The Lazarus Curse Read online

  A few paces along the narrow passage, they came to another door. Roberts opened it.

  “Get in,” he ordered.

  Jeremiah hesitated. It was not something he usually did when commanded by a white man, but, after a moment, he did as he was bade, walking into a tiny, dark room with only the smallest of windows to let in light. It was cold and smelled musty. The walls were lined with shelves for boots and hooks for riding crops and whips that he suspected were not used on horses at all. There were the familiar sticks, too, that had small paddles on the end that his master used to hit balls around for pleasure.

  “You shall stay here until your master is ready for you,” said Roberts, and with that he shut the door, locking it behind him.

  Left alone in the murky darkness, Jeremiah walked over to the corner and sat himself down, rolling his body into a ball for warmth, and resting his head on his folded arms. This is how he must have fallen asleep, for it was how he found himself when he was wakened by the sound of the key in the lock. His head shot up to see a woman, swiftly followed by a man, as they blustered into the darkness of the room. He froze. They did not know he was there.

  In the murky light he watched them move like shadow puppets, heard their panting, then their words.

  “You should not have come here,” said the woman.

  “But we have business.” The man lunged toward her, planting kisses on her neck. “Your lord and master is engaged upstairs.”

  “It is dangerous,” she protested.

  “You love the danger!” He laughed. “You have more for me?”

  She pushed him away slightly. “There will be another very soon. A fine Coromantee male.”

  “Excellent,” came the reply. Jeremiah heard the man’s breathing thicken before he pushed the woman up against the wall. “My reputation is not the only thing that is growing.”

  The rustle of silk was heard and the grunting began. The woman let out an odd cry, somewhere twixt pleasure and pain, he a great roar. Then it was over and silence.

  Jeremiah held his breath, willing them to leave as quickly as they had come, but in their exertions the couple must have knocked a shelf and a boot came tumbling down, narrowly missing him. As it clattered to the floor, he saw both their heads turn his way. Then the woman gasped.

  “There’s someone there!”

  “What?”

  The man instinctively grabbed the nearest weapon to hand, a golf stick, and launched himself into the darkness.

  “A slave!” he cried, seeing the whites of Jeremiah’s eyes, and he lifted the club to strike.

  Jeremiah leapt up and headed for the open door, but before he could reach it, the man brought down the club on his back, striking him hard. A scream of pain tore through the darkness and he stumbled. His hands flew up to protect his head, but the man confronted him, raining another blow, this time on his skull. He felt the blood gush from a wound, but could see just enough to know that his attacker was about to strike again. Managing to scramble into the passage, he fled to the back door, shouldered it open and found himself outside. He staggered along a path and into the garden, leaving a trail of blood on the snow in his wake. There was a side gate. It was not locked. He glanced back. There were footsteps. He knew he could not return.

  Later that night, in the solitary gloom of his own bedroom, Thomas began to read Dr. John Perrick’s letters by candlelight. The small fire in his grate had long since died and he gathered the blankets from his bed and wrapped them around him. In the poor light he sat squinting at the closely written text of the correspondence between man and wife. He was not completely at ease doing so. He felt like a voyeur or an intruder. There were obviously passages which were of a private nature and he skimmed over these quickly. What was of the utmost interest were the excerpts that dealt with the adventures of the expedition members and at least he trusted that these, addressed as they were to his spouse, would not be as graphic as Dr. Welton’s observations.

  The letters did, indeed, prove a mine of helpful and intriguing information and threw up many pharmacological secrets, known only to the island’s natives. With a journal open on his desk, Thomas made copious notes, adding his own deliberations every now and then. There were descriptions of various plants that were the basis of good physic. Aloe vera was mentioned prominently and, indeed, there was a recipe for the relief of fever which used it as the main ingredient, while garden balsam, it was said, was good for both colds and colic in babes.

