Chapter 2
The skeleton in Dr. Christie’s office was giving Luke Lewis a bad case of the collywobbles. The problem wasn’t so much that the bones represented all that remained of a human being. He had seen plenty of dead human beings in 1847 when he’d helped bury typhus victims in Kingston. He’d also dissected two bloated and foul-smelling cadavers during his medical training at McGill University. The act of plunging a scalpel into a gelatinous, putrefying body hadn’t sickened him at all. He had been too eager to see what lay underneath the flesh, to discover firsthand the hidden organs and systems that coursed beneath the flesh of a person. He knew that as far as Dr. Christie’s skeleton was concerned, his agitation didn’t stem from squeamishness.
It was more, he thought, the way the bones were wired together. The skeleton hung on a stand in an upright position with one hand resting rakishly on a jutting hip. The other arm was outstretched, the index finger pointing in admonition from an otherwise clenched fist. This accusatory finger seemed to follow him wherever he moved, whether he was seated at the oak desk in the middle of the room or standing at the cabinet that served as a dispensary. Combined with the slightly opened jaw, wired to give a good view of the teeth, the overall effect was a bony caricature of mocking, sneering contempt. But it was the finger, Luke decided, that bothered him the most.
He had read of pictures that were so well-painted that they unsettled observers in the same manner — ancestral portraits hung in dining rooms or depictions of public figures in civic halls that drove people mad by the way the painted eyes followed them around the room. Likenesses of ancient forebears come to life to cast disapproving glares at the antics of their descendants. Murdered wives seeking revenge. Bygone martinets outraged that history had passed them by. But that was the stuff of novels, allegory, he supposed, for the wrath of God. And he had certainly never heard of a skeleton that could have the same effect.
Dr. Christie was quite proud of the bones that graced his office.
“Boiled him down myself,” he told Luke during the initial tour of the premises. “Back in ’11 in Edinburgh. Made a devil of a smell.”
“Where did you get the body?” Luke asked.
“From the university,” the doctor replied. “They were finished with him. He’d been sliced and diced by seven or eight of us and there wasn’t a lot left for anyone else to see, so I took him. They were glad enough to be rid of him. Saved the disposal fee.”
“Were cadavers hard to come by in Edinburgh?” An adequate supply of bodies for the purposes of dissection was a chronic problem for the medical school at McGill. Sometimes a whole crowd of students would be assigned to the same corpse, making it difficult to see the component parts as they were coaxed into the open, and one careless slice on the part of one of them could spoil the exercise for everyone else. Some of the students had taken matters into their own hands, extricating newly buried bodies from nearby churches and fattening their purses by selling the corpses to unscrupulous lecturers.
Christie shrugged. “There are never enough. Most of ours were criminals, hanged for their sins. This fellow probably came straight from the gibbet. I don’t really know what his crime was, but I’ve named him Mul-Sack, after the famous highwayman.”
Luke had never heard of Mul-Sack, although he knew what a highwayman was. Travel was dangerous anywhere, road agents and pickpockets could lie in wait for the unwary even in Upper Canada.
He had given the skeleton no more thought at the time. It was only later that his disquiet surfaced. Christie introduced him to the housekeeper, Mrs. Dunphy, and then he’d been shown the parlour and the dining room and the two small rooms on the second floor that had been set aside for Luke’s use. He had been given a small bedroom and an adjoining sitting room at the front of the house, “so that there’s room,” Christie said, “for your father when he visits.”
After the tour he was left to cool his heels in the office while Dr. Christie went off to do heaven only knew what in the nether regions of the house. Whatever it was, it seemed to entail a great deal of shouting at Mrs. Dunphy, and a rather obnoxious smell that seeped under the door by the dispensary.
Luke’s eye would catch the bony, pointing finger no matter where he stood in the room. He’d told himself that he would get used to the skeleton after a time. Familiarity would dull the effect. But the next day his unease grew worse.
He wondered if his nerves were getting the better of him again, as they had in Montreal when he’d first arrived there. He’d had difficulty getting settled at first. Lodging was scarce. The cheapest accommodation in the city was in the St. Anne’s suburb, but all the rooms there seemed to be taken by the Irish emigrants who had made it no farther than Montreal in their desperate flight from famine. After two days of searching, Luke finally found a tiny, unheated attic room at the southeast end of the Récollets Faubourg. The landlady was willing to rent it to him, she said, only because he wasn’t an Irishman. The accommodation seemed fine in October when he first arrived, but as the weather turned colder its shortcomings became far too apparent. The roof leaked and the wind rattled the glass in the window as it blew through the gap between the sill and the sash.
He resolved to spend every evening studying the notes he had taken each day, but when he returned to his cheerless closet of a room after a full slate of lectures, he found that he was exhausted. He seemed unable to do anything but throw himself on the narrow cot that had been provided and fall into a disturbed sleep tormented by loneliness, bedbugs, and fear of failure. He began to have difficulty concentrating on what his professors were saying, and he knew he was falling behind in his studies.
The amount of information he was expected to process was overwhelming, his ignorance laid bare by off-hand references to classical works he had never heard of and by the assumption that he already had a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek. Materia Medica and Therapeutics proved particularly troublesome, the potions and elixirs referenced by exotic-sounding names, when all too often he would subsequently discover that the lecturer was talking about some common garden-variety ingredient.
Hardest of all had been the attitude of his fellow students. Many of them appeared to know each other already and shared notes and knowledge. Luke knew no one. There were a few others in the class who appeared to be as much an outsider as he was, but although they were civil enough when he spoke to them they seemed little inclined to establish a relationship that went any further than a nod of acknowledgement when he met them in the halls.
To add to his worries, he realized that his money was disappearing far faster than he had anticipated. He had to get through two years of lectures and two years of walking the wards of Montreal General Hospital before he could be licensed. He needed to find an odd job for evenings and weekends and full employment when classes ended for the year, but every menial position in the city appeared to be firmly held down by the desperate Irish.
Only after he’d found a better place to live and a job of sorts, had he settled down and started to enjoy his studies. He was sure that it was this same reaction to the unfamiliar that was affecting him here in Yorkville. It was the novelty of his new circumstances that made him over-imaginative. After all, he had only just joined the practice. He had no routine yet, and was still taking the measure of Dr. Christie. Besides, he could scarcely ask that the offending object be removed. The older man would think him strange indeed, and Luke couldn’t afford to do anything that would jeopardize this welcome partnership with an established physician.
Having completed his medical studies, Luke could have gone anywhere that was without a doctor and simply hung out his shingle. In fact, his original intention was to return to the Huron Tract, where his brothers both had farms and where doctors were scarce. Later on he had imagined that he would stay in Montreal. Then everything had changed, and he realized that upon graduation he would have no money for necessary instruments, nor a stake that would see him through the first lean months of a fledgling practice.
And then, an aging doctor who lived at the northern edges of Toronto wrote to the medical department at McGill asking for help in finding an assistant.