The Lazarus Curse Read online

  The drumbeats in his nightmare soon turned into the jangle of the spars as they flayed the ship’s masts frantically in the prevailing westerly. They were rising and falling in the swell, cresting waves with ease in the lee of the land. The salt tang of the spray filled his mouth and nostrils and up above he heard a lone gull cry. Closing his eyes, he felt the rhythm of the water rock him like a babe in his hammock and he willed the wind to strengthen, the quicker to blow them ashore, the quicker to dispel his lingering terror and further his purpose.

  Chapter 2

  The knife men were assembled at the operating theatre at the anatomy school in London’s Brewer Street. Before the sheet was pulled back, they had gathered ’round the table. The soles of their shoes rasped across the sand scattered on the floor to soak up the blood and other bodily fluids. The large window in the roof allowed the light to flood in, bathing the covered corpse in a bright halo. The men set their features appropriately, nonchalant yet sufficiently sombre as befitted the occasion. All of them had seen more corpses than a plague pit in an epidemic. They were hardened, self-assured. Somewhere in the cavernous room, a fly buzzed; its high-pitched drone a minor irritation that chaffed at the composure of the moment.

  The men were all there at the invitation of Mr. Hubert Izzard, an eminent figure of the chirurgical establishment with a stature that matched his lofty ambition. Those minded to be cruel, and there were many, said he had the face of a prize fighter. His nose had been broken when he was young and it was flattened and skewed to the left.

  At Izzard’s sign, the beadle whipped away a cloth with all the flourish of a fairground conjuror to reveal the face that lay beneath on the table. The spectacle solicited the desired effect. In an instant, the men’s expressions changed. Gone was the blasé air, the quiet cynicism, and in its place veneration. Like shepherds ’round the holy manger, they stared at the woman full of amazement.

  Dr. Thomas Silkstone, a Philadelphian anatomist and surgeon, was among them. He had no particular regard for the men around him. He had even crossed swords, or rather scalpels, with some of them and his dealings with others in the medical profession left a bitter taste in his mouth. Most of the practitioners were old enough to be his grandfather. Most were set in their ways, convinced that bloodletting was a cure-all and that the possession of healthy bowels was the key to longevity. He, on the other hand, had different ideas and found his respect for his fellow anatomists and surgeons regularly tested. This, he feared, would be another such occasion.

  After a moment’s awe-filled silence, one of the surgeons standing next to Mr. Izzard managed to express the thoughts of the others.

  “But how did you lay your hands on such a one?” he asked in wonderment.

  Izzard’s large mouth widened into a smirk. “Apparently the blacks are more prone to chills. They come to our inclement clime from the plantations, take cold and fever and die,” he informed them, adding cheerfully: “Their great misfortune is our gain, gentlemen.” A ripple of polite amusement circulated around the room like a gentle breeze.

  The anatomist’s eyes dwelt on the woman and he touched her head lightly, almost reverentially. “Is she not magnificent?” he said in a hushed tone, neither expecting nor receiving a reply.

  The woman’s beauty was beyond question. There was a Madonna-like serenity in her attitude, thought Thomas. She was clearly of African origin, her skin black as ebony and her features fulsome, yet angular. Her hair was cropped close against her skull and her lips were slightly parted, so that she gave the appearance of being merely asleep. Indeed, several of those gathered did secretly think that she might open her eye lids at any moment, so uncorrupted and perfect did she appear.

  “But wait! There is more.” Mr. Izzard raised up a long finger in the air and again the beadle rushed forward. With even greater theatrical flair he pulled back the sheet that covered the woman’s torso. A collective gasp arose. She had been pregnant and her belly was as rounded as a whale. Glistening in the sunlight thanks to an application of teak oil, the sacred mound encasing an infant drew admiration from every quarter.

  “Full term, gentlemen,” announced Izzard over the din. The anatomists quietened down to listen. “She was fully dilated.”

