Anatomy: A Love Story
Dana Schwartz
To Ian, who has my heart
To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.
—MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, FRANKENSTEIN
prologue
Edinburgh, 1817
HURRY UP!”
“I’m digging as fast as I can, Davey.”
“Well, dig faster.”
The night was nearly moonless, so Davey, standing on the damp grass, wasn’t able to see Munro roll his eyes down in the grave he was in the process of digging up. It was taking longer than normal—the wooden spade Munro had managed to steal from behind the inn down on Farbanks was smaller than the metal one he’d started off with tonight. But it was also quieter, that was the important thing. Ever since Thornhill Kirkyard had hired a guard to watch over the graves, keeping quiet was essential. Already, three of their friends had been picked up by the guard and were unable to pay their fines. Davey hadn’t seen them on the streets since.
Something was wrong. Davey couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but something seemed strange tonight. Maybe it was the air. The grease smoke hovering low in Edinburgh’s Old Town was always dense, heavy with the smell of cooking oil and tobacco and the noxious combination of human waste and filth that had sent the well-to-do into the fine new buildings down the hill and on the other side of Princes Street Gardens. Tonight was windless.
Davey didn’t mention it to Munro, the strange feeling he had. Munro would only have laughed at him. You’re supposed to be a lookout for night men, not strange feelings, Munro would say.
In the distance, Davey could make out a candle burning in the window of the rectory behind the church. The priest was awake. Could he see movement this far into the kirkyard in the darkness? Most likely not, but what if he decided to come out for an evening stroll?
“Can’t you go any faster?” Davey whispered.
In answer came the unmistakable sound of wood hitting wood. Munro had reached the coffin. Both boys held their breath for the next part: Munro lifted the spade high as he could and brought it down hard. Davey winced at the crack of the lid breaking. They waited—for a shout, for dogs barking—but nothing stirred.
“Throw me the rope,” Munro called up. Davey did as he was told, and within a few moments, Munro had expertly tied the rope around the dead body’s neck. “Now pull.”
While Davey tugged the rope, Munro, still in the grave, helped to guide the body out of the small hole in the coffin and back toward the surface world, a strange reverse birth for a body past death. Munro successfully removed the body’s shoes as it left its coffin, but it was up to Davey to strip off the rest of its clothes and throw them back in the grave. Stealing a body was against the law, but if they actually took any property from the grave, that would make it a felony.
The body was a she, just as Jeanette had told them. Jeanette worked as a spy for whichever resurrection man paid her the best that week, sneaking around funerals, standing just close enough to make sure that whoever was being buried hadn’t been given an expensive stone slab atop the coffin to prevent the very crime they were currently committing.
“No mortsafe and no family,” Jeanette had said when she showed up at the door to Munro’s flat in Fleshmarket Close, scratching her neck and grinning up at him from beneath her curtain of copper hair. Jeanette couldn’t be more than fourteen, but she was already missing more than a few teeth. “Or ’tleast not much family, anyways. Coffin looked cheap too. Pine or sum’thing like it.”
“Weren’t pregnant, were she?” Munro had asked hopefully, raising his eyebrows. Doctors were so keen to dissect the bodies of pregnant women that they were willing to pay double. Jeanette shook her head and extended her hand for payment. As soon as darkness fell, Munro and Davey set out with their wheelbarrow and spades and rope.
Davey averted his eyes as he peeled off the body’s flimsy gray dress. Even in the darkness, he could feel himself blushing. He had never undressed a live woman before, but he’d lost count of the number of times he’d taken the clothing off a woman the day after she was put in the ground. He looked down at the stone half-hidden by dirt and darkness: PENELOPE HARKNESS. Thank you for the eight guineas, Penelope Harkness, he thought.
“Throw it here,” Munro said from below. Davey tossed him the dress. As soon as the woman’s clothes were back in her empty coffin, Munro pulled himself out of the hole and onto the wet grass. “A’ight,” he said, clapping the dirt from his hands. “Let’s fill it back in and be done with it now.” Munro didn’t say it, but he felt something strange, too, an odd thinness in the still air that made it harder to catch his breath. The candle in the rectory window had gone out.
“You don’t believe she died of the fever, do you?” Davey whispered. The woman’s skin wasn’t pocked or bloody, but the rumors these days were impossible to ignore. If the Roman fever really was back in Edinburgh …
“Course not,” Munro said with certainty. “Don’t be daft.”
Davey exhaled and smiled weakly in the dark. Munro always knew how to make him feel better, to cast away the fears that crept into his brain like rodents in the walls.
Silently, the boys finished their task. The grave was as well covered with soil and weeds as it had been that morning, and the body, stiff with rigor mortis, was in their wheelbarrow, covered by a gray cloak.