Chapter 12
Roland would have liked to have taken the walk in silence.
It felt like an appropriate moment for silence.
Unfortunately, they were in the company of Sybil Lutch.
“And I was very cross with him after that story, you understand,” she was saying to Mae, swinging her arms as she wove around every other cobble in her path.
“He couldn’t get around telling me how he’d ended up with black thread in his arm, so I got the whole thing out of him, and when I tell you the coin I could have made if I’d have been there to draw a study of the procedure. ”
“We couldn’t pause it for you to draw,” Mae replied, her brow furrowed, casting several concerned glances over her shoulder at Roland, who was trailing behind them, hands in his pockets, watching this conversation unfold with resigned fatigue.
“No, you wouldn’t have to,” Sybil said, shaking her head.
“I could do close-up drawings of the sutures, the incision, the whole area beforehand if it was visibly rotting. Oh! The amputated foot! I bet you just threw it out. What a waste! I could have had steak dinner for a month on multiple detailed angles of an amputated foot and then the boiled bones besides. Gracious.”
“Sybil,” Roland murmured from behind them.
She flapped her dirty hand at him over her head.
“It’s why I kept asking Roland to bring me to the clinic.
For years, you understand, but he never wanted me to meet his people from outside the brothel.
I’m not good enough for the likes of you, of course.
Never have been. I’ve never met the vicar either.
Or the big ’un and his fancy sister. But I know about them, and I suspect they don’t know about me, so I suppose that’s a kind of winning in a way, innit? ”
He sighed.
“The … the brothel?” Mae repeated, looking alarmed. “Oh, do you also work as … erm …”
“Me? No, but my mum does,” Sybil said. “And so did his. And you just met Aristotle. Not sure what other vocation that man was built for. We were both born in one. Came up together. Didn’t we, Roland?”
“Sybil,” he said again, more impatiently.
“It isn’t a secret,” she said, snickering. “You tell people all the time.”
He frowned. It was true. He even enjoyed telling people and watching how off guard it took them. It had been particularly fun to do so to Vix’s groom moments before their wedding.
So why was it bothering him now?
“She doesn’t care,” said Sybil. “She works with Sally, doesn’t she? Everyone knows Sally’s an exceptional slut.”
“Sybil!” Roland barked, but it only made her grin and add a skip to her gait.
“I love Sally,” she added, directly to Mae. “She makes a great cup of coffee.”
“Yes,” said Mae, sounding a little dazed. “Yes, she does.”
“So, to answer your question, I don’t sell the drawings as drawings exactly,” Sybil continued, pausing at the intersection and waiting for Roland to point in the direction to the morgue.
“I sell them to the people who sell their art as art, most of the time. They are studies, really. There’s no artistic interpretation.
It’s the difference between a legal statement and a good story, I suppose.
Sculptors and painters are my best clients, but the anatomical stuff has really been very good coin since I discovered it.
It’s a bit nasty, so there’s less competition. Which is why I want the dead folk.”
Roland wondered if this had completely extinguished the romantic glow in the aftermath of their kiss for Mae Casper or if it had also poured grave dirt over the top of it and slapped it several times with a shovel.
She glanced back at him one more time with a look of concern. “And you know the coroner?” she said, sounding a little affronted.
“I do,” he said. “He loves a game of hazard.”
Her face relaxed, relief washing over it. “Oh,” she said with a sigh. “Oh, that makes sense. From the Vixen.”
He nodded.
It wasn’t completely untrue.
After a moment, Mae stopped dead in the street, as though she’d just collided with an invisible wall. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “You sell your drawings to sculptors. And you draw Roland sometimes?”
“Oh, hold on that, mate. That wasn’t me!” Sybil immediately exclaimed.
Roland sighed again, dropping his forehead into his hand and squeezing at his temples. “We’re here,” he said to his feet, to reassure them, if no one else.
“Are you certain?” Mae pressed as they walked down the stairs into the subterranean morgue room. “Did you see that sculpture? It’s installed at Kew Gardens now. It’s uncanny.”
“Please stop,” he begged, putting his hand on the door.
Mae gave him a quick flash of her dimples and bit her lip but said nothing more about that damned statue.
Mr. Richards was standing over a body, his neat hair reflecting the sunlight streaming in from above as he bent over a sheet of paper, filling out information about the deceased as he observed it from beneath the sheet.
He startled a little when the door opened, and he glanced up at the visitors, blinking a few times and whipping away his spectacles. “Ah,” he said. “Mr. Reed. I wasn’t expecting you until early evening.”
