The Heart Specialist Read Free Page A

these dead things.” She paused, taking in my father’s Beck microscope squatting beside me in the straw. “And that is stolen property. Am I correct that it’s the property of your father?” She stared at me hard, her jaw trembling slightly. “I cannot imagine how you ever stole it away and kept it hidden this long.”
    As soon as my grandmother had left, taking three empty jam jars with her, Miss Skerry removed her spectacles, exposing squinty mole eyes. “Well,” she said. “This is a surprise.”
    She walked over to the microscope and squatted. “You said this was your father’s?”
    I did not answer. It was my grandmother who had said it, and even if the words were true I didn’t feel I owed anyone, least of all the governess, an explanation.
    “I will take your silence as an affirmation,” she said.
    “I didn’t steal it,” I finally muttered. “That instrument is my birthright.”
    This earned me a look. “He was a doctor?”
    I nodded.
    The governess did not seem angry so I continued, enjoying the furtive pleasure of talking about my father. “Yes, but not a country doctor like the ones out here. My father worked at McGill. His specialty was morbid anatomy.” I looked at her, hoping she would be impressed.
    “Morbid anatomy,” she said. “How gloomy sounding.”
    “Morbid means disease,” I said, for I had looked it up in the dictionary right after I’d learned the term and my father’s association with it. “It comes from the Latin, morbidus .” I was showing off now, parading my cleverness and subtly putting the governess in her place.
    To her credit she did not react. “So he studied diseased anatomy?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Under the microscope,” she said, bending to examine my father’s sleek Beck model. “May I?” she asked.
    I nodded. I had not shown it to anyone. A mixture of pride and protectiveness surged inside me. “Do you wish to see how it works?” I picked it up by its three-pronged base and put it on the work table. “It is not all that difficult to manoeuvre once you get the hang of it.”
    “You know how to work it?”
    “Of course.” I showed her how to fit her eye to the eyepiece and explained about the slides and the focus knob.
    “Your father taught you this?”
    “Not really. He did not sit me down to give me a lesson as I have done for you. I was four when he left.”
    Miss Skerry became interested. “You could not have taught yourself these skills at the age of four, Agnes. It is not possible. This is a highly complex instrument. You could not have figured out how to use it and the slides and how to collect all these things in bottles on your own?”
    I had not thought about this before. I was eleven when I set up the dissection room in my grandmother’s barn, and at that point I had been a complete novice. I do not believe I had touched a microscope before, but somehow I had known what to do. What I had not known I figured out by trial and error.
    “No one taught me,” I said firmly. “I guess I watched when I was young. My father had a room set aside for dissections in our home.” I could picture it as clearly as my father’s face, although this last part I did not tell her. “It was full of jars on shelves. Not pickling jars like the ones I use,” I added quickly. “Real laboratory jars with thicker glass. Inside were his specimens — diseased hearts and lungs and such like. My father excised them. That was his job. There was also a skeleton, a real one, not much bigger than I was at four. It was pinned with metal staples and propped up on a pole. I used to play with it — until its arm broke.”
    “You learned simply by watching him?”
    I nodded. “Not just him. There were others too, his students from McGill.” I had not thought of this in years. There had been one young man who came quite often, I remembered. He used to eat dinner with us. I could not quite picture him, but I remembered that he was kind and brought me