The Anatomist's Apprentice

Book 1: Dr. Thomas Silkstone Mystery

by Tessa Harris

Genres: Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

In the first in a stunning mystery series set in eighteenth-century England, Tessa Harris introduces Dr. Thomas Silkstone, anatomist and pioneering forensic detective.

The death of Lord Edward Crick has unleashed a torrent of gossip through the seedy taverns and elegant ballrooms of Oxfordshire. Few mourn the dissolute young man—except his sister, the beautiful Lady Lydia Farrell. When her husband comes under suspicion of murder, she seeks expert help from Dr. Thomas Silkstone, a young anatomist from Philadelphia.

Thomas arrived in England to study under its foremost surgeon, where his unconventional methods only add to his outsider status. Against his better judgment, he agrees to examine Lord Edward’s corpse. But it is not only the dead, but also the living, to whom he must apply the keen blade of his intellect. And the deeper the doctor’s investigations go, the greater the risk that he will be consigned to the ranks of the corpses he studies.

Release date: October 24, 2011

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 321

Sample

A stifled scream came first, shattering the oppressive silence. It was followed by the sound of a heavy footfall. Lady Lydia Farrell rushed out into the corridor. A trail of muddy footprints led to her brother’s bedchamber.

“Edward,” she called.

A heartbeat later she was knocking at his door, a rising sense of panic taking hold. No reply. Without waiting she rushed in to find Hannah Lovelock, the maidservant, paralyzed by terror.

Over in the corner of the large room, darkened by shadows, the young master was shaking violently, his head tossing from side to side. Moving closer Lydia could see her brother’s hair was disheveled and his shirt half open, but it was the color of his skin as his face turned toward the light from the window that shocked her most. Creamy yellow, like onyx, it was as if he wore a mask. She gasped at the sight.

“What is it, Edward? Are you unwell?” she cried, hurrying toward him. He did not answer but fixed her with a stare, as if she were a stranger; then he began to retch, his shoulders heaving with violent convulsions.

In a panic she ran over to the jug on his table and poured him water, but his hand flew out at her, knocking the glass away and it smashed into pieces on the floor. It was then she noticed his eyes. They were straining from their sockets, bulging wildly as if trying to escape, while the skin around his mouth was turning blue as he clutched his throat and clenched his teeth, like some rabid dog. Suddenly, and most terrifying of all, blood started to spew from his mouth and flecked his lips.

Hannah screamed again, this time almost hysterically, as her master lunged forward, his spindly arms trying to grab the window drapes before he fell to the ground, convulsing as if shaken by the very devil himself.

As he lay writhing on the floor, gurgling through crimson-tinged bile, Lydia ran to him, bending over his scrawny body as it juddered uncontrollably, but his left leg lashed out and kicked her hard. She yelped in pain and steadied herself against the bed, but she knew that she alone could be of no comfort, so she fled from the room, shrieking frantically for the servants.

“Fetch the physician. For God’s sake, call Dr. Fairweather!” she screamed, her voice barely audible over the howls that rose ever louder from the bedchamber.

Downstairs there was pandemonium. The unearthly cries, punctuated by the mistress’s staccato pleas, could now be heard in the hallway of Boughton Hall. The footman and the butler emerged and began to climb the stairs, while Captain Michael Farrell put his head around the doorway of his study to see his wife, ashen-faced, on the half landing.

“What is it, in God’s name?” he cried.

There were screams now from another housemaid as more servants gathered in the hallway, listening with mounting horror to the banshee wails coming from the young master’s bedchamber. The house dogs began to bark, too, and their sounds joined together with Lydia’s cries for help in a cacophony of terror that soon seemed to reach a crescendo. All was chaos and fear for a few seconds more and then, just as suddenly as it had left, silence descended on Boughton Hall once more.

Dr. Fairweather arrived too late. He found the young man lying sprawled across the bed, his clothes stained with slashes of blood. His face was contorted into a grotesque grimace, with eyes wide open, as if witnessing some scene of indescribable torment, and his swollen tongue was half protruding from purple lips.

The next few minutes were spent prodding and probing, but at the end of the examination the physician’s conclusion was decidedly inconclusive.

“He has a yellowish tinge,” he noted.

“But what could have done this?” pleaded Lydia, her face tear-stained and drawn.

Dr. Fairweather shook his head. “Lord Crick suffered many ailments. Any one, or several, could have resulted in his demise,” he volunteered rather unhelpfully.

Mr. Peabody, the apothecary, came next. He swore that he had added no more and no less to his lordship’s purgative than was usual. “His death is as much of a mystery to me as it is to Dr. Fairweather,” he concluded.