  Walking over to a nearby table, he pointed to a large, leather-bound atlas. “You will all be familiar with the late, lamented Dr. William Hunter’s epic work The Gravid Uterus,” he said in a reverential tone. A murmur of acknowledgement rippled around the theatre. “And I know that a few of our older brethren will have witnessed Monsieur Desnoues’s most extraordinary waxwork of a woman who died in labor with the child’s head pushing through the cervix.” One or two more senior members nodded. “But I aim to venture even further into the field of obstetrics and I can guarantee that you have not seen anything of this quality and this”—he fumbled for a word—“this freshness.” Heads were shaken in agreement.

  “What I propose to do today, gentlemen, is to dissect the abdomen, but initially leave the uterus intact,” he announced. There was a chorus of approval.

  Izzard, confident he had his audience enthralled, strolled back to the operating table with the air of a man on a Sunday promenade. The corpse now lay fully exposed. Thomas felt uncomfortable, not because of the public dissection that was about to take place, but because of the nature of the cadaver. Corpses were so rarely available these days that the motley specimens that made their way into the theatre were very often on the turn. It was usually obvious, too, how they had met their end, from some fatal injury or debilitating disease. It was also usually obvious that they had been interred for several days before being landed on the dissecting table, courtesy of unscrupulous grave robbers. Thomas had even been offered bodies where the sack-’em-up men had not even bothered to clean the soil from their skin. The cadavers were either very young or very old. Pregnant women were a rarity and, by the very nature of their circumstance, often very poor and always alone.

  Edging his way toward the corpse, and seeing his fellow anatomists’ attention taken by Mr. Izzard, Thomas studied the body more closely. It was then that he saw it: a raised silver scar on the top of the left breast in the shape of two letters, possibly a B and a C, although tissue had grown around it, making it harder to decipher. He put out a hand to touch the woman’s skin. It was cold, but not as cold as one might expect. He pushed the flesh lightly with the tips of his fingers. There was still a telltale elasticity in it that deepened his concern. It was also clear from the way her arm rested on the table that rigor mortis had not yet set in. Quickly he felt her fingers for signs of stiffening. They were still malleable. He estimated she had not been dead three hours.

  “Ah, Dr. Silkstone!” called Izzard. All eyes turned on Thomas. “I see you cannot wait to get your hands on my corpse!” he said with a laugh.

  Thomas, embarrassed that his surreptitious prodding had been uncovered, gave a polite bow. “It is, indeed, a magnificent specimen, sir,” he replied. His heart was beating fast, but he knew he had to make his point. “You obviously have a new supplier, sir,” he said with an assurance that belied his nervousness.

  The smile that had been hovering around Izzard’s lips all morning suddenly disappeared. He pulled back his shoulders in shock. “A new and most discreet supplier, sir,” he retorted, obviously insulted by Thomas’s insinuation.

  “I expect they drive a hard bargain,” he persisted.

  The color rose in Izzard’s cheeks. “I pay a good price, but,” he said, looking around him at his peers for support, “I believe it is entirely worth it.”

  Some of the others in the room shouted, “Hear! Hear!” A few glared at Thomas, dismayed that anyone, especially a youngster from the Colonies, would dare to question the great Hubert Izzard.

  The disapproving gathering parted as Izzard made his way toward the young anatomist who remained near the dissecting table. On another small table at the side, an array of surgical instruments was laid out on an oiled cloth. Izzard gazed upon them, then picke
d out a scalpel. Walking up to Thomas, he presented him with the sharp blade.

  “In that case, Dr. Silkstone,” he said with a smile tight as a tourniquet, “I am sure you would be honored to make the first cut.”

  Thomas could not leave the stifling atmosphere of the operating theatre soon enough. Usually his eagerness to quit such a place was caused by the sickly sweet smell of corruption as the dead flesh started to putrefy. But the Negro woman’s corpse he had just been compelled to dissect was far too new for that. Had the outside temperature not been so cold, he would have taken off his shoes and shaken the sand from them as he departed Hubert Izzard’s anatomy school.

