-28-

Eliza

Bell had Eliza gather lanterns and candles to bathe the area in light while he disrobed and inspected the body, but the room remained thoroughly gloomy. He noted her stares once she'd returned to the table and flicked a bemused glance in her direction. "This is not the first time you've seen a man disrobed I think."

She shook herself. It was not. Nor was Linfield the only male corpse she'd seen. "Why is his… Why is he so bruised about his nethers?" She cast a swift nervy glance at the door separating them from the surgery, while scraping her teeth against her lower lip. Not at all certain what to make of the contusions.

"Nothing to do with Jem, if that's what you're thinking," Bell remarked, demonstrating more insight into matters than she'd thought him privy to. Then again, he was more intelligent than most of the physicians she'd met, most of whom were too busy masquerading as gentlemen to notice anything that wasn't biting them on the nose. "My fault. I set my pets on him." He nodded to the bell jar full of leeches on the countertop at the foot end of the table.

"Why?"

Bell's eyes lit with mirth as he sought out Linfield's sternum and brandished his scalpel. "For the same reason your man Whistler produced that blasted gas. I'm guessing he didn't get into the details of why he was making it with you."

The laughing gas? All those bladders of it remained next door, ready for a party that would never come. "He was making it for Lord Linfield." Curious how it choked her to say that, while looking at his naked corpse.

"More like out of desperation. He needed to get himself out of a bind and he thought the gas might do it."

"I don't understand."

"Do you not?"

"Pray just speak to me as the idiot you consider me."

Bell grinned. "His lordship here needed to sire an heir but couldn't manage to maintain a stand robust enough to prick his wife with. He was getting desperate, the wedding was over two months gone, and the earl's impatient. He was ready to try anything: leeches, experimental gasses, inviting another man into bed alongside his wife, and likely a dozen other things. Daft really, given it wasn't a matter of impotence, merely preference."

"I see." She was not entirely sure that she did, but it was something to cogitate later. Jem had said the situation was more complicated than she wanted to believe. He'd hinted at coercion, but she'd seen them together. It hadn't looked that way. Or maybe, her heart was still too dented to genuinely accept that possibility.

She chewed that over as she watched Bell work. He raised a line of blood as he pushed the scalpel through the dead man's flesh.

At least Bell's words confirmed it wasn't anything Jane had done that had kept her husband from her bed. "Yet, Jane is with child," she said after a moment.

Bell flashed her a toothsome smile. "Did I imply that I thought otherwise? Swab, please, Miss Wakefield."

She obliged.

"We both know that the one thing is not dependant on the other."

"Will you say it is not his?" That would destroy Jane's reputation as surely as any threat posed by Mr Cluett. At least he might be bought, but Bell… She did not think he could be so easily swayed by money. Or maybe he could. She truly didn't know him at all.

"Why would I do that, Miss Wakefield, hm? They are wed. Of course it is his. Half the peerage is sired by someone other than the man acknowledged to be their father, and we should likely all be grateful for it or none of them would possess a chin or brains, and there's few enough of either to go between them all as it is."

"But you just said—"

"No one beyond Cedarton is aware of his issue, Miss Wakefield, and no one here besides you, me, and Mr Whistler. I shan't be slurring a dead man's name. How would that benefit me? Will you? And while I'm sure you have your quarrels with Mr Whistler right now, do not doubt his integrity. He will not share the intimacies Linfield confided in him, after all, he didn't share them with you, even when it would have benefitted him to do so."

"I don't see how announcing his lordship's impotence would have helped matters."

"No?" He shrugged. "Perhaps not. Perhaps one truly does need to consider the whole picture."

In actuality, she was more hurt by the deception than the notion of him having been intimate with another man. If two people loved one another, then it was for God to judge them, not their fellow man. Except, Jem had been quite adamant that love had not been a part of it.

Then again, she hadn't asked for his love either, when she'd asked him to sin with her.

"Wait, what do you mean the whole picture?"

She took Bell's silence as a refusal to elaborate. "I…" She sniffed hard and pulled her shoulders back. "I don't care for being deceived, Doctor Bell."

"I don't much care for lady doctors, but sometimes one simply has to get over oneself."

She bristled. "They are hardly the same things."

"They both involve things we love, Miss Wakefield." He challenged her with cocked brow. "Swab."

Eliza huffed. She had no intention of getting any further into the meat of the matter with him. Thus, when he opened his mouth again, she blurted, "What of Mr Cluett?" to divert him.

Bell stared at her bemused. "What of him?"

"Do you think him responsible? Trustworthy? Do you think he did,"—she peered down at the dead man—"this?"

"Trustworthy. George? Hell, no!" He laughed. "As to whether he's responsible, until I determine the cause of death, let's not be too hasty with the accusations. Poison doesn't strike me as his style though. It requires forethought and planning, and George is… Well, you saw the pair of them this afternoon chasing about. Now, if Linfield had been run through with a sword, or had a pistol ball lodged between his ears, then I would point the finger at George. The truth of the matter is though, Miss Wakefield, is that there's not a soul among us who didn't have a reason to want him dead, you included, so shall we concentrate on the task at hand and see what we might uncover?"

