The Dead Assassin

CHAPTER 19 RIGHT COFFIN, WRONG CORPSE

“Stop thrusting that dagger into my brain, Arthur, I am quite recovered!”

Wilde flailed a clumsy hand, trying to push aside the smelling salts Conan Doyle was wafting under his nose.

They were seated once again in the sanctuary of Wilde’s carriage. Conan Doyle reached over to let down the window and tried to guide the Irishman’s large head outside.

“What on earth are you doing?” Wilde demanded, firmly resisting.

“You need air. Take a good lungful.”

“Are you mad? The air is dangerously fresh. What I require is a cigarette.”

Against Conan Doyle’s repeated urgings, Wilde insisted on lighting up one of his Turkish cigarettes. Despite all logic, after several long, lung-tingling drags, he seemed to revive and was finally well enough to look about and take note of where he was. The driver had drawn up a little ways from the prison gates. Having slaked their blood lust, the mob was dissipating, as revelers repaired to alehouses and brothels to satiate other appetites.

“I’m afraid we’re trapped here until the crowd thins,” Conan Doyle said. “Plus, you still look a little green.” He tried again with smelling salts, but Wilde pushed his hand away.

“I am Irish. Those of us who hail from the Emerald Isle are given to mossy complexions.” He dug in his coat pocket and drew out a hip flask. “This is what I require to revivify body and soul.” He uncapped the flask, took a long swig, and offered it to his friend. “A nip for the doctor, too?”

“A tonic I fully concur with.” Conan Doyle took a swig and gasped out a liquorish breath as high-proof brandy burned down his throat, kindling a fire in his belly.

Wilde eyed the milling crowd with distaste and said, “I do not wish to tarry in this insalubrious place. Have you seen enough, Arthur? Why do we loiter?”

“I am struck by the presence of the marquess. A strange coincidence. First he is at the theater, bosom companion of the Prince of Wales, and now here.”

“When it comes to bosom companions, Prince Edward’s current mistress has few equals.”

“Yes, very droll, Oscar. I see you are fully recovered.”

“The marquess’s attendance at one of my plays is fully understandable — genius attracts the attractive — but I cannot imagine why such an elegant young aristocrat would frequent something so horrid as a hanging.”

“You heard what he said to that young swell. Plus, I noticed the other night that he wore a pendant about his neck — a pentacle.”

“A pentacle? Then perhaps he truly is an aficionado of the occult.”

“He seemed quite boastful of the fact when his friend ‘Bunky’ recognized him.”

“I thought that was a jest. How very odd.” Wilde mused a moment and said, “Still, it is the meek and mild Doctor Lamb that intrigues me.”

“How so? He struck me as a noble man. He has renounced monetary gain to volunteer his talents to the least fortunate in society.”

Wilde’s mouth puckered skeptically. “Yes, he said as much, and yet his clothes argue volubly against his claimed state of penury. You did notice his attire?”

Despite being the author of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle was embarrassed to admit he did not share his fictional creation’s powers of observation. He shook his head, abashedly.

“Our poor-as-a-church-mouse physician was kitted out in fawn doeskin trousers, a very fine shirt of Irish linen with French cuffs, and a beautifully tailored waistcoat from a gent’s haberdashers I only frequent when I am feeling at my most self-indulgent. The prison doctor may indeed receive a pittance of a yearly stipend, but he obviously enjoys someone’s patronage when it comes to procuring his wardrobe.”

“Perhaps he supplements his income by other means.”

“A darker, but entirely credible possibility.”

Conan Doyle frowned. “Of course, bodysnatching is largely a thing of the past, but medical schools still require fresh corpses for students of dissection.”

“And as prison physician of Newgate, the selfless Doctor Lamb would be in a most convenient position to procure the very freshest of pickings.”

“I am curious to witness the fate of the body. The executed are left hanging for a full hour to ensure death. We will just have to wait—”

He was interrupted as the prison’s smaller gate-within-a-gate flung open. A cadre of uniformed prison guards jogged out and began to drive the crowd back with threats, curses, and the occasional jab of a truncheon in the ribs. The main gate opened behind them and a hearse drove out drawn by two black horses with plumed heads. The well-heeled spectators that had been allowed inside the prison now also spilled out of the main gate, joining the mob.

“But there’s the hearse now,” Wilde pointed out. “Surely an hour has not elapsed?”

