Читать книгу The Burying Ground - Janet Kellough - Страница 5

The skeleton in Dr. Christie’s office was giving Luke Lewis a bad case of the collywobbles. The problem wasn’t so much that the bones represented all that remained of a human being. He had seen plenty of dead human beings in 1847 when he’d helped bury typhus victims in Kingston. He’d also dissected two bloated and foul-smelling cadavers during his medical training at McGill University. The act of plunging a scalpel into a gelatinous, putrefying body hadn’t sickened him at all. He had been too eager to see what lay underneath the flesh, to discover firsthand the hidden organs and systems that coursed beneath the flesh of a person. He knew that as far as Dr. Christie’s skeleton was concerned, his agitation didn’t stem from squeamishness.

It was more, he thought, the way the bones were wired together. The skeleton hung on a stand in an upright position with one hand resting rakishly on a jutting hip. The other arm was outstretched, the index finger pointing in admonition from an otherwise clenched fist. This accusatory finger seemed to follow him wherever he moved, whether he was seated at the oak desk in the middle of the room or standing at the cabinet that served as a dispensary. Combined with the slightly opened jaw, wired to give a good view of the teeth, the overall effect was a bony caricature of mocking, sneering contempt. But it was the finger, Luke decided, that bothered him the most.

He had read of pictures that were so well-painted that they unsettled observers in the same manner — ancestral portraits hung in dining rooms or depictions of public figures in civic halls that drove people mad by the way the painted eyes followed them around the room. Likenesses of ancient forebears come to life to cast disapproving glares at the antics of their descendants. Murdered wives seeking revenge. Bygone martinets outraged that history had passed them by. But that was the stuff of novels, allegory, he supposed, for the wrath of God. And he had certainly never heard of a skeleton that could have the same effect.

Dr. Christie was quite proud of the bones that graced his office.

“Boiled him down myself,” he told Luke during the initial tour of the premises. “Back in ’11 in Edinburgh. Made a devil of a smell.”

“Where did you get the body?” Luke asked.

“From the university,” the doctor replied. “They were finished with him. He’d been sliced and diced by seven or eight of us and there wasn’t a lot left for anyone else to see, so I took him. They were glad enough to be rid of him. Saved the disposal fee.”

“Were cadavers hard to come by in Edinburgh?” An adequate supply of bodies for the purposes of dissection was a chronic problem for the medical school at McGill. Sometimes a whole crowd of students would be assigned to the same corpse, making it difficult to see the component parts as they were coaxed into the open, and one careless slice on the part of one of them could spoil the exercise for everyone else. Some of the students had taken matters into their own hands, extricating newly buried bodies from nearby churches and fattening their purses by selling the corpses to unscrupulous lecturers.

Christie shrugged. “There are never enough. Most of ours were criminals, hanged for their sins. This fellow probably came straight from the gibbet. I don’t really know what his crime was, but I’ve named him Mul-Sack, after the famous highwayman.”

Luke had never heard of Mul-Sack, although he knew what a highwayman was. Travel was dangerous anywhere, road agents and pickpockets could lie in wait for the unwary even in Upper Canada.

He had given the skeleton no more thought at the time. It was only later that his disquiet surfaced. Christie introduced him to the housekeeper, Mrs. Dunphy, and then he’d been shown the parlour and the dining room and the two small rooms on the second floor that had been set aside for Luke’s use. He had been given a small bedroom and an adjoining sitting room at the front of the house, “so that there’s room,” Christie said, “for your father when he visits.”

After the tour he was left to cool his heels in the office while Dr. Christie went off to do heaven only knew what in the nether regions of the house. Whatever it was, it seemed to entail a great deal of shouting at Mrs. Dunphy, and a rather obnoxious smell that seeped under the door by the dispensary.

Luke’s eye would catch the bony, pointing finger no matter where he stood in the room. He’d told himself that he would get used to the skeleton after a time. Familiarity would dull the effect. But the next day his unease grew worse.

