BROTHER SURGEONS by Garet Rogers

The anatomists

When the Hunter brothers came to eighteenth century London, surgery was scorned by physicians. Flesh was butchered in stinking hospitals by ignorant hacks. Bleeding was the cure for all ills.

Cleanliness was almost unknown, and in that whore-infested city venereal disease was rife. The Hunters were not much concerned to change the habits of the day: yet they made an impact on surgery and medicine which eventually revolutionised the science.

William the elder was the ambitious social climber; John was rough, passionate, boorish; frequenter of taverns and brothels, drunkard. Yet his was the genius that would not rest until, through endless dissections, the mysteries of the human body were tracked down. Anatomy was a forbidden practise, so the search for “subjects” took him with body-snatchers on their midnight forays, and often to the public scaffold.

In this great novel, Garet Rogers tells of the struggles of the Hunter brothers against ignorance and against each other; and about the glory and tragedy of the great John Hunter.

Publishers

BROTHER SURGEONS

A NOVEL BY  GARET ROGERS

PUTNAM & Co

42 GREAT RUSSELL STREET

LONDON

First published in Great Britain  1957

Made and printed in Great Britain by

Richard Clay & Company, Ltd., at the Chaucer Press,

Bungay, Suffolk, for the publishers Putnam & Co. Ltd.

Quotes

Of Caesar’s sword we wonders hear;

Alcides’ club, Pelides’ spear;

But those let others celebrate

The wasteful instruments of Fate.

Thy lancet merits more by far,

Than all the weapons used in war …

ANON 

Grub-Street Journal, I732

There will always be found a ready race of panegyrists…… who draw their portraits in miniature, and are smooth and flattering, telling rather what a man ought to have been, than what he was.

Jesse Foot

The Life of John Hunter, 1794

Contents

PROLOGUE

I DAWN

II MID-MORN

III NOON

IV MID-AFTERNOON

V DUSK

EGLOGA

John Hunter, 1728-1793

Introduction

Man, engaged in the long and arduous living of his span, has always recognised the ephemeral essence of a lifetime. Soldiers will speak of Napoleon’s day, and poets of Pope’s. Surgeons, then, speak of John Hunter’s day. 

Yet the story of surgery in eighteenth century London does not belong solely to John Hunter. Always at his side we find another figure, that of his brother, the glittering, charming, and, at times, deadly, William Hunter. The brothers can no more be separated now than they could in life. Antipodes, rivals, enemies even, their lives were not so much entwined as entangled. Yet they two stood against the world, loyal to one another in their rivalry, bound by deepest affection in the midst of their hatred. Like warring natures in one being, they were still a unity.

Let us begin where the eighteenth century has neared the halfway mark. And let us, on occasion, mingle with the living those who are but representative. If John Hunter’s twelve-year "London season" was not exactly as we find it here—the facts are lost—still, this could have been the way of it.

Prologue

Sooner or later everyone in London came to the square known as Covent Garden. Though the discreet may have kept the reasons for their coming to themselves, others made so bold as to promenade the arcades thrusting out from the houses openly. The Garden, reputedly, appeased all appetites. It had a produce market and the finest of shops and taverns and coffee-houses; it had the most delightful of sluts and the most diseased as well; it had the most disreputable night-houses clustered on the south side; it had a playhouse and all the low activities such an establishment encourages; it had a church for the pious and a churchyard for the dead and—in the natural order of things—the Garden abounded in surgeons and physicians and quacks and apothecaries; it even harboured a ghoul. This last called himself an anatomist, boldly carrying on his nefarious work in a house in the east arcade, or the Little Piazza. The north arcade–the Great Piazza—was not so disgraced. Covent Garden had a parrot who hung in a cage outside the hotel, squawking distinctly, "Son-of-a-bitch-of-a––-" all day long. The owner of the parrot was quite prepared to swear on his mother’s grave that one time the cage had fallen to the stone footpath of the arcade, stunning the bird momentarily and so enraging it that the creature came out of its coma shrieking, "Near broke my ass, son-of-a-bitch-son-of …. " It was to the Garden that veiled ladies repaired in search of respite from rich and gouty husbands. There was nothing in the way of diversion the Garden did not offer; one could be dined, wined, entertained, accommodated, mobbed, robbed, beaten and left for dead in the dark portico of the church, and all within the happy hours of a single evening. The Garden, in short, was always so very gay.

On a wet afternoon in September a group of physicians was seated in the bay window of a coffee-house in the Little Piazza idly discussing the surroundings. Each man of physic had happened into the Garden on that particular day by mere chance, and on encountering kindred souls had stopped for coffee and a chat. In truth, the Elderly Physician had been the first to enter the coffee-house, for the pain of the stone in his bladder necessitated that he drink something hot at once. Seated in the bay he had seen a Dr. Grimes march past, making his way smartly down the Little Piazza, importantly swinging his gold-headed cane. The Elderly Physician had promptly snatched up his own cane to gain Dr. Grimes’s attention by rapping on the window-panes. In time, the gentlemen were joined by a Dr. Shapes, and a very young physician who was said to be somewhat notional, though his extreme youth might have accounted for this.

The gentlemen, bent on various enterprises in the Garden, had, perforce, to keep the Elderly Physician company while he squirmed in his chair with pain and nagged at the world. He had begun by remarking on the deterioration of the Garden, but was speedily launched on his considered opinions of what was wrong with men, manners, matters, London, and the times in general. He would soon be arriving at the surgeons next, the youngest physician foresaw, and God alone knew to what lengths he might aspire on the topic. Now, the youngest physician loved to gossip about the lowly surgeons as well as the next physical man, but he had come to the Garden to buy one of the daily handbills advertising the harlots and giving their names, addresses, and attributes, and he was dying to get on with it. Yet protocol being what it was, and he being in awe of the Elderly Physician, he too sat squirming, promising himself that the instant the rain ceased he would take that as his excuse and depart.

"… were gentlemen then," the Elderly Physician was droning on. He wagged his head, his physician’s wig remaining where it was, while his narrow skull slid about within it. "But that was fifty years ago, when I lived here. Well, lived there," he corrected himself, pointing vaguely past the crowded Piazzas to the rain swept, deserted square. Dr. Grimes sipped and nodded, not even bothering to look, and Dr. Shapes struggled with a yawn. The youngest physician was desperately bored.

"The year seventeen forty-five," the Elderly Physician took up suddenly "marked the greatest blow ever to befall physic, gentlemen. When those rascally surgeons set themselves up as a separate group from the barbers, physic suffered a––—"

"Speaking of surgeons," Dr. Grimes pounced happily, "I have heard a new quip about them!"

Dr. Shapes leaned forward eagerly. "Ah?"

"… cruellest blow ever dealt," the Elderly Physician tolled on. Whatever Dr. Grimes might have felt about the surgeons personally, he was in no doubt that the Elderly Physician was dealing a cruel blow to his story.

"Mark me, they’ll be calling themselves doctors next. Or petitioning the Crown to that effect. Not a man in the lot of them is good enough to shave my coachman."

"Shave!" Dr. Grimes cried. "That leads me to my little jest about"

"Cheselden," the Elderly Physician rambled on crankily, "playing the great surgeon. Oh, the great surgeon indeed, our Mr. Cheselden. Advising me I must submit to cutting for my stone!" At last he had led himself on to such a painful topic that he could not proceed, and so sat silent and wretched, staring down at his coffee.

Dr. Grimes seized his chance. "My jest! They are saying that a surgeon forgot himself and lathered a leg before amputating it!" The youngest physician tittered dutifully.

"Why," the Elderly Physician asked, "should he do a thing like that?"

"Doctor, it is a jest. He was a barber-surgeon, you see, before the barbers and the surgeons parted company" Ecod, the old fool’s wits were wandering; at any rate the jest was ruined. Dr. Grimes let the matter drop, preferring to look sullenly out of the window. Of a sudden he brightened, pointing. "Ha! gentlemen, look…"

The physicians craned their necks. Several doors down from the coffee-house, a gentleman was to be seen emerging from a small, tightly shuttered house. He descended the two steps to the Little Piazza, and started at a slow and dignified pace towards the coffee-house. He was dressed in dark green, with much tasteful gold working on the coat, and his wig flowed to his shoulder in snowy ringlets.

"Who?" the Elderly Physician demanded excitedly, squinting his eyes. "Who, who?"

"None other than Mr. William Hunter, surgeon," Dr. Snapes said, smiling.

"But is he not Scotch?" the Elderly Physician protested.

Quite understanding his colleague’s indignation, for Mr. William Hunter was separated but a hairsbreadth from a fop in dress and walk, Dr. Snapes replied, "Oh, indeed. Or was, sir. But he’s quite un- scotified now. He’s been in London six or seven years, I would say.

"What hospital connection does he have?" the youngest man wished to know.

"None, I believe. Though I have heard talk that he is being considered for the post of surgeon-man-midwife ."

"Surgeon-what". the Elderly Physician yawned. "Preposterous! He is no gentleman. I may state to you without reservation, even though I have no acquaintance with him, that he is no–— Pray rap him in. Rap him in, I said! I wish to have a word with such walking effrontery. There is an example of what the surgeons will be doing next. A man-midwife, indeed!"

Mr. William Hunter, making the measured progress of a Personage along the Piazza, did not at first attend the rapping on the pane of the coffee-house window. Then, pausing long enough to recognise that a gold-headed cane, symbol and ever-present accoutrements of the physician, was making the noise, he slowed his feet. Vaguely he made out the face of one Dr. Grimes whom he had met recently somewhere about town. Mr. Hunter swept a hand to his heart, placed the red heel of one shoe to the instep of its mate, and made a most exemplary leg. Within, Dr. Grimes and a very young man hastily rose to execute the same. Mr. William Hunter prepared to stroll on.

Again the tapping arrested his forward progression. He was being waved in. Fancy, Mr. Hunter thought to himself, pleased. The physical men in town are beginning to take notice of me. As well they might, he told himself a trifle heatedly. As well they… The Elderly Physician made a ludicrous leg to Mr. Hunter before falling again into his chair. Mr. Hunter’s smile was so serene that it bordered on the impudent. "A grim day, gentlemen," he remarked pleasantly, taking the chair offered him. "Ah, my thanks. Coffee, I think." He looked about him to see if his companions were having coffee or hot punch. "Yes, coffee," he derided, following in their lead. Such was his control, that though he was in a turmoil inside, he knew himself to appear at his ease. He had dismissed the youngest physician as being of no consequence whatsoever. Dr. Grimes and Dr. Snapes were small beer. But the Elderly Physician was a man of importance; he had Court connections. As he awaited his coffee and smiled and delivered himself of the most inane civilities, Mr. William Hunter was busily thinking how he might sequester the senile physician and invite him to dine with him. Dare he? Mr. Hunter’s noble nose turned in the direction of the Elderly Physician. "Are you in the Garden to attend the playhouse, sir?"

"Playhouse?" that gentleman snapped. "Indeed, no. Trumpeters, plays. Tarts, actresses. You may not believe this, Mr. Hunter, but I once lived in the Garden. That was many years ago, I must give you to understand. Garden rogues now."

William Hunter smiled; it was as if his social position were so secure that he had either heard amiss, or no offence had been intended. By his gracious smile alone he conveyed this message to the Elderly Physician. His eyes, extraordinarily blue and clear under his white wig, remained steady. "I have taken residence here myself," he said carelessly. "I shall have to live at day School until such time as my"—he coughed slightly as if to ask pardon for mentioning the crass—"my finances will permit me to move to the Court end of town."

Both Dr. Grimes and the Elderly Physician said at once, "School?"

William flicked the lace at his wrists, lace so crisp it should have tinkled when in motion. "I am engaging in the teaching of anatomy, gentlemen. Perhaps you may have read my advertisements in the newspapers. Ah? No. As I have said, I shall teach anatomy in my School, as well as surgery, midwifery—I say midwifery, because I am myself an accoucheur."

"Accoucheur?" the Elderly Physician echoed. "Upon my soul!" He leaned forward to examine William Hunter the more closely, snorting to himself the while.

"My main objective," William continued coolly, "is to train young surgeons and physicians by the Paris Method."

The Elderly Physician was quite red now, though his pale wig may have contributed by contrast to his apoplectic flush. "Teach, sir, teach physicians by your Paris Method? What in the name of–– What in the world––"

"The Paris Method of teaching anatomy consists of instructing each student in the complete dissection of the human body."

"But that would entail…" the Elderly Physician began, but could go no further.

"It will entail the procurement of ‘subjects’, yes," William supplied for him daintily.

"Dead subjects?" the youngest physician blurted.

"My dear sir, I should scarcely think live subjects suitable for dissection." William smiled to take the sting from his words.

"You will be stoned," Dr. Grimes said flatly. "The populace nearly rioted when the Surgeons’ Company was granted the needless privilege of one human dissection a year at their Hall. Now you tell me, sir, that—pray do not open your mouth to deny it—that for every student who enters your front door the fruit of some grave will be carried in the back."

"How prettily you put it," William said in a warmly admiring tone.

This sufficed to silence Dr. Grimes, and so William could return to the Elderly Physician. "I have recently returned from Paris sir, where I studied anatomy by the Method. Or, I should say, resumed my study of anatomy, for I attended Monro’s lectures in Scotland. In my youth," he added. The Elderly Physician peered at William hard at this last, for William was thirty and looked not a day older. "Would you gentlemen care to see my School?" William asked.

Baffled apparently by the audacity of this Mr. Hunter, the Elderly Physician reverted to an earlier topic. "I once lived in the Gar…." But he was drowned out by Dr. Snapes, who was attempting to couch his refusal in civil terms. "Most gracious of you"

"Another time," Dr. Grimes put in, quite put out, in fact, for he had rather wanted to be the one to snub this Hunter person.

The youngest physician found himself wondering if William Hunter knew of a facial expression other than the smile. Hunter’s lips had remained curved, sweetly so. He parted them to say, "I shall be entirely at your disposal, gentlemen; you have only to name the time."

In the awkward pause that followed, and as if he were totally unaware that there was such a pause, William slipped his hand into his pocket to withdraw a snuffbox. Fastidiously he applied a pinch to his nostrils, at the same time extending the box to the Elderly Physician. Petee, William Hunter sneezed. And again, because the Elderly Physician had partaken, and William was now offering the box to Dr. Grimes, he enquired on another sneeze, "Petee?"

"Thank you, no," Dr. Grimes said huffily.

The Elderly Physician exploded brown drops of coffee directly into William’s face. "I, for one, have it in mind to see that Anatomy School of yours, Mr. Hunter. You say you intend to teach physicians, sir?"

"I meant teach them anatomy , not to become physicians," William said with a slight bow. "Why, only a day or so ago I received the fee of a young doctor from Oxford. He is a Reader in Anatomy there—fancy—yet he is coming to study under me. He wrote me that he has never so much as put a scalpel to flesh. But for the main part, most of the young physicians who may attend my School…" He was rushing his words, becoming garrulous, and William slowed his speech accordingly. "…. will come to learn anatomy they may apply it to their learning of Physic. Res amendent lumina rebus—one thing will illuminate another. "

"I am quite able to translate Latin for myself, thank you," Dr. Grimes announced, though he was not the one being addressed.

"What a fetching snuffbox," the youngest physician said tactfully.

"My thanks, Doctor. I am rather fond of my little tabatiere myself."

"Tabatiere indeed!" Dr. Grimes said quite audibly.

"Is your School open now?" the Elderly Physician asked.

"There is only my assistant and myself now, sir. I assure you, I had quite to scour the town before I found him, ineffectual creature that he is. I have been in constant agitation lest my students arrive—many of them will reside with me—and I be without an assistant of any sort. A surgeon sufficiently versed in anatomy to be able to proctor my dissection room is not easily come by."

"I should imagine not," the Elderly Physician agreed. "Even a surgeon, as you say. Now I," he went on proudly, "know not the first thing about anatomy. In my day Physic was a study as ponderous and ennobling as—as poetry, sir! However, I suppose the surgeons of today are more interested in that sort of Oh, lathered a leg! Ecod, I thought you said levered the damned thing!" The Elderly Physician was lost to the world in laughter.

William Hunter sat smiling, smiling, his brows elevated slightly, for this had made no sense whatsoever to him. Since he must obviously say something, and quickly, as the gentlemen to a man were laughing uproariously at some private joke, he lost his poise for the first time and heard himself babbling. "And, too, I am expecting my young brother to visit me for a day or so, later this month. He will be entering the army" Suddenly he gained control and subsided. No one had heard him anyway but the very young physician.

"That will be quite pleasant for you," the young man managed politely.

"Eh?" William said over the laughter. "Oh. Yes… he is to join the army, you know. Yes, the youngest of us, and entering the army as so many of the younger lads will do." Though he did not say so, still there was in William’s voice a note of such great but restrained pride, that the young physician was assured that this brother had managed to receive quite a respectable commission. Perhaps the Hunters had influence. The Scots who had remained loyal during the Bonnie Prince’s uprising had done handsomely for themselves, the youngest physician reflected.

"He is very much younger than yourself?" the young physician shouted over the snorting and gasping of his colleagues.

"Ten years," William cried back. "I have not seen him for a considerable time, and he was then at that age where one turns overnight from a callow brat to manhood." Which, on reviewing what he had said, seemed a remark so fatuous that William Hunter decided he had best take his leave. He was sorely hurt by the teasing he had received at the hands of the physicians, and most disappointed that he had lost the Elderly Physician’s attention just at the moment when the acquaintance might have ripened into something useful. He was so absorbed in preparing for a graceful exit that he almost did not hear the young man’s next remark.

"I am wondering, sir," he was saying, much in the manner of one experimenting with words, "if you have already accepted your full complement of students for this term? I—I am most interested in the Paris Method, and would like to.—"

"Look! Look there!" Dr. Shapes cried suddenly, and now he was pointing out of the window. William Hunter could cheerfully have struck him to the floor, but the next moment he was gazing out of the window, was bored with what he saw, and then sharpened his gaze. 

Across the deserted square of the Garden rode a ridiculous figure on a sorry horse. A youth, by the squat, powerful build of him, and a cynosure by virtue of his hair which burned fiery orange through the rain, curling all over his head.

"Scotch, most certainly," Dr. Grimes said contemptuously, his eyes sliding for a moment to William Hunter. "Why, Mr. Hunter, I believe he is alighting at your door. An anatomy student, perhaps? Some young physician from Oxford come to avail himself of the–hee–Paris Method?"

Now the gentlemen were giving their closest attention to Mr. Hunter, for he sat visibly blanching, so that his eyes deepened by contrast, and one could clearly see that his brows had been cleverly darkened with the burnt end of a sulphur match. "Some—trades-man or other," he was mumbling. "My servant will send him packing, never fear." Yet, strangely enough, William Hunter was rising in haste, leaving his pretty snuffbox on the table.

Dr. Grimes permitted William to make his hasty bows and half turn away, before he said, "Ah, you are forgetting your tabatiere, Mr. Hunter

"My thanks," William said in the same distraught mumble, not taking his gaze from the window. His narrow, soft hand moved over the table in search of the box, much as a blind man’s might. Discovering it, he dropped it into his pocket without so much as a downward glance.

"Mr. Hunter," the youngest physician called out, "might I talk with you soon on the matter of my–" But William Hunter was gone, rushing through the door and down the Little Piazza to his house.

"Well," the Elderly Physician said, sniggering, "that was fine sport, eh, gentlemen?"

William Hunter reached his door in time to see it open and his servant, Duncan, appear. "Well?" Duncan was saying to the visitor with all the hauteur of a peer.

"Where’s me brother?" the red-haired youth asked jovially.

"Heu?" Duncan enquired. "For heum are you enquir––"

"Wullie! My brother Wullie–—

"By this time William Hunter had mounted the steps.

"Mr. Hunter, sir," Duncan said loftily, "this person––- "

William sighed. "He is my brother, Mr. John Hunter," he said. Turning to the red-haired youth, he begged, as in a faint dying request, "And pray don’t call me Wullie. I did not expect you so soon, Jock."

"Well, I am here, nevertheless."

"So I see," William Hunter said.

In William’s parlour the brothers conversed, both of them ill at ease, over their wine. William could hardly gain John’s attention, for the fiery head turned from the great mahogany bookcase to the brocaded sofa, bent to examine the carving on the arm of a chair, the inlaid work on a table, and returned ever to the splendour of William’s suit frothed with his crystalline lace.

In his turn, William looked in vain for a single redeeming feature in his youngest brother’s appearance. The lad was short-necked with an enormous jaw that might have served excellently as a shovel. His glance was colourless, but so direct that William found it a touch disconcerting. William nearly lost the thread of what he was saying. He had asked after their widowed mother—she was well. Of the ten children born to the Hunters, only the two brothers and a sister remained above ground. The sister, it came out, was also well. She had no immediate prospects of marriage. The conversation, ailing up to now, suddenly gave up and died.

William prodded it to make certain. "Well," he cried heartily, "I dare say the army will suit you excellently, Jock."

John was glum. "Aye."

How annoying. William gave the conversation a swift kick. "Come, Jock, you should be the first to admit that the army is the only course open to you. Your playing the truant from school year after year has precluded anything else. In truth, you are not in the least like the rest of us at all."

"I am no scholar,"John agreed. The pale eyes traced the design on William’s coat.

"At least," William said, "the military life being what it is, one is much in the open, I am given to understand. Whatever it is they do between wars will in all probability keep you safe from the consumption."

"Being in the open on the farm did not save most of us," John observed.

"Our Jamie was studying physic at the time he succumbed?" William snapped. "Not running wild about the fields. I tell you, Jock, he would have been the best of us. When he died in my arms…when he…" William was overcome.

The brothers sat in silence while William dabbed at his eyes with a fine lace kerchief.

"We shall talk of other matters," William said at last. "How long may I hope to have you for your visit?"

"Why, as long as.—"

"For my part you could stay as long as you like, but my students are due in a fortnight. I shall need every inch of space in this little house for them. A good dozen will reside with me."

"Aye," John said, for want of anything better.

"I must find the time to show you a bit of London. The playhouse is open now, and there are concerts and the like. However, you may prefer bull-baitings…" William grew fretful, recalling another kind of baiting which had taken place a few hours past. "Needless cruelties, to my mind, but they appeal to certain low, spiteful…"

A faint disembodied coughing filtered through the house and William paused, frowning. "My assistant, Mr. Symons," he explained. "Let a drop of rain fall and his chest is bound as with chains. He is somewhat of a trial to me, I must confess, for though diligent, he is clumsy. Still, assistants are hard to come by, as I was saying this very afternoon to… Damn them! Smirking and tittering and craning their necks out of the window for all the world like a company of sluts seeking.— Come, what am I going on about! Would you care to see the schoolrooms, while I have Duncan prepare our supper?"

"Aye," John said.

"Do not say ‘aye’," William said gently, rising at the same time. "The affirmative is ‘yes’."

"A–-"

"You shall see my lecture-hall first."

They stood looking into a bare room containing chairs and what resembled a lectern at one end. Next, William took John into the dissection room, and here William’s candle lit up long wooden tables bleached white by scouring. An air of depression prevailed throughout this back part of the house.

"And now," William said, noting and immediately forgiving the pridefull ring of his voice, "I shall show you the most unusual room in the whole of London. My preparation room." His step resumed its briskness; forgotten were the physicians of the coffee-house and their sport. William was entering his counting-house, his treasury. And a strange one it was, by the look of wonder on John’s face. William went from sconce to sconce lighting up his treasures. On shelves, in jars, reposing or floating in a colourless liquid were …

"What?" John asked, indicating ajar.

"Ah." William took it from the shelf lovingly. "The human kidney, the vessels injected with wax so that they might be studied. It is what is called a preparation, Jock. These in jars are preserved in spirits of wine, as the odour of the room may have told you. Now, here we have. But surely this sort of thing does not interest you. I had merely wanted you to see the–– "

"And this, Wullie?"

"Why, a six-month foetus. You do not see a sight like that every day. I venture to say not one surgeon in–- "

"An unborn infant? Is that what it is, Wullie?"

"If you feel faint, Brother, let us return to the parlour."

"And up there?"

William looked up to the organ hanging on a thread from the ceiling. "The human bladder, of course. Inflated with air and then varnished–– You must not touch it, Jock; it may not be dry."

To his consternation, William was unable to guide his young brother from the room. John must point to this and stare at that, engrossed as a brat at a fair. "If you are faint," William tried again, but gave it up as hopeless.

John completed his tour of the room, stopping for a final glimpse of the foetus. The great jaw came forward as it always did when John prepared to speak. Now we shall have some witticism, William found himself thinking involuntarily; they all must find humour in my preparations—that or nausea—as if to prove to me that they are unimpressed with them.

"Wullie," John said, "they are beautiful?

William beamed. "Fancy your saying that!" Of a sudden he grew thoughtful, wary even. Hastily blowing out the candles, he led the way back to the parlour.

Over the roast William began to expand. His fire was warm, his stomach full, his wine heady, and he had a properly appreciative audience. It was comforting to speak ones heart freely, to utter ambitions and decry injustices, and to know they would go no further. John was a Hunter, was William’s own flesh and blood, and was, moreover, a safe confidant in that he would be leaving London so shortly. In spite of the lad’s appearance (and he could not really be charged with that, William reminded himself, catching a glimpse of his own male beauty in the gilt mirror), Jock was a likable young man now that the wine had dispelled his protective Scotch glumness. Very richly, savouring his words, William was saying, "… students, for the most part, will be men as young as yourself. Sons of country surgeons, ‘prentices, physical young men who wish––- Allow me to fill your glass, Jock ––- "After doing so, William held his own glass to the candelabrum, bathing his face in the rosy shadow that fell on his features. "And even a Dr. Smith from Oxford! Though I dare say it was the Paris Method and not myself which prompted him to…… Are you asleep, Jock?"

John was, snoring cosily to himself in William’s dainty little gilt chair.

ii

The rain continued steadily that night, the Piazzas grew quiet quite early. William lay awake watching the play of light cast on the ceiling by his dying fire. He could not shed the humiliation of the afternoon. Himself, burning with ambition, fuelled by it, yet humbled by a gaggle of malicious physicians. He, thinking himself so adroit, and they finding him not deft but daft.

And Jock… William began to sweat under the bedclothes. Soon the familiar itching and burning would begin. Jock, riding across the Garden on his poop-rumped nag, his hair ablaze, and Dr. Grimes wishing to know, "Ah, Mr. Hunter, some young physician from Oxford, no doubt, coming to study….."

 Should, he have said: Gentlemen, that is my brother. 

There was a chest in William’s room, he could see it by moving his head and looking through the parted bed-curtains. In the bottom drawer lay a coat stained with blood. That great stain was all William had left of Jamie. He closed his eyes to the sight of the chest, and saw against his lids Jamie ‘s mouth opened and pouring blood. In the next moment Jamie was dead, never to follow William to London, never to become a physician. The Hunter brothers, London would have called them. They had been like twins, equally favoured in feature and grace, equally tall, a unit within the larger unit of the Hunter family, with the oldest sister at one end and wild little Jock at the other. Dead Jamie bleeding on William’s Coat …. "And in his place God left me Jock!" William thought, and was horrified to hear his voice dying away in the night.

Someone stirred in the house, but it was only Mr. Symons coughing in his sleep. John was down the corridor in the large room where the students would sleep, and could not possibly have heard him.

Now the bedclothes were tangled at William’s feet; the burning sensation would soon become unendurable. He turned his shorn head From side to side, feeling the pink bristles covering his skull scratch against the pillow. His new wig, was it too much like a physician’s wig? Had they thought so today, savouring his exposure of his pretensions, while he postured and called himself an accoucheur, and offered his tabatiere about.

"God damn that snuffbox!" William cried aloud, making no effort to contain the outburst.

iii

By morning Mr. Symons was feverish. John slept on in the cold students’ room. "Do not wake him," William said to Duncan; "he is tired out from his journey."

Duncan stood obediently holding William’s cup of chocolate, while William smeared his head with wig paste. "Please, sir, your chocolate will be quite cold ."

"Pray permit me to decide when I wish to drink Oh, damn, I forgot that arm! It should be dissected out this morning, and here Symons is abed with the sniffles."

"Indeed, Mr. William," Duncan suggested brightly, "perhaps Mr. John—"

"Twaddle! My brother cannot dissect out that arm for me. I doubt if he knows a scalpel from a butter knife; as why should he? Furthermore, Duncan, it will not be necessary for you to differentiate between my brother and me by using our given names. He won’t be with us that long. I shall continue to answer to Mr. Hunter as usual."

"As yew wish, sir," Duncan said, carefully blank. "Shall we be wearing the new wig today?"

"You may have the cursed thing! That is, if you care to parade about looking like some fool physician." William drank off his tepid chocolate, and stepped back to observe his appearance in the glass of the basin-stand. Moving in, he grimaced in order to examine his white, even teeth. There were faint shadows under his eyes, but otherwise all was well. Without further conversation he and Duncan went to the window where Duncan might apply the char to William’s orange brows.

Cheered by his appearance, William went out into the day smartly. Though the day was overcast, the rain had stopped, and he strode along the Piazzas as if walking for a constitutional. That his carriage-house contained only a cart and a pad nag of a horse, irritated William anew. All the physicians and most of the surgeons rode about town in neat little chariots. He, William Hunter, walked.

His rounds took more of his time than he had anticipated, and as he again came to the Little Piazza, William’s conscience prickled. Poor Jock! shut up in a strange house all day with a coughing, wheezing old bore and an impudent servant. I must make it up to him, William thought, as he entered his front door.

The sound of coughing led him directly to his preparation room. Just within the doorway William came to a halt. Mr. Symons was up, yes, but down also, in that he was bedded in a chair, snugly tucked about with a blanket, a woollen cloth bound about his head in place of a wig, and a steaming cup of what was surely claret in his hand. At the table by Mr. Symons’ side sat John, hard at work dissecting out the muscles of the amputated arm.

"Well, sir " William began testily. Then his eye fell on the arm again. The dissecting was neat, incisive. There had been no hacking or sawing. It was far better work, in truth, than Mr. Symons himself was capable of.

"Your brother, sir, is a born anatomist," Mr. Symons wheezed softly. William shook his head as if to scatter all distracting sounds from his ears. Duty would have a word with him: the dissection was commendable, and John was now watching him intently from under the thatch of dreadful hair. "Indeed?" William murmured feebly.

There was silence in the room, broken only by Mr. Symons’ respiration and the occasional sputtering of John’s work-candle. Duty tapped its foot impatiently: Well, William Hunter?

Mr. Symons occupied himself with an examination of first one brother, then the other, his face plainly dubious of their blood relationship. The squat, stocky man and the slim, elegant William—brothers?

Still John regarded William with the colourless, steady eyes; the parted, thick mouth, the rigid pose of the back, and even the tight grasp of the hand, closed about the scalpel, spelling out a desperate supplication.

William wavered. Jock was his brother. But then, he was prepared–-resigned, if that was the word–-to enter the army. There was no question of William’s failing him, where there had been no promises made. "Wullie?" John said simply.

Incredibly, William suddenly saw Jamie watching him from the depths of the pale eyes. "Yes, brother?" He could not himself have said to whom he was speaking. "Yes, brother," he said again, and this time it was a reply.

Mr. Symons stirred under his blanket to recall his presence to the brothers. "Well, now," William cried, drawing up a chair, "we must keep Jock here and make a surgeon out of him eh, Mr. Symons? He’ll be my twenty-first student this autumn!"

Mercy on us, William thought, observing the dawn of John’s smile, Jock has a… a glorious grin!

Duncan appeared precipitately in the doorway, John’s coat depending from his finger-tips. "Mr. William, Mr. John’s coat is lousy!"

"Burn it," William said calmly. "He shall have some of my clothes." Belatedly he noticed how Duncan had addressed him."Des est qui regit ontnia," he went on in a resigned voice. "It is God who rules all things. Though why He tells you of it first, Duncan, I cannot imagine. Loosely translated, of course."

"And Mr. John’s lousy hat?"

"Burn that also. The students’ room will need another cot, Duncan."

"Yes, Mr. William, I know."

John had been in London not quite twenty-four hours. In that time William had become not his brother but his master and teacher. He sat respectfully erect in his chair listening to William. The sconces were lighted in the preparation room now, the candles reflecting in jar after jar. In the soft light William’s face was remote, stern even. "I shall have Clutterbuck supply you with a subject at once."

"Who?"

"Pray do not interrupt. Mr. Symons can instruct you—if he ever gets out of that bed of his again—but I am straying—and you should have completed much of your first dissection by the time the students arrive. We shall have to preserve the parts in spirits, but I shall tell you of that when the time arrives. I wish it understood, Jock, that you shall receive no favours from me. Your position in this School shall be that of any other student, no more. There will be money provided for your expenses—and very little else, may I add. After you have completed your course with me, we shall see about your further surgical training at one of the hospitals. In the meantime I shall expect you to apply yourself. Among the students you will find a certain Dr. Smith of Oxford—"

"So you have said, Wullie," John murmured deferentially.

"Pray do not interrupt! I suggest you associate with him closely. He writes a most gentlemanly letter, and is, I have no doubt, an exemplary young man. You, if I may point out your faults, brother, are not quite…. a gentleman. Dr. Smith is but a year older than you– "He is a doctor at twenty-one?" John marvelled. "And so might I have been, and Jamie too, with that young man’s advantages!" William thundered. "I have come a long way, Jock, from my beginnings. Do not lose sight of that!" John stared, scratching his head nervously. "And have yourself doused," William said. "And put some bear-grease on that—that conflagration of yours!" He sprang up to pace off his agitation, marching back and forth past the jars. "You must forgive me," he took up on a more relenting tone, "I suffered a most painful experience yesterday and have not yet rid myself of it." William came to a halt under a sconce, brandishing an arm as another would have a sword. His gesture included the shelves of jars as well as the varnished organs hanging from the ceiling. "I shall tell you something of myself, and my School, and these preparations, Jock. One day my reputation will rest on what is in this room—or some other little bit. Exegi momentum aereperennius …. " Blue eyes burning intensely as the base of a flame, William translated softly for the benefit of the awed John, " ‘I have raised a monument more enduring than brass …. ‘ Yes, Jock, I–William Hunter–shall be justified in saying that."

"I am certain that you will, brother," John murmured politely.

"And no one," William said, with flat finality, "shall stop me." So matters were on the eve of John Hunter’s day.

I Dawn 

All the long, moonless night a wintry wind had blown through London, squeezing itself to a shriek to rush through the Piazzas, broadening to a roar to sweep across the bleak, deserted Garden. Winter was arriving early that year, the fires were barely lit for the season before there was hoarfrost on the sills in the mornings, and the floors took on a dry hardness and complained aloud when trod on. By mid-November the pre-dawn wind blowing up from the river left a glaze on the water of the kennels which bisected the streets, and those who were up before daybreak would look at the small, frozen streams clogged with garbage and sewage and the carcasses of cats and curs, and their own flesh would stiffen and almost crackle in the cold. The coming winter would be a hard one, an iron winter. None knew this better than those few who were up and about in the last hour of dark that bitter November morning.

In Covent Garden the fruiterers and greengrocers arranged their hampers under stars that seemed to burn with the jagged glisten of ice, and only to the east were the stars fading, melting into the first tinge of light seeping on to the night. The Piazzas were deserted but for a harlot on her way home, and a derelict or rogue of sorts, leaning against one of the stone pillars.

Under a filthy wig, roofing him to the brows, the man’s slit eyes streamed tears as he clung to his support. The harlot paused, then passed on with a rusty sigh; she had seen the bottle of gin which he held to his breast in readiness. The derelict again raised the bottle to his lips with resolution and drank. Now his tears felt on his face as stone drops might on a statue. He shook in a spasm of pain as the gin seared his gums, licking the hinges of his jaw with pain. His brief but violent seizure past. He sank against a pillar, panting. It had been thus with him on braving the cold for almost twenty years; only gin could numb his swollen, snag-embedded gums so that he might endure the sting of air on them—and he could not yet decide if the agonies of his first gin-layings of the morn were worth it. Still, he had surmounted the pain once more, and was now ready for what the day might bring. A final sob escaped him before he wiped his eyes and looked about him.