Roland turned and gave a pointed stare at Sybil, who looked utterly unabashed at this proof that he had indeed scheduled this encounter for a specific time of day.
Mr. Richards turned to the women and gave a gentle smile, tugging the sheet up over the face of the dead man. “Hello,” he said. “I am Mr. Richards. I understand one of you is a figure artist?”
“Me,” said Sybil, stepping forward, already peering curiously at the sheet as she thrust her hand out in a slightly incorrect angle by way of introduction. “That’s me. I’m Sybil. Sybil Lutch.”
Mr. Richards stepped to the left and shook her hand, looking amused by her fascination. “Mr. Reed has told me you are interested in our crime victims and visible injury.”
Mae blinked.
Roland resisted the urge to smile at the expression on her face. He could tell she was also very damned interested in seeing these crime victims and injuries for her own professional curiosity but was far too polite to say so.
“Miss Casper here is a healer,” he provided, drawing the attention of the room. “She may also have some insight that will benefit any ongoing investigations you have afoot. I thought bringing her along might be useful.”
“Did you indeed?” said Mr. Richards, looking impressed. “Actually, Miss Casper, I do have one case that has stumped us all right down to our core. It appears that this woman died of a bruise to the thigh! Will you have a look?”
“Of course!” Mae breathed, already floating forward, her fingers flexing like they were itching to investigate. “Clotting in the legs can sometimes stopper the chest, you know. Lungs or heart.”
“I’ll wait outside,” he said to them, giving a quick bow and turning to flee back out into the embrace of London and all the air that it provided.
Truth be told, his heart was still hammering from everything that had come before. He wasn’t certain if he was still reeling from the shock of seeing that particular woman on his father’s doorstep or if his body was still demanding to know why he’d stopped at just kissing Mae Casper.
He’d kissed her as thoroughly as he could, at least. He’d not wasted the snap decision to finally do the thing.
But he’d had to stop if he didn’t want to make another desk into a versatile piece of furniture. Kissing her for the first time in his father’s house was already less than the ideal setting. Anything further would’ve been wholly unacceptable.
Then again … the kiss had been punishment for crossing a line into his private life.
What would he be entitled to if she ever saw his flat? That one place he’d never shared with anyone else?
He groaned and dropped his head back against the bricks outside the morgue, scratching at the scar on his forearm.
He could still feel the curves of her body under his hands.
He could still taste her.
For all he had waxed poetic about crossing lines, he had apparently forgotten that the entire point of that metaphor was that once crossed, the line vanishes. The line ceases to exist.
He’d kissed her now.
So did that mean he could do it again?
And if so, how often? And when? And where?
He shut his eyes and gave himself a shake. He knew very damn well that he couldn’t take flagrant liberties with the likes of that woman.
He had always known that.
It was a lovely fantasy, though. A vivid one, easy to conjure in his mind’s eye. Easy to recall on the tip of his tongue and the pads of his fingers and nudge past memory and into possibility.
And though whatever came next couldn’t be flagrant, and it likely couldn’t be permanent, perhaps it could still be more than just that once.
It needed to be.
He couldn’t survive on that one, single taste.
It’s why he hadn’t taken it for so long. He had known that once he had it, he would want more. There would be no finding a substitute or waiting out the burn or attempting to purge the desire from his system.
There was only one answer to this kind of want, and Roland knew it.
He wondered if Mae knew it too.
When the women emerged from the morgue, they were chattering excitedly to each other about deep veins and autopsies and an appointment they’d both evidently made to meet back here tomorrow to perform some sort of gruesome procedure together.
“Do you ever heal animals, or just humans?” Sybil asked. “I got invited to a vivisection once to remove a tumor from a prize race horse’s rump. It was fascinating. Horse seemed completely unbothered. They got him dead drunk first, I think.”
He resisted the urge to say her name again in his most exhausted voice. It wouldn’t work anyway, and Sybil did love to chatter. She likely thought she was distracting him from the fact that she was following them back to the clinic.
He didn’t care anymore. All that mattered just now was doing his level best not to imagine a live horse having its arse muscles opened up for a rapt audience while a pocket of pus was dug out. He failed, obviously.
He would probably dream about it, at this stage.
Sybil never shut up long enough for him to speak, which suited him just fine. He was always ready, however, when Mae glanced at him. His eyes were always fixed on her, ready to meet hers should they turn in his direction.
At first, it seemed to spook her, making her fidget and blush, but by the time they rounded the final corner toward their destination, she had started to smile to herself every time she caught him watching, those dimples flickering into her cheeks.
And to his ultimate doom, he found himself starting to smile about it too.