wonder about their lives, their suffering. He somehow doubted that such thoughts greatly troubled Dr. Knox.
“Are you a religious man?” Knox asked at length, his tone much moderated.
“No, sir. I am not.”
“Very well. You should then, being rational, be aware that the light of reason has shone brightly in this city these last fifty years. Great men have walked these streets, and their learning, their insight, in every field of thought from the arts to science to philosophy has illuminated all the land and driven superstition into exile. The flame is less bright now, perhaps, but still there are some men of exceptional talents, with the will to feed it. You do your city, and your nation, no service if you seek to traduce the reputation of those who strive to keep it lit.”
“That is not my intent, sir,” Quire said blandly. “I know only that we cannot have murder going unanswered, and that I am required, by duty and inclination alike, to find those responsible.”
“Again, you presume some knowledge upon my part that does not exist.”
“They are resurrectionists, sir. Lifters of corpses. It’s a matter of common sense to make enquiry of those through whose hands a great many corpses pass.”
“A very common kind of sense, indeed,” snorted Knox. “I smell the prejudice of the mob in it. The irrationalities and misguided sensitivities that would set shackles upon scientific endeavour. Let me make it clear, Sergeant: corpses do not pass through my hands, as you so casually put it. They receive the attention of my knife, and such skills as I possess, for the education of hundreds—many hundreds—of young men who set a not inconsiderable value upon it.
“Paterson, my doorkeeper, manages the supply of cadavers, and I can assure you they are acquired by means that need be of no concern to you and your ilk. Now, if you will excuse me, I have matters requiring my attention. Be so good as to give me some peace, would you?”
Knox rose at that, and came briskly out from behind the desk, extending an open hand. It was, Quire supposed, the politest dismissal he could have hoped for in the circumstances. He stood, and shook the proffered hand. Knox’s grip was firm, almost excessively so. It was the grip of a man unfamiliar with the inhibitions of self- doubt; or inured to them by force of will.
“You do not recall me, sir, I suppose?” Quire said.
“Recall you?” Knox frowned as he released Quire’s hand from its imprisonment. “Why, have we met before?”
“You saved my life; or my arm, at the least.”
“Did I? In what circumstances?”
“Brussels. Thirteen years ago now.”
“Ah.” Knox nodded slowly. “Waterloo. Yes, there was a good deal of work for me there. You should have introduced yourself as a fellow veteran of those struggles in the first place, man. Why did you not tell me sooner?”
“It was not to the point of my visit, sir. And I did not expect you to remember.”
“Your arm, you say. Let me see, then.”
Taken aback, Quire found himself quite motionless, and with no words offering themselves to his tongue.
“Come, man,” Knox said with a rather cold smile. “Allow the craftsman to inspect his former works. You say I saved the limb. Let me see it, then.”
Quire tried to pull back the sleeve of his jacket, but the material was too thick and tight.
“Take it off, take it off,” Knox muttered.
Quire did so, and draped the jacket over the back of a chair. He rolled up his shirt sleeve to expose his left forearm, and turned it—with an uneasy tightening of embarrassment in his chest—so that Knox could examine the scars on its inner face.
“Burns,” the doctor murmured as he took hold of Quire’s wrist and ungently lifted the limb closer to his eye.
The skin was thick and messy and hairless, with an unnatural shine to it like wax that had hardened and smoothed in mid-flow. Ridges and furrows knotted themselves over the surface. In the midst of that wound, another, more distinct, resided: ugly and slightly raised, like a corrupted boil.
“And this?” Knox asked.
“You extracted a ball fragment, sir.”
“Ah. Well, you were fortunate, then. To work amidst burns, digging around in there—nine times in ten I’d think to lose the limb. Or the entire patient.”
“They told me afterwards that you prevented them from amputating it. You thought it might be saved. Removed not just the bullet but several pieces of my uniform from the wound.”
“Yes, yes. Often overlooked. It is rarely the lead itself that carries rot into the flesh, but what it takes with it. Very well. Cover yourself up.”
Quire pulled down his sleeve with relief, his left hand making a fist of its own volition, tensing against shivers of pain in his arm.
“Not my best or neatest work,” Knox said, handing Quire his jacket. “But that is to be expected: I was learning my trade then, on the army’s coin, and there were a great many demands on my time over those few days. That Corsican dwarf made sure of that, eh?”
“He did.”
“Well, luck was with you. And an astute surgeon, dare I say? Or one filled with the hubris of untrammelled youth, in any case.”
Knox’s manner was greatly mellowed, perhaps by self-importance, perhaps by fond reminiscence. Quire shared neither, and had no memory of any luck worthy of the name attending upon him in those days. Quite the reverse, in fact.
“Come, then,” said Knox, opening the great panelled door and ushering Quire out to the head of the stairway. That his teaching practice was successful, as Christison had intimated, was beyond doubt. The oak staircase, the paintings upon the walls, the wide entrance hall below, all put Quire in mind of the house of some noble family; and this was not even Knox’s residence, merely his place of teaching.
“Paterson!” Knox shouted, leaning over the banister and peering down.
There was no response from his doorkeeper.
“Ach, that man,” muttered Knox. “Unreliable staff are a blight upon every enterprise, Sergeant, you mark my words.”
“I will make my own way out, Dr. Knox,” Quire said.
He glanced back as he descended the wide stairs, but Knox was already gone, retired to his desk and his gallery of silent specimens.
Robinson’s Last Day
Adam Quire’s dreams, when he remembered them at all, had once been of fire, darkness and little else. Never, in other words, conducive to a restful slumber. Now, they were fiercer still. Teeth and shadows and horrors unnamed. He would come roughly out of sleep, trembling or sometimes rigid with morbid fear, to find himself entangled in his sheets and blankets.
Quire awoke, unrested, in just such a state of disorientation. Only the intrusion of the mundane upon his senses finally shook him free of the nightmare’s grasp. He heard the haberdasher’s wife on the floor above berating her husband—the disappointed tune to which their whole marriage was sung, as far as he could tell. He smelled, with the unique clarity of early morning, before familiarity blunted the pungency of their fumes, the breweries.
By such small, insistent statements, the world demanded his attention. The hallucinations of his sleeping mind retreated. In their wake they left only a dull fretwork of pain deep in his left forearm: a stubborn memento of his thrashing about. He dispelled it by making a fist, then flexing his fingers, grinding the thumb of his stronger right hand into the palm of his left.
Still wrapped in a thick, heavy woollen blanket, he sat on the edge of the bed and hooked out the pisspot from beneath it with his foot. While he urinated, his gaze drifted over the loaded French pistol he now kept at the