Now he saw a world blue-grey in colour. The stone fronts of the houses, the arches, the blank windows looking down on him, even the bite of the wind brought to his mind that ominous and nameless hue of surgeon’s steel. Suddenly as if some great golden eye had blinked, the grey world brightened. The eastern roofs of the Garden turned pink; while on the opposite side, the parrot being brought out in his cage for the morning air, ruffled his feathers, noted the rising sun and prepared to crow the Garden awake. "Qwuak! Son-of-a-bitch-son-of-qwuak…"

The derelict stepped out from the shelter of the Little Piazza and looked to a window above him. Shutters parted, a window opened quietly, and an orange head appeared. "Coming, Clutterbuck," a Scotch voice called down.

"Let me in the back?" Mr. Clutterbuck cried, and without further risk of his gums to the cold hastened around the corner.

Within, John Hunter drew the shutters to, and tiptoed to the fire in his stocking feet. He had built it up with newspapers and sea-coal so that the room would be warm when the students arose. He warmed his hands for an instant, looking about at his sleeping fellows. The dozen or so young men in the room were but noses thrust up for air; they might have been sleeping under water. Only Dr. Smith of Oxford lay on his back, his sleeping face supercilious as ever under a fine wool nightcap. On a chair by his side hung his handsome crimson coat, the skirt of which was so richly encrusted with embroidery that, upon first beholding it William Hunter had been sufficiently put upon his mettle to raise his brows in envious disdain. John smiled at the thought, William need not have bothered, Dr. Smith could never match William’s beauty or grace.

He stirred himself. Poor Clutterbuck was at the back, and he was leaning against the study table half dozing and warming himself. On the table lay the students’ notes, a book or so held open in place with a bone lying across the pages, a chart illustrating the intricacies of bandaging, a skull, and, lying on another set of notes, a hair-riband coated with bear-grease. As it was his last for which he had been searching, he snatched it up, and, binding his hair as he slipped his feet into his shoes, he took up his lighted farthing dip and tiptoed from the room.

(William had so early as the second lecture departed from matters purely anatomical and surgical, venturing into botany so far as to inform the gentlemen that wax candles cost sixpence per pound and did not grow on trees. Farthing dips were used throughout the school except in the lecture room, the preparation room—the soot of the dips would stain the preparations—and William’s pallor.)

Creaking his way to the stairs, John went past Mr. Symons room, hearing his cough dimly echo his September fever; past William’s, from which no sound or sign escaped; past Duncan’s, who, as usual, was addressing the creatures of his dreams in William’s most authoritative lecture voice; and finally past the small room which housed William’s iron tub, his wig-stands, and his elaborate ward-robe.

Clutterbuck was impatiently scratching on the dissection room door when John arrived to let him in. "Bygar, lad," Clutterbuck cried, coming in out of the cold, "I near froze my crooks out there." He banged his hands together to bring the life back to them, looking about him. On the dissection tables lay the fruits of Clutterbuck’s nocturnal endeavours, and he eyed them with deep satisfaction. "Four pounds apiece," he said fondly, then added hastily, "and worth every bobstick, eh, Jock?"

"Have you hitched the horse?" John asked busily. This was to be his first major errand for William and he was concerned lest something not go right.

"Jock," Clutterbuck said by way of answer, "I can see from where I stand that you’ll be fretting your guts to fiddle-strings over this. No need for it. You’ll do handsomely, never fear. Pelvis and all, right as rain."

"Pelvis. Is the horse hitched?"

"Pelvis, then. What’s in a name? He, ha. Heard that in a play. Her pelvis will be as safe as if she was in her bed. Bed! Bygar, I’m as full of wit this morning as a bag of––- Have a sip of gin, Jock, and we’ll be off."

John sipped, sputtered, and grinned. "Gods, I’ll be drunk as a horse on no breakfast."

"No break–– fie on that lazy Duncan, Jock! Mr. William ought to flog him. Each time I’ve come, you’ve been up boiling your own tea and working away there"—an arm indicated the subjects—"defiling the dead---- "

"Defiling!" John snorted.

"Aye, I said that. It is a very elegant way of saying ‘dissect’, so I’m told …. Defiling the dead and that Duncan asleep up there, for all the world like he was crapped out for good. Well, Jock, I have brought you your breakfast." Clutterbuck proudly drew an object from his pocket at this juncture. It was a bun, a veritable fossil of a bun. John accepted it gratefully. "That will be ha’pence," Clutterbuck said blandly.

"Go to hell," John replied cheerfully. "Gods, we’ll be late, if we don’t hurry."

Clutterbuck would not be hurried. He must now prepare to go out into the cold again, and must numb his gums. "…. be exactly on time," he said rather moistly. "Learned this business through toil and error, Jock!" No better way to learn anything."

As they drove the cart out of William’s carriage-house, the sun was pouring into the alleyways of London like a pale and shimmering tide. "They should be thanking God on their knees right now for such a pretty day," Clutterbuck observed piously.

What would have seemed the mere possibility of a miracle some hours before dawn had come to pass. It was a glorious morning in London. The breeze was still crisp as the snap of a neck, but the sun had already begun to melt the ice in the kennels and lick the rime from the roofs. Shortly after dawn the street-criers had come to waken the city, and amidst their cries, the tin trumpets of the approaching Gazette vendors sent pellets of sound skyward to fall in a shower of glinting echoes through the streets. And then the bells, the hundreds of bells all over town, began to ring. To such a tumult London awakened, shook its aching head, regretted the punch or port of the night before, and staggered to the window. One breath of the morning, one glimpse of the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral floating in the greater dome of the sky, and London’s head was cleared, its back straightened.

Exhilaration on such a morning is pandemic.

By mid-morn passage on foot in Oxford Street had become difficult, and in sedan or carriage impossible. Equally clogged were the roads leading in from Edgware and Paddington. Tyburn itself was liquid, sloshing over into neighbouring streets with the mob. At windows above this merry mass sat the quality in space rented for the occasion, while others had precariously ensconced themselves in viewing stands rising from the mob like islands. Yet the uneasiness the quality so often felt in the presence of their countrymen was not too much in evidence today, for the mob stared at their betters with the same good natured insolence they exhibited when viewing the animals in the menagerie at the Tower. Quips passed between meaty-faced butchers and fops who sat atop the carriages, while from the carriage windows ladies of high station tittered at the ardent glances of brawny ‘prentices. Laughter was lilting; everybody was happy here.

If there was an exception it was John, heady with gin or agitations he was uncertain which, trying for a steady voice when he said to Clutterbuck, "‘Twill be getting on towards noon, I expect." He indicated the shadows of the ropes, almost perceptibly shortening. His hand shook and he hastily lowered it. Clutterbuck sniggered.

Through the throng struggled vendors doing a brisk, if rather hectic, business in handbills. A gentleman near John and Clutterbuck bought one and began reading from it in a shout, delighting many of those about him: Good friends, though it grieves me to see you, gathered around me, weeping at my parting, it gives me hope that by the lesson I am to learn you will also––

"To me," Clutterbuck said quite loudly, "it don’t seem fair. Reading it for him like that Eh, Jock?"

"Aye," John said solemnly.

"Should shut his boneshop…" Clutterbuck muttered, then uttered a joyful howl.

The cart was coming, and no Royal Coach had ever received such a welcome as this.

To John it seemed as if the sun had suddenly gone out and he was gazing into the black hole of eternity. Someone had snatched the globe of the world from under his feet; he hung in nothing.

He was being supported by Clutterbuck. "Bygar, Jock, you gave me a fright."

John found his feet and his senses at the same time. He was sober now, tense but steady. The cart was coming, and he would not fail William.

The crowd contorted in serpentine excitement. The cart carried sixteen of condemned. Of these, four were silent wretches. A fifth was a weeping girl, and the sixth was a cocky, a devilish, a dandified rogue who was bowing and blowing kisses to the ladies. Oft-times he glanced somewhat surreptitiously at one of the hand-bills while his lips moved soundlessly; then, in the manner of one digesting a piece of information before engorging the next, he returned to his gracious acknowledgement of his admirers. To his left, the girl, with mouth wide open, bawled some private agony to the world. At her breast a newborn infant bawled also. They were but two opened mouths emitting noise to Clutterbuck, and he said so contemptuously. "She bawled her belly four months ago to save her neck, and like as not has not stopped since. Oh, I know her kind! Turn her loose and she’d wring the brat’s neck in the first dark doorway she came to. Have another sip of gin, Jock."

John shook his head, eyes fastened on the girl.

"Be prepared to push when I tell you," Clutterbuck warned, "We must get to the ropes when they do." As he spoke he moved as easily with the mob as a man floating on the sea. "You’ll get great pleasure from this, lad, being in such a choice position." He turned his head in the direction of the stands filled with the fashionable and sneered. "They may as well be boating on the river."

John nodded.

"Sure you would not care for a sip of… Be quick, lad, push!" Clutterbuck barked at him.

John obeyed, using his broad shoulders as rams, keeping his eyes ever on the girl in the cart, intent as a lover, pushing and shoving until at last he could hold on to the cart and move with it. The girl did not seem to know he was there. A crone reached out of the mob for John and he pulled her to him in passing. Now there were three in his Little group, Clutterbuck behind him exchanging noisy pleasantries with the highwayman, and the crone hugged to him for protection. She it was who had sold the girl to William, and she it was who would care for the child with the four pounds William had already paid her.

In time the cart came to a halt just where the shadows cast by the ropes were like black dots on the ground, giving the ropes the appearance of having bled tar. It was at this moment, belatedly, and with a fine flair for drama, that the hangman, Mr. John Thrift, made his first appearance through the mob. Those in the cart stopped throwing kisses, stopped praying, stopped blubbering; they watched the approach of Mr. Thrift with a terrible stillness. They could not have been more naked before the great throng had they been stripped. This moment, for which the mob waited, hushed it. In the vast silence, Mr. Thrift came up to the cart and raised his eyes to those of the condemned. Some silent message passed—only Mr. Thrift could cipher it; but he, smiling, merely put up a hand to finger the material of the highwayman’s sleeve, and then turned away. That coat, by law, would soon be his, and the lingering fashion in which Mr. Thrift’s fingers had drifted from the sleeve had spoken of his pleasure in it. As he turned, Mr. Thrift’s cool, secret gaze met John’s. "Ghoul," Mr. Thrift remarked idly. His smile declared he thought John detestable.

Behind the hangman, unnoticed until now, had come a parson who was quite quite lousy. Whatever the cause of his distress, he scratched himself viciously, poking a long finger up under his wig to attack his skull. Unlike the hangman, he received little attention, even from the condemned, and John had to help the ridiculous parson up into the cart. The highwayman seemed not to know of his presence at all, for he was engrossed in his handbill, and his companion, the girl, had resumed her wailing with more vigour than ever. The other four were but corpses still drawing breath, deaf and blind to all around them. Undaunted, the parson entered into some monody or other, but it was purely for his own benefit.

"Who is let off first?" John asked of Clutterbuck.

Clutterbuck consulted the programme of a friendly neighbour. "The men. Then the girl, and then" his voice grew covetous "the highwayman."

John looked on the latter with unconcern. "Good muscles ….Still, for our purposes, he’s only meat."

Clutterbuck said promptly, for he loved cracking a joke, "Well, he would make a fine dish for Mr. William’s table, for all of that throwing back his head, he roared with his opened mouth exactly beneath that of the girl’s. A kick in the backside cut him off, and he muttered his thanks, for matters were now to commence.

Mr. Thrift had climbed into the cart. He selected one of the lifeless four and slipped the noose about his neck. At this moment, the girl, noisy as ever, opened her bodice and began to suckle her child. The parson scratched and looked on, licking his lips. The first man was let off the cart. The knot was good, it tightened. The hanged man, creaking, began to gambol in the golden air. In quick succession his three companions followed him, and the four of them turned to one another and away, turned and danced and bowed and wrenched ball from socket, burst vessel after vessel, before entering into coma.

Clutterbuck intoned the ritualistic statement over the cheering of the mob, "They died damned hard, Jock, and bold as brass."

Now the interest of the spectators quickened, for with the girl out of the way next, Mr. Thrift would get to the highwayman. On the cart Mr. Thrift was reaching for the girl as daintily as one selecting a sweetmeat from a box. Her mouth still open, she grew desolately silent as his fingers closed gently about her wrist. Her gaze locked with Mr. Thrift’s, she permitted him to take the babe from her breast and hand it down to the crone who had pressed near. John’s heart began to pound in his ears like the sound of wings; the muscles in his legs bulged, his great jaw was thrust forward. He could have reached out and touched the rope.

Soundless rather than silent now, the girl moved to the edge of the cart, urged on by the light, caressing touch of Mr. Thrift. Her gaze had never left his face, and as the noose dropped about her neck, an awed wonder crept over her features as if Mr. Thrift were introducing her to some sacrament. Of a sudden he pushed her into space, and at that moment Clutterbuck cried, "Jock!" though it was not necessary, for John had already hurled himself at her, catching her about the waist in mid-flight, near fainting again with the pain of her thrashing legs in his abdomen and groin, and landing with his full weight suspended from her body. Her neck had snapped crisply, and a second or so after her feet bad left the cart she was dead.

Clutterbuck could not but cluck his approval aloud. "Lad, you’ve done yourself proud!"

John stood looking up at his handiwork as Clutterbuck moved off to have a word with the Sheriff. No one was interested in the girl, and Clutterbuck was certain that a shilling would buy them the privilege of cutting her down at once. The men alongside the girl still convulsed occasionally; one was hard at strangling, staccato snorts whistling from his nose. Mr. Thrift had not been quite up to form in his case. The girl’s feet dangled free, swaying gently; she was John’s now.

Echoing his thought, Clutterbuck said importantly, "We can take her, Jock."

Silently John opened his arms to receive her as a knife split the rope from above.

"Why don’t you kiss her?" Clutterbuck sniggered. "Bygar, a pity you two had to meet this way."

"Shut your boneshop," John said fiercely, receiving his burden.

"Boneshop? Clutterbuck cried, delighted. "Boneshop indeed! Jock, you’re a lad after my own –—"

But John had begun the journey to their cart with the girl resting lightly in his arms. When they had gained the fringe of the mob (impeded by those few who had wished to stare at the purple face of the hanged girl), John hesitated, seeing that another cart stood by theirs. It was tended by two gentlemen who were obviously, by their dress, beadles from the Surgeons Hall bearing a warrant for one of the bodies.

They watched John’s approach with interest, burdened as he was with his contraband cadaver.

"Are you not John Hunter?" one wished to know.

"No," John said promptly.

They nudged one another.

"No?" said the second. "The resemblance is uncanny. I would have sworn you were brother to William Hunter, the man-midwife and anatomist."

"I have never heard of him."

"Never heard of Goody Hunter!" The beadles laughed inordinately. "Ma Hunter, the he-midwife!"

"Can’t you respect a man’s grief?" Clutterbuck roared suddenly, coming up to them. "Fie, gentlemen, coming for that poor highwayman. Oh, I see the warrant in your hand, to take him to Ghouls Hall and cut him up. Oh, what will the world come to next! Hurry, Jock, and let us- "

But the highwayman had begun the fine opening words of his farewell, and Clutterbuck was fain to hear them.

"Good friends, though it grieves me to see you gathered—(Cheers)—weeping at my—(Acclaim)"

"It fair chokes me up," Clutterbuck murmured throatily.

"… get them away from me they are not my friends don’t let them…"

A riot was taking place at the foot of the cart, and the highwayman was shrieking and weeping and clinging to Mr. Thrift. It was high time matters drew to a close, Mr. Thrift evidently decided, and with a great thrust he shoved the highwayman to his death. Above the rioters the hanged man began his jolly jig, the friends who had come to cling to his legs unable to reach him.

"Gods," Clutterbuck muttered and clutched at John excitedly.

At this moment also the beadles had started forward with cries of distress. The rioters were now fighting for the highwayman’s body. John dearly recognised the crimson coat which had rested by Dr. Smith’s sleeping form in the students’ room. By now, Clutterbuck had hastened after the beadles, and John took the opportunity to put the girl in the cart and make ready.

As if borne on a tidal wave the highwayman came surging through the mob, supported on high by the Hunter students, coming straight towards the carts, and trailed by the outraged beadles. When the students gained their cart, some altercation or other delayed the beadles, some difference of opinion with one Clutterbuck, it appeared. Into the cart came the highwayman to join the girl, departing side by side from the tuck ‘em fair, as they had come to that hallowed place. A sheet was hastily thrown over the two, and Dr. Smith was crying in his mincing voice, "Pray whip the horse, Jock!" Clutterbuck burst from the embrace of the beadles and leaped up beside John.

John used the whip and the horse responded with several ambling steps before coming to a halt. The sun was warm, the day delightful; the horse stood sniffing the breeze appreciatively.

Dr. Smith grew a little concerned. "In God’s name, Hunter, we’ll be torn to pieces."

Of a sudden the horse roused. From a stand still they were bouncing wildly over the cobbles, the mob close after them now. At St. George’s church they wheeled to the left, then to the right, and left the mob behind them. Now they were rattling through near deserted streets, Clutterbuck directing John to take this alleyway or that.

"What a clement day!" Dr. Smith observed in a shout to his companions. "And such fine entertainment, gentlemen. Excellent as well for the morals. One rarely finds such things at Oxford."

At John’s side, Clutterbuck was congratulating himself wildly. They had made off, not only with the highwayman, but with his fine clothes as well. "Bygar, what a figure I’ll cut in his coat," Clutterbuck exulted. "I tell you,  Jock, the crap-merchant is fit to cut his throat. I could tell he was already fancying himself in it."

"Aye, and God help you if the crap-mcrchant, Mr. Thrift, ever sees you wearing it."

"No fear of that, lad."

ii

At nightfall William Hunter returned from the hospital, where he had newly received the situation of surgeon-man-midwife, to his School. As was his custom, he prepared to have his glass of wine in the parlour before starting his lecture. This night, however, Mr. Symons was awaiting him with such upsetting news that William came straight to the dissection room and enquired at large, "Gentlemen, do you wish this house to be burned to the ground? And ourselves in it?"

The students sat silently, dissection instruments in hand. Still together in death and dissection as in life, lay the highwayman and the girl. He was a handsome specimen indeed, his exposed ribs rising like Gothic arches. The girl, being John’s alone, was untouched, for William had wanted to examine her before John made a preparation of the pelvis.

William moved into the circle of students, his gaze seeming to single out each man individually. The younger students, mere lads of seventeen and eighteen, shrank visibly into the shadows.

No one had yet ventured to answer William’s question.

"Well, gentlemen?" William prodded them softly.

When again he received no answer, he advanced to the tables and stood looking down on the subjects. "What do we have here, sirs? A thing of so little value that we can afford to make sport of it? You have lowered yourselves even beneath Clutterbuck, for he steals the dead for money, and you have taken this man for a lark. Let those who were participators in this disgraceful conduct step forward; they alone shall be the ones to dissect him."

Boldly Dr. Smith came into the light of the farthing dips, his demeanour that of a man secretly amused. "I consider that quite fair, Mr. Hunter."

William smiled. "You will in time, of that I am certain," he said rather obliquely. "There are others to come forward, I believe?"

The guilty crept forth.

"Six in all, I see," William said. "Gentlemen, please to show me your scalpels. Thank you. They are quite sharp; you are to be complimented on them. Now then, Dr. Smith, would you be so good as to roll your sleeve? Again I thank you. Mr. Harrison, you will now dissect out the muscles of Dr. Smith’s forearm."

No one moved. Dr. Smith stared at his arm, the skin appearing pale and vulnerable and soft under its light coating of fine dark hairs. Slowly the arm sagged. Harrison’s scalpel slipped from his hand to the floor. The youngest of the students abruptly began to weep.

"That is why we must steal the dead, gentlemen," William said. "There can be no other reason justifiable in the eyes of God." He looked beyond the flushing Dr. Smith to John. "I sent my brother to the hanging to collect what was fairly ours. I delivered the girl myself in the gaol yesterday, and paid four pounds for her then. It was part of my bargain that the girl’s neck be broken the instant she was let off the cart. My brother did not attend the hanging for a lark, but to perform an act of mercy. I wanted her taken at the waist, and Clutterbuck would not do it. He feared injury." William’s voice was approbatory, his eyes agleam as befitted the high drama he was making of the moment. John flushed with pride, daring to worship William openly.

"It is the custom," William went on, "for the hanged to be taken at the knees. Otherwise, in their death struggles, their flailing legs might kick a friend to a pulp." Almost casually William enquired, "Did anyone in this room assist in the dispatching of our highwayman?"

"He danced," Dr. Smith said briefly, faintly.

"For shame, sir," William Hunter said. He glanced at no one, not even John, as he turned to leave the room and compose his thoughts in the parlour.

"Damme," Dr. Smith said, "I feel the fool." He dissected for a moment more before throwing his scalpel on the table. "I, for one, intend to get drunk tonight after lecture. Jock—Mr. Hunter, I mean —would you care to join me?"

"Jock fits me," John said. "The Mr. Hunter in this house is my brother. And I gladly accept your offer. Provided"—he caught himself up in time—"you pay my way."

"Done, sir!" Dr. Smith took up his scalpel, addressing himself to the highwayman, bowing, "With the greatest of apologies, my good man, I must resume." Nor was he larking now.

Later they went, at Dr. Smith’s instance, to the most disreputable tavern of the Garden, a smoky, crowded place called Tom King’s. Clutterbuck was there, lording it over his companions, resplendent in the highwayman’s velvet coat.

He and John and Dr. Smith were sodden with fondness for one another, long before the evening was over.

iii

Another of William’s instructions to John had come to pass. John was indeed one of the students, even if—as the majority were inclined to admit—the most industrious of them. True, he had his duties that the others did not have. He rose in the deeps of the night to admit Clutterbuck and his cohorts in the back, helping them drag sack after sack across the secluded garden in the back of the School, then to count out the money to Clutterbuck, while that worthy swigged at his gin, and his helpers stood about silently, shuffling their feet and peeping at the subjects lying on the tables in various stages of dissection. He polished William’s surgical instruments, and saw to it that the fires in the students’ room and the dissection room and the lecture room were maintained. And when he was not attending a lecture or studying or working in the dissection room, he was forever attempting one preparation after another, determined to master that difficult art of displaying and preserving flesh. He injected vessels with wax, and boiled bones, and varnished dry preparations, and was forever experimenting with this consistency of coloured wax or that, hoping, hoping that one day one of his attempts might draw a nod of approval from William.

He was never aware of when it was he quietly began to assist Mr. Symons in the dissection room. He knew only that after the School had been open for about a month, and he had completed his second dissection, that he was helping this student to find that nerve, and that student to uncover a buried vessel. Gradually, the students sought his assistance as readily as they did Mr. Symons. It really depended on who was nearest, no more.

Except at lectures, he saw William infrequently. When William came in from the hospital or his rounds, there was always his quarter-hour of solitude in the parlour over a glass of wine. William then changed his coat and made his appearance to lecture, either in the dissection room, demonstrating, or in the lecture room. When the lecture was over William strode briskly to his bedroom, there changed his coat and linen, came down, stopped before the hall glass long enough to adjust his hat just so, and departed for the British Coffee House for his supper. It was no secret that he had many literary friends about town, Fielding and Smollett and other important gentlemen. It was no secret, because he accidentally dropped their names during the course of a lecture or two—merely to illustrate some point or other. Other points, on occasion, were best explained by mentioning the names of many prominent physicians and surgeons.

Even Dr. Smith, the arrogant and learned, confessed he was a trifle awed by William.

Certain it was that John was overwhelmed.

By the time Dr. Smith’s Oxonian composure had returned to him on the matter of the highwayman, John had completed his preparation of the pelvis of the hanged girl. Christmas was coming on, heralded by yellow fogs and incessant rains, the town awash in mud, and fully half of it, it would seem, being carried into the School regularly on the boots of Clutterbuck and his cohorts. The School devoured subjects, was ever voracious for more of them, the students swarming over; the winter dead; for if William had promised that each student would perform a complete dissection, he had not said on a single cadaver. Flesh had the propensity to decay, the dissection room was rank with purification. And yet the school was a cosy place on a winter’s evening.

In the lecture room William was luminous, bending over his notes in the light of his wax candles, lapsing into a witticism one moment and waxing perfervid in the next. He went naturally from one graceful attitude to another as he pointed to charts, or stood with gaze on high, rapt, whilst he chanted surgical principles, or daintily demonstrated a preparation, adjuring the gentlemen to be solicitous of it when he passed it among them. He was no less concerned over John’s preparation of the hanged girl than one of his own endeavours.

"Though I am now a staff accoucheur, sirs, and quite in a position to obtain a number of cadavers, I was still unable to come by the exact one I wished. I desired a woman who had died from causes other than childbirth, in point of fact one who had died"–William permitted himself the faintest of rueful smiles–"accidentally, shortly after being safely delivered. I desired also, a primipara." Of a sudden, William pointed a soft white finger at a ‘prentice. "Mr. Harris, does the pelvic arch separate during delivery?"

"Yes, sir," Harris said promptly.

"You will please to take this preparation, Mr. Harris, observe it, then pass it to the gentleman in the first row."

Harris complied.

"Do you observe any separation or wrenching apart of the arch?"

"Indeed, no, Mr. Hunter."

"Yet the girl met her death scarce twenty-four hours after she had been safely delivered, and had the arch been torn apart there would surely have been evidence of it, would you not say so, Mr. Harris?"

Mr. Harris would have said anything in the world to please William.

From the lectern William looked down on John. John contained his pride with an effort. "Some nicety is wanting in the colouration of the bone, gentlemen," William remarked carelessly. "You will observe it to be a touch brownish. I fear my brother did not boil the bone sufficiently to remove all the grease. Remember the point, a brown bone indicates a careless anatomist. Chalk-white to pale ivory encompasses the range of acceptable shadings. A preparation carelessly executed cannot be trusted, for what we learn from it we must apply to living human beings."

"Even as to shading?" Dr. Smith begged prettily.

"Even so," William said severely, gaze still on John.

Still, the preparation made its way about the room. William stood gracefully at the lectern admiring his long, aristocratic hands. When the preparation reached John at his seat nearest the door, William said with his sweetest smile, "Please to return it to its shelf, sir." He resumed, "Now, gentlemen, taking it as a fact that the arch does not open during delivery, what are the causes of difficult birthings? The position of the infant, certainly, the–- . "

John carried his preparation into the preparation room. On a separate shelf stood William’s own master-project: those preparations of the human pelvis which would, when completed, demonstrate those changes which occurred during the growth of the foetus, from the first trimester of pregnancy to delivery. An Atlas Gravid Uterus was what William had in mind. He spoke of the volume as if it already existed. It would be an elephant folio containing engraving after engraving, executed from these very preparations. Everyone could buy the Atlas, but only the very fortunate would be admitted to William’s own preparation room one day to observe the originals themselves. Women as yet unborn would owe their lives to what stood upon William’s shelves, and if William took glory from the work as well, was that not but a reasonable recompense? There was no arguing the point, and thus each preparation must be perfect. John sighed, placing his own at the very end of the shelf. William would repeat the preparation, given another opportunity. There was more than enough time, for William calmly assumed that the project would consume some twenty or thirty years of his life. Wullie does not, John thought, take the short view.

If he was suffering a pang over William’s public criticism of his own preparation, he was struggling mightily to conceal the fact from himself. A blow had been dealt to some desire forming in him, foetal as yet, whose existence he dared not recognise, and whose pain he could not afford to suffer.

"You are missing the lecture," Mr. Symons said behind him.

John turned, nearly brushing a jar from a lower shelf.

"In God’s name," Mr. Symons muttered anxiously, "be careful, Mr. John." He came closer, holding his dip to John’s glum face. "Rome was not built in a day." He coughed; having come safely through his autumnal fever, he had recently been felled by the winter chills. "Even Mr. William had to be a student before he could be a teacher. But I am keeping you from the lecture…"

William’s voice rang out in the corridor as John hastened back. He entered in time to behold William brandishing aloft a pair of rusty forceps.

"The instrument of murder, gentlemen! When Nature herself nightly refuses to wrench open the pelvis, the ignorant and the superstitious do it for her—with these. I have seen women literally cracked apart and the infants removed with crushed skulls––- " William let his unused forceps clatter to the floor, his hand remaining on high. "Observe the only instrument to be used in delivery!"

To a man the students gaped in admiration at William’s soft, obstetric hand.

"Well, come in, Brother, come in," William said testily. "Do not idle there in the doorway."

So it went, night after night. William covered practical surgery as well as theory. Cupping—the art of raising blisters on one part of the body to draw off deep-seated pains and the poisons causing them; cupping, wet and dry, the one taking blood from great scratches in the skin, the dry raising blisters that stung for days. He occupied himself at length with the art and purposes of blooding, from the selection of the vein to be punctured and the correct position of the lancet, to the exact oblique cut and the plastering of the lips of the wound, to the observation of the blood taken off and the varying amounts of it. William discussed recipes for fever powders, and purges, and bark decoctions, and diuretics, and repellents, and poultices, and liniments, and washes, and collyria, and sudorifics— to clean out, to cool, to calm, to desiccate, to nauseate, to irritate, to make perspire that patient incapacitated and abed with an inflammatory fever, a racing pulse, and a raving tongue.

The students covered pages of notes, scribbling furiously—reducing fractures, bandaging—notes which they pored over before their own fire, crabbing and jesting and drinking beer. They tried to make preparations of their subjects and their room stank with their failures. They bled one another so clumsily that they looked to be victims of a knifing row, and John raised a blister on Dr. Smith’s elegant buttock that had the young man sitting on one cheek for a week, wincing and cursing and vowing vengeance.

iv

Just before the Christmas holidays, John Hunter, leg in a splint, arm bound to his chest, head bandaged to his red eyebrows, lay, rather than sat, propped in a chair in the students’ room. His grin was broad, but fading even as Dr. Smith surveyed him thoughtfully. "Shall we blood him again, gentlemen?" He held to his nose, in lieu of a gold-headed physician’s cane, an ivory-shaded femur, sniffing it delicately, as did the physicians smell of the herbs contained in the heads of their canes. "Mr. Harris, pray count his pulse."

Harris obliged, watch in hand. "One hundred and twenty-five, Doctor."

"Tut, a trifle rapid," Dr. Smith said judiciously. "Is the cup warmed, Mr. Twigg?"

"Bygar, Smith " John began.

"You are in extremis, sir," Dr. Smith cut in severely. "Have the goodness to respect your condition. Mr. Blair, what is your diagnosis?"

"A fractured leg, Doctor."

"And Mr. Harris?"

"A fractured skull."

"Mr. Matthews?"

"Gout of the heart, without doubt."

"Wrong, gentlemen." Dr. Smith sniffed at his femur. "Gentlemen, he has the venereal distemper. The luetic distemper."

"Ecod," Harris said, awed. "Is there nothing to be done?"

"James’s powders?" Dr. Smith said doubtfully. "Well, no harm in trying, gentlemen. Eh."

A bumper of beer was held to John’s mouth. He drank until he choked. "You turds, wait until I–—"

Camphorated julep?" Blair wondered.

"Oh, excellent!"

John drank until his stomach seemed near bursting. "Smith, I’ll bleed you white for—"

"Tincture of’ rhubarb in ginger tea?"

"What else?"

He drank again.

"We must not forget the Hebraic tincture!"

"Nor the bark!"

"Asafetida!"

"Raise a blister on his––"

The beer ran out of his nose, they dumped the rest over his head.

"Dying words, sir?" Dr. Smith prompted tenderly.

"Son-of-a-bitch!"

"I will carry them to the world," Dr. Smith said. "Another sip of the Hoffman’s anodyne liquor, sir?"

"I have no more Hoffman’s anodyne liquor!" Blair wailed, peering into his empty bumper. "He drinks like a horse."

"Why, then, we must rush him to an apothecary at once. Gentlemen!"

"Gods," John begged, "you cannot take me down to the Piazza in this.–- "

"Out of his head. Poor fellow."

"Plainly mad."

They pulled John to his one free leg. He swayed, the bandage overhanging his vision like an eave. Down the stairs and out into the night they went, supporting him among them. Under the arcade of the Little Piazza loiterers stared.

"Lord," a strange gentleman cried. "What has happened to the poor man?"

"He made improper advances to a lady," Dr. Smith announced coldly.

"Lord?"

"She bit me," John howled, but was hastened away, leg dragging before he could enlarge on his story.

Tom King’s Tavern was used to nearly everything, but the sight of a man bandaged from head to foot, boisterous on beer, and banging his splinted leg on the floor crying for more beer, was a sight not in the living memory of man. Cut-throats gawked and harlots drew away. A man so severely injured should be glum and pious, not bawling for a doxy and a drink at the top of a rough Scotch voice.

The students were earnestly requested to leave, and to take their dying companion with them. Dr. Smith waved the suggestions away with his gold-headed femur.

"Send for a surgeon," someone said, or so John thought. He was taken with the novelty of the idea no less than Dr. Smith. They took up the cry. Blair endeavoured to shush them, Harris became nervous. John grew vociferous.

"Bygar, send for a surgeon! Can you not see I am ––––— "

"Disgustingly drunk," William Hunter said icily.

The students quieted. The cut-throats leaned forward to note this new turn of events with interest. William, immaculate suit, neat wig and all, stood with a formidable poise looking down at his brother. He addressed the students in a body, however, "Pray return whence you came at once, sirs."

Dimly John remarked that William refrained from mentioning the School. Then William left as suddenly and quietly as he had come. The students left in disorder, John bumping after them as best he might.

Harris took the splint off him in silence. They went to bed sobered. John fretted until nearly dawn; surely there had been no harm in their prank?

In the morning John’s head ached and his hands trembled at dissection. When William entered the dissection room he found his students industrious to a man. John was helping a slow student. William moved among the tables. "Any questions, gentlemen?"

They shook their heads; the students were remarkably brilliant and self-sufficient this morning. At last William came to a halt by John’s side. "Is there some difficulty, gentlemen?"

"Not now, Mr. Hunter," the slow student murmured. "I could not locate the Buccinator Artery, but Jock—er—Mr. Hunter—was so kind as to locate it for me." He lowered his eyes immediately, gazing down at the head of his subject, his site of dissection, with great concentration. "Indeed," William murmured. "The artery is small." His gaze, meeting John’s was opaque. He strolled on.

John searched out William that evening in the parlour just before lecture. "Wullie, might I have a moment of your time?"

William was affable. "Most assuredly, Brother. Come in." He poured John a glass of wine, he chatted briefly on John’s progress with a new preparation. He was Olympian, remote, beyond the reach of a John with wild hair tamed with bear-grease and his suit freshly brushed free of cadaveric material.

John blurted, "Wullie, I must ask your forgiveness for my conduct."

William plainly attempted to recall the events of the night before.

"Ah, yes… there is nothing for me to forgive. You disgraced yourself, not me. I cannot take upon myself the guilt of every escapade of my students."

"Aye, but I am your brother."

"Yes," William said, basking in the shadow of his wine; "incredible, isn’t it?"

He went on to other things. A few words more and he had dismissed John. John left his wine on the inlaid table, untouched.

v

The School was deserted, the students scattered for the holidays. William was out, off to a party, dressed in blue satin the colour of his eyes, and wearing his favourite pair of red-heeled shoes. John sat in the dissection room working on a preparation of the liver. Clutterbuck sat before the fire alternately bewailing his lot and nursing his gin bottle. He was, at the moment, embarked on the deplorable state of his gums and the suffering they caused him while at work in the cold churchyards. Jock had no idea of what a grave-robber with an industrious turn of mind must force himself to endure. Besides, he could not honestly say that the work paid handsomely, considering the risk.

