes narrowing as he tried to recall the sign.

“So if all of the coffins in question were supplied by Fraser and Hess, wouldn't that point to …”

“Our nefarious friend,” Thaddeus said quickly. Luke understood that he had protected the Spicers by not supplying the identities that went with the story, but he was getting dizzy from trying to express his thoughts without using names or giving anything away. He hoped that his question about coffin supply would result in another look at the cemetery ledger. Armed with the knowledge of who was responsible, he might find some clue as to which graves had been targeted.

His hopes were dashed when Morgan said, “There's no mention in the records of where the bodies came from, much less the coffins. I'm sure there's a record of contracts, but that's the sort of thing that's handled by the Board of Trustees.”

“Is there any way you could ask them?”

“I'm not sure it would help us much,” Thaddeus said. “Even if we tie the bodies here to the double burial at James-the-Lesser, there's still nothing to tell us why they're now being dug up.”

“Didn't the man at the African church — Mr. Finch — say that Isaiah Marshall was a carpenter?” Morgan said. “I wonder if he worked for Fraser and Hess.”

“Yes, he did say that. He also said that Marshall kept to himself. And there was something else about him that Finch didn't want to tell us.”

“Maybe … our friend … was hiding something besides bodies. And maybe Marshall helped him hide it,” Luke said. “And whatever it was, the gentleman in question needs to get it back.”

Thaddeus thought about this for a moment, then shook his head. “No, I don't see it. The beauty of putting extra bodies in the coffins is that no one would ever be likely to unearth them. He'd never be found out.”

“But that would be true for anything else he wanted to hide, wouldn't it?” Morgan said. “And it would explain why he had no interest in the bodies themselves.”

“But not why he suddenly decided to open all these graves. Even if there was something else hidden in the coffins, something that he now wants to retrieve, it would be incredibly foolish to dig so many up over such a short period of time. One grave now and then is easily attributable to resurrectionists. Three graves in a handful of weeks is bound to attract someone's attention.”

“But only yours and mine,” Morgan pointed out. “And yours only because I told you about it. The constable I spoke to wasn't concerned at all. And I wrote a letter to the Board of Trustees, but I haven't heard a thing from any of them. It hasn't attracted much attention at all.”

“That's true,” Thaddeus admitted. “You may have something there. So where does that leave us?”

“It's either a criminal conspiracy, or Dr. Christie has lost his mind,” Morgan said.

“I still think Christie makes the most sense. It's the simplest explanation. And after all, he offered to write to his colleague at the hospital, but we haven't heard a word. I'm wondering now if he even sent the letter.”

It was time to put paid to the Christie theory, Luke decided. That was the only way he would ever be able to get his father to focus on Hands.

“I don't agree with you,” Luke said. “I don't think it's Christie at all. And I'll prove it.”

Thaddeus looked at him with surprise. “How will you do that?”

“I'll ask him.”

There was no point in taking anything but a direct approach. Luke knew that it would be impossible for him to get into the back of the house undetected. Now that his presence was no longer required to see to patients, Christie again spent most of his day either in the dining room or somewhere in the kitchen regions. There was also Mrs. Dunphy to dodge. Other than the times she dumped plates of food on the table, Luke seldom saw her, and he assumed that she spent the bulk of her time in the kitchen — this was confirmed on several occasions when he heard her voice in admonishment to something Christie had shouted at her. Only occasionally would he run across her in another part of the house, duster or broom in hand. There was little likelihood of there being a time when Christie was absent while Mrs. Dunphy was cleaning.

But armed with the knowledge that, whatever Christie was doing, it had nothing to do with the events at the Burying Ground, Luke saw no reason why he shouldn't just walk into the kitchen and see for himself. All he needed was an excuse to seek Christie out. Thaddeus wanted books for the Spicer twins. Luke would make an appropriate selection or two from Christie's shelves and ask to borrow them.

The next morning he dawdled at his breakfast and then made an excuse to go back upstairs where he waited until he heard Christie and Thaddeus get up from the table. Coming back downstairs again he passed Mrs. Dunphy, who had her broom and duster in hand. Just as well to have her out of the way, Luke thought, although his father said that she seemed unconcerned about his discovery of the marten on the kitchen table.

He walked through the dining room to the parlour. He would be unlikely to find any books that were specifically for children on the shelves, but he knew that there were numerous volumes put out by the Edinburgh Cabinet Library. He had read a number of them himself, particularly enjoying the tales of polar exploration and an account of the travels of Marco Polo.

Thaddeus was sitting in the parlour, staring at a piece of paper.

“It appears that Dr. Christie wrote to his colleague after all,” he said when Luke appeared at the door. He waved the letter he held in his hand. “This came in the morning mail. It confirms that both Abraham Jenkins and Isaiah Marshall died in hospital and that both their bodies were sent for dissection when no one claimed them. There's not much information beyond that. I'm not sure that it helps much.”