  Yet there were other, more sinister, entries, like Perrick’s impression of Kingston on his arrival. It pains me to say that I am glad you are not with me to see this port, my dear, for it is no place for a lady. Bewildered Negro men, women, and children, all with chains about their necks, are dispatched at markets to their owners as traders sell pots and pans in Spittle Fields.

  His candle now burned low, Thomas rubbed his strained eyes and decided to retire to his bed, although he knew he would not rest easy. Matthew Bartlett’s murder had unsettled him and the mistreatment of their slaves by Carfax and his wife had disturbed him. These notes and letters opened the window even wider onto a world of savagery and inhumanity. It had always been there for him to see, but he had never taken the time to observe it. Now, like the botfly larva he had removed from the arm of Samuel Carfax, it was rearing its hideous head. Perhaps it was because he found it too terrible to contemplate that he had chosen to ignore it before. Now that it had made itself known to him, he could no longer brush it aside. He heard the watchman cry three o’clock before he finally fell asleep.

  Chapter 29

  The following day Thomas told himself would have to be devoted to working hard on the specimens. Forcing all thought of Matthew Bartlett’s murder aside, he rose before dawn and concentrated his energies within his laboratory. The schedule he had set himself was slipping fast away. Since breakfast he had turned his attention to the snakes—there were four different species—and had ranged a number of large glass jars before him. The air turned sharp with preserving fluid as he poured at least two pints into each container, depending on the size of the specimen. By four o’clock, however, he found he had completely run out of the liquid.

  He set off to visit the apothecary a few streets away to order some more and was almost at the end of Hollen Street when, in a pool of light cast by a streetlamp, he saw flakes of snow wafting overhead. Two chairmen stood by their sedan waiting for a fare, stamping their feet to keep warm. A carriage decamped its passengers and rumbled off into the distance. Three gentlemen on foot braced themselves against the northerly wind as they passed him. Their footfalls, crumping in the snow, had just receded when he heard the noise: a low moan, followed by a whimper. He stopped still and craned his head. There it was again. An injured dog, perhaps? Or a babe born of a street girl and left to die? He looked ’round. Something caught his eye on the steps that led to a basement nearby. He turned and squinted into the darkness. To his horror he could make out a hand, clawing at the street railings like a giant crab. Scooping up his cape and tucking it under his arm, he bent low. And there, in the blackness, he could see a man’s face racked with pain.

  Darting up, Thomas looked down the street once more toward the chairmen at their stand. Cupping his hands around his mouth he called out to them as loud as he could. “Over here. I need help!”

  The men whirled ’round, saw Thomas’s frantic waves, and hurried over.

  Bending low once more, the doctor scrambled halfway down the basement steps to tend to the man. He could see he was barely conscious. Throwing off his cape, he was wrapping it around the patient to protect him from the cold just as the chairmen arrived.

  “What goes on, sir?” called one of the men, frowning into the gloom.

  “A man lies badly injured,” replied Thomas, mopping a bleeding brow with his kerchief. “These wounds need treating straightaway. Help me, will you?”

  The two men swapped shocked looks. This was way beyond their normal duties. Thomas read their faces.

>   “I will pay you double the fare,” he snapped. “Just help me get him into the chair, will you?”

  The injured man was broad and tall and did not come easily. With great difficulty the chairmen hauled him up out of the basement and onto the poorly lit walkway, where Thomas could at least discern his features to assess his injuries. But as soon as the men saw his face, both of them balked.

  “A Negro!” cried one.

  Ignoring their consternation, Thomas pulled away the folds of the cape to inspect the man’s head as blood gushed from a wound. Wrapping his muffler around the skull, he managed to stem some of the flow, but he knew there was no time to waste. The Negro’s eyes were now closed and his voice was stilled. He had lost consciousness.

  “Hurry, men!” he shouted.

  With little regard for their passenger, the chairmen bundled him into the sedan and within two minutes they were carrying the injured Negro through the front door at Hollen Street. Helen, answering the door, had screamed at the sight of the bloodied passenger, but soon the chairmen were laying him down on the chaise longue in the small downstairs drawing room as Thomas directed.

