The Resurrectionist Read Free

ounce of iron filings.’ Next he takes his notebook and sets it down where the students may see.
    ‘Emptied thus upon a sheet of paper they are inert, their arrangement determined by the accidents of chance. Physics, sir, no less, no more.
    ‘But if a magnet is introduced, then something quite different can be observed,’ he says, drawing a small metal rod from a drawer in the cabinet against the wall and placing it upon the page. With a sudden rush the filings shift and slide, their motion almost audible as they skitter across the paper, marking out the lines of force about the magnet’s poles.
    ‘No agency is visible, no atoms collide, yet the filings move. But how?’
    ‘Magnetism!’ calls one of the students from the rear.
    ‘Your powers of diagnosis are as remarkable as ever, Mr Dawson,’ Mr Poll replies, turning back to the body on the table.
    ‘Consider, gentlemen, the man that lies before you here. Once …’ With a practised pause he looks down at the figure. In the light from the lamp that hangs overhead, the skin has already begun to mottle, as if fading bruises swam beneath the skin.
    ‘… perhaps not quite as recently as we might prefer, he lived. His heart beat, blood coursed in his veins, his body was racked by all appetites carnal and sublime. Yet now he is as clay once more, the motion of his heart and blood gone still, his body cold. Already this shell of flesh begins to spoil, a week more and it will be foul, a year or two but tooth and bone. How can this be, you ask, what has changed? What force that once prevented this inevitable decline has failed, what secret charge has fled?’
    ‘His soul?’ quips Hibbert, and though a smile flickers across my master’s face the others do not laugh.
    ‘Look more closely at these filings here, and observe the image that they make. Though once inert they now have both shape and energy. Yet we need not invoke the cant of priests to understand how this might be.’
    Pausing, he stares out across the silent room. None move, nor speak; they are his.
    ‘We are men of science, gentlemen, students of nature. It is our purpose to tear down the veil of superstition, to pierce the very fabric of our living being and elucidate the nature of the force which animates these shells we call our bodies. And we will find it here, in this cold flesh. For these tissues we will divine the shadow of that force which drove the fuse within, which set his heart to flicker and beat. Call it a soul if you wish, yet I promise you it shall prove no more mysterious than this magnet’s power to bend these filings to its will.’
    With the lecture done the students make their way from the house into the street. Outside the afternoon has gone while we laboured here, and overhead the sky is already pale. Whether Marshall will be back or not I do not know: at a guinea a time it is an expensive way to be made a fool. But if not there will be others to take his place, for while there are many in London who give instruction in the science of anatomy, there are none who can exceed my master in quality of mind. Although the great work that will form the cornerstone of his enduring fame remains unfinished, and he is a man no longer young, in the grim theatre of the dissecting room he plays his role as none other can. With Charles beside him he is fast, merciless, a man in total command of his art, with a wit as sharp as his knife.
    Yet in truth his is not an easy disposition. For all his talent, he taunts those who would admire him. A miller’s son, sent to London to be made a clerk, who sought instead to be a surgeon – whose services now command a fee second only to that of Sir Astley of Guy’s, and who has attended the bedside of dukes and earls. A man who does not seek to hide his origins, nor the way they linger in his voice, but rather flaunts them almost as a goad, who keeps a carriage and fine house on Cavendish Square and whose daughter would be a prize for any man, were she not