News of the untimely demise of the Right Honorable The Earl Crick was quick to seep out from Boughton Hall and spread across to nearby villages and into the Oxfordshire countryside beyond within hours. Without a surgeon to apply a tourniquet to stem the flow, it gushed like blood from a severed artery. And of course the tale became even more shocking in the telling in the inns and alehouses.

“ ’Twas his eyes.”

“I ’eard they turned red.”

“I ’eard his flesh went green.”

“ ’E were shrieking like a thing possessed.”

“Maybe ’e were.”

“Mayhap ’e saw the devil ’imself.”

“Claiming his own, no doubt.”

There was a brief pause as the drinkers pondered the salience of this last remark, until suddenly as one they chorused: “Aye. Aye.”

The six men were huddled around the dying embers of the fire at an inn on the edge of the Chiltern Hills. It was autumn and an early chill was setting in.

“And what of ’er, poor creature?”

“ ’Tis said ’e lashed out at ’er.”

“Tried to kill ’er, ’is own flesh and blood.”

“And she so delicate an’ all, like spun gossamer.”

“ ’E was a bad ’un, all right,” said the miller.

Without exception his five drinking companions nodded as their thoughts turned to the various injustices most of them had suffered at their dead lord’s hands.

“ ’E’ll be burning in hell now,” ventured the blacksmith. Another chorus of approval was rendered.

“Good riddance, that’s what I say,” said the carpenter, and everyone raised their tankards. It seemed to be a sentiment that was shared by all those contemplating the young man’s fate.

For a moment or two all was quiet as they supped their tepid ale. It was the blacksmith who broke the silence. “ ’Course you know who’ll be celebrating the most, don’t ye?” He leaned forward in a conspiratorial gesture.

The men looked at one another, then nodded quickly in unison at the realization of this new supposition that had been tossed, like some bone, into their circle.

“ ’E’ll be rubbing his ’ands with glee,” smirked the miller, sucking at his pipe.

“That ’e will, my friends,” agreed the blacksmith. “That ’e will,” and he emptied his tankard and set it down with a loud thud on the table in front of him, with all the emphatic righteousness of a man who thinks he knows everything, but in reality knows very little at all.

Outside in the fading light of the marketplace, the women were talking, too. “Like some mad dog, he was, tearing at his own clothes,” said the lady’s maid, who heard it from her cousin, who knew the stable lad to the brother of the vicar who had attended at the hall on the night of the death.

She was imparting her blood-curdling tale to anyone who would listen to her as she bought ribbon for her mistress at Brandwick market, and there were plenty who did.

So it was that inside the low-beamed taverns and in bustling market squares, in restrained drawing rooms and raucous gaming halls around the county of Oxfordshire, the death was the talk of milkmaids and merchants and gossips and governesses alike. Some spoke of the young nobleman’s eyes, how they had wept blood, and of his mouth, how it had slavered and foamed and how foul utterances and curses had been spewed forth.

The more circumspect would simply say the young earl had died in extreme agony and their thoughts were with his grieving family. Nevertheless, from the gummy old widow to the sober squire, they all listened intently and passed the story on in shades as varied as the turning leaves on the autumn beeches; on each occasion embellishing it with thin threads of conjecture that were strengthened every time they were entwined.

Boughton Hall was a fine, solid country house that was built in the late 1600s by the Right Honorable The Earl Crick’s great-great-grandfather, the first earl. It nestled in a large hollow in the midst of the Chiltern Hills, surrounded by hundreds of acres of parkland and beech woods. Its imposing chimneystacks and pediments had seen better days and the facade was looking less than pristine, but the neglect that it had endured over the past four years under young Lord Crick’s stewardship could be easily remedied with some cosmetic care.

Lady Lydia Farrell loved her ancestral home, but now it was fast taking on the mantle of a fortress whose walls stood between her and the volleys of lies and insinuation that were being fired at her and her husband since her brother’s death. The vicar, the Reverend Lightfoot, tried to comfort her as they sat in the drawing room one evening three days later. His face was mottled, like some ancient, stained map, and he rolled out well-practiced words of comfort as if they were barrels of sack.

“Time,” he told her, “is the great physician.”

She looked up at him from her chair and smiled weakly. His words, although well meant, did not impress her. She forbore his trite platitudes politely but remained silent, fully aware that while time may have been a great physician, it was not a good anatomist. The longer her brother lay in his shroud that held within it the secrets of his death, the sooner time would turn from a physician into an enemy.

