take away the taste of the pit.”
Hawkwood drank. Brandy: definitely not the good stuff, but the sexton was right. The smell of the grave had been so strong that by the time the body had been loaded on to the cart it did feel as though the back of his throat had become coated with the trench’s contents. Two swallows of the sexton’s brew and it felt as if his entire larynx had been cauterized. As cures went, it was eye-wateringly effective.
When his vocal cords had recovered from the shock, he asked the sexton if he’d heard or seen anything during the night.
Predictably, Stubbs shook his head. “Not a bloody thing. I tends to sleep right through. Might stir if a field battery was to open up by my ear, but that ain’t likely round these parts.”
And the rain would have covered most sounds, anyway, Hawkwood thought, as well as every other sign that might have pointed to whoever dumped the body in the pit. As for the place of entry, in retrospect it was ludicrous to think the corpse might have come from over the hospital wall, which meant access had either been made via the main gate or else the body had been carried over the dividing wall from the adjacent burial ground.
Which left him where? Maybe the body would provide the answer. Suddenly, Gulley’s argument was starting to make sense. Perhaps it would have been easier to have left the thing where it was.
The thing.
Dammit, he thought. Now I’m calling her that. He drained the mug.
Sexton Stubbs, he saw, was throwing him a speculative look.
“You’ve a question?” Hawkwood said.
The sexton hesitated then said, “Back there, the constable called you ‘Captain’. If’n you don’t mind me askin’, that mean you were an officer when you was in the Rifles?”
“Eventually,” Hawkwood said. “It didn’t last.”
The sexton turned the statement over in his mind. Emboldened by the cynical half-smile on Hawkwood’s face, he enquired cautiously, “You miss it?”
“The army?”
The sexton nodded.
“Sometimes,” Hawkwood admitted. “You?”
Hawkwood thought about the sexton’s admission when they were standing by the graveside. Stubbs had received his wound at Corunna. Hawkwood remembered Corunna; the epic retreat across northern Spain in appalling winter weather. Discipline had broken down, food had been scarce and the dead and wounded had been left by the roadside. When Moore’s army eventually reached the port, there was no sign of the transports that should have been there to carry them home. By the time the ships arrived, four days later, the French, under Marshal Soult, had caught up and the town was surrounded, forcing the British to take to the field.
While Hawkwood had been leading skirmish parties against French forward positions, the 36th Regiment, along with others, had been engaged in a decisive rear-guard action on the opposite flank. Moore’s army had saved the day, albeit at the cost of his own life, and the evacuation had been completed. The 95th and the 36th had been among the last troops to embark.
The sexton took his time answering. Swirling the dregs of the brandy around the inside of his mug, he tipped the drink back and placed the empty receptacle on the table. Drawing a sleeve across his lips, he looked Hawkwood full in the eye.
“Every bleedin’ day.”
Rumour had it that Quill had once served in the Royal Navy and that he’d been wounded in action at the Battle of Lissa while serving aboard HMS Volage under Phipps Hornby. Hawkwood had no idea if the rumours were true. From his own limited experiences of life on board a man-o’-war, he thought Quill did have the look of someone who might be at home between decks, though not as a surgeon; more likely as the captain of a gun crew. He had a bruiser’s stature. The shaven, bullet-shaped skull added to the mystique. It wasn’t hard to imagine him screaming orders, surrounded by sweaty, hard-pressed men ramming powder and shot down the barrel of a 32-pounder while enveloped in a world of fire, flame and flying splinters.
And yet, on the occasions that Hawkwood had visited him, there had been no visible sign of a wounding and he’d always appeared remarkably affable, which, given the nature of his work and the environment in which he laboured, was something of a miracle. Quill was the surgeon appointed by the Coroner to perform necropsies, usually whenever the circumstances of death were outside the ordinary. His place of work was a dead house.
Quill’s dead house was located in a dark and gloomy cellar – formerly a crypt – situated beneath an annexe of Christ’s Hospital. With St Bartholomew’s just around the corner, it was a convenient staging post for transferring bodies from hospital to grave. The authorities had been using it for decades, mostly because they hadn’t had to make any structural alterations.
Sleeves rolled up above his elbows, Quill was bent over one of his examination tables when Hawkwood arrived.
“Door!” he commanded with his customary opening brusqueness. He did not turn immediately, but when he did, he smiled upon recognizing his visitor. In the gloom, his breath misted as he spoke. “Officer Hawkwood! Hah! I was warned you’d be along.”
It was a macabre vision, for the surgeon’s hands were red with gore, as was the apron he was wearing. Hawkwood couldn’t recall a time when he hadn’t seen Quill in his bloody apron and didn’t like to think what the rest of the stains might be. Beneath the examination table, the flagstone floor was slick with dark fluids.
“Warned?” It was all Hawkwood could do not to clamp a hand over his nose and mouth, for the smell was appalling; worse than anything at the burying ground.
Quill grinned. Clearly unmoved by the reek coming off the bodies around him, he also seemed unaffected by the cold. Beads of sweat shone across his bald pate and Hawkwood could have sworn there was steam rising from the apron. He’d seen similar sights when heat appeared to ascend from the innards of wounded and just-killed soldiers; and in Smithfield slaughterhouses, too, on market day. But these bodies weren’t warm; they were anything but. He decided it had to be a trick of the light.
“Good to see you again,” Quill said. “I take it you’re here for the St George’s cadaver?”
Hawkwood realized the surgeon was clasping a scalpel in his right hand. His stomach turned.
“I am.”
“I couldn’t have examined it where it was?”
“If you had,” Hawkwood said, “you’d have ended up like me.”
The surgeon studied the gap in Hawkwood’s coat and beneath it the stained breeches and boots to which the mud was still clinging.
“You think that would have made a difference?” Spreading his arms, the surgeon invited Hawkwood to inspect his apron.
“It was a burying ground. It was in the wet and I didn’t think it was a proper place to perform an examination.”
“There wasn’t convenient shelter nearby?”