Conan Doyle’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “No, it has not. Clearly they are not following protocol.”

With jeers and cheers, the waiting rabble surged forward to greet the hearse, a sea of upraised hands, all jostling for a single touch of the dread black carriage.

“What are they doing?”

“A morbid tradition. They all seek to lay a hand upon the hearse… for luck.”

“Ugh!” Wilde had had enough and was about to insist they depart when he spotted a mane of fiery red hair among the scrum of figures darting dangerously close to the turning wheels.

The Marquess of Gravistock.

Meanwhile, Conan Doyle’s attention was fixed upon the driver’s seat of the hearse. The noble Doctor Lamb rode alongside a funeral groom in a top hat draped in black crepe: a man with a familiar port-wine stain.

Conan Doyle suddenly flung open the carriage door and dropped to the cobblestones. “I will leave you now, Oscar.”

“What? Wait! Where are you going?”

“To follow the hearse. I want to see the body placed in the ground. I suggest you return to your club until you recover.”

Without waiting for a reply, Conan Doyle plunged into the milling crowd and soon vanished from sight. Wilde strained to keep his eyes on the long mane of fiery red curls amongst the river of bobbing top hats. He followed the marquess’s progress along Newgate Street until he climbed into his personal carriage.

A very distinctive carriage, as it turned out.

Wilde rapped his knuckles on the carriage ceiling.

“Yes, sir?” his driver called down.

“Gibson, I want you to follow that carriage.”

“Which one, sir? I see a number of carriages.”

“This one is hard to miss. It’s a rather handsome yellow landau… and it’s being drawn by four zebras.”

Feeling slightly foolish, Conan Doyle trotted along behind the hearse, in the coma of a comet’s tail of whooping and skipping street arabs. But as the crowd thinned, the hearse gained speed and began to draw away and Conan Doyle feared it would leave him behind. Fortunately, he was able to steal a hackney cab someone else had bribed to wait behind, by offering the driver a bribe of a larger denomination, and resumed the pursuit. Soon the ominous hulk of Newgate fell behind the hearse and its following cab.

It proved to be a short trip. A brief trot up Farringdon Road ended at Spa Fields, London’s most infamous burial ground, a barren two-acre plot of unconsecrated mud where the poor, the indigent, and the corpses of executed prisoners were interred at a minimum expense to the state. Separated from the surrounding tenements by only a tumbledown wooden fence, a stench of putrefaction hovered about the place, released by the eructations of gas from corpses ripening like vile fruit beneath a thin skimming of mud. Conan Doyle watched as the gates opened and closed behind the hearse and instructed his driver to pull up a dozen feet beyond.

He stepped down from the cab and, removing his top hat and coat to be less conspicuous, tossed them back onto the seat. “Wait here,” he called up to the driver.

“Wait ’ere?” the incredulous driver replied. “With the stink of contagion shiverin’ in me lungs? I’d be like to catch me death!”

Conan Doyle dug in a pocket and tossed up a half crown. “Another if you stay.” And with that, he ducked through one of the many holes in the dilapidated fence.

Although he knew of Spa Fields’s reputation, he was not fully prepared for the blasted vista that greeted him: a churned field of muck, trampled flat of grass and trees. Here and there, a few tilting gravestones, like a mouthful of crooked teeth, marked the most recent burials. In places the ground appeared to be moving and alive, swarmed as it was by fat bluebottles and shabby crows rooting amongst the broken clods for a greedily gobbled morsel.

Stumping across the landscape like damned souls wandering in purgatory were the gravediggers: lumpen golems conjured from grime and filth; although, to call them gravediggers was part misnomer, for they spent as much time digging up as they did digging down as Spa Fields recycled graves with unseemly haste to make room for new interments.

Rising from the blasted ground like a black tumor swelling upon a diseased face was a bone-house crematorium with a brick chimney belching human ash. This was the place where coffins and rotted corpses — after an indecently brief sojourn amongst the worms — were burned to make space for more.

Conan Doyle was in time to watch the hearse rattle across the rutted ground to where the black maw of a freshly hewn grave yawned. Dr. Lamb jumped down and strode toward the waiting grave, the Gladstone bag swinging at his side. Four funeral grooms unloaded the cheap-deal coffin and lugged it to the scandalously shallow grave where it was lowered belowground without care. In place of a formal ceremony, Dr. Lamb dropped to one knee, grabbed a clump of soil, and lobbed the clod onto the coffin. He stood for the briefest of moments, head bowed, as if murmuring a prayer. The perfunctory ritual performed, the doctor settled the top hat upon his crown of blond curls and strolled back to the hearse.

