The Dress Lodger by Sheri Holman Read Free Book Online Page A

coffin’s lid with a loud crack of splintering wood. At last. At last, he kneels, looking upon his prize. Shrouded in a length of filmy linen from which a few strands of long brown hair escape over her shoulders, she sleeps on her right side, dreaming of angels and hot cups of tea and a comfy seat at the sandal of God, the usual poor person’s dream of Heaven. He can reach in and touch the rounded curve of her hip, embrace her narrow shoulders. He could climb in beside her and pull the dirt over them both like a blanket.
    He gently rolls the girl onto her back and reaches around her waist to draw her up. But barely has he gotten his arms around her when he feels this girl is spongy underneath, her winding sheet wet and reeking. Mary Paterson? he whispers, breathing in the unmistakable smell of cheap whiskey. I left you behind in Edinburgh.
    Henry drops the body sharply against the coffin and scrambles back to the surface. This isn’t happening. Calm down. Calm down, he tells himself. Men far less competent and careful than you have dug up bodies and not been driven mad by it. Reach in, feel under her armpits. Pull. Yes, this is not the smell of rye, but merely a ripening body not yet preserved in salt. This heaviness I understand; it is not a frantic pulling back to the grave but the purely scientific phenomenon of blood pooling in the extremities. He lies flat on his belly and tugs the young woman free of the earth. Now that he has her above ground, he sees she looks nothing like the one for whom he almost mistook her. By laudanum moonlight, the similarity in height and hair coloring had been uncanny, but it was a momentary terror; he has composed himself now. He eases his bag over this first cousin as gently as he might help a lady into her cloak. I have only to fold her gently into this sack, replace this earth, climb this wall, and fly across the town moor. I have only to secure seven more first cousins for my students before the school year is out.
    Knox holds the purse strings Chiver saws the bow With hearts as black as sin And hands as white as snow… .
    One of the many songs the balladeers wrote during the trial coupling his name with Knox’s is stuck in his head. He works quickly to refill the grave, sending shovelfuls of earth into darkness. His hands, he realizes, have become uncomfortably hot, and when he looks down, to his dismay, they are white as snow. Henry could shake himself for his stupidity. Even the most witless hireling would have thought to wear gloves before he dug around in a poison-laced graveyard. Henry wipes his raw, quicklime-corroded hands on his white powdered jacket. He tears open his contaminated frock coat, pushing against the cool white shirt, and leaves hot bloody handprints against his chest. He needs to wash this off fast; his hands—his surgeon’s hands will be eaten away. He frantically refills the grave, but there is no time. Flinging aside his shovel, Henry lunges for the bag of first cousin— they must get out of here. But when he lifts his hard-won prize, the burlap sack runs with clear yellow whiskey.
    No! Henry cries, flinging the bag back into the half-filled grave. He pushes hard against the chemical snowdrifts, stumbles and falls on a hard stone marker, cracking his lip, instinctively touching his searing hands to it and igniting his mouth. Stay away! Just behind him he hears a stampede of stumbling, heavy footsteps, he feels the heat of breath against the back of his neck, reeking of filthy rags, sweet drugged-gin, yellow-tongue, headachy anger. It overpowers the putrescence of the graveyard, coming closer and closer, the fetid breath that hid in the mouths of all sixteen corpses delivered to Dr. Knox’s school. He scrambles up and over the high brick wall, leaving far behind cousin, crowbar, and bag. He looks back and finds himself face-to-face with whiskey-bloated Mary Paterson and the furious, limbless gang of sixteen.
    (They had followed me, you see, he will say to