The Resurrectionist (6 page)

M
R POLL SHAKES
the letter open, scanning it quickly. ‘What is it?’ Charles asks. As if it were but a little thing Mr Poll hands it to Charles for us to read. It is from Sir Astley, informing Mr Poll of the results of an autopsy conducted on a woman who was, until two days past, a patient of ours.

‘Caley was to bring
us
her body,’ Charles says, and Mr Poll nods. No love is lost between him and his rival, whose fine manners and vanity play ill with Mr Poll; there can be little doubt Sir Astley’s letter is intended to provoke, despite its air of generosity. For a second or two Mr Poll considers, then he looks to me.

‘Fetch Mr Tyne,’ he says. ‘Tell him I would speak with him.’

Mr Tyne is in the room below. He looks up as I enter. Though with Mr Poll his manner is unchanged, in regard to me I have felt a change in him since the night of Lucan’s visit, a hardening of some suspicion. Told of Sir Astley’s letter and asked how this might be, when the body was
requested of Caley only two nights ago, he says he knows naught of it.

Tight-lipped Mr Poll dispatches him to find Caley and seek some explanation, but he returns with little more than we might have guessed. By Caley’s account the grave in which the woman lay was empty, the body already taken by another. When Mr Poll asks Mr Tyne if Caley might have lied to him, that it might have been Caley himself who sold the body on to Sir Astley’s men, Mr Tyne’s face hardens, the charge dismissed.

‘He is too close to them,’ Charles says, once Mr Tyne has gone.

‘You think he lies for them?’ Mr Poll’s voice is sharp. When none of us replies he lifts his hand.

‘Go,’ he says. ‘I will have no more of this.’

That night, alone in my room, I listen to Mr Poll and Charles speaking below, their voices low and urgent. It is Charles’s view we should raise this thing with Sir Astley, learn how the body came to him, but Mr Poll will not. Against my back the wall is cold, yet it is not the chill of the air that is most keen, but the remembered image of Arabella, the sense of possibilities contained within her as she stood pouring over that bowl. Though I have not chanced on her again she has occupied my thoughts almost constantly. I would ask Charles of her, but his silence on the events of that night seems to forbid it, and my promise to keep the events a secret between ourselves prevents me from inquiring of her with Chifley or Caswell or the others. More than once I have thought I glimpsed her in the streets, moving ahead in a crowd or passing in a carriage, but each time the likeness vanished as I
approached. Once, alone with Charles in a tavern near Drury Lane, I thought I saw her in conversation with another woman in the street outside, her face distorted by the flaws of the panes, but as she came close she turned away, and although I strained to see her once more I could not, and she was gone.

O
UTSIDE
D
RYDEN’S BOOKSHOP
, I come upon May. It is a low, cold day, the streets thick with a freezing mist which seems to grow heavier with the approaching evening. The snow of a week before has melted, the straw that was laid to cover it turned black and slippery with soot and ice.

Though a single misstep would send one sprawling May hurries carelessly, head down and one hand held out, his first finger half-uncurled and waggling slightly as if in preparation for some admonishment or explanation he rehearses in his mind for any who might seek to delay him. Stopping by a door next to the bookshop, he fumbles in his pocket for a key. Without thinking I call out his name. At once he looks up.

‘Gabriel,’ he cries, shaking my hand delightedly.

I grin, disarmed by his enthusiasm. Several weeks have passed since he last accompanied us on one of our adventures and I am surprised to realise I have missed him.

‘What brings you here?’

‘An errand for my master,’ I reply. ‘And you? Where are you bound?’

‘Home,’ he says. ‘Here.’ He points to the door.

‘In such a hurry?’ I ask, laughing.

At this he is suddenly less certain. ‘I have been to see old Ruthven the apothecary,’ he says in a rush, then laughs nervously, a high-pitched, whistling giggle. He looks round at the door then back at me.

‘Come,’ he says, already backing up, ‘I will show you my rooms.’ Behind the door the stairs are cluttered with a strange assortment of refuse and abandoned things: chairs and carpets, cages for birds, an escritoire. As May closes the door he tells me they are the property of his landlord, a man with an aptitude for the accumulation of things of dubious value – then May is pointing first to one and then to another, giving an account of each, his words flowing in a spilling rush, each story beginning before the last has ended, before looping back to try to resume itself, until at last I laugh, and for a moment he stares at me in bewilderment, before he too laughs.

