The Dress Lodger (4 page)

“For what it’s costing my father,” sniffs Grose. “the Quarantine had better do the trick.”

Have they learned anything? he wonders. They speak of holding back illness as if it were as simple as fencing out a curious pig. Did they give more than a passing glance to the shy girl who came in to retrieve her father tonight? Mark her too bright eyes, notice the dainty drops of blood blooming on the handkerchief she touched to her mouth? Over by the door, did they observe the once-handsome face craterous with smallpox, or his companion, the swine-eyed old man whose nose has been eaten down to a snout by syphilis? Disease is drinking in the bar with us. For all we know, Cholera Morbus is even now thumping the bar for a gin. I am wasting my time on these boys, Henry thinks. He looks down at his hands, wrapped in clean white bandages, the only thing about him that has remained clean. I nearly gave my hands in service to you, ungrateful boys. I am teaching you all the time and yet you have no eyes with which to see.

“Here’s something,” Bietler offers, flipping back a page so that Henry knows he’s read the passage already but deliberately saved it. “Warburton has reintroduced the Anatomy Act. Soon we’ll have all the bodies we need, and we won’t have to wait for you to procure us one. Isn’t that fortunate, Dr. Chiver?”

Poor Mazby looks woefully at his teacher. Oh, now I see, thinks Henry, looking from one young man to the next. They drew straws before they met me .here, and Bietler won the privilege of reminding me that eight months into their training, I have once more failed to produce the bodies I promised for dissection.

“Soon we will have our pick of the workhouse dead, won’t we, sir?” asks Grose, seconding Bietler. “We won’t need to wait until the moon is new or the ground is soft, or whatever it is you are waiting for.”

“It must be better for us to get our bodies legally from the workhouse than worry someone has murdered to sell to us,” says Mazby softly, not looking at his teacher.

No, we must be able to trust our suppliers of corpses, and what better pander, thinks Henry, than the British government? It will provide the bodies of the poor in heaps so that we may learn from them how to save the rich. God, it used to be so easy. A professional resurrectionist would appear at Sir Astley’s or Dr. Knox’s back door, negotiate a price, and without further ado, the students would have a body upon which to learn the art of kidney stone removal, of suturing, of speedy amputation, so that they might save lives. No one liked it, but the system had been in place for well over a hundred years. Then along came Burke and Hare and nothing would ever be the same again.

“You told us Human Anatomy began in the winter. We are two months into it already,” says Coombs. “What is it you are waiting for?”

What am I waiting for? Henry swirls his glass of flat mahogany beer and watches the sediment sink like grave dust. God damn Burke and Hare. He is waiting for absolution.

Outside, the rain has picked up. The patrons of the Labour in Vain can hear it against the windows, and each new man who comes in is handed John Robinson’s towel with which to dry his hair. The bar has a little rush when the theatres let out. One or two had taken in the new play Cholera Morbus and declared it a right frightening little melodrama. By far the favorite, though, was Signior Capelli’s menagery, and all the men who saw it moan into their beers over their talentless cats back home, who if they only showed the least bit of initiative could make their fortunes.

Into this crowd slips a little bit of blue. John Robinson automatically hands over the towel, and then he sees who it is. His wide, flat face lights up.

“Gustine, my girl, what can I get you on this raw evening?” asks he.

“Not a drop,” says she, frowning. “I’m working.”

John Robinson reaches for his least dirty glass and pours into it a splash of gin.

“Just to take the chill off,” he says, holding it out to her.

“No point in an expensive dress if I have liquor on my breath.” Gustine waves it away, and scans the crowd. She sees a hundred brown heads and a hundred beefy red faces. Could he not have come tonight?

“Little hope anyone here could afford that dress,” laughs John Robinson, following her eyes around the crowded bar. “Except maybe the good doctor …”

“Is he here?” asks Gustine.

The proprietor of Labour in Vain smiles fondly at the overdressed girl. Everyone thinks it’s sweet that Gustine has a crush on Henry Chiver, and who knows—though he doesn’t strike John Robinson as the type, maybe he’ll keep her. With Clanny’s money, he could certainly afford a cheap little flat somewhere, she could quit the pottery, move out of Mill Street. That is, if Whilky would ever let her go. He nods toward the far corner.

“Back there,” he says, but Gustine has already spotted him and is pushing her way through the crowd. She is all business, this Gustine.

“It’s a shame to waste such fine gin,” John Robinson says to the counter, giving it a wipe with the hair-drying towel. “Madame Eyeball, won’t you taste it?”