“It helps exonerate Christie,” Luke pointed out. “And I intend to clear him entirely.”

He ran his finger along the spines of books, head tilted to read the titles. Halfway along the row he found
Lives and Voyages of Drake, Cavendish and Dampier, Including a History of the Buccaneers.
Perfect. The twins could play at swashbuckling pirates. And then he found another small volume tucked behind two of the adjacent books:
The Tales of Aesop.
The perfect moral counter to rapine on the high seas.

“I'll ask if you can take these to the Spicers,” he said to Thaddeus. “Wait here and I'll fill you in on what I find.”

Books in hand, Luke walked through to the kitchen, but to his surprise there was no sign of Christie. There was no tell-tale carcass on the table, either, although the trace of a musky smell lingered in the room.

He opened a door to his right. It was the pantry, full of jars of preserves and vegetables set on racks. He returned to the kitchen. There was another door to his left, but he knew that it led to the office. It was this door that Christie had burst through the day Luke had been so immersed in a book that he hadn't heard the Holden boy knocking. There was a third door on the rear wall, which under ordinary circumstances he would have assumed led to the large lean-to woodshed at the rear of the house, and beyond that to the small yard outside. The shed was no longer needed for wood, he knew, since Christie had switched to coal, the fuel delivered once a month by a rumbling cart that dumped its black load directly into the cellar through a ground-floor hatch. He opened the door. The use to which Christie had converted his shed was astonishing.

The room was full of bones. Not bones like the ones that had been disturbed at the Strangers' Burying Ground, stained and worn from their time in the earth. These bones were uniformly white and carefully reassembled, their relationships charted, their joint articulations noted and recreated, and then displayed as if the flesh and muscle had magically melted away, the organs banished and the fundamental nature of each animal laid bare. He recognized a rat, a frog, a rabbit. A bird, which from its size Luke knew must be an eagle, perched on a rafter, its wings spread wide. A tiny turtle skeleton clung to its shell, the long spine of a snake spread its S shape across a polished wooden board; a bat hung from wires in the ceiling, the leathery wings gone, only the elongated fingers spread out as if it were in mid-flight. Each animal had been meticulously pared down to its essential being, its identity evident at a glance, but minus the fur and the skin and the sinew that masked its structure.

Evident in all but one case, that is. One skeleton was only half-assembled, its head attached to its backbone, but a wooden packing case had been substituted for its hindquarters. It was impossible at this juncture to tell what it was, except that Luke felt that there was something familiar in the way the back curved, something recognizable in the head, even though the teeth had not yet been returned to the jaw.

“It's a pig,” said a voice from over by the large window that had been set into the back wall of the shed. Luke whirled to find Dr. Christie smiling out from behind an easel. “Hard to tell when they're only half put together, isn't it? Believe it or not, domestic animals are harder to come by than wild ones. Hunters and trappers often bring me carcasses, but pigs go straight to the butcher. I was lucky that this one sickened and died of something-or-other first. The butcher said it wasn't fit to eat.”

“I'm sorry to intrude,” Luke said, “but I wondered if I could borrow these books for the Spicer twins.”

“Of course,” Christie said. “And it's no intrusion, no intrusion at all. If I'd known you were interested, I'd have shown you long since. Fascinating hobby, the putting together of bones. You learn so much. Started with old Mul-Sack, been going ever since, whenever I got the time.”

Luke walked over to the hanging bat. “It's incredible, isn't it?” he said. “The bones look like fingers.”

Christie beamed. “They do, don't they? Nature is a wondrous thing. It was delicate work, getting them down correctly. Tell me what you think of the finished product.” He nodded toward a workbench that ran along one side of the shed. “I did it recently. It should be at the top.”

Puzzled, Luke walked over to a pile of large papers that were stacked neatly on one corner of the bench. He selected the topmost and turned it over, and there was the bat, its skeletal remains faithfully depicted in pen and ink. It was a fastidious work, each articulation clear, each small joint transcribed. In spite of the fact that flesh and muscle were absent, it looked to Luke as though it could fly off the page.

He turned over the next paper and there was the turtle, then the snake, the rabbit, and all the other animals that had been boiled to bone.

“These are beautiful,” he said.

“I rather think the rabbit is a bit of a failure. I didn't get her back together in quite the right way. Didn't really capture the way she moves. I'll have another go at it. They're easy enough to come by.”

“But….” Luke wasn't sure what he wanted to say. Why seemed a foolish thing to ask. He could understand why. He had the same fascination with the structures that lay under the flesh. It was the reason, really, that he decided to become a doctor.

“I know, it seems a very odd occupation, doesn't it? But I've been fascinated for years. I'm trying to convince myself that the sketches are good enough to be published some day, perhaps in a folio or some such arrangement.”

“I would be fascinated by such a book,” Luke said.

