Sawbones Read online

  “I know, sir,” Ezra cut in. “I know I had a lucky escape. It could have been worse for me in very many ways.” He thought of his scar and the tumour on the shelf in the master’s museum. “It is something else.”

  “Out with it, then, lad!”

  “You have done so much for me, sir. But I think it is time I was independent. I have no means…”

  “Ezra, lad, your skills will be your means. Don’t you see that? Once you are fully trained—”

  “But sir, you said I was better than most trained surgeons already!”

  “Perhaps your head has swollen, Ezra, and I am to blame for it with too much praise.” The master started towards the door that led back to the house. “Enough of this talk.”

  Ezra followed. “But sir! I am an adult! I need my own…”

  “You will have in time, lad. Your impatience does you no favours!”

  Ezra scowled at the master’s back. He called after him, “I swear I have more than enough skill to work for the navy.”

  He should not have said it. The master turned round, furious, and strode back towards the table.

  “The navy? I did not train you for butchery!” McAdam thumped the table and the body on it almost jumped. Ezra had heard him run down drunken navy surgeons over many dinners. It was the one thing guaranteed to draw a reaction. Now he wished he hadn’t.

  “No, sir.” Ezra didn’t look at him.

  “Those navy sawbones! How many times have we seen how their work ends? Gangrene, stumps splintered and filthy. You are better than that! In a few years you will be a surgeon – I grant the mood these days means a mulatto surgeon may not raise the same fees as a white one, but, with my name, lad, you will be your own man.”

  “But I need to earn now!” Ezra burst out.

  “You are more than an apprentice to me, lad.” McAdam frowned. “The navy! Do not provoke me!”

  Ezra turned away.

  Mr McAdam put a hand on Ezra’s shoulder and gently turned him about to face him. “I need you, Ezra. There is none your equal, none in the whole of London who knows how I like things done.” He looked full into Ezra’s eyes. “You are of age. And you are free. I would never wish to constrain you, but I wish you would think on it.” McAdam looked away. “You know you are the son I never had. I beg you, think. Wait.”

  Ezra went to speak. He wanted to say how he knew McAdam was a fine master but how he wanted other things too; he wanted Anna, and he wanted to be his own man.

  “The navy will be a harder life than you have known. I cannot stop you, but you would not have my blessing. A sensible lad such as yourself would not be so stupid.”

  “No, sir.” Ezra felt trapped. He did not want to go to sea. He tried to think of some crystalline clear argument to advance his case for a wage.

  “Mr Lashley offered me a paid position only yesterday.”

  “That fool? My boy, you are a better practitioner than him already. And he goes through apprentices the way the flux goes through a neighbourhood. You are too clever to work for him. Even if he paid you in Spanish gold!” Mr McAdam turned once again to leave. “I will have no more of this. Not a word. You have work to do and you will do it. And you can take a message to your Mr Lashley at Bart’s. I must have words with him – he thinks to charge the poor for the Monday surgeries. But before that I would have you boil down and clean off the tibia belonging to the child – the left is the more bent, I think.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ezra sighed. For the first time in his life he felt a deep irritation with his master. He was as tall as him now, eye to eye. And though he admired the man, right now he longed to storm out of his house and into the world.

  Mr McAdam pulled on his jacket as if nothing had happened. He paused. “I’ll ask Mrs Boscaven to make an Irish stew tonight. That is your favourite, if I am not mistaken.”

  “Sir! Please!” Ezra snapped. “I am a man. Do not seek to mollify me with treats like some lapdog!”

  McAdam stepped back and there was silence between them. Ezra could see the hurt in his face.

  Ezra felt angry and ashamed; he should not have spoken back to the master like that. He ran out into Ham Yard, still in his stained apron. He wanted to yell and rant and break something; feel the pain in his heart made real. He kicked a flowerpot against the wall and watched it shatter.

  “Ooh, still upset, are you, bone boy?” Henry Toms was leaning against the wall smoking a clay pipe. He must have heard the exchange in the anatomy room. He grinned and tapped the old tobacco out of his pipe onto the ground. “Why don’t you push off, like you want to? I’d be glad to see the back of you even if the master thinks you’re worth feeding.”

