“You mean he has it?” Kim asked with disbelief.
“Apparently so,” John said. “The Warren Anatomical Museum is on the fifth floor of building A, catty-corner from the front of the library. Are you interested in going over there?”
“By all means,” Kim said. She could feel her pulse quicken at the thought that she might finally have found Elizabeth’s evidence.
John reached for his phone. “Let’s see if Mr. Nebolsine is still over there. He was a little while ago, but I believe he has several offices. Apparently he takes care of a number of the smaller museums and collections sprinkled around the Harvard community.”
John had a quick conversation in the middle of which he gave Kim a thumbs-up sign. Hanging up, he said, “You’re in luck. He’s still there, and he’ll meet you in the museum if you head over there immediately.”
“I’m on my way,” Kim said. She thanked John and quickly crossed to building A, a Greek Revival structure faced with a massive pediment supported by Doric columns. A guard stopped her just inside the door but then waved her on when he spotted her MGH identity card.
Kim got off on the fifth floor. The museum, such as it was, was tucked along the wall to the left and consisted of a series of glass-fronted display cases. They contained the usual collection of primitive surgical instruments capable of making a stoic wince, old photos, and pathological specimens. There were lots of skulls, including one with a hole through the left eye socket and the top of the forehead.
“That’s quite an interesting case,” a voice said. Kim looked up to see a much younger man than she’d expected for a museum curator. “You must be Kimberly Stewart. I’m Carl Nebolsine.” They shook hands.
“See that rod in there?” Carl said, pointing at a five-foot-long steel rod. “That’s called a tamping rod. It was used to pack powder and clay into a hole drilled for the purpose of blasting. One day a hundred or so years ago that rod went through that man’s head.” Carl pointed to the skull. “The amazing thing is that the man lived through it.”
“Was he all right?” Kim asked.
“It says his personality wasn’t as agreeable after he’d recovered from the trauma, but whose would be?” Carl said.
Kim scanned some of the other exhibits. In the far corner she spotted some books on display.
“I understand you’re interested in the Rachel Bingham exhibit,” Carl said.
“Is it here?” Kim asked.
“No,” Carl said.
Kim looked at the man as if she hadn’t heard him correctly.
“It’s downstairs in the storeroom,” Carl said. “We don’t get a lot of requests to see it, and we don’t have nearly enough space to display everything we have. Would you like to see it?”
“Very much,” Kim said with relief.
They took the elevator down to the basement and followed a labyrinthine route that Kim would not have liked to retrace on her own. Carl unlocked a heavy steel door. Reaching in, he turned on the lights, such as they were: several bare light bulbs.
The room was full of dusty old-style glass display cases.
“Sorry about the mess down here,” Carl said. “It’s very dirty. No one comes in here very often.”
Kim followed Carl as he weaved his way among the cabinets. Passing each one, Kim spied assortments of bones, books, instruments, and jars of preserved organs. Carl stopped. Kim came up behind him. He stepped aside and gestured within the cabinet in front of him.
Kim recoiled with a mixture of horror and disgust. She was totally unprepared for what she was seeing. Crammed into a large glass jar filled with brown-stained preservative was a four-to-five-month-old fetus that looked like a monster.
Oblivious to Kim’s reaction, Carl opened the cabinet. He reached in and dragged the heavy canister forward, jiggling the contents so that it danced grotesquely, causing bits of tissue to rain down like a glass bubble snow-scene paperweight.
Kim clasped a hand to her mouth as she stared at the anencephalic fetus, which had no brain and a flat cranium. It had a cleft palate that made it appear as if the mouth were drawn up into the nose. Its features were further distorted by being pressed up against the glass of the container. From just behind its relatively huge froglike eyes, the head was flat and covered with a shock of coal-black hair. The massive jaw was totally out of proportion to the face. The fetus’s stubby upper limbs ended in spadelike hands with short fingers, some of which were fused together. The effect was almost like cloven hooves. From the rump extended a long fishlike tail.
“Would you like me to lift it down so we can carry it out to better light?” Carl asked.
“No!” Kim said, a little too harshly. In a calmer voice she told Carl she could see the exhibit just fine where it was.
Kim understood completely how the seventeenth-century mind would have viewed such a beastly malformation. This poor creature could easily have been taken for the devil incarnate. Indeed, copies of woodcut prints of the devil that Kim had seen from that era looked identical.
“Would you like me at least to turn it around so you can see the other side?” Carl asked.
“Thank you, no,” Kim said, unconsciously stepping back from the specimen. Now she knew why the Law School and the Divinity School had not known what to do with it. She also recalled the note John Moldavian had shown her in the Medical Library. It didn’t say, Curiosity by Rachel Bingham contrived in 1691. The word was conceived, not contrived!
And Kim remembered the entry in Elizabeth’s diary where Elizabeth expressed concern over innocent Job. Job hadn’t been a biblical reference. Elizabeth had known she was pregnant and had already named the baby Job. How tragically apropos, Kim thought.
Kim thanked Carl and stumbled back toward her car. As she walked she thought about the double tragedy of Elizabeth being pregnant while she was being unwittingly poisoned by a fungus growing in her store of rye. In that day, everyone would have been certain Elizabeth had had relations with the devil to produce such a monster, certainly a manifestation of a covenant, especially since the “fits” had originated in Elizabeth’s house and then spread to the other houses where the children had taken Elizabeth’s bread. Elizabeth’s assertiveness, her ill-timed struggle with the Putnam family, and her change in social status wouldn’t have helped her situation.
Arriving at her car, Kim climbed inside and started the motor. For her it was now totally clear why Elizabeth had been accused of being a witch and how she’d been convicted.
Kim drove as if she were in a trance. She began to understand why Elizabeth would not confess to save her life as Ronald had undoubtedly urged. Elizabeth knew she was no witch, but her confidence in her innocence would have been undermined, especially with everyone against her: friends, magistrates, and even the clergy. With her husband away, Elizabeth would have had no support whatsoever. Utterly alone, she would have thought she was guilty of some horrid transgression against God. How else to explain giving birth to such a demonic creature? Maybe she even thought her fate was just.
Kim got bogged down in traffic on Storrow Drive and was reduced to inching forward. The weather had not improved. In fact it had gotten hotter. Kim felt progressively anxious about being cooped up in the car.
Finally she managed to get through the bottleneck at the Leverett Circle traffic light. Bursting free from the bounds of the city, she headed north on Interstate 93. With the literal freedom came a new revelation and the suggestion of figurative freedom. Kim began to believe that the shock of her visual confrontation with Elizabeth’s monster had caused her to stumble onto the message that she believed Elizabeth had been trying to communicate: namely that Kim should believe in herself. She shouldn’t lose confidence because of other people’s beliefs, as poor Elizabeth had. She shouldn’t allow authority figures to take over her life. Elizabeth hadn’t had a choice about that, but Kim did.