Читать книгу The Madman’s Daughter - Megan Shepherd, Megan Shepherd - Страница 6

We bundled into our coats and slipped into the cold night, crossing the Strand toward the university’s brick archway. This late only a few lanterns shone in the upper windows. The boys passed a bottle around with hushed laughter at being on school grounds after hours. I wrapped my arm around Lucy’s and tried to join the mirth, but the warmth didn’t spread below my smile. For the boys, this taste of mild scandal was titillating. They’d never known real scandal or how it could tear a person apart.

Adam led us to the side of the building, through a row of hedges to a small black door I’d used only once or twice. He unlocked it and held it open. Hesitation rooted my feet to the ground, but a gentle tug from Lucy led me inside. The door closed, plunging us into darkness broken only by the moonlight from one high window.

The hallway filled with the eerie silence of unused rooms. My hands itched for a rag and brush as a legitimate reason to be here. Coming on a lark to settle a silly wager, risking my job – it didn’t feel right.

Lucy squinted into the darkness, but I kept my eyes on the tile floor. I already knew what lay at the end of the hall.

‘Well?’ Adam asked. ‘Which way to the skeletons, Mademoiselle Guillotine?’

I started to head for the small door to the storage chambers, but a light at the opposite end of the corridor caught my eye. The operating theater. Odd; no one should have been there this late. Something about that light chilled my blood – it could only mean trouble.

‘We’re not alone,’ I said, nodding toward the door. The boys followed my gaze and grew quiet. Lucy slid off her glove and found my hand in the dark.

Adam started toward the operating theater, but I grabbed the fabric of his cuff to hold him back. The hallways were filled with the normal smells – chemicals and rotten things. Usually it didn’t bother me, but tonight it felt so overpower-ing that my head started to spin. A wave of weakness hit me and I grabbed his wrist harder.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

I waited a few seconds for the spell to pass. These spells were not uncommon, coming upon me suddenly, usually in the late evening, though I wasn’t about to explain their source to him. ‘The skeletons are the other way,’ I said.

‘Someone’s in the theater after hours. Whatever they’re doing, it has to be good. The skeletons can wait.’ His voice was charged. This was a game to them, I realized. If they got caught, the dean might give them a stern talking-to. I would lose my livelihood.

He cocked his head. ‘You aren’t scared, are you?’

I scowled and let go of his cuff. Of course I wasn’t scared. We made our way silently down the hall. As we approached the closed door, a sound began to gnaw at my ears. It took me back to my childhood, when I would hide outside the door to Father’s laboratory, listening, trying to imagine what was happening within before the servants chased me off.

The sound grew louder, a scrape-tap, scrape-tap. Unaccustomed to being in a laboratory, Lucy threw me a puzzled look. But I knew that sound. The scrape of scalpel on stone. A gesture surgeons made to clean the flesh from the blade between cuts.

Adam threw open the door. A half-dozen students huddled around a table in the center of the room, over which a single lamp formed an island of light. They looked up when we entered, and then after a few seconds their faces relaxed with recognition.

‘Adam, you cad, get in and close the door,’ said one of the students. He threw Lucy and me an annoyed look. ‘What are they doing here?’

‘They’ll be no trouble. Right, ladies?’ Adam raised his eyebrow, but I didn’t answer. A good part of me contemplated bolting out the door and leaving them to their sick lark. Yet I didn’t. As we drifted closer with hesitant steps, I could feel the stiffness in my bones easing, as though releasing some pent-up, slippery curiosity from between my joints.

Why were they in the operating theater after dark?

Adam peered over the surgeon’s shoulder. Their bodies blocked the table, but the metallic smell of fresh blood reached me, making my head spin. Lucy pressed a handkerchief to her mouth. Memories of my father flooded me. As a surgeon, blood had been his medium like ink to a writer. Our fortune had been built on blood, the acrid odor infused into the very bricks of our house, the clothes that we wore.

To me, blood smelled like home.

I shook away the feeling. Father left us, I reminded myself. Betrayed us. But I still couldn’t help missing him.

‘They shouldn’t be here,’ I murmured. ‘This building’s closed to students at night.’