“Really? Do you think so? Very kind of you to say. More success with the actual bones, I think, than with the illustrations. The trick, of course, is not to over-boil the carcasses. They can sometimes turn to mush. And then, of course, I like to whiten them up with magnesium carbonate before I put them back together again. Makes a nicer display, I think, and helps disperse any oil still left in them.”

“I wondered why you asked me to get such a large supply from the apothecary.”

“Oh yes, I suppose I should have explained,” Christie said. “Had you asked, I would have. But you didn't seem very curious, not even about poor old Mul-Sack, so I didn't pursue it.”

Mul-Sack and Aniseed Robin. His intention in seeking out Christie had been to prove that he was no grave robber, but maybe Luke could discover the significance of the highwayman's story as well. He willed his hands not to shake.

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “Mul-Sack kind of bothers me.”

“What? Really? Oh, my dear boy, he's not there to bother you. He's there to bother me.”

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

Christie stared at Luke for a moment, then seemed to make up his mind to speak. “I'm glad you came in here this morning, Luke. There's something I've been meaning to talk to you about for some time, but I wasn't just sure how to approach it. Bit of a delicate subject, if you know what I mean.”

Luke's hands seemed to have taken on a life of their own. He placed the illustrations back on the bench so the shaking wouldn't be so noticeable.

Christie sighed. “I don't tell many people this story, and it's painful for me to talk about it, but I think you'll understand when you hear it. Mrs. Dunphy is my cousin, you know. She very kindly came here to look after my household when my dear wife died. Flora — Mrs. Dunphy that is — had a younger brother, Alan. The Gods must have been in a jocular mood when they created Alan and Flora. You may have noticed, Luke, that she is rather an unprepossessing woman — no, much as I love her, it's true,” he said when Luke made a polite sound of disagreement. “And as big and clumsy and homely as poor Flora is, Alan was her opposite: handsome and graceful and full of life. We all grew up together. They were my brother and sister, in my eyes. As he grew into a man, Alan was coveted by every young woman who met him, but it was impossible to be put out by this because he was such a modest and good-natured chap. And, as it turned out, he hadn't the least interest in girls.”

Luke thought he was going to be sick. He clenched the side of the bench with both hands and bowed his head so that he could catch a breath.

Christie appeared not to notice. “I never gave it much thought until he came to the university. I was older and occupied with my studies. I didn't look after him as I should have. He was found out one night and his fellow students stripped him naked and doused him in a cattle trough — harmless enough, I suppose, though humiliating. But his life was a misery from that night on. Everywhere he went he was sniggered at and whispered about. His professors would barely acknowledge his existence. A couple of times he was caught by some of the ruffians in the town and beaten rather badly. It was too much for him.”

“What happened?” Luke's question was a whisper. He already knew what had happened.

“I did nothing,” Christie went on. “I was afraid that the taint would rub off on me. I had only a year and a bit to finish my studies and I thought that if anyone knew that Alan was my cousin, I, too, would be beaten in the town and shunned at the university. So I ignored him. And then one night he went to his rooms and hanged himself. A month later I acquired Mul-Sack. I boiled him down and put his bones back together in such a way that he would always remind me that bigotry can only lead to a bad end. But most of all I keep him around to remind me of my own treachery.”

“The pointing finger,” Luke said. “I thought it was pointing at me.”

“Really? Oh, I am sorry. I didn't realize you would take it that way. But don't worry, I know all about you.”

Luke willed himself to keep breathing while he waited for Christie's next words.

“I've known from the start,” Christie said. “Your Professor Brown, at the university, was no friend to you. When you expressed an interest in joining this practice he wrote me a rather nasty letter. He claimed that you were unsuitable for the position due to your suspect morals, and that it was well known in the city that you were in an unnatural relationship with a local bookseller. He did his very best to scuttle your career before it even started.”

It had been a mistake to call in Brown. Luke had known it at the time, but he had been so distraught over Ben that he would have done anything to try to save him.

“As soon as I received that letter, I decided that you were the one I wanted. You were by no means the most qualified applicant. Some of your classmates had sterling recommendations and far better marks. But I took it as an opportunity to atone, at least a little, for what I failed to do for Alan.”

Luke was astonished. He didn't know what to say. Finally he stammered out an almost inaudible and completely inadequate “Thank you.”

“Oh, it's nothing to do with you, boy, although I must admit that so far I'm not sorry about my choice. I've been watching you. You've proved yourself to be a good doctor. People like you. No, the thing that really decided it was the way Brown did his filthy business behind your back. Cowards like that should be hanged.”

This last, ludicrously typical addendum to the most generous thing anyone had ever done for him released a torrent of pent-up tension and anxiety in Luke. He began to laugh, and he couldn't stop it, any more than he had ever been able to control the shaking of his hands.

Christie looked at him with puzzlement.

“I'm sorry,” Luke said. “I just didn't expect this. Do you want to know why I came in here this morning? Because my father thinks that you're the one who has been digging up the graves at the Burying Ground. I said I'd prove him wrong, but I didn't know that he was as wrong as it's possible to be.”