A good corpse is like a fine fillet of beef, the master would say—tender to the touch and easy to slice. He neglected to make any comparisons with the odor, however. Once it began to stink any cook worth her salt would throw the offending meat to the dogs. Not so with a cadaver. Unlike the side of an ox whose texture and general flavor benefited from a few days’ hanging, the human body needed to be butchered, in the technical sense, ideally within the first few hours of its slaughter, or in this case, demise.

Despite the fact that this particular corpse was relatively fresh, however, it was still proving difficult. Rigor mortis was setting in and Dr. Thomas Silkstone knew he would have to work quickly if he wanted to dissect the intestinal lymphatics before they atrophied. The translucent flexible tubes that resembled a large tangle of string were already beginning to lose their elasticity, even though their unfortunate owner, a Mr. Joshua Smollett, had died only that morning. A former patient, he was one of the few visionaries to comprehend that if any strides were to be made in the field of medicine and the curation of diseases they could only be taken via the knowledge gleaned from the practice of anatomy. “Dissection,” as the master, properly known as Dr. Silkstone’s mentor, Dr. William Carruthers, would frequently say in his lectures, “is the key to understanding all illness.”

Thomas often found himself inadvertently reciting Dr. Carruthers’s mantras. He hated himself for doing it, after all he was now a qualified surgeon in his own right, but the influence of the old man’s teaching had seeped into every fiber of his being and dictated every turn of his professional thoughts, every incision of his razor-sharp knife. “You are an artist,” Thomas recalled him saying more than once. “You are a da Vinci, a Michelangelo. The scalpel is your brush and the corpse your canvas.” It was hard to think of himself as an artist, however, when he had to breathe in short, sharp movements to stop himself retching.

It was autumn now, and the air was cool and relatively fresh, but when the temperature rose so, too, would the reek of decaying flesh. That was the time when only those with the strongest of constitutions could stomach the vile and noxious miasma, which rose throughout every dissecting room in London, fed by sunlight and heat.

It was rare for Thomas to handle a corpse such as Mr. Smollett’s. Indeed, these days he was finding it increasingly rare to handle a corpse at all. When he had first come to London, a fresh-faced foreigner all the way from Philadelphia, the Corporation of Surgeons had invited him to participate in the dissection of a cadaver fresh from the gallows. He shuddered as he remembered them in their black robes and gray wigs, as they peered and prodded like so many vultures until they went in for the first incision. Even now Thomas found the whole affair utterly distasteful, despite the fact that the man they were mutilating was always a convicted felon and had, in all probability, mutilated several people himself while they were still alive.

It was only natural therefore that a man in his position and with such weighty responsibilities should seek out just a few of the many distractions that London offered. In his native Philadelphia he had enjoyed masques and balls, whereas here he found the company a little dull and markedly less refined. The ladies, too, he had noted, possessed by and large thicker ankles than their sisters in Pennsylvania. Nevertheless in London he had found salvation in the theater and, in particular, Mr. Garrick’s in Drury Lane. He had read all the great philosophers but nowhere was the human condition so well expounded as in the great actor’s production of King Lear.

As he worked on the flaccid body that had once housed Mr. Smollett, Thomas was in a reflective mood. Unlike most of his patients, who would make their loved ones swear as they sat by their deathbeds that their corpses would never be handed over for dissection, Mr. Smollett had no fear of forgoing the pleasures of paradise if he allowed his body to be opened. “St. Peter will welcome me whether I be in a shroud or in pieces,” he had quipped on Thomas’s penultimate visit, before his laughter had caused him to cough up blood.

Phthisis, also known as tuberculosis, also known as the white death, was the obvious agent of his demise. Thomas had found his lungs to be badly scarred as he had expected, but it was the lymphatic system that currently occupied him and so he had taken the opportunity of slicing into the lower abdomen. Mr. Smollett had been a portly gentleman to say the least, and by the time Thomas had peeled away through layers of cream-colored subcutaneous fat, the tissues and organs were becoming increasingly resistant to his scalpel. Not only that, but the light was now fading and he would soon have to resort to candles.

Mistress Finesilver, the wily housekeeper, had already warned him that too much household money was being expended on candles but a good, bright light was essential for his work. He would rather spend money on tallow than on port wine and had told her so, much to her annoyance. He put down his scalpel, wiped his hands on his large, stained apron, and fetched a candelabrum from the windowsill. Placing it on the table just by Mr. Smollett’s left buttock, he struck a flint and lit a long taper. He could not afford himself the luxury of a fire that would turn the corpse even more quickly. Cradling the flame in his bloody hands, he lit the five candles so that Mr. Smollett’s abdomen was gradually illuminated in a halo of soft light.