But before Lucy could answer, the scrape of the scalpel sounded again, drawing my gaze irresistibly to the table. We stepped forward. The boys paid us little attention, except Adam, who moved aside to make room. My breath caught. On the table lay a dead rabbit, its fur white as snow and spotted with blood. Its belly had been sliced open, and several organs lay on the table. Lucy gasped and covered her eyes.

My eyes were wide. I felt vaguely sorry for the dead rabbit, but it was a far-off sort of thought, something Mother might have felt. I wasn’t naive. Dissection was a necessary part of science. It was how doctors were able to develop medicine and how surgeons saved lives. I’d only ever glimpsed dissections a handful of times – peeking through the keyhole of Father’s laboratory or cleaning up after medical students. After work, in my small room at the lodging house, I’d studied the diagrams in my father’s old copy of Longman’s Anatomical Reference, but black-and-white illustrations were a poor substitute for the real thing.

Now my eyes devoured the rabbit’s body, trying to match the fleshy bits of organ and bone to the ink diagrams I knew by heart. An urge raced through my veins to touch the striated muscle of the heart, feel the smooth length of intestine.

Lucy clutched her stomach, looking pale. I watched her curiously. I didn’t feel the need to turn away like normal ladies should. Mother had drilled into me the standards of proper young ladies, but my impulses didn’t always obey. So I had learned to hide them instead.

I looked back at the rabbit. Creeping vines of worry wound around my ankles and up my legs.

‘Something’s wrong.’

The student performing the surgery glanced up, irritated, before selecting another scalpel and returning to work.

‘Sh,’ Adam breathed in my ear. My chest tightened as my eyes darted over the rabbit. There. The rabbit’s rear foot jerked. And there. Its chest rose and fell in a quick breath. I clasped Lucy’s hand, feeling the blood rushing to the base of my skull.

My brain processed the movements disjointedly, with an odd feeling like I had seen all this before. I gasped. ‘It’s alive.’

The rabbit’s glassy eye blinked. My heart faltered. I turned to Adam, bewildered, and then back to the table, where the boys continued to operate. They ignored me, as they ignored the rabbit’s movements. Something white and hot filled my head and I gripped the edge of the table, jolting it. ‘It’s not dead!’

The surgeon turned to Adam in annoyance. ‘You’d better keep them quiet.’

‘It isn’t supposed to be alive,’ Lucy stammered, her face pale. The handkerchief slipped from her hand, falling to the floor slowly, dreamlike. ‘Why is it alive?’

‘Vivisection.’ The word came out of me like a vile thing trying to escape. ‘Dissection of living creatures.’ I took a step back, wanting nothing to do with it. Dissection was one thing. What they were doing on that table was only cruel.

‘It’s just a rabbit,’ Adam hissed. Lucy began to sway. I couldn’t tear my eyes off the operation. Had they even bothered to anesthetize it?

‘It’s against the law,’ I muttered. My pulse matched the thumps of the frightened rabbit’s still-beating heart. I looked at the placement of the organs on the table. At the equipment carefully laid out. It was all familiar to me.

Too familiar.

‘Vivisection is prohibited by the university,’ I said, louder.

‘So is having women in the operating theater,’ the surgeon said, meeting my eyes. ‘But you’re here, aren’t you?’

‘Bunch of Judys,’ a dark-haired boy said with a sneer. The others laughed, and he set down a curled paper covered with diagrams. I caught sight of the rough ink outline of a rabbit, splayed apart, incision cuts marked with dotted lines. This, too, was familiar. I snatched the paper. The boy protested but I turned my back on him. My ears roared with a warm crackling. The whole room suddenly felt distant, as though I was watching myself react. I knew this diagram. The tight handwriting. The black, dotted incision lines. From somewhere deep within, I recognized it.

Behind me, the surgeon remarked to another boy in a whisper, ‘Intestines of a flesh-toned color. Pulsing slightly, likely from an unfinished digestion. Yes – there, I see the contents moving.’

With shaking fingers I unfolded the paper’s dog-eared right corner. Initials were scrawled on the diagram: H.M. Blood rushed in my ears, drowning out the sound of the boys and the rabbit and the clicking electric light. H.M. – Henri Moreau.

My father.