  Ridding himself of the company he could not abide, Thomas took a lungful of air. The late afternoon grew colder, wreathing him in his own breath as he walked. He plunged his hands into his pockets and quickened his pace. Past a chestnut seller he went, where three or four unfortunates huddled simply to keep warm, the brazier glowing red like a beacon in the street. Some shopkeepers were already locking up for the day. A peascod hawker cried forlornly, her breath catching on the icy chill.

  Thomas was just passing a coffeehouse, its pungent aroma wafting from its open door, when a man appeared. In his hand he held a large poster and he started hammering it onto a noticeboard outside. Stopping a few feet away, the doctor registered that a reward was being offered for the return of a runaway slave.

  His thoughts flashed to the dead Negro woman and the brand on her breast. If, as he suspected, she was enslaved, then her baby would have been born the property of another. Little wonder that pregnant slave women so often resorted to drinking concoctions that forced their menstrua and aborted their un-borns. Rather that than let their children enter the world bound to white masters. He paused for a moment, still gazing at the poster and trying to recall the words of Rousseau, the French philosopher. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Even he, that very afternoon, had been forced by convention into carrying out a postmortem that he found distasteful. And yet he had felt bound to do so. His profession demanded it. He turned away from the poster and shook his head before continuing on his way back home to Hollen Street.

  So preoccupied had he been that he did not notice a young man slipping into the back entrance of the anatomy school. He was pushing a handcart with a load covered in sacking. There was no reason to mark him out as being anything other than an ordinary lackey running an errand, save for one thing: anyone who drew near could clearly have seen a black toe sticking out from beneath the hessian.

  Chapter 3

  The Negro girl picked her way through the dank streets toward the river. It was the end of a day that had not seen light and the lamps had been lit awhile. With a shawl covering her head, she threaded in and out of alleys and under arches as easily as black silk through cotton. Her eyes were kept to the ground, not so much as to sidestep the slushy ruts or frozen pools of waste, but to avoid eye contact. She had no wish to be noticed, no desire to be singled out.

  A sudden squall blew up as she ventured down one of the side streets off the Strand. It sent the trade signs creaking on their hinges. The few citizens who were abroad hurried to shelter in shop doorways from the sudden icy rain. The street women on the corners feared they were in for a lean night, a night when the sleet would douse all but the most fervent ardor. Still the girl carried on, all the while clutching a small drawstring bag under her shawl.

  It was almost nine o’clock when she reached the tavern near the waterside. The windowpanes were frosted over, but she could see the warm glow of lanterns from within. It was as cold a November as anyone could remember and it was not yet the time Christian men called Advent. Even she, who’d only heard stories of English winters from the older household slaves, knew that this weather was out of the ordinary.

  She paused for a moment, nervously fingering the silver collar about her neck while listening to the music coming from inside the tavern. There were voices raised in a sad song, an old lament from the plantations. A lone baritone made a sound as rich as hot chocolate. He was answered by a chorus of notes as sweet as sugarcane itself. The girl smiled, not through happiness or nostalgia, but to reaffirm her resolve. She patted the bag and as soon as the voices had died down and given way to applause, she entered the inn.

  The place was full of her own kind: Gold Coast Negroes, Coromantees, sold to the white traders by the Ashanti at the great slave market at Mansu. They were the best sort, the noblest, prized above others for their superior physique and courage. These were the men and women who had been wrenched away from their African homeland and doomed to a life in chains. Under their thick frockcoats or their shifts most of them still carried the scars of the lashes or the marks where the manacles cut their flesh. Some still walked with the stoop of slaves kept in a yoke so long that their spines bowed.

  On benches and pews, they sat around tables drinking rum and ale and listening to the songs. Tobacco smoke curled in the air; tobacco from the very plants that profited their white masters. A parrot, its feathers red and gold and blue, perched on one man’s shoulder as a girl fed it scraps. And there was a man sporting a hat modeled on a ship. These were the fortunate ones, the ones who had bought their own freedom or fought for King George against America in the war and been given passage to London to forge new lives for themselves. They could not learn a trade—a Lord Mayor’s edict had put paid to that fifty years before—but at least those present had all broken their slave bonds. She could join them. She could run away. But not tonight.

