She went back down into the cellar and unbuttoned her handbag and took out the two jars of oil she’d brought and she poured them out over the bed and the wrapped body of the woman and the wood shelves. She stopped at the glass specimen jars. The fetuses floated, pale, still. She tapped a knuckle. The poor things. Teratological birth defects. There was still the pasted label on two of the jars from the Hunterian Collection at the Royal College of Surgeons. She did not know how a creature as pitiful as Walter Laster could have got inside such an institution, could have smuggled these things out. One more mystery. Well, well.
What was it that compelled her to do what she did next, a feeling, perhaps, an intuition, as Frank Coulton might say, something she had learned to trust in herself? She couldn’t say. But she took down the third of the jars, the one with the smallest fetus, its little eyelids closed like petals, its delicate features almost human. It was heavy, far heavier than Walter, and the formaldehyde sloshed unevenly against the glass walls as she lugged it outside. Walter still lay in the mud, unmoving.
It was getting late now. Back inside, she took a long safety match from her handbag, struck it on the brick walls, dropped it into the oil-soaked bedding. The room erupted into flame. She adjusted the veil over her face, the birthmark like a purple handprint that stretched across her cheek and nose and up over one eye, which she’d lived with all her life. It wouldn’t do to be stared at. Then she went calmly out, leaving the door standing open, and she scooped up Walter in one arm and draped her shawl over the jar with the other, and then, picking that up too, while the cellar whooshed and roared into flame behind her, and a drunk in the corner of the yard raised his bleary head, she made her way out through the fog to Bloom Stairs Street, there to hail a cab.
That was the thing about her job, what she did. There was a gruesomeness to it, an essential unladylike gruesomeness, which she enjoyed. Her husband, rest his soul, had seen it in her and loved her for it. Not that every day involved the burning of bodies—the kidnapping, yes, call it what it was, the kidnapping of opium-addled unfortunates. Homicidals. No, mostly she was a kind of manager, like in a bank, she supposed, or an insurance office, overseeing the jobs Dr. Berghast wished done in the capital and streamlining all of it for efficiency. Still, it was a life of secrecy, a life of deceit, even at its dullest. And Margaret Harrogate enjoyed it too much, was too good at it, ever to quit it.
The Cairndale Institute’s building at 23 Nickel Street West, Blackfriars, was unmarked. It was an imposing five-story row house, and Margaret Harrogate was its sole occupant, drifting through the dim heavily furnished rooms, past the coal-burning fireplace, the thick warm drapes, or lurking at the street-facing bay window like an apparition. When her husband had been alive there had been maids and a cook and even a coach and horses stabled in the cavernous cobbled carriage house that made up the street-level entrance. But now it was only her, had only been her for so many years that the presence of others felt like an interruption, like a wrongness. Her days were days of institute affairs. In part that meant the filing of papers, organizing of correspondence, the occasional meeting of an institute investor. But mostly it meant that whenever Frank Coulton or his new partner, the Quicke woman, brought in an orphan, Margaret would examine the child, confirm the nature of their talent, and record her findings in one of the big institute ledgers kept in the hollow behind the coal scuttle.
Talents. That was what Dr. Berghast called them. She had seen disturbing things, biblical things: flesh, rippling like water, altering the face of a child into another’s; a little boy, laying hands on a corpse and raising it, boneless, into a hulking flesh giant. Two years ago she had listened as a girl of twelve—a bone witch, as Dr. Berghast had described her in a letter—whistled a skeleton up out of its coffin and into a clattering dance. The stuff of nightmares. Margaret Harrogate had no such talents herself, thank the good Lord. Nor had her husband any, when he was alive. And the truth of it was, she wasn’t even sure now whether she thought what the children could do was natural or unnatural, a right thing or a wrong one.
Walter Laster, though, was a wrong thing, through and through. She knew that much, could see it in his bloodless skin, hairless as a larva, and in his appetites, his fang-like teeth. He was something new; and Dr. Berghast would be intrigued.
* * *
It was her husband who’d got her involved with Cairndale, nearly thirty years ago. Or his death had done: he’d died of a fever in their second winter together. That was 1855. She had still been so young. When she’d met Henry Berghast for the first time, three weeks after the funeral, after the man had unlocked the iron gate at Nickel Street West with his own key and rang the bell with a bouquet of lilies in one hand, his hat and a leather satchel in the other, she hadn’t quite known what to say. The servants were gone by then; she’d had to answer the door herself.
“My condolences, Mrs. Harrogate,” he’d offered. “Your husband perhaps spoke of me?”
She looked at his handsome, powerful face, his oiled black hair, and wasn’t sure that he had.
“I am the director of the Cairndale Institute; I was your husband’s employer. I have something I wish to discuss, in private. Might I come in?”
“All right,” she’d said, reluctant. She had led him to the sofa in the parlor and sat first, with her black gloved hands folded in her lap. She supposed he had come to evict her.
Dr. Berghast seemed ageless back then, neither young nor old, though he was already remote. There was about him a concentrated focus, almost like a perfume. His gestures were slow, deliberate. His knees and ankles clicked softly as he crossed his legs. Yet he was broad-shouldered, with a thick black beard, gray-eyed and powerful-looking. The black suit he wore was immaculate, tailored to the season’s fashions, and the white rose in his lapel looked freshly cut. Margaret saw through the windows that the afternoon had turned gray and rainswept, but her visitor was not wet.
“I am exceedingly sorry for your loss,” he’d begun. He’d regarded her birthmark without a trace of dismay. “Your husband didn’t fear death, didn’t wish it to be a cause for grieving. We spoke of it often. But what he didn’t consider was how those who loved him might be expected to carry on.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Have you given any thought to how you will live? You are still young—”
“I am not destitute, sir. And I have a sister in Devon.”
“Ah.” He seemed to pause then, weighing something. He folded one elegant wrist over his knee and frowned politely. “I’d hoped you might consider another possibility. Mrs. Harrogate, we are all of us surrounded by the unseen, every day. What else is loss? What is death? Who doesn’t believe in things they can’t explain? God and the angels, gravity and electricity, death and the mystery of life. There are forces we understand, and forces we still do not. The Cairndale Institute cultivates and preserves one such mystery. Your husband was a great help to us in our efforts, as was his father, and his father’s father before that.”
She nodded mutely.
“I’m speaking of the river, the wall, the curtain, the shroud, Mrs. Harrogate. I’m speaking of the passing from this world to the next. Death, madam. Of which we know more than we realize.” He leaned in close, his voice lowering. She caught the scent of peppermint, of pipe smoke. “We need the dead more than the dead need us. But the human body is made up of nearly as much dead tissue, as living. Think of that. We carry our own deaths inside us. And who is to say, in death, that the proportions are not reversed? The chemistry of death, the physics of dying, the mathematics of the realm of the dead, these are the mysteries science hasn’t yet begun to approach.”