A butler appeared, looking parched and skeletal.
“Dr. Palsgrave cannot be disturbed.”
Polishing the copper star with my coat sleeve did the trick. He sighed, looking grieved at the sad pass New York had finally come to.
“Very well, then. Dr. Palsgrave is lecturing at New York University. You will find him there,” he droned while the door was shutting.
By the time I’d arrived at Washington Square, it was nearly midmorning. The sun was perched high over the trees, and students streamed from place to place like ants in their brightly colored hose and squashed hats. Fresh-cheeked and worried ill over nothing whatsoever. The third one I hailed pointed me to the medical lecture hall and public dissection forum. I set off, feeling about thirty years older than him and not the more probable five or six.
The door to the hall creaked when I pulled it. Light gushed through the opening, glancing wildly off the dust in the air. Down in the central lecture pit it was pretty dim, though the twelve-foot windows hadn’t any curtains over them and a number of lamps glowed. A few wigged heads turned to glance at me, but soon shifted away again. Dr. Palsgrave stood behind a corpse with a hole drilled in its head and a metal hook screwed into it, the hook tied to a rope with a pulley. He tugged, raising the body’s torso upright from the head. The ribs were already spread wide, skin peeled off like an orange rind, mouth grinning in unlikely good will.
“And so you see,” he continued as I descended, “that the thoracic cavity does not end abruptly at the height of the uppermost rib. It allows the thymus, trachea, esophagus, and the longus colli muscles to extend higher, for one, but we shall continue to focus upon the left common carotid artery’s progression upward into the skull for the moment.”
“I need to speak with you, Doctor,” I said at the bottom of the stairs.
The little man looked up. Golden eyes molten, corseted spine crackling with annoyance. Then he returned his full attention to science and science alone.
“I am
busy at present.
Can you not see that? As if enough trouble has not come of this so-called police force—”
“It would be very, very much
better
,” I insisted, “if you took me someplace private.”
“Out of the question! I would be
wasting
a very valuable speci—”
“Get one of your fellow doctors to take over the lecture. I’ll wait.”
Seething, Dr. Palsgrave did as I asked. With an angry flick of his wrist, he led me out of the lecture hall and into another interior corridor. His posture balletic, his white whiskers mad as a cat’s, his formal coat very brushed and very blue, muttering infamies at me all the while. When we’d reached the end of the passage, he threw open a door—which also, I noted, had his name engraved above it.
Dr. Palsgrave had a second alchemy lab at the school, I realized when we entered the office. And he was in the midst of an experiment, an assistant wearing a robe hovering over the delicate equipment. Retorts were burning away, little fires dancing with the liquid metal above them. There were bits of tissue pinned to boards, vials filled with mysterious poisons. I hadn’t the slightest notion what Dr. Palsgrave was about, but it all looked to be so wonderfully full of
promise.
As if he could see a future where some as-yet-undiscovered substance made a fraction of a child whole again. I dreamed—just for a moment—that I was the very person to watch him do it.
It wasn’t true. But I wanted it to be.
“Please leave us, Arthur,” the doctor sighed.
When his assistant had quit us, I turned to face Dr. Palsgrave. Feeling pretty awkward about procedure under the circumstances, but not able to waste any time either.
“I know,” I said quietly. “About the kinchin. The burial ground outside the city is yours. I need to talk to you about it.”
A puppet with cut strings would have been a kinder sight. His eyes flew back to me and I could see whole civilizations, cities that he’d built and cherished and planned for, like the model of an entire world, all crumbling. Dr. Palsgrave turned white. And then he started panting, his hand over his heart shaped into a claw.
“Stop,” I gasped, lurching toward him. “I never meant to say it like that. If I could have done the same, with your education— I just need to know I’m right, Dr. Palsgrave. Tell me I’m right and stop shaking so.”
It took several more seconds, but he did. I’m not in any particular sense good at lying. But I’m extremely good at telling the truth, so he believed me. He shuddered a few more times, and then out came a toxic-green kerchief worth ten dollars as he wiped the sweat off his neck. Quickly, I set myself to extinguishing all the open flames, and then returned to stand before him.