  Dr. Carruthers pricked up his ears and came to the doorway.

  “What goes on?”

  Thomas, putting coins into the callused palms of the chairmen, explained:

  “A young Negro man has been viciously assaulted, sir. I found him with a severe head wound not two hundred yards away in the street.”

  Hearing the commotion, Mistress Finesilver also appeared at the doorway. The chairmen pushed past her, leaving muddy footprints in their wake.

  “And what do you think you are doing, gentlemen?” she railed, hands on hips, as she surveyed the chaos in the small drawing room. A blue, bloodstained coat lay on the floor.

  “I found a badly injured man in the street, mistress,” explained Thomas, placing a cushion with the utmost care under his patient’s head. “We could not take him upstairs.”

  “All this to-do!” she clucked, hurrying over to the stranger who lay unconscious on the good furniture. Her eyes widened in horror as she saw a cushion on the chaise longue spotted with blood. She snatched it away.

  “Mind you take off his boots,” she huffed as she drew closer to inspect the man’s face. It was only then that she realized the identity of this unexpected houseguest and her hands flew up in shock. “A blackamoor!” she shrieked.

  Thomas had anticipated her reaction, but refused to be drawn by it. “This man is my patient, Mistress Finesilver,” he countered, “and will be here for at least the next few days. It would be most appreciated if you could fetch me warm water and my medical case.”

  The housekeeper’s mouth opened to deliver a rejoinder, but closed again when she thought better of it. Instead her face set into a grimace, as if she had just sniffed a jug of sour milk in the pantry.

  “Very well,” she conceded and flounced out.

  “His condition sounds serious,” remarked Dr. Carruthers gravely.

  “It is. He has lost consciousness,” replied Thomas, peering at the man’s head wound. “He is fortunate to have survived.”

  Thomas, squinting into the deep cut, touched the cranium lightly, pressing gently in search of cracks and bumps. The injuries were concentrated around the crown and left eye. The swelling and contusions around the latter were such that he feared for the man’s sight. The injuries, he believed, had been inflicted by a blunt instrument. It seemed to him that he had been struck at least twice about the face and head.

  There was worse to come. Loosening the young man’s shirt at the neck, Thomas was shocked to see a silver collar, as if he were an animal. He had heard it was fashionable in some households where slaves were employed and now he knew it to be true.

  Taking out his magnifying glass from his case that Mistress Finesilver had just grudgingly delivered, he peered more closely. It was as he thought. There were other, older marks around his wrists, too. They had been made not during this latest attack but, he suspected, sustained after manacles had cut into his flesh.

  Gently examining the rest of the young man’s body, Thomas could see it bore all the telltale signs of maltreatment. Apart from the bruises from the most recent attack, there were several scars. He ran his fingers over the lumpy tissue around the wrists. There was more around the ankles, too. The skin of his torso was stretched tight as a drum over ribs that looked so sharp he thought they would pierce through from the inside like needles. It was as if he were staring at a patchwork of abuse; a tapestry of torture and deprivation stitched on the body of a human being. It sickened him and he sighed deeply.

  Straightening himself once more, he took a step back. Still gazing at his patient, he said, “This man is a slave.”

  Dr. Carruthers nodded sagely. “A runaway most like. Beaten by his master, I’ll wager.”

  “We should call the constables,” said Thomas firmly. He was surprised when his suggestion was met with derisory laughter.

  “He is a slave, young fellow. He is tantamount to mere property under the law. He’ll find no protection there!” came Carruthers’s reply.

  Thomas wondered at his mentor’s cynicism. “Surely there is some recourse to the law?” he pressed, covering the young man with a blanket.

  Dr. Carruthers thought for a moment. “There was a case, a few years ago, where a slave, by the name of Jonathan Strong, was cruelly beaten by his master. He was left for dead and cared for by a courageous clerk and his brother, a surgeon, but then seized back by his master two years later.”

