Chapter 6
The rain had eased up by the time Sebastian left for the Tower Hill surgery of the anatomist Paul Gibson.
“Best walk ’em,” he told his tiger, Tom, as they pulled up before the surgeon’s medieval stone house. “That wind is bloody cold, and I don’t know how long I’ll be.”
“Aye, gov’nor,” said the lad, scrambling forward to take the reins.
Small and sharp-faced, with lanky brown hair and a jaunty, gap-toothed smile, Tom had been with Sebastian since the dark days when Sebastian was a hunted fugitive and Tom an orphaned pickpocket living in the shadow of the gallows.
“As cold as it is, I’m thinkin’ we’ll be lucky if it don’t snow soon. ”
“God help us,” said Sebastian, turning away to cut down the narrow passage that ran along one side of Gibson’s house.
Pushing open the warped wooden gate set in the high old stone wall, he entered a long, sloped garden, cold-nipped now but still peaceful despite the dark secrets buried there.
At the base of the garden stood the high-windowed stone outbuilding Gibson used for his postmortems. It was also where, less openly, the surgeon practiced new techniques and expanded his knowledge of anatomy on cadavers filched from the area’s churchyards by body snatchers.
As he followed the stone-lined path that wound through the wet, dripping shrubs and shriveled perennials, Sebastian could hear his friend whistling “Seán ó Duibhir A’ Ghleanna” as he bent over the charred corpse that lay on the elevated stone slab in the center of the old building’s single room.
“One of these days,” said Sebastian, pausing in the open doorway with one hand on the frame beside him, “you’re going to get yourself transported for singing that bloody song.”
Gibson looked up with a grin and wildly exaggerated his brogue. “Sure then, but I wasna singing it, now, was I?”
Sebastian laughed. The friendship between the two men dated back more than a decade, to the days when Sebastian had been a captain in the 25th Hussars and Paul Gibson the regimental surgeon.
Irish by birth, he was only two years Sebastian’s senior but looked older, his dark hair heavily laced with gray, the grooves beside his mouth dug deep by years of phantom pains from his missing limb, and his frame gaunt as a result of the opium dependence he’d developed trying to control them.
Thanks to the efforts of his brilliant, enigmatic French lover, Alexi Sauvage, the pains were gone now.
But so far her efforts to help him overcome his love affair with poppies had been less successful.
“I was expecting to see you bright and early this morning,” said Gibson, his peg leg tapping on the flagged floor as he reached for a rag to wipe his gore-smeared hands.
“Bright and early this morning, I still hadn’t made it to my bed.” Sebastian took one look at what Gibson had been doing to the body before him, then glanced pointedly away. “I hear Sir Samuel Toole has already positively identified this as his son. Is that true?”
“It is,” said Gibson. “Recognized his son’s chipped tooth, then flew into a towering rage when I told him he couldn’t take the body away with him.
Not only is the very idea of an autopsy an affront to the nature of being, but if the Lord God had wanted dirty Irish surgeons cutting up and gawking at the bodies of wellborn, God-fearing Englishmen, he wouldn’t have sent bonny William of Orange to put so many of us in our graves. ”
“He said that?”
“He did. I don’t think our Sir Samuel—the Sixth Baronet, mind you, not some mere puffed-up knight, as he was at pains to tell me—is accustomed to being told no. He stormed off threatening to call the constables on me.”
“Did he? Call the constables on you, I mean.”
“He may have tried. All I know is, I haven’t heard from him again. One must make allowances for a father’s grief, but…” He hurled the rag he’d been holding onto a nearby shelf and blew out a long, hard breath. “Does he have other sons?”
“No.”
“Ah, the poor man. ’Tis a terrible thing, to be sure, to lose a son so young. And then to have to see him looking like this…”
“I can’t imagine it,” said Sebastian. He didn’t want to even try to imagine it. He had to force himself to take another look at what was left of Marcus Toole. “Please tell me the man was dead before he fell—or was thrown—onto that fire.”
“Probably not.”
Sebastian glanced over at his friend. “God help us.”
“He was shot first. But the bullet only tore the aorta; it didn’t directly hit his heart. I could be wrong, but I think he was still alive when he went in that fire.”
“He was shot in the back?”
“He was not; from the front. Given the way he was found, it’s possible the impact spun him around so that he then pitched forward into the fire.
Although it’s also possible that whoever shot him then picked him up and deliberately threw him on the fire.
Either way, odds are he was still alive at that point, although it wouldn’t have been for more than a moment or two. ”
“Even a few seconds in that fire would have made his last moments on earth a screaming nightmare,” said Sebastian, his gaze on the dead man’s charred skull.
Most of the flesh of his face had been burned away, leaving only bone and hideously exposed teeth.
“And there truly is no doubt about the identification?”
“I don’t see how there can be, given the chipped tooth.
Otherwise, I suppose someone could have dressed the body of a different man of about Toole’s age and size in his clothes and slipped his ring on the man’s finger and Toole’s watch into the fellow’s pocket before tossing him in the fire.
But I don’t see how they could have replicated that tooth.
There’s enough wear on the broken edge to indicate that it happened years ago. ”
Sebastian went to stand in the dank building’s open doorway, his hands on his hips, his gaze on the rain-soaked, haunted garden.
Gibson watched him for a moment, then said, “I understand your nephew was there, passed out drunk.”
“So he claims.”
“You don’t believe him?”
“Frankly? I don’t know.” He turned to face his friend again. “Two weeks ago, another young gentleman named Gilbert Keebles was murdered. Did you by chance do that autopsy?”
“I did not; that was Robert Fink, over in Rotherhithe. From what I’ve heard, it sounds as if Keebles was stabbed in the side before being thrown or falling in the river. Fink is an idiot, but he did have the sense to check to see if there was water in the man’s lungs, and there was.”
“So he drowned?”
“It’s likely. Although according to Fink, the knife wound would have killed him soon enough.”
“Any idea what kind of knife we’re talking about?”
Gibson shook his head. “That sort of analysis is beyond Robert Fink.” He paused. “Were both young men friends of your nephew?”
“They were. And now Bayard is convinced that whoever murdered his friends is going to try to kill him next.”
“I can understand that fear.”
Sebastian found himself staring again at the charred, gruesomely grinning face of Marcus Toole. “So can I.”
Gibson hesitated a moment, then said, “Primrose Hill is where they’ve been holding all those Celtic ceremonies, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“My Latin was never the best, but from what I remember from my days of slogging through De Bello Gallico, the Celts used to burn sacrifices to their gods—human sacrifices, sometimes shut up in a big wicker cage shaped like a man.”
“Or so Julius Caesar claimed.”
“You think that could be what’s going on here?”
Sebastian met his friend’s worried gaze. “I sincerely hope not.”