Lifting both his hands, Dr. Palsgrave dragged them down his white side whiskers. “How did you find me out?”
“Mercy Underhill gave a piece of it away, though she never meant to. You told me the rest yourself. And you were seen.”
“
Seen?
By whom?”
“By a girl who lives in a nearby cherry orchard. She never spied your face, but she saw your carriage. I’m afraid she’s already told the chief of police that it carries the insignia of an angel. But it doesn’t, of course. It’s the staff, the snakes with the wings. A caduceus. What else would you paint on your coach?”
I hold Dr. Palsgrave in the highest regard. And so I don’t wish to dwell over the moments just after he was found out. He really isn’t a dignified man, apart from the corset. And I wish that his version of the world would come true quicker. So I’ll just report the first sensible thing he asked me after I’d fetched us both chairs and he’d collapsed into one.
“When did you begin to suspect me?”
“Honestly, I never suspected you until about three hours ago. But I’d started asking myself why any man would do such things, and I’d several other … pointers. When did you start performing autopsies on recently dead kinchin?”
“Perhaps five years ago,” he murmured. “I never lied to you when
I did the autopsy on the children from the common grave. They ranged from five years dead to recent, and somehow you fathomed—”
“That you knew each and every one of those kids, having first cut them open and taken which organs you pleased,” I supplied for him. “Your reaction to the very first corpse ought to have posted me. Liam. You were terrified that we’d called you in to examine him on purpose, you thought it a ruse meant to force a confession. The reasons you suggested why someone would saw a body open were ridiculous, Doctor. Swallowed a valuable? You an anatomist and giving every reason save for an autopsy. I’ll grant your autopsies don’t look a bit like most I’ve seen—they’re
wider,
yes, along the rib cage? The cut below the breastbone? They let you see better?”
He nodded exhaustedly.
“They were never meant to be the symbol of the cross at all. But for all they look so foul, you couldn’t expect me to believe they were
cannibalism,
or—”
“I didn’t know what to tell you. It was all so sudden, so horrible, and putting the body of that child in a … in that
trash bin
… was the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he whispered. “I’ll never forgive myself for it.”
“Tell me from the beginning,” I asked him calmly. “I’ll start it off for you. Bodies are extremely scarce. Bodies of kinchin specifically, and the fresh deceased sort you needed for your studies still more rare. What sane parent would ever hand their dead kinchin over to you to be hacked open? But in the bawdy houses …” I paused. “They fall sick pretty often.”
Dr. Palsgrave passed a hand over his mouth, wincing. “The bodies of kinchin are anatomically very different from those of adults, and when I could not obtain the materials for study I needed, I grew … morose. I had lost so
very
many already, Mr. Wilde, and so very
long
before their time. I could not erase brothels from New York, but I thought I saw my way to a solution five years ago when a little
girl under my care passed away due to a severe heart defect. Her madam in life, Silkie Marsh, asked me whether I had any use for the remains, as she was in poor straits and could not afford to bury the girl herself.”
Dr. Palsgrave had protested that he’d no right to the body, and that the university would surely demand answers if he tried to dissect an unidentified corpse there. But Silkie Marsh was quick on the trigger with a solution. He could return that night, masked or hooded. She would clear out a space and a tarp and put a table in her cellar. All for just fifty dollars. Dr. Palsgrave could bring whatever other equipment he required, and spend as long as he liked at his work.
“I suppose when you cautioned Madam Marsh that you would need a way to dispose of the dissected remains without anyone getting peery, she offered another compromise,” I ventured. “You’d supply the carriage, for who would question a doctor, and she’d summon the manpower.”
“Their names were Scales and Moses,” Dr. Palsgrave answered. “They were most efficient about the burials outside of town. It was good work, Mr. Wilde, I vow that it was
good
work. Finally I could perform dissections that meant something to me, to the
children
.”
It went on for five years, all told. When a kinchin-mab died, Dr. Palsgrave was summoned back. He paid his fifty dollars. He performed his life’s work. He saw that the child was given a burial, each and every time, no half measures. He thanked them aloud as they were being put into the shallow ground. It was no shallower than any other pauper’s grave, after all. And they were doing good meanwhile, all in the meanwhile, every sin atoned for during that meanwhile. Dr. Palsgrave never doubted it.
