Heaven's Bones (28 page)

“It's nought, Davy. I've brought the doctor lady.”

Davy McPhee nodded and moved aside to let them in. Although his back was twisted, his shoulders were broad and his arms as thick and muscular as a gorilla's, and none of the toughs of Whitechapel cared to get close enough to come within his grip. There was little Davy had to fear as guardian of Mrs. Barnes' foyer, yet here he was shaking like a leaf.

It must be the ague, thought Sophie, as she mounted the steps. It was early yet for influenza to strike, but she had seen a few cases in the tenements, and there was little to do but pray that it was a less virulent strain than had been seen in the past.

“Do you have a fever, then, Davy?” she said, automatically reaching for the forehead where great drops of sweat were standing.

“There's nothing wrong with Davy but that he's had a bad scare,” said Lottie.

The cripple rubbed at his forehead with the back of a beefy hand.

“Too right, missus,” he said. “And begging your pardon, miss. But it weren't anything I was expecting to see of a night, and that's the truth. And anyone'd say the same, I'm sure.”

“Really, Mrs. Barnes,” snapped Sophie, irritated by the strangeness of the circumstances and the loss of her warm bed. “If you'd tell me why I'm needed, I would be most appreciative.”

An odd look flashed across Lottie Barnes' face. Fear, and anger, and something else—almost satisfaction. I know something you don't know, the expression seemed to say. You'll find out—but for as long as it takes you to climb my stairs, you will have no idea what you're about to see. And I will.

It was gone in an instant, and the doyenne of Petticoat Lane was as implacable as always.

“Upstairs,” she said. “Davy found a girl wandering the alley tonight, and he brought her back here because he thought she was hurt, and when he got a good look at her in the light he got his wind up. He'll be all right. But the girl … I don't know how to describe it, Miss Sophia. You'd better come look.”

Something about her tone made Sophia's skin prickle, and she was glad of the staunch solidity of Janet at her back.

The carpet on the stairs was worn but relatively clean, and gas lamps burned low in the alcoves instead of candles. Mrs. Barnes kept a tidy house, by East End standards, and although whores inarguably dossed here and brought the occasional punter, there was a dignity about the place that no one cared to trifle with.

As she and Janet followed Lottie to the second floor, Sophie felt an unwarranted strangeness to the place. It was too quiet: There ought to be chatter down the hall as girls borrowed each other's hairpins and giggled over the day's adventures.

At the landing a door in a long hallway of similar doors cracked open a fraction, stayed open long enough for the occupant to glance them over, and then shut too. Three rooms down a door gaped open like a maw, and a woman leaned against the sill, clearly waiting for them.

When she saw them she started toward them eagerly.

“Any change?” said Lottie, forestalling the babble that came to her lips.

The woman shook her head. Angie, Sophie thought. She'd treated her for a torn perineum some time ago. She couldn't remember her last name. Maybe she'd never given one.

“No, missus,” she said. “She's just sitting there, still as can be.”

Sophie's irritation returned. Perhaps this mysterious patient's face had been beaten to a pulp—but they'd all seen worse. It was
no occasion for this creeping about and whispering and cryptic statements. She shouldered her way past Angie, not taking the effort to be polite.

It was a bare little room, though neat enough, and the dim flicker of an oil lamp on the bedside table cast a pale yellow glow on the occupant. She sat on the edge of the bed, a young woman of perhaps twenty. Her face, thin with enormous dark eyes that were shiny as a spider's, was devoid of expression.

There were dark circles under her eyes, but otherwise no sign of damage. Her brunette hair had been shorn close to her head and was growing out in ragged layers. In her absolute stillness there was something of a nun about her; she didn't seem to respond to anything in the room, not even Sophie placing her bag on the bed beside her. A plaid shawl was draped around her shoulders, covering her upper body; she also wore a full petticoat that was muddy at the hem, as if she'd wandered the streets without bothering to lift it out of the way of the city's grime.

Her feet peeped from beneath the petticoat—bare toes: she was unshod.

Had she been assaulted? If so it was odd that her face was untouched, although that would go far to explain her near-catatonic state.

“It's Lydia Dare—Gummige, her name was properly, but she went by her mother's.” Angie's low tones, almost a whisper, at her shoulder made Sophie jump. “I haven't seen her for near on three years—thought she'd gone to the country. She said she had family there.”

“You said she was hurt,” said Sophie, turning to Lottie. The older women merely looked back at her, then flicked their eyes back to the woman on the bed, who had not stirred or said a word.

Feeling like she was being tested under the stare of Professor McPherson, Sophie moved to the woman's—Lydia's—side.

“Lydia,” she called gently. “Lydia, I'm going to examine you. Is that all right?”

The woman blinked, but that was her only response.

Sophie placed a cautious hand on her shoulder, feeling the bones underneath. As she bent close, she became aware of a strange smell, unnerving in that room. It was a smell she was familiar with, certainly—but in the hospital, in the examining room, in the surgery and dissection chamber—the antiseptic smell of alcohol and disinfectant. In Mrs. Barnes' lodging house that smell was as out of place as the whiff of manure in St. James' Cathedral.

“She must have been to hospital recently,” she said, mostly to herself, as she cautiously loosed the shawl that Lydia wore and drew it away from her unresisting body, exposing what lay beneath.

She heard Janet gasp behind her. Angie made a choking sound. Beside her she felt Lottie tense and brace herself.

“Sweet Jesus Christ in Heaven,” said Dr. Sophia Huxley.

At her exclamation Lydia turned her head and stared at Sophie with her too-bright, insect eyes. Without the shawl she was naked to the waist.

Sophie felt frozen in that gaze, pinned like an insect herself. Her brain was spinning like a cogwheel that had slipped and spun by itself, out of true with its fellows.