A pair of rumpled gravediggers leaned on their spades as they watched, and now they stirred into action, kicking and shoveling dirt into the grave. The hearse driver shook the reins and the ominous black carriage jounced across the rutted field back toward the gates. Conan Doyle had barely time to spring back into the shadows of the fence to avoid being seen. The hearse clattered through the gates and swung left, heading in the opposite direction by which it had arrived. Conan Doyle vacillated, torn by the urge to follow the doctor and hearse, but finally succumbed to the stronger instinct of staying to ascertain what exactly was in the coffin.

“You there,” he shouted, striding across the muddy ground toward the shoveling figures. “Stop this instant.”

The two gravediggers ceased their labors and looked up with eyes startling white against the blackened grime of their filthy faces.

Conan Doyle reached the graveside and commanded, “Dig it up. Immediately.”

The two grubby fellows answered with gormless stares.

Just then a door in the bone house banged open and a squat figure emerged and stumped toward Conan Doyle with a strange, attenuated gait: a dwarfish man in a full-sized frock coat whose long tails dragged through the mud.

“What is this? What’s going on?” the man demanded in a querulous voice. Up close, his appearance was startling. The stumpy body supported a large head with a prominent, domed forehead. The man also had a clubfoot, as evidenced by the hugely built-up sole of his right boot.

“I must insist you open this coffin.”

“What? Who are you? I am the sexton here. By whose authority—?”

Conan Doyle found himself at a loss for what to say, but suddenly burst out: “I am William Bland, Warden of Newgate Prison.”

The pronouncement widened the dwarf’s eyes. Conan Doyle did not know where the words had come from. He had not consciously chosen to lie, but he would not stop until he had discovered the truth.

“William Bland? Here? Prove it.”

Conan Doyle ground his molars. He did not expect to have his bluff called. But then a sudden inspiration struck him. “Proof? If it’s proof you want—” He dug in his pocket and pulled out the small leather volume of Holmes stories he had unsuccessfully tried to present to the real Warden Bland. “This is one of my most prized possessions: a signed volume of Sherlock Holmes stories. I carry it everywhere with me.” He slipped off the red ribbon, opened to the frontispiece, and thrust the small volume in the dwarf’s hands. “See. Read for yourself: It was presented to me, personally, by the greatest writer of our times, Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle.”

The small man snatched the volume. His eyes crawled across the dedication over and over again. Placated, he handed the book back and spoke in unctuous tones, “My apologies, Warden Bland, but you must understand my caution.” And then he added, with no shred of self-awareness, “There are those unscrupulable types wot do not show the dead the respect they is deserving thereof. As you might have noticed by my execrable vocabules, I am a great reader myself, for I believe it felicitates the brain corpuscles.”

“I quite agree,” Conan Doyle said, adding, “But I must have you open the coffin. I believe a terrible error has been made.”

“Error? I fail to perspicate your meaning. Wot error?”

“I believe the coffin you are currently burying… is empty.”

The sexton made a spluttering sound. “Empty? But surely my men would have noticed the faultability in weight—”

“Most likely lead ballast, added to the coffin to counterfeit the weight of a corpse.”

The sexton looked at the gawping gravediggers who showed no signs of having comprehended any of their conversation. “Wot are you waiting for?” he shouted. “You heard Warden Bland. Dig it up. Now! Sharpish!”

Whipped up, the gravediggers set to with gusto, and within seconds their spades were scraping against the coffin lid. Ropes were tossed down into the grave and looped under the coffin, which was hauled up from the ground with ease. Conan Doyle sensed that his supposition was correct. With the coffin aboveground, the blade of a spade was driven beneath the lid, which pried open with a loud crack revealing…

… a green-faced corpse in a thin white shroud.

The dwarf glared up at Conan Doyle, who stood openmouthed. “Empty coffin, eh? Not so empty after all, eh, Warden Bland? If that’s who you really are!”

“No…” Conan Doyle shakily admitted, “… not empty. But that is not the body of the man I saw hanged this day at Newgate.”