"The crap-merchant will get you, no matter what you do," John said comfortably. "why fret?" He grinned greedily. "And then–-I’ll get you!" 

"There!" Clutterbuck cried, gazing heavenward. "Do You hear that? Not even a kind word for my troubles!" 

"There’s nothing unkind about dissection; it cannot hurt you." Clutterbuck would not have it so. "Oh, indeed no! As, I suppose, people do not feel surgery either." He sipped at his gin, then turned to face John. "And there’s more to it than that, Jock. Much, much more." He seemed to be debating telling John some fearful secret. 

"You’re consistent, I grant you," John said idly. "Most of them fear only the anatomist’s knife, and apply to their surgeons as often as to their peruke-makers."

"One thing leads to another," Clutterbuck let slip darkly. "I have pulled them from their graves with only the nick of the lancet to show why they died. That and the red streaks up and down the arm to show where the lancet poisoned them. I tell you, surgeon’s steel spells death to some, and I know in my heart that I am one of them. Never have I been nicked—and never shall be!" He pounded on the table to make his point, jarring John’s preparation.

John whirled, scalpel in hand. "You do that again and I’ll nick you! I’ll nick you in the carotid, my friend––"

"If we are to speak filthy," Clutterbuck said with great dignity, "then I’ll take my leave. I but stopped by to cheer you, but if these are my thanks…" He made no move to rise.

"I’m quite cheerful, thank you." John lifted the preparation carefully from the table and lowered it into the acid bath. Now he would have to watch closely while the acid ate away the walls of the vessels, leaving the wax injected into them. The wax, now tubules, would take the place of the vessels themselves in the finished work. He was experimenting with the consistency of his wax, having added more resin than usual and a touch of tallow to the mixture.

"You’ve been glum for days over that row at Tom King’s," Clutterbuck contradicted him. "Bygar, you’ve made too much of the matter."

"My brother was not enchanted with my behaviour," John said, dour in spite of himself.

"A bobstick would put it completely out of your mind. There’s a plump bedraggletail this moment in Tavistock Row who can be had —in honour of the season—for a single shilling."

"I’ve no desire for a woman tonight."

"Ah, you’ll be like your brother next!"

"Explain that," John snapped.

Clutterbuck shrugged. "I’m saying only that when a man lets it sour between his legs, it sours his disposition as well and–—"

"Shut your damn boneshop about my brother."

Clutterbuck raised his brows. "I was merely, remarking. I want no quarrel with you, lad. I have only your best interests at heart. But perhaps leaning a woman up against a house in this weather does not appeal. Now, for twelve shillings we could spread ourselves out a bit. There’s a fine pair not a dozen doors from here—Meg and Peg—all warm and cosy in the garret." He was reading from a crumpled handbill. "Meg and Peg, very taking ways. Seven shillings, or twelve the pair. Why, that’s a bargain, Jock! And… ah… here we are… Surgeon’s certificate against the–-Hmmmm, what’s this?"

John read the extended handbill. "Surgeon’s certificate against the venereal distemper."

"Fancy! And for only twelve shillings," Clutterbuck wheedled, "we could have Meg and Peg and a certificate for ourselves."

"Not ourselves! Gods, you gype, the certificate is given them by some quack saying they are free from the distempers. Who would give you a certificate? God knows, you’ve taken the mercury treatment so many times your teeth have all fallen out, and it’s a miracle your scrotum hasn’t fallen off as well!"

Clutterbuck rose, wounded. "I can see that you are out of sorts tonight. However, if Meg and Peg do not interest you, there is no more to be said. But there is no cause to abuse me, simply because the names of Meg and Peg do not—" He went on at some length, but in time was assuaged by John’s apologies and drifted to other matters.

William it was who was to introduce John to Meg and Peg.

Londoners made pigs of themselves at Christmas, William averred, gorging and imbibing until their bowels were costive and their blood thick as with fever. Over the holidays he was due to blood near a hundred patients, and purge as many more. Some required both. John needed a bit of practical surgery, so what better a solution than that he accompany William as his assistant?

John was charmed with the idea. Assistant, he thought to himself, Wullie’s assistant. He greased his hair until it lay on his head some- what like the varnish on a preparation, red-brown and brittle in appearance. He gouged cadaveric material from under his nails, and plagued Duncan about some clean linen. He dragged a tub before the dissection-room fire, heated water, and bathed. Before the glass in the parlour he did not know himself.

"Mr. John," Duncan said impudently, "if yew would only wear a wig, yew could be quite presentable."

"Only gentlemen wear wigs, Duncan. And lackeys."

Duncan retreated, off to tattle to William. John grinned at himself in the glass. When William entered John bowed. "You will pass," William said. "Pray, in future, do not tease my servant. If he steps out of place, come to me. Shall we be off?"

The day was downcast, damp and penetratingly cold. "Damme," William muttered as they left the shelter of the Little Piazza and faced the mercy of the wind. "What I would not give for a chariot!"

"Are not the students’ fees–" John ventured.

"And how am I to afford a chariot and pay your fee to walk a hospital this summer? One does not obtain a surgeon’s education for nothing in this town, Jock. Moreover, I am saving— Well, I shall not speak of that now. Damn this wind!"

Yet once in a patient’s house, William was all charm and Snuff-boxes, unbending occasionally to deliver a pleasantry or even a witticism. John watched him closely, speaking only when William wished him to, and imitating William as best he could. Then on the streets again, William was snappish. They returned to the School for some lunch and Mr. Symons lancet. "Little use he’ll have for it," William complained. "I vow the man’s abed with the snipes three-fourths of the year."

"Wullie" John said. "Wullie, after I have finished a course with you, why could I not help–-"

"We will never be through at this rate," William said distractedly. "Well, we have but a short walk this time. Just around to Russell Street."

William was indeed in a pet. John wisely kept his silence after they had started out again. Mr. Symons lancet was cold to the touch in his pocket. Still, he and the students had practised on one another, he should be able to do a bit of blooding for William. They left the Piazza for Russell Street. A few doors and William said, "Here we are, Jock. Now for the sluts."

They climbed stairs, coming at last to a door fronting on them. They were on the top floor of the house. Nailed on the door was a handbill: MEG AND PEG. COMELY AND WITH TAKING WAYS. SEVEN SHILLINGS OR TWELVE THE PAIR. TRAVELLING GENTLEMEN GIVEN SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS. SURGEON’S CERTIFICATE AGAINST THE VENEREAL DISTEMPERS.

"You, Wullie?"

"Aye," William snarled. "Me! Pray do not cry out when you hear what I charge them. Sluts …. That I should need money so desperately …. Never be ambitious, Jock."

The advice fell on deaf ears. A certain ambition had now taken hold of John; it was expanding hourly like a dreadful cancer.

A crone admitted them; a crone in a wig as red as John’s hair, with a back as straight as a soldier’s, and a glance as beady as that of the parrot that hung outside the hotel. "Son-of-a-bitch," John would not have been surprised to hear her say. She said nothing of the kind. "Ah, Mr. Hunter, we are honoured! Pray come to the fire at once and warm yourself.. wine and biscuits, of course? Or bread and butter? Such an inclement day. Your assistant? How charming, sir. Puts me very much in mind of Mr. Cheselden. When he was younger, I must give you to understand. Yes, a look about the eyes. Uncanny."

John stood somewhat awkwardly amidst the decayed luxury of the parlour. He had never seen velvet curtains with such a rich pile —even if worn in the folds; had never seen a pale green harpsichord with shepherds and shepherdesses engaging in intimacies painted under the wing; had never seen such ornate carving on sofas, nor such long tassels depending from the bolsters; had never seen such spindly chairs; had never in all his life been confronted by so many in, ages of himself in so many gilt nilprops, all so cancerous with so many sconces proliferating from their frames—one fully supporting eighteen candles, he counted them. Wax candles, he noted, sixpence the pound.

William, the while, was conducting himself in the manner of royalty out on a low and delicious venture. The crone would not rest until he was cosy by the fire with a glass of Madeira in his hand, would never forgive herself if Mr. Hunter’s fine young brother and assistant—remarkable, so like Cheselden—were not seated at once and his greatcoat hung close to the fire so that he would be warm as toast when he departed for the streets again. Through all this John sat, feeling his grin widen like a spring freshet, while his eyes ran out of control, each seeking to call his attention to some new and exciting object.

"Now, Ma Minten," William was saying importantly, "you must not delay me, for I have many patients waiting on me . "

"Bless you, sir, I’ve no doubt of that!" Ma’s back was as erect seated as standing. She gazed on William like an adoring and eccentric duchess. "Meg and Peg would desert me in a fortnight were I not fortunate to receive your services for them, sir. They have told me again and again that they consider your attention of the utmost value–––-"

"Oh, dear me," William demurred, and somehow discovered that his glass was refilled. "Perhaps, though, we had best get on with it."

Ma Minten rose. Now her voice was formal, her manner austere. "I shall take you to Meg first, Mr. Hunter. Should you need anything––"

William disappeared. John was not to follow him.

Ma re-seated herself and bent her fierce regard on John. "You have been in London long, young sir?"

"Since September, ma’m."

"You are very fortunate to have Mr. Hunter for your brother."

"Aye," John said fervently.

"I have never known a finer man. Nor one with so many parts. Never. And in my time I was intimate—if I may use the word— with some of the greats." She raised a hand to tick them off, and John decided that her acquaintance must have been small, for she was missing a number of fingers from one hand. "The great Cheselden," she said, allocating him a thumb. "And Caesar Hawkins of St. George’s Hospital—you know him, of course."

"Only by reputation," John said politely. (William had mentioned him once: "That windbag of a Caesar Hawkins—knows less anatomy than the most stupid and backward of my students.")

"Mr. Hawkins did me the kindness of saving my hand when it was frozen. A lesser surgeon would have taken it off at the wrist, but not Mr. Hawkins. Fingers only." She held forth the stubs. "Black gangrene too, if you please!"

John made the suitable sound of distress with his lips.

"Mr. Cheselden, of course, performed the lithotomy on me." Ma Minten said this much as if the surgeon had knighted her, and rising, took a small box from the mantel. Within, on the velvet bed jewellers used to exhibit pearls, lay a small curved white object. "My calculus," Ma said modestly. "Mr. Cheselden took it from my—the, I should say—the bladder in exactly one minute, stitches and all! He told me later that mine was the most perfect stag-horned stone he had ever seen. Though that was many years ago, when he was no older than Mr. Hunter, and may have seen better since."

"I am sure he has not," John said politely.

"Bless you!"

William emerged from the room to the left of the parlour. "Miss Meg’s certificate," he said, handing a paper to Ma.

"My thanks," Ma said, most formal again. She read the paper quickly. "All in good order, I see. Meg’s a very sharp girl. Quick as a wink to notice a gentleman who might" She snapped her mouth shut, drawing it tight with wrinkles lest something improper slip out. She directed William to the door on the right. "Peg is ready, sir. May I beg your attention for my granddaughter also, Mr. Hunter? She has been listless and may want bleeding."

"Polly?" William said. "‘Pon my soul, Ma, you’ve not begun her–-"

"Indeed, no, Mr. Hunter. Polly’s for marriage, never fear that. As I may have told you, her father was a preacher. Or so my daughter swore to me on her deathbed."

"Just so," William said hastily and again left the room.

"Polly," Ma continued, returning to John, "is exceeding pretty, as you shall see for yourself." She preened a moment, touching the stag-horned stone with the tip of a remaining finger. "Though not as pretty, if you’ll forgive an old woman’s vanity, as I once was. When Mr. Cheselden performed the lithotomy on me––La, young sir, no less than a gift paid for the operation. Yes, I once had a poet at my feet…"

Belatedly, John discovered the old woman was tipsy, and he marvelled anew at her rigid back and the ferocity of arrogance in her merest glance. "I am wandering, I fear," she murmured as if nothing could be farther from the truth. "I shall have Polly come play a tune for you."

She called the girl, John jumping to his feet to make his leg as she entered. Polly was indeed pretty—as pretty as a glossy little pony, and like a pony, a trifle walleyed. Her hair was dark, her skin fair, but the wide-set eyes were the indescribable colour between purple and blue of the wax he used to inject veins. They gave her a look of incorruptible innocence, the effect heightened by the demure manner in which she lowered them. Polly was not quite a young woman, the straining of her bodice denied by the childish plumpness of her hands. Yet she so hovered on ripeness that between one breath and the next she could have become equal to any man’s desire.

"Play for us, lass," Ma said imperially, and then proceeded to shout over the girl’s indifferent efforts. "Did you ever see a skin like that, Mr. Hunter? Not a pock on it. I had her inoculated against the smallpox and nursed her myself. I stayed up for three days and nights bathing her and preventing her scratching herself. They said I was a fool, risking my taking the real pox from her. Well, I risked it gladly, and that perfect skin is my reward. I knew that if she ever took the pox without inoculation her chances would be ruined. She’d have been no better than Meg or Peg—" Ma lowered her voice—"two pocked sluts I found on the Bridge and took home with me. Play another tune, Polly! Don’t be listening to what I’m saying, Miss Slyboots! And now she’s for marriage, Mr. Hunter. What do you think of that, eh?"

He thought it a pity she was not for sale, and came near to blurting out his disappointment. He himself would have gladly paid a pound for her, and gone all year without to save it. "Any man could consider himself fortunate to have her," he said sincerely, and caught Polly’s gaze behind Ma’s back. She smiled slightly. Well Polly knew the truth of what he was saying, and he detected calculation in those wide-set eyes before she lowered them demurely again. For no reason, he thought of William, but that might have been only because a door was opening and William himself was emerging, paper in hand.

Now Ma and Polly must be blooded and the visit come to an end. Polly was fearful, skittish, and so Ma fell to John. He bungled, his lancet slipping so that a welling of blood obscured the site. William’s voice was ominous, "The other arm, Jock. And plaster the wound quickly."

He began to sweat, the room was warm, and Ma’s wrinkled skin slid wetly away from the point of the lancet. "Calm yourself, young sir," Ma said calmly. "I know I am a difficult one to blood. Mr. Percival Pott himself said—you know of him, surely—that I had the veins of a lady. ‘La, Mrs. Minten,’ he told me, ‘your veins are as fine as a butterfly’s wing. I cannot believe these arms ever lifted so much as a tea-chest or a book of poetry.’ ‘Poetry!’ said I. ‘However did you happen on that? Because I once had a poet at my––’" Her vein was opened, and nicely oblique too, so that John, cup in hand, dared to meet William’s glacial gaze. Well enough done, William’s face said, but in future do not bungle so ….

The cups were filled, eight ounces from Polly, the full twelve from Ma. The old woman wanted it so, notwithstanding her age. "A good blooding, or none at all," she said rather faintly. "I’ll wager I’m pale as a lily now. Nature’s best cosmetic for the skin, and you know, young sir, how concerned I am with that subject."

Polly had risen unsteadily to pour her grandmother a glass of port, and William was now conferring with the girl over the decanter, looking back at Ma. Polly nodded at something he said, taking the package of purge powders William handed her.

Somewhat regaining her customary straightness, Ma smiled on John. "I am not so tough as one of your brother’s cadavers, eh, sir? You see, it was the light nick that did the trick. But there, some surgeons never learn that." Her head sagged and she dozed for a second or so. "But–— What was I saying? Now you have learned the trick. You will be a fine young surgeon, sir; you are gentle. You have"—she searched the air with her stubs of fingers as if picking the words from some invisible tree—"you have a—bel air? she concluded triumphantly. "You must come around for tea with me, old whore that I—dreadful, I am not myself when I have just been blooded–old woman that I am, and talk to me. La, I love surgeons even above poets. Once a physical man was in love with me. Snob! But I fancy surgeons …. Ah, Mr. Hunter, I have been having a fine chat with your young brother and assistant!" Now Ma was indeed her old self again, twelve ounces or no, for she rose to her full height when William pronounced the awful words, "A guinea, if you please, Ma."

"A guinea …. To be sure, are not Meg and Peg charming, Mr. Hunter? ‘Twas not two days ago that they took to wrangling over you, naughty girls. Each was insisting that, should you come to visit us, she would be the one to honour you. ‘Why, girls,’ says, I, ‘next I see Mr. Hunter, I shall be sure to tell him of it. He might wish to make up a little party of his surgical gentlemen friends and––’ "

"My guinea, Ma," William said, implacable. He rested a hand on a chair, posing gracefully, patience itself.

Polly smiled full at William and went to the desk. She returned with William’s money, and curtsying prettily, dropped it into his hand. She lowered her wide-set eyes, then raised them, brimming with innocence. "I vow, Ma quite forgot where she had hidden the money, Mr. Hunter."

William returned the smile. He put forth a hand to touch a dark tendril of hair. "My thanks, Miss. What a pretty child you are." The light avuncular note did not quite come off, and William took his hand away hastily. "Hemmmm …. Well, Ma, we must away."

There were effusions at the door, consisting of a number of parting compliments from Ma to both brothers, and a final urging of John to return and bring his young "surgical friends with him". Then, with a final glimpse of Polly, prinking before one of the gilt mirrors for the benefit of John and William alike, the brothers proceeded down the stairs.

"Well," William said, after the closing of the door, "you have made a conquest, Jock. The hag finds you comely."

"Aye. I wish Polly had!"

"Ha." William’s instrument case banged against his legs as they rested on a landing. "How the child has grown! Why, she must be all of thirteen or fourteen now. But I wonder at her virtue, indeed I do, for all Ma’s protestations. The lass is a knowing miss, and is fiddly as determined as Ma to catch herself"—here William cast a cold eye on John—"a surgeon. Take care, Jock. And warn my students of the wench. Meg and Peg are safer."

"I am sure they are. But I have not seen them."

William sighed. "You shall, I can see it written all over your face. I wonder that I was fool enough to take you up there. Ah well- "

They resumed their descent. "I do not mind your having a bit of sport, Jock. It is only when you disgrace me in some public––- Ah, good afternoon, Doctor!" William interrupted himself to cry with large delight. The gentleman they so warmly greeted flushed with the heat of it from chin to wig-line. He bowed and would have continued on up the stairs but for the fact that William was bowing so deeply and with such eloquence in his overwhelming admiration and respect for the strange doctor, that the doctor was forced to wait out William’s performance. At last released from William’s politesse, the doctor hurried on.

William stood where he was on the stairs. Finally a door opened somewhere above them and Ma’s voice drifted down. "Why, sir, the ladies are somewhat indisposed at the moment, but pray come and—"

William snickered. He looked at John with dancing eyes. "That was a certain Dr. Grimes, Brother. I had the pleasure of taking coffee with him one afternoon last autumn. Ha!"

William was blithe, charming, and full of wit for the rest of the afternoon. "Dear Ma," he said once, fondly, "will long since have informed our Dr. Grimes why I was on that stair. Oh, too delicious to be borne! Too delicious entirely… Petee?"

"No, thank you, Brother," John said.

He could not make head nor tail out of William sometimes.

John was so desirous of returning to Ma’s with his "young surgical friends" that he waited out the holidays in a fever of impatience. Only his everlasting attempts to master the art of preparing anatomical specimens helped to while the labours away.

Dr. Smith, hearing of Ma’s establishment, slammed shut his notes, declaring himself off at once. The students came tumbling after him, greatcoats forgotten; they would not need them for the short walk.

At Ma’s the young gentlemen drank tea and listened to music. Erect, though gracious, Ma chatted of surgeons and poets and seemed not to notice that, one by one, the young gentlemen slipped from the room, to return, grinning sheepishly, a good time later. Dr. Smith, wearing his most supercilious smirk, went to the right-hand door, returned, and some time during the course of the evening, then repaired to the left.

So did John. Dr. Smith seeing him, choked on his tea.

Only once did a slight unpleasantness occur. A student, a country lad, touched Polly’s bodice as she refilled his cup. "Nay!" John cried indignantly, but Ma cut across his protestation calmly. "My granddaughter, gentlemen, is my ward, not my wares. Miss Polly is for marriage."

"And quite rightly," Dr. Smith said primly, winking at John. John scowled at his boon companion; the old woman was treating them exceedingly kind, no need to make sport of her behind her back.

In truth, he was growing louder of the indomitable old procures by the hour.

When the small hours of the morning had come, and Polly’s wide-set eyes were shadowed, Ma sent her to bed. Each gentleman rose to bid her good night, bowing. It was all very decorous, she calling each young gentleman by name. Then she was gone, and now, at last, Ma poured the wine.

When they returned to the Little Piazza it was full daylight and the parrot was in his cage in front of the hotel. "Son-of-a-bitch—" They heard him faintly as they tumbled into bed.

John did not sleep at all, merely changing into his dissection suit. He had his little tasks.

And so it did not come out until much later, after Meg and Peg had been fully discussed and compared, that no one had paid for the evening. "Ecod," Dr. Smith said, "Ma is indeed determined to marry off the girl. No wonder Meg and Peg had so many lovely things to say of her."

They went back, but not too frequently, cautioned by Dr. Smith that Ma might become impatient and press matters. And no one ever thought to ask for Polly’s pretty hand.

But Ma was not one to give up easily. "There’ll be a new crop of students next fall, eh, Jock?" she said in an aside. "Pray let me pour you some tea."

"Polly is still very young," John said gallantly.

"So she is, but not that young," Ma said cryptically.

And William, encountering John in the preparation room, said, "Well, Jock, are you enjoying your London season?"

"Aye, Brother."

William said randomly, "What a disappointment that Dr. Smith turned out to be."

"Why, Wullie, I like him very much," John said loyally.

"Do you?" William examined a preparation of John’s minutely. He was searching for a flaw in it, John found himself thinking suddenly. He had to turn away lest William see his expression and read his ingratitude written there.

"It will pass," William said grudgingly, assigning a permanent place on the shelf to the preparation. "However, hearts are never difficult of execution. Several of the students have done equally well." With that he departed and John saw him no more except at lectures for a number of days.

vi

Of a sudden it was spring. Water dripped from the arcades, the dissection-room tables were bare and scoured, and there remained but the lectures on midwifery before the course was over. Most of the resident students were gone, mumbling various reasons for not wishing to remain for the midwifery lectures, yet obviously believing, as Dr. Smith dared to say openly to William, that he did not "… ah—quite consider midwifery a suitable concern for a—ah— gentleman—who, that is– In brief, you have liberally sprinkled your lectures with as much of the topic as I desired, considering, as I have said––-" This so served to insult William that Dr. Smith could now seize John’s hand and fell William by declaiming for all the dissection room to hear, "Jock, you must come to Oxford. There are the makings of a fine physician in you, sir!"

John had been hurt. It seemed a needless betrayal that Dr. Smith had tried to set, him at odds with William, as a final gesture before departing for Oxford, that pinnacle of the Heights of Windy Discourse. The last words, of course, were William’s, who, thusly describing Oxford lightly, went on to say to John, "One would think he had learned nothing from me. That he had attended my School not to learn, but only to enjoy a London season."

"I’m sure not, Wullie!" John said stoutly, then was silenced by the memory of William’s using that term in connection with himself.

William was still smiling stiffly and turning away.

Now the lecture hall was desolate with its complement of only a half-dozen students, and when William brandished his rusty forceps his voice echoed hollowly and all the fine drama was gone. Even William’s blue gaze was rather lacklustre, and the students remaining found themselves staring off into space, forgetting to take notes. "If the pelvis be small," William was saying, "I find it best to give ergot in the middle of the third trimester and thus induce the wanted premature labour. The Greeks are said to have preferred the seventh month, but my reading leads me to believe that this was for superstitious reasons. The eighth month, gentlemen, will allow of the infant’s sufficient growth to enhance its chances of survival and—"

He broke off, himself looking blankly at the opposite wall. "Gentlemen, there seems to be—a—strangeness in the air tonight. A contagious miasmata, perhaps… I cannot say …. "He blew out all but one of his lecture candles, and closed his notes.

The students, as if walking in a sleeping state, rose silently and filed out. William left, bemused. John sat on alone; he too felt strange, disembodied. Dimly he could hear shouting coming from the Piazza in front.

He went out to discover the Piazzas emptied; everyone was out in the square itself. John followed them, and looking upwards, saw the sky aflame with tongues of bright green fire. The display arched the heavens, rising and falling as if being fanned by the lungs of a god.

That night great winds had at London, banging shutters and shaking houses and uprooting trees. The whole town seemed like a ship weathering a gale, rocking and tossing.

Just after dawn the earthquake struck.

In the cataclysm two persons suffered fractures, a house or two tumbled down, and innumerable Londoners ran from their houses to trample one another in the streets. There were several versions of the divine purport of the tremor. A religious cult had it that the end of the world was near, and thus warned, went about noisily, noisily, requesting of perfect strangers to confess and repent, and becoming contentious if met with refusal.

A Mr. Clutterbuck (by his later account) was tossed from his bed, and after saluting his gums with their morning laving of gin, also arrived at the conclusion that the end of the world had come, which thought led him immediately to the realisation that the Resurrection would next be taking place. The contents of uncounted jars standing on the shelves in Mr. William Hunter’s preparation room loomed in Mr. Clutterbuck’s thoughts, and in the ensuing few moments, while the floor rolled under his feet, he endeavoured to preserve his brain with gin in the jar of his skull. What reasonable explanation he might give concerning his personal usurpation of the prerogative of resurrection, the befuddled Mr. Clutterbuck could not imagine. The world at an end and those jars to damn him; he prayed wildly they would be shaken from the shelves and smashed.

In the preparation room of William Hunter’s School, John Hunter prayed as wildly that the jars would not be shaken from the shelves. He himself was occupied solely with the protection of the shelves containing William’s projected Atlas of the Gravid Uterus, receiving a clout on the ear from a dancing jar, retrieving it even as the floor rolled under his feet, and cursing so loudly that the screams of the terrified Duncan above were nearly drowned out. He was of the opinion that an end had come also the end of his course of study under William. All night he had lain awake listening to the wind, wondering, both hopefully and in despair, what plans William might have for him now.

The floor settled, the house creaked loudly several times, and all was still. A moment or so later he heard William’s step upon the stair. William entered, blanched, his head smeared with wig paste. "Jock, my preparations–"

"All safe, Wullie."

"Thank God!"

Duncan entered, piping, "Mr. William! Yew have forgot your wig?

"Send Mr. Symons down here to me," William said, absently clapping the wig on his head. He bent to his own preparations to ascertain that they were indeed safe. He did not so much as glance at the many John had made for him during the winter and spring. "Thank God," he murmured again. He straightened, flicking at his lace. "Jock, let us have some chocolate in the parlour. I wish a word with you and Mr. Symons. Now seems as good a time as any."

He has decided, John thought, and his empty stomach roiled aloud his anxiety.

John could not drink his chocolate; in truth, in his misery, he would have vomited the hot rich stuff on the floor. Mr. Symons cup sat untouched also. Only William sipped, yet, by his glacial demeanour, he took no warmth from it. The morning was sunny, William had opened the windows, and the parrot could be heard clearly echoing down the Great Piazza.

"Gentlemen, I must straighten my affairs," William said. "For this summer I intend to go to the University of Glasgow and present my thesis for my medical degree."

"Excell–-"Mr Symons began, just as John cried warmly, "Wullie!"

"Pray do not interrupt me, gentlemen. Now, Mr. Symons, I could not but notice that you had an autumn cough, a winter cough, and are now just past the throes of a spring cough."

As if prompted, Mr. Symons coughed deeply. "The dissection room," he said apologetically. "I fear some effluvium or miasmata from a subject—"

"To be sure," William agreed heartily. "And for that reason I am wondering if you had best not return to—er"

"My home? Exeter?"

"Just so," William said crisply. "To be blunt, Mr. Symons, I feel you should take a long holiday from the dissection room. A very long holiday."

"You do not desire me to return from Exeter? I wish to be clear on that head, sir."

"I no longer require your services, sir," William said flatly. He added belatedly, "For the sake of your health…" but did not bother to continue.

Strangely enough, Mr. Symons turned to John with a pleased smile. "Permit me to say, Mr. John, that your brother could find no finer assistant than yourself in the whole of England. I have watched your progress with pleasure and admiration. Believe me, Mr. John, when I tell you that I shall gladly step down- "

William uttered a vicious little laugh. "Jock, my assistant? Oh dear me, no, Mr. Symons! No, I’m afraid Jock will be quite busy learning his operative surgery this summer and fall. He should be ready to return to Scotland and a practise by next Christmas. Ah, no, I shall find myself an assistant at the University this summer. Some young man with a degree––— "

John sat stunned. Scotland? William would ship him back there? The ambition which he had hid even from himself, revealed itself as full grown and in complete possession of him. His application to dissection; his many preparations, each done at so much as the merest indication from William that the preparation room wanted such a one, or that William might use it in teaching; his attentions to the slower students; his eagerness to win the briefest nod of approval from William for his progress; his gloom when he did not …. Gods, he had been a fool not to have realised how much William and the School meant to him.

Mr. Symons was speaking, straightening his narrow shoulders in his shabby coat. "Mr. Hunter, pray do not take this amiss, but "

"Yes, Mr. Symons?" William challenged.

"I have but one virtue, Mr. Hunter; it is this: having no talent whatsoever myself, I am nevertheless quite able to tolerate its presence in others."

"What do you mean by that?" William shouted. "Explain your self, sir!"

"Wullie," John said, "it is of no import–—"

"Pray answer me, Mr. Symons," William said through a thin white mouth.

Mr. Symons shrugged. " John is a fine anatomist. I should like to see him have his chance."

"I am aware, entirely aware, of my brother’s capabilities, sir. I have fee’d Mr. Cheselden, no less, to permit my brother to walk the wards after him this summer and autumn. Or do you consider that depriving Jock of his chances? Have I ever spoken to you of my chances when I first arrived in London? I will tell you then. I came with a few pounds in my pocket and a letter of introduction to an apothecary. My entire anatomical knowledge consisted of what I had managed to learn peering past three hundred other students at a professor demonstrating on an infant. Those were my chances! No one had paid my fee to walk after a renowned surgeon, no one had–- "

John stood up and walked from the room. He sat in the empty dissection room listening to William’s voice going on and on. After a time he laid his head on a scoured table and wept.

"Jock," William said gently, "you must understand that Symons had infuriated me by his pertness. Insinuating that I was jeal–- That I was not doing my duty towards you."

"You are more than kind to me, Wullie," John said. His voice sounded drained, lifeless to his ears.

"You see, Jock, I need …. We are not alike, Brother, and that is the truth of the matter. I must have an assistant who is a young man of parts, of education, of—impressive appearance. The School would benefit from it. Moreover, he must be able to take some of the lecturing duties from my shoulders. In a year’s time I could train a graduate to do these things for me. You yourself are the first to admit you cannot speak or read a word of Latin Ah, it is so much more than that, though, Jock!" William let his hand drop to the dissection table helplessly.

"I have nothing to offer you, Wullie."

William was silent. But at last he said, "No, Jock. You do not have anything to offer me …. Come, Brother, it will soon be time for my last lecture. And then–- why, then we two will dine together somewhere, eh?"

"I shall be looking forward to it, Brother," John said formally. Of a sudden he heard himself blurting, "Wullie, while you are gone this summer …"

Yes?"

"I shall miss you."

At times William’s eyes seemed to have been steeped in icy waters so hard was his gaze. He looked down at his pretty bottle-green coat, "Surely I have asked you before not to call me Wullie," he said.

2

Mr. William Cheselden was London’s finest surgeon, in fact and in repute. Now sixty-one, he had retired to the position of surgeon in residence at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, for retired and disabled soldiers. Yet his scalpel had not lost its edge, nor his lancet its point. Students and patients from Europe and even America had travelled to him to be cured of ignorance or disease, and for years the great had thought it unseemly to succumb to death unless Mr. Cheselden were to dignify the event with his presence. Newton himself, suffering from the stone, refused to die until the great surgeon had pronounced him inoperable; and Pope, the malevolent little hunchback poet, closed his eyes forever on the world and Mr. Cheselden at one and the same time. They had been dear friends, those two.

The Royal Hospital lay on the river about two miles out of London. Facing north, it looked past its own square to the rotunda of Ranelagh, the pleasure-garden. On summer nights the retired soldiers could hobble down to the river at the back of the hospital and watch the boatloads of the fashionable as they drew up to the landing for the garden, hearing the laughter of the ladies move as fluid on the night as the lights moving on the Thames. By day they dozed in the shade, twitching slightly as cannon boomed in their dreams; and there were those whose stumps of legs again squeezed horseflesh between their knees as they followed Jack Churchill into the Battle of Blenheim, their ears ringing with the exalted screams of their mounts, their own mouths wide open in the ecstasy of a clash that had occurred almost fifty years ago. Now, like the fallen in battle, they lay under the trees with their pennyworth of tobacco, their red uniforms in disarray, unbuttoned and revealing the blue linings, just as their slack mouths revealed the purple gums of age.

On a fine summer’s morning, John Hunter made his way to Chelsea Hospital. The river was calm this morning, soft, scenting almost to be composed of mist, while behind him, to the east, London itself lay under a haze. Only the dome of St. Paul’s could be seen floating like a half-moon in the sky. There was a blueness to the air this morning somewhat like the fine spray of a waterfall deep in a sun-dappled woods.

He would have liked to stroll, to sip the morning, to stare after pretty women, to flirt, if possible, to perform any act but that duty which he owed to William—the walking of the cutting wards after the great Cheselden.

He came at last to the hospital, entering under the pediment of fourteen magnificent columns, and coming into the entrance hall. A knot of pupils had clotted there, reluctant as John to spend such a free day in the hot, close wards. They greeted him distantly, having sensed from the first day that he was of another breed than they.

The hospital pupils were indeed not of the stamp of the Hunter students. These young gentlemen were less serious than stuffy, less diligent than dogged. Anatomy and theory were of as little use to them as the contents of the philosophical papers the learned and eccentric gentlemen of the Royal Society read to one another. Albeit Mr. Cheselden himself was a member of the Society, he did not stress that part of his nature in his teaching at the hospital. No, these pupils were here to learn the art of the dexterous slash, the hurried sawing, and the swift searing of the cautery. That was operative surgery as they knew it.

John joined the group with no enthusiasm whatsoever. They returned his greeting drearily. There was a shambling ‘prentice or two, a slop of a practitioner from Wapping, and a tall, lounging fellow—an American—who seemed to don each day, along with his clothes, a sardonic smile. This smile he hung over John, exaggerating (or so John thought resentfully) the difference in their heights, parting it to ask, "Well, well, Hunter. And are we prepared for more bloody humbuggery today?"

John declined to answer.

"It is time we go up," the slop from Wapping said dispiritedly. The knot of pupils began to move towards the stairs. Passing the chapel, the American pointed to the stirring painting of the Resurrection over the altar. "One would think a representation of Jesus healing the sick more appropriate, eh, gentlemen? Or would that put old Cheselden to too distinct a disadvantage? Eh, you humbugs?"

Again he received no answer; he had said this before, it had not been amusing even the first time.

Just outside the first cutting ward Mr. Cheselden awaited his pupils. As always, the great surgeon wore a silk turban of sorts bound about his head in place of a wig. His clothing was open at the neck for comfort, the easy-swinging flaps of skin which lolled therein not unlike those that dangled from the chins of the fierce dogs that were used to bait bulls. Never one to raise his voice, though he commanded the attention of all within hearing whenever he opened his mouth–such was his quiet strength—Mr. Cheselden said, "Shall we walk, gentlemen?"

He entered the first ward, the pupils following after him.

Even the odours of the dissection room dimmed in contrast to those of a cutting ward. In the long room every window was nailed shut to prevent the noxious miasmas rising from the river from seeping in. Under every bed rested a foul linen-box, which was emptied on occasion, and which contained the discarded bandages and dressings of the patient. The floor was sprinkled with sawdust, and just within the door, the slop from Wapping hawked and spat into the sawdust, as was his daily habit. Behind him, John, entering, noticed conglomerations of his exertions for at least the past four days.