He completed the cut he was making so that it ran from sternum to pubic bone, then two more from each shoulder to the sternum so that the two lines formed a Y-shape. "You will find other anatomists tackle things in different ways, but this is my preference. And now, we will determine your true mettle, Miss Wakefield. These cuts traverse both the skin and abdominal wall, but to reach the organs it is first necessary to remove the ribs. For that we use—"

"A saw?" She reached for the tray ready to pass it, recalling the accounts of the surgeons' theatres she'd scoured in the past for insights.

"Pliers." He corrected her, reaching for them. "I prefer pliers. I find them more efficient. First, we need to ensure these flaps stay out of the way." He drew the top flap back over Linfield's face first, then peeled back the two sides, only to pause. "What in the name of hell?"

Eliza too gave a gasp. She was made of stern stuff, though her desire for knowledge was currently warring with her emotions. This was the man she'd only recently dined with, and with whom Jem had embroiled himself. The smell of offal and garlic assaulted her nostrils, prompting her to pinch them closed, but it was the sickly green glow emanating from within the cavity of his opened torso that prompted her to make an unladylike exclamation not dissimilar to Bell's. "That… that is not—" She looked to Bell for confirmation. "—normal?"

The physician stood with his arms raised, pliers at the ready. "No." His tongue swept his dry lips. "No. Not normal at all." He stretched out and snuffed a couple of the nearby candle flames, which made the glow increasingly apparent. It ran through many, but not all the exposed organs.

"It's concentrated in his alimentary canal." Bell gestured with the pliers, pointing out Linfield's stomach, and then both intestines. The glow was most pronounced in the upper regions. "This is certainly what did for him." The pliers clattered against the metal tray as he dropped them. "Never in all my days. That's…" He bolted through the door to the adjoining room.

"Doctor!" Eliza scurried after him. The hairs on her own arms were raised. There was something particularly ghastly about the quality of the light spilling from Linfield's body. It filled the mind with unease, sucked at her sense of reality, so that all her hairs stood on end. "We cannot leave him exposed like this for the mice and rats to nibble on." Such a grotesque fate she wouldn't wish on a commoner, and absolutely wouldn't do for the son of an earl. It was not that one was more deserving of dignity than the other, rather a matter of decency. "Doctor Bell!"

"A moment, Miss Wakefield."

Jem hastened from the chaise as the pair crossed the threshold. "Are you done so soon? Does this mean… Is it as you feared? Poison."

Eliza froze, assaulted by memories forged earlier that day, of lying in Jem's arms, contented and merry, giddy with the possibilities that lay ahead. She hadn't dreamed of forever with him—well, maybe a little—but she had revelled in the pleasure of his company. What she wouldn't give to be back in that pleasant daydream. She noted that Jem was twirling one of the gas-containing balloons in his fingers. He let it go, and it sank to the floor, before being blown into a corner by Bell's swift pacing.

The doctor ignored them both. He bowed his head over the old bucket sink as if he thought he might vomit but uncurled to his usual height a moment later. "I'm not done, no. Barely begun, but yes, I think we might conclude poison the cause. Poison or the touch of whatever spectre roams this place."

"Spectre?" Jem's brows wrinkled in turn. "Eliza? Whatever? What nonsense is this?"

"It's…" She raised a hand, while the other she pressed to her waist. "It's…"

Bell's agile fingers set to tapping against his troubled mouth. "I like none of this. It is distinctly wrong in every regard. Gentleman, Lady, I am not one given to theatrics, and while I enjoy novelty, this is… it's…" He rubbed his nose.

"It's what?" Jem asked, his eyes flashing with his frustration at the both of them.

"Peculiar," Eliza ventured. "I'd suggest you look for yourself, but perhaps don't." He turned almost the same sickly shade as the light in Linfield's guts at the mere suggestion. "The thing is Linfield's innards are… Well, they're glowing."

"I beg your pardon."

Bereft of an explanation, Eliza simply raised her shoulders.

"Glowing? Like a lantern?"

"What she says is true." Bell straightened the set of his wig, then gave a shudder as if to cast off his unease. "There's a spectral cast to his organs, an incandescence. Good Lord, I've lost count of the number of corpses I've examined. Young, old, rich, poor, bodies that had decades in the ground and those fresh from the gallows. I've dissected them all, but never once have I witnessed such as this, nor heard mention of such lambent light as part of the process of decomposition. It's eerie. It sends a shiver down the spine."

Such a reaction gripped him at that very moment.

To Eliza, the fact that Bell was shaken made the occurrence more disturbing. Panic was not part of his usual demeanour, nor any hint of fragility. He continued making staccato bursts of movement, clasping and unclasping his hands, and taking long-legged strides that took him nowhere in particular, but left his cheeks increasingly ruddy, while Jem scratched his chin.

"Eliza?"

"It's like pixy-light," she began uncertainly, quite as baffled by it as Bell. "I don't think the cause supernatural, though. It's probably caused by a chemical reaction related to decomposition."

