Chapter 28 We Add the Bones
We Add the Bones
We have taken the leap, Harry. Pray that it will be enough. It must be enough.
It was midnight last night when we set to work.
A very dark, moonless night. For some reason those seem to be better for Georgiana’s illness.
She was by my side, and quite strong and lively as ever.
(Actually I have never seen her otherwise than strong and lively.
She takes great care to guard her illness from view.
The Darcy pride at work again, I suppose.
Never mind Pike’s suspicions.) It was storming, as well—a good thing we are having a stormy autumn!
A rapping at the window alerted us that Pike had arrived. I opened the window to him and let him climb down from the roof, sodden from head to foot. By the time he reached the floor there was a puddle beneath him.
“You’re late,” I said to him.
“There was a line of carriages waiting to go home from the Lucases’ card party. I had to go through the woods so as not to be seen.” He examined his feet and growled. “Quite ruined my new boots, too. Why all this rigmarole, pray?” He offered a brusque bow to Georgiana. “Miss Darcy.”
“Mr. Pike.” She nodded.
“If this ‘rigmarole,’ as you call it, succeeds,” I said, “your dependence on me will be permanently at an end.”
That got his attention. “Then let us get on with it.”
I waved a cup at him. It was a muddy blue color—the last of the blue extract, mixed with a few drops of the ruddy orange I got from Papa—that seemed to make Pike sleepy. “Medicine first.”
He took the cup and peered down into it. Then he made his way to the shelf and helped himself to several phials each of red and black. “For later,” he said.
Georgiana and I exchanged glances. “As you will,” I said at last. After all, if this went well, he would soon be free of both the need and the inclination for the stuff.
“Are you sure about all this?” he asked, eyeing the array of instruments gleaming on the table.
“Hush,” I told him. “We’re going to make you better.”
“By cutting me open.”
“You already agreed,” said Georgiana. “You brought us the bones. Lost your nerve?”
He smiled faintly. “I would never disoblige a lady as charming as yourself, Miss Darcy.”
“Good.”
Pike toasted us. “Your health, ladies.” Then he drank it down.
We bade him lie down. He did not actually fall asleep, but lay quite calmly on the table and watched us as we made our final preparations.
The neat twist of copper wire hung above him, flickering in the lamplight.
I saw the peace of the blue serum steal over him.
If only he could always be this biddable.
“Will it take long?” he asked me.
“Not if you hold still.”
“I shall hold still, then.”
He was humming when we made the first incision. In the moonlight, his already pale chest looked as white as a snow-covered field, with two little purple-black smudges for the nipples. Consulting the anatomy book, I cut along the sternum. I flinched when the scalpel sank into his flesh. He did not.
“Are you all right, Pike?”
Silence.
“Pike?”
“You told me to be still.”
I blew out a breath. “You may answer me.”
“I’m well enough. A bit bored.”
“We’ll soon have you up.”
His eyes, still compliant and uninterested, rolled away from mine, and stared at the ceiling. He began to hum softly, then to sing.
“A fox went out on a chilly night / Prayed to the moon to give him light / He’d many a mile to go that night, / before he reached the town-oh, town-oh, / He’d many a mile to go that night / before he reached the town-oh.”
Geo and I exchanged glances. “Should we make him stop?” I whispered.
She knelt down by the table until her eyes were level with his sternum. “We needn’t,” she said. “Look.”
She took my leather-clad hand in her own and laid it on his chest. It ought to have risen and fallen with the rhythm of his song. It was perfectly still.
“He’d many a mile to go that night, before he reached the town-oh…”
I swallowed. “R-right. Onward?”
I could feel a slight tremor in G’s hand, but she nodded crisply. “Onward.”
The long cut I opened from collarbone to stomach ought to have bled horrendously.
There was little blood, however. Just a thick dark red fluid that welled up almost decorously at the edges, and was easily wiped away by Georgiana.
I opened a second cut along the bottom of his ribs in an upside-down T shape, and then carefully peeled back the flesh.
“He grabbed a gray goose by the neck, / Threw the goose across his back, / He didn’t mind their quack, quack, quack, / With their legs all dangling down-oh…”
Slowly, slowly, I peeled back the flesh, the only sounds Pike’s singing and a faint whispering, as of cloth against cloth. At last I had him pinned open, and I stopped and stared.
I am a farmer’s daughter. I have seen the insides of animals before. Once, with a sharp blade and a book of anatomy, I even cut open my own thigh to see if it looked the same as beast meat; it did. Pike did not.
There was no scent of life, nor of death, either.
His organs were all there, just as the diagrams had said, but they were a dusty gray-black instead of the colors the book said they ought to be.
There was none of the dampness of the inside of a living thing, nor any shriveled desiccation.
All was plump and smooth and dry as a bone.
His scent was something between gunpowder and charcoal.
A calm, inorganic smell. His heart was pumping, but it whispered instead of thudding.
His lungs seemed to be working out of sync, rippling rather than pumping in and out together.
I knew then that I was seeing something no living creature had seen before. And I had made it. I had done it.
Georgiana made a slight sound, and I started out of my fascinated reverie. I worried she must be disgusted with it and disgusted with me. Perhaps I was as dry and dead on the inside as Pike was.
