The Burying Ground (4 page)

He continued his survey, but no clues presented themselves. The key to the riddle must lie elsewhere. He returned to where Morgan was waiting, his brood of identical children hunkered at his feet.

“I'm sorry,” Thaddeus said. “I can't see anything that would explain what happened, unless someone was after the body itself. And without knowing who he was, it's unlikely that we'll ever think of any reason for him to have been dug up.”

Morgan's face fell. “At least you tried, which is more than the constable was willing to do. Ah, well, come back inside and we'll finish our tea.”

Thaddeus's first inclination was to protest that he needed to be getting back, but then he realized that both Luke and Dr. Christie were no doubt occupied, and that there would be little for him to do and no one for him to talk to at the doctor's house. Better to chew over old times with Morgan and Sally, he decided, even if it meant being subjected to the unwavering stares of the twins. Maybe he'd get used to them.

Luke sat in the armchair behind the big desk in the office, glumly trying to ignore Mul-Sack's toothy grin. After breakfast Dr. Christie disappeared into the kitchen with Mrs. Dunphy. Thaddeus went off in search of Morgan Spicer, not even stopping to ask the way to the Burying Ground. No doubt, Luke figured, he already knew where it was.

His father and Dr. Christie seemed to hit it off. That was a relief. Although Luke's rooms were ostensibly his home now, they didn't feel like it, and he was too aware that he was living in someone else's house. Christie was more than gracious in welcoming Thaddeus, but the dynamic of the household could have been difficult had the two men detested each other on sight.

It seemed very odd to Luke to be doing nothing after the frantic years at medical school, when every day was filled to more than capacity with knowledge that must be learned, tasks that must be done. No one had told him that real doctoring would entail long periods of waiting for something to happen, yet he knew that no one would call for a doctor unless there was an accident, or some illness that swept through the village. He would need to find something to keep himself occupied while he waited for calamity to strike the residents of Yorkville.

Books: Dr. Christie had whole shelves of them. It was books that had led him to the shop in the little lane off Notre Dame Street in Montreal. As soon as he'd arrived in the city he had gravitated to the cluster of booksellers on St. Vincent Street, drawn both by the knowledge their books contained and the warmth of the shops. Most of the texts he needed for school were sold, usually at exorbitant prices, at the university, but all of the Montreal book dealers had small sections of medical books. Some of the titles were on the local curriculum, but many of them were obscure, out-of-step with current medical theory, or English and French translations of foreign texts. Even so, he browsed through these as long as he dared, in particular lingering over the illustrations of anatomy, trying to absorb as much as he could in preparation for the lectures he would hear during his classes. Most of the proprietors of the shops chased him away after half an hour or so, cautioning him to either buy or be gone.

Ferguson's was different. To begin with, it wasn't in the heart of the bookselling district, but just at the periphery of it. The tall, thin proprietor seemed not to mind how long Luke dawdled in front of the heaped tables and shelves of books, or how long he stood in the aisle reading them. It was a tiny shop, crowded with bookcases and bins and racks, but there was a stove in the corner that filled the space with a fragrant heat that seeped into his frozen limbs. He stood for hours, comfortably lost in the mysteries of the human body.

Eventually Luke hadn't bothered with any of the other shops. As the season turned to a hard winter, he tramped along the snowy streets to Ferguson's, where he consulted the texts on matters that had puzzled him during the day's classes. He seldom bothered to stop at his room first. The temperature in the attic was only a few degrees warmer than outside and he knew that he would not be able to study there. He would fall into a fitful sleep, huddled under a thin blanket with his coat still on. At least at Ferguson's he could accomplish something useful.

And when he tired of tracing the veins and arteries and muscles shown by the illustrated plates in the medical books, and when he grew weary of reading about the symptoms of the many complaints that could plague a human body, he turned to some of the bookstore's other offerings. He found a wealth of literature — accounts of daring explorations and doomed expeditions, memoirs and biographies, bins full of maps, shelves full of novels and stories. He delved into these and stood with his nose in them until hunger or closing time chased him out of the shop.

He wasn't sure how long the owner would have been content to let him haunt the store without saying anything. Possibly forever, he reflected, had he not walked in one day just as the man had finished tying a bundle of books together with twine.