  In this strange country that was colder than stone, slavery was not permitted. All Englishmen were free and yet because she was only staying a short while, she still had to wear her collar. Her master regarded her as little more than a trinket and certainly of less value than his thoroughbred horse. So, for now, she would content herself with slipping out of his mansion after dark, unseen.

  Amid the cheering that night, as the singers returned to their seats, nobody noticed the girl, no one apart from the landlord at the pump, a mulatto, a large hoop piercing his ear lobe and a gold front tooth in his mouth. She caught his eye and, with a wordless greeting, he gestured her to a low door at the back of the bar. She felt a flutter in her stomach when it opened, as if a trapped bird was stirring inside her. The room was dimly lit with a single lantern dangling from the ceiling. The shutters were closed and the smell was earthy and damp. In the darkness she could make out bunches of dried herbs hanging from the beams. She narrowed her eyes and shivered, not with cold but fear. There were other objects, too; what looked like a snake was draped around a rafter and something round and white, a small skull, perhaps, sat next to it. On one wall there were shelves crammed with an assortment of oddities; lumps of coral, twisted animal horns, and jars of teeth.

  From over in one corner came an odd cackling sound, then a sudden flurry. Startled, she let out a faint cry as her eyes followed the movement. In the darkness she could make out two white cockerels pecking among the rushes on the floor.

  An old man sat at a table in the centre of the room, his head bowed. Around his bony shoulders he wore a goatskin, and a necklace of sharp teeth hung from his neck. His hair was grizzled and gray as pumice stone, but when he lifted his gaze a faint yelp escaped from her lips. Even in the half light she could make out his twisted features. She had heard this obeah-man was hideous, that his face looked as though it had been mauled by a lion—but still she could not hide her shock. One of his eyes was completely closed and where his nose should have been there was a small hole encrusted with pus. She had seen men like him before, blighted by the yaws. The disease had eaten into his flesh. He would have been banished from the plantation so that he could not infect the other slaves.

  He lifted his hand—she noticed it was crabbed—and gestured to the chair in front of him. A strange grunt issued from his mouth. Part of his lips had been eaten away, too, so that the black stumps of his teeth showed. He seemed unable to form words properly, as if the disease had eaten into his s
oft palate, making his tongue flap loosely in his mouth.

  Taking a piece of flint and a spill, he lit a candle in front of him. It cast a sickly light across the table. The girl sat down, but kept her eyes away from his face. They darted up to the rafters, or along the shelves, anywhere but on the old man’s grotesque features.

  Sensing her unease he sought to allay her fears. He knew he was a hideous sight. For many years now he had been reviled. In his makeshift hut on the edge of the cane fields he had managed as best he could, fending for himself, grubbing for worms in the red earth, living on plantains and coconuts. Even the fierce Maroons who dwelt in the mountains and raided the plantations carrying off women and livestock had left him alone. They feared he would bring misfortune on them. He would have died alone in the humid heat, his own flesh becoming food for the leeches and mosquitoes, had not the great snake god, Ob, looked kindly upon him. One day news came that he had been sold, along with all the other slaves on the estate, and he was eventually given his freedom. In London, just as in Jamaica, he was forced to hide himself away. But his power had not faded with the strength of the sun. It may be cold and gray and damp in the white man’s land, but his special gifts had not deserted him.

  The expressions of horror that his disfigured face prompted were the same, too, but he took no pleasure in frightening the young and vulnerable.

  “You want?” he asked her, lifting up the bottle of rum from the table. There were two cups next to it. He filled one and pushed it toward her but she shook her head.

  “Have na fear,” he said in a hoarse whisper. If he had been able to smile, he would have done so, but he could not, relying on his red-rimmed eye to reassure the girl. He guessed she was no more than fourteen full suns old and she was as nervous as a bride. They always were, those who sought him out. He downed his rum in one.