Read an Excerpt
An opportunity had arisen.
A woman had ended her own life at Bethlehem Hospital.
No family wanting her, the Hospital gave her body to the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge—or, rather, to its Secretary, Mr. Robert Hooke. He was friendly with Bethlehem’s Physician, and had, after all, designed the place.
Hooke summoned the Fellows.
About thirty of them gathered at Gresham College, jostling by the entrance to its repository.
Even in the shade of the colonnaded walkway, most stood hatless and holding their coats, for the midday sun was remorseless. Sweat darkened the backs of their waistcoats as they waited for admittance. Some had removed their perukes.
Hooke promised an extraordinary demonstration.
#
All their talk was of the forthcoming dissection. It was to be performed upstairs in the repository—more spacious than the anatomy room, or the Reading Hall, where most of the Society’s experimental trials took place. Hooke expected more Fellows than usual; he was right.
Led by Sir Christopher Wren himself, the trial would reveal a brain and spinal cord. Then—by some method not yet divulged—Wren planned to impart movement to the limbs. The idea came from a meeting of Hooke’s New Philosophical Club at the Angel and Crown a few nights before, when John Aubrey—his speech slurry from genever—had mentioned the mouths of those beheaded continuing to move in prayer. Anne Boleyn was one such. Her eyes had moved, too, roving around her from the straw.
May self-awareness continue even after the blade’s descent, the person knowing of their own predicament?
#
Word was, His Majesty might attend. At the Office of Works that morning, Sir Christopher had invited him. The King replied he was free and wanting entertainment.
Was this him now? The Fellows strained to see.
Red-faced from their load, two men carrying a sedan entered the quadrangle from Broad Street.
Once they had settled the chair, their passenger emerged and paid them; both looked gratified by the amount.
The newcomer wore a suit of blue silk, his waistcoat long, shirtsleeves copious, breeches beribboned. He repositioned his hat—also blue, with a swan’s feather curling around its brim. His peruke was a pristine creamy white, dazzling in the sunlight. His boots, of soft Moroccan leather, transported him silently across the grass, which had toasted over the summer.
Not the King, but Mr. Henry Hunt.
His appearance differed markedly from their last sighting; some Fellows did not even recognise him. Despite the news of his good fortune—rewarded handsomely by the Duchesse de Mazarin for services to her, and by the King for services to the Queen—they still expected the scruffy youth they knew as Harry, in the brown leather coat scarred by his adventures. Not this gentleman of sumptuous appearance. He had gained weight, too, his features softened by new flesh.
The door to the repository’s stairway swung open, and out stepped Robert Hooke. Standing in his hunched fashion, dressed in habitual grey, he welcomed each Fellow as they filed in. All the men bowed and expressed their pleasure for the forthcoming demonstration.
A fragile-looking youth carrying a tray full of tools hastened past them. This was Thomas Crawley, Harry’s replacement as Observator, about to assist Sir Christopher. Hooke patted his back as he went inside.
On spotting Harry, Hooke’s demeanour changed. His mouth formed a sour line. Harry, feeling shame, knew why: over three months had passed since they last saw each other, on his last visit to Gresham.
Warily, the two men bowed to one another, then shook hands for old times’ sake. Harry was careful not to squeeze too hard, for Hooke looked frailer than he remembered. Besides, all the rings Harry wore might cause him pain.
‘Sir Christopher awaits,’ Hooke said stiffly. His bulbous eyes, their irises mercury grey, held no warmth in them at all.
‘I am gladdened to see you, Mr. Hooke,’ Harry replied. ‘I have been busy. My new house . . . its decoration, and choosing furniture.’
Hooke raised an eyebrow. Harry’s voice had changed. Elocution lessons raised him up a class. His spectacles, Hooke noticed, were gold-rimmed.
‘Grace made mention of your improvements,’ Hooke said. ‘I await your invitation to view them.’
Harry opened, then shut, his mouth, and gestured that he would follow Hooke upstairs to the repository.
Hooke smiled tersely. Even Harry’s attempt at courtesy seemed superior. More a command that Hooke should walk in front.
#
Once upstairs and inside the repository, Harry could see Sir Christopher on the dais at the far end of the long, narrow room, setting out the tools Crawley passed to him. The new Observator exhibited—to Harry’s critical eye—a clumsiness about him. Between them and the assembling spectators stood a table supporting the cadaver, covered over by a thin cotton sheet.
