Searchterm Story: Shovelling Pride
Are you sad that the Search Term Challenge is over? Fear not, for there is one more story for you to read. This story was submitted for the challenge, but is over the word count limit and therefore wasn’t included in the voting.
M. Jones is the author of a number of webfiction serials, the most recent of which, Black Wreath, was inspired by this very story below. Yay to the Search Term Challenge for spawning new serials!
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Shovelling Pride
I have no intention of giving him the stillborn, so I leave it alone inside the coffin as I take the infant’s mother instead. It may be argued that I am taking no higher aspiration here, that robbing a grave of only one corpse does not diminish my crime, but as I am familiar with what happens at the other end of my exchange, I do hope that some celestial mercy could be afforded me. A patron saint for resurrectionists surely has to exist, for how often does my colleague claim that my nefarious work is in the grand interests of humanity as a whole, that my putrid excavations are of a worth that even Hell cannot acknowledge? He has a lofty mind, Doctor Faust Grey, but he is pitiably ignorant of the grander world that hovers in the periphery of our own, judging our movements and predicting our hereafter accordingly.
Still, I am not so monstrous as to leave the infant without some memorable scrap of its mother, the tiny murderer having brought her too early to her grave. I remove the young woman’s shawl, and I swaddle the infant within it before I close the coffin and begin the work of sealing it from view with a thick veil of loose dirt. The young mother is now swaddled herself in burlap and then bent in half with a decided crack of her spine to force her to fit into the travelling trunk I bring for such occasions. Dr. Grey’s private coach waits for me on the other side of the cemetery, in an area I know to be frequented by other grave robbers thanks to its isolated location and lack of visibility on the main street. I am lucky that the evening is overcast, the thin patterns of rain a hamper to my fellows in decay. For those who stoop only one shade shy of murder, this kind of employ is easy, and they aren’t men who are willing to sully themselves with muck when a less dreary evening will make lighter work of it. Besides, this poor woman was buried just hours ago, and only careful stalking of her home when I heard she was ill brought this particular corpse to light. My fraternity wouldn’t hear of her until morning, when the papers got out. How disappointed they will be to find her child nestled comfortably and waiting for their hands to grab it into their clutches, where it will be nursed by the scalpel of a potential surgeon. I pity the patient who suffers the blade of such a man who would be so eager to perversely cut into the depths of a child’s heart.
It’s hard work lugging the chest out of the cemetery as quietly as possible, though by now my physical exertion should be used to such abuse. With great effort I manage to get the chest into the back of the carriage, its driver wisely not stooping so low as to help me, nor even look in my direction. He is a solid fellow, and a quiet one, a large, sallow Reaper who pretends to have no involvement. A wise man, in my opinion.
We take a long, meandering route to the dirty house that Doctor Faust Grey uses for his scientific explorations, a term which you may interpret to mean ‘dissections’. Or, as a man of law may refer to it, ‘gross indecencies upon the flesh of the dead’. I’m not a man of law myself, so my ignorance of the exact legal wording must be forgiven. As you may have guessed, I am an educated man, one of lofty ambitions and trailing on the last coattails of a good name. Old money has its uses, but not when it is mostly spent. A good name goes far in securing adequate social standing, an issue which I have made my fullest employ while I dabble in these midnight excursions. The sweet Amelia Pertwee is a lovely girl, of long brown tresses that hang about her shoulder and swoop like a raven’s wing up the back of her neck in folds of carefully woven softness. Her lips are unblemished and ripe as plums, her skin the hue of perfectly filtered virgin olive oil. She is, to be sure, a palatable delight, and one which I am hoping to partake of in the interests of her waiting fortune, which is set to come about upon the death of her aunt and guardian, Mrs. Lettuce Cox. There are those of my fellow grave robbers who would rather hurry along the achingly slow progress of Fate in ensuring their fortune, and would have dispatched of the odious, overbearing mourning monstrosity that is Mrs. Cox long ago (and I describe her thus in the most flattering terms possible), but as I am not a peer among these malcontents, and am in reality a gentleman, I shall have to be patient and simply wait my turn. After all, she is a woman in ill health and is self professed to be not long for this world.
Yes, indeed. I have seen plenty of such evidence first hand. It is not unreasonable to hope.
Thus, as I wait for this inevitable good fortune, I am forced to keep up the appearance my family name suggests, and to do so one must earn a living. Death is a fairly lucrative enterprise that affords me enough time to keep up with the social engagements that my precious Amelia Pertwee’s love demands. A corpse only two days gone will fetch me seven pounds from Dr. Grey, and one as fresh as this, with only a few hours between death and the grave, is certain to put a ten pound note in my pocket. Ample earnings, and one which suits the interests of a gentleman such as myself well.