He wondered if his nerves were getting the better of him again, as they had in Montreal when he’d first arrived there. He’d had difficulty getting settled at first. Lodging was scarce. The cheapest accommodation in the city was in the St. Anne’s suburb, but all the rooms there seemed to be taken by the Irish emigrants who had made it no farther than Montreal in their desperate flight from famine. After two days of searching, Luke finally found a tiny, unheated attic room at the southeast end of the Récollets Faubourg. The landlady was willing to rent it to him, she said, only because he wasn’t an Irishman. The accommodation seemed fine in October when he first arrived, but as the weather turned colder its shortcomings became far too apparent. The roof leaked and the wind rattled the glass in the window as it blew through the gap between the sill and the sash.

He resolved to spend every evening studying the notes he had taken each day, but when he returned to his cheerless closet of a room after a full slate of lectures, he found that he was exhausted. He seemed unable to do anything but throw himself on the narrow cot that had been provided and fall into a disturbed sleep tormented by loneliness, bedbugs, and fear of failure. He began to have difficulty concentrating on what his professors were saying, and he knew he was falling behind in his studies.

The amount of information he was expected to process was overwhelming, his ignorance laid bare by off-hand references to classical works he had never heard of and by the assumption that he already had a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek. Materia Medica and Therapeutics proved particularly troublesome, the potions and elixirs referenced by exotic-sounding names, when all too often he would subsequently discover that the lecturer was talking about some common garden-variety ingredient.

Hardest of all had been the attitude of his fellow students. Many of them appeared to know each other already and shared notes and knowledge. Luke knew no one. There were a few others in the class who appeared to be as much an outsider as he was, but although they were civil enough when he spoke to them they seemed little inclined to establish a relationship that went any further than a nod of acknowledgement when he met them in the halls.

To add to his worries, he realized that his money was disappearing far faster than he had anticipated. He had to get through two years of lectures and two years of walking the wards of Montreal General Hospital before he could be licensed. He needed to find an odd job for evenings and weekends and full employment when classes ended for the year, but every menial position in the city appeared to be firmly held down by the desperate Irish.

Only after he’d found a better place to live and a job of sorts, had he settled down and started to enjoy his studies. He was sure that it was this same reaction to the unfamiliar that was affecting him here in Yorkville. It was the novelty of his new circumstances that made him over-imaginative. After all, he had only just joined the practice. He had no routine yet, and was still taking the measure of Dr. Christie. Besides, he could scarcely ask that the offending object be removed. The older man would think him strange indeed, and Luke couldn’t afford to do anything that would jeopardize this welcome partnership with an established physician.

Having completed his medical studies, Luke could have gone anywhere that was without a doctor and simply hung out his shingle. In fact, his original intention was to return to the Huron Tract, where his brothers both had farms and where doctors were scarce. Later on he had imagined that he would stay in Montreal. Then everything had changed, and he realized that upon graduation he would have no money for necessary instruments, nor a stake that would see him through the first lean months of a fledgling practice.

And then, an aging doctor who lived at the northern edges of Toronto wrote to the medical department at McGill asking for help in finding an assistant. He had himself, Stewart Christie said, trained at the University of Edinburgh, but “failing to entice anyone from that august institution to the wilds of colonial Canada,” he was willing to settle for a recent graduate from McGill who had been thoroughly schooled in the Scottish method, provided he was able to engage one who was “fit and able to shoulder the more onerous duties attendant on the practice.” The doctor was offering a small salary, a fully-equipped office, and free living quarters on the second floor of his house.

One of the surgeons, Professor Brown, had duly brought the letter to the attention of the graduating class, to a less than enthusiastic response. Luke’s fellow students had never heard of Yorkville and scorned the prospect of a village practice.

“Middle of nowhere,” one of them scoffed as they trailed down the ward in the surgeon’s wake.

“Farmers and ploughboys,” said another. “Not very interesting.”

But what they really meant, Luke knew, was “not lucrative.” Many of Luke’s classmates had family money that would help them get started or family connections that would guarantee them a place with a prosperous city practice. Their futures had been assured almost as soon as they had been accepted at medical school.