“Would you like to earn a few coins?” he asked in a soft Scottish accent. “A customer needs these books delivered right away, and if I take them myself I'll have to close the store while I'm gone.”

Luke was happy to run the errand, and although he was quite desperate for money, refused the coins the man offered in payment.

“It's the least I can do,” Luke said. “I've read my way through most of your stock.”

“Fair enough,” the man agreed with a smile that transformed his long, thin face. “I'm Ben, by the way, Ben Ferguson.”

Luke often ran errands for Ben after that, in exchange for reading privileges. He began taking his class notes with him to the store. He could sit at a small table by the stove and study them. Ben supplied him with regular servings of tea and coffee while he worked. Gradually Luke stopped being so jittery and started sleeping again. Lectures were no longer the torment they had been, and when he didn't understand something that had been said, he had no hesitation in raising his hand and asking for clarification. He was no longer afraid that this would make him appear inadequate. He was there, after all, to learn.

As he struggled to absorb the information he needed to get through the examinations that were looming, he began to turn to Ben for help. The older man knew nothing of medicine, of course, but seemed happy enough to use the notes Luke had taken to grill him on the indications for the use of cupping and plasters, the pros and cons of administering ergot in cases of prolonged labour, and the pharmacological properties of recipes, compounds, and formulae from the endless list of preparations commonly encountered in a modern medical practice.

It was clear that Ferguson was an educated man, but when Luke asked about this, he merely shrugged, and said that he had had “a few years of schooling, but not in anything useful.” He had a grounding in classical studies, “like all good Scots,” but beyond that he had little to say about his life before he had come to Canada and opened his store.

Luke asked no further questions, although he was curious about Ferguson's background. The man appeared to love anything that was printed on paper. He constantly tidied the bins of maps that became disarranged when a customer shuffled through them, straightened shelves, and dusted books with a reverent care.

“Knowledge is everything,” he said one time as he rearranged a section of reference books, “and this is where it's kept.”

Dr. Christie seemed to share Ben's respect for the printed word, if not his liking for tidiness. The small parlour at the front of the house was filled with encyclopedias and dictionaries, compendiums of English literature and periodicals of every nature. Newspapers spilled from a table under the window and the office itself was home to a stack of leather-bound medical texts jammed, in no particular order, into a bookcase behind the desk.

Luke ran his finger along the titles. There were the usual tomes on medical chemistry, surgical techniques, and midwifery, but Christie had collected numerous other related publications as well. Randomly, he pulled out a book with handsomely marbled boards. It was
The Complete Herbal and English Physician Enlarged
by Nicholas Culpeper, apparently an addendum to a book called
The English Physician
by the same author. It was no more than a curiosity, its medical theory based on the movement of the planets, but it did have a number of handsome coloured plates that illustrated the herbs and other botanical sources that Culpeper had found useful, and which Luke recognized as the basis for the current knowledge on pharmaceuticals. He was soon absorbed in the work, fascinated by the careful drawings and acute observations — so absorbed that he jumped when the door behind him slammed open.

Dr. Christie stood in the doorway glaring at him. “For God's sake boy, there's been someone pounding on the door for the last five minutes. Are you deaf?”

Luke rushed to the front door and opened it. A young girl stood there, her face streaked with tears.

“Please, could you come, sir? It's my gran. We think she's going.”

“Of course,” Luke said. “I'll just get my bag.”

As he returned to the office to grab his leather instrument bag, he realized that Dr. Christie was still standing at the interior doorway, and that he looked most peculiar. He had removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, over which he had tied a white apron of the sort that a butcher might use. Or at least the apron had once been white. The entire front of it was covered in ugly brown smears and rust-coloured stains. Again Luke was aware of a most peculiar smell emanating from the kitchen behind him.

“You'd better get in here.” Mrs. Dunphy's voice floated out into the room.

Christie glared at Luke again, then returned to the kitchen, slamming the door behind him.

Luke followed the girl down the street. She led him across Yonge Street and past the Red Lion Tavern, where, even at this early hour of the day, three openly intoxicated men loitered in front.

She turned into one of the short streets that led toward the edge of the escarpment that marked Yorkville's boundary. Beyond this lay the complex of ravines that scarred the lands around the Rosedale estate.