Through his old diagram, these boys had resurrected my father’s ghost in the very theater where he used to teach. I was flooded with a shivering uneasiness. As a child I’d worshipped my father, and now I hated him for abandoning us. Mother had fervently denied the rumors were true, but I wondered if she just couldn’t bear to have married a monster.

Suddenly the rabbit jolted and let out a scream so unnatural that I instinctively made the sign of the cross.

‘Good lord,’ Adam said, watching with wide eyes. ‘Jones, you cad, it’s waking up!’

Jones rushed to the table, which was lined with steel blades and needles the length of my forearm. ‘I gave it the proper dose,’ he stuttered, searching through the glass vials.

The rabbit’s screams pierced my skull. I slammed my hands against the table, the paper falling to the side. ‘End this,’ I cried. ‘It’s in pain!’

Lucy sobbed. The surgeon didn’t move. Frustrated, I grabbed him by the sleeve. ‘Do something! Put it out of its misery.’

Still, none of the boys moved. As medical students, they should have been trained for any situation. But they were frozen. So I acted instead.

On the table beside me was the set of operating instruments. I wrapped my hand around the handle of the ax, normally used for separating the sternum of cadavers. I took a deep breath, focusing on the rabbit’s neck. In a movement I knew had to be fast and hard, I brought down the ax.

The rabbit’s screaming stopped.

The awful tension in my chest dripped out onto the wet floor. I stared at the ax, distantly, my brain not yet connecting it with the blood on my hands. The ax fell from my grasp, crashing to the floor. Everyone flinched.

Everyone but me.

Lucy grabbed my shoulder. ‘We’re leaving,’ she said, her voice strained. I swallowed. The diagram lay on the table, a cold reminder of my father’s hand in all this. I snatched it and whirled on the dark-haired boy.

‘Where did you get this?’ I demanded.

He only gaped.

I shook him, but the surgeon interrupted. ‘Billingsgate. The Blue Boar Inn.’ His eyes flashed to the ax on the floor. ‘There’s a doctor there.’

Lucy’s hand tightened in mine. I stared at the ax. Someone bent down to pick it up, hesitantly. Adam. Our eyes met and I saw his horror at what I’d done, and more – disgust. Lucy was wrong. He wouldn’t want to marry me. I was cold, strange, and monstrous to those boys, just like my father. No one could love a monster.

‘Come on.’ She tugged me through the hallways to the street outside. It was cold, but my numb skin barely felt it. A few people passed us, bundled up, too concerned about the weather to notice the blood on our clothes. Lucy leaned against a brick wall and pressed a hand over her chest. ‘My God, you cut its head off!’

Blood was on my hands, on the tattered lace of my sleeves, even dotting the diamond ring my mother had left me. I stared at the paper in my fist. The Blue Boar Inn. The Blue Boar Inn. I couldn’t let myself forget that name.

Lucy braced her hands on my shoulders, shaking me. ‘Juliet, say something!’

‘They shouldn’t have done that,’ I said, feeling feverish in the cold night air. The paper was damp from my sweating palms. ‘I had … I had to stop it.’

I felt her hand squeeze my shoulder tighter. ‘Of course you did. Our cook kills a brace of hares for dinner all the time. That’s all you did – killed a rabbit that was already going to die.’ But her voice was shaking. What I had done was unnatural, and we both knew it.

A cold breeze blew off the Thames, carrying the pungent smell of sweat and Lucy’s perfume. I drew a shallow breath. The rumors of so long ago crept through the streets, coming back to life. All I had were slips of memories of my father: the feel of his tweed jacket, the smell of tobacco in his hair when he kissed me good night. I couldn’t bring myself to believe my father was the madman they said he was. But I’d been so young when it happened, just ten years old. As I matured, more memories surfaced. Deeper ones, of a cold, sterile room and sounds in the night – recollections that never entirely disappeared, no matter how far I pushed them into the recesses of my mind.

I didn’t tell Lucy about the diagram with his initials in the corner. I didn’t tell her that he used to keep it neatly in a book in his laboratory, a place I glimpsed only when the servants were cleaning. I didn’t tell her that, after all these years trying to accept that he must be dead, a part of me suspected otherwise.

That maybe my father was alive.