Mary and Diana crossed Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Mary had never been in this part of the city—there were so many parts of the city she had never seen, although she had lived in London all her life. She sighed, remembering weeks when she had barely left the house for fear that her mother might suffer another of her attacks—thank goodness for Nurse Adams, who had been so reliable, although very expensive. But here she was, after a long walk from Threadneedle Street. Somehow she had expected Lincoln’s Inn Fields to be fields, but as so often in London, the name was deceptive: it was simply a park, surrounded by streets lined on two sides with respectable buildings in the Georgian style. On the other two sides were Lincoln’s Inn, where barristers plied their trade, and the Royal College of Surgeons. As she and Diana walked through the park, under a canopy of ancient oaks, Mary remembered the park she had seen yesterday in Whitechapel, with poor children playing in ragged clothes. How strange that the word “park” could describe such different places! The rain had stopped, but whenever the wind blew, which was often, large wet drops would fall on their heads from the branches above. Mary kept her umbrella up and tried to cover them both, but Diana always walked either ahead or behind her, not caring whether she got wet.
As they left the park, they saw the facade of the Royal College of Surgeons with its gray columns, looming like a great mausoleum. There was already a line of visitors stretching down the stone steps. Mary could see respectable men in frock coats and bowler hats, mothers with children pulling at their hands and asking if they could go play in the park, maids on their day off, boys in dirty trousers who would obviously not be able to pay the entrance fee, but probably hoped to sneak in and catch a glimpse of the Poisonous Girl before they were ejected by the porters. She checked to make sure she had the advertisement with her, folded into her purse.
“Are you here to see the poisonous beauty?” asked a young man with a sparse attempt at a mustache, presumably one of the porters. He had an official look about him and was holding a sheaf of pamphlets in his hand. When Mary nodded, he told her to line up behind the others. At 10 a.m. precisely, the line began to move. The visitors who had been waiting filed into the entrance hall, handing the porter either an advertisement or the requisite number of shillings and pence. In return, he handed them a pamphlet. Mary glanced at it quickly. At the top of the page was written The Poisonous Girl! A wonder of modern science! Discovered by Professor Petronius, M.D., D.Phil., member of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. She did not have time to read the rest. The line was filing past a set of stairs marked TO LIBRARY, and through a pair of doors that opened into a large chamber. In the middle of the chamber was a wooden platform, with a table on it. On the table was a collection of objects—Mary had no time to pay them closer attention, although she noticed that one was a canary in a cage.
“Now that’s more like it!” said Diana, turning and staring upward. The chamber was two stories high, with a balcony running around it. On both the first and second floors, the walls were lined with wooden cabinets. Through their glass fronts, Mary could see anatomical specimens of various sorts: skeletons, but also row after row of glass jars filled with what were presumably parts of the human body. It looked like the pantry of a frugal housewife who, instead of pickles, had put up hearts, livers, spleens.
“Come on,” she said to Diana, pulling her along by the collar. The audience to see the Poisonous Girl was a large one, and Mary wanted to get as close to the platform as possible. It was obviously the stage on which Beatrice Rappaccini would stand and—do what? Mary had no idea. Would she simply be put on display, like the freaks that were shown at the Royal Aquarium—the bearded women and dog-faced men? Mary had never seen one of the shows herself, but she had heard about them from servants. Alice, the scullery maid, had gone once with Mrs. Poole and could talk of nothing else for a week. She pushed through the crowd and secured a space for them at one corner of the platform, somewhat crushed between a woman in a violently purple walking suit and a man with a monocle. The woman gave her a look as Mary pushed her way in, as though she were some sort of recently discovered and unwelcome beetle. Well, she told herself, politeness has no place in a murder investigation.
When the audience had been kept waiting just long enough to start getting restless, the porter said, “Make way, make way, for Professor Petronius!” The crowd parted, and a man in a theatrical black cloak, with enormous side-whiskers too black to be entirely natural, walked to the platform. He looked around at the audience, clearing his throat once or twice while the crowd quieted down and waited expectantly. Then he spoke in a voice that carried to the back of the room.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I am Professor Petronius. Welcome to this august institution, which has so generously allowed me to reveal to you one of the scientific wonders of our age—a marvel out of the classical world, when such a phenomenon was known, although it astonishes us to see it in the nineteenth century! Today I will show you a young woman, as beautiful and innocent as a rose in bloom, whose system has been so imbued with poisons that she herself has become poisonous to all she touches. Imagine, ladies and gentlemen, not being able to touch, to kiss, other human beings for fear of harming them—of rendering them lifeless! Imagine being so deadly that your fellow men shun you once they learn of your powers. Today you shall see just such a creature, separated forever from others of her kind. She is not a monster—no! For unlike the Elephant Man or Bear Woman, of whom you have no doubt heard, she was not born with her peculiarity. The poison was introduced into her system slowly over a period of many years, as you may read in my article, a copy of which you hold in your hands, originally published in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute. Beatrice Rappaccini is not a monster, but a marvel of modern science! Behold!”