Now that Dr. Carruthers’s failing sight had forced him to relinquish his work, Thomas had taken on his mantle. Gone were the days when Carruthers would pack a lecture theater to the rafters with students eager to see the precision with which he could remove a man’s spleen or amputate a limb. Unlike his teacher, Thomas was no great showman. He preferred to work quietly and efficiently alone, making detailed notes of his observations as Dr. Carruthers had taught. He now labored in his erstwhile master’s laboratory, graduating from the cramped, airless room at the rear of the Dover Street premises that once served him as a study. He had inherited Dr. Carruthers’s spacious rooms in Hollen Street and all that came with them and that included the grotesque and disturbing creatures that now stared out at him reproachfully from their glass prisons in the half light, like forlorn captives frozen in time.

There was, however, one other living creature in the laboratory—a creature that served as both companion and confessor. He had named him after his father’s friend, the noted scientist, politician, and now war activist Benjamin Franklin, and he was a white rat. Thomas would swiftly point out to anyone who objected to his presence that he was an albino rat as opposed to a black rat. Franklin was, he insisted, not a carrier of disease, but a “pet”—a concept that many surgeons found hard to grasp, it seemed. Dr. Carruthers was about to dissect the poor creature, but Thomas had taken pity on him and persuaded him that he would be much better off kept in the laboratory for experiments. Dr. Carruthers was persuaded of the logic of this and shortly afterward lost his sight. So Franklin—although Dr. Carruthers was unaware that the laboratory rat had been given a name, of course—came out of his cage and accompanied Thomas to his room at night, where he slept in a wooden crate on the floor.

There was something very comforting about having Franklin with him while he worked, Thomas thought, as he wiped the blood from his lancet. He liked to hear him nibbling away at the scraps he left out for him and scurrying around in his cage, which was kept unlocked so that he could, if he chose, roam freely around the laboratory. Thomas frequently talked to him, trying out new theories on him. If he understood a tenth of what he was talking about he would be the most learned rat in Christendom, Thomas thought, smiling to himself.

The smile, however, soon left his lips when he realized that Mr. Smollett’s guts were still exposed like untidy skeins of wool and that, according to the large timepiece on the wall, it was nearly six o’clock. It would soon be dark and time was not on his side. Painstakingly he traced a length that ran alongside a vein and which drained into a channel connected to a vein in the upper chest. Through this branch, Dr. Carruthers had discovered that the nutritious properties of food products enter the veins, conveying them to the heart, the blood acting as a sluice. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Thomas’s mentor had long held that the lymphatic flow was afferent, draining tissue fluid and chyle from the organs and gut back to the heart.

Three years before, the old man had completely lost his sight, but with the help of Thomas, he had proved conclusively that his theory was right. Prior to this most of his colleagues had believed the converse to be true and that the arterial flow was in fact the opposite, toward the heart. This, Dr. Carruthers and Thomas had been able to demonstrate, was like laboring under the delusion that water ran up a spout rather than down it. Thomas now believed it was his duty to continue expanding on this hypothesis. He reported any new observations regularly to Dr. Carruthers, who listened eagerly to the protégé who had now become his eyes. Now and again he would interject with a challenge or an adjunct, always enlivening any report Thomas made with a peppering of colorful expletives and jocular asides. “The monkey’s arse, it did!” was one of his favorites. Fate had been cruel to the old man, depriving him of the very tools that were so vital to his craft, and Thomas felt privileged to be able to continue work so vital to the understanding of the human anatomy.

The young man squinted and pushed away the lock of dark blond hair that had flopped forward with the back of his bloodstained hand. For a moment he stood upright to straighten his aching back. He was fine-featured, tall and slender, and cut a dashing figure about London. The ladies especially noted his pale, flawless complexion and his smile, which revealed a mouth of perfect white teeth.

The light was poor and he knew he would soon have to admit defeat. He had no wish to put a strain on his eyes and suffer the same fate as his master. Out of respect for Mr. Smollett, he stitched up the large flap of skin over his belly, so that he now looked quite respectable, and replaced his sutures in alcohol.

Thomas rinsed his bloody hands in water and as he dried them on a towel, he heard the hoarse cry of a newspaper boy shouting out headlines through the high window facing out onto the street. Continuing to tidy away his instruments he suddenly found himself looking forward to Mistress Finesilver’s venison pie, a tankard of stout, and some good conversation with Dr. Carruthers. Afterward they would sit by the fire in the master’s study and Thomas would read that day’s edition of The Daily Advertiser out loud. They would discuss the major news of the day, and then Thomas would turn to the obituaries so that Dr. Carruthers could keep abreast of old associates or adversaries who had been recently deceased.

