muscles. Once they stood back, Ure delicately set the tip of a rod against a deep-buried fibrous thread.
“The phrenic nerve,” he announced.
And the corpse’s chest heaved. Clydesdale’s whole inanimate form shifted as his ribcage rose and fell in a dreadful parody of breathing. More exclamations of amazement, and of horror. Some of those watching averted their eyes, or closed them, their morbid fascination exceeded by repulsion and unease.
“You see,” Ure said calmly and clearly, “that the mechanism of breathing remains intact after death, lacking only the animating force by which it was formerly enlivened.”
Though his voice was steady, his face was flushed with excitement, for he was as captivated as any by the wonders he performed.
And so the demonstration proceeded. The leg was made to straighten, jerking and kicking as if during a fit. A rod inserted into a notch cut above the orbit of Clydesdale’s left eye made his face contort and convulse in a mad dance of lopsided expression. At that, another woman was overcome, and helped from the chamber. Two men departed, one after the other, each pale of visage and with a hand pressed over his mouth. One was already gagging as he made for the door.
At the conclusion of Ure’s work, another white-clad figure, Professor Jeffray, took charge. He had the dead man laid out on a flat trolley, where he dissected out his every inner working, breaking open the ribcage to reveal the organs beneath, carving away until Mathew Clydesdale was rendered down to so many dissociated, exposed parts.
A state of numb shock settled across many of the observers. They shuffled out more slowly than many of them would have wished, constrained by the crowding to essay a patience few felt. Some lingered, though, after the corpse had been covered up with winding sheets, as the medical men busied themselves with tidying away the tools of their trade.
One—a tall, thin-faced and well-dressed man with a dispassionate intelligence alive in his eyes—descended from the steep slope of benches.
“Professor Ure,” the man said, and Ure looked up from his rolling of the knives into their cloth parcel.
“Sir?”
“A remarkable demonstration. Fascinating.”
“I am delighted you found it so. One hopes to inform and educate. Are you a medical man, sir? You have the look.”
One of the attendants was damping down the brazier behind them. It hissed and crackled, spinning a few sparks up into the air.
“No, not strictly a medical man. I have some slight experience in that field, but my researches have followed a rather different course in recent years. Still, the equipment you use is most interesting.”
He extended a languid arm towards the stack of discs, with all their panoply of wires and rods.
“Ah, the Voltaic pile?” Ure smiled.
“I have heard them described, of course, and seen illustrations, but this is my first opportunity to observe the thing itself. Copper and zinc plates, separated by plasterboard soaked in brine. Am I correct?”
“I believe it is charged with acid rather than brine, but in principle you are correct, yes. A quite remarkable contraption. I confess my facility with the construction and care of the things is somewhat limited. Carlyle there, on the other hand: an invaluable man. A natural and subtle talent when it comes to the machinery, whether electrical or mechanical, with which our world is becoming so crowded. He is employed here for that sole purpose, and I dare to think there is none in Scotland to match his expertise.”
“Carlyle, you say?” the other man murmured, staring with acute intensity at the indicated attendant, white- clad as the others, who was examining the Voltaic pile with proprietorial concern.
“Indeed. Edward Carlyle.”
“Tell me, Professor Ure—if the question is not unwelcome, of course—tell me, have you had any success in stimulating the heart?”
“No, no. Not as yet. The heart remains unresponsive. I have to say, I believe it is through stimulation of the phrenic nerve that the greatest successes will be achieved: it is my hope that it might one day even be possible to thereby restore life and its functions to the victims of drowning, suffocation. Even hanging. But we are scientists, you and I, eh? We must have a realistic view of these things. Our ignorance is reduced with every passing day—how could it be otherwise, when so many great minds are applied to the task?—but it remains prodigious.
“I rather fancy, if you will forgive me an aphorism, that we live not in the Age of Reason, as so many proclaim, but in that of Ignorance; for there is nothing reason so readily proclaims to the attentive mind as the extent of our ignorance. It transforms what were once mysteries, for ever inaccessible to human comprehension, into merely phenomena we have not yet explained, and thereby at once increases what we know and what we do not. Do you see?”
“Very astute, I am sure.”
“Yes. Well. If you are interested in natural philosophy, you should consider attending some of my evening lectures. Every Tuesday and Thursday at seven o’clock. All the most recent developments are explained.”
“I am an Edinburgh man. I am seldom in Glasgow, unfortunately; we came today only for your demonstration.”
“Oh, I see. I am flattered. I did not catch your name, sir.”
“No? Well, forgive me, I must have a word with my man Blegg over there. Do excuse me.”
Blegg cut a slight figure in comparison to his master, and at that master’s approach he was already sinking his head in obsequious expectation of instruction.
“Do you see the man beside the pile, Blegg? His name is Edward Carlyle. We require him, and his services, so you get yourself over there and give him my compliments. Convey my admiration of his work, and ask whether he would hear a proposal I have for him. One that could be of the utmost mutual benefit. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Blegg dipped his head once more, his hands clasped as if in submissive prayer.
“And make some enquiries. We will be requiring rooms for the night. It is too late to return to Edinburgh now.”
Blegg hesitated, unsure whether further commands would be forthcoming.
“Be about it, then,” his employer snapped.
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”
And Blegg scampered away to deliver the message.
The Dead Man
Edinburgh, 1828
The castle had colonised its craggy perch over centuries, embracing the contours of the rock with a network of angular walls, yards and barracks and gun platforms. Spilling eastwards from it, encrusting the long ridge that trailed down to the royal palace, was the Old Town of Edinburgh. There—packed inside the strict confines once set by the city’s defensive wall—soaring tenements vied for space, crowding one another, making labyrinths of the narrow spaces they enclosed. It was an aged place; not designed but accreted over centuries. Thickened and tangled by the passage of years.
A multitude of gloomy and overshadowed alleyways projected, like ribs, from the great street running down the spine of the ridge. They descended into the shallow valleys to north and south, sinking away from the cleansing breezes. Through these closes and wynds the people of this ancient Edinburgh moved, and in them they lived. And died.
Down there, where one of those closes gave out on to the Cowgate, a low and grimy thoroughfare, dawn revealed a dead man curled in the doorway of a shuttered whisky shop, his blood crusted in black profusion upon his clothes and on the cobblestones around him. Looking like something forgotten, or spent and casually discarded, by