After rounds finished, Luke approached Professor Brown and indicated that he might be interested in applying for the position. And then he promptly wrote to his father seeking his opinion on the matter.

“Able to shoulder the more onerous duties?” Thaddeus had written back. “In other words, you’d be a drudge. On the other hand, I can think of no more expeditious way for you to enter the profession you have chosen. You might be wise to consider this.”

His father was also familiar with the village called Yorkville, as Luke had known he would be.

“Although it’s true that it’s a small place right now, it can’t be any more than two or three miles to Toronto,” Thaddeus wrote. “In a few years, it’s entirely likely that the city’s limits will have stretched to encompass the entire area. By the time your elderly doctor is ready to hand over the reins, you could well find yourself with a city practice after all.”

Armed with this knowledge, Luke wrote to offer his services.

When he arrived in Yorkville, he found a sleepy little village on Yonge Street, which — according to Christie, who seemed to have an extensive knowledge of the history and events of the area — had sprung up around a tollgate and a tavern, The Red Lion Inn. This public house was famous as a rallying point for the rebels of 1837.

“Brigands, all of them,” the doctor said. “Should have been sent straight off to the hangman.”

A small stream to the northeast had attracted the attention of Joseph Bloor, who built a brewery beside it in the early ’30s, and then of John Severn, who did the same. The two breweries, along with the brickworks that produced a distinctive yellow product from local clay, were, Christie said, the major industries of the village.

“You won’t see many grand estates here. It’s mostly small houses and cottages for the local workers, more’s the pity. I could do with a few clients who don’t have to be hounded for payment.”

To Luke, it seemed like a very self-sufficient little community, but he could see signs that his father might well be correct about Yorkville’s future. Just south of the village, the area between the Tollgate Road and Queen Street was designated by Toronto as part of its liberties — not really city, not really county — but a legislative distinction that cleared the legalities for future annexation. City factories, once too far away for the workers of Yorkville to reach every day on foot, were now serviced by omnibuses. And the Strangers’ Burying Ground, a cemetery on the corner of Yonge Street and the concession line, once considered on the verge of wilderness, now formed a barrier to the ever-expanding sprawl of houses in the village. Yorkville would probably always be a small town, Luke figured, but by the time Dr. Christie finally packed it in, its fresher air and slower pace might well have attracted a more well-heeled population.

In the meantime, as junior partner, Luke was relegated to the tasks that entailed the most work. This arrangement meant that he handled the cases that required walking any great distance. Dr. Christie’s definition of “any great distance” was narrow in the extreme, as the older man was disinclined to indulge in any sort of effort and much preferred that his patients come to him. Few patients ever did this. As a rule they attended to their gumboils and bunions themselves, and when a more serious ailment presented itself, they expected a physician to treat them in their own homes. This meant that Luke would be handling virtually all of the calls. That was fine, as far as he was concerned — every time he was called out it meant that he could leave the office and the sneering skeleton behind.

When a small boy pounded on the door the day after his arrival, Luke eagerly grabbed the scuffed leather satchel that contained his potions and instruments and followed the child down Yonge Street and into a side alley that led through a cluster of modest cottages.

“Hurry,” the boy said, “Pa’s bleeding something fierce.”

Luke’s patient was still in his back dooryard where he had been splitting firewood. The axe had sliced through the man’s boot and embedded itself in the big toe of his left foot. The man had not attempted to remove either the axe or the boot, instead slumping to the ground to await the doctor’s arrival. He was not suffering in silence, however, and his yells and moans had drawn a crowd of his neighbours, who hung over the garden fence to watch the drama.

“You’ll be all right now, Holden,” one of them said when he saw Luke. “The doctor’s here.”

“He’ll probably have to remove the leg, you know,” another offered, resulting in a further, and louder, round of moaning from the injured man.

“Shush!” a woman said to the man who had spoken. “You’re scaring him!”

“That was what I was hoping to do.”

“Well, stop!”