‘Here,’ he says, leading me up. The staircase is so steep it is almost a ladder. Still chuckling I follow him, up and in through the door at the top. The room is dark, a low-beamed space lit only through the panes of the dormers. Although a stove stands in one corner, the air is freezing, and as May strikes a match to light a candle I draw my coat closer. The place looks to have been furnished from the collection on the stairs, everything worn and broken, nothing matching. By the stove stands an armchair draped with a blanket, stuffing leaking out at the back; opposite is an old divan, one leg gone and propped up on a stack of books; beneath the window a chair on which a sketchbook lies. But the pieces of furniture are crowded out by the canvases which stand deep against the walls, and the boards and sheets stacked and piled on every conceivable surface.

The candle lit, May draws a flat bottle from his coat, and pours a measure into a wineglass on the floor. Though it is
done openly I turn away, something in the manner of its execution making observation seem an intrusion.

On the chair the boards of the sketch book are open, and on the uppermost page a face is visible, the first outlines of a body. Setting down his glass May approaches.

‘You draw?’ he asks.

‘A little,’ I say.

‘Perhaps I might give you a lesson some day?’

His face is earnest. ‘Perhaps.’ For a few moments we contemplate the drawing.

‘So, where is your master this evening?’ he asks then, his voice slower somehow, looser.

‘With his daughter,’ I reply. ‘And Charles.’

He pauses. Then, ‘How is Charles?’

I look at him in surprise. ‘You have not seen him?’

May shakes his head, jiggling the glass in his hand.

‘One does not quarrel with Charles,’ he says. ‘Surely you have realised that by now.’ For a moment May simply stands, then he laughs, as if to deny what he has just said. Then he pauses again.

‘He has made you his friend, has he not?’

For a long time I do not answer. Looking down I indicate the sketchbook on the chair.

Then I ask, ‘Who is the girl?’

May looks up from the sketch.

‘Come,’ he says.

A low door is partway open at the room’s end. May presses on it and quietly ushers me in. On a bed a girl lies sleeping, the blankets cast off so her breasts and shoulders are exposed to the icy air. She has the translucent skin of the redhead, her nipples as pink and small and hard as those of a child. Her head is cast back, the mouth slightly open, her face that of a dreamer, lost in some hidden place within. From outside comes the clatter of a carriage, the sounds of a
coster’s cries, but here it is so still her breathing can be heard, gentle and steady. I feel myself colouring. This is some private thing – not her nakedness, but her vulnerability.

‘You think her beautiful?’ May asks, as we step out again, his face eager.

‘Who is she?’

‘Her name is Molly.’

‘She is a whore?’ I ask, my tone harder than it might have been. A look of hurt passes across May’s face.

Behind us there comes a sound. The girl has risen, and stands in the door behind us, a blanket wound about herself.

‘Who’s this?’ she asks.

‘Gabriel,’ says May. ‘A friend.’

She gives me a hard, assessing look, a warning of the perils of encroaching on her domain. Seeing then that I have understood she smiles, and crosses to the chair beside the stove and seats herself. Her legs protrude from the blanket and her feet are bare, their soles stained and roughened by a lifetime without shoes.

‘Light me a fire,’ she says, and though she still smiles there is no softness in her face. May takes a few lumps of coal and places them in the stove.

‘What manner of man is he?’ she asks, looking at me. ‘Another of your painter friends? Or is he a gentleman?’

‘One cannot be both?’ May asks, smiling. As he speaks I am struck with pity for him, for I see he loves this girl with all that is good in him.

She makes a sound of derision. For a long moment May stands watching her, then, smiling nervously, he turns away, and taking up the flat bottle from before he pours two more glasses. In her chair Molly follows the movement of his hands, and though she seeks to hide it I see the way she hungers for the contents of the bottle. May brings a glass to her, and as she reaches for it she grasps at it. Taking the glass
in both hands she drinks it quickly, an urgent motion of the throat. And then, when the glass is done, she sets it aside, ignoring May’s outstretched hand. Looking at me now she laughs, a slow, dreamy sound, absorbed in itself.

