The Lazarus Curse Read online

  Outstanding praise for Tessa Harris and her Dr. Thomas Silkstone Mysteries!

  The Devil’s Breath

  “Excellent . . . Both literally and figuratively atmospheric, this will appeal to fans of Imogen Robertson’s series during the same period.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  The Dead Shall Not Rest

  “Highly recommended.”

  —Historical Novel Society

  “Outstanding ... well-rounded characters, cleverly concealed evidence and an assured prose style point to a long run for this historical series.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Populated with real historical characters and admirably researched, Harris’s novel features a complex and engrossing plot. A touch of romance makes this sophomore outing even more enticing. Savvy readers will also recall Hilary Mantel’s

  The Giant, O’Brien.”

  —Library Journal

  “Tessa Harris takes us on a fascinating journey into the shadowy world of anatomist Thomas Silkstone, a place where death holds no mystery and all things are revealed.”

  —Victoria Thompson, author of Murder on Sisters’ Row

  Books by Tessa Harris

  THE ANATOMIST’S APPRENTICE

  THE DEAD SHALL NOT REST

  THE DEVIL’S BREATH

  THE LAZARUS CURSE

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  The LAZARUS CURSE

  A DR. THOMAS SILKSTONE MYSTERY

  TESSA HARRIS

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Outstanding praise for Tessa Harris and her Dr. Thomas Silkstone Mysteries!

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Notes and Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapiter 8

  Chapiter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapiter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter23

  Chapiter 24

  Chapiter 25

  Chapiter 26

  Chapiter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Postscript

  Glossary

  Copyright Page

  To Katy, with thanks

  Author’s Notes and Acknowledgments

  The story of black people in Britain did not, contrary to popular belief, begin with the docking of the Empire Windrush in 1948. The ship’s arrival from Jamaica, bringing 492 passengers to settle in the country, is widely seen as a landmark in the history of modern Britain. Yet almost two hundred years earlier there were an estimated 20,000 black people out of a population of 676,250 living in London alone. Most of these were living as free men and women. Their number was swelled in 1783 by Black Loyalists, those slaves who, in return for their freedom, had sided with the British in the American Revolutionary War and been given passage to British shores.

  Unsurprisingly when I decided that the story of these displaced Africans should form the backdrop of my fourth Dr. Thomas Silkstone mystery, I found research material quite hard to come by. While there were a few prominent black people in eighteenth-century England—the concert violinist George Bridge-tower and Francis Williams, who studied at Cambridge University, for example—there were hundreds more who lived as servants or beggars. One of the most famous manservants of the day was Francis Barber, who was in the employ of none other than Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer.

  The British attitude to those of color has been far from exemplary. As far back as 1731 the Lord Mayor of London issued an edict forbidding “negroes” to learn a trade, thus effectively sentencing them to servitude and poverty. Look hard enough and you will see these people everywhere, in the paintings of Hogarth and of Reynolds, in the caricatures of Rawlings and Gillray, and in poems and plays of the period. As Gretchen Gerzina put it in her excellent book Black England, eighteenth-century Africans occupied “a parallel world . . . working and living alongside the English.”

  My own foray into this parallel plane was prompted by the remarkable story of a young African slave by the name of Jonathan Strong. Cruelly beaten by his master and left for dead on the street, he was found by a kind surgeon, William Sharp, who nursed him back to health. Two years later, however, Strong was recaptured by his master, who promptly sold him back into slavery. He was due to return to the slave plantations of Barbados when, in a last-ditch attempt to evade his terrible fate, he appealed to the surgeon’s brother, the abolitionist Granville Sharp, for help and was eventually freed. In 1772, Sharp was instrumental in securing the famous ruling by Lord Chief Justice William Mansfield that reluctantly concluded that slaves could not legally be forced to return to the colonies by their owners once they were in Britain. The judgment was widely seen as abolishing slavery in Britain, although the law was not necessarily practiced by all citizens. Nevertheless, the case elevated Granville Sharp to his rightful place as one of the most influential men in the British abolition movement.

  Crossing the Atlantic to the West Indies, a number of fascinating but disturbing accounts of life in the colonies threw up more background material for this novel. A compelling collection of original documents was drawn together in an online project edited by Dr. Katherine Hann, called Slavery and the Natural World, and carried out at the Natural History Museum, London, between 2006 and 2008. The information is based on documents held in the museum’s libraries, and explores the links between nature (especially the knowledge, and transfer, of plants), people with an interest in natural history (mainly European writers from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), and the history and legacies of the transatlantic slave trade.

  Firsthand accounts from slave owners and overseers as well as botanists, naturalists, and physicians painted pictures of life with devastating and often brutal clarity that shock and appall our twenty-first-century sensibilities and, indeed, went some way to helping the abolitionist cause at the time. William Blake’s barbaric image of a woman being whipped, Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave, 1796, had a huge impact on public opinion in Britain.

  When calling African slaves “Negroes” I am using the terminology that was employed widely in contemporary accounts from the eighteenth century. While the backdrop to this novel is based on fact, all the characters are fictitious apart from Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson.

  In my research I am indebted to the Natural History Museum, London, The
Old Operating Theatre, Southwark, and to The Museum of London, Docklands. For her medical expertise I must thank Dr. Kate Dyerson. As ever I am also grateful to my agent, Melissa Jeglinski, my editor, John Scognamiglio, and to the rest of the team at Kensington, to John and Alicia Makin, and to Katy Eachus and Liz Fisher. Last but not least, my thanks go to my family, without whose love and support I could not write these novels.

  —England 2014

  Chapter 1

  The Elizabeth, somewhere in the English Channel

  November in the Year of Our Lord 1783

  As he lay in his hammock, the young man dreamed he was back on the island. In the black of a jungle night the drums began. Low and throbbing, they drowned out the sound of his heartbeat. The rhythm was slow and steady at first, like the relentless turn of a rack wheel. Each beat was a footstep in the darkness, each pause a breath held fast.

  In his mind’s eye he saw himself and the rest of the party make their way toward the sound, slashing through the thick stems and waxy leaves, as the beat grew louder and louder. Reaching the clearing, they saw them: a circle of Negroes and at their centre a man gyrating madly, his head ablaze with bird plumes, dancing around a fire. In his hand he grasped a long bone at its heft, shaking it as he pranced wildly in the ring.

  The victim, little more than a child, was brought to him struggling, flanked on either side by men. They held him in the centre of the circle, his cries for mercy drowned out by the sound of the drums.

  The onlookers were shouting, cheering on the priest, as he whirled ’round like a demented dog. From time to time he would take a pipe made from hollowed-out sugar cane and blow a cloud of powder into the face of his victim. The drumbeats gathered momentum and the cries and caterwauls grew louder.

  Someone in the crowd handed the magic man a skull; it looked like a human’s. It was lined and filled with some sort of potion. To a great roar, he thrust it up to the victim’s lips, forcing him to drink the contents. Seconds later the hapless boy was being whirled ’round rapidly like a spinning top until he finally lost his senses and fell to the ground, clutching his belly in agony.

  As the victim writhed in the dirt, the sorcerer also began to judder violently. While the youth’s body convulsed and shuddered, the magic man mirrored his actions as if the very ground beneath him were quaking. Then, when the boy’s juddering lessened, so, too, did the priest’s until he stopped as suddenly as he had started. The crowd was hushed, and watched as he examined the motionless victim until, with a triumphant whoop, he raised his arms aloft and pronounced him dead.

  In his hammock, the young man, his dark brows knitted across his forehead, sat upright. His heart was pounding as violently as the jungle drums and his hands were clammy with fear. He looked down at the skeletal frame he hardly recognized as his own. He was safe on board the ship. Glancing to his left, he made out a circle of inky sky that was visible through the porthole. Dark clouds scudded across the moon, making the stars blink. He shivered with cold, but sighed with relief. It was the finest cold that had ever pricked his skin. It was English cold and after the steaming jungles of the West Indies it felt as sweet and as thrilling as the touch of a maiden.

  There had been three of them on the expedition. It had been their mission to gather specimens of flora and fauna of potential interest to the medical fraternity. Dr. Frederick Welton, his assistant, Dr. John Perrick, and himself, Matthew Bartlett, were accompanied by ten porters and a guide. Battling through swamps and under endless attack from vicious mosquitoes, it had taken them two days to reach the Maroon encampment. Their reception was hostile at first. Indeed, they had feared for their lives, but, after much negotiation, they had managed to convince the priest, or obeah-man, and the rest of the elders that they meant no harm; that they were not spies. They were there to observe and learn. In return they gave them clothes and trinkets, beads and mirrors. Through smiles and slow gestures, the initial suspicion turned to mutual respect. They were fed and watered and in exchange the doctors were able to use iodine or sundry physic to treat some minor infections that native medicine had not been able to ease. Indeed, Dr. Welton managed to win the Negroes’ confidence to such an extent that the priest allowed his myal men to show them how they treated various ailments with bark and sap from the plants of the forest.

  Even though several days had passed since they set sail for England, the fear of what he had seen lingered. In his nightmares Matthew Bartlett relived his experience during his time in Jamaica a thousand times. The memories would stay with him forever. He dreaded closing his eyes for fear of seeing the horror replayed once more.