But as we approached the dilapidated shed (a former cottage of an unknowable medieval serf, its roof comprised of peat moss and the walls crumbling down to worm eaten beams, its family long forgotten beneath history), there was a heated argument seeping out into the misted morning. Clouds of grey clutched at my heels as I struggled with my earthbound parcel, the weight of a good soul putting an added strain on my resolve. The coachman remained silent, waiting until I had unloaded the chest before setting off towards Dr. Grey’s proper home, a large establishment befitting a man of highly lofty means.
“You are a stingy cur!” a male voice insisted. His words were muffled against the thick mounds of wet mist that curled up from the ground and clutched at me, the spirits beneath the earth longing to claim back their prize. Or so my imagination projected, and I pushed it aside as I struggled, my ear only half listening to the drama unfolding within the cottage. “We are all learned men, Faust, and we become this way by a sharing of our limited resources. The least you can do is give one to me!”
I pushed the cottage door open with my back pressed against it, and it sank to allow myself and my heavy parcel in. In vain, I tried to hide my visage beneath the rim of my bowler hat, but the smart tailoring of my suit betrayed me, and I inwardly cursed at my own unthinking foolishness.
“Arthur Endswell? Is it really you?”
Let it never be said that I am not a social man, nor that I am a belligerent one. But as I raised my head to see my old school chum Randy Willcorn, with his red freckles and closely cropped red hair, it was all I could do to refrain from punching him full force across the jaw and making a good run for it. Randy Willcorn. Insufferable boor. Ignorant surgeon in training with the bedside manner of a tick in that he sucked what funds he could from his patients no matter their station. This unethical practice had, of course, made him a resounding success at his chosen field. He grinned and grabbed my hand, pumping it furiously in greeting. I smiled and returned the feeling of comradery with a hearty slap upon his shoulder. “I dare say, it’s good to see you!” he said, his grin more befitting a bulldog than a human being. “It’s been a while, a long while. Still, Amelia has been kind enough to keep me informed of your doings. I heard you made a splash in India, and made a good return or two on some lucrative investments. Here now, you should have thought of your old pal Randy when negotiating that round. Good show on you, in any case, my good man. Good show!”
I grinned back, my hands clasped tight behind my back as he forced his friendliness upon me like forty lashes from a whip. Truly, I hate this man.
Being forced to endure the company of my chief rival in Amelia’s affections and subsequent fortune rendered the corpse at my feet a secondary problem. Tired from dragging the chest into Dr. Grey’s scientific lair, I boldly sat upon it, the casual ease with which I did so hopefully deterring Randy from understanding my real reason for being here. Which, considering I knew why *he* was here, being the surgeon he was, made for an interesting play acted out between us, one in which I clearly had the upper hand. “I never knew you had an association with the esteemed Dr. Grey,” I said. I fixed upon him the most vibrant grin I could. “What business brings you here?”
“A patient enquiry,” he blissfully lied. “A most difficult case. I was hoping Dr. Grey could help me in determining the best course of treatment, seeing as he has had experience in this area before.”
“Really?” I said, crossing my legs and getting properly comfortable. “I would love to hear about it. I’m no doctor, of course, but I did partake of a lecture on biology back in the summer. It is in fact the very reason I am here, as I have procured some medicinal instruments for his use from my contacts in India. As a doctor you may be interested in taking a look. I have syringes, glass vials, brass bowls and several herbal poultices from the region which may be of use to you. It’s all very fascinating.”
It was with no small amount of glee that I watched him stiffen at the use of the term ‘poultices’, a word no doctor worth his training entertained as having value. In the narrow mind of such as Randy Willcorn, the herbs and sticks of peasants were not worthy of genuine medical study, a point I hit home with the added bonus of offering him a sachet bag guaranteed to cure a choleric temperament.
“I’m sure Dr. Grey would be more than delighted to make use of your potions,” Willcorn coldly replied. He gave a nod to his colleague in dismissal and a more pleasant one to me, in deference to how well he knew he was gaining an edge on me in his pursuit of Amelia. “I shall be sure to send Mrs. Cox your love,” he said, and with that made his leave.
“Bastard,” I could not help but say upon his full exit. “I suppose he was looking for this, was he?” I kicked the side of the chest with the heel of my shoe, a thin layer of dried mud dusting the ground beneath it.
The good Doctor Grey is a man who does not involve himself in grudges of any kind, and he wisely ignored my outburst. With his hands rubbing together in happy glee he motioned for me to get off the chest, and I complied, allowing him access to his prize. “It’s only a few hours cold,” I told him.