At once the stench of pus and crusted bandages and the sweat of the old and febrile seemed to enter John’s body through his nose and mouth and pores and become a part of him. Only on his tongue, like one drop of wine, did there linger briefly the taste of the blue morning outside. The ward was already suffocatingly hot. The patients lay uncovered and sweating on their beds. Only one, deep in a coma induced by laudanum, was covered. On the prior day each student had touched his cool, waxen skin, so that they might known the clammy feel of the moribund. The youngest pupil, who always gagged, gagged again this morning. Each breath of the ward gave the intolerably nauseous sensation of some thick, warm, foetid liquid draining into the throat.

This was a cutting ward; it was here the patients were taken after their ordeals in the operating theatre. Mr. Cheselden led his little column to the first patient of the day. A stump of a leg, ripe with pus, needed Mr. Cheselden’s immediate attention. Mr. Cheselden, by his own admission, admired a rich and copious pus. "Laudable pus" he pronounced it, for it meant that the body was casting off poisons and that healing would next take place. Healing rarely took place without the formation of pus. Always preceding the pus was the time of greatest danger—the fever and inflammation. After operative surgery, the patient’s wound swelled and strained at its stitches, growing flame-red, growing liver-coloured, while the patient raved in a high fever. When the inflammation passed off—and if the patient were fortunate—he lived to form pus and to heal. The process rarely took more than six or eight months in its entirety. It was the natural order of things, Mr. Cheselden had informed those few pupils who had not known it. One sight only caused Cheselden to abandon a patient to his fate—that of red streaks irradiating from the site of surgery. "The rapid progression unto death is inevitable, gentlemen. The poisons spread throughout the body of the patient refuse to gather at the site of surgery. In my entire practise I have seen but one or two live through an inflammation which has not given rise to pus. Those red streaks usually signify the stamp of death"

I have taken them from graves, Clutterbuck had intoned through a mouthful of gin, with only the red streaks where the surgeon’s lancet had punctured them––

Happenstance. Let Clutterbuck have audience enough, and he would in time stumble or mumble his way through half the wisdom of the world.

John dutifully returned his attention to Mr. Cheselden. The great surgeon faced a most unpleasant task this morning: he was preparing the enfeebled owner of the stump for the ordeal. The stump was healing by the first intention—that is, Mr. Cheselden explained to the pupils in a low voice, the flaps were healing from the surface inwards. Healing by the second intention was best for the patient— that slow healing from the base of the wound to the surface. The stump told the story. Under the healing flaps, under the spiny, stretched skin, lay the copious, laudable pus. An abscess was forming, the pus had to be released.

From nowhere the porters had appeared around the bed. They bent over the patient, restraining him. Mr. Cheselden wiped his knife on his coat and struck home like a flash of lightning. The patient shrieked and fainted. The youngest student gagged. John watched stolidly. And the handsome American smiled on.

The abscess was draining blood and the laudable pus, Mr. Cheselden hard at staunching the flow, diligently mopping out the crater with rags.

This was operative surgery. This was how John was committed to spending his days—were he fortunate enough ever to obtain a hospital post. Otherwise he would cut and saw and hack on a kitchen table for a living.

So it went, in ward after ward. The stench, the wounds, the pus, the heat, the agony, and finally the torpor they combined to induce. At night John dreamed of the shrieking patients, of the stumps and the tumours and the fractures and the hernias, only to awaken in time to hurry to the reality. When he discovered that he was not becoming inured to the sight and sound of pain, he grew frightened. Were William there—but William was not. He was alone in the empty School with only Duncan, and he rarely saw that worthy. Duncan had his own pursuits that summer.

He sought out the company of Ma Minten one evening after his return from the hospital. She was busy; a number of gentlemen were seated about the room awaiting their turns and cracking jokes. Polly was not in evidence. Ma would have him stay, but he would not. He was intruding.

He had a shilling to spare, and the night was balmy. Not feeling exactly the libertine, he accosted a pocked little thing with a limp. She leaned lazily against the side of a house, waiting for him, looking out over his shoulder at the rising moon. And when the ride began to gather, the high wave thundering down on him, he dimly perceived that, hips rolling mechanically against the brick, she was diligently searching in her nostril for a gobbet of matter collected there. He grunted in climax; he sagged against her. Her eyes were vacant, still on the moon. As he was arranging his clothing, she absently wiped her finger on his coat.

He went back to the School, and taking up a candle, went straight into the preparation room. He was lonesome for anatomy. He spent a long hour examining William’s preparations of the gravid uterus. The beauty of William’s work filled him with a quiet happiness. He held his candle close to look at the fingernails of a foetus. They were like fish scales, perfect, pearly; the foetus itself curved like a question mark.

Was there an answer?

He stirred restlessly; his hands were idle, that was it. He moved on to his own work. He judged it coldly. He found it good. There was a preparation of the nerves of the face; he took it from the shelf. The olfactory nerve and its ramifications were not dissected out. Had never been, to his or even William’s knowledge.

The clock in the lecture room ticked loudly. Was it too late to rove the alleys near the river in search of Clutterbuck? That part of town known as Alsatia, the thieves den, was but blocks away. No one would molest him: who in hell would take him for a gentleman?

He hastened out into the night.

ii

Clutterbuck, dressed in his highwayman’s coat, was seated in a foul night-house dandling a bedraggletail on his knee. "Jock, lad! You’ll join me?" He indicated his fair companion.

"Not again tonight, thank you," John said absently. "Clutterbuck, I wish to–- "

"Bylaw…" Clutterbuck exploded, spewing his gin.

Clutterbuck did not care for his idea. He lolled in the doorway arguing. First of all, there was a moon. It was not safe to raid a churchyard on such a bright night. Secondly, heads came attached to what went with them. Thirdly—money.

John’s face fell.

"Now, lad, no need to take it to heart. When Mr. William opens the School again, you’ll be up to your ears in—"

"I’ll be at Chelsea all day, learning how to butcher! After that, my brother plans to ship me off to Scotland."

"Bygar! Why, damme, I’m sorry to hear that. Why, if it’s a head or two you want, ‘tis little enough I can do for a departing friend!"

So it was arranged, and John slept easily that night.

Now he had his project, the tracing of the ramifications of the olfactory nerve. He hastened to the Garden from the hospital each night, eager as a lover. The ramifications were spidery, the nerves had not the thickness of a single hair on Polly’s glossy head. He worked until his eyes burned and his face was covered with soot from his farthing dip. He was praying he would not sever a nerve even as his sweaty hand slipped and the preparation was ruined.

"Bygar!" Clutterbuck cried in dismay. "More?"

"More. I’ll go with you to help."

William did not have a complete skeleton. Now, in vats, two were maturing, the flesh being cleaned away by fly-blows. Boiling was quicker, easier, but only fly-blows could render a bone as pearly as white satin. The odour bothered John not at all: he spent his days in a cutting ward.

Duncan complained unto weeping. "Mr. John, yew have no right to "

"Depart, you turd," John said cheerfully.

It was a strange summer. He was leading two lives, each running parallel, never touching.

iii

This day was to be a high light for those who walked after Cheselden. The great lithotomist was to cut for the stone. The pupils gathered outside the cutting ward, somewhat excited for a change.

"It’s all humbug," the American said carelessly, but he had long since ceased expecting anyone to answer him. He gazed out of the window down on the river, smiling. "Damme, but my stomach hurts!" But no one said anything to that either; he was always complaining about his stomach. It was still on its sea voyage, he said, whereas he had some months past set foot on dry land.

Mr. Cheselden arrived, head bound in a fresh silk cloth. They walked.

The odour of pus, of suppuration, of sweat, of pain, of—urine? John tested the air. He stood in the circle about the patient, steeling himself to the sight.

The patient lay, suffering considerably, with a ligature on the penis to prevent urination. After a purge the day before, the ligature had been had on and liquids were forced down him all through the night. By now the abdomen was distended, a distinct sloshing sound could be heard when he moved, and the organ above the ligature was swollen with urine, while below the string a thin thread of water dribbled out continuously, though hardly enough to afford the patient the slightest amount of relief. John stood in awe of this discomfort; different from pain, it was a special agony, the enforced cessation of a bodily habit. He sensed that the body might panic, even as the mind.

"By sundown you will be at your ease, asleep," Mr. Cheselden said gently to the old soldier.

The patient moved liquidly, and the air around him, saturated with heat and odour, seemed to shift with the nostrils. "Could you move the string a bit, sir?"

Mr. Cheselden bent over and had another ligature in place before releasing the first. The old man cried weakly from the pain of it, cloudy tears running across his cheeks. Of a sudden, not knowing even that he was moving, John quietly put forth his stained hand and blotted up a tear with his finger. He tasted it.

Mr. Cheselden fixed him with a piercing glance. "Well, Mr. Hunter?"

"The taste was that of urine, sir."

"Ah… I know. The same urge seized me once."

"Humbug," the American breathed from the back row.

The patient had been taken from the cutting ward into the theatre by the porters. The pupils were assembled, the instruments were laid out, and the wine decanter was handy. The pupils stood, transfixed by the sounds emerging from the anteroom. Mr. Cheselden was within, vomiting and retching violently, the man at war with the surgeon in him. The pupils could not accustom themselves to this horror. The youngest pupil, he who gagged, now clutched the American for support. His white face, beaded with sweat, announced that he would faint again during the operation. The slop from Wapping spat on the sawdust nervously. This was no mere amputation they were to see, this was lithotomy—the penetration of the trunk, into that distended bladder.

No sound came now from the anteroom, and a moment later Mr. Cheselden appeared. He was collected, his step as he went to his stool, firm. The pupil holding Mr. Cheselden’s gold watch readied himself to count. Mr. Cheselden but moved his eyes to the porters.

The patient, knees in the air and wrists bound to his ankles, was suddenly fallen upon by the porters. They had been wrestlers, these four, and their great muscles rippled as they pressed the old man flat to the table.

"You will pass the sound," Mr. Cheselden said to his assistant, and as he spoke he picked up his knife. On his left sleeve were ranged the needles, threaded, ready to hand.

The oiled catheter was pushed into the uretha. The patient gasped, then was silent, waiting. The assistant indicated he had located the stone.

With his left hand Mr. Cheselden distended the skin of the perineum to hold it steady, and as he did so, the patient involuntarily tried to bring his knees together to shield the site of surgery. Which he could not, he cried out almost in a questioning tone, "No?" even as Mr. Cheselden slashed his incision and the pupil holding the watch intoned: One.

The site was instantly obscured; Cheselden worked on by touch alone, fingers holding the wound apart, his right hand moving smoothly, catching the the gorgeret, and then the forceps. There were no crossings over of the hands, no waste motions; each instrument in line awaited its turn.

The shrieking was unending.

Thirty-one …. Each second dropping without haste into the receptacle of time.

The stone was now caught in the chops of the forceps, was now withdrawn from the bladder. The assistant bent to aid in the suturing, the last knot was had, and Mr. Cheselden straightened up, the calculus in his hand.

Fifty-four seconds, the pupil with the watch intoned.

Mr. Cheselden rose and poured wine into the glass. He, the Great Lithotomist, held it to the patient’s lips. The old man sipped, then fell back to the table. Mr. Cheselden waited. At last the patient’s eyes met his, and in them Mr. Cheselden read what he sought.

He had been forgiven.

The youngest pupil lay on the floor in his faint.

This too was operative surgery. Swiftness, knowledge, mercy . Butchery. It was the final failure after all other means had failed.

iv

"We shall be caught," Clutterbuck carped. "Do you know what they would do to us?"

"Whip us through the streets, I understand," John said. "Then put us in pillory. Who knows, we might be hanged."

It was a strange business, this raiding of churchyards. Strange and, in the warm months, dangerous. The watchmen did not snooze in the churches, keeping themselves out of the bitter cold, but instead dozed lightly under the stars, guns cocked. There were apt to be lovers, and on occasion anguished mourners hovering over the fresh mounds. They had to enter a churchyard soundlessly, peering into every shadow. They did not disturb the new mounds at all, tunnelling to the grave from a distance. Deep in the damp earth, his feet secured by Clutterbuck, John pried open the end of the box, delivering the subject back up into the world again. Only a small disturbance of turf, some yards from the grave, betrayed their theft.

"It must be done."

"Why?" Clutterbuck demanded.

"Because I am in the cutting wards all day and watch worse done to the live. The dead have answers that may save the living."

"They will not save us if we are caught," Clutterbuck said gloomily.

They nearly were. A watchman came out of his doze in full shout, firing his gun into the dark. Windows in nearby houses were flung open, and the cry rang out: Grave-robbers… Ghouls…

"Anatomists!" a woman wailed over and over at the moon.

Clutterbuck dropped subject and spade, and disappeared. John hesitated among the headstones; the watchman was almost upon him. Beyond a low stone wall he could see figures gathering, but behind him stood the church and its shadows, and beyond it a dark, twisting alley. He panicked.

In the alley his feet clattered on the cobbles revealing the path he was taking. His pursuers had reached the church, and he had yet to reach the end of the alley. His lungs burned. Oh God, he was still carrying the sack! He dropped it at the exit of the alley.

It lay there in the moonlight, pointing out his passage.

He was nearing the Garden; he could bear his pursuers behind him, arguing about which turn he might have taken. He dared not enter the School, lest they see him. Perhaps if there were people in the Piazzas he might join them innocently. But the Piazzas were deserted but for one slight figure hastening down the Little Piazza to his door. "Polly?"

"Mr. Hunter, Ma sent me for you; she—"

He dragged her against a stone pillar, ripping at her bodice. "Pull up your skirts—pull them up!"

He buried his earthy hands in the softness within her bodice and enveloped her mouth with his.

The pursuers came upon them, two rapt figures in a grinding embrace, Polly’s thighs bared to the night air. The pursuers paused, sniggered, then offered suggestions.

"Gods," John cried, "can not a man–—"He could not go on for panting, but who was to question the cause of that?

The pursuers went on their way, still not without a backward glance or two and a cheery cat-call.

Again the Piazzas were quiet. He leaned against the girl while his panting lessened. Polly’s hands began to let her skirts fall, and his, in anarchy against him, stayed hers. "Polly… pray… pray…"

The wide-set eyes, nearly on a level with his, filled with tears. "Would you do me dishonour, Mr. Hunter? When"—her breath warmed his mouth— "when I’m for marriage."

He kissed her again. "Would you care to live in Scotland, lass?"

"No, indeed, sir," Polly said.

Ma wanted blooding, she said. She huddled in her chair little more than a heap of faded satin topped by a red wig. She wheezed symptoms at variance with one another, then interpreted their meanings, predicting the direst and most immediate of ends for herself.

John opened his mouth.

"… gout… if not worse… a stroke…"

"Ma, you’re—"

"… my heart! Jock, lad; there’s no hope for…"

"You’re shamming," John said. "Fie, Ma!"

She sat erect; her beady eyes were angry. "And how else am I to enjoy the company of my favourite young surgical gentleman? Or does the great Cheselden require your evening hours as well as your day? Fie yourself Jock Hunter! Polly, pour my favourite surgical gentleman some wine. La, girl, whatever is the matter with your"—Ma glared at John—"bodice!"

He told her hastily. The old woman softened, at last to smile on him again. "You must be careful, lad. The School cannot be worth all that to you."

"The work is not just for the School—nor William even. It is that it must be done. Someone must do it."

"Noses?" Ma said. "I cannot see the importance of noses one way or another. Now, the great Mr. Cheselden—"

"For all his greatness does not look beyond his nose!"

"There, you see?" Ma said, quite satisfied with her retort.

The candles on the gilt mirrors burned down, Polly slept sweetly on the sofa. A gentleman came in to enter the room on the right. When he left, Ma put out her hand for the money as absently as if he were a servant handing her a cup of tea. She knew her surgeons as other women know their immediate families; she would not let John go, having one more titbit to impart, urging one more glass of wine on him. He cried that surgery was butchery. She mocked him by holding up her stubs of fingers. "Black gangrene! And he saved my hand!"

"You should never have gotten the black gangrene in the first place!"

She wagged her head sagely. "Tell me how I may prevent it next time."

"Gods, I cannot do that. Ma, I cannot even tell you what every organ in your body is there for. How can I tell you why they become diseased? One must know the why before the wherefore, the whence before the whither— I am quite drunk, I fear," he concluded owlishly.

"Still, noses—" Ma said doubtfully.

v

He was through with noses. The preparations demonstrating the ramifications of the olfactory nerve stood side by side on a dissection table. In the corner hung the chalky skeleton he himself had wired. The other skeleton was spread out, a collection of bones for passing around during lectures. He lingered over his work, playing the truant from the hospital.

Duncan babbled something from the corridor. The door opened and a resplendent William entered the room. "You are John Hunter, the surgery student and anatomist?"

John gaped.

But William was making a delicious leg, right hand over his heart. "Mr. Hunter," he said playfully, "I am Dr. William Hunter. Your servant, sir!"

"My God, what time is it?" John blurted.

"September," William said promptly, revealing that he lived by the same clock that John did.

Their first greetings past, William eyed John as warily as he would an enemy. "How is the surgery, Jock?"

"Very well, thank you, Brother."

They might have been discussing someone who was ill in the next room.

"Have you learned much?"

"Enough to know that I do not care for operative surgery, Wullie."

William tossed his head. "Oh, we all go through that stage. You will reconcile yourself to it in time. Noisy business…"

"You are looking well, brother. Physic must agree with you." John laughed hollowly. William merely stared.

William, in truth, was restive. His long trip had given him time to think, there was so much he must do before the School opened. He read from a list in his mind: he must refurbish his wardrobe, he must find patients to attend in his new role of physician, he needed a chariot (he would have to find the money somewhere), he needed a new address (his assistant would arrive in time to take over the School), he needed a physician’s wig and a gold-headed cane–----

He was gone as suddenly as he had come. John went gloomily out to Chelsea Hospital.

William settled, somewhat unwillingly, upon a house in the Great Piazza. He had had it in mind to go west to the Court end of town, but could not afford the rentals. Consequently, being William, he did not move in so much as shop in. He bought highboys and ornate sofas with bow-shaped backs and bookcases surmounted by open pediments, and what he called "chandeliers" in crystal, and dumb-waiters–—

"What?" John asked.

"Dumb-waiter. A kind of table… a tripod with shelves on it for wine and the like. Very tonish. One can serve oneself from it without having the servants erupt into the room every.. "

"Servants," John repeated tonelessly.

"Jock, do not concern yourself with the fact that I have only Duncan to serve me. With my expenses being what they are, and the salary that pert Dr. Ferguson demanded before he would consent to join me, and the fee I shall owe to Cheselden for your further training—petee! What are all those bones doing on the dissection table? What preparations are these?"

"I cleaned them for you this summer, Brother. There’s a complete skeleton yon."

William was silenced. He studied the bones, he spent long moments examining the skeleton. He said, a trifle dashed, "why did you not tell me of these before, Jock?"

"You were—engaged with other matters."

"And these preparations of the olfactory nerve? Why, why— ‘pon my…" William sat down to stare.

"I have traced the ramifications of the nerve, Wullie."

"No one has done that," William said flatly.

"I have."

After a silence, William said, "Light me a candle or two, Jock."

John took up some farthing dips.

"I said candles! Do you want soot staining these, you fool?"

Again William bent to the preparations. "Ha. Sever’d the nerve here, I see."

"Aye. But the last is perfect."

"Yes," William said. "It is perfect. Well" He raised his head, he flicked at his lace. "You have earned a minor fame for yourself, Jock. I’ve no doubt that every anatomist in London will be talking about you as soon as you show them these. Oh, yes, entirely possible." William laughed briefly. "Fancy! I vow you have made quite a start on your own preparation room. You’ll be opening an anatomy school next!" William was quite overcome by this time.

"They do not belong to me, Wullie."

"Eh?" William wiped his eyes daintily. They were never bluer.

"They do not belong to me, Wullie," John repeated sturdily. "They are yours … the School’s. I had thought you might like them for lecture purposes …"

William’s expression stopped him.

"I did not make these preparations," William said strangely.

"You may as well have. You taught me all I know of the art. I would say they are your work as much as mine."

"Indeed," William murmured. "Indeed, indeed, indeed…" It was as if he could think of no other word. "Indeed, indeed …. "

"I must off to Chelsea," John said.

"To hell with Chelsea!" William shouted. "You stay here and ready the School for the students. Mercy on us, I am getting fee’d every day by some new prospect. Twenty-six so far, Jock! I must have someone to cater to the dissection room who knows anatomy and preparations. That lackwit Ferguson knows only the scraps of anatomy he managed to pick up in old Monro’s classes at the university. I shall write him on the instant that I have changed my plans …"

John fell into a chair, grinning like a fool, like an ass, feeling his great jaw ache with the stretch of his grin. Would he never understand William?

"… discovery such as this…" William was crying, on his feet, pacing, gesticulating. "… now that I’m a physician with the best of them… damme, a fine discovery, those nerves as fine as infant down… discovery, I say, damn it!"

Bewildered, overjoyed, John barked at regular intervals, "Wullie … what… Wullie! Who?"

"Monro!" William cried. "Discovery!" he added.

And with those two words William had fired the shots that opened what John was to call "Wullie’s War".

3

Wullie’s War …. William sat in his library in the house in the Great Piazza stirring himself up a fine commotion. Opposite him was John, no more able to take his ease than a soldier at attention. Whatever the why of Wullie’s War, John perceived it was going to be a bloody row before it was over. Before now there had been premonitory rumblings, a series of sporadic, minuscule, but heated encounters. One of them had had to do with William and a certain Dr. Grimes. John was never to get the way of it. Then that spring there had been the matter of the pamphlet, anonymously published, having many unkind things to say about men-midwives. William had been a walking fulmination over that, declaring himself ready at any time of the day or night to boot the author in the fundus—could he but find him. Again, there were several gentlemen about town teaching anatomy—not by the Paris Method, to be sure—who had some pointed things to say about the School. And there were the physical gentlemen, Oxonians, who refused to be over impressed by William’s Scotch medical degree.

Nor was William the only gentleman brewing himself a war. At St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, the surgeon, Percival Pott, was said to be making a noble and solitary stand against the scornful physicians on the staff. A front was said to be opening at St. George’s Hospital, spearheaded by the formidable Caesar Hawkins. And at Chelsea, the great but ailing Cheselden was having his own troubles with a bold and powerful quack. Throughout the physical world tempers were short.

Rumours and threats and insults filled the air, the august and the eminent looked on with dismay—as well they might. They were dying off; the younger men knew it; and therein lay the single issue. Who were to take their places? Who to snatch the laurels?

"I," William Hunter said. He fingered the ruby velvet coat with the innovatory skirt just covering his neat backside. "Mark me, Jock, in a hundred years from now physicians will speak of our times as having been William Hunter’s day."

John thought it a pleasant conceit. "Not entirely impossible," he conceded.

William was plying him with his best wine.

"Not entirely!" William echoed. His smile was never sweeter, nor he more deadly.

"But Professor Monro––-" John began.

William was coming to that.

William had encountered his old anatomy professor while in Scotland. Professor Alexander Monro, flanked by his nephew Donald, and his son, Alex, Secundus, had had some interesting things to say about William’s School. Students, as students will, were coming to question the wisdom of attending a university when they might as easily avail themselves of the Paris Method in London. William had been, for an instant, beside himself with pride. "However," old Monro, Primus, had gone on, "I have heard of no discoveries of yours, Mr. Hunter. I take it you are solely engaged in teaching and practising?"

Professor Monro most certainly was not. He was hard on making anatomical discoveries, he and his nephew and young son. For instance, had William heard of the theory that the lymphatics were not a continuation of the vascular system, but a separate absorbent system?

William had. He had even been making the point in his lectures.

"We," Professor Monro had informed him, "are attempting to inject the vessels of the testis ."

John interrupted William’s tale at this point. "But, Wullie, you yourself have filled the lymphatics of the testicle with air. Why did you not inform Professor …… "

"Oh, to be sure! And tell him of my gravid uterus while I was at it!"

John had had enough confusion for one evening. Thirty students crowded the School, he had spent the day readying them for the first dissections, he was groggy, confused, and wished only to receive his orders. "Tell me what it is I’m to do, Wullie."

"Why," William said, "I should think that quite clear. We must inject the testis with mercury. Monro has tried it and assured me it cannot be done."

"Can it be done, Wullie?"

"Mercy on us, I have no idea! Pray do it, Brother."

There it was, the first objective for John, William’s army of one

During the course of William’s introductory lecture, the next evening, matters became a little clearer, though John was not to learn the intricacies of Wullie’s War all at once.

"… will learn new facts hitherto unexplained, as well as anatomy, surgery, and midwifery," William was saying. "For example"—he pointed to John’s preparation of the olfactory nerve—"we have here an anatomical discovery. The first and only demonstration of the ramifications of the olfactory nerve. You will not see such a thing in Oxford, or Edinburgh, nor yet Glasgow. Only under this roof, gentlemen, does such a preparation exist. This is but one example–—"

Matters were somewhat clearer to John.

ii

When the first subjects arrived, escorted to the School in the middle of the night by Clutterbuck and his silent cohorts, John set to work at once. Even as the sacks were still being dragged in, John had found a male and detached the testes. Clutterbuck watched in undisguised horror. "Jock, I do not hold with this taking off of bits and pieces of a man. Cut him up whole is one thing, but what good will heaven be to that man now?"

John was unable to answer. He was carefully attempting to push mercury into the Tunica albuginea by means of a blowpipe. Where air entered, so should mercury.

Before the students arose, he had had his first failure. The mercury was spreading under the skin in a dark stain; one of the minute, snarled vessels had ruptured.

"No more than you deserve, Jock," Clutterbuck said severely, observing his fallen countenance.

"Gods, I’ve my work cut out for me," John muttered.

"Oh ha! Jock, you are a wit," Clutterbuck spewed, a fine spray of gin causing the farthing dips to flicker. 

John failed to see the humour of it. And so, when he heard of the failure, did William. "You must try again, Brother."

Failures and failures later, William was still saying imperturbably, "You must try again, Brother."

Menace had not entered William’s voice as yet; the anatomist in him as well as the seeker after glory knew the value of patience.

Too, there were John’s duties as proctor of the dissection room. This year, forgetful of his escapades with Dr. Smith, he ruled the students with an iron hand. There was no sniggering over the subjects, no larking with them, as there had been under the permissive Mr. Symons. The older students, the surgeons and the like, accorded John their respect; the young ones, the seventeen-year-old shavelings, were openly wary of him.

William unbent only so far as to admit, "Well, Brother, you’re proving a terror in my dissection room, I hear. At least, they’ll learn their anatomy."

"Aye," John said determinedly.

"Have you injected the testis yet?"

"Gods, Wullie, if I had I would have told------- "

"Ummmm…" William said, and proceeded on into the lecture room.

John took up his post at a table by the door. Here he could pursue his preparations, cater to the students, and listen to the lectures, all in their proper times. He could be found at this table from dawn until long after dark. When he finally sought the bed he had inherited from William, he lay awake pondering his failures to inject the testis, and listening to the students droning out their notes or teasing one another as they sat before their fire drinking beer.

iii

A note came round to the School addressed to: Mr. John Hunter, Anatomist, and His Gentlemen Students. It stated in terms most cordial that one Mrs. Minten, known to her familiars as Ma, along with her charges, Meg and Peg, desired the company of the young gentlemen. Groups of six or more would be entitled to reduced fees, these to include wine and music. Moreover, Meg and Peg were in possession of "venereal certificates writ by Dr. William Hunter’s own hand".

Gods, John thought, were William to read this!

He tore the note to bits, but dutifully reported most of its contents to the students, adding sternly, "Pray, if you go, conduct yourselves in a seemly manner up there. The old woman admires surgeons, and I’ll not have the Hunter students being the ones to bring disgrace on the profession. You will not receive such courtesies in another stew in London; pray to preserve the privilege for future students as well as yourselves. As for Ma’s granddaughter"—here he fixed a stern eye on the lads of the group—"do not pay your addresses to her unless your intentions are of the most honourable. Ma plans the girl to marry."

"My!" said a practising surgeon, a gentleman William’s age, who, beset by an avid and uncontrollable curiosity, had come to learn the art of dissection. But he glinted at John even as he spoke to show he meant no disrespect. John grunted; well then, it had to be said.

Yet that evening during lecture when he had a free moment or so, he must slip over to Russell Street to take Ma to task. William had not signed the certificates as Dr. Hunter, but merely as William Hunter, sturgeon. He would not permit Ma to asperse William so, even indirectly.

He had gone prepared to meet a defiant Ma, and instead found himself attempting to comfort a wounded and broken old woman. Her bright eyes were full of tears as she hugged her pretty little granddaughter to her. The certificates in question rested on the mantel next the box containing her precious stone.

"So Dr. Hunter is now too good for us?" the grandam said piteously.

Polly shifted from one foot to another, bored with the matter, impatient with it.

"Aye, Ma," John said steadily, gently.

"That he could send you to me to wound me so!"

"Ma!" Polly said.

"I came of my own accord," John said. He noted that Ma was maintaining her crumpled attitude with some difficulty; soon that back would draw erect in spite of her. And the be-wigged head, as fiery as his own, would be moving imperiously this way and that.

"Out of friendship," John added artlessly. "La," Polly murmured negligently.

"Hold your tongue, Miss," Ma said. "Friendship, eh, Jock? I thank you, sir." She blew her nose thoughtfully, her back straightening as John had known it would. "Well, perhaps I did do wrong. I must not disgrace Dr. Hunter now that he is become so grand. They tell me his house in the Great Piazza is filled with fine furniture and books, and that his chariot is the smartest in town."

"To me it is."

"And his mistress is a beauty. She was pointed out to me not three days ago."

"His.— Wullie?"

Ma guffawed most inelegantly over her tea. "My dear Jock! It comes as a surprise to you that your fine brother is a human man?"

"Wullie?" John said again, "Wullie?"

"It is but natural in a man, is it not? You and your grand young friend, Dr. Smith, saw nothing amiss in a bounce with Meg and— ahem, Polly, pray fetch more water for the tea …. There’s a good girl. Where was I?"

"Wullie," John marvelled anew.

"A beauty," Ma confirmed. "Took her from a knight too. Stole her right from under his nose." She permitted herself to cackle waggishly, peeping at John from under the mass of flaming wig. When Polly had left the room, she added, "But not near as pretty as Polly. A year or so older, I am told. Though who’s to say the age of a girl? Polly could pass for sixteen. However," Ma added hastily, "Polly’s for–— ."

"Well, there’s a fine new crop of students to choose from," John said absently, his thoughts still with William. Wherever did William get the money to support a mistress? Of a sudden he found himself wondering how much William had promised to pay the University graduate he had hired that summer. He, John, received from William only enough for the barest necessaries.

"… made my choice," Ma was saying. "But Polly’s wilful and cannot see it yet. Wants a pretty man, she says, silly girl. Why, I say to her, Polly, a jaw’s not the whole of a man. A monstrous soul is far worse than a–- Lord, what am I saying? But your jaw is quite prominent, Jock. I learned to look inside a man, Polly, I tell her. I had a poet at my feet once, and a kinder man there never was—to me. Well, he wore a hump on his back. Ah, here’s our tea-water. Polly, pray to fill Mr. Hunter’s cup. Will you be continuing on with your hospital studies, Jock?"

"I cannot say. I hope not, Ma."

She bent to him cosily. "The day you are licensed—that very day, no later"—she pulled Polly to her side again—"that day, Jock—she’s yours!"

"‘I’ll return to Chelsea in the morning," John cried gallantly.

But Polly was pouting. She saw nothing to jest about, and indeed, nothing to be serious about. Still, pouting or no, she was very pretty this night. John silently applauded Ma’s wisdom in protecting the girl from the virulent smallpox, for the white skin was flawless. "Would not a poor anatomist serve as well?" he heard himself saying, near to being serious.

"Indeed no!" Polly blurted.

Ma fetched her a clout. "Indeed no, sir!"

"Sir," Polly said dutifully, wearing her demure look.

"She’ll have manners, that one, before I’m done," Ma announced with rich satisfaction.

He was thoughtful as he walked back to the School, bumping into people under the Little Piazza and being but dimly aware of it. Ma was resolute, redoubtable even, when it came to Polly. Yet, the world being what it was, not Ma’s resourcefulness and Polly’s charm together might be sufficient bait for snaring a surgeon. Still, Polly grew prettier by the days–-some man must soon have his hands on her, for being unable to keep them away.

On that head, he grinned suddenly at a perfect stranger, his own stained hands caused no little trouble to himself on occasion. Tut, he reproved himself, pleased. And Ma had openly declared the girl was his as soon as––

But now he was entering the dissection room, and could distinctly hear William declaiming:

"… though I have not as yet proved the point, gentlemen. I expect to master the problem soon, however, and shall show you a preparation clearly demonstrating that the vas deferens and the epididymis are continuous. Injecting the lymphatics of the testes with mercury should prove conclusively–––"

John hastily sat down to his work.

Failure again met all his efforts. William too attempted, in a pet, to inject the testes. The dark stain of ruptured vessels heralded his own failure. He threw down his blowpipe. "I will not rest until we have bested the Monros!" He stalked out of the preparation room to roam among the subjects, as John had done, searching for new material.

The brothers worked the night through. To no avail.

"Were our Jamie alive," William said childishly, toward dawn, "he would have done it."

John would not let himself be hurt. the looked on William’s conviction that the lost Jamie would have been the best of them, as William’s one article of faith. It touched him so that he but loved the glittering William the more.

William was the best of them and would have been under any circumstances. To this John clung. Whenever, as it happened, he grew over-tired from his days and nights pursuing tediously the labyrinthic wanderings of the tubuli of the testes, or pondering further the function of the endre lymphatic system, or forever making various other preparations from the subjects which William desired, or aiding William in his furthering of the projected Gravid Uterus, and so, rarely, briefly, was inclined to doubt William’s abilities, construing persistence as its less noble counterpart, greed for victory in the fray known to John secretly as Wullie’s War; or whenever he became dismayed by William’s frequent forays into foppishness and his vain social ambitions, John had only to glance across the worktable at William’s quiet concentration and be freed of the pain. All that winter he built up in his mind his one side of William as being inclusive of all dimensions. If William grew too dainty in his manipulations of his snuffbox, flipping back his lace with a rising circular motion, then widening his nostrils before the frustrating little sneeze—petee; or if William disappeared after a lecture, only to reappear hours later, his thin mouth as soft as if greased with butter, and his air that of a man languid with repletion—John had only to remind himself of William rising in the middle of the night to attend a woman in her child bed strainings, going from there to the hospital, from there on his rounds, from there to his lectures, from there to his club for a bite of supper, and from there to the School again, where, rolling back his lace falls, he took up blowpipe and scalpel and plunged into work.

That was William Hunter. Let no one mistake him.

In their mutual failure to inject the testes and best the Monro’s, John fancied that he and William were growing closer. He rather neglected Ma again, leaving her to her own devices with the students until, recollecting her kindness to him, he grew ashamed. On an afternoon when the dissection room was murmurous with the dronings of the students completing their dissections, and the preparation room was in perfect order, and he himself was stale, John went out to have a cup of tea with the old woman, and to hear how she was faring.

Climbing the stairs to Ma’s, he saw a familiar figure coming down towards him. The ironic smile lay as ever on the handsome face, and the American bowed. "Ah, Hunter, not walking the wards these days, I see?"

"No," John said shortly. "Surgery is no longer my main concern. I have more pressing matters."

"How fortunate for surgery" the American murmured. "My pardon; I had meant to say------ what a loss to surgery. But surely you understood that?"

"May I pass, sir?" John said, adding politely enough, "Good day." The American agreed sardonically. "Oh, a very good day? His accent was execrable, John decided. It made everything he said sound like a deliberate insult. Ass, John thought to himself, why does he not return to America? But at the next turn he forgot the taunting popinjay, for Polly was standing in her doorway, pensively looking down on him. He ran the rest of the way.

