Page 18 of The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin (The Ill-Mannered Ladies #2)

18

We jogged up the footpath to the entrance. The iron gate stood open, leading to the large central quadrangle enclosed by the hospital buildings. I had never been inside Bart’s before, although Julia and I had contributed funds to its expansion. I had to say the four buildings were rather handsome: frontages in the classic style with large windows and arched doorways and walk-throughs that were all reassuringly solid in their symmetry. Hospital attendants in smocks, nurses, and patients were already airing themselves or crossing the cobbled expanse of the quadrangle, and the doctors we had followed were entering the building to our right, conversing with some vigor. I caught the words pneumonia and sputum before a delivery wagon stacked with barrels came through the main gateway, the sound of its wheels and horses’ hooves upon the flags overwhelming any other sound. “Look, over there,” Evan said through the noise. He pointed to Gib and Reed pushing the cart toward a lane between the north and east buildings. “You have found them.”

Still, we had no time to waste—they would be gone from view in a moment or two. We half walked, half ran across the quadrangle, using the horse and wagon as cover until Gib and Reed had disappeared into the lane. Evan increased his speed, his longer legs covering the ground in an athletic stride. I was not too far behind, but gulping for air, my lungs aching.

We rounded the corner just in time to see the back of Reed as he entered a side door halfway along the building, Gib and the cart no doubt already inside.

Evan drew to a panting stop. Thank God. I came to a halt beside him and leaned a steadying hand against the building, struggling for a deep lungful of air.

“So, we know what happens to the girls now,” he said between breaths. I followed his upward gaze. A sign above the door declared Through to Dissection Room . “Mr. Reed and Mr. Gibbon are resurrectionists.”

Good God. I had read about such resurrection men. Body snatchers who pried loved ones from their resting place and sold the corpses to anatomists and doctors for dissection. Indeed, I knew one family, the Purdams, who had been forced to mount a guard upon their father’s grave until his corpse had decomposed to the point that it would no longer be attractive to the grave robbers. It was a foul profession that, to my surprise, was not entirely illegal. Interfering with a grave was only a misdemeanor, and punished by fine, if at all. If items were stolen from the corpse, however, then that could mean prison or transportation. How odd it was that theft of a few grave items was considered worse than dragging the body from a grave and selling it for further desecration. But then the law was not justice, was it?

And how wickedly clever of the men in the Exalted Brethren of Rack and Ruin to employ resurrectionists to sell their victims to hospitals or anatomy schools. Lost among the abandoned suicides and the criminals and the unclaimed poor.

“Should we catch them in the act?” I asked. “We can arrest them by law.”

“And then what?” Evan said. “We cannot take them to Bow Street. We have just seen one of the undersecretaries of the Alien Department attend the very club where the murder took place. I do not think our report would go very far, do you? Besides, I cannot walk into Bow Street—I might as well string myself up now—and nor can you, in your current guise.”

All true. Yet it did not sit well to allow Gib and Reed to profit from Miss Hollis’s death.

Sometimes, however, inaction was the most intelligent course, even if it did feel morally wrong. We walked back to the corner of the lane and leaned against the wall: just two laborers loitering in Bart’s quadrangle, or perhaps waiting for the open surgery to start.

I dug my hands into my jacket pockets, my left fingers closing around the knitted bulk of Miss Hollis’s purse—I had forgotten I had shoved it in there. I pulled it out, nudging Evan for his attention. There was something so pitifully innocent about its homemade shape; a gift, perhaps, from a loving mother, or maybe knitted by her own hands to go with a new gown. Now it was stained with her blood and in my hands, a stranger who had followed her body to a dissection room.

Evan eyed it somberly. “All her worldly possessions?”

I worked two fingers into the opening and spread the tightly bunched drawstring apart. Inside, a handkerchief embroidered with flowers, a sixpence, and a folded letter. I returned the handkerchief and sixpence to the bag and unfolded the letter. The direction on the front of the packet was to Miss Catherine Hollis, Chapel Street, Cheapside.

“Her home?” Evan asked, looking over my shoulder.

“Probably.” The sealing wafer had dropped off long ago, its gum discoloring the paper in a neat oval. I spread the page.

Tuesday, 18th June 1811

The Vicarage,

Whixley

My dearest Cathy,

I know you will probably not write back to me, you said as much in your last letter, but I want you to know that Mother and I are still here and still hoping you will return home.

Mother has been ill again. The doctor says her chest is weak and she needs sea air. Father is hoping to take her to Lyme Regis in the spring. After a bleak time of it after you left, he has been able to take up the ministering of two new parishes, so it is more than possible we will have enough for Mother and me to make an extended visit for her health.

I am happy to report, dear sister, that Father has mentioned you in kinder terms during the past few months. It is, I think, the relief of new income and some distance from that terrible day when you told him the truth and then lost the little life that you carried. Perhaps it is a sign that he will allow you to come back to us.

Please, if you can, write a note to let myself and Mother know you are well. And if you wish to return anytime, I will try my hardest to send you the fare and we will find a way together for Father to forgive you. And you him.

Your loving sister, always,

Rosalie

What had happened in that genteel vicarage? Clearly, something tragic that had seen one tiny life lost in the past, and another life lost now.

“They should know what has happened,” Evan said.

Indeed. To never know the fate of a missing loved one would be purgatory on earth.

“We have an address,” I said, refolding the letter. “I will write to them and tell them the terrible news.”

How did Miss Hollis—the daughter of a vicar—end up in the basement of the Exalted Brethren of Rack and Ruin? Was it just by chance—one of Long Sal’s runaways who ran out of luck? Yet Long Sal said other genteel girls had been seen inside the club, so Miss Hollis was not an anomaly. A nasty possibility sprang to mind: was that part of the wager too? To seduce respectable girls and take them into the bowels of hell? I would not put such degradation past the Exalted Brethren.

It was at that moment that the side door opened again. I thrust the purse and letter back into my pocket as Gib and Reed came out with the cart, their expressions smugly satisfied.

On seeing us lounging against the wall, both men stared for a belligerent moment but clearly saw no threat. It was lucky they could not see into my heart and the rage that roiled within me. By the way Gib pushed the cart across the quadrangle, I knew it no longer held Miss Hollis. In that moment, every part of me wanted to make Reed and Gib suffer for so blithely delivering her to this final desecration. But then again, they were not the true villains. Merely foul adjuncts to the brutal killers at the club.

“Let’s go in,” I said, heading back to the door. “I want to find out what the anatomists have to say about buying a body that has so plainly been murdered.”

···

The door led into a dingy corridor with scuffed pale walls and a parquetry floor that crunched underfoot with tracked-in gravel and dried leaves. A number of the wall lamps were guttering or already spent, any light left drawing the flutter and buzz of moths and flies. At the other end of the corridor, a man pushed a basket upon a cart, the sound of his squeaky-wheeled progress receding into the distance. A rancid fatty blood smell, not unlike that from the meat market outside, hung in the air, mixed with the stink of alcohol and feces. I closed my eyes for a second, trying to suppress the desire to gag.

“Over there,” Evan said. I heard the same reflex in his voice. “That might be where they went.”

I opened my eyes. A doorway farther along bore the legend Dissection Prep .

We approached, the dead-flesh stink intensifying. I peered around the doorway. A young man in a smock sat at a desk writing in a ledger, a single candle providing light. Behind him, two wooden trestle tables stood with a body upon each, draped in a grubby, stained sheet. Or that is what I presumed was under the cloth by the shapes of what lay beneath. Was one of them Miss Hollis? A number of flies crawled upon the dark stains, occasionally rising into buzzing flight and landing upon another damp patch. A glint of metal upon one set of shelves marked a jumble of instruments—saws, knives, forceps—some rusted, some new, some still coated in dark matter. Another shelf held dozens of ledgers.

The young man, sensing our presence, looked up, quill poised over his entry. “What is it?”

He looked to be about twenty and not in the best of health—no wonder since he sat among death and decay. His movements were nervy quick and his complexion a sickly yellow, with blemishes that stretched his skin in large red lumps upon cheeks and chin.

“Have you brought a body?” he asked as we entered.

“No,” I said, making my voice as gruff and manly as possible.

Behind me, Evan closed the door and lounged against it, the pose both relaxed and threatening at the same time.

The young man frowned. “What are you doing?”

“We are asking you why you just accepted the body of a young woman for dissection when she has clearly been murdered,” Evan said pleasantly. “What is your name?”

“I am not going to tell you my name,” the young man said, puffing a little at the outrage of our intrusion.

“Everyone needs a name,” I said. “Like the young woman those two coves just brought in.” I glanced at Evan. “Let’s call him Napoleon.”

Evan considered my suggestion. “It suits him.”

“My name is not Napoleon,” the young man said, outraged. A true patriot. “I am Reginald Drake and I have no recollection of a young woman.”

I walked over to his table. He pushed his chair back, scooting it across the floor in a dull screech of wood upon wood and revealing a pair of reasonably clean stockings and good shoes with silver buckles. A young man of reasonable means. Perhaps a medical student working his way through his studies.

I leaned over to view the ledger. “Ah, this unfinished entry you are writing: unidentified woman, approximate age twenty-five. Marked upon back and neck.”

He eyed me. “You can read?”

“It would seem so,” I said. “Allow me to ask again: why are you taking the body of a woman who has so plainly been murdered? Is that her under one of those sheets?”

“Yes,” Reginald muttered, his eyes darting to the left table. “I don’t know what you want from me. I just do what I am told. The doctors say take whatever bodies come in. It does not matter where they are from.”

“It does to their people,” I said as mildly as I could. I glanced at the patently female figure beneath the stained cloth, struggling for a moment to contain my fury. I would write to her family as I had vowed, but could I tell them what had truly happened to their daughter and sister? How she had died and what was about to happen to her body in this terrible place? Surely it would just compound their grief and add the ongoing misery of imagined torture and lonely death. A decision to face when I had pen and paper.

I resolutely turned back a page of the ledger. It detailed the bodies and dissections from the previous week. Another page, another week. Rather like the hideous wager book…which presented a rather interesting idea. “How far back do these ledgers go, Reginald?”

He glanced at the shelf of ledgers beside us. “Fifty years or so.”

I looked across at Evan, eyebrows raised.

He nodded: Interesting.

With menacing grace he levered himself away from the door and walked over to the shelves, running his finger along the spines of the bound ledgers. “Here we are, 1792.”

“I wasn’t here then,” Reginald said quickly.

“We rather gathered that,” Evan said dryly. He started to flip through the pages.

“You should get more fresh air,” I said to Reginald.

He gave me a sour look. “I would if I could.”

At the corner of my eye, Evan stopped flipping through the ledger, his attention fixed upon a page. “May 1792,” he said, looking up at me.

“Anything?”

“Not many listed. But there is one unidentified female about the right age and around the right time.” He frowned and brought the ledger over to Reginald, pointing to an entry on the page. “What does that mark mean?”

Reginald leaned over. “It’s a P . It means the female was with child. She would have been dissected whole. Females are usually only dissected whole if they are…”

“Pregnant?” I supplied through my teeth. Did the Exalted Brethren kill not only a woman but a child too? Their depravity was beyond comprehension.

“Yes,” Reginald muttered. “Did you know her?”

“I don’t know,” Evan said slowly, but it was said more to me than to our jaundiced friend.

“You remember something?” I asked.

He shook his head, not in denial, but more as if he was trying to shake free a memory. “Something is there but I cannot grab hold of it.”

“At least we know now what happens to the women.” I considered the ledger entry. Another piece of evidence. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. I took hold of the page and ripped it out of the ledger.

Reginald sprang to his feet. “You cannot do that!”

“It seems I can and I have,” I said. “But if you keep quiet about it, I am sure no one will be any the wiser.”

He glared at me.

I dug into my pocket. “Here, something to help your silence.” I placed a half crown on the table. Even as I did so, another possibility presented itself. A way, perhaps, to bring some peace to the family of Miss Hollis. And a way for her to have some dignity in her death. I placed another half crown next to the one already on the table and nodded to her nearby shrouded body. “Guard that woman and hand her over to some undertakers who will come to collect her this afternoon. If you do this, both coins are yours and the undertakers will give you a guinea on top for your trouble.”

He stared at the two half crowns: it was a sizable amount for someone who had clearly accepted an unsavory position to survive. A guinea on top of that would be largesse, indeed. “I will not take stolen money,” he said stiffly, although he could not take his eyes off the coins.

“Then you are in luck. It is not stolen,” I said, rather liking his stand upon the matter. “Do we have a deal, Reginald?”

He hesitated. Rubbed his mouth. It was, after all, a lot of money. Finally, he sighed. “Tell the undertakers they must come up the back way by Little Britain into Well Yard to collect her. By six tonight.”

“I will.” I picked up his pen and drew a thick line through the half-finished entry in his ledger, obliterating the words. “She was never here. Is that clear?” Reginald nodded as I returned his pen to its rest.

Evan opened the door, the arrival of some slightly less fetid air from the corridor a welcome reprieve from the stink.

“We were not here either,” he said, every distinct word holding a warning. “You never saw us.”

Reginald picked up the coins and returned to his chair. “Of course not. It is just me and the dead here.” He pocketed the money. “Always just me and the dead.”