“You’ll get your compensation,” he impatiently replied. His voice was thick, an Austrian accent coursing through his syllables, elongating the nouns and shortening the consonants, so when he spoke it sounded to myself as ‘Uule geeet uurre coompenzaaaason.’ He eagerly opened the chest, and bid me to aid him in getting the body onto the slab, a job I wasn’t usually requested to perform, but seeing as how much I had manhandled this unfortunate soul already it didn’t seem an unreasonable action.
She was on his slab and beneath his scalpel within minutes. He is not an unconscionable man, Dr. Grey, and he was kind enough to drape her young body with a thin veil of muslin before he began his slashing work. The tools of his trade were strangely domestic. A ladle to dip into the body cavity and empty it of fluids. A scale to weigh the organs and record their shape and size. He writes longhand, the tall, leaning letters outlining copious amounts of information as he cuts and prods and investigates each human piece. “She has had a child,” he notes aloud, and writes this observation down carefully. He turns wizened eyes upon me, the large grey brows above his eyes giving him an owlish expression. “Where is it?”
“Where is what?” I asked.
“The child.” With his accent, it sounds like ‘Teee chyyurld’.
“There wasn’t one,” I lied. I have become quite adept at this base skill as of late.
Dr. Grey is an intelligent, observant soul. He pulls away from the young woman’s corpse and turns his back to me as he washes his hands in the brass bowl of cold water beside him. “She is an unfortunate case. One I have seen far too often, and one will haunt my slab again. A woman dying of childbirth is more prevalent than the ravages of consumption. I know what you think, when you bring the bodies here. You see me as a butcher. As a man who carves up the dead as if they are playthings.” He turns on me, his brows so furrowed I can barely see the black pinpricks that are his tiny eyes. “Science is not concerned with how you feel or what you believe to be true. It is my duty, as a doctor, to seek out those things that will help my patients. If there is a story to be told by this woman’s body, then it will reveal itself beneath my scalpel, and perhaps, the next time I find a woman in similar distress, I will know how to stop the clutch of death from claiming her.”
He looked upon corpse on the slab with something akin to pity. For him, I had to understand, she was like a present, a highly treasured gift that had to be carefully unwrapped lest her preciousness be defiled. I felt a strange twinge of shame in his presence, as though my thoughts on my gruesome earnings had made myself the unsavoury participant, while he was the champion of the death bed. “An extra ten pounds,” he promised me, treating me as if I was one of those low classes of men who cared solely for the realm of money. Which in many ways I did, but it would be ignoble of me to be so open in regards to it.
“I shall do what I can,” I solemnly promised.
***
Being a gentleman does give one the benefit of good breeding and is an office that provides a certain degree of respectability that is otherwise lacking in the lower classes. As I strolled through the front gates of the cemetery in early morning, I was immediately struck by the sound of shovels hitting rock and the low cursing of unkempt men. There were two of them, one standing above the grave with an oil lamp that gave off less light than the early morning sun provided, and the other was busy in the grave, his shovel tossing out dirt with alarming speed. I had to stop myself from admiring this tenacity and while it was on the tip of my tongue to enquire as to his technique, I refrained and instead shouted, “Here! What are you doing? Stop, there!”
As one grizzled member raised his head from the grave, I was relieved to find myself face to face with one of the infamous Bellowing Bastard Brothers, a duo of petty thieves who had only recently been trying their hand at grave robbing. They were well seasoned criminals, but thankfully weren’t as immorally grounded as another pair, who were impatient when waiting for corpses to arrive and thus took the problem into their own hands often enough to get caught. “Not to be begging a problem, sirrah. Jus’ diggin’ a new one for h’a unfortunate soul, we are.”
“I see,” I said, standing at the mouth of the grave, looking down on them with withering judgement. I can be quite persuasive to lesser men, and am always surprised at how easy it is to pry a sense of morals out of seemingly lost causes. Perhaps I had been woefully miscast in my life, and should have done better to have studied at a seminary and become a vicar. That particular lofty vocation is woefully blocked to me now, and I shooed the Bastard Brothers from the grave with a point of my walking stick at the grave site marker, shaking my head in disgusted disbelief. “A new grave, and yet here her marker is already. And look, there is her visage, looking down upon you as you dig. What terrible, immoral business have you here? Have you not heard of the tragedy? Of how such a young one as this died of a particularly unusual ailment, one that mimicked that most horrific of scourges–The dreaded Black Plague?” I gasped for effect, and stood apart from the grave a few steps, as though fearful of being diseased. “There are reasons this body was interred so quickly. I should half wonder that by turning the earth she lays beneath you have not also stirred that which turned her very heart to bile. A terrible, horrific way to die! Why, they say there was not one orifice that wasn’t spewing a viscous black fluid…”
“Stop!” the toothless elder Brother exclaimed. His filthy hands let the shovel clasped within them drop with a clatter to the surface of the coffin. “What say you, sirrah? Is this true what you be telling us? Nay, it can’t be, for the whole of her house would be thus affected. I’ve seen the way these things go.”