"Ma’s not here, Jock," Polly said, leading him into the decayed luxury of the parlour. "She’s out shopping with Meg and Peg."

It was more than he had bargained for; his heart was light as he sat before the fire having tea alone with this pretty creature. But for her lingering listlessness he might have enjoyed himself completely. Then, between one idle remark of his and the next, he looked up to see her in tears. A drop rolled from her chin and fell, with the soft sound of a single drop of spring mist gathering and falling from an eye, into her tea.

"Why, Miss Polly!"

"Have you come to court me at Ma’s instance?" she accused him bitterly.

"Gods, no? Yes …. Have it as you will, Polly"

"Say rather, as Ma will! Damme, must she always have me up for sale? ‘Polly’s for marriage, gentlemen, Polly’s for .. ’ " She was crying in earnest, raining into her tea.

John took her cup from her, and then pulled her to her feet. He held her head against his shoulder, noting that they were of a height now. He made shushing sounds, running his stained hands over her dark hair. His coat was wet when at last she pulled away from him to smile ruefully and remark, "What a fool I am. Ma wants only the best for me. Is my nose very red, Jock?"

"Aye."

She giggled. "There’s gallantry for you. I suppose my eyes are swelled as well."

"Aye."

"And yet—you would have me, wouldn’t you,  Jock Hunter!"

"Aye?"

"You may kiss me for your kindness," Polly said.

"Sir!"

"Sir," Polly added dutifully. She laughed shakily, then heartily, before holding her mouth to his. Having kissed him, she wanted to know, "Do you love me, Jock?"

"No, Miss Pertness, I am for Ma."

Polly slapped at him. "You rogue." She flounced back into her chair. "I can see in your eyes you are dying for love of me. Pray give me my tea."

But for some difficulties in keeping his hands where they belonged, he had a fine time. When Ma returned, Polly’s eyes were clear and serene. Demure now, one would never have guessed her to have been so saucy.

Ma looked at the decorous John and the modest Polly. Ma beamed.

iv

When the cold weather departed, the damp was left in possession of London. Everyone complained. William’s lace was as limp as his manner; Clutterbuck’s gums were painful and bloody; the students were fretful—need they finish dissecting the malodorous remains of the subjects? (We do not waste flesh, gentlemen, John maintained sternly. They groaned.) Ma was cranky, for no gentleman had come forward to offer his hand to Polly; Polly herself was moody; and John was brusque and anxious. Through the corridors of his being, like the fog collected under the Piazzas, there drifted a vague premonition. 

William had shut himself away in his own house after lectures, moved away from John, to read of an evening. All was not well. William was as sparing of the reasons for his initiation as was Meg or Peg with a genuine caress. William admitted only to a few facts. His literary friend, Toby Smollett, was helping a rival man-midwife prepare a publication on the art of midwifery. William had been violently affronted by every word of the manuscript. Why had he not thought of such a volume first? Well, let it pass, the work was of no importance, really. No discoveries were described in it.

John twisted in his chair unhappily. "Aye, Wullie, discoveries are not come by so easily."

"I shall want a word with you after lecture," William said, coldly observing John’s agitation.

They walked under the Piazzas in silence, their feet stirring the pools of fog. John lagged against his will.

"Do not loiter, Brother," William snapped.

"Aye, Wullie."

John revived a bit at the sight of William’s firelit library. he took hope when William twirled the dumb-waiter and poured them wine. "Well, have you injected the vas deferens yet?" William said, attacking so suddenly that John started and laughed nervously.

"I see nothing humorous in your defection," William went on, without permitting John time to answer. "Nor shall I find it difficult to control any mirth when the Monro’s make the discovery before the Hunter School is prepared to announce it. Putting horns on my head, so to speak, by my having been cuckolded out of a discovery which was rightfully—"

"Wullie, do not press me so," John cried wretchedly. "I become over-anxious and do not take the proper care with the work."

"Being awash to your brows in tea does not impair your efficiency, I suppose?" William enquired pettishly.

It was a long moment before John realised that his brother had reference to Ma.

"… obstructs the vision," William was going on, "makes the head tremble, and turns the brain to soup. Or perhaps, I should say, turns the mind towards sluts, eh, Brother?"

"Wullie, I must have an hour or two a week for my own amusement," John said, attempting the reasonable in tone.

"Then come over here and read a bit," William said. "You will quite soon be in the state I am, I assure you. I tell you, Brother, there are anatomical discoveries to be made that would put Harvey in the shade! What do we know of the hernia congenita? Nothing. But there are physical men, here and in Europe, who would give their souls—to—discover—its—cause?

"The hernia congenita? That condition in the infant where the intestines and the testes are in the same sac?"

"That condition exactly."

John maintained his grip on the conversation grimly. "It would indeed be interesting to discover how the condition comes about."

"Interesting! I—tell—you–—. "William was sitting on the edge of his chair, shouting.

"Gods, Wullie, one would have to have hundreds of subjects at one’s disposal to find a single one with the condition! More than that, we do not even know how the testes themselves descend into the sac."

"Exactly. Nor will we find out dallying over the tea-table of a procures."

John struggled with his temper. "Wullie, do you wish to take me to task, or discuss the hernia congenita? Pray, one or the other, for I cannot follow the two when you will jump about pulling me one minute and pushing me away the next.…. Gods!"

William pursed his mouth as much as to say he considered John’s outburst completely uncalled for. And only when John had collapsed against the back of his chair, glowering, did William mince, "No tantrums, I implore you. I trust you left that childish habit of yours behind you in Scotland. Well can I remember you, red in the face, a screaming brat pounding your head on the floor…"

"Wullie, I was five years old!"

"Were you?, I cannot recall your exact age. But we are digressing …. I had hoped to have a quiet discussion with you this evening. Some little questions or other which have occurred to me during my reading—I merely wished to raise them in your mind, that is all."

"Very well,"------John said doggedly. "The hernia congenita, for one. You would like preparations of it."

"If you please," William said coolly.

"And?"

William’s eyes strayed to his crowded bookshelves. "We must not neglect the lymphatics—the absorbents, I should say. I prefer to call the system the absorbents, Brother."

"Aye. The absorbents also." It was becoming ridiculous; William would be calmly requesting a preparation of the moon next. "Has your reading given rise to any other projects?"

"Umnm… no," William said grandly. "Not for the present. Naturally, I should work these little things out for myself, but my Atlas of the Gravid––— "

"To be sure, Wullie," John said contritely.

"On the other hand," William continued, turning the corner so quickly that John could not follow at once, "I do not wish to place too great a burden on your shoulders." He sniffled on John’s stocky person and over-broad shoulders. "Naturally, with so much glory to be had merely for the taking, or the doing, I should say, I am dismayed to find us still bogged down by the injection of the vas. With summer coming on," he concluded innocently. He studied his limp lace unhappily, gracefully turning a wrist this way and that. "Annoying…" he murmured to himself was he being dismissed? John could not determine. He sat on in his chair, vainly attempting to read William’s expression. "Wullie," he said at last, "I have tried to please you. I have tried very hard. Not only because I love anatomy–I need not tell you that–-but because– I am so grateful to you." He could not prevent his clogged throat from coarsening his voice. "I shall endeavour to work harder for you this summer, Wullie. I can procure our subjects for us myself, and with no students about I may be able––"

"I have fee’d Percival Pott for you to walk after him at St. Bart’s this summer," William put in, in as amiable a tone as if they were discussing some projected pleasure jaunt or other. "Dr. Pitcairn recommended Pott to me most highly. For operative surgery and that sort of thing, of course. Pitcairn’s at St. Barr’s also, or perhaps I may have mentioned that to you. No? Well, no matter."

"Have I failed you so much, Wullie?"

William picked up a book and began to idle through the pages. "Wullie!"

William looked up. "Yes, Jock?"

"Are you planning to send for someone else to assist you?"

William considered this. He turned a page. "We shall see …. Hmmm, here is yet another question unanswered. So much to be done. So much glory awaiting the industrious."

"I do not give a farthing for glory," John said desperately. "I wish only to please you. And bygar, I shall inject the testes if I have to geld every man in London to do it!"

"Then see that you do," William said, not alarmed in the slightest.

Why in hell, John asked himself in the late hours of the night, does Wullie have to read books? Well, he has not booted me into the street yet, even though I am to walk the cutting wards again.

Suddenly he wondered if someone were not newly threatening William’s growing reputation, opening another front in Wullie’s War. William needed another discovery, that was the core of it. The ramificatious of the olfactory nerve had not caused the stir William had predicted. Gods, John thought, threshing about, if you would not press me so, Wullie. Punishing me with operative surgery one moment, and goading me on with the hernia congenita the next ….

He was hollow-eyed with weariness. Sleep would not come.

The students came shuffling and sniggering up the stairs. Someone cursed, and someone else shushed him in warning.

"… Polly…" someone whispered, as they hastened past John’s door.

John sighed; a short year ago he had been creeping past that door, drunk less on spirits than on joy.

v

When William did relent in his severe attitude towards John, the way of it was passing strange. John was bent over a dissection table, halted in the act of scouring, staring up at Duncan.

"Your sewt," Duncan repeated snippily. "Your good sewt, Mr. John. I am to sponge it and have it ready for you to wear tomorrow evening." He dared to survey John from head to foot with the utmost disgust, stopping on the way to stare at a stain of cadaveric material on John’s sleeve, and to draw back in horror at what he spied on John’s shirt-front. "Oh, I do pray," he announced, "that your good sewt is not in as deplorable a condition as the one in which yew are now attired. Sir," he added so negligently that John debated cuffing him.

"I’m to wear my good suit tomorrow night, Duncan?"

"Indeed, sir, that is what Dr. William told me. ‘Duncan, my faithful retainer,’ he said to me, ‘do you go to my brother ’"

"Get to the point, you turd," John said. "Why tomorrow evening?"

"Why, Dr. William's dinner-party, sir. Yew," Duncan said, as if he could not credit his own words, "are tew attend."

"Gods!"

"I should say so, sir," Duncan agreed.

"Well, go upstairs and get my sewt! Or do I have to do it for you?"

Duncan could hardly believe his ears. Such cruelty from his master’s brother was entirely uncalled for and–-

I can’t believe my ears, John was thinking. Wullie and I to be sociable? Together?

"And Dr. William told me to tell yew to wear a wig!" Duncan bawled from the top of the stairs and disappeared into John’s room.

John Hunter, London dandy and fashionable bachelor, left the house in the Little Piazza and turned to his right to stride briskly under the arcades towards the Great Piazza. He arrived at William’s house, breathless in his freshly sponged suit and a borrowed wig, from under which the orange tail of his own hair escaped to lie on his back. As the wig was slightly too large—it belonged to a student—it marred John’s elegance a trifle, settling on his forehead and giving him a lowering appearance, as if he were gathering for a storm. William, addressing himself one final time to the gilt mirror in the hall, caught sight of John’s reflection and, without turning, said, "Jock, be so kind as to come out from under that sheep."

"You recognise me, then," John said.

William raised a brow. "You are a sharp one tonight. I see that I must whet my tongue."

"I’ll join you," John said promptly. "Is there still some of that Madeira?"

"I can no longer best you, eh, Jock?"

"Not by wit." John said, allowing the flattering inference to stand. William smiled broadly, and arm in arm the brothers marched to the parlour. As it happened, William remarked between snatches of Handel, there was a fresh supply of Madeira.

William’s small guest list was distinguished. There were a Mr. Fielding, publisher, magistrate, and novelist; a Mr. Peter Shaw, Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians, influential in Court circles, and a reputed quack, for he claimed, but could never produce evidence of, an M.D. degree; and the Drs. Pitcairn, Armstrong, and Smollett; and Mr. David Middleton, surgeon of St. George’s Hospital.

"Dr. Smollett?" John said. "I thought he wrote books."

"Oh, so he does, Jock," William said impatiently. "But surely I told you of his getting himself an M.D. from Aberdeen?" Dr. William Hunter smiled down into his glass. "Dr. Smollett, indeed! On my oath, Aberdeen would grant an M.D. to an apothecary’s horse, if it trotted up and asked for it."

"As for Mr. Fielding, my other writer, I know only of his reputation, having met him but recently."

"He is important?"

William’s eyes sparkled. "Indeed, Jock, indeed!"

Yet even with such a recommendation, John was rather surprised to find that Mr. Fielding clearly adjudged himself the lion of the evening, considering that he was the only non-physical man present. No sooner were the gentlemen seated at the table, than old Mr. Fielding announced, as though revealing an astonishing secret, that he had written several most warmly received books. William murmured agreement at once, as did the distinguished physicians.

Dr. Smollett downed his wine, took a deep breath, and agreed also. "‘I would say, sir, that your books are very warmly received. I would say that they are received with a considerable degree of heat."

"Ah, that is a witty re––-" began Dr. Pitcairn courteously, and was dashed at once by Mr. Fielding’s coldly announcing, "Drivel!"

To which Dr. Smollett cried in the tone of one giving the devil his due, "I would not say they were as bad as all that, sir!"

William rose, but it was some moments before he had gained the attention of either physicians or men of letters. At last, because he must either re-seat himself at once or begin to appear foolish, he held out his glass and shouted, "May no English nobleman venture out of the world without a Scottish physician, as I am sure there are none who venture in!"

The gentlemen stared. Then John, Dr. Pitcairn, and Dr. Smollett drank with fervour. Mr. Fielding emptied his glass in gouty bad temper, impatient for the fight to continue.

It was at this point that Dr. Pitcairn sought John’s attention. "Your brother tells me that you are to walk after Percy Pott this Summer."

"Aye, Doctor."

Dr. Pitcairn wiped his lips daintily. "A fine man. For a surgeon. Now that your brother is seeking to remove himself from the roster of surgeons and join the physicians, may I speak freely?"

"Eh?" John said over the row of the literary gentlemen.

"Freely!"

"Ah… freely?"

"Of the surgeons, that is to say."

"The surgeons," John shouted back politely.

"In point of fact, it was I who am responsible for your walking after Pott. I was introduced to your brother"

"Who?"

"Brother!"

"Ah."

"And during the course of our conversation he asked me if he might have my advice on a matter most close to his heart. I said heart! And he—oh, damme, I missed the wine, pray can you reach it?–very kind–ahhh, excellent!—and spoke to me of his concern over your education. ‘Why,’ I told him, ‘why, send him to walk after Percival Pott, quite a good man in his way and ‘Who did? I did!’ And your brother was so grateful that he asked if I would not dine with him and meet the young man whom I–––— "

"Who?"

"I"

"Eye? I don’t think so." John dabbed at his eyes.

"… had not met your brother before, but had fallen into conversation with him over Pott’s hernia congenita"

"Pott’s hernia congenita?"

"Well, not exactly a pot. More of a jar, I would say. All dissected out, too. I have seen it. Though on that head, your brother assured me that one single preparation of the hernia congenita did not constitute a discovery, though why he seemed so concerned over the matter I could not for the life of me under—--"

"Pray pass the wine," Dr. Armstrong shouted to John.

Duncan entered the room, went directly to the sideboard, and took out several chambers. Mr. Fielding, not taking his eyes from his adversary, Dr. Smollett, indicated by a wave of the hand that he wished one, as did Dr. Armstrong. Rather unsteadily Mr. Fielding rose, went to the sideboard, and then said over his shoulder, "… make you fit to run with the geldings. But for being in the house of a friend." he returned to the table, noting Dr. Smollett’s rage with satisfaction.

William was on his feet again, apparently unaware that several of the gentlemen were still engaged with the chambers. "… end… English… nobleman venture out of whirl without a Soch… Scosh…",

Dr. Pitcairn put his head down on the table and began to snore. A one-bottle man, John thought with the smugg pity of the young. He decided it would be wise to finish the good doctor’s wine as well as his own.

"… be ush… ered into wor Schott …. Damme, me shirt’s ruined l Pray, cease jogging elbow in that careless manner!"

Duncan was leaving the room with the chambers. "Duncan," John called out casually, intent on pouring himself more wine, "pray bring me one. I’m fair bursting with piss."

Dr. Tobias Smollett’s eyes danced. Mr. Fielding regarded the ceiling, Dr. Pitcairn snored on, Mr. Middleton found the candelabrum of untold interest, Dr. Armstrong was bored, and Dr. William Hunter grew as flushed as a cupped blister.

Then all the gentlemen laughed as if John had said something most witty; as if he had said it with premeditation, deliberately.

The candles burned down, were replaced, and again burned down. The guests must needs depart. Dr. Smollett and Mr. Fielding, inseparable friends, went out, arm in arm, shouting at one other under the Piazza. The physicians and the surgeon, noisy as larrikins, fell one after another into the same carriage and disappeared. Duncan and Dr. Pitcairn’s coachman carried that gentleman out to place him in his own carriage. The last hoofbeats rang across the empty square of the Garden. Then John helped William to bed.

Abed, with a single candle by his shorn head, William commented on his dinner-party. Crossing his hands over his breast, William hiccuped, then sniffled. "Fashionable! Most fashionable…"

"Wullie," John said, slurring a bit himself "are you sending me to walk after Pott because he is interested in the hernia congenita? Am I to find out what he–— "

"Piss," William said indignantly. "Piss, indeed! Never more humilia––— " William Hunter was asleep.

In the morning he denied all knowledge of Percival Pott’s preparation of the hernia congenita, only to add carelessly, "However, should you get the opportunity, do take a look at it. Though I doubt if he has anything …. Whoever solves that problem will indeed cover himself with glory …."

vi

That Mr. Percival Pott of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital was engaged in the search after glory, could not be doubted even in the instant of first beholding him. He had been a full surgeon on the staff for only three years, but It was the heir apparent to the throne of the ailing Cheselden. Now that Cheselden was no longer teaching, the students reversed themselves to go streaming all the way across London to St. Bart’s. Mecca was the person of Mr. Pott, a lively man in plum velvet with ruffles at wrist and throat, and a dress-sword banging at his side as he made his brisk progress through the wards. Now Pott had the reputation of being a man of vision, though not a dreamer. He sought ever the new in technique, he was always experimenting with new instruments or inventing his own, and still he managed to stay on the safe side of the purely philosophical or fantastical. Because of this reputation, John was not at all surprised to encounter former Cheselden students now walking after Pott. Among them was the sardonically handsome American.

"Gods," John said, upon meeting him on the way to the hospital, "have you not gone home yet?"

The American grimaced. "I have not recuperated from the misery of the trip over. My stomach seems to be eating itself alive as it is." He shook his handsome head as if casting away more such whining remarks and enquired almost pleasantly, "Have you been to St. Bart’s before?"

John had never had the occasion to go as far afield from the Garden as the Smithfield part of town.

"A wonderful place," the American student said. "At home we have nothing to compare with it. At home," he repeated sadly.

They were approaching the hospital. John could see its four buildings forming a quadrangle, each building three stories high. It rose above the clean shops and mean streets with a massive dignity for all its newness, for the hospital was in the process of slowly being rebuilt, like a cathedral. To enter, they must pass under the Henry VIII Gateway overlooking Smithfield. In a niche over the archway was a statue of the King, and above it an interrupted entablature burdened with semi-recumbent figures representing patients. In the centre of the tableau was a great clock.

They moved under the Gate and entered the busy court. The hospital was built on the right-of-way between Smithfield and Little Britain, and on this fine summer morning both businessmen and tradesmen were marching in on the City.

Just as they were to enter the confusion, the American detained John and said in a strained voice, "Hunter, pray, wait an instant…" He cleared his throat dryly as if embarrassment rather than mucus had clogged his windpipe.

"Aye?" John said, not at all helpfully.

"Could you let me have the use of a shilling or two?" the American said, humiliated. "Mr. Pott’s fee took almost the last of what I have, and I cannot expect more from home for a month or more." He had to shout the last over a gust of haggling that blew past in the form of two bickering tradesmen.

John felt his thick mouth pucker close as the mouth of a purse. His broad, stained paw became the claw of a miser. His Hunterian nature enumerated each and every use he had for those few coins even as he was giving them over. It came to him that never had his expression so approximated that of William. He could not resist grumbling, "You would be worth more to me dead."

"You anatomists," the American murmured. "So humane." his mouth showed his hurt, "Forgive me, you are most generous, Hunter. Shall—we proceed?"

Chelsea Hospital had never been like St. Barr’s. Here there was no residue of old wars dozing about, no quiet card games, no controlled murmurings drifting lazily from the wards in mid-afternoon. Here, hawkers surged up the wide staircases carrying beer and sweet-meats and tobacco and foul nostrums; they bawled their wares down the wards out-shouting the patients who screamed back, either in good-natured raillery or outrage because they had been interrupted in their current occupation of suffering. Pimps and whores plied their wares or services in the halls, doing a fine business among the ambulant patients (those in the venereal wards got about quite nicely), or those out-patients who came in for treatment. Beggars roamed the hospital with all the aplomb of physicians; and all manner of quacks boldly marched among the patients, diagnosing and prescribing, and deploring in carrying tones the treatments of the staff physicians.

St. Barr’s was as busy from dawn to dark as Covent Garden and as exciting. Only the comatose or those dosed with laudanum ever shut an eye during the day; for the majority of the patients St. Bart’s was a Lilliputian London. Thus, though ill and bedridden, they did not feel out of things at all.

Silent with admiration, John struggled through the crowded hallways after the American. Vendors shouted in his ear, visitors and patients jostled him, and a woman carrying a limp child clutched at his sleeve, sobbing incoherently, trying to detain him. The child hung on her front like a trained monkey, its emaciated hand around her neck. The child’s skin was covered with scattered red spots, and as it rolled its head in torpor the mouth opened to reveal a tongue red and raw as a slab of beef.

"Please, sir…" the woman was babbling, "… doctors… sirs …. Please!"

The American grasped John’s free arm and pulled. "Oh, come on, Hunter," he cried impatiently, and then turning to the woman said in an even louder tone, "Ma’m, there is nothing we can do. You’ll have to get your letter from the Governor of the Hospital, same as everyone else! Besides, Wednesday is doctors’ taking-in day."

The woman released John, looked wildly up and down the hall, and rushed over to an elderly gentleman emerging from one of the wards. Her voice carried clearly, "Please, sir… doctor …. He’s dying …. "

The American said, "She’s been here every day this week trying to get that brat admitted. I told her yesterday, clearly, that if she couldn’t deposit the sum of nineteen shillings and the sixpence for the burial fees she couldn’t get the boy admitted. Either that, or a letter from the Governor. She kept pestering me and whining that she couldn’t get her letter for another two weeks at least ….Well, it’s a busy hospital."

"I thought St. Barr’s was a charity hospital!"

"Why, so it is," the American said reasonably. "The nineteen and six is just caution money; they return it if the patient doesn’t die. But the dead must be disposed of, they can’t just be left lying around. The beadle gets a shilling for notifying relatives of the death, the bearers who carry the bed to the gate outside get two shillings, the porter another for a burial certificate to the parish of burial, and another to the steward for certifying the death… ah yes…. and a shilling to the matron for the use of a black cloth------- Where are you going, Hunter!"

"To send her to my brother. He’ll treat the boy for nothing on a promise for its body if it dies. Nineteen and six! Why, I never heard of such a…"

When he returned, defiantly grinning, he said, "Still, it was a pity that she had to carry her dying child through the halls stopping everyone she met, hoping to accost a physician."

"A pity indeed," the American agreed crisply. "If I find any fault at all with St. Bart’s, it is that the halls are overcrowded. Some regulation of the traffic is wanting. Ah, there is a cutting ward, ahead …"

"My nose had already told me," John said.

At the far end of the ward stood a cluster of young men surrounding a surgeon bent over a bed. Hands clasped behind back, feet placed heel to instep and one knee bent, heads inclined, each student seemed to be mocking his neighbour. The American noticing this snickered. "The students’ stance. Ever mark it, Hunter?"

"I notice everything," John said casually as they entered the ward.

They passed a nurse, a handsome young slattern carrying a jar of broth. With a glance at John that was like a spoken aside, the American pinched her rump and made a small noise with his mouth. The nurse giggled, twitched, and slopped some of the hot broth over the exposed foot of a patient. The patient did not seem to notice, his eyes smiling with fun as he enjoyed the nurse’s antics. The broth ran over the tops of his swollen necrotic toes with only lines between them to indicate their separation.

Again addressing himself to the nurse’s backside, the American said in a low voice to John, "She’s a fine nurse, eh, Hunter?"

"She’s a draggletail," John muttered sourly, eyeing the neglected patients and the disorder of the ward.

"Yes, isn’t she? A fine nurse, I repeat. Keeps up the patients’ spirits."

"Their spirits," John said primly, "were better off asleep between their legs. This is a cutting ward."

"You anatomists. You fustian anatomists. Even the dying can take joy in a final contemplation of the differences between the genders." The American returned to the nurse, delivering a final chuck at chin and chunk, before proceeding on down the ward.

When they entered the circle, they took the students’ stance; John, however, balancing himself on massive legs spread apart rather than daintily placed heel to instep.

Ah, the sweet odours of the cutting ward. Why in hell, he asked himself, am I ere? What does Wullie really want of me?

Percival Pott, one of four staff surgeons of the hospital, was, at thirty-eight, a frail knight astride a prancing fancy: that surgery, and therefore the surgeon, was as dignified, as necessary, and as lifted a calling as physic. The fancy was to give Mr. Pott a rough ride for his natural life, but at St. Bart’s he had been completely unhorsed. It was a cardinal rule at the hospital that the Apothecary "do not deliver or prepare any medicine but such as shall be ordered by the Physicians of the Hospital, except that the surgeons of the Hospital may order mercurial physic and purges for their patients". In effect, this reduced the ambitious and capable surgeon to the role of dispenser of cathartics and those mercurial specifics for the Great Pox or the clap, or both. Therefore, Mr. Pott felt himself and his fellows hampered to a degree considerably exceeding that of any quack who chanced to wander in.

Mr. Pott, astride his horse, consequently tilted at every quack he saw. His fall was invariably bard.

Only from his students and patients did he receive the respect due to a man of his devotion to his work. When John entered the circle of students, they gave ground reluctantly, stared briefly, and then returned their attention to Mr. Pott.

The patient was a lad of eight or ten. Naked from the hips up, he sat on the side of his bed strikingly erect until one saw that the effect was achieved by supporting the trunk on thin, rigid arms.

"Note," Mr. Pott was saying, his sword swaying as he turned slightly towards the students, "that though the legs and thighs are affected by the disease as well as the spine, they have neither the flabby feel of the true paralytic limb, nor the looseness at the joints."

Mr. Pott’s own apprentices so noted, each in his turn gravely touching the boy’s legs and thighs. The students were only privileged to observe.

"Now, lad, I want you to look out of this window here," Mr. Pott said.

The patient painfully turned not his head but his entire trunk and dutifully looked out of the window.

"Too painfully to turn the head alone," Mr. Pott murmured. "Now, were this lad seated on a high table so that the feet hung free of the ground, you would see the feet tending to point downwards. He has not reached the stage where he will be unable to set his feet flat on the ground, as his ankles are not particularly stiff yet…" In a much lower tone, he added, "Place the patient prone, please, gentlemen. Be ready to secure his hips …. Thank you." He raised his tone to his normal conversational level. "Now, it is generally considered that the curvature of the spine itself is the cause of this disorder. But recently I had occasion to observe a case wherein a seemingly accidental abscess near the spine served to drain off the discharge of matter in the spine, and the patient was soon restored the use of his limbs. Morbid dissections have since convinced me some afflictions of the fluids and solids near the spine are causative. Therefore, I propose to effect an abscess to drain off the poisonous matter. Is the lad secure, gentlemen? Thank you."

Mr. Pott withdrew his scalpel from his pocket and without further ado made a deep incision at the base of the patient’s spine. Next from his pocket, and in one quick motion, he took a large kidney bean and thrust it deep into the wound. While he was making his second incision one of his ‘prentices was suturing the first bean securely in place. The patient howled and screamed endlessly.

"There! And we are done!" Mr. Pott cried cheerfully, wiping his hands on the bed-clothing. "From now on the patient will lie perfectly still and rest. The beans will encourage the formation of abscesses which I will keep suppurating and draining until the cure is completed. When the poisonous matter is completely drawn from the spine I will allow one sore to heal. And when the patient can walk firmly, briskly, and without the assistance of a stick, the other will be allowed to heal."

"Stupendous," a student blurted.

Another asked deferentially, "Sir, what is the designation of this disorder? This curved spine?"

Oddly, the alert Mr. Pott seemed at a loss to answer.

"If you will permit me, sir," a ‘prentice spoke up pridefully, "the surgeons about town are beginning to call it ‘Pott’s Disease’."

"Fancy!" Mr. Pott cried in pleased surprise.

"Took him completely unawares, I’ll wager," the American student murmured as Mr. Pott straightened. "Ah, we are ready to walk, Hunter. Take your humble place at the tail of the line, pray."

By mid-afternoon a mist swirled through the town, seeming to come up from the streets as much as from the sky. Those coming into the hospital from the outside had a fine sprinkling on their shoulders, and their faces shone as if polished. The atmosphere was packed, wet, and the skin alternated between a clammy horripilation and a thick sweat that ran slowly like salve down the ribs and between the buttocks. Dusk came, and with it, rain. Mr. Pott’s day had come to an end, and the students separated to drift down the empty halls, the last to leave.

Trudging under the Henry VIII Gate, John forced himself again joined by the American. "Ah, Hunter, there you are. I lost you on the stairs."

"Did you?" John said irritably, then noticed that however he quickened or slowed his steps the American was still at his side. Not particularly pleased with the discovery at the moment, he realised that he had acquired a friend. Moreover, his new friend was manifesting by his cheerful tenacity that he was fully intending to place his long legs under whatever dining-table John placed his.

They dined frugally on roast tongue and udder, a dish which the American declared an insult to the palate of a savage. Then, leaning back in his chair, and looking about the small parlour of the School, he took out his pipe and began to fill it from a curiously worked and beaded pouch.

"Do you not find the tobacco irritating to your stomach?" John asked.

"Ah, you sweet-tempered anatomist! Do you never open your mouth, Hunter, except to criticise or complain?"

"Rarely," John said stiffly.

The American lit his pipe from a twist, blew blasts of smoke in John’s face, puffed, relit the twist in the candle, blew more smoke, puffed, threw the bunting twist to the floor when it threatened to burn his fingers, stamped on it, cursed, drew on his pipe again, and found it was not lit.

"Must be a source of great satisfaction to you, smoking," John commented upon this performance.

"Almost as great as being dour is to a Scot." 

John yawned, scratched himself, and thought about his work for the evening. "I must be getting on with it," he said, rising.

"You’ve some work to do now?"

"Aye"

"Fine," said the American. "I’ll watch."

"If you stay, you’ll work."

"Fair enough. Show me where I am to sleep, then. Fortunately, I was not–ah–-separated from my apartments until this morning."

John’s stare collided with the American’s candid regard. He found himself grinning. "There are a number of cots upstairs. Have your choice—until the students return."

"When will that be, pray?" the American asked politely.

"October."

"Excellent! I may have some money from home by then and be rich. Mark me, Hunter, I’ll pay you handsomely for all your little kindnesses."

"To be sure," John said skeptically.

He was thinking that perhaps he might trust this pert creature to the extent of having him quarter and dismember an infant which was waiting in spirits and threatening decay.

Well, he has bottom, John thought grudgingly, watching his new friend grimly performing his task. It amused him that the American’s face was as pale as Italian cheese, and as plastic, the nostrils fluttering, and the mouth trying to convince itself that it was unconcerned, composed.

By midnight the American was lying on a dissection table, skin in hands, staring at John. "Hunter, do you know what sleep is? If not, pray tell me if you know what beer is. Or port. Hunter, shall I tell you about port? It’s a rich red wine like blood, and for a man who has been working hard it is like drinking liquid vigour, it’s–– "

"In the sideboard in the parlour," John said, looking up from the infant testes. "And bring the bottle with you."

"Hunter," the American said, not too clearly, but still understandably, "are you aware that you are ugly as sin? As ugly as surgery? When mothers threaten their brats with the surgeon’s lancet, it must be a visage like yours that disturbs their dreams. Are you aware of that?"

"Not at all times," John said. "But some more than others."

"Then, bearing that in mind, could you acquaint me with why I find you an amusing companion? I who am as fair as Apollo, choose to consort with an ill-tempered, ugly ––-"

"Why do some people choose to become surgeons?" John said without rancour. "Gods, do not ask me to account for–—"

"Because they have not the wit or the money to become physicians."

"Are you saying Percival Pott had not the wit to be a physician?" John said innocently.

"I would say that—that you have bested me in the matter, Hunter. Pray, put the bottle on the table, I consider it unseemly of you to hold it against your chest like that, making it difficult for me to obtain my fair share of the—"

"Why are you not at a university?" John thrust suddenly.

"To study physic instead of surgery?"

"Aye."

"Physic is humbug, Hunter. humbug, and you and I know it."

"Like surgery?" John supplied.

"Surgery is the desperate measure taken to cover up the mistakes of physic."

"Jog my memory," John said, "should I forget to repeat that for Pott in the morning."

The American ignored him. "As for anatomy—this spiriting of bodies from their graves and cutting them up—it’s all humbug too!"

"That it is not!"

"Not humbug, then," the American said in the tone of one graciously conceding the point, before resuming, "not humbug in the least to defile this infant. Not humbug to make all these preparations-" He waved at the collection of John’s most recent failures and successes on the table.

"We use them in teaching," John said reasonably. "We pass them around the room so that each student may study the preparation as my brother lectures on it. Then when the student comes to dissect for himself he has some knowledge of the location and shape and circulation and enervation––-"

"Do you know the location and shape and circulation and enervation of the spleen, Hunter?"

"I do."

"To what avail? Are you ever to cut at, or near, or on the spleen of a living person?"

"I never intend to practise surg–---"

"Will any surgeon now or for evermore ever attempt to perform such a bloody piece of butchery? No. Then what good does it do you to know about it? Suppose you were to dig a hole in the ground six miles deep and peer down it every day. What good would it do you? Anatomy is as useless as that. Anatomy is humbug, Hunter, and you are a humbug, all ugly humbug, and I’ll thank you to put the wine where we may both reach it."

"Funsh–— " John said.

"What?"

"Function, I was going to say function. The anatomist tries to discover the function–- "

"Humbug! How do you find the function of the spleen? Do you lift it up and peer underneath it? Do you open a pocket in it and see if the function is tucked away. Hunter, what is the function of the spleen?"

John’s underlip sagged. "I don’t know," he said sullenly.

"Aha! Do you even know if it has a function?"

"It is there. It has a function."

"Oh, la… cogito, ergo sum… eh, Hunter? I see you are both resentful and unenlightened. You said the spleen exists, therefore it must have a function… sum, ergo function …. Or perhaps," the American was enjoying himself, he grew rather sly, "perhaps the spleen is just sitting there trying to conceive of a function. Has that occurred to you? how long did it take the birds to learn that wings were for flying? Hunter, you humbug-- "

"Did they have wings before they could fly? Bygar, turn it around and what do you see?"

"You mean, lift up the spleen and peep underneath? Turn it around? How long could birds fly before they had wings? You fool, you ugly fool, they weren’t birds at all if they didn’t have wings!"

"Aye! And what were they?"

"Who?" The American looked bewildered. "Pray let us return to the spleen. I feel some little fondness for that spleen; I was on firm ground. But birds without wings–— "

"What was the spleen before it was a spleen?" John found he was shouting. "You pretty barbarian tell me that?"

The American rose with dignity. " You are drunk sir, and I wish to retire"

"Sit you down, you pennyless beggar, and tell me: What was a spleen before it was a spleen?

The American resumed his position on the disecting table, drank from the bottle and hazarded a guess. "A spleen without wings, perhaps?"

