Sawbones Read Free

someone a kiss. He let it rest a little longer while he looked at the torso, the arms, the legs. They would have plenty to tell him.
    Ezra McAdam could read a corpse as well as an Oxford scholar could read Ancient Greek. He sometimes thought he must have seen more dead men than spoken to live ones. Mr McAdam said there was a lot to be learnt just by looking, and that’s always how he began. Look first, notes second, he always said. Ezra had notes for every cadaver that had come through McAdam’s anatomy school for the past three years. The master said it was good to know as much as possible about every single specimen.
    Ezra lifted the candle closer.
    The cadavers were not often Negroes. In the flickering yellow light he – and it was a he – looked almost well, his skin a deep, dull brown. He couldn’t have been dead very long at all. Ezra lifted the left leg. It had gone through the rigor mortis and was now loose and limber, so the body was at least two days old. The discoloration and the settling of the blood in the back of the limbs told the same tale. There were no signs of disease, no necrotizing or ulceration – and anyway, it was utterly and completely obvious how this one had met his Maker.
    Ezra took out his notebook. In all his years assisting with anatomizing he could count on one hand the number of gunshot wounds he had seen. And they tended to be drunken soldiers discharging their weapons for sport – or perhaps shooting into a crowd at a riot, missing their target but harming some innocent flower seller or crossing sweeper instead. It was always the poor, the foreigners, the refugees who suffered the most, Ezra thought. At least in death, all were at last equal.
    This young man was healthy, or at least he had been at death. Taller than average – a soldier, then, gun happy and drunk?
    Ezra lifted the cloth he had rested over the man’s face.
    “You will do us all a favour, sir, whoever you were,” he said aloud. “We will know more, thanks to you.”
    The cadaver, of course, said nothing.
    The face was clean shaven, with a good bone structure. Ezra lifted the eyelids; the eyes were clear and not bloodshot. He smelt the mouth – not a taint of gin or spirits – and his teeth were good and strong. His hands were a gentleman’s hands, manicured, clean. Not a soldier, then, and not one of the St Giles’ blackbirds, men who had been slaves and soldiers once, fighting for the British against the free colonials, but who now scraped a living on the streets. Ezra made a face, deep in thought. Perhaps this one had been the loser in a duel. But a Negro in a duel? With pistols? Surely it would have been common knowledge, sung by every news sheet singer from here to Stepney and back.
    The wound was just below the man’s left ribs. Ezra knew Mr McAdam would be upset if the lungs had been damaged. He lifted the candle and brought it closer to the wound. It was like a dark red flower, black and foul in the centre, the skin forming red, petal-like fronds around it.
    He hoped to God this wasn’t a gentleman, some sort of wealthy merchant. If he had been a man of quality, that could mean a world of trouble for Mr McAdam. No one was too bothered about the empty coffin of an ordinary Londoner – and in too many cases wives sold their husbands; fathers, their children – but a gentleman, and a Negro one at that … someone might be looking for him.
    Ezra looked back at the face. There were no scars or marks such as he’d seen on visiting African royalty in Whitehall once. The hair on this one was cropped close, almost a shave, and there was a slit in both ears, as if Mr Allen or one of his kind had been in a hurry and pulled the earrings out. A sailor, then? But no sailor had hands like this, so little used to rough work.
    The man’s arms were well muscled, so he could not have been a merchant or an ambassador who sat in a chair all day. On the inside of his left forearm there was a mark. A bruise? Ezra lifted