The old woman who followed in the slip of blue rolls her all-seeing eye toward the counter and spots a cloudy bit of juice. She smacks her lips and downs it in a gulp.

Before she can find him, Henry spots the dress making its way through the crowd. It is unmistakable against the earthen browns and rust blacks, a dress fit only for the fanciest ball or for the stage. He has not seen that dress for a month, was beginning to think the girl who had worn it was nothing more than a diseased dream, a blue and white laudanum hallucination. God help him, he wishes she were.

Mazby spots her first and stands up respectfully.

“Is this the gentle Miss Audrey Place we’ve heard so much about?” he asks gallantly.

The other boys quickly fold their newspapers and rise. Everyone stands but Henry, whose face is crimson.

“No,” he says tightly. “This is not Miss Place.”

Mazby hurriedly sits back down, blushing brighter than his instructor. Of course this is not Henry’s fiancee. Why would she come to a place like this? On a wet night like this? Oh why doesn’t he think before he speaks? Why? Why?

“Sir,” says she, barely glancing at the students, “step out with me?”

Henry rises as if he had been waiting to do so all night long. Wordlessly, he follows her to the front door of the bar. The back of her expensive dress is wet and streaked with mud.

The rain is falling in great torrents now and sheet lightning, far out to sea, leaches the eastern half of the black sky indigo. They stand on the single step elevated from the flooded lane, sheltered under John Robinson’ s shovel and skull. Now that he looks at her sober, Henry realizes Gustine has much in common with her name. Except for a slight gutturalness in the first letter, her name would be almost musical, and if not for the unfortunate gutterishness that began her, she, the girl, might have grown up to be very pretty. The name suits her so well, he wonders if she made it up. Standing so close, he can smell butterscotch candy on her breath, mixed with the sickly scent of rotting teeth.

“I found one,” she says. “Dead under the bridge.”

“Gustine,” Henry starts. “Forget everything I said.”

“Snub Irish nose. Bloody bully and a drunk, I’d say.”

“I’ve decided to teach from plates. I will make models. I can’t do this.”

“You told me to look for you.”

“I know. I can’t.”

“I’ve been looking. For weeks. Keeping my ears open like you said. Asking after the sick. I’ve been working for you.”

Why does his temperature drop ten degrees when she stands near him? Why does he feel infected by her, fluish, why do his teeth chatter? It used to be when he was in love he felt this way. Then, when he stood before the uncharted universe of his first opened body. Inept, hopeful, terrified. Like he felt a month ago, in the Labour in Vain, when drunk and floating on laudanum he poured out his soul to this girl; confessed his needs, his fear, his failure at the Trinity graveyard. They must have bodies, he told her. My teachers—Sir Asdey, Knox—they provided bodies. I am afraid. Did he say it out loud? I am afraid.

“Who is Miss Place?” she asks.

“Gustine, go home,” he says, a little sickened to hear his fiancee’s name in her mouth. He knows he shouldn’t be angry at her. She is only doing what he, in a moment of insane weakness, asked her to do. But he is embarrassed by her. She has no idea what it is she’s doing.

“Dr. Oliver.”

He hears her calling his name, but walks back inside. Did anyone overhear what they were saying? He looks around suspiciously, but the only person he sees regarding him is a hideous one-eyed woman standing by the bar. Someone did a bad job sewing that up, he thinks. Back at his table, four oblivious boys slouch in their chairs, their long legs imperiously stretched out before them. Four boys from among the best families in Sunderland, friends of his uncle Clanny’s, paying students. Here in this out-of-the-way town where he was to forget everything that happened in Edinburgh, where he was to begin again. With his own school. Under his own control. But he has taught them everything he can from charts. He has exhausted the illustrations from Albinus and Bichat. And he has seen firsthand the dangers of allowing a surgeon to operate when all he knows of the human body is the space it takes up in a book. Back in London his teacher’s nephew, Bransby Cooper, was admitted into the Royal College of Surgeons with no better qualification than a kinship to Sir Astley. Henry witnessed him perform what should have been a routine bladder stone removal on a middle-aged man, the father of six children—a procedure any trained surgeon could perform in under eight minutes. Bransby took an hour, digging with his knife, then his clamp, finally groping with his fingers like a grocer fishing for olives. The patient, fully awake the entire time, bound, and screaming in agony, was so exhausted he died twenty-four hours later. Six children. Could he live with himself if he graduated four more Bransby Coopers?