"It was–—an–—organ–––-Bygar, do you know what it was? It was an organ that was acting like a spleen. Attend me, you turd––-" John seemed to be on his feet pounding the table, causing the spirits in the jars to slosh about. "You turd lying in a pool of bloody flux–––"

"You see?" the American pointed out smugly, "I could tell by your face you were lonely this morning. All that was wanting was a bit of kindness, a bit of friendship to bring out your may parts, to sweeten your temper, cleanse your tongue–—"

"You son-of-a-bitch," John said, "Which came first, the organ or the function?"

"The egg," the American said promptly. "I may be provincial, I may come from the wilds of Virginia, but you can’t trap me on that one."

"Function," John said, sitting down with a thump. "Function," he repeated and smiled on his friend beatifically. "I shall never forget what you have done for me tonight. I may forget your name—I have forgotten your name—but I shall never—"

"Spleen," the American said "My name is Josiah T. Spleen, Hunter, you ugly humbug, you are drunk, Let us retire."

"Tomorrow night," John said, rising in compliance and stretching, "we are going on a pleasure jaunt. I will show you the sights of London. There is a small churchyard–-"

"I will not join you in your neferous enterprises."

"If I am going to have you around me, I will have to make an anatomist of you. Give me the candle and I will lead the way," he finished carelessly.

The American sniggered and repeated, "Give me the candle and I will lead the way …. Hunter, you humbug, the light you cast will not illuminate tomorrow. Not you and all the anatomists together could cast the light of this one small flame-------"

"Watch the step," John advised.

So, wrangling, they stumbled happily to bed, John throwing himself down on one of the students’ cots, fully clothed.

Sometime in the early morning John awakened to the sounds of vomiting. Dimly he could discern the American standing by the window, chamber in his hands, sobbing. He started to speak, then noticed that the American was tilting the chamber, trying vainly to see its contents.

"It is too dark for you to see anything," John said quietly. "What is it you suspect—blood?"

The American started, then heaved. "Blood or port," he gasped, "it’s all one. Neither should be coming out of me now."

"Perhaps you have a cancer."

The American swirled the contents of the chamber, but his head was turned away, gazing across the deserted Garden. "God knows, Hunter. But I do not think so …. I have been to half the physical men in this town, and they but hide their ignorance behind bland faces and guess."

"In my dissections," John said, "I have seen stomachs- "

"I don’t want to know about those stomachs of yours," the American cried violently. He set the chamber on the floor and slumped down beside it, resting his head on the sill. After a moment he asked quietly, "What was it about your stomachs?"

"They seemed pitted. I always thought the spirits had perhaps eaten at them. Later I decided that the stomach eats itself after death; and that the subjects were far advanced in decay if I found the stomach so."

"Eats itself…" the American said. "Aye …. And mine is not waiting for me to die. It is as if I had swallowed caustic, this burning. Hunter, in God’s name, could it be that my stomach is eating itself away?"

"Whatever I say would be only conjecture," John said, and would say no more. In the darkness the American stumbled back to his coat. "Humbug," he said bitterly. "Hunter, I tell you physic and surgery alike are humbug. Beans in the spine, indeed!"

vii

By morning all London knew that the rain had settled for a prolonged visit. The drops fell steadily, straight down, purposefully. Nightfall would see half the kennels overflowing; by mid-week refuse from the kennels would be flowing into cellars. In other places dead cats and faeces and garbage and a stray shoe and newspaper would wad together at street corners, forming dams, the intersections becoming wide lashes of ordure. London was used to it, life could not stop because one had to wade ankle or knee-deep in order to cross the road.

At the hospital everything seemed to go wrong. The students bungled the simplest of venesections, flesh was slippery with sweat, instruments rusted, and a small fever, or what was generally called a "cold", ran through the hospital, attacking patients, students, and staff alike. Sneezing, like yawning, became infectious, one patient setting off his neighbour, and he the one next him. The quacks spoke brightly of their having "caught cold" and prescribed thin white-wine whey with lemon-juice to raise a sweat, and marched out smugly, secure in their knowledge that the staff was helpless to ease the patients further.

Then the rumour passed through the halls and down the wards like a noxious miasma: gaol fever at Newgate Prison …. The physical students whispered to the surgical students—gaol fever, ship fever, hospital fever—call it what you would, it was the dread putrid fever which spread from one victim to the next like fire, consuming everyone in its path.

"Nonsense," Mr. Pott said sharply of the rumours. "Putrid fever is occasioned by a collection of the Humors in the constitution, resulting from the obstruction of perspiration. There is some danger, certainly, for the cold fever is itself but the first manifestation of sweat obstruction. The weather… humidity …. "But he, too, applied to a physician for sudorifics for his patients, lest the colds of the lad with Pott’s Disease, or the amputee, or the comatose child next her, inflame their constitutions. He bled copiously to cool, the sudorific drugs inducing sufficient sweating, and forced liquids to dilute the blood even more.

They waited then, all of them, to see what would happen next. Percival Pott was composed, if given over to gravity. A patient had applied to him to have a hernia reduced; would those students who wished to see the procedure apply to the tub-room that afternoon?

The students crowded into the small humid room wherein stood a metal tub and a plain wood table. Mr. Pott explained that he hoped to replace the hernia by taxis, without having to bleed the patient into relaxation before reducing it. In such cases arteriotomy was employed, though Mr. Pott warned solemnly: "Remember, gentlemen, veins flow, arteries spurt. Therefore, make it a rule of your lives, following it as you would the Ten Commandments, that you open no artery other than the temporal or one of its branches… . Nurse, admit the patient, if you please."

The patient was a man of middle years, dignified by virtue of his obesity, and at this moment by a neat wig, though he was otherwise clad merely in a sheet. With a senatorial calm he strode into the room and placed himself supine on the table. Mr. Pott revealed the hernia. It rose mountainously front the abdomen, the umbilicus a crater in its summit, and wreathed with scar tissue. Mr. Pott attempted to manipulate the hernia back into the abdomen. The hernia was resistant; the patient began to grunt. Mr. Pott desisted and turned to survey the students. He chose John, and motioned him to the table.

Mr. Pott locked the knees of the patient about John’s short, strong neck. He requested John to support the weight of the patient so, head hanging down past John’s buttocks. John’s calves bulged, his broad shoulders ached, still the hernia would not permit itself to be eased into the abdomen.

Mr. Pott requested John to stamp his feet; to jump. The grunting of the patient mingled with John’s panting. The hernia was stubborn yet.

The patient was placed in the tub of water, John supporting him. Mr. Pott opened the temporal artery just above the zygomatic process and in front of the auricle. He had located the exact place he wished his lancet to enter by finding that discernible pulse just in front of the ear. After five full cups of spurting blood were caught, the patient fainted against John’s breast. "Ligature that vessel," Mr. Pott murmured to a student, working his hands firmly at the hernia. "Ah…" he said, expelling his breath. "Now, we are ready to apply the truss, gentlemen." He absently wiped his hands on the patient’s wig, lying on the floor to hand, and then gave it over to John.

The porters came to place the patient on a litter, and Mr. Pott, his task done, now turned his attention to his own bloody person. The American, as the unconscious patient was carried past him, gravely placed the stained wig on his chest, murmuring to John, "Relaxed at last… otium sine dignitate… rest without dignity, Hunter, you humbug."

Over the remains of the cold roast tongue and udder that evening, John grumbled and complained about the rain. "… impossible to slosh around in a churchyard and dig. I’ve a mind to find Clutterbuck and see what’s to be had above ground." He told himself it was for the American’s sake that they must find a subject; but in truth —and he almost admitted it—he did not feel himself unless he were anatomizing, and he had run out of material. Not surgery, not the novelty of St. Bart’s, not even the fresh joy of friendship could allay the desire to work. His hands, when unemployed, twitched. He continued to fret, gesticulating with his fork excitedly, and bits of food spilled from his mouth as he talked. The American pretended not to notice, muttering only, "Lord have mercy on us, we are not to go into that driving rain again!"

They trotted under the protection of the Piazzas to William’s house first. William was on the point of departure for a loo party in Leicester Fields. But he took the time to greet the American cordially, and to suggest subtly, if a touch majestically, that the American take his course in the fall. "One dissection will only whet your appetite," he observed, offering his snuffbox and sneezing delicately.

"I fear my stomach does not welcome snuff, sir," the American refused politely.

William looked rather blank.

"He has a disorder of the stomach occasioned by his journey over from America," John said.

"Indeed!" William cried, intent on a final examination of his appearance in the hall glass, and adjusting his chapeau bras just so on his wig. Pleased by what he saw, he turned to the American, saying with hearty condescension, "Happy to hear it, sir! Pray, have my brother bring you here again when I am not engaged. I am late now, Jock. Be careful …. Good night, sir!"

"That was my brother, William," John said.

"Indeed, I thought for a moment it was God Himself," the American said, then added with his usual malice, "petee?"

John felled him with one blow. The American lay on the floor looking up at John, while the mirror on the wall rattled slightly on its cord and then hung at rest atilt.

"That," John repeated, "was my brother William."

The American picked himself up and brushed off his coat. "Forgive me, Jock. from the manner in which you looked at him, I truly thought you disliked him?"

"My brother William is the finest man I have ever known," John said.

"It was not that I was disputing," the American said evenly. "Shall we go, you humbug?"

viii

They could not find Clutterbuck anywhere. But in the flooded basement of a night-house in Alsatia they found a crony of Clutterbuck’s lolling on a table, pinching a bawd, and guzzling gin. In the flickering light of the one taper the rogue’s eyes signalled John to approach. The American he did not know, and therefore did not trust.

"Clutterbuck?" the man said. "Jock, the crap-merchant may have gottim, for all I know. He was on the highway last week, I had it from a unimpeachable source." He belched and repeated the phrase with obvious pride, "A unimpeachable source …. P’raps I could be of help?"

John changed his footing in the water. "This danmed rain … impossible to dig… I was wondering if anyone has suffered a great … sorrow… recently? Last night? Or just today? And has not had the occasion to give them a proper … "

"Strange," the rogue said in a low voice of wonderment. "Passing strange that you should come to me tonight with such a request. At this moment, so to speak. Strange!"

John pressed a shilling into his hand. "Where? A male?"

"A sailor," the man said and smiled. A louse wandered across his forehead and disappeared under his disreputable wig. "Came in out of the rain only a few hours ago. Feverish, I should say, poor lad. But he had money on him and was very generous to us all. When he fell I thought it was only the gin …. Dead, Jock, very dead. We dragged him to the back. You wait here, but gi’ me your sack."

John took his sack from under his coat.

"Oh, and your guinea too," the man said, sniggering. "Fancy, I like to forgot!"

In a moment he returned, motioning to John.

"Hunter," the American muttered, "I do not like this…"

"Come on? John said impatiently.

The sailor’s knees and feet still protruded from the sack, but before shoving them in, John, wise in the ways of grave-robbers, felt in the dark for the man’s pulse. The wrist was cold and wet, there was not the faintest throbbing. "All right," he said, pushing the legs into the sack, "he’s ours."

They struggled up the back stairs, and opening a door, found themselves stepping out into a rain swept alley. "Now, hurry!" John said, shouldering the sack.

"Hunter, I like it not…" the American said on a rising tone.

"Shut your Boneshop. Trot, man, trot!"

"Hunter, I knew it, I knew it was so!" the American was crying in a high, uncontrolled voice.

John stood twisting the sack in his hands and looking down at the sailor on the table. The blood from the cut throat had mingled with the rain so that the clothing was slimy and soggy. Above the heart there was another stain gathered around an oozing hole in the coat.

"You felt his wrist!" the American shouted.

"It was not warm. He must have been lying unconscious in the water for some time."

Abruptly the American sat down and began to weep, his tears gleaming as they ran down his cheeks. "We murdered him. We asked for this body, we offered to pay for it. His corpse."

Not so facile of tears, John let the sack drop to the floor. He took his gaze from the sailor to the many preparations about the room. The hundreds of preparations he had made; the students’ subjects: fell from its mother’s arms, Clutterbuck had said, crushing its skull … or crawled out into the street right under a carriage, shocking the way those rich bastards drive… she was left in the Tower moat, raped and strangled … he fell from the scaffold, and him only ‘prenticed two months… her husband stabbed her and fled, but the crap-merchant will get him yet ….

How many?

William had been dealing with Clutterbuck even before John came to London. William would never be a party to…. Not Clutterbuck, for he himself has whispered tales to me. There is an anatomist in Soho Square who once… but I had not believed the story.

"Hunter, are you an anatomist now?" the American said fiercely. "Are you still an anatomist?"

"Aye."

"This has not teared your vision? You still must have more to open so you can cut out the spleen"—the word came out in a sob— "or the heart?" He pointed to the corpse. "Do you not see that this is the natural result when criminals go to work for madmen? What manner of man are you, Hunter? You with your jars of organs? What manner of man cuts up the dead for his own pleasure"

"An anatomist," John said, and slapped him cleanly on the chops again and again until the American quieted. Then he began removing the clothing from the sailor, automatically gong through the pockets and noting that he had been robbed also. There was a chance, far from a certainty indeed, that the sailor had been dead at the time they entered the night-house. Yet the fresh blood at the throat …. He felt the American’s eyes on him, held fast by horror, and continued silently to strip the sailor.

He wiped the skin clean of blood, he could not have said why, and then took his scalpel from his pocket. He said for his own ears to hear, "A man I caused to be murdered is on a dissection table. What would you have me do?" He made an incision from the slit throat to the genitals. "He will decompose rapidly in this weather. Most of the parts I must try to save for later by preserving them in spirits." A quick glance showed him that the American, tears dried in streaks on his face, was watching intently. "The stomach," John said in a tone grown dry, "may interest you. Have you never seen one?" 

The American wet his lips. "No, Hunter, you hum––––No, Hunter, I have not."

When they came to the skull they found the tongue coated as if with white fur. The American scraped at it with his probe. "He was said to be febrile…" He sighed and flicked again at the tongue. "I am but trying to convince myself that death had marked him anyway."

John removed the eyes and dropped them into spirits. "You may be operating on cataracts one day, and other eye disorders. It would serve you well to dissect each carefully .. " The American’s attention was wandering. He stretched. "Hunter, let us go—er—for a walk. I am in need of some air."

"No," John said, busy.

"If am to enter the School this autumn, cannot we let there be an end to this business? Let us dispose of him and forget the whole thing."

John cursed him steadily in a level voice, until the American, flushing, rose and stalked out of the house.

He returned within the hour, wearing his old smile and anxious to make amends. "Come, Hunter, let us be friends," he said winningly.

"Go to hell."

The American shrugged and sat down. "No crime in a bit of rogering, Hunter. Is there? You should have accompanied––—" But thinking better of continuing along that line, he took up his scalpel and resumed dissecting. His grin was sheepish.

"Very well, then," John grunted, still grouchy. "That is more like."

The American worked on; soon he began to yawn and scratch. "Damme, was this poor creature lousy? I am crawling …. "

John did not answer. He dissected in a frenzy, taking out organ after organ for preservation. He knew himself compelled to pick the corpse clean; to make good and telling use of every possible inch of it. It was more than a matter of honour, it was a duty.

ix

Suddenly one afternoon the sun came out, and an hour later St. Barr’s was as gay as a fair. In all but the cutting wards windows were flung open, sending glittering drops of rain flying.

The water in the streets began to recede back to the kennels, carrying silt with it. Except for the drying dams, and the refuse stagnant in cellars, the town was country-clean, and the air smelled not of damp wigs and ripe garbage but of growing things. All too soon the sun descended towards the roofs, and the people on the streets shaded their eyes and looked directly into the fire, loath to see it drop behind the houses. Fragments of clouds lay like broad marble steps descending the sky down to the sun, and those who looked at them were gradually possessed by a lofty longing, as if they were gods in exile looking upon Olympus.

And the American student, emerging from under the Henry VIII Gate, shaded his eyes too, and said simply, "Look, Hunter, over there’s Virginia."

The halls of the hospital rang with vendors’ cries, doxies flitted about, shrieking amicably when patients too ill to buy nevertheless window-shopped and occasionally pinched the merchandise to see if it were ripe. From the cutting wards came the sounds of patients cheerfully slapping at lice, and wagers were laid as to the greatest number of red spots on the bed-clothes. Even the salivation wards were cheerful. patients whose teeth were being washed from their mouths by the powerful mercurial specifics for the venereal distempers grinned hopefully, wiping at the thick ropes of saliva descending from mouth to chest, and slobbered at one another that soon they would be cured.

"One night with Venus," the students said to each other and the sheepish patients, "and you spend a month of nights with Mercury."

The students grew decorous of a sudden, John no less thoughtful than the rest. Close by his side, the American, handsome and therefore a most likely candidate for one of the beds they were passing, let out his breath and avowed with fervour, "God! Never again!"

Percival Pott, overhearing, turned and smiled in comradely disbelief. For the sun was out, the air was soft, and all London was in the mood to perform nightly rites to Venus. At the door to the ward he made shooing motions with his hands to two pretty geese loitering there, and then said, smiling whilst they giggled, "Remember these two charming faces, gentlemen, and where you saw them last--- should you discover them in your arms some night."

The weather held good, and on the weekly examination and treatment day, Mr. Pott appeared splendrous in velvet the colour and texture of peachdown, with lace at his wrists and throat and his sword bumping at his knee. In the eyes of his students he was as elegant as any of the physicians, and they held their heads only slightly higher than did the physical young men, to show their conviction that the calling of surgery was equal in dignity to that of physic. The procession through the wards began at eight in the morning, the physicians—with William Hunter’s friend, Dr. Pitcairn among them—in the lead with the physical students, followed by the apothecary and his two tyros hastening to keep ahead of the surgeons and the surgical students, who, in their turn, delighted in treading ("accidentally" their hasty bows and murmured apologies proclaimed) on the ‘pothecary’s heels.

The procession halted in each ward and fanned out. The physicians were seated in the chairs awaiting them, and motioned for the ward book to be given them. Dr. Pitcairn looked on John and smiled slightly and with great composure, in spite of the fact that he knew John knew him as a mere one-bottle man.

Standing to the side, the surgeons and their students tried to look as though they chose to stand, as though they would not care to sit down if all the chairs in the world were offered them. In alphabetical order the patients left their beds and stood before the physicians to be examined and diagnosed. Those who were not ambulant were carried by porters. The physicians tapped their canes against their cheeks. They poked at wheals or spots with the tip of the gold canes and conferred; they requested to see tongues, they peered at eyeballs, they listened to recitals of aches and pains, but they did not touch. Very rarely did they touch. They were dignified and withdrawn.

When the physicians could not agree on a diagnosis, they clarified the issues, they hewed away the irrelevances by conversing and discussing the symptoms in Latin. At last gaining accord, they communicated their prescriptions to the apothecary in Latin.

Sufficiently awed into getting well, the patient stumbled or was carried away.

For every patient, John noted wryly, Dr. Pitcairn ordered’ the maximum dosage of laudanum.

The surgeons, then, in the eyes of all, had to admit their inferiority by attending their patients at bedsides. Their lowly prescriptions for salves and ointments were received with something less than humility by the apothecary, who did not write them with any of the flourishes with which he recorded the physicians’ wisdom.

Always, no matter how fine the day, or high his spirits, or beautiful his appearance, Mr. Pott was curt and touchy before the procession had quit the first ward. A sense of insult chilled his voice, and he carried his spare frame with a proud rigidity. At such times he reminded John painfully of William, and he wondered what it would be like to suffer from a plethora of vanity so that one must be blooded of it regularly.

By the time all the wards had been visited, Mr. Pott was in such a cold fury that his hands trembled, and his face was as white as if a full quart had been taken from an artery. Then, only as the procession disbanded, and he was again alone with his students, did his manner soften enough for him to smile grimly and say, "Well, gentlemen, let us rejoice that that is over for another week!"

Like women who have a lifelong project in a massive piece of embroidery, or who suffer from the arachnid compulsion to spin lace from between their hands, year in and year out until they die, still at it, the last bit between their fingers of the same pattern as that first inch completed fifty years ago, so John was always like to have a scalpel in his hand—or so the American opined. Yet he had come to sit opposite John in readiness to work under John’s supervision. He had found to his expressed surprise that the anatomy of the human body was not all humbug. It was, in fact, a "marvellous works, a machine", and he grew poetic over the kidneys and philosophical over the heart. "The watch of God," he said taking down the jar containing the sailor’s pierced heart. "When the last heart stops ticking, God will know it’s time for eternity."

"Tut," John said. "Tell me the first thing you notice about the heart." 

The American frowned, he was frequently thrown into confusion by John’s strange questions. "Well, Hunter, it’s… it’s just a heart."

"It’s a muscular organ, you blathering ass," John began, to subside under the American’s grin. More patiently, he resumed, "Now, before you cut into it, try to see it in your mind as it was in the chest cavity. How was it placed?"

The American closed his eyes and thought. It came to him only that it had been right side up, and he said so feebly, then winced even before John opened his mouth. "Then you tell me how it is placed," he begged humbly.

"It lies in the chest obliquely, it lies between the lungs in the middle mediastinum and is contained within the pericardium…"

"Yes," the American muttered, "… the middle mediastinum … behind the sternum… oh, yes, I recall now … divided by septa…"

Twice in that week William dropped in to chat a moment before he was on his way. He noted again John’s failure to inject the testes of the new subject and sighed. He was affable to John’s friend, his manner revealing that he firmly expected to welcome him as a student in the fall. Each time, William fluffed the ruffles of his stock, mentioned casually the illustrious soirée which was his destination, and departed. As casually, the American said, "Hunter, is your brother a man of note about town?"

Aye."

"Yet you never accompany him out."

"I am never invited."

The American said, "Quite so."

x

On the day following the next examination day, Mr. Pott noticed that the lad with Pott’s disease was feverish, headachy, and pettish. The beans were suppurating nicely, the pus swelling the pockets so that the skin was stretched to a glistening tautness; the poisons in the boy’s constitution were localizing about the beans, there seemed no reason for his febrile condition. Mr. Pott ordered him blooded and proceeded on his way. In the next bed a patient with his leg in a splint lay dozing, the bedclothes pulled up to his chin. In the warm air of the ward the patient shook occasionally as with a chill. Mr. Pott stayed his steps and considered the sleeper; but it was not his patient and so he moved on.

At midday the cutting wards grew most uncomfortable in the heat. Moreover, the boards of the flooring began to swell so that the floor rose in waves, making walking difficult and inducing along with the heat a kind of vertigo among several of the students. The American, as always, criticized and complained in a low voice, but John paid him little mind.

Mercifully, the late afternoon was overcast and the American at once felt revived. His recovery was seemingly complete when a porter gave him a letter from home sent in care of the hospital.

He read his letter, wept unashamedly, and then laughed through his tears. "They are sending me their love—and some money! It should be here in a few days. Hunter, you and I will anatomize every tavern and brothel in London. We will.––- "

"—do nothing of the kind," John said calmly. "You have not finished the heart yet, and there is the brain to be done. And the eyes. And the—"

The American grumbled all the way back to Covent Garden. Hunter had dashed his spirits, he declared, and now his vertigo was back along with a headache. By morning he was completely out of sorts, saying that John was working him too hard. To John’s surprise he refused to rise from his cot, throwing back the bedclothes irritably. John saw then that his torso was covered with a rash that extended from chest to lower abdomen. The maculae of the rash were fiery. John put his hand thoughtfully to his friend’s forehead. Then he left for the hospital.

He drew Mr. Pott aside and questioned him. "You say a rash on the chest?" Mr. Pott asked slowly. John nodded.

Mr. Pott said only, "Come, Hunter."

At the bedside of the lad with Pott’s disease, Mr. Pott said, "A rash such as this, Hunter?" The patient lay on his front, eyes out of focus with delirium. From his mouth came a hoarse panting as if he could not suck in sufficient air to cool his lungs. The mouth was open, gasping, and the tongue, grossly swollen, was seemingly covered with white fur.

"A rash such as that," John said.

A louse wandered across the boy’s bare back. Mr. Pott squashed it absently. "Gaol fever," he said. "The putrid fever. There was talk of it at Newgate …. God have mercy on us, Hunter, there is a pestulence abroad in the hospital."

John would not return to the hospital, shutting himself away in the School to nurse his friend. The American lay in the house in the Little Piazza amidst a pool of his own vomit. His tongue, no longer furred, was now curled in his mouth, a black ball. William, coming over to examine him, shook his head. "Jock, his skin is still dangerously ardent, yet I dare not bleed him again. Perhaps you should have sent him to St. Barr’s. I fear the end is near."

"He would not have wanted to go there," John said fiercely.

William looked at John keenly. "I see …. You are quite fond of him, eh, Jock? Well, mayhap you did right, for I doubt if anyone could save him."

"Indeed, not Dr. Pitcairn with his massive dosages of laudanum?

William took no offence. "On that head, I would agree. Clean him up, Jock, and send for me if you notice a change."

The days and nights blended. The American sank into coma.

In the late afternoon the American opened his eyes, struggling to speak. John bent to the hot, foul breads. "God is… witness… Hunter…meant…to take…her…Amer –—. " He convulsed once and died.

"Aye, Wullie," John said heavily, "there’s a change. He is dead now."

William sighed. "There are five more deaths at St. Bart’s, I had it this afternoon from Dr. Pitcairn. And God knows how many cases of it there are at Newgate …. What shall we do with your friend’s body, Jock? The expense of burial must be consid–— "

"He was expecting some money. We can bury him with it, and I will write his family."

William mopped away the rivulets of perspiration coursing down his forehead from under his wig. "Yes, we must do that. Poor lad. … This heat is unusual, is it not? I have sometimes thought that the earthquake must have affected our climate. So monstrously hot… . We had best get him underground as soon as possible, considering."

"I’ll start at once," John said.

"Don’t open the stomach until I come in this evening," William said hastily. "And make a preparation of the tongue."

John carried his friend over his shoulders down to the dissection room. The American lay in death looking at John steadily. John removed the tongue and the testicles, putting them in spirits. The eyes watched him. He opened the chest and the abdomen. The room reeked, the foeted air moving about him like the sluggish, rolling spasms that herald regurgitation. He removed the stomach and put it in spirits. He found no anomalies. He closed his incisions, and gravely stitched them.

While the last of the daylight flowed slowly from the room, he stood for long moments in the malodorous heat returning the gaze of his friend. Even after it grew too dark for him to see, he could still feel the eyes of the American on him. Belatedly he thought that he should have pressed them closed.

"Jock," William said from the doorway, his features pale in the light of his candle, "he is decomposing rapidly. Have you––"

John turned again to his contemplation of his friend.

"Jock… Jock, you are not ill yourself, are you?"

A suspicion that had been gathering in John’s mind, gathering with the unreasoning, unarguable strength of intuition, then thickening, taking form as he had worked, at last solidified into conviction. "Somehow," he said, meeting the steady gaze, "it was my fault that he died. The sailor we anatomized… I think he had the fever. My friend took it from him."

"Superstition!" William cried worriedly, and then added in the loud necessary tone used on approaching hysteria, "Humbug, Jock, humbug?

"I killed him," Jock said. "An eye for an eye…" He began to sob in the painful choking manner of the young. "Wullie, what manner of men are we? We anatomists?"

William wisely declined to answer.

xi

In William’s library the candles had flickered one by one and gone out. Now there remained only one, newly lighted, which seemed to cast more shadows than it did light on William’s mahogany bookcases, his growing collection of books, his newest foible—a brave little collection of ancient coins—and his beloved dumb-waiter. In- different to William’s luxuries, John locked his gaze on the single flame. "I know only," he said, as he had been saying again and again all evening, "that he took it from the sailor. The murdered man was the source." He raised his glass and drank, but he was helpless to take his eyes from the flame.

"Murdered––" William said, and then, as if having kept his opinion in abeyance for some time, began again, forcefully. "And that is another thing, Jock. I have not bothered to beat a dead dog by telling you my thoughts of your incaution in that matter. However the man might have died it was no fault of yours; but you may consider yourself fortunate that your own throat was not slit, going unarmed, and with a guinea in your pocket, to a—a—"

"Night-house," John said sullenly.

"Night-house," William repeated after him, crabsidled.

John took the opportunity to repeat, "The sailor was the source…

William beat his hand against his forehead. He was tired, he was nauseated either by the wine or by his brother’s maudlin assumption of the guilt for the American’s death, yet he was reluctant to go to bed and leave the young fool to his own devices. He started to say so, and was again interrupted by a drunkenly obstinate Jo]m. "Explain to me once more then," William said, "how it is that you were responsible. Pray ignore all that I may have told you this evening about contagious miasmas; pray overlook all the philosophies of Sydenham and Boerhaave, and give me, instead, the benefit of your great wisdom."

"The sailor," John said, "then ourselves, then the cutting wards at St. Barr’s. Only the wards where Mr. Pott went, at first. And only the wards where we walked after Mr. Pott."

"And you carried the fever with you?" William asked with a weary sarcasm.

"Aye, Wullie, we did."

"And how do you account for the fact that Newgate was plagued with it? Since you did not walk there?" William leaned over and snatched John’s glass from him, throwing the contents into the hearth. "Now, we will have no more of this. You have lost a friend and I am sorry. I am sorry, and I am also," William said, though not unkindly, "half asleep. I can tell you that no one presents a disease to another like a handfull of posies. A disease can exist only in a person who is born with a predisposition for it, for that particular disease. Each of us is born the victim of a certain number of diseases—as are the members of our family, for example, most susceptible to the consumption. These predispositions we call ‘morbific seeds’. Since you yourself did not succumb to the noxious miasma bringing the disease, it follows that you do not carry the morbific—"

"Gods, Wullie, it has to start somewhere! Why did he die of the fever today? Why not last year? Or ten years from now?’

"The atmosphere has tides of detrimental forces, like an ocean. And as the oceans follow the moon so do these tides follow the seasons. These tides of miasmas produce poisons in the air, or chemical acridihes. Or fluids within the body itself can become morbid and agglutinate in the organs or be absorbed, thus affecting the economy of the body–— "William was lecturing

"Humbug," John said bitterly. "Why do the fluids become morbid and agglutinate? D’ye know that, Wullie?"

"Indeed, I do. I must remind you that I am a physician- " Then seeing John’s mouth open, William hastened on, "Jock, ideally there is an equilibrium existing between the liquids and the solids of the blood. Life itself depends upon the movement of the liquids through and about the solids, and this movement is guided by the soul. The heart is the mechanism of the movement of the blood, the brain that of the nervous fluid, and the lungs that of air. So it would follow that the miasma which carries the fever could so irritate the lungs that it might innervate the morbific seeds"—the ice being thin, William chose to skate closely to the edge—"contained in your friend’s body—"

"Wullie, you do not believe a word of it," John said witheringly.

"Very well," William shouted, "Fracastoro once had it that diseases went from victim to victim by means of some growing particles or other, which grew in the body! Would you prefer to believe that? Rest on it, it is entirely immaterial to me what you––"

"Now you would have me talk the fool," John said, and the conversation, like the candle, seemed to have burned down considerably.

"As you like," William said. He put out his hand and began to mould the melted pool about the flame of the candle into a square. "I will tell you," he said slowly, "what I believe. I believe that we die when our usefulness has come to an end. I believe our fates lie within each of us like morbific seeds. Once I thought that there was some great work I might help my beloved Jamie to accomplish …. Then he died in my arms; you were but a little lad, but you saw how it affected me. But it came to me later that if I was still alive, then the task was mine—not Jamie’s–- And after that, you followed in my footsteps and came to London––"

"To walk after you through life?" John said. "As I walk the wards after Percival Pott? You like to think that, Wullie?"

"It was you," William said gently, "who would have it no other way. Your passionate determination to stay on at the School…" He broke off to take a deep breath, to declare without any display of vanity whatsoever, "It is in my stars, Jock, to be a great man. Perhaps it is in your stars to follow after me, to shine by reflected light."

John stared at him, trying to keep the calm assured smile in focus; but it ebbed and rose like a tide on William’s face. In a voice that was beginning to slur John remarked, "I do not believe there was a man who wanted to be a great man ever was a great------"

"You had best retire," William said comfortably, rising. He came round to John and placed an arm over his shoulders. He chuckled tolerantly. "Perhaps you had better sleep here on my sofa. In your condition I do not think you capable of the hazardous journey to the Little Piazza."

The weight of William’s arm was proprietary, oppressive. "You did not like my friend, did you, Wullie?" John mumbled.

William moved his arm slightly. "I was barely acquainted with him. I saw him only on my infrequent visits to the School." He went on evenly, "And each time I discovered you devoting your time and my money to teaching him what the King himself would have had to pay me twenty guineas to learn. But for all that, I found him a likable enough young man–- Did you find his stomach of interest?"

"It was pitted," John said bitterly. "Full of pits, you humbug." The arm did not withdraw for another moment or so. Then William yawned, raised the bottle of wine against the candle, adjudging the volume of its contents, and set it down. "Enough for another swallow or two," he said easily. "I’m to bed." He lit a stub to light his way up the stairs.

The great man left the room, walking lightly on his elegantly shod, aristocratic feet.

John took the wine with him to the sofa and stretched himself out, the bottle resting like an infant in the curve of his arms. The sofa was fully six feet long and he had to reach back to pull the bolster down for a pillow. His feet did not touch the bolster at the other end. The candle sputtered, wavered, then grew steady. He watched it, his thoughts roaming among the clutter of his experience, He saw the eyes of the American looking at him thoughtfully as he removed the tongue and testicles. William was wrong, there was no reason for one man to live and another to die. It could have been myself on the table, John thought. It could have been William even …. But he did not think so. Not William, moving quietly about overhead, readying himself for bed. William had yet to be a great man. William, the bird before it had wings.

He was arguing with the American, arguing with a volubility and articulateness he did not really possess. Meeting the calm dead gaze he said with unshakeable conviction: In the singular lies the key to the universal. In the chaos of the imperfect are imbedded the fragments of the perfect. All life is the pattern, and each living thing but a piece of it.

He awoke suddenly, starting, his lips still moving. His mind grasped the concept. Fully to learn the anatomy and constitutional workings of the perfect animal—man—he had only to know the anatomies and functionings of the lesser animals. A memory of himself as a child, finely detailed, filled his mind with a green world:

 He was standing in a fallow field where grasses and weeds, taller than he, formed an arch over his head. In this shadowless green world all was alive: life, industrious, intent, humming, buzzing; life that moved past on a hundred rhythmic legs, that inched overhead in loops, that sought to know him by extending two waving antennae before his face, that fell on him with a sound that was like a pinpoint of pain, that flew straight against his eyes and drowned; life that rushed ahead with a thunder of hind feet, that trundled across the mounds and valleys of his toes, bearing a scute too heavy for its hair-fine legs; life as a pattern, and he but one small part.

The memory tilted. Above him he heard William shifting about restlessly in bed, heard the scratching sound of the chamber as William slid it out for use. He had heard Mr. Pott use the term for such sufferings as William’s… pavor nocturmus… the fears and anxieties that visit one in the deeps of the night. 

Whereas he had been visited by a vision which would consume his lifetime in its expression. He welcomed the task.

Of a sudden the candle went out.

xii

John went back to St. Barr’s. He found the halls deserted; word of the fever had spread and the vendors of food and flesh alike were absent from the hospital. The quacks were gone as well.

The sour odour of vinegar was everywhere, the floors had been sprinkled with it, the patients sponged down with it. There were three remaining students walking after Mr. Pott when John joined the group. They entered the first ward, their clumping feet sounding loudly. The dying were undisturbed, lying deaf in their foulness. No nurse was to be seen. Corpses stared at them from jelled eyes.

"I have done what I could," Pott said in a tired voice. "Alone." They passed into another ward. John found himself looking down on Polly. Delirious, naked to the waist, afire, she moaned from a crusted mouth. She did not know him.

Percival Pott came to stand opposite John. He shook his head. "No hope here, I fear. You are acquainted with the girl, Hunter?"