The Society’s curios filled the repository. The Fellows nudged for spaces among the cabinets and chests of drawers.
Hooke went crookedly through the crowd of men towards Sir Christopher. His stoop from the hunch in his back had worsened, Harry observed. Hooke was one of the few men in the room without a wig; his long hair, tied back, looked disreputably unkempt.
Denis Papin, now in all but title the Society’s Curator of Experiments—at last, Hooke could concentrate fully on the Secretaryship—waved Harry over. Harry negotiated his way around a Roman statue of a woman dredged from the Fleet; the two men embraced happily.
‘The prodigal son returns at last,’ Edmund Wylde remarked in a stage whisper.
Harry ignored the gibe—which he knew to be good-natured, for he knew Edmund Wylde—and acknowledged him, and also John Aubrey, with a dip of his head. Wylde, leaning on a case full of fossils, shared an amused glance with Aubrey.
Nowadays—in appearance, at least—Harry was quite the gentleman.
At a hushing of the audience in readiness for the demonstration, they concentrated on the dais.
The tools—serrated knives, chisels, hammers—were by now arranged on a smaller table turned at a right angle to the one supporting the corpse. Harry recognised them from Gresham’s anatomy room; he had used them himself when assisting Hooke.
Loud claps and a bellowed ‘Lords, Sirs, Gentlemen . . . the King!’ made everyone turn to the door. Despite their squash, the Fellows did their best to show their servility, all getting in one another’s way as they made their bows, deep and sincere.
Sir Christopher, the Royal Society’s President, descended from the dais and pushed his way through the company.
‘Your Majesty, you do us great favour by your visit. You—’
‘Let there be no speechifying!’ The King sounded cheerful, glad of the distraction anatomy could provide. ‘Sirs, I greet you all. I am most pleased with the invitation. Hmm. And, as you see, to accept it.’
He waved at the Fellows to settle them. Sir Christopher led him through the opening channel of men, all still bowing.
Unless occasion demanded, the King dressed informally. Today, in a russet-coloured suit. A head taller than most of the Fellows—his height further increased by heels and a full black wig—he looked over them as he walked towards the dais. Although the windows were open, the heat in the repository was considerable; he stayed cool and unruffled. His face, with its dark complexion and exaggerated features of his Medici forefathers, tended towards solemnity, but for now he was smiling, seeming free from the cares of Whitehall.
Hooke positioned a chair at the foot of the dais. With another happy look behind him, the King sat down to observe the dissection.
Returning behind the table, Sir Christopher tied on a leather apron. A smile played around his mouth as he waited for quiet.
Despite being nearly fifty, he was unlined and fit-looking, more like a man ten years his junior. He radiated energy and enthusiasm. Rare for him nowadays to undertake anatomy; as the King’s Surveyor of Works, his time was greatly taken up with building. But his expertise with brains—had he not illustrated Willis’s Cerebri Anatome?—made him the natural choice to lead the demonstration.
‘May it please Your Majesty, my Lords, Sirs, Gentlemen, Fellows all,’ Sir Christopher began. ‘I shall reveal the brain, the brain stem, and its continuation through the bones of the spine.’
Applause broke out. Sir Christopher waited for it to quieten. His expression promised there was better to come. ‘Perhaps we may animate the material of this dead woman’s brain, its folds and undulations, into giving movement to her limbs. It is, therefore, a postscript to the investigations of Dr. Thomas Willis, with whom I had the honour to work.’
‘You made the drawings for his excellent book!’ Aubrey cried, unable to help himself.
‘Yes . . . thank you, Mr. Aubrey,’ Sir Christopher said, put out of his stride by the interjection. ‘He had other help, too. Mr. Millington. Mr. Lower. The bulk of the work, though, was his—to say otherwise would do him disservice.’
All the men murmured their assent. Willis, dead five years, was one of the Royal Society’s founders, and a well-liked Fellow.
‘Willis studied the treelike arrangement of the cerebellum, and the corpora striata, the optic thalami, the parallel lines of the mesolobe. He numbered the nervi craniales. He discovered God’s providential design—which we now call the Circle of Willis—allowing the blood’s flow to proceed even if one of its arteries is blocked. He avoided the usual mutilation of autopsy by cutting at a brain from beneath. He invented ways of preservation, so putrefaction did not curtail his investigations. It was these preserved brains I drew, using Mr. Hooke’s perspectograph.’
As more applause broke out, Sir Christopher gestured to Crawley.