How? she thought. How is it possible that this woman is alive?

The flesh and skin between each of Lydia's ribs had been carved away, so that each bone stood out like a skeleton's. It looked like extra skin had been stitched around each rib, so that they were clad in scar tissue. On Lydia's spare frame it looked like a barbarian kind of lacework.

Sophia drew closer. The smell of antiseptic grew stronger.

At first she thought the woman's stomach had caved in for lack of food, but now she saw—How? But, how—that like the skin and
muscle between the ribs, the flesh of her stomach had been scooped away, leaving a concave surface.

“Miss,” said Janet, her voice trembling despite her iron control. “I think you should send for Mr. Donovan.”

Sophie took a minute to consider this, listening to the woman's slow, steady heartbeat, staring abstractedly at Janet's somber face.

She was very likely right. This situation was beyond her.

Sophia Huxley's relationship with Artemis Donovan was a strange one. The women who were too often her patients had little trust in the police, although Artemis had gained a certain grudging regard in the stews of Whitechapel, for more than once he'd made it clear to certain gentlemen with a taste for the rough trade that they were not welcome there. And he had a gentle way of speaking to a girl, as if he'd forgotten she was shop-worn and street-soiled, as if he was talking to a girl from his own Cornwall village, as if her parents and his had sat together in church of Sundays year after year.

Sophia knew that if she informed the police of every crime against human flesh that was committed in her domain, she'd lose the fragile trust, hard-won, that the women of Whitechapel had in her—that she'd fought so hard for, with competent care and gentle hands and an understanding nature. It wasn't easy. What she so often saw horrified her, and more than once she'd considered giving up her profession and retreating to the safe confines of home.

More than once she'd had to remind herself how hard she'd fought for her medical degree and the right to practice. How hard so many women had fought—Elizabeth Blackstone and the Edinburgh Six, and those that struggled now for acceptance in medical schools across the country; across the world.

But a few times, yes, she'd sent for the tall, soft-spoken detective, when she felt something must absolutely be done and the police engaged. Once it was with the consent of her patient. Once it was not, and she'd bought herself a torrent of abuse as a result.

This, yes. This was beyond her ken. The case of Lydia Dare was hard enough to comprehend medically. When she tried to imagine the person who could do this, who could carve another human being like a block of soapstone …

“Yes, Janet,” she said, straightening and coiling away her stethoscope. “I think Mr. Donovan should be informed. I'll tell Lottie—she might object, in her house.”

But Mrs. Barnes, although she paled and her jaw clenched at the idea of the police in her house, had little opposition after all. This case was nothing she could control with the force of her formidable personality, or with a word and a coin to the right person.

Besides, it was Mr. Donovan, after all.

Her examination over, Sophie waited for Artemis in the hallway with a nervous tension that was not altogether due to the horror on the other side of the door. In her previous encounters with the detective she'd had to fight a certain tightening of her belly to maintain an air of cool composure, and her hands would sweat in a most annoying manner. She supposed that despite her upbringing and respect for the laws of the land that she had a primitive desire to break the law—and that a part of her feared Artemis would search the impulse out.

She admitted of no other reason for the clammy palms or the flutter beneath her diaphragm.

She heard his tread up the stairs and had time to compose herself, so that when Janet and Mrs. Barnes appeared with the detective following she was able to maintain a suitably icy demeanor appropriate to a medical professional, despite the expression in his warm eyes and his smile when he saw her.

“It must be something extraordinary, to have you send for me voluntarily, Doctor Huxley,” he said, hat in hand. Silently Lottie Barnes took it from him, as if for all the world he'd simply been
another gentleman seeking an evening's entertainment in her house. “And for Mrs. Barnes to look so foreboding, and Davy McPhee to have the wind up—what have you got yourself into this time?”

It was hard not to smile back, but she managed it.

She opened the door and nodded. “I don't know what to make of it. It's impossible, medically—and yet … I've no idea what to do. Take her to St. James', certainly—I'm sure she'll not want for attention there. But somebody's done this to her, and they must be found, Mr. Donovan. They must be stopped.”

Artemis frowned and moved past her into the room, stopping when he saw the woman sitting so quietly on the bed. Sophie had covered Lydia up again with the shawl when she had finished examining her and as Lydia's face was untouched, it seemed that nothing was amiss.

Sophie crossed to the bed and gently removed the shawl from Lydia's shoulders, exposing her body to the detective's view. She heard the sound he made as he suddenly sucked in his breath.

It was more than simply the elegant brutality of the girl's injuries, the deliberate nature of the mutilations, the ominous, indefinable
purpose
in the way she'd been carved out and allowed to heal.

It was also the shock of recognition, the nearly physical blow of knowing he'd seen this man's work before.

Only once, and many years before. And compared to this, it had been unpracticed, amateur work. Not far from here, in a Whitechapel alley, when he was a new-made detective, when he'd been told to turn his attentions to more important matters than a gutted prostitute, when he'd had no power to argue. It came back in a rush—the girl laid down in the trash of the streets with an incongruous tenderness, her body cut open with a clinical skill, for what purpose he couldn't begin to imagine.

Somewhere, somehow, this man had honed his skill. Somehow he'd become the master of an unspeakable craft.

And this time, whatever it took, whatever the cost, Artemis would find him.

Sophie was still standing at Lydia's side, ready to step in between them if he came too close. It was something he liked about her, although he'd never tell her—the fact that her patients were foremost with her, that she still could treat them with respect and gentleness, that she would protect them with every ounce of her being. She had years ahead of her, of seeing the slow grind of poverty and despair destroy every tender feeling, years before a self-protective cynicism took hold.