  “Shut up, Toms.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do, freak boy.”

  Ezra knew better than to let Toms needle him. Instead he imagined unpicking the cadaver’s innards and flinging the three-day-old large intestine in the footman’s face.

  “What’re you looking at now?” Toms said.

  Ezra thought Toms was a lean streak of meanness and bitterness: why Mr McAdam kept him on was unfathomable.

  “Nothing,” Ezra said. He picked up the copper to boil the boy’s bones and went back inside.

  As he pared every scrap of flesh off the thigh bone he reflected that there was so much more trouble in the world than his own. This child, whose life had been brutal and short. The man, shot in his prime, perhaps for the price of his earrings. Ezra’s own blood family, somewhere in Jamaica, on the far side of an ocean, breaking their backs cutting cane under the lash.

  He lit a fire under the copper. Anna was as good as gone. He would have to live with it. This world was made of suffering, and if he didn’t know that by now, he was no more than a child after all. The worst of it was, he knew McAdam was right. He would be better off in the long run if he stayed. He would never learn half as much with any other surgeon on earth. And he would be a good one. The best. That dream, at least, was still intact.

  Ezra promised himself he would find the master as soon as he had completed his tasks, and apologize. But by the time Ezra went in to fetch the letter to take to Bart’s, Mr McAdam had already left in a chair for a dinner at the Company of Surgeons and would not be back till late. It would have to wait.

  As Ezra walked eastwards through the city, he did wonder why Mr Lashley wasn’t going to be at the Company of Surgeons but surmised that any dinner he was at would be a much poorer and duller occasion.

  He came to St Bartholomew’s from the Old Bailey, holding his breath as he passed the massive stinking hulk of Newgate Prison, then up Giltspur Street and through the old gate of the hospital. As he turned under the archway he noticed a girl: small, maybe fourteen from her face, with bright – no, flaming – red hair piled on top of her head. She sat on a stool by the gateway, her arms folded, saying, doing nothing, only glaring. She was dressed in mourning, and the black of her dress and shawl only seemed to make the colour of her hair shout louder.

  Ezra followed her line of sight. She was staring straight at the Fortune of War public house, which sat almost opposite the hospital entrance.

  “Are you quite well, Miss?”

  The watchman in his gatehouse shifted and stood up. “That’un’s been there best part of the day. Not budged an inch,” he said.

  She was very still. Ezra waved a hand in front of her face.

  “I am quite well, thank you. Now if you will leave me alone,” she said, but did not look at him.

  Ezra and the watchman exchanged looks. He tried again. “The Fortune of War is not a –” Ezra coughed, trying to find the word – “a very salubrious tavern.”

  “I done told her that already,” the watchman put in.

  At last the girl moved, turning her steely grey eyes on him. “Don’t you think I know that, sir?”

  Ezra shrugged; the girl obviously did not want his assistance. He turned and, with one last glance over his shoulder, made his way through the arch into the courtyard of the hospital and into the w
est wing, where Mr Lashley had his office.

  As he walked along the first-floor corridor he looked out of the long window, which gave a perfect view of the corner of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane – and the tavern. He couldn’t see the girl from here, but he was sure she was still there because, on the pavement outside the inn, a knot of men was standing, looking back towards where she had been sitting. Ezra recognized one of them as Mr Allen. Whatever the girl’s fight was with those men, it was terribly one-sided. From her dress, Ezra guessed she had lost a loved one – perhaps those gentlemen had sold him on to surgeons.

  Ezra thought he should like to tell her the truth of it, how they needed the cadavers to do their work, to find ways of making the living live longer, live better. But he knew it would be a waste of his time. He had had that conversation so many times and people never listened.

  Ezra paused. He took a moment to brush down his coat and pat his hair into place, then knocked twice on the door.

  “Aha, Ezra McAdam! Changed your mind, I hope?” Mr Lashley sat behind an enormous dark wood desk. He was studying a jar containing an ear, and on his desk a pile of letters was held down with what looked like a twisted section of a human spine.

