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

Gustine later at the Labour in Vain, watching pass over her thin intent face the masks of those beggars, all murdered over two yeafs ago in that cheap Edinburgh boardinghouse, crept up upon and suffocated while passed out drunk, consigned not only to haunt the living for evermore, but to do it with crippling, bloody, eternal hangovers.
    How could I have not known they were murdered? he will ask her as if expecting an answer. When Burke and Hare brought bodies so fresh that blood still foamed at the mouth and dripped from the nose? Why didn’t I ask the question we all had on our lips when six-toed, cauliflower-eared Daft Jamie, beloved by all boys and organ grinder monkeys for his liberality with cashew nuts, went missing from the street, just at the time a headless, footless corpse appeared on Dr. Knox’s dissecting table? Or go to the police the night they arrived with a grandmother and a twelve-year-old boy folded into a pickle barrel, whose bodies had so obviously set into rigor mortis while inside that we had to smash the barrel before we could free them? Or cry out when they presented us with the naked body of a prostitute I’d been with only the night before—giddy and beautiful and very much alive—folded inside a tea chest, franked with threads of moldy black pekoe? She is almost too beautiful to cut, Dr. Knox had said, calling in an artist to paint her as a cadaver odalisque, preserving her in a trough of whiskey for three months so that his students might explore her perfect musculature. How could I deny Mary Paterson? Would you have kept silent, Justine?
    Gustine, she corrects.
    Would you?)
    Henry falls running from the wall and never looks back.
    It is at the town moor communal pump that Gustine finds him as she is heading home from a long night’s work. She stops by the pump as she does most nights to wash away an evening’s accumulation of gentleman callers and finds a man slumped over at the watering trough, running cold water over his hands and face. He is staring at her so strangely she thinks surely she must know him from somewhere. Henry sobs through the cascade of icy pump water when he sees the pale blue vision advancing on him. I didn’t know. Leave me alone.
    Had we only chosen this night as the night of our beginning, we might even have ended our chapter conveniently here at the Labour in Vain, where Henry took Gustine once he realized that she was not Mary Paterson—how could she be—but in fact one of her kind, a creature who might, more than anything else, help him erase this awful night from his mind. Another girl already had a customer upstairs at John Robinson’s, so they waited at the burying table, and while they waited Henry found himself telling this strange blue girl everything about himself. He poured it all out to her: how he fled Edinburgh after Burke and Hare were arrested rather than face the public’s wrath, how doctors must constantly battle stupid, stupid superstition when people should just donate their bodies to Science damn it like he was going to do, like the valiant Jeremy Bentham had done, and how he was a goddamned failure, yes he was, having to face his students empty-handed, and all because he couldn’t secure them a body. A damned dead body. She listened carefully, barely sipping her gin, and when she finally spoke, she surprised him.
    Funny, she says through her sugar, I come across dead bodies all the time. Would you like it if I brought you to them?
    Says Henry, pausing long enough to make sure he understands her, You would do that?
    Yes, says Gustine, if it would help you. And in return, she continues, in return you will let me ask you a favor.
    Her tone of voice has changed. She is not the gentle listener of a moment before, but a flinty businesswoman. Over her shoulder, he sees the couple come downstairs from John Robinson’s upper room. The woman’s face is red and rough from the man’s two-day stubble and both look tired and drunk. Henry is gripping