The girl turned in at a modest wooden cottage, its front dooryard neatly fenced to protect the riot of flowers that bloomed in the beds beside the plank walk. The front door led directly into a small parlour, where Luke's patient had been installed on a daybed. Not only to facilitate her care, he figured, but also to afford her a degree of privacy in her final days. Judging from the girl's tear-streaked face, the old woman was a beloved grandmother whose passing would be mourned.

Luke knelt beside the cot and took the woman's hand. It was covered with dry, parchment-like skin tinged with the blue of the veins underneath. He stroked it lightly and was rewarded when the woman's eyelids fluttered a little, although the eyes did not open.

“What's her name?” he asked.

“Bessie.” The name startled him for a moment. Almost the same name as his mother's, and this woman, he judged, was close to the same final circumstance — death was not far off.

A middle-aged, careworn-looking woman and a young man who appeared to be in his late teens crowded into the room.

“I'm Dr. Lewis, Dr. Christie's partner,” Luke said in response to the question on her face.

“Thank you for coming. I'm Margaret Johnson. I hadn't heard that there was a new doctor, but then I've been so busy with Ma.”

“How old is she?”

“Seventy-eight her last birthday.”

“And has she been ill for a long time?”

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Johnson said. “She has a growth in her stomach. Dr. Christie told us it was cancer.”

Luke peeled back the light blanket that covered the old woman, but he didn't have to search long to find the problem. Her abdomen was huge, the outline of the tumour clearly visible.

“Has she been in a lot of pain?”

“She was before today. Now she seems to have sunk too low to feel anything.”

There was no mercy in doing anything to prolong this battle, Luke knew. The best he could do was to make sure she went peacefully. He turned to the family members.

“I don't think she can last much longer,” he said. “But I don't want to see her go in pain, even if she can't let you know she's feeling it. I'll give her something, just to make sure she's comfortable.”

“How long?” Mrs. Johnson asked.

“It's impossible to predict,” Luke replied, “but I would be surprised if she lasts the day.”

The young girl burst into tears at this, but the daughter just nodded. “I thought as much.”

Luke pulled a bottle of commercial laudanum preparation from his bag, then hesitated a moment before he also retrieved the tiny bottle that was beside it. Pure opium extract. He would strengthen the dose to speed her along. There was no point in letting her linger.

“Could I use your kitchen for a moment?” he asked. “I need to mix this.”

The young man led Luke through the doorway and hovered nearby while he carefully added a few extra drops of opium to the laudanum bottle, pouring it over the kitchen basin in case he spilled it.

“Be a good lad and rinse the basin for me?” Luke directed, before returning to the parlour. Mrs. Johnson lifted the old woman to a sitting position and Luke spooned a little of the medicine into her mouth.

“Let me know if anything changes,” he said. “I'll come back as soon as it does.”

Luke left them clustered around the dying woman, certain that it wouldn't be long before he returned.

It happened even faster than he expected. Dinner was ready when he returned to the Christie house, but he had scarcely finished his custardy dessert when there was a rap on the door. It was the young man who had watched him mix the medicine he had given to the old woman.

“We think she's gone,” he said. “She took a big deep breath and then nothing.”

Luke collected his bag and accompanied the young man down the street toward the cottage.

“It's for the best, you know,” Luke said.

“I know.”

They walked in silence for a minute or so and then the young man suddenly said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.” Luke hoped he wasn't about to be questioned about the dose of opium he had given. He was sure that the daughter knew what he had been doing, but younger people sometimes had little perspective on dying.

“Are you married?”

It was such an unexpected question that Luke stopped walking and stared at the boy for a moment before he said “No. Why do you ask?”

The boy blushed. “It's just that …well … do you know anything that will stop urges? You know … at night.”

“Urges to … oh, I see what you mean.”

Luke could feel himself blushing in turn. At medical school there had been entire lectures devoted to the dangers of onanism. Self-abuse could lead to lethargy, sapping of physical strength, blindness, madness even, they had been told. All manner of disease was ascribed to the shameful solitary act, and Luke sometimes wondered if it was responsible for his own difficulties. The professors had certainly claimed that this was so.