Imogen Robertson - Island of Bones

‘No doubt,’ Quince replied, then drew his watch from his pocket. ‘I believe the fireworks will commence shortly. May I fetch any refreshment for you, ladies?’

The ladies wished for nothing, and all turned their chairs in the direction of the lake and waited.

Crowther’s work that evening was delicate. It required concentration and care, and he was glad of it. He was content to do this sort of work alone. It made him grateful his intellectual interests had not turned towards pure scholarship; here in his temporary laboratory, he looked as much a butcher or cook as a baron. He wrestled answers, or more questions, from flesh rather from the immateriality of his own brain, and he took pleasure in the physicality of his work. As he looked into the cooling coppers he thought of his brother, and wondered again with a revulsion that his work never normally engendered, if he were looking at Addie’s first victim. Then he found his thoughts straying to his family and his own youth. His father had been an exacting parent, and Crowther remembered being sent away from the family group in disgrace if he had appeared unscrubbed or with the chemical signatures of his early experiments on his sleeves. What would Sir William think now, to see his son bend over old coppers in the semi-darkness?

Crowther realised he had become still with thought, and returned to the practicalities before him. The last of the body’s flesh had melted away in the water and heat. Now it was his intention to remake the form of the man. In the silence of the old brew house, in the pools of fluttering light shed by the lanterns, he lifted each bone from the warm water and on the old workbench, remade the skeleton.

Time passed.

When the bones were laid out before him, Crowther removed his apron and dried his hands, then began to examine them in detail. The body was that of a mature male. He had guessed as much from the probable height of the corpse and the clothing, but the bones of the pelvis confirmed it. Ilium, ischium and pubis all fully fused; the pubic arch showed the steep incline typical of the male of the species. Next he lifted the skull, letting his fingers travel across it like a blind man trying to trace the features of a friend, then, settling it on his fingertips, he brought it towards himself in the lamplight until he stared into the empty sockets, turning it from left to right. There was no sign of damage, or of damage healed.

‘What would you tell us, friend?’ he murmured under his breath, and for a moment touched his free hand to his own thin face. ‘Alas, poor Yorick indeed. .’ As he set the skull down at the head of the table he was momentarily startled by the sound of explosions from the lake and saw the darkness outside the window stained suddenly red and yellow. The fireworks hissed and flashed, their light enough, even at this distance, to colour the pale bones below him. Something cracked in the air and a white phosphorescence fell across the bones, making a new shadow across the ribs.

Crowther knelt and brought the lamp as close as he dared to the flattened cage. On the underside of the third rib, on the left side, there was something not quite right. He traced his finger along its falling edge and found a nick in the bone, such as might be made by a blade driven into the chest. The mark was suggestive, not conclusive. Crowther was sure the damage was not a result of his own treatment of the relics. He had handled each bone as a craftsman handles gold leaf.

Moving away from the remains to the pile of clothing remnants, he gently teased the waistcoat flat, then straightened and placed his fingers on his own chest, counting down his own ribs until he reached that which matched the damaged bone on the skeleton. It would be on the left, far enough clear of the button-holes. The shirt was too ragged to be of any use, but the material of the waistcoat had been thicker.

He bent low, inhaling the gravesmoke that hung around the clothes. Perhaps. The threads here were cut rather than thinned with age, but the blade, if blade it was, must have been very narrow. He lifted the waistcoat to his eye and shifted to let as much light fall on it as it might. Baron, butcher, now he seemed a tailor. A hole indeed, and another, possibly, to match on the back panel of cloth. There was no particular staining he could see, but the fabric was dark. He teased it with his fingertip. There was another flash outside, a sound like heavy rain, and the light in the room shifted into the deep reds of blood in darkness.

Stephen flinched when the explosions began. The man Mr Askew had hired provided a brave show. Stephen could see the workers moving along the shore, shadows in front of the blaze of light they controlled, like minions at work in Vulcan’s forge. He would ask Mr Quince tomorrow about gunpowder. For a moment his ambition to be a ship’s Captain like his father wavered, as he thought of himself grinding powders to make all these rainbows of noise and light. He glanced towards where his mother was sitting, her face bathed white, red and green, and he could see the red of her hair light up as if the glowing sparks had fallen on her and were burning coldly among her curls.

There was a pause and the crowd began to applaud, then Stephen saw another shadow, moving towards the centre of the wooden platform from whence the fireworks flew, torch in hand. The crowd saw him too and the applause fell away. Suddenly a breath of white fire ran up from the place where the man had touched his torch, drawing the outline of a cross on the darkness behind it. Catherine wheels caught all round its edges, spewing white sparks in tight circles. Then within the shape, fires of other colours caught till it seemed alive with angry jewels of red and green. The crowd gasped, and Stephen closed his hand round the little rowan Luck in his pocket.

Crowther put out the lantern that swung above the skeleton and, content that the place was secure, he left the brewery and locked the door behind him before beginning to climb up the steep lawn to the main house. It was still so warm he barely needed the coat that hung over his shoulders, and the moon was bright enough he could have made his way along the gravel path without the light he carried. He looked up at the house above him, showing palely against the wooded hillside. Most of the windows in the upper storeys were dark, but the one that gave onto what had been his mother’s room had a candle showing on the sill. He caught a movement in the shadow above it. His sister, watching him, he presumed, as he so often had been used to watch his neighbours from his house in Hartswood. She must have returned early from the fireworks. He guessed the reason. He would have to speak to her in the morning and ask her what she could remember of Addie’s visits home, but not until he had allowed Mrs Westerman to pick through his thoughts. Margaret seemed to have survived the disgrace of their youth. Had she loved their father? Had she found something in the baron he had not, or seen something?

Crowther had left home in 1741 first for a repellent boarding school for sons of rich men in Lincolnshire, then for Cambridge, returning rarely and reluctantly. His mother he had been glad to see in Town, but although she at times made some effort to understand her second son in the years before her death, she reached across a gulf that could not be spanned, and he remained a mystery to her, so cold and inward. His intellectual pursuits meant nothing to her. She seemed always to be surrounded by light and noise, even in her isolated home in Silverside. Lady Keswick had been a joyful, rather impulsive character always ready to be amused. She teased Sir William, and her dour husband had seemed to dote on her as a result; Addie had always made her laugh, and Margaret she could dress up in costumes that were copies of her own and parade with her as some women did with little black slave boys in a parody of exotic dress. She had loved him too, he supposed, but his strongest memory of her was the sound of her laughter coming from some other room in the house, from some place where he was not.