Crawley removed the sheet, revealing the cadaver.
Before the dissection, Crawley had positioned the dead woman on her back. Her face was turned away from them.
All the Fellows wondered if she made a pretty corpse. None spoke the thought.
Her skin was the colour of cream. Her age, Harry guessed, was eighteen or so. She was slim—hipbones and ribs discernible beneath her flesh—and muscular, so obviously had been active. Released from under the sheet, a gamey smell arose; not yet too unpleasant, even in the repository’s stifling warmth.
Crawley had already shaved her head. A pile of long dark hair—almost black—lay on the floor, shining glossily. The assistant swept it further under the table with his foot.
‘Firstly, I shall expose the spine,’ Sir Christopher announced.
All the Fellows shuffled forwards, as close to the dais as they could without bumping the King.
At another sign from Sir Christopher, Crawley positioned the dead woman onto her front, turning her away from the Fellows. By the loose way she rolled, Harry could see rigor mortis had faded.
Sir Christopher had arranged his tools as if set out for a banquet, in the order he considered he would need them. Crawley passed over the leftmost knife.
Naming them aloud as he did so, Sir Christopher soon exposed the muscles of the back. They gleamed wetly. He sliced through the long, deeper muscles on both sides of the spine, then scooped beneath them with his fingers to lift them away.
He cut through the V shape of muscles wrapping the neck and attaching to the skull.
All this took time; so absorbed were the men in Sir Christopher’s work that few noticed the duration. Most were waistcoatless by now; hardly anyone still wore their wig. In the crowded repository, the smell of their sweat, and of the cadaver, was rising.
Using a chisel, Sir Christopher removed the top parts of each of the vertebrae. He named the meninges, cutting through them deftly with scissors to avoid severing the spinal nerves.
‘Next,’ he said, ‘I shall remove the brain while keeping it still attached to the spinal cord.’
Starting above one ear and finishing at the other, he cut over the top of the skull. Crawley helped him peel back the dead woman’s scalp, leaving her cranium covered by its fatty, fibrous tissue. Sir Christopher peeled this away, too, then cut through the muscles on each side of the head.
Crawley passed him a handsaw.
Sir Christopher sawed the forehead, working around the curve of the skull, being careful not to cut Crawley, who held it steady. Dust flew from the saw’s teeth, catching the light from the repository’s windows and then landing as a powder on the floor.
The dome of the woman’s head came away. The tough layer covering her brain released from the bone with a ripping sound. Sir Christopher sliced through it. Wanting to escape the confines of her skull, her brain bulged, but it was still restrained by cranial nerves, connective tissue, and the optic nerves.
‘You may observe the encephalon,’ Sir Christopher told the Fellows as they leaned even further forward. ‘The cerebrum, the cerebellum, and the truncus encephali. Covered by the arachnoid mater. You see this transparent covering?’ He lifted and tipped the head so they could see more clearly into the hole.
Having cut the covering away, he announced, ‘I shall expose the whole of the medulla spinalis.’
He broke open the vertebrae at the top of the neck to reveal the final length of spinal cord, and cut the last attachments keeping the brain inside the skull.
‘Mr. Crawley, please lift her.’
By now, Crawley looked pale, and seemed hesitant to touch the body. Sir Christopher narrowed his eyes at him. The Observator jumped forward, placing his hands under the woman’s shoulders to turn her. To prevent the brain from spilling, Sir Christopher cupped her head in his hands.
As Crawley brought the woman to a sitting position, for the first time she faced her audience.
She still kept her last colouring: the ceruse on her cheeks, now faded; the vermilion on her lips, now smudged; and the darkening on her eyebrows, now smeared.
Her eyes were half closed; she looked mistrustful of these men observing her.
Harry felt the blood leave his face. He was in danger of fainting. His legs threatened to collapse beneath him.
Knowing him to be squeamish, Papin looked at him sympathetically. Papin’s face changed to astonishment as Harry began to wave his arms, shirtsleeves flapping wildly.
‘Stop, Sir Christopher! Stop!’
In the silence of the great pause around him, Harry was conscious of the other Fellows, and King Charles II, all turning to stare at him.
‘You must stop!’
A buzz of disapproval started up at his interruption of Sir Christopher’s extraordinary demonstration.
‘She is no suicide from Bethlehem Hospital,’ Harry told them all. ‘Her name is Miss Diana Cantley. She was my neighbour in Bloomsbury Square.’
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