Resurrectionist

scream pierced the night.

“Sweet Mary!” Jago spun round.

The scream sounded as if it had come from below them. It was followed by a second of equal intensity and another after that, both in quick succession. By which time, Hawkwood had thrown the petticoat down and was running for the stairs with Jago in close pursuit.

They were halfway down the stairwell when the screams ended abruptly. Hawkwood wasn’t sure what was the more disturbing, the screams or the uncanny silence that followed.

Jago stared about him wildly. “Where the hell did that come from? We looked, damn it! There’s no one here!”

Jago was right. They had looked.

And then, the moment they hit the ground floor, Hawkwood saw it. “There!”

Jago swore. There was another doorway, tucked deep in the shadows beneath the stairs, almost hidden from view. They’d both missed it the first time around.

Another room, small and airless, but with signs of recent occupation: on the table stood an empty Madeira bottle and some mugs. Several news-sheets lay scattered across the tabletop. Beyond the table was an opening that led off towards the rear of the property. The house, Hawkwood was starting to realize, was like a rabbit warren. They ducked through the aperture and found themselves in yet another cramped room. A row of coat hooks ran along one wall. The only notable item of furniture was an old wooden desk.

They both saw it at the same time: a pale ribbon of light at the base of the far wall.

With a nod of agreement from Jago, Hawkwood stepped forward and hauled the door open.

It was smaller in scale than the operating room at Guy’s, but the design was almost identical: a series of wooden benches rising in semi-circular tiers towards the ceiling. In the well of the amphitheatre, framed within the light of a hundred candles, two men dressed in shirtsleeves and bloodstained aprons were bent over an oval table. Between them lay the naked body of a young woman.

At the sound of footsteps, the two men turned, faces frozen in shock.

“It’s over, Colonel,” Hawkwood said. “Put the knife down. Move away.”

Titus Hyde stood perfectly still.

Hawkwood looked at Hyde’s companion. “That goes for you, too, Surgeon Carslow.” Hawkwood raised the pistol. “And that’s an order, not a request.”

Slowly the two men stepped away. Jago gave a sharp intake of breath as the body on the table came into view.

A sheet covered the lower half of the woman’s torso. If it had been placed there to preserve the victim’s modesty, it had been a gesture too late. In a scene almost indistinguishable from the autopsy in Surgeon Quill’s dead house, Hawkwood saw that the woman’s chest had been cut open. The flesh on either side of the incision was on the point of being peeled back. Had her screams not told him already, Hawkwood did not need to be informed that Molly Finn was beyond help. In death, her young face, framed by her mane of blonde hair, looked remarkably serene; an expression undoubtedly in sharp contrast to the fear and terror she must have felt in the moments before Hyde cut into her with his scalpel. Wordlessly, Hawkwood pulled the sheet over the rest of her.

His eyes moved to the second table and the object that rested upon it. There was a covering sheet here, too. Cautiously, Hawkwood lifted it away and found himself looking down into a shallow metal trough. The trough was filled with a honey-coloured liquid. Immersed in the liquid was another body.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Hyde said. There was a note of pride in his voice.

The corpse might have been beautiful once, Hawkwood supposed; perhaps in the full bloom of life. It had arms and legs and breasts and was undoubtedly female, but beautiful wasn’t a word he would have used to describe what he was looking at now. The flesh had the appearance of melted wax. A patchwork of stitching, clearly visible along the arms, thighs, hips and hairline, indicated where the sections of skin excised from the Bart’s cadavers had been transplanted. An incision had been made in the chest wall and the skin had been folded away, following the same procedure Hyde had been in the midst of performing on Molly Finn. But whereas Molly Finn’s face still retained its colour and the freshness of youth, the face on this body looked about a thousand years old. It reminded Hawkwood of the monkey head he’d seen in one of the jars upstairs.

On the floor of the operating room, adjacent to the second table, was a cluster of cylindrical objects, about a dozen in all, each approximately half the height of a man. They were columns of metal discs. The top of each stack was connected to its immediate neighbour by a strand of copper wire. Hawkwood did not need to be told what he was looking at. It was an electrical battery.

Hawkwood swallowed bile. He turned. “You really believe you can perform miracles, Colonel?”

Hyde held up his blood-stained hands. “With these, yes.”

“You’re not God, Colonel.”

“No, I’m a surgeon.”

“And that gives you the right to commit murder? I thought physicians took some kind of oath.”

“She’s my daughter. She was taken from me. I have the power to restore her. I can make her whole again. I can turn back time.”

“Daughter? She’s not your daughter, Colonel. She never will be. I’m not even sure you could even call that thing a she. That’s what the sack-’em-up men call them, by the way: things. All that thing is now is skin and bone and whatever fluid she’s embalmed in. You think she’s beautiful? God help you. Molly Finn was beautiful, before you butchered her. What in God’s name were you after, Hyde? What had this poor girl ever done to you? Good Christ, you’ve killed three people – and for what? A bag of bones in a bathtub? You really are insane.”

Hawkwood turned his gaze on Hyde’s companion. “I wonder what that makes you, Surgeon Carslow?”

“You don’t understand,” Carslow said.

“Don’t I? Well, maybe you could enlighten me. I knew someone had to be helping him. It had to be someone with the money; and you, Carslow, you’ve got more money than God. And this is how you choose to spend it?”

Hawkwood turned back to Hyde. “Your friend here told me he never visited Bethlem, but that didn’t stop the two of you corresponding, did it? What did you do, Colonel? Write out a shopping list? What did you send him first, I wonder? The drawing you got from James Matthews? All this equipment doesn’t come cheap. You’d need to have had it specially made. And he’d have told you about this place being empty, of course: your old school. You must have jumped at the chance. It’s even got its own operating room. How’s that for convenience? I did wonder how you knew who I was, too, but then I realized it had to have been Carslow here who gave you my name and description. It must have been damned cold, hanging around Bow Street, waiting for me to turn up. Oh, and it was Sawney who gave you up, Colonel, in case you were wondering how we got here. He’s dead, by the way. They all are. It’s been a busy night.”

Hawkwood smiled. “Still, look on the bright side: we saved Jack Ketch a job. That way, he can concentrate on the two of you.” Hawkwood turned to Eden Carslow. “What? You think keeping silent won’t incriminate you? It’s too bloody late for that.”

Carslow blanched, recovered quickly, and drew himself up. “You know nothing. You think science stands still? Tell that to Leonardo and Galileo, and John Hunter. It’s surgeons like John Hunter and Titus Hyde, men who are prepared to take that first step beyond the frontiers of knowledge, who light the way for others. You’ve been in the wars, Hawkwood, you’ve seen men like Colonel Hyde work, you’ve seen the miracles they can perform. I suspect you’ve even had occasion to thank men like Titus Hyde for sewing you back together after some bloody encounter. How do you think he acquired that sort of skill? It was because the men before him dared to explore beyond their boundaries.”

“You can save the lecture, Carslow. I’m not one of your damned students. I’m not impressed. You’ll go down as his accomplice. Hell of an end to an illustrious career, don’t you think? Swinging from a gibbet. I wonder what your students will think of that? You never know, you being a condemned murderer, they could end up with your body to dissect. Now that would impress me.”

Carslow went pale.

You don’t look so hale and hearty now, Hawkwood thought. Do you?

Hyde’s thin lips split for the first time. “My dear Captain, you don’t seriously think that’s what’s going to happen? You can’t be that naive. They don’t hang surgeons, Hawkwood. We’re at war. Who do you think is going to