"Nonsense." Bell slashed a hand through the air. "Have I not just said it is not that? This is not a normal occurrence. It is true, that there are spurious reports of bones glimmering in the dark, but not the soft tissues. Never the tissues. Man does not glow. He is neither firefly nor fungi. The bowels do not create light."

"Fungi glow in the dark?" Jem muttered.

Eliza levelled him with a look. Perhaps he was unfamiliar with foxfire. In any case, there'd been no mushrooms served at dinner.

Bell continued his agitated rambling. It recalled to Eliza Jane's back and forth march before the dining room fireplace earlier. Could she be entirely certain about her friend? They'd agreed to trust one another, but what if Jane were behind this? She was not without knowledge of toxins. They had nurtured the same kitchen garden during their stay at Miss Hardacre's School, learned its plants names and uses by rote, but naught among them glowed like Linfield's bowels were doing.

"Ludlow, I think you might agree that this is not a typical situation," Jem began, attempting to engage the physician in some reasoned discourse. "If Linfield has been poisoned by a substance it would usually be inadvisable to eat, then might that not cause the phenomenon you've just witnessed?"

They both waited while Bell thoughtfully scratched his clean-shaven jaw. "It is possible, one supposes. I guess it is the hypothesis we have. Pray, give me a moment, and I will resume my examination. But I do not anticipate finding mushrooms in his bowels." He idled by the skeletal remains of Jem's chemistry apparatus.

"There are other poisons besides toadstools," Eliza said. "Might we consider them?"

Jem nodded. "Bell?"

"What?"

"Other toxins?"

"Yes."

Eliza wasn't certain he was taking the words in.

Jem reached for a clean vessel and poured brandy into it. He then pressed the flat-bottomed flask on the doctor. "Drink." The two men shared a moment of mutual grim humour, before Bell downed the spirit in one. Fortified, he wiped his mouth with his coat sleeve and returned to his workspace. They both followed, but Eliza stayed Jem at the door. "Don't if you'll regret it."

"I'll stay on the threshold. I can't sit idle while the two of you investigate. Something or someone has killed him, and I mean to determine who and bring them to justice. He was a bastard, Eliza, a scoundrel, but he didn't deserve this."

She nodded, then returned to her former position on the opposite side of the operating table to Bell, whose face remained grimly shadowed and drawn. Linfield's inners still glowed with that same eerie light. She watched studiously as Bell cracked his lordship's ribs, then removed his innards, placing them on a tray and removing them to a clear surface on which to examine them.

Eliza relit the candles he'd snuffed and moved them closer to the organs.

"There's evidence of tissue damage consistent with chemical burns, but otherwise he seems entirely healthy. No obvious liver cirrhosis. No ulcers. No fungi. I can examine the brain, once I'm done with the intestines—"

"Is that entirely necessary?" Jem asked. "Surely the answer is staring you in the face. He was poisoned by whatever is causing that ghastly gleam."

"It's dimming slightly, I think," Eliza wafted the air before her up towards her nose. "The smell is dispersing too. Not the offal smell, I mean the other one. The garlic scent."

"I hadn't noticed," the doctor replied. "But, aye, you may be right about the glow."

"That would be consistent with something reacting with the air," Jem said. "I mightn't be the most competent chemist, but I know that. Oxidation of some sorts."

"Aye, perhaps," Bell muttered as he sliced open his lordship's heart. "Though don't ask me what manner of poison could do this." He continued with his neat cuts and even smeared some samples onto slides to view beneath his microscope.

Vexed by the matter, Eliza rubbed her temple. Most of the poisons she was familiar with were plant extracts. "Hemlock, nightshade, aconite, foxgloves… They all caused nausea and vomiting, some, arrhythmia, but—"

"Not glowing intestines," Bell finished for her. "I've seen victims of all of those."

"I suppose there's arsenic and strychnine to consider."

"Do you intend to list every poison you can think of Miss Wakefield? For the record, I don't think it either of those. The latter especially we can rule out. There's many a cheap tavern that uses strychnine in their watered beer. Even fools aplenty who are happy to suffer its ill effects for the kick to the head and visions it brings on. I am well acquainted with strychnine poisoning."

She raised a hand to her throat. "Fools."

"Probably no worse for them than the gin."

"Cyanide?" Jem suggested.

"What's that?" Eliza and Bell both asked.

"Something my cousin Pip has mentioned a time or two. I assume it a recent discovery since neither of you appear familiar with it. Transmutation is his passion, not mine. The more dangerous the better. I only dabble. Numbers are infinitely less volatile. But there must be chemicals, medicines that phosphoresce, surely."

"Like phosphorous, you mean," Eliza said, brows raised. She also was no chemist, but she was familiar with Robert Kerr's translation of Lavoisier's work describing the elements. How her sisters had decried her over the purchase of that volume in place of The Castle of Wolfenbach , which they had to wait on the travelling library to provide.

"You'll not find that on my shelves," Bell insisted, as both Eliza and Jem scurried in that direction. "Fools. I'm an anatomist, not a chemist. Phosphorous is of no practical use to me."

"Mayhaps not, Ludlow, but your shelves are as well stocked as any apothecary's."

Also, he was wrong.