Jocasta immediately became famous in the parish and found herself dealing cards a dozen times a day. She’d been to the execution, saw the cart bringing the man from Newgate with the priest beside him and the crowd cheering. She was sure he’d noticed her in the mass of people, and nodded to her. The crowd loved him. He went bravely with his head up. Jocasta spent two pennies on a pamphlet of his last confession and got a boy who’d been to the charity school to read it to her. The woodcut didn’t look much like him, and the words, though entertaining in their account of his terrible crimes, didn’t sound as if they came from his mouth. Jocasta couldn’t watch the drop; just heard it, the clap of the opening trapdoor in that moment of stillness, then the roar of the crowd. She had felt sick and wouldn’t read cards for a week. Then she got hungry.
With a growl she swept the cards up again and sat them in their box. Another knock came at the door, and this time she answered it.
When Harriet folded back the damp sheet from the corpse, she found herself being oddly precise about her movements. She was aware that Crowther was, for the time being, still more engaged in watching her than looking at the body.
“Crowther, I am quite well. I have heard more hurtful words about my husband’s current condition than those Proctor just used, and with less care and respect in them.”
Her companion did no more than nod, but it seemed the reassurance was sufficient. He continued to lay his knives and hooks on the bench in front of him.
“I must be a little more subtle in my arts here than we were in Thornleigh,” he said. “The cut throat on the body you used then as an introduction to myself was a more obvious cause of death than drowning.”
Harriet smiled a little at his characterization of their meeting. She had bullied her way into his house, she had forced him to place himself in danger, she had caused his most private griefs to become public, yet they had developed between them a friendship that was as valuable to her as the love of her own family.
Since the events of the previous summer he had become a regular companion in her house in Caveley. He would arrive unannounced when the mood took him-or, if he had taken delivery of some exciting preparation or curiosity, they would not see him for a week. She missed him greatly at these times, though she would never admit it, or tease him for ignoring them when he returned. To Harriet’s younger, orphaned sister Rachel, he took the role of an uncle, encouraging her, tolerating her, or ignoring her depending on his mood and Rachel’s choice of conversation. To her children he also stood something like an uncle. He did not join in their games, but would answer any question her son could think of to ask, until, when he grew tired of the circling logic of a seven-year-old, he would declare himself hungry and in need of a child to eat, whereupon Stephen would scream with delight and run from the room. .
Crowther’s dry voice broke in on her thoughts. “So, Mrs. Westerman, what do we see at first?”
Shaking herself, Harriet turned toward the body and looked into the dead eyes for the first time.
He was an elderly gentleman, she thought, something older than Crowther. The slight stubble on his face was white, and the flesh of his face was loose and lined. His eyes were gray and his jaw hung open as a man who has been suddenly, unpleasantly, surprised in the midst of a laugh. His limbs were thin, though not malnourished, the nails of his hands neatly and closely clipped to the pads of the fingers. She felt their texture. His throat was hidden by a sodden cravat, but there was a red mark high under his jaw on his left side. It did not seem a bruise or tearing of the skin.
As Harriet tilted the man’s chin toward her to better examine it, she realized there was something not quite right about the shape of his mouth. Gently retracting the man’s upper lip, she saw that his teeth were false, but not made of the usual animal bone or carved and stinking wood. Easing them loose, she passed them to Crowther without comment and he lifted them to examine them more closely under the light of the oil lamp.
“How very strange,” he said.
“He is of an age, Crowther.”
Crowther did not reply at once, but turned the dentures over in the light, then flicked them with his fingernail. They gave a dull chime like a teacup awkwardly placed on its saucer.
“No, Mrs. Westerman. I am not surprised that he required false teeth at his age, or was vain enough to wear them, but these are most unusual. They have been cast of porcelain. I have never seen such things before. A really most ingenious idea. And a rarity. We must make enquiries.” He smiled contentedly and Harriet shook her head a little. Crowther’s enthusiasm was not often provoked, but when it was, it tended to be by the most unusual things.
Their examination of the body was methodical. The rope and knot were first scrutinised, then the man’s ankles were unbound, his clothing removed and each piece passed between them before being folded and placed on the bench beside the teeth. The man could afford to dress like a gentleman, but all his pockets were empty.
His skin was marked, discolored in several places, but removing his cravat and exposing the throat had exposed a pattern of bruising that made Harriet draw in her breath. Moving forward, she put her hands, thumbs crossed, on the cold flesh over the Adam’s apple, trying to stretch her fingers to reach the marks, then had a sudden sharp vision of it living under her, struggling to breathe, a wet rattling gasp. She sprang away from it and shivered. Thoughts of her husband reared in her mind like agitated mud at the bottom of a pond, then fell back.
“That certainly seems consistent with the bruising,” Crowther said. “If he were throttled, we are likely to find damage to the hyoid bone.”
Harriet remained with her face in shadow. “Could a woman do that, Crowther?” she asked.
“Mrs. Westerman, I am quite convinced that some women can do anything.” He paused, and added in a more measured way, “Many women would have the strength to kill a man in this manner. Certainly.”
At last Crowther turned toward his knives, and looked inquiringly at his companion. She did not return his gaze at once, but stood with her shoulders tilted and her head on one side, gazing at the poor naked being in front of her. He looked so frail and waxen on the table in the spill of the lamp that she felt a sadness flow up from the cold ground under her feet.
There were times when she hated the brutal honesty of flesh. The body was marked and bruised in places other than the face and neck; odd, red, angry patches that seemed to glow out against the general pallor of the skin.
Harriet let her mind clear and her eyes rest on that strange red mark under his chin. It sparked some memory, some trace of thought in her, but the idea would not form itself into a notion she could put into words.
“Shall I make the first cut, madam?”
Since their first meeting, Harriet had only once seen Crowther perform a full autopsy, and that had been on the corpse of a cat. It was known to the members of the reading public, and now to the fellows of the Royal Society, that she had attended Crowther in his examinations of other unfortunates, but they did not perhaps realize how limited, in some ways, those examinations had been. The business of pulling open a corpse was a brutal art, slippery and foul-smelling. It required a scientist to become a butcher, and a gentleman to redden his cuffs with gore and bile.
By way of answer she sat down on the bench a little removed into the shadows, crossed her hands in her lap and settled herself, to show she meant to remain where she was as Crowther went to work with his knives. He adjusted the lamp and lifted his scalpel, which caught a gleam.