T. Boyle - Water Music

With Quiddle out of commission, Delp came to rely heavily on Ned. And Ned, with few if any options left him, gradually overcame his resistance to the job and began to exercise his wits in competing with Crump and others for the short supply of cadavers in the precincts of London. For a gallon and a half of gin a week he was able to hire Boyles as his assistant, and the two soon became as familiar with catafalques and churchyards as they were with hogsheads and taverns. Within the year Ned was providing all the specimens Delp could handle, and doing a bit of free-lancing on the side. The following year he was able to move out of St. Bartholomew’s and take up lodgings in Limehouse. He began to dress with a degree of elegance. Dine out. Think about a trip to the Continent to track down his lost love.

He was alive. He was adapting. Despite the dangers and unsavory conditions of his new trade, he was infused with a guarded sense of optimism. Delp loomed on the one hand, demanding and unscrupulous, and Crump, rankled over the incursion into his sphere of influence, threatened on the other. But Ned was tiptoeing a fine line between them, and very gradually, with a steady, slow, incremental force, his star was rising.

♦ ♦ ♦

And so, like the mourners on the front steps and the old man distributing sprigs of rue, Ned is interested in the deceased on a purely professional basis only. The previous morning, while scanning the obituaries, he had come across the following notice:

The City will sorely feel the passing of Mr. Claude Messenger Osprey, manufacturer of fine porcelain and china, dead of the quinsy at the age of fifty-seven this eighth day of June, eighteen hundred and one. Mr. Osprey was perhaps best known for his determined and innovative work in the manufacture of porcelain chamberpots. He was the first to conceive of the personalized pot de chambre , and he employed a number of inspired artisans whose refreshing clover-leaf and willow designs are intimately known to us all. Mr. Osprey is survived by a brother, Drummond, of Cheapside, and a son, Claude junior, the Bristol china merchant. The deceased will lie in state at the residence of his brother this evening and throughout the day tomorrow. The funeral service is scheduled for nine o’clock tomorrow evening.

A few inquiries among the bereaved Osprey household staff turned up a rather intriguing bit of information: Claude junior, now en route from Bristol, was remembered only as a small boy. Due to a rift between the senior Osprey and his wife, the boy had been sent away to school at the age of nine, matriculated through the university, married, and had taken control of the Bristol branch of the family business without ever having returned to London. None of the London Ospreys had laid eyes on him in nearly twenty years.

That evening, Ned, Quiddle and Billy Boyles were waiting for the Bristol mail when it rolled up in front of the Gloucester Coffee House. Boyles, in livery, swung back the door of the coach before it had come to a stop and called out the young Osprey’s name in a voice thick with grief and anxiety.

He introduced himself as footman to the late Osprey senior, and led the young heir up the street to a waiting carriage. Inside the carriage, like house spiders anticipating a visitor, Ned and Quiddle toyed with lengths of rope and sturdy strips of cotton. Osprey didn’t have a chance.

♦ ♦ ♦

“You know,” the cousin sniffs, “I recognized you the instant you stepped through the door.”

Ned emits a mournful whimper or two, then blows his nose and looks up at her out of grief-stricken eyes. “Oh? How was that?”

“You. . you. .” here she falls into his arms again, blubbering like a drowning dog, “you look so much like him.”

The rest is easy. A few ponderous aunts, quaking uncles, sour in-laws, cousins thrice removed, a suspicious old nursemaid. No widow, thank god. (Ned can’t be sure, but thinks he recalls snatching a Mrs. Tillie Marsh Osprey from a churchyard in the West End nearly two years back.) Meanwhile, expressions of sympathy fall around him like brick buildings collapsing in an earthquake. Someone proposes a toast. And then another. More tears, back-patting, the reek of perfume and alcohol, a kiss and a squeeze, and then they’re out in the street, wrapped in black capes, torches held high, treading with stately tread behind the massive horse-drawn hearse. Over the cobbles and down the street, around a corner and into the churchyard. The glittering weasel eyes of the parson, dust to dust. And then Ned flinging himself on the coffin, biting at the ankles of the gravediggers, inconsolable, fighting off a host of soothers and sympathizers in the pure fierce outflowing of his grief. He grovels, he whines, out-Hamlets Hamlet. And finally, tearfully, begs them to leave him with his sorrow and his burning compulsion to bury this great and noble man, his father, with his own caring hands.

Ten minutes later the cemetery is deserted as the sleek phaeton draws up at the gate, Quiddle at the reins. A thin, flat-headed figure slips out and joins Ned beside the grave. There is a movement in the dark, a grunt or groan perhaps, some brief hint of nefarious activity. Then the carriage moves off and the final torch is snuffed in the cemetery.

♦ ALL THINGS THAT RISE

MUST CONTAIN YEAST ♦

As dawn stretches her rosy fingers over the rooftops of London, a harelipped match girl stumbles upon the writhing form of Claude M. Osprey, Jr. The heir to the Osprey fortune, bound hand and foot, is methodically inching his way up a soot-blackened alley, dragging a small ridge of detritus along with him. His face is a grid of scratches thin as cut hair, and a dirty cravat has been stuffed in his mouth. “Mmmff,” he says. “Mmmmmmmmff!” The girl cocks her head and looks at him alertly, like a setter responding to its master’s cluck, then bends to sift through his pockets. Half an hour later a butcher’s boy happens by, does a double take, and then slouches up to hang over the young heir as if the appearance of a bound and gagged man in a back alley presented a dilemma of Aristotelian proportions. Osprey’s eyes widen above the gag in rage and exasperation. The boy’s mouth drops open. He starts up the alley, ducks his head, turns and comes back again. Finally he squats down and cautiously removes the cravat from Osprey’s mouth.

The bound man works his jaw as if it were a newly created part of his anatomy. “Cut me loose,” he demands.

The boy tucks the cravat away in his pockets. He digs a sliver of wax from his ear and then examines it thoughtfully at the edge of a blackened fingernail. “Wot’s in it for me?”

“Half a crown.”

“Make it a crown and yer on.”

“A crown then. Cut the cords.”

“Ten shillings.”

“Help!” Osprey shouts. “Murder! Help!”

“All royt, all royt.” In a single practiced motion the knife appears from the boy’s ragged sleeve and the hemp cords fall to the ground.

Osprey sits up and frees his ankles, then reaches up a hand for support. The boy helps him to his feet. “Idiot!” the young heir hisses, and slaps the boy against the wall. Then he’s out of the alley and running for a hackney cab.

♦ ♦ ♦

They are stunned in Cheapside. Bowled over. “But, but — why would anyone want to do such a thing?” the uncle stammers.

“The grave!” shouts Osprey.

The authorities are called in. The parson. The cousin with her eyes of pitch. The aunts and uncles. The in-laws. When the earth is turned back from the grave and the casket revealed, they breathe a sigh of relief. “Open it!” shouts the heir. “Open it!” he insists, over a murmur of protest. The gravedigger pries open the lid. The casket is empty. Some gasp. Others faint. That afternoon the following handbill is distributed throughout the city: