Matthew Pearl: The Dante Club

She returned to the house the next morning to clean the upstairs. Just as she crossed through the door, another fly sailed like an arrow past the tip of her nose. Outraged, she secured another of the judge’s heavy magazines and stalked the fly up the main staircase. Nell always used the servants’ stairs, even when alone in the house. But this situation called for rearranging priorities. She removed her shoes and her wide feet fell lightly over the warm, carpeted steps, following the fly into the Healeys’ bedchamber.

The fire-eyes stared out jarringly; the body curled back like a horse ready to gallop, and the face of the insect looked for that moment like the face of a man. This was the last moment for many years, listening to the monotonous buzz, that Nell Ranney would know some measure of peace.

She rumbled forward and smashed the Review against the window and the fly. But she had faltered over something during her attack, and now looked down at the obstacle, twisted on her bare foot. She picked up the tangled mass, a full set of human teeth belonging to the upper chamber of a mouth.

She released it at once but stood attentively, as though it might censure her for the incivility.

They were false teeth, crafted with an artist’s care by a prominent New York dentist to fulfill Judge Healey’s desire for a smarter appearance on the bench. He was so proud of them—told their provenance to anyone who would listen, not understanding that the vanity leading to such appendages should prevent any discussion of them. They were a bit too bright and new, like staring right into the summer sun between a man’s lips.

From the corner of her eye, Nell noticed a thick pool of blood that had curdled and caked on the carpet. And near that, a small pile of suit clothes folded neatly. These clothes were as familiar as Nell Ranney’s own white apron, black blouse, and billowing black skirt. She had done much needlework on his pockets and sleeves; the judge never ordered new suits from Mr. Randridge, the exceptional School Street tailor, except when absolutely essential.

Returning downstairs to put on her shoes, the chambermaid only now noticed the splashes of blood on the banister and camouflaged by the plush red carpet that covered the stairs. Out the parlor’s large oval window, beyond the immaculate garden, where the yard sloped into meadows, woods, dry fields, and, eventually, the Charles River, she saw a swarm of blowflies. Nell went outdoors to inspect.

The flies were collected over a pile of rubbish. The tremendous scent caused her eyes to tear as she approached. She secured a wheelbarrow and, as she did, recalled the calf the Healeys had permitted the stableboy to raise on the grounds. But that had been years ago. Both the stableboy and the calf had outgrown Wide Oaks and left it to its eternal sameness.

The flies were of that new fire-eyed variety. There were yellow hornets, too, which had taken some morbid interest in whatever putrid flesh was underneath. But more numerous than the flying creatures were the masses of bristling white pellets crackling with movement—sharp-backed worms, wriggling tightly over something, no, not just wriggling, popping, burrowing, sinking, eating into each other, into the… but what was supporting this horrendous mountain, alive with white slime? One end of the heap seemed like a thorny bush of chestnut and ivory strands of…

Above the heap stood a short wooden staff with a ragged flag, white on both sides; it was flapping with the undecided breeze.

She could not help knowing the truth about what lay in that heap, but in her fear she prayed she’d find the stableboy’s calf. Her eyes could not resist making out the nakedness, the wide, slightly hunched back sloping into the crack of the enormous, snowy buttocks, brimming over with the crawling, pallid, bean-shaped maggots above the disproportionately short legs that were kicked out in opposite directions. A solid block of flies, hundreds of them, circled protectively. The back of the head was completely swathed in white worms, which must have numbered in the thousands rather than hundreds.

Nell kicked away the wasps’ nest and stuffed the judge into the wheelbarrow. She half wheeled and half dragged his naked body through the meadows, over the garden, through the halls, and into his study. Throwing the body on a mound of legal papers, Nell pulled Judge Healey’s head into her lap. Handfuls of maggots rained down from his nose and ears and slack mouth. She began tearing out the luminescent maggots from the back of his head. The wormy pellets were moist and hot. She also grabbed some of the fire-eyed flies that had trailed her inside, smashing them with the palm of her hand, pulling them apart by the wings, flinging them, one after another, across the room in empty vengeance. What was heard and seen next made her produce a roar loud enough to ring straight through New England.

Two grooms from the stable next door found Nell crawling away from the study on her hands and knees, crying insensibly.

“But what is it, Nellie, what is it? By Jesus, you ain’t hurt now?”

It was later, when Nell Ranney told Ednah Healey that Judge Healey had groaned before dying in her arms, that the widow ran out and threw a vase at the chief of police. That her husband might have been conscious for those four days, even remotely aware, was too much to ask her to permit.

Mrs. Healey’s professed knowledge of her husband’s killer turned out to be rather imprecise. “It was Boston that killed him,” she revealed later that day to Chief Kurtz, after she had stopped shaking. “This entire hideous city. It ate him alive.”

She insisted Kurtz bring her to the body. It had taken the coroner’s deputies three hours to slice out the quarter-inch spiraled maggots from their places inside the corpse; the tiny horny mouths had to be pried off. The pockets of devoured flesh left in their wake spanned all open areas; the terrible swelling at the back of the head still seemed to pulse with maggots even after their removal. The nostrils were now barely divided and the armpits eaten away. With the false teeth gone the face sagged low and loose like a dead accordion. Most humiliating, most pitiable, was not the broken condition, not even the fact that the body had been so maggot-ridden and layered in flies and wasps, but the simple fact of the nakedness. Sometimes a corpse, it is said, looks for all the world like a forked radish with a head fantastically carved upon it. Judge Healey had one of those bodies never meant to be seen naked by anyone except his wife.

In the stale chill of the coroner’s rooms Ednah Healey took in this view, and knew in that instant what it meant to be a widow, what an ungodly jealousy it produced. With a sudden jerk of her arm, she swiped the coroner’s razor-edged shears from a shelf. Kurtz, remembering the vase, stumbled backward into the confused, cursing coroner.

Ednah kneeled down and tenderly snipped a clump from the judge’s wild crown of hair. Crumpling to her knees, her voluminous skirts spreading to every corner of the small room, a tiny woman unfolded across a cold, purple body, with one gauze-gloved hand clenching the blades and the other caressing the plundered tuft, thick and dry as horsehair.

“Well, I’ve never seen a man so cleaned out by worms,” Kurtz said with a tenuous voice at the deadhouse after two of Kurtz’s men escorted Ednah Healey home.

Barnicoat, the coroner, had a shapeless and small head cruelly punctured by lobster eyes. His nostrils were stuffed to double capacity with cotton balls.

“Maggots,” Barnicoat said, grinning. He picked up one of the wriggling white beans that had fallen to the floor. It struggled against his meaty palm before he flung it into the incinerator, where it fizzled black and then popped into smoke. “Bodies aren’t as a practice left to rot out in a field. Still, it is true that the winged mob our Judge Healey attracted is more common to sheep or goat carcasses left outdoors.” The truth was that the sheer number of maggots that had bred inside Healey for the four days he was left in his yard was astounding, but Barnicoat did not possess knowledge enough to admit this. The coroner was a political appointee, and the position required no special medical or scientific expertise, only a tolerance for dead bodies.