Jane Steele(75)

I wrenched my eyes up. “You must think me a hateful busybody.”

“You haven’t the vaguest idea what I think of you.”

“Forgive me.” My enterprise now seemed detestable. “I’ll not broach the subject again, I don’t care what you’re—”

“Yes, you do!” he exclaimed, shoving a hand over his high brow. “Damn it, I— If we are apologising, then I apologise for accidentally besetting you with waking nightmares. Now, do you wish to see something of my work, or shall I escort you upstairs?”

“Oh, please, if you will have me, I should prefer to . . . to stay.”

Mr. Thornfield studied me as the devout study God; then he softened the hard spread of his shoulders.

“I have told you that I’ve not practised medicine save in two wars?”

Nodding, I straightened my spine.

“I have told you that I’ve a friend called Sam Quillfeather who is a police inspector?”

Again I inclined my head; Mr. Thornfield stepped back as if testing how much of the view I could manage.

“Behold the Highgate House Mortuary.” His voice rang clear as a brook, but I could not discern any pleasure in the telling. “There isn’t a single decent deadhouse between here and London, and Inspector Quillfeather is a monomaniac when it comes to collecting evidence. I had him round for dinner not two weeks after arriving here and told him I should require an occupation or else succumb to despair. This morgue, with me as its coroner, was his notion, and the men have been hard at work for three months.”

He asked more gently, “If I turn the lamp up, will you swoon?”

“Bugger swooning,” I replied, meaning it.

Mr. Thornfield smiled and reached for the tab; the brightening lamp revealed an incongruously lovely sight. The floors had been finished with wood stained quite dark, the walls plastered where before there was only stone. The air made my arms tingle, cool as a cave, and the rough-edged pillars remained; but lining the walls were cabinets and tables, and a set of medical tools was arranged upon a counter. I spied a chemistry apparatus, a formidable hacksaw, and what I would later come to understand was termed a rib spreader.

I forced myself to view the corpse, taking a few steps closer. The stranger was of medium build, with a weak chin and ruddy side-whiskers, aged over forty years, and he lay upon a huge slab of wood with grooves carved along the edges.

“I ought to have had a look at this fellow some two days hence, but was delayed by the family’s protests. Chap dropped dead in his barley field, and Quillfeather understands that the bucolic countryside ain’t precisely free of murder,” Mr. Thornfield observed, watching me carefully. “He and I studied together, so he knew that I always had an uncanny knack for autopsies. It was as if they told me the stories of their final moments—I never once got it wrong.”

You’ll feel better when the dead start speaking to you again, I recalled Mr. Singh telling him, and could not suppress a shiver.

“Aye, it takes one like that at first.” Mr. Thornfield’s gloves rested next to a delicate chisel, and he pocketed them as if the sight were too private for sceptical eyes.

“You said that you only used your training when you were at war. Why not start a practice rather than aiding an enthusiastic policeman?”

“Because I touch only the dead, never the living.”

Having experienced a fair number of shocks in my time, I gave no outward indication when he said this.

The silence, however, grew around us like a cancer.

“No, not always, not before, I’m not . . . it’s a sacrifice,” he told me. “For my sins.”

“For a period of time, sir?”

“For the rest of my days.”

I do not know how it feels when the trap drops and the noose crushes the windpipe—but though I stood perfectly still, staring at the pained crease thickening above his nose, I imagined the sensation was similar.

“I’ll take you on a brief tour, as the facility is modern as possible.”

Mr. Thornfield wanted me to attend, and I wanted to settle his spirits; so I listened dumbly to short lectures. Absently he said, this is a microscope; absently he said, this is a bone saw. The morgue was constructed with an attentive eye for detail—there were grooves in all the tables, drainage, plentiful basins, no white tile even a hairsbreadth out of place. When he was quite through, Mr. Thornfield turned, and the face which ought to have been emblazoned with pride looked near as pale as the body he was about to dissect.

“You are mute, Jane. When we walk out of this place, will we two still be friends?” he asked.

Words formed on my tongue and dissolved like dreams; but I already knew what I wanted to say. Striding towards him, I gripped the bend in his forearms where only shirtsleeves separated us, and his hands lifted to mimic mine as if they were not his own.

“You are either asking me that because you mistakenly think having a morgue under the house would upset me, which it doesn’t, or because you know I seek an explanation for your present distress in your past trials. Mr. Thornfield, I . . . I should prefer to risk all than to inflict further torments on myself. May I ask you three questions?”

“You may ask them, but whether I will answer is another matter.”

Shaking my head, I pressed warm skin beneath cool cloth. “Have you ever loved?”