Andrew Taylor - The American Boy

"Why didn't you say so before?" she demanded. "It's Mr Longstaff you want." She turned her head and called over her shoulder: "Matilda!"

She stood back to allow me to enter. As I did so, a door opened at the back of the hall and an old woman emerged.

"There's a gent here for Mr Longstaff." The younger woman towed her children towards the stairs. "And I'll be obliged if you would remind him about the last week's rent, Matilda. I can't pay the butcher with hot air and promises for ever."

"I'll speak to him." The old woman looked up at me and her cracked voice rose to a polite whimper. "You're fortunate, sir – it happens that Mr Longstaff is quite at leisure at present. Pray step this way."

I followed her into a small room overlooking the yard at the back of the house. In front of the window was a high-backed elbow chair in which was sitting a man who seemed even smaller than the woman who had ushered me in. The chair was fixed to the floor with iron brackets.

Its occupant sprang to his feet as I entered, and I saw he was very much younger than the woman. He was short and broad-shouldered, with a crooked back and one leg shorter than the other. He gave a lopsided impression, like a man walking across a steep slope.

"Well, sir, whatever you desire for your teeth, you'll find it here," he said in a rush. "The cauterising of nerves, fillings, simple extractions performed with such skill and rapidity they are almost painless. Transplanting, though, is my speciality, sir – a practice endorsed by Mr Hunter, under whom I studied as a young man. I use only teeth from living sources, sir, those from corpses never take, though lesser practitioners will attempt to fob you off with them. Should you wish it, I can manufacture for you a complete set of false teeth that may be worn for years together, and are an ornament to the mouth, and greatly assist clarity of speech. I have made them from mother-of-pearl, silver and even enamelled copper in my time, sir. But I recommend walrus or human teeth, they discolour less than the others."

As the torrent of words was tumbling out, Mr Longstaff approached very close to me. With a trembling hand, he put on a pair of spectacles with lenses as thick as penny pieces and looked fixedly at my lips.

"Pray open your mouth, sir."

"I do not at present require treatment," I said. "I am come to ask after a friend of mine whom I believe you may have treated the other day."

"The gentleman with the extraction," the old woman said loudly, and so immediately that I suspected they had had no other patients within the last few days. "You remember."

"He did not give you a name, I suppose?" I asked. "I am not fully persuaded that it was my friend."

"Not that I recall."

"Then what did he look like, sir – you will have seen his face."

"I look in their mouths, sir, not at their faces; but his was not a pretty sight."

I swung round to the old woman. "And you, madam? Did you remark his appearance?"

She burst out laughing, exposing a fine set of false teeth, made of what might have been ivory. "Bless you, sir, there's not much I see clearly nowadays." She lifted her face to mine and the light from the window fell in full upon it. All at once, her meaning burst upon me. The eyes exhibited a singularly blurred and unfocused appearance, as different from healthy eyes as a stagnant pond is from running water.

I turned from one to the other, my frustration mounting. "Pray, can you tell me what his voice was like?"

The man shrugged but the woman nodded vigorously. "A deep voice. There might have been a brogue in it. Later he sounded more like a West End gentleman. But I don't know: all the time he was most indistinct."

"Indeed, Mother, that was on account of the toothache." The dentist snickered. "Afterwards, he had no time for talking and too much blood in his mouth to speak at all."

"He couldn't get away fast enough," the dentist's mother confided. "They're often like that. Bless you, sir, they're so terrified we have to strap them into that chair. And when we unstrap them, they're away like a startled rabbit."

"If you know where he lodges, you could take his bag," the dentist said.

"His bag, sir?"

"He had several with him. But he was in such a hurry to depart that he left a satchel behind."

"Sobbing, he was," the woman observed, and smacked her lips.

"Hush, Mother," said the dentist, turning to me, and once again the torrent of words began to flow. "In my profession, sir, it is inevitable that even the most skilled practitioner must inflict the occasional moment of pain upon his patient. Laudanum and brandy may blunt its edge, but they cannot resolve the difficulty altogether. And operations involving the removal of a wisdom tooth can be particularly painful. The posterior molars are invariably the most difficult to extract."

I felt a sympathetic twinge in my own teeth. "If you would like, sir, I will undertake to reunite my friend with his satchel."

"You will be doing us a service, sir," said the dentist.

"But you must give us a receipt," the woman said sharply, turning those unsettling orbs towards me.

"Of course, madam."

Taking out my memorandum book, I scribbled a receipt while the dentist fetched the satchel which had been hanging all this time from a peg on the back of the door. It was made of brown leather, much scuffed, and its straps had broken so the flap was now secured with string. I tore out the page with the receipt and took my leave. The dentist begged me to consider his services should I need treatment for my teeth, and even offered to give me an examination, gratis, upon the spot. I declined and hurried away.

I walked rapidly to a tavern in Charlotte-street, where I found an empty booth and ordered ale. When the girl had gone I tugged at the knots that secured the satchel. My hands were cold and the knots obstinate. I lost patience and sliced through the string with my penknife.

The fog outside seemed to serve as a pretty metaphor for the fog inside my own mind. I opened the satchel, and the first thing I saw, traced in blotched ink on the inside of the flap, was the name David Poe. The letters had faded to the colour of dried blood.

The satchel's contents spilled on to the scrubbed surface of the table. My fingers explored the little heap of possessions – a small flask which had once contained brandy, a shirt of fine quality but in need of a wash, a grubby neckcloth and a cigar case made of leather. I opened the case and shook out its contents.

As I did so, I was thinking that, every time I turned up what I thought was a fact, it seemed that the more I inspected it, the more it retreated into the realms of hypothesis. I longed for certainty, for indisputable facts. Now it seemed probable, but of course by no means certain, that the dentist's patient had indeed been David Poe, the American. In this case, of course, it followed that there was no longer any reason to suppose that the dead man in Wellington-terrace had been anyone other than Henry Frant. But such speculation was as fragile as a dandelion's feathery pappus. A breath of wind would suffice to destroy it.

Behind me, and above my shoulder, came a sharp intake of breath. I turned quickly. The girl had brought my ale. The tray was trembling in her hands. She was staring not at me but at an object on the table.

There followed a moment of superhuman clarity, of prodigious ratiocination: my mind accelerated and packed into an instant thoughts which would normally fill a minute, an hour, a day.

"I am a student of medicine," I snapped. "What are you gawping at? It is nothing but a rare specimen of digitus mortuus praecisus lent me by the professor himself. If you value your position, do not spill beer on it."

I covered it with the neckcloth – casually, as though making room for her to set down her tray without risk of spillage. The girl laughed – still nervous, but the reassuring opacity of the Latin words had soothed her alarm. Despite my warning, though, a few drops of beer slopped on to the table. Her hand flew to her mouth; she muttered an apology and scuttled away.