"Aye."

In the next bed was a tiny mound. John lifted the bedclothes. Ma’s bald wrinkled skull nested there. The proud fierce gaze still gleamed between the slitted lids, and the hand with the stubs had clutched the coverlet in the frenzy of dying. She was entering rigour.

"Died in the night," Pott said. He returned to Polly. "The nurse— we have but one left in here—tells me the girl aborted in the early morning hours. The nurse admits to being drunk though, and says she did not see fit to preserve the evidence. Poor child …. She was a pretty thing, was she not? I had occasion to attend the grandmother a number of times."

"Aye, she spoke well of you, Mr. Pott."

Pott nodded. "Loved surgeons, that old woman did."

John knelt to cover Polly. "I must save her," he said, but Pott took it as a question, again shaking his head and replying:

"I don’t know, Hunter …. I will tell you truthfully that these contagious diseases are a puzzlement to me. Contagion—how meaningful we make it sound, when, in truth, it has no meaning at all."

John was not listening. "A child …. Polly lost a child? The nurse admits to being drunk—"

"The fullness of the breasts in her present state of emaciation might indicate some such state. A pity… a pity …. " Pott was ready to move on, asking in passing, "Hunter, where is your friend? The American student?"

"He is–—"

John was suddenly silent. Again he saw himself on the stairs leading up to Ma’s establishment, and saw too the American coming down, smiling, sardonic, yet withal pleased with himself. Was it there he had gone when they had quarrelled over the sailor’s corpse? Aye, and returned, soothed and satisfied, keeping his own counsel about his conquest of Polly. How pawky the lovers must have been to have hoodwinked Ma ….

"If you wish," Pott was saying, "you may apply to the ‘pothecary for some oil of sulphur for her. She did not haemorrhage overmuch, and may want blooding …. Do as you think best."

Now again, he was to sit up, sleepless, agonized, to watch someone die of the putrid fever. Percival Pott, returning late in the day, said, "You must not overtask yourself, Hunter."

John, wringing out a cloth to lay on Polly’s forehead, did not bother to answer. He bled her carefully, light; he went out to buy oranges and wine; and he applied constantly to the ‘pothecary in Pott’s name for more concoctions of the bark. Once, returning to Polly’s bed, he noted that Ma was gone, her body taken to be dumped in some common grave.

Polly’s fever went off. She recognised John. "I am taking care of you now, Miss Polly," he said. She began whimpering for Ma. 

He left her long enough to go over to Russell Street. Ma’s neighbours scampered when they spied him climbing the stairs. Through a crack in the door a woman shouted at him, "The sluts are gone, and the old whore and the girl carted off for dead. Christ, how the old whore screamed for you when they took her away. Ha, we were fast rid of them and their pestulence from this house!"

The door to Ma’s apartments was ajar. The rooms were bare but for a few bits of torn clothing scattered on the floor. All of Ma’s beloved and decayed luxuries had been stolen. As for her money— strongbox, desk, and all were gone. The precious certificates signed by William were nowhere to be seen. In the rooms once occupied by Meg and Peg he found only a caked pot or so of cosmetics. He returned to the parlour, and there by the fire a small object took his eye. Ma’s stag-horned stone lay in a crevice of the boards. Even the tiny velvet box had fallen into the hands of the decamping Meg and Peg.

Polly was destitute.

He took the pretty stone with him for the preparation room. Ma would have been pleased with the conceit. Then, leaving the School, he went straight to William.

William chose to attitudinize. "Poor little lass! Ah, Jock, it’s a hard world. Well, there’s no help for it. Her destiny found her out. Still she’s not the first to make her living on the Bridge, nor yet the last, I’ll––— "

"I must take care of her, Wullie."

William straightened in his chair. "You? My, we are tonish these days, talking of taking mistresses as calm as you please!"

"I cannot say whether Polly will have me in that way or not. I know only that I am responsible for Ma’s death. My friend gave the putrid fever to her–– "

"I will not listen to such talk! I had thought we were done with it. If you must have the baggage, then that is your concern. Though how you will support her is beyond my—"

John said deliberately, "There are other anatomists in London beside yourself, Wullie. One of them may use me in some mean capacity or other."

William crumpled. Tears stood bright in his eyes. "How could you use me so, Jock?" he asked softly. "We are the Hunter brothers! Are you to let some little slut come between us?" He sobbed quietly.

"The choice must be yours, Wullie," John said.

A silence fell between them. John wavered. Not the American and Ma and Polly together meant to him what William did. "God damn you!" William screamed suddenly. "You little turd! Run off to some other anatomist, will you? Aye, and take my secrets with you? William’s voice was as thick with brogue as John’s had ever been, his eyes hard and dry. "Tell them of my plans to best the Monro’s, tell them of our theories By God, you will not! I’ll not sacrifice my future for some halfpenny little whore! She’ll come here, to this house. Aye, and she’ll work for her keep, you may rely on that. She’ll clean and scrub and sew––"

"Saving you no little amount of money, Brother," John put in.

"Certainly! Saving me–- Eh?" William’s sweet smile made its tremulous appearance; it steadied, beautifying his aristocratic countenance. "Mercy on us, Jock, how true! The wench can clean the School as well. But mind you, keep an eye on her when the students are there! I’ll brook no––"

"Never fear, Wullie. Polly’s for marriage."

"Umph!"

John decided to remain silent on the matter of Polly’s affair with the American.

William was suddenly preoccupied with his lace. "Let us hope Mistress Polly sews a fine hand. My linen is badly in need of repair."

For the first time during the interview John sat himself down. "Wullie, I need some money."

"Money!" William bawled. He looked staggered at the enormity of John’s blunt request. "For that little––"

"No, not for Polly. I wish to make preparations of animals."

"Animals? What animals?"

"All animals," John said simply. "I had thought to buy carcasses from the various menageries about town." In his halting way, he began to explain to William his project for comparing the anatomies of animals to man’s. William, quizzical at first, suddenly took fire. His lips began to move in concert with John’s,

"Then we would have an array of the imperfect to the perfect," John said, stumbling along. "We could arrange them in that manner----- No, let us go forward-------"

"I shall arrange the preparations myself," William said smoothly, "when they are done. But let us not," he added in warning, "forget that the Monro’s are at our heels! The injection of the testes, Jock, and after that the lymphatics. Not to mention the –- "

"Hernia congenita," John supplied. "I had a glimpse of Pott’s preparation at the hospital."

"And?"

John grinned. "No fear from that quarter, Wullie. Not now."

"Good," William said. "Good." He sought for his snuffbox. "Well, Brother, matters are fully in hand, eh? Petee. Quite a little storm we two had--------Tell me truthfully, Jock, would you have gone to some other anatomist?"

"Indeed no, Wullie," John said promptly.

"Ha! You rogue!" William said fondly.

Before the summer was out, Polly arrived at the house in the Great Piazza. William and John barely mentioned the matter between them. John was hard at preparing a monkey in his evenings, and William had a new preparation for the Gravid Uterus. They worked opposite one another in the preparation room, cosily excluding all the world as they played at being the united front which they chose to call "the Hunter brothers".

"Thirty-six students, so far," William gloated one evening.

"Gods, they’ll keep us busy."

"If they do not," William said lightly, "I shall."

Thus again, William was sounding the trumpets of Wullie’s War.

xiii

A thin and silent Polly appeared to clean the School. She avoided the preparation room and peeked fearfully into the empty dissection room, shuddering. She came shrieking out of the parlour, for John had taken to hanging varnished preparations in there to dry.

John soothed her with a glass of wine, holding one hand firmly. He pointed overhead, explaining what each organ was. She would not look up, preferring to fix her wide-set eyes on his face. Under her lank hair her skin was sallow and blotched. He poured her more wine.

"‘Twill thicken your blood," he said, urging it on her.

It loosened her tongue as well. She was bitter about her new estate. Duncan treated her as if she were a drab; Dr. William did not know of her existence except to set her to tending his linens–—

"… and I could have been, this minute, in a fine house in America," she concluded angrily. "My own fine house, and all the servants I wanted. My own coach and my own------ "

"Husband," John supplied gently. "You must not grieve, Polly. You’re a pretty lass and there’ll be another man to–- "

"Grieve! La! All he left me was his brat. Had it not been for the fever–— Why, I’d have been Ma all over again. On the Bridge with a brat in my arms, whining for a shilling–— "

"Perhaps," John said, "that will be enough wine, Polly. You had best sweep the students’ room."

She left him without another word.

Nor was the name of her lover ever to cross her lips. But as autumn drew on, she lost her wanness and sullenness as well. Soon her step would be quick on the stair and she as saucy as ever. William saw to it that she appeared at the School only when absolutely necessary. Her days of flirting with the Hunter students, William declared, were past.

xiv

The students arrived, fifty-three of them. Over half were resident students, filling the house in the Little Piazza to bursting, crowding over into William’s old room so that John had to move again into the closet he had taken over from Mr. Symons; others spilled out into apartments in and around the Garden, pouring into the coffee houses and taverns, rubbing elbows with the actors and wits and ageing frolicsome blades who frequented the Garden, strolling in groups under the arcades, cramming William’s lecture-room to the point where the air was stale a quarter-hour after William had begun, and always talking, talking, talking, about the ailing Mr. Cheselden, about Percival Pott, about Sam Sharp, about Caesar Hawkins who made two thousand pounds a year with his lancet alone, about the rumour that a lady claimed to have caught the venereal poison from the leeches of a reputable surgeon, about their plans and aspirations, and about the dissections that lay in store for them and conjectures as to who was dying at that very moment, destined to fall under their scalpels. This last led to some very witty jests, and John, living among them, silent, remote, always busy, thought dourly: Aye, amuse yourselves; gentlemen, but when the subjects arrive—then you will sing another tune, for there will be no horse-play in my dissection room.

When the sunlight on the Garden grew thin and colourless and the shadows under the Piazzas were a dank grey, he went in search of Clutterbuck. When be found him, in a cellar in Alsatia, he was dismayed to discover that Clutterbuck was withdrawn, and in a pet. He was forced to believe, after a moment’s conversation, that he had somehow, inadvertently, wounded Clutterbuck deeply. Not comprehending, John continued to idle his way through a number of prefatory pleasantries, until he saw that Clutterbuck had made of his face a mean puckered purse. It was clear that the old rogue no longer intended to squander the gold of his friendship on the likes of Jock Hunter. Very deliberately Clutterbuck spat a mouthful of gin just past John’s cheek and tried to turn away. Annoyed, amused, and certainly determined, John would not have it so, grabbing at his arm. "Damn you! It’s harvesting time, you old bastard, time to bring in the sheaves!"

"Gittum yourself," Clutterbuck gummed angrily. "Or find your fine friend who took the guinea that was mine not so long ago."

This was so meaningless to John that he stared. "I have no friend," he began, inching his way, and then remembered the dead American, and with the old ache of intuitive guilt saw again a cellar room, similar to this one, with the water on the floor and the sailor in the back, ill with the fever, but not yet dead, only condemned as John bargained with a murderer whose forehead was a thoroughfare for lice wandering from the left side of his wig to the right. "I have no friend," he repeated. "Except a dead one."

"Oh, dead indeed," Clutterbuck said righteously. "I saw him myself, dead with the gaol fever, and that guinea closed tight in his mouth."

"He–— The one who—"

Now Clutterbuck was the one to stare. "Aye, and who else were we talking about?"

"The gaol fever?"

"And the guinea you give him closed away in his mouth," Clutterbuck repeated in the same aggrieved tone. "When you knew I would have helped you dig for half of that. Oh:" he said on a rising note, "never fear it’s the money! mind! But that the Hunter gentlemen have traded with me for years now, and the first time you cannot find me …. "

"When did he die?"

Clutterbuck took a drink of gin and swirled it about his gums before answering. "Within the week, the murthering –— "

"Then you heard of that part of it too."

"There was talk," Clutterbuck said judiciously. "You’d best be careful, Jock, lad. Stealing lives is not the same as just stealing the dead. You’d come to me, and that would not have------ "

"I’ve come to you now," John put in.

Clutterbuck mused. "They said about the Garden that the American died too," he asked in a questioning voice.

"He died."

"Ah, then…" And as if John had learned his lesson, an eye for an eye, Clutterbuck clapped him heartily on the back. "You never can tell what will happen," he said slowly, "when you trust a stranger. I would have told you myself, Jock, beware of them that comes off a ship with fever. Stay away!"

"Indeed?

"Indeed indeed! Shit; fever’s the same as gaol fever, I should think you’d know. That poor murthered sailor gave your American the fever that killed him. Killed him and his murderer both."

"Gave it to him?"

"Aye," Clutterbuck said, and spat, "that is What I said."

Thus, his greatest concern as the weather grew cold was the procurement of the subjects for the students. Over fifty subjects! Lord, where would he and Clutterbuck and company find them all? They would have to be snatched from graves, stolen from biers in the middle of the night, slipped out of undertakers’ rooms, lifted from gutters, carried down from garrets, dragged from the river, and purchased from the bereaved. At the prospect, Clutterbuck exhibited no little gloom. He yammered about his gums and the assorted tribulations of the professional grave-robber. He was strangely skittish, evasive, appearing when he was not wanted only to be swallowed up by the dark slums of Alsatia when he was. One night he had come rapping at the dissection room door, in company with a gaunt youth who had once had the case among cases of the smallpox. All dignity tonight, adorned in his highwayman’s coat, and eschewing those waggish asides he could not usually resist on the matter of John’s preoccupation with the vas deferens, he thrust the youth before him and announced:

"Mr. Jock… me ‘prentice. Howison by name," and then kicked the hapless lad squarely in the backside. So prompted, he of the case among cases executed an awkward bow for John. "Hmmm…" Clutterbuck said, evaluating his apprentice’s performance. Thoughtfully he came in the door, slamming it in young Howison’s face, to advance to the fire. "Very chilly out, Jock. A nip of gin to—"

"Are you going to leave him out in the wet?" John asked.

"Certainly! Discipline him to long hours in the cold. First thing the lad must learn." Clutterbuck took his ease on a dissection table. "On that head, you should apply to Dr. William to get you a helper, Jock. All those students upstairs. Would make your life easier all around, and free you for… tee… a lubrication or two––

"Damn you, mind your own affairs!" John shouted. He wanted no sharp young lad playing Jock Hunter to his Mr. Symons.

Clutterbuck rose, dusting himself off. "Well, don’t fret your guts to fiddle-strings about it. ‘Twas only a suggestion."

He departed, to disappear completely for over a week. The students were honing their scalpels in the meantime, speaking with a delirious apprehension of the Paris Method. "The first dry moon-less night, gentlemen," John promised, "and we should have some subjects."

"And where," William demanded in the privacy of the preparation room, "is that rogue, Clutterbuck? Or that lackwit votary of his you spoke of?"

John could not say. During the lecture he wandered about, searching, only to discover the forlorn Howison right under his nose. Howison was supping glumly on hot punch in Tom King’s, gazing sadly into his mug. "Ah, Mr. Jock, I fear Mr. Clutterbuck is on the highways," he said.

"My good God! He’s too old for it."

"So he is," young Howison agreed. "But there’s been thievings every night I’ve not been able to find him. And how else can all those tickers he’s got be explained? Not"—Howison’s voice broke, emerging from the pocked face in a whisper—"to mention the wipes."

"Watches and kerchiefs—oh, the fool, risking his neck for— When next you see him, tell him to come to me at once!" John had started away when another thought engaged him. He bent over the unhappy Howison. "Unless lad, you’d like to earn a pound or so for your own. Eh?" he wheedled.

Howison but clutched his mug the closer. "I should have to ask the master," he said. Somewhere among the galaxy of pocks, determination managed to find space for itself on his countenance.

Bygar, the loyal little turd, John thought indignantly. He took his leave, and was then to be nagged by William on the matter as soon as he told his brother of it.

At last, Clutterbuck reappeared, showing himself more than ever the dandy, from his highwayman’s coat to his silver buckles and the lace kerchief dangling elegantly from a sleeve. The gold braid on his waistcoat glittered, and his wig was fresh from the perukemaker’s.

"You fool," John said, by way of greeting. "You utter –– Are you trying to get yourself hanged?"

Clutterbuck simpered. His ‘prentice stood behind him looking meaningfully at John, for it turned out that Clutterbuck was paying a social visit rather than a business one.

"I’m relying on you," John said sternly. "We have need of at least thirty subjects as soon as you can bring them in. Yet you come to while away an evening with me talking about nothing!"

"I’ve given me ‘prentice," Clutterbuck said, with a graceful wave of his hand, "leave to attend to your wants."

"Then I’ll pay him directly as well. Will that suit your convenience?"

It would not. It would seem only fair that a master was entitled to some share of the earning of his ‘prentice, earnings accruing only by virtue of the training the ‘prentice had received through the kindness and generosity––—

"My God," John interrupted, "what did you do, make them give you lessons in fancy talk and deportment whilst you were taking their watches? Come to your senses, man! There’s work and money aplenty for you this time, and you can’t deny that you’ll be paid handsomely for –– "

"But the work is so dirty," Clutterbuck protested, and for the first time John noticed that he was foolish-drunk. He sat grinning at John, a minikin rogue, his hands making fluttering motions with the lace kerchief, bringing it up to his mouth again and again. Behind him, Howison caught John’s eye and pointed to his own strong teeth. Bending closer, John saw that Clutterbuck’s gums were fat and glistening.

He must be in agony, John thought, while his hand went quietly to his pocket. "Hold him down," he said softly to Howison, who pounced without warning on his master, dealing him a sharp crack at the back of the neck. John fell on the stunned man and wrenched his mouth open. With two deep slashes he had opened the gums fully with his scalpel so that the pus poured out. "Spit!" John ordered as Clutterbuck choked and opened his eyes.

Clutterbuck retched and would have fallen had not John and Howison supported him. He made several gurgling sounds in his throat, and then lapsed into a faint.

"A fine thing," John said. "A mouth like that, and he afraid to apply to me for help. No wonder he was drunk. The real wonder is, he didn’t get caught. A highwayman ought to have his wits about him."

"Well, sir…" Howison began, and then silenced himself.

"Well, what?"

"In point of fact, sir, I was rather doing it for him. He would go on the highways, so I …. Well, I began to do it while he hid somewhere near. He’s been so good to me, sir. Like a father––- "

"I’m sure of it." John mopped at the blood in his patient’s mouth to keep him from strangling on it. " Just--like--a--father--eh?"

"Yes, sir." Looking sadly at his master, young Howison was swept up on the watery bosom of his emotions. He began quietly to weep. John thoughtfully went for a glass of wine for him. Returning, he sat staring at the fire, scheming. Such loyalty as the youth’s was not to be had at any price; therefore it was exactly the commodity the Hunter brothers were most in need of. How, then, to woo Howison away from Clutterbuck?

John refilled Howison’s glass. Abruptly he remembered that Clutterbuck had once intoned that those who went under the knife living, insured that they would go under it dead. One knife leads to another …. He smiled to himself, Clutterbuck would not know which to choose, rage or terror, when he revived.

Still, the School was provided with the subjects, for Clutterbuck lay in a fever on his pallet, while his ‘prentice deserted the highways for the graveyards. The wages from John were certain, and Howison needed the money to care for his master. As November approached, the house in the Little Piazza was quietly chaotic night after night, as men in the employ of Howison stole across the garden in the back, sacks filled with "fruit".

Gazing at one new subject after another, the emaciated, the swollen, the butchered, John wondered: Did anyone in London ever die of old age?

One subject held tightly clenched in her hand a strand of her own hair.

xv

When it happened, John was in no way surprised. Clutterbuck, piqued by young Howison’s treachery in the matter of having his gums lanced, then to serve the man who had caused him such misery, had betaken himself to the highways alone. There, under a bright November moon, he had stopped a town coach and endeavoured to rob the occupants. He was struck in his tender mouth by a choleric gentleman and beat about the head with a fan wielded by a shrieking maiden. The fan had done him a slight injury in one eye. The coachmen had also added to his injuries. He was carried in the coach to a Magistrate, and there detained. Later he was to tell his ‘prentice of how the young couple who had taken him had taunted him gleefully, and pinched and punched him when he turned sullen on them, as they carried him back to town.

He was tried and condemned. He was to be let off the first Monday after his trial. Howison’s scar of a face remained almost immobile, locked in its signature of the smallpox, as he sought out John for comfort and again wept.

On Clutterbuck’s final night in this world, Howison appeared at the School with two buxom doxies in his wake. They were off to assuage the agony of Clutterbuck’s last hours in Newgate. One carried the wine for the funereal feast, the other, the sausage. Howison felt it would be a nice gesture on John’s part to attend the feast—at least for the earlier part of the evening.

"Well " John temporised. William, he well knew, would be in a pet when he found out.

In the Newgate dungeons there were several gay patches in session, for almost a dozen were scheduled to be let off in the morning. Despite the cold and damp of the place there was still a festive air prevailing, and the dripping arches echoed the laughter of women. Clutterbuck, as be fitted one of the guests of honour for the morrow, was dressed in his best, although one sleeve was almost torn off, and the gilt embroidery of his waistcoat hung by a mere thread here and there much as if someone had attempted to claw it off. He greeted John with a touching dignity. He was, in truth, not very gay, though he supped with one hand on the thigh of his partner for the evening. Only twice did John refer to matters surgical or anatomical. On the first he enquired tactfully, "How are the gums? Any more pains?"

With equal cultivation, Clutterbuck replied, "Healing nicely, thank you. They pain me only when a draught touches them."

"Splendid," John murmured.

Then as John was taking his leave, Clutterbuck shook his hand and asked in the voice of Dr. William Hunter discussing a projected levee or loo party, "Shall I see you in the morning?"

"If you wish."

"The truth now …. You had it in mind all long to come claim me."

John grinned.

Clutterbuck smiled tremulously in return. "I have already arranged for it, Jock. There will be no fighting over me. With dignity, that’s how I will have it …. Dignity and sorrowful weeping. And don’t," he went on, suddenly growing fierce, "let the crap-merchant have this pretty coat! Remember?"

"Aye."

Again Clutterbuck’s mood changed, now he was wistful. "This time tomorrow night me ‘prentice will be wearing of this coat. And I’ll… be looking out at you from a bottle. Or parts of me swinging from the ceiling. In the parlour, I do pray…" Then his face broke as if he were a reflection in a shattered glass. "Jock, I’m to be let off in the morning. Christ, don’t let me dance! Don’t let me––"

"It will be swift, I promise you!"

"What," Clutterbuck said strangely, "was that thing you once called the noose?"

"The anodyne necklace?"

"Ah. Means that it kills pain, eh, Jock?"

"It kills pain." Clutterbuck smiled. "Always one to have your little jest, Jock." Another thought came to him. "And will you be again at that Dreadful Business with me? I never held with it, Jock, some- how …. "

"I must. But you’ll not mind. Believe me, you will see."

"Yes, so I shall …. "

Amidst the hilarity of the farewell patches, Clutterbuck stood gazing straight ahead. To John he had the look of one attempting to see through a barrier, to see both backwards and into tomorrow simultaneously. One hand rose to tremble possessively against the gold embroidery, the fingers tracing the design. "I never owned so pretty a coat before," he said to himself. "Why did the bitch have to tear at it so?" He turned away from John and blindly held out a hand to Howison who put a glass full of a mixture of wine and gin into it. Clutterbuck drank without pause. When the glass was empty, he took it from his lips. "My pretty coat," he said. "My pretty…"

In a steady downpour John hung grimly to the jerking legs of the hanged man. When the body stilled he fell away and touched Howison on the shoulder. "He’s dead, lad." While Howison stood by, John paid the hangman a pound and was thereby allowed to take the body away to be "buried in his own clothes". He arbitrarily tossed the rope to a thin, shivering, apothecary’s ‘prentice, although several cries of angry disappointment went up at this authoritative gesture. The ‘prentice hastened to stuff the rope into his shirt, then pushed his way out of the crowd, cheeks pink with his good fortune.

An entire length of rope could be compounded into innumerable specifics for as many ills, and the apothecary might, perchance, reward his ‘prentice with an extra slice of roast for supper. Clutterbuck, you have become a philanthropist, John thought, as he loaded the body into William’s chariot. "Take the coat," he said to the bereaved Howison, as they clattered along in the rain. 

xvi

"Magna est verltas et praevalebit, gentlemen," William declared joyously some thirty-two hours after the body of Clutterbuck had hung quietly in the rain. "And once again truth has prevailed, though denied by the great and scorned by the powerful. Being a humble man myself, I but submitted that the vas deferens and the epididymis were continued tubules. The wise and the renowned denounced me. No other than Professor Monro of Edinburgh University, and his son Alex Monro, Secundus, and his nephew, and the infirm anatomical staff for all I know, sirs, told me that they were not, could not be, and that I was, in short.—mad."

William raised the preparation of the injected testis on high. "Magna est verltas, gentlemen, and pray to be careful of the preparation as you pass it among you. You will notice we injected the vas deferens with mercury, and filled the whole epididymis, and the tubes that come out from the body of the testis, to and from it. I have not cut the preparation as yet. I intend to do so as soon as my brother or myself shall successfully inject another subject. That"–William said, casting an eye in John’s direction as he stood pridefully in the doorway—"shall come to pass swiftly, I may state."

And when the lecture was over, William advanced on John, radiating brotherhood and casting charm among the students as he might have coins to beggars. John retreated into the preparation room; William’s grin had been vulpine, one could never tell what he had in mind when wearing a grin such as that. William was hard after him. "Jock, my dear! If you’ve no plans, let’s sup together. Mercy on us, we brothers rarely have time for so much as a little chat together. You should not mew yourself away from me so. I’ve some new wine I want your opinion on—"

There was more to it than John’s considered opinion of the wine. Much more, as it turned out. William was interested in other opinions of his as well. And John, gazing into William’s library fire, could not find answers. "Wullie, there is no way of accounting for our sudden success. We have used the same methods over and over. But this time—this time only…"

They sat comfortably, musing, listening to the rain pelt the garden. Overhead there sounded quick footsteps, and Duncan’s nag drifted down faintly. "Miss Polly, where did yew put Doctor William’s new–—"

John laughed. "Poor little Polly. Duncan is after her like an old woman."

"Ha," William said "The minx is quite able to…" He drifted into silence as one will with his mind on more important matters.

John’s great jaw slid forward, he plucked two thick hairs from his brow, lost in thought, winced, and had at the orange fur again. "Wullie, at Newgate on his last night, Clutterbuck had two women at his disposal."

"For shame, Jock. D’ye mean to say you went to such a place?"

"He had two… pray, attend me, Wullie, two women! He spent his last hours drinking and rogering the night away. And I’ll wager he didn’t stop until he dropped from exhaustion. Drained… . Or would that matter?"

They delved into each other’s gazes.

"Could it matter?" John repeated. "The whole system drained, yet not collapsed, because he was still alive. Does the difference lie there?"

Together they reviewed the hypothesis. At last William, nodding-indeed, indeed, indeed—lips moving with John’s, spoke out suddenly, "We have stumbled on the secret, Jock! You must hasten to find us another subject, so that we may slice the next preparation. ‘Pon my soul, every anatomist in England will be talking of nothing but the discovery once they hear of it. The Hunter School of Anatomy, Surgery, and Midwifery will be on the lips of the Monro’s from morn until night. No discoveries, eh? Oh, let them but hear of it …. "

Trust William, he was hard at spreading the word before the week was out. Strange physicians came threading their ways after William into the School’s preparation room, there to gawk, and nudge one another behind William’s back. A cranky old gentleman fell heavily into a chair, and leaning his chin on his gold-headed cane, demanded of John, "But, sir, in-ter-esting as the discovery may be, I find no prac-tic-al use of it."

"Exactly," William wove in sweetly, "the response Harvey met with when he discovered the circulation of the blood. Interesting and impractical. Ah yes, we anatomists are greeted with it everywhere. I have no doubt that my Atlas of the Gravid Uterus will be so received one day. But there, Doctor"—William made the slightest of bows—"knowledge is of little use to any but the knowing. Surely, he who first set a keystone into an arch may be said to have postulated a cathedral?"

Going on in this manner, William gave himself a fine time before the gentlemen departed—or perhaps retreated was the better word, John decided. William led the gentlemen on through to the parlour to point overhead. "Now here, Dr. Grimes, we have—"

But the elderly physician was peevishly announcing that he must have some coffee. William interrupted himself with a soft cry of dismay. Tsk… remiss! Would the gentlemen accompany him to his house—only a step or two to the Great Piazza—never forgive himself if they did not

After lecture that night, William stopped to chat at John a moment while he blew out the candles. "Have you received a suitable subject from Howison yet? We must do another preparation at once, Brother. After that we have but to clear up the matter of the hernia congenita, and get on into the lymphatics. Or absorbents, as I prefer to call them. Did you say you had received another subject from Howison?"

Aye, Wullie. No, Wullie, aye, Wullie, no.

"Then what have you been doing?" William wanted to know.

Well, among other things, he had discovered his thoughts to dwell frequently on Polly. The glimpses he had of her tripping fearfully past the dissection room (and yet, those wide-set eyes must peek in to flit greedily over the handsomer students), or shopping in the arcades or at produce barrows, blithely depositing parcel after parcel on the nagging Duncan just as if he were a shelf, or lingering—not even lingering, just the merest hesitation—as she passed the play-house door to catch a compliment or so—well, among other things, these glimpses of her might be said to add up to frequent thoughts of Polly. Might they not? Strange, when he thought on it, that he did not see her more.

xvii

Clutterbuck had trained Howison well, John was edified to learn. The youth knew the exact value of a bribe, and to whom it was to be offered for the greatest results. And too, he knew the exact amount any particular bribe should be, for over-payment earns only scorn in a community such as Alsatia. It was a peculiar circumstance, to be sure, Howison’s representing a customer who was in the market for males who had died literally on the body of a woman, but it appealed in some way to the denizens of Alsatia, and they sought to supply the merchandise. Certain swaggering gentlemen extracted a promise from Howison, that should they be hanged, he would procure a number of women for them on their last night. Naturally, there were wagers as to the number of women these certain gentlemen could accommodate. "And it’s all for a good cause!" a wag said, and Alsatia took it up at once.

One bitter February night it so happened that a handsome thief was stabbed while having what the courts would call a "criminal conversation" with a married lady. The husband wiped his knife on his coat, kicked his lady in the face, and sent word to Howison that he had a certain article for sale. Someone brought up the criminal conversation aspect of the matter, and someone else—the wag again, no doubt—averred the victim always had "talked overly much", and yet another person remarked upon young Howison’s sagacity, exemplified here in the ease with which he had procured the corpse. That last party mentioned was, of course, Dr. William Hunter, doling out Latin and largesse to the faithful Howison.

The very next evening Dr. Hunter exhibited a second preparation of a testis injected with quicksilver. This preparation was cut to reveal the connection of the tubules of the vas deferens and epididymis. And, for a wonder, William was saying, "My brother’s work, gentlemen; do be tender of it. Note, if you will, the nicety of execution."

John’s cup ran over.

xviii

"Wullie, am I to walk after Pott again this summer?"

"Oh, operative surgery…" William said negligently. "I suppose it would do you no harm to continue on with it. One day you might want to take the examination at the Surgeons Hall. But again, if you do not care to practise …. Umm, are these the notes you made while dissecting that civet cat?"

"Then, Wullie, if I am to continue on at the School, Wullie, I may be paying my respects to Polly at times this summer. I had thought to take her boating on the river, perhaps, or-------"

"Oh, dear me no, Jock. You’re off to Scotland this summer."

"Scotland!"

"Why, yes, to bring our sister back to London with you." William had a letter somewhere, had he not shown it to John? He thought he had "Well, no matter. She cannot find a husband at home," William said in explanation.

She was the only surviving member of the Hunter family in Scotland. Now Dorothea wanted to join her brothers in London. "The trip will do you no end of good," William said.

John went. William drove him to the coachyard in his chariot. William exhorted John to rest in Scotland from his labours in the dissection room, found himself going naturally from that topic to the happier one concerning the fallen Monro’s, reviewed briefly the major battles of Wullie’s War, clapped John on the back, and concluded, "Pray hasten back, Brother. I need you."

John leaned out of the coach to wave at William. At the sight of the elegant figure in the brocaded coat, legs placed just so, white hand waving a kerchief, a great wrenching tore at John. He was homesick for William even before the coach turned a corner and Dr. William Hunter was lost to sight.

The coach careened through the crowded streets, then through the outskirts of town, at last gaining a rise so that London lay below them.

The dome of St. Paul’s floated like a half-moon in the sky. John felt he might have reached out his hand to cup it.

4

Dorothea Hunter had reached that decade of her life known as the thirties. There she remained for two years, wandering the shores of her youth, while William became thirty-five and then thirty-six, and John, ten years behind him, reached twenty-six. Still Dorothea could not force herself to venture into the interior of the dark unwanted middle years, searching plaintively everywhere for a husband. She was a good woman, a kind and reasonable woman, and so she would have a minister. For two years William had combed the town for divines, inviting them to dine with him. He could not remember, he remarked ruefully to John, when last he had put a bite of food into his mouth that he did not have to wash it down with one pious assertion or another. Though this was not exactly the truth, for William had become highly fashionable and had danced away many a night in some of the finest houses in town, John assumed a properly grave expression. Dorothea had a fault; the brothers had come to acknowledge it with no little dismay.

She had a whining voice, sharp and pointed as a couching needle, which she wove endlessly in and out of yards of inconsequential conversation. William was driven to drumming his fingers on the furniture, while John sat, thoughts on the School, grunting, "Uh… uh… uh …. "

Duncan muttered darkly that Miss Hunter gave him the gout, whatever he meant by that.

Whereas Polly seemed to find Dorothea’s vocalisations utterly compelling and sat sweetly listening by the hour. She brushed and powdered Dorothea’s Scotch-orange hair, and touched her Hunterian nose with the lightest dusting of flour, and darkened her pink brows, as William did his, with a smudge of char. She was respectful at all times to Dorothea, as became a lass just turning eighteen, yet never so much that her manner emphasized in any way the differences in their ages. Only John caught the glint of calculation in her dark eyes—but then, he saw everything about her there was to be seen. She was so glossy, so delectable, that she hollowed him out to look on her. William noticed with a smile.

"Do not forget the girl’s antecedents, Jock. Nor that she is a servant in nay house." Then he would go on to other matters, the animal preparations, the slowly growing collection of the hernia congenita, the truly astonishing number of young men who were seeking out William to fee him for the autumn term. Important topics, to William’s mind. And to John’s as well.

Polly had noticed too, and therein John’s downfall lay. 

He had been over to the house in the Great Piazza, tending to the preparations William had taken to storing there in what he called his "museum". In this room were exhibited William’s coin collection and a few of his incunabula, and some of the more esoteric of the preparations. William was in and out of the room, fussing, gossiping about someone or other called Horace Walpole, and sipping at his vinium pomonae. It was William’s favourite wine, though John considered it weak in the knees. Poor Henry Fielding had sent a cask of the pale vinegary wine to William from Portugal, just before his death in that strange unheard-of place. Therefore William liked to sip his vinium pomonae and tell himself he was racked by memories. He was no such thing. "Ah, poor Henry," he said. "Jock, do you find this shade of blue becoming to me?"

"Very, Brother," John said, not bothering to look up.

"Hmmm. Still, I think I shall turn this suit over to Duncan. Unless, of course," William said hastily, "you would care for it."

"I’d look the proper fool in a blue velvet sewt," John said. "Give it to Duncan."

The brothers laughed inordinately.

"Well, I must be off," William said, finishing the last of his wine. "Poor, poor Henry …. I suppose that sister of ours is dressed by now. Polly has been at bedecking her for the entire afternoon. Mercy on us, perhaps I shall marry Sister off to Horry?"

"Who?"

William was gone. Dorothea’s sharp voice sounded in the corridor, and then—for a wonder—there was complete silence in the house. After a time Duncan slipped past the museum, on his way out, dressed no less stylish than William had been.