Behind him, Gustine waits. She has someone for him. A drunk and a bully. Dead under a dark bridge. Who is to know? Burke is dead. Hare gave King’s evidence and was transported. It is not the same, he tells himself. We have murdered no one.

“Dr. Chiver.” Gustine comes up behind him. “I lost money coming to find you. My landlord is going to be mad.”

And Gustine’s landlord is going to be mad if he doesn’t give her some money. There is no way around it. His students are slouching, again pretending to read their papers, but about to mutiny. Our teacher is afraid, he knows they are thinking. He is afraid to get us a body.

“Did you hear me?” she asks.

Henry strides to the table in the back and Coombs, who had taken his seat, jumps up. Henry knows they are wondering about the woman in the fancy blue dress. He can see the unasked question hovering on Coombs’s lips like a smirk. He won’t give him a chance to ask it.

“Be at my house in two hours,” he says. “Sleep, eat, do whatever you need to do. Tonight, we will have a lesson.”

It is midnight, and the Labour in Vain is closing up. John Robinson wipes the sticky beer from the tables with his fusty rag, sweeping the rain-soaked sawdust onto the street to clog up the gutters. He has blown out all the lamps but one to save on oil, leaving the public house shadowy and cold, robbed of the evening’s fire and body heat. As he sweeps, he reunites the chairs with their tables, turning them over and setting them on top to discourage the rats from climbing up.

One by one, he wipes and sets the chairs. Here sat that shy consumptive young girl who came to drag her father home, waiting for Da to drink himself into a semblance of sobriety, or at least to get through hilarious and on to maudlin. She smiled at his jokes patiently, then with her soft gentle voice got him to crying with how he was breaking Ma’s heart, and from there it was easy enough to help him from this chair—which John Robinson now turns over—and out the door for home.

Sweep, sweep. John Robinson moves on to the next table and collects the sugar-crusted gin glasses left by the factory girls. By the end of the evening each girl had a silk kerchief for her neck given to her by a keelman who had fallen madly in love. He’s seen it a hundred times before. Each will wear her man’s cloth like a lady wears an engagement ring, giving out the favors a hardworking fiance has the right to expect. They will be madly in love until next Saturday night, when there is a row, and the next Saturday night, when perhaps there is a bruise, and then, John Robinson suspects, the smart factory girl will give her neck kerchief back, the stupid one will wear hers to the altar.

The proprietor of the Labour in Vain puts their glasses to soak in cold soapy water and moves on to the larger table in the back. Oliver’s four students left their newspapers behind on the table; John Robinson collects them to read and to line the windows upstairs. They seemed more nervous than usual tonight, he thinks, sweeping up the hulls from the sunflower seeds Bietler obsessively fished out of his jacket pocket and ate. Usually, they swagger in with their teacher, act bluff and all hail-fellow-well-met like they belong in such a bar and not off sipping sherry at the Bridge Inn. When they think he’s not looking, they wipe the rims of their pint glasses with their shirtsleeves. Usually, they last an hour, maybe two. Tonight though, he couldn’t get them to leave. They switched from beer to rye and knocked back a bottle between them, looking grimmer and grimmer with each round.

Their four chairs he wipes and turns over.

Tired John Robinson leans against his broom and surveys his bar. Before he goes upstairs to bed, he must water the gin and correct the wine. He buys as cheaply as he can from a French sailor, mostly vinegared old casks, sweetened with a little packet of grayish-red oxidized lead got off the chemist. He knows he stands a chance of poisoning half his clientele, but most drink beer, so he doesn’t sweat it.

Saturday seems to be his only solid night since the Quarantine. There was a time, before this cholera business, when any night of the week his

bar was packed to overflowing, when sailors who didn’t frequent the Life Boat or the Golden Anchor would walk the few blocks up to the Labour in Vain for a pint or six. Then the tap would flow, then the blood would fly! Most nights he’d have to toss out twenty brawny men instead of four sotted students. Ach, that it’s come to this. A few keelmen, four nervous rich kids, lost without their teacher, and him off to get a little piece of Gustine. The proprietor shakes his head. He wonders if Whilky would look kindly on his dress lodger spending so much time downstairs in his brother’s bar. She’s dressed for the Bridge Inn and the Majestic Theatre; she’s dressed to have a vestryman invite her up to his best friend’s dark flat—oh, no, he’s off on business just now, but he left the key under this mat. It’s dangerous for a working girl to keep too much company with one man. And she is smitten. John Robinson saw that the night they sat here in the corner.