Luke ignored them all and lowered himself to one knee in order to assess the injury. Sometimes these wounds could be nasty, the laceration rarely clean, the edges of the wound ragged and shredded, depending on the sharpness of the axe.

After a moment, he turned to the boy. “Can you find me some clean rags?” he asked. “Freshly washed ones, that haven’t been used for anything else?”

The boy nodded and disappeared into the house.

Luke untied the boot, removing the laces entirely in preparation for taking it off. There was a great deal of blood spilling out from the slash in the toe. He would have to move quickly once he’d withdrawn the axe.

The boy returned, wordlessly holding out a wad of rags. They looked reasonably unstained. They will have to do, Luke thought. I can only hope they’re truly clean.

He looked around at the gaggle of onlookers at the fence.

“Could you give me a hand?” he asked. “You,” he said pointing at the man who was hoping for an amputation. The woman who had shushed him pushed him toward the garden gate. The man approached Luke reluctantly.

“I need you to pull the axe out while I take his boot off.”

The man paled, his jokes forgotten, but he reached for the wooden handle.

“Not until I tell you, mind. And pull it straight up and out.”

Luke grasped the edges of the boot, then said “Now.”

As soon as the axe head was freed, he slid the boot off in one smooth motion, then grabbed the bundle of rags and jammed a wad of them into the wound as blood spurted out. His patient screamed.

It had only taken a few seconds to accomplish, but it had been long enough for Luke to see that the toe was almost entirely severed, attached to the foot by only a small piece of bone and a flap of skin. He would have to remove it.

He would have preferred to get the man inside and away from the prying eyes of the onlookers, but that would take too long — the sooner the severed digit was out the way, the sooner Luke could stop the bleeding.

He looked up at the man who was still standing with the axe in his hands.

“The toe’s gone,” he said. “It’s hanging by a shred. I need to finish the job, but I’ll need you to hold while I cut. Do you think you can manage that?”

“What? Oh, my toe, my toe,” the injured man wailed.

Luke ignored him.

The standing man gulped. “All right, I guess.”

“Put the axe down and kneel down, on the other side of the foot.”

The man complied.

“Now, when I take the rags away, you need to grab the toe by the end and pull it taut so I can see where I have to cut.”

“Nooooooo!” screamed the injured man.

“I haven’t actually done anything yet,” Luke pointed out to him. “Save your screams for when I do.” And then he looked at the other man. “Now.”

He held his scalpel ready with one hand and pulled the cloth away with the other. His unwilling helper gingerly grabbed the toe and lifted it away from the foot. Luke sliced. The toe detached and both his patient and his helper fainted, the latter still holding the severed digit like a purple, blood-spattered trophy.

The bleeding was easing off a bit, Luke could see, the wound starting to clot on its own. There was enough skin left, he judged, that he could suture it closed around the jutting piece of bone. He fished a needle and a length of catgut out of his bag and began coaxing the skin up around the wound, sewing it in place wherever he could find undamaged flesh.

He was halfway through the task when the man holding the toe came to again. He took one look at the grisly relic in his hand and promptly fainted again.

When he was satisfied with his handiwork, Luke enlisted the aid of a beefy neighbour, and together they carried the patient into his kitchen, where they laid him on the small bed in the corner. Luke sluiced himself off at the kitchen pump.

When he emerged into the dooryard again, the swooning assistant was gone. He had left the toe where it fell, in the middle of the yard. Luke retrieved it, wrapped it in an unused rag, and handed it to the boy.

“Bury this under a bush somewhere,” he said. “That way your Pa’s foot won’t itch so badly. I’ll check on him tomorrow.”

Satisfied with his morning’s work, he tipped his hat and left by the garden gate, suddenly feeling quite optimistic about his decision to come to Yorkville. The village was still small enough that word of his backyard surgery would spread, especially since no account of the operation would fail to include a grisly description of the toe, or the information that a grown man had fainted at the sight of it. The next time a mishap occurred, few would insist on waiting for “the old doctor” instead of accepting Luke’s attendance. The fees he brought in to the practice wouldn’t be exactly lucrative, as his old schoolmates so seemed to desire, but they would be steady and help to solidify his position as the junior partner. In spite of Dr. Christie’s unsettling office skeleton, Luke was starting to feel quite cheerful about his future prospects.