There had been nineteen dead, all told, the results of pneumonia and of fevers and of pox and contagion. Then one day Dr. Palsgrave had arrived in his black hood, the kinchin had all been bid to stay
in their rooms, and he and Silkie Marsh had gone to carry Liam’s body down to the cellar chamber. When they entered the room, it looked like a slaughterhouse.
“Liam suffered from pulmonary trouble,” Dr. Palsgrave explained, “and I was performing alchemical experiments using blood. I still am, the results have been …” He trailed off, abstracted and achingly hopeful momentarily, and then snapped back to earth. “But no matter. I bid Madam Marsh that—should the unfortunate child fail to recover—she should inform me as soon as possible, for I wanted to drain the blood. There are French researches suggesting that blood contains elements of metal, and I wanted to see if I could distill it into the rarefied essence of itself. The notion of purifying blood is very promising. I was duly informed, raced to the brothel when the boy met his end, and siphoned the unfortunate child’s blood into a bowl. So hurried was I, I extracted it in his sickroom rather than using the basement. But then I found that I had stupidly forgotten the vessel I meant to carry it away in, and so I rushed back to the carriage.”
“The room was left dark when you did,” I said. “Why?”
Amazement and fear vied for control of his features. “How can you know that? I took my lantern with me. I tried to be as discreet as possible upstairs, whenever I was forced to do any research in proximity to the other children. I came back within three minutes, but—”
“But you walked into a butchery. Someone had found you out, someone who’d spilled the blood everywhere.”
“Madam Marsh stifled a scream, and I fear that I myself experienced a
severe
palpitation.” Dr. Palsgrave pinched his fingers over his nose regretfully. “It may have played a part in my actions. I cannot say. We tracked footmarks into another bedroom and found the window open, a makeshift ladder tied to the catch. Madam Marsh ordered me to dispose of the body, without making any other employment from it, just as she demanded that I help her scrub the
blood from the floor. Moses and Scales were in the house within twenty minutes.”
“But then you rebelled.”
“I
could not do it
,” he gasped, clenching his fist upon his knee. “To
waste
a child’s shell that way, the blood being lost, and I needed a spleen. I am sorry I told you it was rats. I demanded use of the cellar. Silkie Marsh refused at first. But then I told her I would never darken her door again if she failed to give me ten minutes, that our entire arrangement would be off for good and all, and so she allowed it.”
“Go on.”
Dr. Palsgrave’s mouth turned down, hiding something sour and pained and weary-seeming. “I took the organ. We bundled the poor kinchin into my carriage. We were headed north to the burial site, but I freely confess that we had gotten only as far as Mercer Street when the most awful
panic
overtook me. I had spent ten additional minutes that Madam Marsh had claimed could be disastrous. The evidence was at my very feet, and a witness—God only knew who, I never was told precisely how many children she employed at any given moment—was at large, and probably frightened to death, the poor creature. I stopped by a trash receptacle outside a chophouse.”
He stopped dead.
“I … it will
never
leave off haunting me, Mr. Wilde.”
I believed him, too. It’s no easy lay to look that stricken over a point of honor when you’re not honorable.
“Silkie Marsh learned what you did from Moses and Scales. Did she object to how close the body was to her ken?”
“No, or if she did, she never mentioned it. Next morning, she informed me that the missing child had been found. She told the kinchin that Liam had gone through a bloodletting before he peacefully passed, and the child believed her, thank heaven. She’d
handled the situation, and all could go back to normal, Madam Marsh said.”
“Knowing all about the deaths, the letters must have confounded you even though they did deflect attention from you,” I hazarded. “The only one printed publically, the Hand of the God of Gotham message in the
Herald
, you managed to keep quiet through. But then you were sent something very sinister in tone. Addressed to you personally, and you the man behind it all in fact. It gave you a scare. You couldn’t imagine what to make of it, so you sought me out, knowing you couldn’t destroy the thing and keep a clear conscience. Then you saw Bird Daly.”