Rarely a week went by without someone with whom he had worked, or worked on, passing away. If the person had been a patient, Dr. Carruthers would relate his symptoms at the time of his treatment, be they gout or goiter, but if they were his colleagues, he might pause for a while as if picturing them at work, and mutter some melancholy tribute into the brandy that he cradled in his lap.

Thomas had all but finished clearing away when he heard footsteps outside his door. It was Mistress Finesilver. Despite having worked for Dr. Carruthers for more than thirty years, she still had little respect for the practice of anatomy and believed in a strict mealtime regimen. It mattered not that Thomas was on the verge of some great discovery that could benefit all mankind. Dinner was at half past six sharp and woe betide any man who challenged that. Mistress Finesilver also disapproved of Franklin, but had promised not to tell Dr. Carruthers about him in return for a regular supply of laudanum, which was her evening pleasure.

“Dinner is served, sir,” she shouted through the door. She knew better than to enter the laboratory for fear of seeing something she would rather not.

The venison pie was palatable, even if the meat was a little on the tough side. Another half hour in the pot would not have gone amiss, Thomas thought to himself as he champed his way through the chewy haunch.

Mistress Finesilver had cut the old doctor’s food up for him. He insisted on feeding himself, but did not always succeed. After the meal, he almost invariably had spits and spots of gravy liberally splashed over his waistcoat and Mistress Finesilver would dab it off with a damp cloth afterward, fussing like a mother hen.

That evening they sat as usual by the fire and, as usual, Thomas read out loud, starting with the top left-hand column, then working his way through the whole newspaper. On that particular day in October 1780 it was reported that a great hurricane had killed thousands in the Caribbean and that the ships on Captain Cook’s third voyage had returned to port in London, only without their master, who had been slaughtered in Kealakekua Bay. But it was the news that his fellow countryman Henry Laurens had been seized by the British and thrown into the Tower of London that caught Thomas’s eye and he inadvertently tutted his disapproval aloud.

“What upsets you so, young fellow?” questioned Dr. Carruthers. He often called Thomas “young fellow.”

Thomas framed his words carefully, not wishing to offend his mentor. “We New Englanders are not faring so well in our bid for independence,” he informed him.

“Independence! Balderdash and piffle!” came the swift response. “If you colonists have your independence, then every Tom, Dick, and Harry here in England will be wanting a vote soon. Mark my words. Then what would become of us all?” exclaimed Dr. Carruthers, taking a large gulp of brandy. There was a short pause, then the old gentleman said, as he always did, “So tell me who’s died this week, young fellow.”

Thomas smiled to himself and turned the page. There was a list of five notables, starting with the most eminent. He began: “Lord Hector Braeburn, Scottish peer and expert swordsman, aged sixty-seven.” He always paused to await a response from Dr. Carruthers.

“Expert! Tosh! I patched him up after a duel once.”

Thomas continued. “Admiral Sir John Feltham, RN retired, fought during the Seven Years’ War and sustained an abdominal wound from which he never fully recovered.”

“The old sea dog had the pox!” interjected the doctor.

Next came a lady who had done many charitable works, followed by a lesser member of the Royal Academy. A well-known musician took precedence over a mathematician and an exclusive clothier. They were all known to Dr. Carruthers and they all solicited various anecdotes and yarns, seasoned with the old physician’s favorite expletives. “All those bodies safely tucked up in their mortsafes and vaults. Such a bloody waste!” was how he would usually wind up the evening. This lament was often intoned just after the mantel clock had struck eleven.

“Bedtime for me, young fellow, and I suggest for you, too,” Dr. Carruthers would say. Thomas was usually more than ready to follow his advice. On this particular evening, however, he returned to the front page of the broadsheet, folded it neatly, and put it on the desk. It was too late to finish reading the back page, he thought, although he told himself he might return to it the following evening. Had Thomas read the final page of The Advertiser of that particular edition, however, he would have seen a small item, tucked deep down on the right-hand column of the newspaper under the announcements section. It read: “Death of Young Earl.”

According to the broadsheet, the Sixth Earl Crick, of Boughton Hall in Oxfordshire, died at his home on October 12, 1780, aged just twenty-one. But the unremarkable insertion went unnoticed and instead Thomas climbed wearily upstairs, undressed, and as soon as his head hit the pillow, he fell sound asleep.

The face of Lady Lydia Farrell’s dead brother peered in at the win. . .