“Have you no understanding that this was no streetsweeper? She did not crawl her way out of a poorhouse stall, she had a home filled with servants, a doting husband…” I had no idea if these things were true, and considering the simplicity of her grave and the lack of supervision, it was unlikely she was anything more than yet another hungry mouth upon the streets of London. But considering the vile nature of my work, I felt a sincere need to elevate her to a far more worthy status than her life had afforded her. “This is not a business for men who wish to live long lives,” I said. “For her household has likewise felt her affliction. It may take a few hours, but mark my words, there will be several more plots opened by nightfall.”
Of course there would be. In London, death was far more prevalent than life. Every morning, that sombre visitor would take the hand of hundreds and lead them to its peaceful, dark embrace, be it in the Thames, or in the muck strewn cubbyholes where poverty lurked at every turn. There was no getting away from the gaunt trudge of Death. Every cobblestone in Whitechapel was tainted with His step.
“I has touched her tomb, I has,” the younger Bastard Brother wailed. “I’s a sight for the Black Evil, I is!”
“Oh shut yer gob, we’re out of it!” the elder replied. He huffed his way out of the grave and gave me a low nod. “I ain’t what you believe, sirrah, we’re not the devils you make us to be. We ain’t no hobgoblins digging up young precious things. Ain’t nothing to happen on us, sirrah. Nothing at all.” He tipped his grimy cap at me in deference. “A good day to you, sirrah.”
It was a bold assertion, but I did hear the elder hush the younger with a promise of poultices from a local gypsy that would cure them of all ills. Perhaps I should have taken better heed of their words. Dr. Grey might have been interested in this gypsy’s natural alchemy.
As it was, I had a most unpleasant job to do, and once I was sure the Bastard Bellowing Brothers were out of the way, I leapt into the grave and opened the coffin. My good mood at fooling them into leaving this prize was instantly quashed by the tiny form that lay swaddled within, the face hidden from view. I took its small, cold body up in my arms, and held it close to me, as though it held life. It was doubtful it ever had, but this small gesture of goodwill felt important, no matter how much my soul was revolted by the horrific chill.
***
“It is as I suspected. An extra sex!”
The weight of that dead child was still in my arms as I beheld Dr. Grey examining it carefully, the muslin draped over it in a vile parody of modesty. “I had seen it upon the mother. A strange duality of womb, and it was this that made me wonder if it likewise afflicted the child. Aha, such a fascinating discovery! Perhaps I should preserve it permanently.”
Another weight pressed deep upon me as I watched Dr. Grey at work, his notes scribbled furiously on yellowed paper, his tiny black eyes absorbing all light beneath his massive, bushy grey eyebrows. “Does this answer how she died?” I asked.
“What?” the Doctor said, as though forgetting I was there. Then, with an impatient shake of his head, “Yes, yes. A tearing of the second womb, which caused an incurable hemorrhage.” He poked his scalpel behind the curtain of muslin. “Fascinating.” Black eyes glinted in the gloom, candle light piercing them with singular flame. “Your payment. Of course, of course. Fifteen pounds.”
“It should be twenty,” I reminded him.
“You will take fifteen. This was hardly a difficult transport, you brought it to me in your arms.”
I took the money from this foul man, who had fooled me into thinking his work was dedicated to the betterment of mankind, only to reduce all such hopeful aspirations to sideshow fables. He understood this, and gave my angry leave a word of warning that echoes inside of me like a hollow knock upon my tomb:
“My work is solely for the living. Death is merciless, therefore, why should I show mercy upon its army? No, Mr. Endswell, you cannot judge the cure.”
I left him, but not his employ. After all, the cut of my suit and my love for Amelia and the life she is destined to give me are packaged neatly in the hope of another’s Death. How wrong Dr. Faust Grey is, to assume it is a war which we fight, this struggle of life a contemptuous one to that dark enemy. With every tap of my cane, I know I am knocking upon the coffins of all I have resurrected, and not once have they judged me, not once have they cried out in fury at my gross disrespect. They have been patient. They have been silent and giving. I’ve held Death, its weight in my arms small and easy. It walks beside me now, thin fingers light on my shoulder, like a sparrow’s talons. Death, I now know, has no use for pride. It understands. It forgives.
I lost my shovel. It was still at the grave.
Two pence will purchase me a shining new one.
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Check out author M. Jones’ serial Black Wreath for more of the same.