When I raised my eyes to her face, though, she was not looking at me, but down into the whispering pit of his abdomen.
“Fascinating,” she murmured. “Do you think all the organs are in such a state? What about the liver?”
I bit my lip, then blurted, “Let’s see.” Carefully, I lifted up a corner of the right lung and peered beneath it. “It’s too dark.”
“Here, let me help you.” With one hand, Georgiana lifted her lamp a foot above the incision; her other hand joined mine beneath the lung. I could feel her fingers next to mine, deft and seeking. A little delicate probing, and then, without needing to discuss it, we lifted the organ together.
“There it is,” whispered Georgiana. Very gently, I palpated it. Most creatures’ livers are fatty, of course; his felt as though it was full of a fine powder.
“Here,” I said. “Feel this.” I moved her fingers where mine had been and gently squeezed them. I felt as much as I heard her gasp. Our fingers still tangled together, her eyes were glued on the cavity, but mine were on her face. Her eyes sparkled in the lantern light.
Then she lifted her eyes to mine and smiled.
“This is the most captivating thing I have ever seen in my life,” she said. She understood. I felt as though my heart would burst.
Not dry and dead, after all.
I was aware of every place her gloved fingers touched mine. I could have stood there all night, entwined with her. But—
“… The legs all dangling down-oh…”
I jerked away. Georgiana flinched and withdrew as well. We had work to do.
Harry, your ribs were not free of flesh when Pike brought them to us, but after many decoctions they were as shining and white as a freshly scrubbed floor.
You’d be proud, I hope. We’d thought, from our readings on anatomy, that we might have to cut or even saw Pike’s own ribs away; we’d prepared by abstracting a set of garden shears and even, in case of greatest need, a saw.
Here again his peculiar form surprised us.
His lowest rib on the right side worked out of its socket with nothing more than two soft pops.
When I turned my attention to the left side, I frowned. “That’s odd.”
“What?”
“He’s got fewer on this side.” Quickly I counted. “Yes, thirteen on the right but only twelve here.”
“I’ve heard about this,” said Georgiana. “Apparently it’s not unusual for someone to have an extra rib on one side. The body is not so uniform as might be wished.”
“Really!” I wished I could spend hours inspecting the rest of his internal organs, but that seemed a bit rude, so I set Pike’s rib aside and took up Harry’s ribs. “Well, after this he will be properly symmetrical.”
“Then the fox and his wife without any strife / cut up the goose with a fork and knife. / They never had such a supper in their life / and the little ones chewed on the bones-o, bones-o, bones-o…”
For a moment I held them in my hand. The smooth, curved weight of them. They rolled end-down in my palm.
These were your ribs.
What would Mr. Henry Bennet, rector of Longbourn and Meryton, think of what I was doing now?
You would not be angry, I hope? You were never angry with me. You believed, so strongly, that natural research was a way to grow closer to God. But what I was doing was hardly godly.
But what choice did I have, Harry? I was all that stood between Longbourn and a monster, and God had shown no inclination to step in. Pray forgive me. I only chose your bones to desecrate because you are the best man I ever knew.
“… they never had such a supper in their life / and the little ones chewed on the bones-o.”
One at a time, I carefully slid the new ribs into place. They shone bright white against the gray of his other bones. The right-hand one was a little bigger than Pike’s own—you were a tall man, cousin—and we had to push some viscera aside to make room for the left-hand one, but we managed.
Finally, I reached for the two pieces of copper wire hanging down above the table. I wrapped each one several times around a rib. Then Georgiana stepped back several paces and I cranked up my electrical apparatus. Once, twice, three times, until the very air crackled with power, and then—
Zzzap.
We had been hoping that, as your bones are fresher, you would not require a full lightning strike to perform.
Peering into Pike’s chest cavity, we found we were quite correct.
Your ribs were already dotted with tiny beads of dark liquid, like beads of sweat on a hot day.
I blew out a breath. “We did it.” I swiped a bit onto my thumb and forefinger and held it up to the lamp. A perfect cyan blue.
“Can we conclude then?” asked Pike. “I am developing the urge to sneeze.”
Georgiana and I exchanged glances of alarm. “On no account must you sneeze, Pike,” I said. “You would expel your new ribs and Lord knows what else.”
“Sew me up, then.”
“Very well.”
Pike sang his fox song three times over by the time we had him sewn up. When we were done, we bade him sit up.
“How do you feel, Pike?” I asked.
His hands traced slowly over the stitches that now crisscrossed his chest and abdomen. “Like a chimney that wants cleaning,” he said.
“What?”
“Itchy,” he said, “but on the inside.”
“It will go away,” I said with as much confidence as I could manage. “You go to sleep now. We’ll wake you when you’re needed.”
We’d poured every drop of blue serum that I had down his throat. We wouldn’t know if the ribs were working until that had worn off. Approximately thirteen hours, I estimated.
Georgiana’s heavy smocks had been a stroke of genius—once we removed them, there was no trace of our late-night project on our hands and clothes beneath.
We slipped into bed and fell asleep as innocently as ever two girls had.
That afternoon, we slipped back up to the laboratory and shook him awake.
“What will you do now, Pike?” Geo whispered.
He gave us the sweetest, most obedient smile I had ever seen from him. “What would you like me to do?”
I blew out a breath. It had worked.