He was lost in these pleasant thoughts as he made his way back to the Christie house, so it took him a moment to realize that a voice from somewhere behind him was calling his name.

“Mr. Lewis?” the voice said again. “Is that you?”

Luke turned to discover that he had been hailed by a scrawny little man whom he was quite sure he had never seen before.

“Yes, I’m Mr. Lewis. Well … Doctor Lewis, actually.” It still seemed odd to use the title. “Could I help you?”

But the little man had a puzzled expression on his face. “I’m sorry, I’ve mistaken you for someone else. I was sure you were someone I once knew, but now that I’m closer I can see that you couldn’t possibly be him.” His brow wrinkled. “And yet you say your name is Lewis?”

“Yes. Luke Lewis. And you are…?”

“Morgan Spicer. Pleased to meet you.” Then the worry lines on his brow cleared away. “Luke Lewis? You’re Thaddeus’s son then.”

Luke sincerely hoped that his father’s reputation as a solver of crimes had not reached Yorkville. He had been forced to recount the stories of Thaddeus’s adventures far too many times. It had all happened a long time ago, though, and with any luck the memory of them had faded. His own adventure with his father, on the other hand, was known to only a handful of people. There had been none of the public acclaim that had attended the other two crimes. And then, from somewhere deep down in his mind, something stirred in his memory. Morgan Spicer. Where did he know that name from?

“I met you once,” Morgan said. “A long time ago. In Demorestville. You were about to travel west with your brother.”

And then it came to him. Spicer was a sorry little stray who had tagged along with Thaddeus on the Hallowell Circuit, in Prince Edward County. He had wanted to be a preacher, Luke recalled, but Thaddeus determined that he needed to learn how to read and write first, and offered to teach him as they rode. It was a propitious decision on his father’s part — Spicer had been instrumental in the apprehension of the murderer Isaac Simms.

“Mr. Spicer. Of course.” Luke held his hand out for Morgan to shake. “I do recall our meeting.”

“I’m sorry about the mistaken identity, but you must realize how much you look like your father.”

“Not so much these days, I’m afraid. My father has aged since my mother died.”

Spicer’s face fell. “She’s dead? Oh dear. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry. She was a nice lady.”

“She was. We all miss her sorely. But what about you? Are you a minister here?”

“No. I’m not a minister. My application was never approved.” It was obviously a sore subject, Luke realized, for Spicer quickly went on. “So where is your father now?”

“Here as well. More or less. He’s gone back to the preaching business, at least on a temporary basis.”

Spicer seemed excited by this intelligence. “Here? On Yonge Street? I would like very much to see him, and not only to renew our acquaintance. I have a difficulty I would appreciate his advice on.”

“I’ll tell him I met you,” Luke said. “He will have completed his circuit in a few days, I expect and then he’ll come back here. Could I give him any indication of the nature of your difficulty?”

He had no idea if his father would be happy to see Morgan Spicer or not, especially if the man required advice. Although, he supposed, that was what a preacher was for, really.

“It’s to do with the Strangers’ Burying Ground,” Spicer said. “There has been a very odd occurrence there, and I can make no sense of it. I’d like to ask Mr. Lewis what he thinks. Tell him he can find me at the Keeper’s Lodge by the front gates.”

Luke’s first thought was that Spicer must be referring to ghosts or hauntings or some other nonsense that people associate with graveyards. He knew that his father would be quick to dismiss anything of this nature as a trick of the imagination, but then Spicer peered up at him anxiously. “Tell him it’s important. Tell him it’s a puzzle.”

No request would bring his father running faster, Luke figured, whether he was personally interested in seeing Spicer again or not. Thaddeus loved a puzzle.

“I’ll tell him,” Luke said, and then he tipped his hat and went on his way, wondering if anything that happened in a graveyard could possibly be any stranger than a skeleton whose finger followed you around the room.