He stared at it as if it were a piece of art. He really did believe it was beautiful – his eyes glistened and I’d never seen him so in awe. For my part, I felt nauseous. Sicker than sick. Mabel had been around that stage in her pregnancy when I’d passed her on to her abortionist. Was it possible that we were admiring the baby that had been cut from Mabel? My whole body quivered at this horrific thought. Was my grip on reality so weak that I had delivered Mabel into the hands of someone who had then carved her insides out? Had I done this? My mind was so thick with fog, I simply couldn’t think straight or sensibly.
‘Where did you get it?’ I said.
‘From a dealer in a coffee house. You’d be surprised what you can buy in such places.’
‘I doubt I’d be surprised, Doctor, not by that,’ I said. I looked along the rest of the shelves, filled with organs split in half, body parts, veins and arteries filled with wax. The shelves were cluttered with every part that could have been extracted; still, sombre and silent, like my women were now. Yet they had all belonged to living creatures with aspirations and fears. ‘What is it about these specimens that fascinates you so? You must have seen many cadavers opened up, why keep collecting?’
‘Didn’t you ever find the carcass of an animal and poke it with a stick as a child?’ asked Dr Shivershev, almost before I’d finished talking. He turned to look at me and smiled. ‘I am willing to wager that you did, Mrs Lancaster.’
‘Yes, I’m sure I did.’
‘Well, you tell me, what compelled you to keep poking, to keep looking, to roll the carcass over and see what was on the inside?’
‘Curiosity, intrigue, I wanted to understand…’
‘So you have it,’ he interrupted. ‘You wanted to understand. And understanding is knowledge. Knowledge is progress, it doesn’t always make sense in the beginning, Mrs Lancaster. It can appear grotesque, amoral, perverse. It is difficult to imagine where the curiosity and intrigue will take you, but still, you want to see what’s on the inside because you wish to understand, you wish to know something.’
I thought of my macabre scrawling of the dead women’s last moments, and wondered if somehow, Dr Shivershev was talking about the same compulsion I had found in myself. The execution may be different, but the urges sounded as if they came from a similar place. He continued,
‘And why do we wish to understand, Mrs Lancaster?’
‘I don’t know, I… it is ultimately a selfish pursuit, I think. Perhaps to make ourselves feel better about … something.’
‘I think it is a way of fighting back?’
‘Against what?’
‘Not sure myself, you?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know.’
‘Well, if you find out, please let me know, I’ll spread the word, we can all move straight to confirming what this is all about and leave all the mess and blood and suffering that God seems compelled to throw at us and live in blissful rapture,’ he said.
‘Is she dead?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
Mabel, I nearly said. ‘The mother.’
‘Yes, of course.’ He laughed. ‘That’s the entire uterus.’ He tapped the glass. ‘And the cervix is that part there, it stretches out like the branch of a tree.’
‘How did the mother die?’
‘I have no idea. It was removed at autopsy. Besides, it’s not the mother I feel sympathy for.’
‘Why ever not?’ I looked at him, shocked by his lack of feeling.
‘There’s likely a man somewhere who lost a wife and child in one day. Now, I really must leave, Mrs Lancaster.’
28
After I was hustled out onto the street by Dr Shivershev, I felt more terrified and confused than ever. My head hurt. I wanted to be at home in my locked bedroom. I wanted my drops and my bed, but when I looked at my arms, I was ashamed at how I had lost myself, scratched my own arms red raw and not even noticed.
I walked. My brain was a bursting mess, all the threads tangled with each other. I couldn’t identify an end to pick up and follow. How could that specimen have found its way from Thomas’s attic to Dr Shivershev’s office without the two of them having some sort of relationship?
I walked until I found myself outside Thomas’s rented office on Harley Street, further up from Dr Shivershev’s. I rang the doorbell and when a bespectacled young clerk answered, I asked if Dr Lancaster was at work today.
‘No, I’m afraid not. Are you a patient?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘Would you like to make an appointment with one of our doctors?’
‘Where is Dr Lancaster?’
‘I’m sorry, but he doesn’t work here any more. If it’s him you really must see, you might try the London. I hear he still works there – on occasion.’
All that fantastical talk of becoming the finest surgeon in England, and he couldn’t even master the discipline of turning up to work every day. I wanted to laugh out loud at my idiocy. I had believed every yarn Thomas had spun for me, taken everything at face value. He’d made sure to persuade me that he was ambitious and driven, but it was all an illusion, words crafted to impress. Thomas had neither the talent nor the work ethic to succeed. Putting in the hard graft required to become a surgeon was just too expensive an investment for him. Too dirty, too boring and too painful. The only sustainable advantage he had was family money, doled out in careful rations by his sister, Helen. Only now did I realise that this too was suspicious. Why would a sister play banker to her brother? The answer was obvious: because he could not be trusted. I began to wonder if he might be