  This time he remembered seeing the child lifted into a nearby hut, an open-sided shelter made of cut palm leaves, and laid on a reed mat. The women—there were four of them as he recalled—sat by the dead boy. They murmured low chants throughout the night, calling upon the spirits of their ancestors to help him.

  At sunrise the following morning, the whole of the village was summoned by the blowing of a conch shell to watch once more. The boy’s body was placed in the circle and the men began dancing around it, their feet stamping in time to the drumbeat. The mad priest’s throaty bawl began again and so, too, did his dance, punctuated by obscene gestures and a frantic scrabbling around in the dirt. After what must have been an hour at least, someone handed him a bunch of herbs. The leaves were large and flat and he called for the boy’s lips to be opened. Standing over the corpse he squeezed some juice into the child’s open mouth and anointed his eyes and stained his fingertips. All the while the men sang and chanted around him in a circle.

  It did not happen quickly. Another hour, maybe two, elapsed until it came to pass. And when it did, the crowd watched in stunned silence as slowly the boy’s eyes opened. Another few moments and his fingers moved, then his toes, until finally the priest took his hand and he rose from his reed mat. The youth had been raised from the dead by the magic man.

  “Like Lazarus,” muttered Dr. Perrick, his eyes wide in awe.

  “Fascinating,” said Dr. Welton, looking up from his journal. He was recording everything he saw in detail, his pencil moving furiously across the page. Turning to the young man at his side he asked, “Mr. Bartlett, you have a sketch of this remarkable plant?”

  Matthew Bartlett recalled nodding. He was a botanical artist and for the past two days he had been making detailed sketches of all the various plants that the obeah-men used in their medicine that appeared particularly efficacious in the treatment of native disorders and ailments. But this plant, the plant used by the sorcerer to raise the youth from the dead, was special, unique. It was the real reason for their mission.

  Dr. Welton had been allowed to examine the victim the next time the ritual was performed, this occasion on a woman. He was able to confirm that there was no pulse, no breath, no heartbeat; that she was, medically, dead. And yet the following day she had been revived. She had stood up and walked, but there was something strange in the way she moved. He was allowed to check her vital signs once more and in her eyes he saw a faraway look. When he had inquired of the obeah-man whether she could speak, the priest smiled and shook his head. Pointing to his own head, he told the doctor that the woman’s mind had been altered so that she would now obey her husband. Apparently her sin had been that of idleness. From now on, the obeah-man assured Dr. Welton, she would do whatever her husband told her, without question.

  Now easing himself up on his elbows, the young artist shook the memory from his head. He needed to reassure himself that the expedition was over; that he and Dr. Welton and Dr. Perrick and the others were safe once more. But then reality hit him like a round of shot and he recalled that the doctors were not with him on the return voyage. Their legacy was on his shoulders. Everything they had seen and heard, learned and discovered in those few momentous weeks in Jamaica now rested with him.

  He surveyed the deck. They were still there, the precious treasures; more than two hundred plants, insects, reptiles, and small mammals had been col
lected and stored in a variety of pots, jars, barrels, and crates.

  Of all of the plants, however, the branched calalue bush, the Lazarus herb, as Dr. Welton dubbed it after Dr. Perrick’s remark, was most prized. Hundreds of cuttings had been taken and bedded in pots that were regularly watered. The Elizabeth’s captain, a Scotsman by the name of McCoy, had even vacated his cabin for the containers so that the tender shoots would receive the correct amount of sunlight. Yet just as the bloody flux had wreaked havoc among the sailors on the outward voyage, so too did pestilence and flies and salty sea spray cause the plants to wither and die. Finding himself in sole charge of the cuttings, the young man had tried his best to nurture them, protecting them from intense heat when the mercury rose or fixing them down in the storms. Yet despite his efforts, out of the scores of plant specimens, only a few survived.

  Yet as important as the plants were, the real prize was Dr. Welton’s journal, containing the formula for the extraordinary narcotic. And that was safe. Of that he could be sure. He patted the leather satchel emblazoned with the crest of the Royal Society that lay next to him in the hammock, containing his sketchbook and pencils.

  The Elizabeth must now be in the Channel, he reassured himself. A few more hours and she would dock in London. The thought of treading on dry land brought a smile to the face of a young man who had had very little to smile about for the past three months. He settled back in his hammock, the very hammock that could so easily have become his shroud. Too often on the voyage they had wrapped a seaman’s corpse in his own rectangle of canvas, pierced his nose with a darning needle to make sure he was dead, then with a few glib words had lowered him over the side. Why he had been spared the ravages of disease he did not know. Mercifully the flux had not returned with them. Yellow fever, too, had wrought havoc among the white men on the island, but had chosen to stay ashore. The seamen who died on the homeward journey had been taken by other ills or accidents.