Anatomy: A Love Story(20)
“You see there?” Munro said to Jack one afternoon when they were watching a hanging at Grassmarket. The sorry murderer’s hands were tied behind his back, and he had to ask the hangman to take off his cap for him, revealing his hair slicked wet with sweat. The man was being hanged for beating his wife with such viciousness that she died, as had the baby she was carrying in her belly. For weeks, boys in the streets had been selling broadsheets with drawings of the man and details about the crime.
Jack and Munro stood and waited for the body to drop through the wooden floor, for the gruesome bounce, and for the twitching to stop and the cheers of the crowd to go quiet. When the body at last lay still, a horde of men fought their way forward to grab the corpse. “There, all them men coming to get the body?” Munro said. “You see them?”
Jack bit into a mealy apple. “Who wants the bones of a dead murderer?”
“Don’t be daft,” Munro said, snatching the apple out of Jack’s hand and biting into it himself. He made a face but took another bite. “They’re trying to get the body to sell it to the doctors. The students up at the uni. They needs bodies to study on and stuff. A body goes for two guineas and a crown. If it’s pregnant, it goes for three guineas, but that’s harder, seeing as they rarely hang a woman with child.” Munro tilted his head toward the gallows, where four or five men were working furiously with penknives to cut pieces of the noose. “They’ll be selling those pieces of rope as keepsakes. Meant to ward off evil spirits, I guess. Or ward off murderers. Or maybe meant to ward off your own bad luck in being hanged yourself.
“But the real money’s in the body,” Munro said, sucking on the apple core. “Problem is, everyone knows when a hanging is, everyone’s fighting over the body. But a body is a body whether it was hanged or not, and doctors don’t care so much about the law as you might think.”
And so Jack Currer became a resurrection man. He kept a spade and slipped into kirkyards after dark to dig up fresh bodies—sometimes alone, usually with Munro, sometimes with Munro and whatever poor boy showed up at Fleshmarket in need of a good meal.
Were they going to get in trouble? No more than the trouble they got in just being poor and living on the streets of Edinburgh. Body snatchers were a vital organ of the living city itself. It was filthy, and the fancy folks liked to look away, but they were essential nonetheless. Everyone knew they were doing it; police hardly cared, so long as they didn’t take clothes or jewels from the graves. Wealthier families had iron cage mortsafes, or solid stone slabs above the graves to protect them from people like Jack. Poorer families sometimes had someone sitting and watching, a sentinel who would stay beside the grave for three or four days, until the body decomposed enough to no longer be valuable to doctors for study. (Both of those were easy enough to get around for a professional like Jack—start from twenty yards away and dig a tunnel straight through and underneath. Pull the body out, and no one ever knows.)
Mostly, though, it was the unloved who made Jack’s living, the bodies buried shallow and forgotten. They would be invaluable to Jack, and to the doctors he sold them to. Whatever little those poor souls did in life, they did plenty in death.
He had thought that starting work at Le Grand Leon would mean giving up that life, the long nights of digging until his shoulders ached, of pulling bodies bloated with gas and shit, of worms that wriggled into his shoes. He had a place to sleep, nestled into the canvas laid across the planks above the stage, and Mr. Arthur made stews for the crew out of cabbage and potato skins and whatever bits the crew could scrounge up.
The way Jack liked to think of it, he had a better view up here than even those posh folks in their fancy box seats, and all he had to do was make sure the curtain and right backdrops unfurled at the right time. Those people in the audience were stuck in their seats, wearing their silk—which would wrinkle if you stood wrong, let alone jumped a garden fence—and shoes that pinched their feet. But the want of money creeps up on you like a fox in the darkness.
And there was Isabella. Always Isabella, dancing on the stage below him night after night. How could anyone not fall in love with her after seeing the way she moved, the way the lanterns onstage made her blond hair glow—made all of her glow? She was the closest thing to an angel Jack had ever seen in Edinburgh.
Jack had worked as a stagehand at Le Grand Leon two months before he started stealing bodies again in the night.
“Ye all right?” Thomas, the lead actor, called up to Jack from the wings during an applause break. Thomas was already dressed in his costume for the next scene, when he appeared as the devil, disguised as the lady’s former lover. Jack nodded. Thomas was from Birmingham—God knew how he had made it to Le Grand Leon, but he liked to tell anyone who would listen that he was going to save up enough money to make it down to London to perform Shakespeare for the king. He was handsome in that broad-shouldered actor sort of way, the type of handsome that had the ladies who do the costuming giggling behind their hands. Jack tended to disappear into the shadows, but that was by design. Like a nocturnal animal, the best way for Jack to remain safe was to remain unseen.
Life at Le Grand Leon was like living inside a music box. The gilt-edged ceiling was painted in four sections meant to represent the four seasons, each with its own collection of potato-shaped cherubs with cheeks the color of roses and skin the color of ivory. And like a music box, there was the dancer, center stage, Isabella Turner. Jack could imagine her like one of those porcelain ballerinas he saw in the window of the antique shop on Holyrood Street, a ballerina balancing on one foot, the other extended out behind her, her arm lifted, her entire body taut like a pulled bowstring. Spinning onstage slowly, to the sound of windup music.