  “What happened?”

  “The master, a brute by all accounts, thinking he still owned the poor wretch, sold him back into slavery, to another rogue. But the clerk took the case to court and won the slave his freedom.”

  Thomas looked grave. “But I thought slavery was illegal under English law.”

  The old anatomist huffed. “Merchants from the Colonies are allowed to bring their slaves here and no one bats an eyelid,” he chided, wagging his finger. He shook his head and said with a tone of resignation, “Surely you know that law and practice are two very different things, young fellow.”

  Thomas was forced to agree.

  After stitching the slave’s wound with catgut, Thomas applied sap from the aloe vera plant to the swollen areas of the face. The tissues surrounding the left eye were so distended they reminded him of a bruised plum. He knew the strange aloe gel contained healing properties and was glad to put it to the test to see if it could relieve the inflammation and swelling. The rest of the night he would spend propped up with pillows in a chair at his patient’s side. The young man was still unconscious and, very worryingly, had developed a fever.

  For the next two days, Thomas set aside his cataloguing in the laboratory to make the wounded slave his priority. He tasked Helen to sit beside him for some of the time, while he returned to the laboratory to obtain more gel from the aloe plants or to make up some formula that Dr. Welton had recommended in his notes. Mixing aloe juice with coconut milk was, apparently, a well-known physic among the Maroons, known to bring down fevers, as well as being an excellent restorative. The regular application of the gel appeared to be working well on the head wound and the young man’s fever seemed to be subsiding.

  In the meantime, when it was his turn to sit at the slave’s bedside, Thomas would read Dr. Welton’s notes. He glanced through the various papers he had at his disposal, convinced that somewhere in those scant jottings and observations lay a clue as to why Bartlett was murdered. Picking up a random sheet written in Welton’s hand his eyes were drawn to an account of a warning that had been issued to the expedition, by a seasoned plantation owner. It was the story of how the Maroons could be every bit as brutal as their erstwhile masters.

  Over dinner, we were told the tale of a rebel leader who, with his men, raided an estate to the east of Kingston. Having tied the hands of the manager, by the name of Shaw, and plundered the house, they helped themselves to all his food and liquor as he watched on
helpless. As he regarded them with great consternation, he suddenly realized that the leader, a man they called Plato, was known to him. The rebel had once been a house slave on his plantation and in his own service, so the manager pleaded for his life. “Do you not recall,” he asked, “how, when you were only a child, I gave you morsels from my table? Remember this, and have pity on me.” But the rebel replied: “You are right. You were my master and you did feed me. But do you also not recall what you did to my mother? You violated her before my very eyes, then when my father tried to stop you, you had him whipped until he died. Now do you remember your own barbarity? You do not deserve to draw breath. Saying this, he took an ax and, ignoring Shaw’s pleas, he held it to his head and before his fellows, he chopped it off to great applause. Not content with his death, the rebels then skinned the man and used his flesh as a floor mat.

  Thomas felt the nausea rise from his stomach as he read the last few lines of the page. A man’s life, whether he was black or white, seemed to count for naught in this godforsaken colony, he told himself. He would force himself to read more of this sickening litany in the hope it may throw up some answers to the many questions he had. But for the moment he must concentrate on the work in hand. Earlier that evening he recalled how he had taken a wrench and prized off the lid of another crate; it had contained several small birds. He thought of the Weltons’ parlor and of the doctor’s own collections of exotica. How strange, he mused, that such beautiful creatures could be born out of such an evil place. The more he read of it, the more terrifying it seemed to become.

  Chapter 30

  Sir Theodisius stood warming his great frame by a roaring fire, the tails of his frockcoat raised so that his rump was exposed to the heat to maximum effect. Poor Dr. Carruthers, seated in a nearby armchair, felt himself eclipsed and hardly benefitted at all from the blaze.

  “Ah, Thomas, dear chap!” said the Oxford coroner as the doctor walked into the room.