‘You would have some?’ May asks, watching me.

I hesitate, my eyes on Molly, then slowly nod.

Even through the sweet burn of the alcohol the opium is bitter, a sharp taste which coats the tongue and lingers in the mouth. At first I feel naught but the brandy’s heat, but then it comes, a stealing ease that flows through me like a tide. At first the world seems unaltered, the only change the weight of something in its textures. At rest in his chair May is talking, his voice both huge and far away, while Molly lies with her head spilled back. I feel a presence press against the surrounding air, another world, as if this room, these lives of ours, this very world were a dream that moves upon some deeper place, like the crossing patterns of ripples on the surface of a lake disturbed by rain, pierced here and there and set to motion only to pass, and fade, its knowledge coming like the memory of something I had not known forgotten, with a rightness that goes deeper with words, as if I understand at last the nature if not the name of the void that lies at my centre.

How long it has been when I leave I am not sure, yet outside the streets are long quiet. Overhead the fog turns the lamps to hissing gold and falling flame, as metal in a blacksmith’s forge. No heat, nor even noise, though on every side the world ticks and shivers. On Old Compton Street I hear a hoot, then overhead an owl swoops by, the pale feathers of its belly and its banded wings beating slow upon the heavy air, its ghostly form so close I might lift a hand and touch it
there. Somewhere later in my bed I sleep, a shifting dreamless thing, until I am woken by the dirty light of dawn, my body filled with memory of what has passed, and feeling now only its absence, the knowledge of its loss.

C
HRISTMAS COMES
, bringing snow and a sort of quiet to the city’s streets. Across the roofs bells ring out, their sound as clear as glass in the frozen air, carriages jangling on the stones. Though I have no family to call my own, by Robert’s invitation I spend Christmas night with his mother and sister, who have a house in Kentish Town. It is strange to see Robert thus, laughing and careless with his family, for he seems not at all the serious young man I have grown to know, and instead he clowns and jokes, teasing his sister until she laughs and pulls his hair, and dancing with his mother by the fire. The house is nothing grand: one floor of a building beside a field where donkeys graze, and its furnishings are threadbare at best, circumstances quite unlike those they must once have known, but tonight at least these things seem not to worry them, and they are to all appearances happy in themselves and in each other.

Though they would have me stay as Robert means to do, I decline their invitation. From his uncle, Robert has a case of cigars, and he presses one on me as the two of us walk
across the frozen midnight fields, made a little drunk and foolish by the smoke. Overhead the sky is clear, the massing light of the stars moving silently against the earth’s darkened curve, the only sound the lowing of the cows as they shift in their sleep. Something in the stillness of the night soon quiets us, and then I feel a sort of emptiness descend. All evening I have felt it there, as if I watched their happiness from without and even my laughter and our songs were illusory. Perhaps Robert sees something of this, for as we stop by the stone gate where he takes his leave of me he grips my hand and holds it, once more urging me to stay. But I shake my head and tell him I would not intrude further, and so we part for the night.

Beneath the open sky I make my way slowly back through the fields and gardens into Camden Town, and thence past the last inns and houses of the country roads into the city streets. From a cart some local lads call out to me, and I wave, but truly my thoughts are not with them. A fortnight has passed since the night of the child, and in that time Charles has not spoken of it again. Outwardly he seems unaltered, but something has changed: in the Cock not two nights past he snapped at Chifley, his temper quick and hot upon him for some little thing. And yet afterwards he urged us on, his mood exuberant and uncontrolled, until even Chifley was afraid of him and our celebrations were abandoned for the evening.

Before the fire in the kitchen Mrs Gunn is asleep, slumped low upon her chair, the ruins of her dinner on the table, a flagon of porter in her lap. The house above silent as the grave. Of Mr Tyne there is no hint, so carefully I help her up, and with my arm about her guide her to the room beside the
kitchen where she sleeps. As I set her down she grabs at me and tries to plant a kiss upon my mouth, her wrinkled lips murmuring something I would rather not have heard, and ashamed for her I pull away. My room upstairs will be cold, so I sit before the fire, losing myself within the pictures in the flames.