  Lashley must have seen him looking. “Yes, rather fine, don’t you think? It shows excessive osteophytes, bone spurs and scoliosis.” He shook his head as if in wonder. “Quite remarkable.”

  “I have not given your offer any more thought, sir. I am quite happy where I am.” Ezra kept his face blank. “My master sends you this.” He took the letter out of his jacket.

  “Is there a reply, sir?” Ezra asked, when he felt Lashley had had enough time to read it over. He would rather not wait while Mr Lashley composed an answer.

  “No, not now. Although I would change Mr McAdam’s mind. We do not operate for the good of the destitute!” Mr Lashley replied, waving him off as if he had more important things to do.

  “As you wish, sir.” Ezra nodded and left as quickly as he could. The man was a penny-pincher and no mistake. He hurried back down the stairs two at a time, glad to be making his way home.

  Ezra could hear the commotion as soon as he came out into the hospital courtyard. At first he assumed an ox had escaped from a pen in Smithfield market – it happened often enough. But as he stepped out through the gate he could see it wasn’t an ox that was being rounded up.

  The men carried shovels and stakes. Allen was there, and a few of his company. They were chasing the girl, the one who’d been sitting stock-still – but she wasn’t still now, not at all. She had her black skirts up and was running for her life, in and out of the animal pens of Smithfield market, falling and getting back up and jumping hurdles as fast as possible in full mourning. All the while the men bellowing and hollering, the sound bouncing and echoing off the hospital walls.

  Ezra watched as she was cornered by two thickset resurrectionists, each with a shovel. The girl was half their size, width and breadth. Why was no one helping her? Ezra ran as fast as he could across the empty meat market.

  As he dodged animals, he lost sight of her for a few minutes, but he followed the sounds of her furious shouting. Then came a scream, a sound of intense pain – a mirror of the sound the boy had made in the operating theatre the day before.

  She was on the floor; one of the stakes that made up the animal pens stuck out of her thigh. Blood, dark as ink, pooled beneath her on the straw-covered ground.

  “Leave her alone!” Ezra tried to sound in charge. “I am Ezra McAdam, apprentice to Mr William McAdam of Great Windmill Street.” The men stepped back. He didn’t recognize either man in the twilight, but they knew his name.

  “Tell this harpy to leave us be or she’ll get some more,” one of them said. “Tell her!”

  Ezra nodded. The men melted away.

  The girl was writhing in pain. Ezra knelt down, took off his neckerchief and tied it round her thigh. Then he put a finger into the pool of dark blood underneath her and sniffed. His face relaxed. It wasn’t hers. Just some cow, perhaps, that had met its end in the same spot earlier.

  “You!” The girl tried to push him away. “You’re McAdam’s man! I’ve heard that name. That butcher!” She still had enough fight to spit at him and he caught it in his face. “You will not kill me!”

  Ezra wiped his cheek with his sleeve. “Correct. I will not.”

  “Then you’ll not take my leg! Away, you gullion, you rusticutter!” She tried to get up and floundered, falling to the ground, her skirts awry. “Help me! Help!” she called into the empty market. Her face burned with fury and pain.

  “I am the help,” Ezra said. “And believe me, I have no wish to take your leg, or any other part of you.”

  He looked at her. She was uncommon in many ways; she did not look like a shop girl or a servant – she was too fierce. Her dress, though once expensive, was well worn, almost shabby. Most intriguingly, she spoke the words of the gutter in the voice of a lady.

  “You are a visitor to the city?” he said.

  She glared at him. “Hah! I am less of a visitor than you, sir! My people have lived here for…” She stopped. Ezra had pulled the hurdle out quickly and cleanly while she was distracted.

  The girl burned the air so blue and so loud, Ezra imagined they could have heard every word as far away as Leicester Square. He checked the wound: it was deep, the cut at least an inch long, but the skin was not jagged. He must take care there were no splinters left inside. He needed light. She could not walk on it, so Ezra carried her across the market, in and out of the hurdles, until they were almost under the main gate. “Not Bart’s, no!” the girl snarled. “My father went in alive and I never saw him again. I am not setting one foot inside!”