John was ready to return to the Little Piazza.

"I am lonesome," Polly said, and he turned to see her looking in at him.

"That will never do, will it, Polly?"

They left the house together, bound for the School. The parrot greeted them as they went by, "Son-of-a-bitch-son-of-"

"Horrid beast," Polly said.

She fixed a supper for him, laughing and teasing him through the meal, eating but little herself She decried his coiffure and then must sit on his lap and tidy his club herself. Then she invited him to test the softness of her own glossy hair. His hand strayed to her breast as well.

"I am for marriage, sir," Polly said.

"And I," he heard himself say, soaring with desire.

She was too wise to press the matter then; and if in the dusk of his bedroom he read no love and only calculation in her glance, he was too enraptured to care.

They laid their plans. He would have to pass the Examination at the Surgeons Hall before he could practise surgery. Unfortunately, he had forgotten much of what he had learned of operative surgery. He would need to walk after some surgeon or other again. He had no money of his own, and would have to save that winter for the fee. Nor could he desert William on such short notice, Polly must understand that.

She did, she had long since learned to refrain from pouting.

"In the spring," he said, "I shall be free enough to resume my study of surgery. And by summer ––––- Gods, I do not know what William will say to these plans of ours!"

Faintly, faintly, they heard the parrot’s cry.

"I do," Polly said.

He barely remarked her. Living flesh was for him, anatomist that he was, quite a revelation.

ii

And still John kept his counsel, reluctant to speak his heart to William. When the students arrived, he and Polly took to stealing out at nights, crisp or wet alike, to meet under the dark portico of the church. At first he had her favours, then as she grew more insistent that he inform William of their plans, and he would not, she sulked by withholding herself from him. "I shall be Mrs. Hunter whether it pleases him or not," she said repeatedly, and Ma lived again in her voice. In the end Polly would make a contest of wills of it, his to procrastinate, hers to resume a slightly worn chastity.

He worked harder than ever for William; no anatomical anomaly in any of the subjects escaped his notice or his scalpel; animal peddlers came regularly to the School with the remains of baitings at Hockley-in-the-Hole; the bereaved and starved had their dead for sale—these he examined most carefully; and there grew larger by the hour in the back of his mind the notion that he had yet some major project to accomplish for William. 

Nor had William forgotten the clarion call of the name Monro. The very word seemed to evoke for him that army of young men who crowded the lecture-halls of the various universities, seeking to learn anatomy through their ears, rather than by their hands under the tutelage of Dr. William Hunter. Only in the matter of the gravid uterus was he able to feel himself the authoritative anatomist. And then, one evening, idly listening to the lecture while engaged in preparing a tiger’s urogenital system, John was alerted to the sound of William’s speech becoming irrhythmic, faltering even. The subject was the gravid uterus:

"… substance of the placenta is a fleshy mass which seems to be formed—ah entirely of the vessels of the umbilical rope." As if in afterthought, he went on, "When injected, the placenta appears exactly like a mass of vessels, but there is also some white uninjected substance between the vessels which must—may—be lymphatic… I have here some preparations which I shall pass to the first gentleman to my left. If you will observe––—"

John found himself, head lifted as if intent on some distant cannonade, thinking, Lymphatics—or what?

Should a discovery be made in that direction by another than a Hunter … I would flee the country, John decided, and he was in no wise amused.

He owed to William then, the discovery of the occasion of the hernia congenita, and the proof of the absorbing function of the lymphatic system. And what of the animal preparations illustrating some fancy or concept of a pattern of life, of which he was aware, and which William grasped, and which neither could have expressed? That too, he owed.

"You owe me the duty of telling William," Polly said one night under the portico. "Tell him, Jock, or you shall see no more of me." She left him inflamed in the state to which she had deliberately aroused him. He could not follow her under the arcade of the Great Piazza until he had contained himself; and when he did walk back and forth past William’s door he knew not whether he hated or desired her the more.

He mounted the steps and knocked loudly on William’s door. Polly admitted him in silence, her eyes beady in the light of her candle. Again Ma looked out, indomitable, from the pretty face. "I will speak to William," John said.

iii

"Absurd," William said carelessly, "the girl’s a strumpet. Let us speak of other matters, Jock. I fear we are remiss in the lymphatics. Gossip has of late reached my ears that the Monro’s are interesting themselves in the———-"

"Wullie, she is not a strumpet!"

William had the audacity to look confused. "Who?"

"Damn you, we will hew to the point! Polly is not a-—-"

"Indeed? And had not your American friend-—that scoundrel who received twenty guineas of anatomical teaching from you for nothing, who lived under a roof I paid for, who ate food!–-"

"What has he to do with it?" ,

"Why only this, Brother, Polly was his sl-—-"

"Say that, and I will …" John had risen, not knowing himself that he was on his feet, stained hand in a fist.

William was as scornfully composed as one watching some poor fellow attempt to play—act. "Pray seat yourself, Jock. I have no fears of your striking me."

John fell hack into his chair, jaw out thrust.

"We must not wrangle over the little-—over her, Jock." William was saddened now. "I would not have brought up her former lover at all, but that I was certain you knew of her pregnancy at the time she was stricken with the gaol fever. On that head, Percival Pott spoke of it to me, purely in confidence, you understand, wishing to know only if I thought her pregnancy might have kept her safe to some degree from the ravages of the fever. There is some theory among accoucheurs, I am one of them-—though the eminent Dr. Smellie is not, and to tell the truth, Brother, how Smelly Smellie maintains his reputation in the face of his abysmal inability even so much as to keep his linen clean and his hands! Mercy on us, I saw him in the ward just a day or so ago, wig askew, nails as long as the Chinese are said to—-"

"Wullie, I beg of you, help me," John put in so simply then broke off and stared.

"How then, Jock? Do you feel yourself competent to return to Scotland and practise? No one would know of Polly there, and were she to mend her ways, I suppose she would make you a good enough wife. If wife you must make her."

"Look at me, Brother," John said wretchedly. "Look carefully at my face. Am I pretty like yourself? Do I have your parts and airs and graces? Am I also, winning? Gods, there is probably no woman in London who would refuse to become your mistress! But I am not elegant and handsome as you are——-"

"Oh come, come …" William murmured, in spite of himself.

"I must offer marriage," John concluded. "Polly will not have me otherwise."

William shifted in his chair and twirled the dumb-Waiter until the wine decanter threatened to slip to the floor. "Well, I suppose you can bring no disgrace to your sister or myself off in Scotland. I’ll write to a friend of mine, or surgeon, and see what he might offer you in the way of-—"

"Polly will not go to Scotland."

William left off fidgeting with the dumb-Waiter. "In that case, I see no further point in discussing the matter. Unless, of course," he grew shrill in an instant, "you have again decided to sell yourself to some other anatomist. Sell yourself and all we have done together, betray me… . My dear Jock, are you again contemplating that?" John merely shook his head heavily. "You know that I would not, Wullie. No, I have it in mind to resume my study of operative surgery-—-"

"Which you so dearly adore," William murmured.

"Wullie, I beg of you! Resume my study until I feel myself ready to take the examination. I shall continue on in the dissection room until February, but after that I could walk after Pott in the after noons again.’

"Not Pott," William said calmly. "I cannot afford his exorbitant fees. I was willing to make the sacrifice when I thought you were to continue on with me, but not merely to further some conceit of yours. I wanted to give you the best, Jock, or at least far better training than I was able to obtain for myself. I was very poor, as you well know, and could only attend a small hospital. I walked the wards of St. George’s for a term or so——

"Then St. George’s should suffice for me, certainly," John said, loathing himself for his descending to craftiness.

"Hmmm… . I suppose I could pay that. Loan you the money."

William smiled his sweetest, his most affectionate. "You will not care for St. George’s, Brother."

iv

Spring never came abruptly; it presented itself and then persevered. Throughout chilling rains and tenacious nightly freezes, spring stayed; then when the last dirty hard crust of snow lingering in some bleak sunless crevice melted, spring prevailed. In gratitude, those who had prayed for it enough the bitter winters, now cursed it. The skin swelled, scalps grew moist under wigs that itched and irritated constantly, lice multiplied, linens were never quite dry, and the doxies of the Garden wafted a heavy venereal odour that damped all but the most ardent of gentlemen.

In the dissection room the subjects were beginning to putrefy, to swell. It was time for John to leave off his proctoring and enter St. George’s Hospital as a student himself.

William had arranged it for him. "You are to walk after my friend Mr. Middleton," he told John with a thread of malice in his tone.

"You dined with him once at my house."

"Aye, I remember him. My—-thanks, Wullie."

"Ha," William said.

Once again he found himself breathing the pungent air of a cutting ward. That air so rich and thick as to make one wonder why it was not visible, knowing, too, that it would surely be creamy. Against the cream, assuming now that the air could be seen, John thought the flowers ordered by the surgeons for the patients would add a touch of violet to the scheme, and the vinegar thrown on the doors would appear as jagged green streaks. Despite all he could do, all reminders of Polly and his urge to possess her, to satiate himself on her, he grew impatient at once with surgeons and surgery. He no longer believed that flowers would prevent a patient from being infected by the stench of his own surgical wound, nor that the vinegar on the floors would protect the rest. He was appalled to find himself ever echoing a stilled voice: Humbug. It is all humbug and butchery.

Outwardly the hospital had the most pleasant appearance and situation of any he had ever seen. Located beyond the west end of town, at Hyde Park Corner, it commanded open countryside, as well as the Park. The brick building itself was three-storied, commodious, having its own garden, and, by the road, its own ditch into which the sewage of the hospital emptied. The building had once been a home, and standing at the narrow front door, smelling the scent of sewage after a spring rain, one could read inscribed over a pediment:

It is my delight to be

Both in the town and country.

From Covent Garden to the hospital was a pleasant walk of about two miles. On wet days the distance seemed somewhat greater. Within the hospital John, all unwilling, walked into a storm of politics, professional jealousies, and petty rivalries. On the first floor there was war in the Board Room, and bickering among the servants in the kitchen. On the second floor, in the wards, the Matron battled with the nurses for selling gin to the patients, while the physicians and surgeons fought bitterly among themselves, with the apothecarial staff ready as replacements should a man fall. Occasionally all wars became as one with irate surgeons storming down the broad wooden steps of the staircase to tattle, and wrathful physicians mounting the steps to deal firmly with a surgeon who had gotten out of hand. For a week John found the situation amusing, then, being John Hunter, found himself embroiled also.

The senior surgeon at St. George’s was William’s friend, Mr. David Middleton. As it was to Mr. Middleton that William had applied to secure more training for John, John found himself under that gentleman’s flag. Unfortunately, Mr. Middleton was quiet, dreamy, and completely overshadowed by the driving force of one of his juniors, Caesar Hawkins, he who was reputed to earn two thousand pounds a year with his lancet alone. Caesar Hawkins was a strong wind of a man, hearty, blustering, and possessor of an enormous practise. Like Dr. Pitcairn of St. Bart’s who believed there was no disease but what laudanum would cure it, Mr. Caesar Hawkins zoo had his panacea. There was no ailment known to man that Mr. Hawkins could not cure by heroic bleeding. Just coming into his forties, a singular honour had already befallen him. Mr. Hawkins was Sergeant-Surgeon to George II. It was no secret wherever Caesar Hawkins happened to be that His Majesty suffered from piles.

Always at Mr. Hawkins’ heels was his apprentice, a spare prim young man named John Gunning. Mr. Gunning had his eye fixed on gaining the position of house surgeon in a few years, after which he would become a member of the staff. As Mr. Hawkins’ ’prentice, the place was practically assured for him. Thus, confident of his ends, having only to complete his apprenticeship and bide his time, young Gunning went about performing his duties with a clerkly efficiency, questioning no orders, rarely thinking.

John Hunter took a violent dislike to John Gunning almost at once. First off, Gunning had a habit of pushing out his mouth when at work which annoyed John to unreasonable lengths. Secondly, he had little use for anatomy or surgical schools and the like; a surgeon learned his trade under a master, not sitting in a room with fifty others scribbling on paper. Thirdly, he had little interest in cutting dead things up, be they animals or human beings. Nothing could be gained by such tomfoolery, was Mr. Gunning’s opinion, and he pushed his mouth out as he gave it.

Perforce, John had to remind himself that he was there to fill in the gaps in his knowledge of operative surgery. If I apply myself, he thought, I shall be ready to present myself for the Examination by autumn. Autumn——but not Polly came to mind, instead he felt the old excitement of readying for the new term, of gloating with Howison over the needs of the dissection room, of— Gods, he must hew to the point!

Polly took to playing a dangerous game with him. Now that he was preparing a career in earnest so that he might have her, she clung to Dorothea’s side close as a fearful virgin. She had heard some of a lady’s having been raped in the churchyard, there was a rumour about the Garden that a band of men——

"I’m but asking you to walk the Piazzas with me!" John yelled exasperation. "I’ll be at your side——"

But at this point, the good and kindly Dorothea opened her mouth. "I am reminded of a terrible thing that happened at home when I was just a child Jock and you were so young that I doubt you could remember it at all William may I must ask him one day if he does though he may have been at the University at the time Jamie was alive I do remember that clearly poor Jamie how William loved him I shall never forget that day that terrible day when William threw himself on Jamie’s grave but there you were there yourself Jock and screamed fearfully in a tantrum the night poor Jamie was earthed I thought I truly thought William would rise up in his grief and———"

"Indeed?" Polly was interjecting as William so often did when fascinated by another’s conversation. "Indeed? Indeed. Indeed! In––-"

She was never so pretty, so glossy, so certain of her charms. He left in a fury. He could go back to the School and work, listening to William rise to the heights of his course in midwifery, rusty forceps aloft, or he could get drunk. He felt he could not bear the sight of the rusty forceps again, and so chose to go to Tom King’s.

Glumly he passed under the portico of the church; another couple were engrossed there, ignorant of his step, or, perhaps, only careless of it. The girl cried out in pleasure—there was no force here.

The night was windy, he felt as if the gusts were fanning his skin to match the flame of his Scotch hair. The wind blew him in the door of Tom King’s and an unwelcome howl of welcome nearly blew him out. A great drunken ruffian sporting a wig which looked as if he had stolen it from a shoe-black clutched John by the arm. "Hunter, isn’t it? And how is the business going?" A monstrous grin hung over John in the crowded steamy room.

"It would be bad if we had to depend on the likes of you," John retorted testily, and attempted to pull away.

"Now …" the ruffian said in mock dismay. "There was nothing wrong with the dog I brought to sell you."

"Except that it was in ribands, torn by a bull!" John saw with no little satisfaction that they were garnering an audience. "What was I to do with it, make it into a pie?"

The ruffian chose to roar with laughter at this, though his fingers, lying on John’s arm, slyly gathered together material and flesh, pinching painfully.

John struck him with the length of his forearm, catching him a clout that snapped his head to one side. The man was far from felled, letting John free for only a moment before attempting to close with John pulled his head deep into his great shoulders, intending to make a ram of it. He hurled himself forward, butting his antagonist, and then was himself flung against those who crowded around them. Off balance, with only his heels in contact with the floor, and his backside where his knees should have been, he was helpless for an instant. In that instant someone kneed him ferociously in the seat of his breeches to send him flying again into the ruffian’s mid-section. Then he fell sprawling, and knew that it would not go well with him from then on. He caught the first kick in his chest, the second glanced from his chin; he was losing consciousness, making grunting noises, trying to regain his wind. A pair of neat shoes came before his fainting gaze.

"A shilling," said a calm voice, "to the one who helps him to his feet."

Willing hands reached down and pulled John up. Still grunting, he hung from his supporters and observed his benefactor. "He’s all right now," said that person, "let him go. And, pray, order what refreshment pleases you for a reward." To John he said only, "Come, Hunter, you damned fool, thank me."

"Thank you, you pious turd," John said promptly.

"Charming… ." The benefactor turned his young, open countenance for a moment to John’s opponent. "Order yourself a bumper, man, you cudgel well. I like a fighter who is ruthless." Returning to John he enquired genially, "Eh, Hunter? Strong feet, would you not say?"

Unaccountably shuffling his own feet, John heard himself say in William’s loftiest tone, "I’ve seen you before, sir."

"I’m sure you have, his young benefactor said, amused. I’m Collin Mackenzie, assistant to Dr. Smellie. We passed in the halls at St. Bart’s a time or two. You were pointed out to me. Pray, shall we go somewhere decent?" 

"Why," John said, rallying, "I thought this was your club!"

"Indeed, it would be, but for the lower element that is beginning to frequent it. Anatomists and such… . Tell me, Hunter, are you rich tonight?"

"I haven’t a farthing."

"My God," Mackenzie said ruefully, "now I shall have to pay for all the refreshments these rogues are guzzling myself."

"I will repay you every—-"

"Damn you," Mackenzie said quietly, "pray don’t insult me before these people. Be quiet, at least, until we gain the street." John found it required a strange kind of courage, a kind of which he had not an exact plenitude, to stand humbly awaiting Mackenzie until he had settled with the proprietor. He wanted urgently to scuttle out into the night, leaving young Colin Mackenzie to think what he might of the brother of the rising physician-midwife, Dr. William Hunter.

"Ah, Hunter," Mackenzie said, coming up behind him. "Shall we depart?"

John swallowed. "I have a bottle of vinegary wine hidden——"

"I was certain that you would."

William said, venturing quite by chance into the parlour, "Oh, pray pardon me, Brother; I did not know you were entertaining-—"

Colin Mackenzie was on his feet, making a leg. William’s, in return, was wondrous of its kind in elegance, even though a stomach hung mere inches above his head.

"Dr. Hunter, your servant, sir."

"As I," William replied, "am yours, Doctor. Dr. Smellie’s assistant, did you say? Splendid! Brother, I do hope you have shown Dr. Mackenzie some of the more interesting of my preparations? Petee?" "Petee," Colin Mackenzie said in thanks.

"I fear my brother has been remiss in his hospitality," William went on, putting the hand of the cicerone on Mackenzie’s arm, "if he has not taken you to my preparation room." He went on to murmur something in Latin having to do with monuments more enduring than brass—John could vaguely recognise the phrase—and then added, casting a smile back over his shoulder to John, following after, "However, Jock—ah-—that is to say, Mr. Hunter is doubtless preoccupied with surgery these days. And other tiresome matters. My dissection room… . Yes, quite finished up now, too warm for subjects… . You’ve no doubt heard that I teach the Paris Method? indeed? I’d no idea anyone would have thought it worthy of mention!" So, blandly contradicting himself, William had led them into he preparation room.

William lingered until he was quite satisfied that Colin Mackenzie was utterly impressed. Then with another reference to monuments and the poor showing brass made as a metal of endurance, and with a further bow of rare grace, he was gone.

John could not but grin triumphantly at Colin Mackenzie. Few men could boast such brothers. And then he remembered that one day he was to desert his fine brother and disgrace him by marrying Polly.

"You are dour even for a Scot," Mackenzie said lightly.

"Aye. ’Tis a woman."

" ’Tis nearly always a woman. Come, Hunter, we are neglecting our wine."

After Colin Mackenzie had made his appearance a number of evenings at the School to crack jokes with John and drink wine and watch him at his work, William saw fit to say to John in private, "A fine young man, your new friend. Old Smelly Smellie is fortunate to have such an outstanding assistant. And how are matters progressing at St. George’s, Brother?".

"Excellently!" John said grimly.

v

As of old, he was rising before dawn to work through long hours before he went to the hospital. The weather was warmer now and his hands no longer ached with cold. Flesh must he placed in spirits the moment the faithful Howison took it from the sack. He was attempting to discover the nature of the lymphatics. He filled the glands with air, with mercury, and with soft wax. They always appeared to be cellular, and the lymphatics passed through the glands in the manner he had thought they might. He washed the wax-injected preparations in spirits of sea—salt to corrode them, then sat through the fine spring dawns watching the preparations crumble to bits. He tried again. He failed.

He heard the parrot hailing the rising sun, shrieking across the barren square of the Garden. "Son-of-a-bitch!" .

His probe fell to the floor. He would have to try again. Now he must go out to St. George’s.

Not even for Polly did it seem he could bear the sound and smell of the cautery on hacked flesh. Only for Polly, he amended hastily. He watched Mr. Middleton dreamily drop lopped legs on the sail-cloth floor of the operating-room. He watched him saw open skulls to peer within, and gouge out eyes, and remove tumours, all impervious to the spurting blood and unending shrieking. The cutting wards with the windows nailed shut grew humid and close even so early in the spring, the sweet smell of the countryside closed out as if it were a noxious miasma. Mr. Middleton’s patients raged with fever and died. But then, so did Mr. Hawkins’, and those of the other surgeons on the staff. It was to be expected in operative surgery, John told himself sternly. If, at the end of his life, a surgeon were to say proudly, "Half my patients lived," he would be a liar.

Between the efforts of Mr. Middleton and the indefatigable Caesar Hawkins, John saw a tidal wave of blood. A thought came to him one day as he passed the clerkly Mr. Gunning hard at blooding a woman suffering from the intermittent fever. The venous blood in the cup was dark, rich. He asked Gunning to let him have half a phial of it. Mr. Gunning pushed out his mouth, irritating John anew, but complied. Later, Mr. Gunning came out of the ward to find John on the gallery vigorously shaking the phial.

"You find that an interesting occupation, Mr. Hunter?"

For answer John showed him the frothy blood in the phial; it was now florid red. "Air, Mr. Gunning, mixed with venous blood, has the power to change the colour of the blood."

Mr. Gunning did not appear at all overwhelmed by this information. "Well?"

"Well, can you not see that this may have some bearing on the reference of the blood in the body?"

Mr. Gunning, showing himself affronted by John’s tone, enquired boldly, "Are you suggesting, sir, that we shake the patients up and down? Is that the purpose of your experiment?"

John looked into the phial for a moment. In a conversational way, he asked, "Mr. Gunning, are you acquainted with the labiae mejorae?"

"I believe so."

"Are you much of an anatomist, pray?"

Gunning fleered. "Are you?"

He knows damned well who I am, John fumed. He knows well "that I am—was-—in charge of my brother’s dissection-room. I am somewhat of an anatomist, sir. But not such a one that I could recognise the difference between a preparation of the labiae mejorae and one of your mouth."

In truth, Mr. Gunning was not much of an anatomist, for it took him several moments to digest this, and by that time John had continued serenely on down the stairs.

He mentioned the results of his experiment to William as he sat in William’s library awaiting Polly. William ceased his idle inspection of his neat legs and grew alert. "Air mixed with blood…. Air. That which we breathe every moment of our lives. What would you say it does to the blood, Brother?"

"I wish I could say, Wullie."

William made a sound of exasperation. "Jock, do you not find our ignorance unbearable at times? To know so little, and a whole world to be learned! To gaze upon a single subject and be forced to admit that our knowledge does not encompass an area six by two-and-a-half. Why, on that head, the contents of a single grave contains all the wonder of creation and the—-—- Well, why am I putting such a point on it, eh? I shall use the information for what it is worth in lecture tomorrow. I thank you for it. But these things no longer hold your interest. I must not weary you with my talk…. Are you satisfied with your progress at St. George’s?"

"I believe so, Wullie. I hope to be ready for the next Examination.

"I’m certain that you shall be. Passing it … Well——-" William rose to select a book from his shelves.

"Finish What you were going to say, Wullie!"

"Eh? was I—— Ah." William opened his book. "A jest, Brother. No reason for them to refuse you a licence at Surgeons Hall. No reason at all. Should you prove yourself able to read and write Latin. I paid twenty pounds for this book, and congratulate myself that I made a bargain. Ha!" William settled himself to read.

"La—" John was stunned. "My God, Wullie, I cannot read a word——-"

"You would play the truant from school as a lad," William said, chuckling. Of a sudden he thrust his book before John’s dulled gaze.

The words were meaningless. His mind stumbled.

The words were Latin.

"Why, I do believe I heard Mistress Polly on the stair!" William said.

vi

"No more than you deserve, Jock," Colin Mackenzie said severely. "For to waste your talents in an operating theatre amounts to a crime. Surgery cannot progress. Why, when Cheselden died, progress in surgery was buried with him."

John mumbled something.

"Oh, very well then, lithotomy, la! The fifty-second dab! And then what? Will you ever saw off a leg in ten seconds? Would it matter to anyone but the patient if you did?"

"The opinion of the patient being of no worth, I suppose?"

"You are begging the question," Colin said impatiently.

"I am not begging the question when I tell you that I want to practise surgery so that I may marry!"

"Marriage is not a future, Jock. Well, you know it is but a doubtful refuge from the cares of the day. Had I your abilities… . Damme, are you sure you did not drain this wine off a preparation? Were I blessed with your dedication to your anatomy——and there’s your real love, Jock, however a pair of eyes might deceive you———Why, had I your——"

"Stop nagging!" John shouted, and his hand slipped and wax came oozing out. "Oh, damme, why can you not hold your tongue!"

"Because I would find it odiously dull merely to sit here in silence," Colin snapped.

"Then be off and talk to your heart’s content."

"You make it very difficult for one to be your friend," Colin said slowly.

John looked down on his ruined preparation. "I cannot see why you wish to be. I am dour and sour and constantly on the fret–"

"I like you," the amiable Colin Mackenzie said simply. "Come out and have a bumper with me, Jock."

"Gods, I may as well. Another preparation ruined… ."

They left the parlour, closing the door against William’s ringing voice. William was reaching the finale of his course; he sounded exactly like the third act of something, Colin remarked, he could not remember what. He hummed a tune. "Handel?" No, he corrected himself, "Hardly. Are you rich tonight, Jock?"

"I am never rich."

"Tom King’s again."

"Our club," John said. He had to laugh.

Tom King’s was virtually abandoned. A night in April was conducive to strolling the Piazzas, or disappearing off into the dark side streets. They sat by a dead fire drinking steadily. "Polly," John volunteered, "is sewing, so she informs me. Sewing, on a night like this. Colin, why do women sew and sew and——— Gods! Would you care to marry my sister, perchance?"

"I am certain I would prove unworthy of the lady," Colin said promptly. "Unless …" He peered at John strangely. "Your brother would care to send me to Oxford, say. But, la, I have one degree and should not be greedy for another. Not when our William is willing to spend the money on you, and spend it handsomely, I’ve no doubt, for such a worthy end."

The notion struck John as being particularly merry. He sputtered. "Are you telling me that I should ask William to send me to Oxford?"

"Ask."

"Oxford? You must be-—"

"Ask," Colin said, stranger than ever.

"Twaddle," John said, tiring of the jest.

"Ask."

vii

The students were gone, the School a lonely place. He came hack from the hospital wearily, the trudge home through the dusk of May, the shoving and elbowing of his way through the crowded streets had filled him with melancholy. The School resounded with his footfalls; there was a note on a dissection table from William asking him to rewire the jaw of the pearly skeleton. He set about it in a mood that approached the sullen. He had had another row with the clerkly Gunning that day.

He considered where he stood. A full summer to he borne at St. Georges, and then? Then he would pass the Examination. William had influence at the Surgeons Hall. He would use it, if he had to.

He must, John thought. He was handling the skeleton carelessly, he collected himself. Gods, and what then? A lifetime of dreary cutting wards-—were he fortunate enough to obtain a situation at some hospital. A lifetime of callous cutting and hacking; no hope for progress in a dead craft. Died with Cheselden, Colin had said.

Damn Colin, why did he choose to go boating with some sl–- some creature this night?

And Polly. Oh, very like she and Dorothea-—-

Whatever Dorothea was doing, Polly was calling for him from the corridor outside the dissection-room.

She could not stay long, she said in a whisper, much as if she feared there was someone to hear them. Dorothea and William were dining out and even Duncan–—

"How you must miss Duncan," John said sourly. "Miss him like the very devil, I would say, to consent to spending a moment’s time with me. Pray do hasten back lest you-—-"

Polly stopped all that with a kiss.

In his bed Polly sat up with a sigh and arranged her hair. But he must pull her down into his arms again. The dark hair came falling down about his chest, a strand encircling his neck. "The anodyne necklace …" he heard himself say into the dark.

"I must go!" Polly said hreathlessly.

viii

The more John’s friendship with the lonely Dr. Colin Mackenzie strengthened (London was full of such young men, come to be assistants to this busy, preoccupied physician or that, and cast on their own resources in a town that viewed strangers with suspicion and Scotsmen with horror), the more William was inclined to condescend to Colin. Thus when Colin arrived unexpectedly one May morning to beg John to forget the hospital for an hour or so and help Colin rouse up Dr. Hunter, John caught fire, and William, engaged with his breakfast chocolate, was but a touch less lofty than he might have been with Howison under the circumstances. Nor was he able to drop the pose when Colin shouted that he had made a great anatomical discovery. He thought he had made a great anatomical discovery. He rather considered that there was the possibility of his having made some discovery of undetermined importance. He felt that he just might have stumbled on something that John and Dr. Hunter would care to see. He humbly hoped that John, at least, could spare the time to come look at the botch he had made in attempting a preparation of the gravid uterus in his apartments, working the night through, and then tell him the lowly value of it.

When William chose to be lofty, people invariably became deflated in just that manner.

Constitutionally unable to recognise any talent other than Hunterian, and almost as myopic in the matter of serendipity when it did not directly concern him, chose to jolly Colin out of the fool fancy that he had discovered the structure of the placenta and its relation to the uterus. As for John and his enthusiasm over the possibilites of Colin’s attempts—-William was, petee, dumbfounded. For it was Dr. William Hunter, after all, who was engaged in a Master-work on the Gravid Uterus, not one Colin Mackenzie, mere assistant to one of Dr. Hunter’s rivals.

"Come over to the School with me," John insisted stubbornly, "for I have the preparation there now. I tell you, Wullie, I made it really, not Colin. He had only injected the veins and arteries of the uterus when he called on us. It was I who interpreted what appeared to be discrepancies, and I who spent the day dissecting out the vessels.

You know that you can trust my work, Wullie. And I tell you that I believe I can establish the placental circulation now." 

"Indeed! Were all this so, why did not your friend, Colin, appraise Dr. Smellie of it? Why come to me—-ah—us?"

John coloured slightly, but said steadily enough, "I think he rather wanted to emulate me."

" You?"

"Aye, in seeking after anatomical discoveries."

"Ah." William examined his lace. "And does Mackenzie think that the discoveries made at the School are entirely yours? And that you donate them to me? Is it that he does not care to go as far as you in that direction though, and wishes to keep his discoveries for him—-—"

"Wullie, pray stop playing the Tom Fool! What have the Hunter brothers to do with Colin and old Smellie?"

"To be sure," William said, mollified. He decided graciously, "Then let us go to the School to gaze on this Anatomical Wonder that Mackenzie has found. Is Mackenzie there?"

"No. He had to attend a delivery with Dr. Smellie."

"Ummph… . Has to hand Smelly Smellie the forceps, no doubt. Ha "

A night later John came home from the hospital to discover the School’s door wide open and the interior ablaze with light. There were gold-headed canes lined along the hall, and strange gentlemen in the parlour examining the dry preparations hanging from the ceiling and thwacking them with fore fingers. There was Duncan rushing down the corridor with a tray of wine; and there was Percival Pott in the dissection—room, hand on his dress sword, white—faced with insult, as he engaged in infighting with a pair of supercilious physicians. In the preparation room candles shone on a flock of physicians’ wigs, none more elaborate or snowier than Williams The gentlemen were grouped about William, oddly enough in the students’ stance, looking down at something on the table. That something, as William was declaring, was his preparation demonstrating the discovery of the placental circulation. "Absolutely established, gentlemen!" William cried. "A problem that has wrinkled the brow of the ages is now solved."

"Marvellous," a gentleman murmured. "Such work …"

"You are to be congratulated, Dr. Hunter," another said. "… too kind, Dr. Grimes …" William murmured in deprecation.

"Ranks with the work of Harvey!"

"Oh dear me, sir, I cannot have you placing such a high value on my poor efforts. Too kind … exceeding generous … indeed! Oh dear me… . How good of you to… . Yes, yes, a day or so ago, quite by accident, I assure you, sir. Well, not entirely accident——" William had turned to discover John. "Um. My brother, Mr Hunter, gentlemen. Ahem. Petee. Oh! I beg your pardon, petee?"

John came into the preparation—room. He saw only William, and of William saw only those piercing blue eyes, cold and direct and deadly as spears of blue steel. William dared him silently, defied him. Love for William burned his nose and eyes like unshed tears. Colin, my friend, my old friend-—-—

An elderly physician standing by a shelf suddenly clutched at a preparation and carried it with him as he crumbled to the floor. Glass tinkled, broke, and the odour of spirits rose strong in the room. Dr. Grimes uttered a cry, going on his knees. The elderly physician tore at his waistcoat in agony, twitched, and died to lie staring up at them. In death his grasp on his gold-headed cane was fierce.

"His heart!" Dr. Grimes Walled. "The excitement, sirs, the excitement was too much for him."

"Dreadful!" William breathed, falling to his knees also, careless of the shards of glass and the spirits and the ruined preparation. "Dreadful… ."

But the preparation, cut and mashed beyond repair, had been of little consequence. It was one of John’s earliest attempts, and some nicety was wanting here and there in the execution.

"We have been expecting it daily," Dr. Grimes said. "He was in great pain… . Terrible pain."

"Still," William said softly, "a loss. Yes, still a loss… ." The knees of his breeches were smeared and stained when he rose.

ix

Poor Colin MacKenzie suddenly found himself no longer connected with Dr Smellie. That gentleman would have found the structure of the placements no less useful to his reputation than did Dr. William Hunter. Sadly, young Colin MacKenzie packed himself off to teach midwifery in the Borough of Southwick: his next years would be hard ones.

He appeared one final evening at the house in the Little Piazza; he would not enter the door of the School, preferring to stand on the threshold. "Jock, I have made another anatomical discovery. There is a second kind of human creature in this world. I have seen but two of them. This creature I call a ‘Hunter brother’."

"Dr. Mackenzie viewed the matter in an entirely false light," William said comfortably and changed the subject. "How are matters at the hospital?"

"The cutting wards are quite warm now," John said dryly. He did not enlarge on the topic, not wishing to burden William with his woes. After all, it was his own choice to take up surgery seriously, not William’s.

"Most unpleasant, cutting wards in summer," William agreed. "Oxford, they tell me, is delightful all the year round. What a pity your old friend, that silly Dr. Smith, will be away for a number of months on his holiday. However, when autumn arrives, you and he, I’ve no doubt, will he drinking the town dry again-—-"

"Wullie, what in hell are you talking about?"

"Oxford," William said.

"Gods——— Wullie, surely you are not suggesting I study surgery there? Were I desirous of becoming a physician—"

"Exactly."

John dwelt on this in silence for a time. "But Polly——-" he said at last.

"Will be quite willing to marry a physician, I assure you. Oh dear me, yes, more than willing. And in the meantime may stay on here with our sister and me as always. Now then, Brother, let us have a glass of wine to seal the pact, eh? Good Lord, Jock, not that wine! I leave that out for Duncan to steal. Here, I’ve some excellent Madeira hidden behind; Oh, yes, behind Cheselden’s Osteographia… ."

"Why, Wullie?"

"Very simple. Cheselden’s Osteographia is an atlas of the bones, and I am preparing an Atlas of the Gravid Uterus, and I can thus easily remember where I hid my wine. Ha? Eh? Ha?"

"Wullie, how long have you been harbouring the notion of sending me to Oxford?"

"Why… . It has been in and out of my head for some time now."

"And why do you wish me to become a physician? In the hopes that I might forget Polly during my absence from London?"

" ’Pon my soul, Jock, you are the very image of suspicion tonight! No, I have reconciled myself to the fact that one day I must call a-— must call Polly ‘sister’. In truth, I have another reason. A … reason close to my heart." William’s mouth was soft, his gaze moist. "It is what I would most have wanted to do for Jamie. Had he lived … