The Heart Specialist (3 page)

I had not thought about this before. I was eleven when I set up the dissection room in my grandmother’s barn, and at that point I had been a complete novice. I do not believe I had touched a microscope before, but somehow I had known what to do. What I had not known I figured out by trial and error.

“No one taught me,” I said firmly. “I guess I watched when I was young. My father had a room set aside for dissections in our home.” I could picture it as clearly as my father’s face, although this last part I did not tell her. “It was full of jars on shelves. Not pickling jars like the ones I use,” I added quickly. “Real laboratory jars with thicker glass. Inside were his specimens — diseased hearts and lungs and such like. My father excised them. That was his job. There was also a skeleton, a real one, not much bigger than I was at four. It was pinned with metal staples and propped up on a pole. I used to play with it — until its arm broke.”

“You learned simply by watching him?”

I nodded. “Not just him. There were others too, his students from McGill.” I had not thought of this in years. There had been one young man who came quite often, I remembered. He used to eat dinner with us. I could not quite picture him, but I remembered that he was kind and brought me candies.

“And these students would dissect things under your father’s tutelage?”

“Dissect and draw and mount things. It’s what morbid anatomists do.”

“It obviously made quite an impression on you.”

I couldn’t make out Miss Skerry’s expression, but I nodded anyway. It was true that I had been impressed, but it was also true that excised tissue had been as natural to me as gabardine would be to a tailor’s child, or leather to a cobbler’s. It was only after we moved to St. Andrews East that it began to seem otherwise.

“These are all yours?” Miss Skerry asked, motioning to my collection of bugs and bones. She was not looking at me, but her face was dark and serious.

“Yes,” I said. I had decided to deal with her straightforwardly. Perhaps honesty in this initial interrogation would lighten my punishment.

Miss Skerry’s expression was still inscrutable. She did not look as though she liked my work, which I admit was improvised and rough, but at least she seemed interested. She approached my microscope and spent some time fiddling with it. She was not afraid of the instrument, handling it, I realized with a start, as if she knew what she was doing.

“You know the derivation, I suppose?” she said, one cheek pressed against the eyepiece. When I failed to respond she continued. “It’s from the Greek, Agnes.
Micros
means ‘small.’
Scopos
, ‘watcher.’ I don’t suppose you’ve picked up Greek out here in the barn as well as all this science?” She straightened up, and it was only then that I saw the smile in her eyes. Next thing I knew she was asking for slides.

In St. Andrews East the only person who knew anything about microscopes was the apothecary. Ordinary people, and certainly the women in our town, knew nothing about them, nor did they wish to learn. I was an exception, and I knew I had to keep these leanings strictly to myself. It had not occurred to me that one day I might meet another person in St. Andrews East with whom I could share my interest. I knelt down in the straw and pulled out a small metal box containing my father’s collection of permanent plates.

“Honoré Bourret,” said Miss Skerry, taking this box and reading the name printed on its cover.

I nodded and blinked. It had been close to ten years since I had heard that name pronounced.

“He left you quite a legacy.” She looked away from me then, gazing around the storage room. “And you have done him justice. In a sense, this is an homage.”

Until she articulated it that day I had not been aware of it. But it was true. I had built a dissection room a lot like my father’s Montreal anatomy laboratory in this unlikely setting. Miss Skerry was scrutinizing me. “Your father was a man of science. Am I to presume, Agnes, that you wish to be one too?”

I nodded again but then realized the mistake. “Not a
man
of science, Miss Skerry,” I corrected her. “After all, I am a girl.”

She broke into laughter, making me start. For the first time since her arrival her face was clearly friendly. “A girl of science, then,” she said. “Of course. That’s it exactly.” She laughed again. “You are original, Agnes White. No one can deny you that.”

Miss Skerry and I talked for some time that day. She explained that she, too, was the daughter of a man of learning. He had not been a scientist like my father but a school master at a private academy for boys. He had had a passion for natural history, which he’d shared with Miss Skerry as if she were one of his students. “He was constantly dragging me off to swamps and bogs to collect things,” she said, smiling at the memories. “And the school had a microscope, although I must confess it was primitive compared with yours.”

At some point that afternoon she discovered my jar of butterflies. “This is Honoré Bourret’s work too, I suppose?” she said, rotating it in the light. They were monarchs, big and brightly coloured. Their wings were spread so the markings could be seen. They bobbed up and down as if actually in flight.

This was the accomplishment of which I was most proud. Until that moment no other living being had seen it. “No,” I said firmly. “That is mine.”

INSTEAD OF BURNING THE
squirrel’s carcass that afternoon, Miss Skerry and I completed the dissection. She was excited when I showed her my illustrated volume on human anatomy, with which we managed to confirm my identification of the heart. Miss Skerry thought we should pickle it in brine, along with the kidneys and liver for future anatomical study.

We found the pancreas, which, according to the book, regulated sugar levels in the blood, and the gall bladder, which helped digest fats. Miss Skerry let me do all the cutting, reading out passages while I snipped and pinned. She did not mind blood, which was an enormous relief. But most importantly my fascination with the dead squirrel didn’t bother her. In her vision of things it was not morbid at all, at least not in the conventional sense of the word.

2

Around four thirty in the afternoon, when the sky outside the barn window began to dim, Miss Skerry and I took what was left of the squirrel and buried him under pine branches in the woods. Then we scrubbed my coat and the surface of the crate and cleaned up the barn. The microscope we put back in its hiding place, along with all my slides. Miss Skerry did not make me get rid of the specimens, although she confiscated the butterflies. I was not particularly worried as we made our way with them over the snow back to the house for tea. By then I trusted her. I knew she wished me well.

The Priory’s windows were glowing, and I realized suddenly that I was happy for the first time in a very long while. Happy and tired and sufficiently hungry to eat a horse. I had no idea what would happen next but I had a feeling that the day would not end badly.

Over tea, Miss Skerry spent some time explaining what a useful teaching tool the microscope could be. The best finishing schools in Europe were offering courses in natural history. The implement in the barn was of excellent quality, she assured my grandmother. It was an achromatic compound microscope manufactured by Beck, the best company in England. All this was said while toast was buttered and tea was drunk, as if we were talking about the weather or food.

Laure joined us. She was sitting on the couch, wearing her nightdress and a robe. Her face was milky white like the tea Grandmother had prepared for her.

“And what will Laure do while you teach Agnes the mysteries of natural history?” asked Grandmother. “You saw for yourself how delicate she is.”

“Laure does not need to study it. We can keep this work separate from what goes on in the schoolroom. Agnes has things arranged quite cleverly out in the barn.”

We were using the ordinary teapot and bone-china cups. I had just started in on my second piece of oatmeal bread slathered with my grandmother’s raspberry jam. “Chew,” ordered Grandmother. “You are swallowing it whole, Agnes, as if you were a boa constrictor and not a human being.”

She turned to the governess. “As you must have noticed, Miss Skerry, my granddaughter is still in many ways a child. My object in hiring you was to change this. Encouraging her to spend entire days alone in the barn, or worse yet, to trek through the countryside collecting things for microscopic inspection will not help her. Nor, I fear, will condoning the slaughter of squirrels.”

“I didn’t slaughter it,” I objected.

Laure made a sound like a kitten, jerking her head and spilling tea down her bathrobe. Grandmother mopped her and took away the cup. “This one’s got an excess of sensibility. The other’s got hardly any at all,” she said, sighing and settling back in her chair.

“From what I saw today,” said the governess, “Agnes has plenty of sensibility. She has an eye for beauty and patience for handiwork.” From beneath her chair she produced my butterflies. “Just look at these, Mrs. White. Your eldest granddaughter is a person of considerable gifts.”

Grandmother took the jar and stared. “Agnes did this?”

Miss Skerry said nothing. Grandmother turned to me. “You stitched them yourself?”

I nodded, forgetting to chew and swallowing a chunk of toast more or less whole.

“But she hates sewing,” Grandmother said. “She wouldn’t mend her frock if I paid her.”

“These are butterflies, not frocks,” said the governess.

For the first time Grandmother smiled. “So they are.”

“But sewing is sewing,” said the governess. “And here’s proof that she can do it.”

Grandmother said nothing. She raised the bottle and rotated it, causing the butterflies to bob up and down. “You are a compelling advocate,” she told Miss Skerry. “And you’re right. The butterflies are beautiful, and superbly sewn.” But her smile began to fade. “They do not, however, negate the squirrel. Bad enough, the scandal with her father hangs above us like a cloud. If word gets out what she was doing in that barn, Agnes will be done for.”

“Done for?” Laure repeated. She had just turned eight and often failed to get the gist of adult conversation.

“It’s a figure of speech,” explained the governess. “Your sister will be fine, Laure. I can assure you, nothing bad will happen.”

“Except spinsterhood,” said Grandmother. A faint blush spread up the governess’s neck and Grandmother lowered her eyes. “Forgive me, Georgina. That was uncalled for. But Agnes is unconventional enough without outside encouragement. What man will want her if I allow these studies in the barn?”

Laure was sitting very still, her slippered feet pressed together beneath her chair. “Perhaps the man she is to marry will appear tonight, Grandma,” she said in her sweet, small voice.

Miss Skerry looked confused. Not even I understood until Laure asked for the poem. She was trying to be kind, feeling guilty perhaps for having been a source of trouble in my life.

Grandmother smiled and patted her youngest granddaughter’s knee. “There’s no trouble raising you, is there, Laure?” She turned to Miss Skerry. “She’s just like my daughter when she was young. Same sweet disposition.”

“Today is Agnes’s name day,” Laure explained. “January twentieth. We always read John Keats before we go to bed.”

“Of course,” said Miss Skerry, who had told me on the path up from the barn that although she liked the sciences, the subject she loved most was literature. “‘The Eve of Saint Agnes.’”

“You know it?” asked Laure.

Instead of answering the governess stood up and began to recite.

“She knows it!” cried Laure. Even Grandmother smiled. She took the heavy volume
Poems of Our Land
from the bookcase and opened to an illustration of an old man in robes rubbing cold fingers, his breath emerging in puffy clouds.

“Shall I read, Georgina, or will you do the honours?”

Miss Skerry took the book and we pulled our chairs in close around her. I had always loved this poem. I listened as Porphyro stole through the halls of the enemy castle to find his sleeping love, the beautiful Madeline. It was the middle of January, Saint Agnes’s Eve, and when Madeline awakened, Porphyro was bending over her like the prince in
Sleeping Beauty
.

Miss Skerry did not need the book. She kept looking up and grinning at the three of us, pronouncing the last syllable of the heroine’s name as if she were a French princess and not an ordinary English girl.

Grandmother closed her eyes as Miss Skerry recited the last lines. “Well read. You have outdone yourself.” Then she looked at the clock in the hall and rose to her feet. I was studying the final illustration. In the light of a full moon two lovers raced on the back of a dark steed across a snow-swept field. Madeline was holding Porphyro about the waist, her hair streaming behind them like a cloak. I could almost feel my own legs gripping the horse, my front pressing hard against the boy’s spine.

“Dishes before sleep, Agnes,” said Grandmother, looking straight at me. “No shirking of chores tonight, no matter what your name is.”

“Agnes is the patron saint of virgins,” said Laure, beginning to giggle.