  “Then truly,” Ezra said as calmly as possible, “if you do not, you will only have one foot.”

  “Oh, I hate you!”

  Ezra sighed. “I am not entirely well disposed to you either, though you are in need of help.” She made a face. “Let me make myself clear. I will take you into the receiving ward. I will stitch up your wound. You could get another to do it, but I can say, honestly, that there are not many who would do as good a job as me. You would only have a bigger scar, it would take longer and it would cost you. From your dress, I’d venture to say that although you may be comfortable, you’re not so wealthy you can afford a surgeon with stitches any better or neater than mine. I doubt you are swimming in cash. Or I could leave you here, and who knows? The wound might never close. The choice is yours.”

  She looked at him, her lip trembling. She was truly afraid, all her bravery had gone. Ezra sighed; he should not have been so cruel. A surgeon needed a good manner as well as a steady hand. He softened.

  “It will be all right,” he told her. “You did not lose so much blood. I think the larger measure was from an ox who’d had the stall before you. I will sew the wound. It will heal.”

  The girl said nothing. Ezra nodded at the porter as they went under the gate towards the receiving ward. She wouldn’t need a bed, Ezra thought, just a needle and suture. It was busy, as usual, and the smell was close to that in the master’s anatomizing room. He saw the girl screw up her face.

  “I think that is the smell of death,” she said.

  Ezra knew she was right, so he lightened his tone. “What is your name?”

  “Miss Finch. And I know yours!” She laughed, bitterly. “You have his name – a butcher’s name. A man known across the city for his anatomizing! If I were you I should change it.”

  Ezra ignored her and put her down carefully. He was well known around the hospital; a nursing sister found him a chair and he begged some suture and a needle from Mr Lashley’s apprentice.

  Miss Finch refused a draught of laudanum to calm her down. “On account that you’ll have put something in it and I’ll wake up on the table being dissected!”

  “That will not happen. Unless you faint away through pain you will be quite awake – although I would advise you to look away. The thought of the deed
is worse than the actuality.”

  “I want my wits about me, thank you very much.” She glared at him.

  Ezra had to tell her ten times to keep still, then, as quickly as he could, made four tiny stitches. Miss Finch bit her lip and looked away at first, but Ezra caught her watching and her face seemed to have changed from outrage to interest.

  “There.” He stood back. “If you hadn’t wriggled so, I might have got in five smaller, but that will do.”

  “Pleased with yourself, aren’t you?” she said. “I bet my stitches would be neater than yours.”

  He smiled. “I’d like to see that.”

  “I would say a human is no different from a smocked shirt. And I do the best smocked shirts – my pa said so…” Her voice tailed off.

  “I’m sorry, Miss,” he ventured into the silence that followed.

  “No matter,” Miss Finch said briskly, and got up to walk.

  “No.” Ezra put a hand out to stop her. “No pressure on it. Not for a few days. Not at all!”

  “So I mightn’t walk now?” She sounded worried.

  “I’ll bandage it up, but you will need to use a stick or a crutch,” he told her. “Look, lean on me and we’ll see if we can find the stores – there is bound to be one there.” He stopped, seeing the shocked look on her face. “Just for a few days,” he added hastily, “until the skin knits back together.”

  Miss Finch leant her shoulder against his and hobbled down the corridor past the medical wards. The lamps were all lit now, but it was a gloomy place, Ezra thought. There was crying and moaning, and perhaps the remembrance of hundreds of years of crying too.

  “So many people have died here,” Miss Finch said, as if reading his thoughts.

  It wasn’t long before they came to a cupboard full of sticks and trolleys and crutches. Ezra found her one of a suitable size and they left the hospital via the north gate.

  “So you have no further opportunity to stir up the drinkers at the Fortune of War,” he said.

  “Those men are not ordinary drinkers.”

  “I know.”

  “And I know I have accomplished nothing with my vigil.” She sighed. “I had hoped to make them feel something. Guilt, perhaps.”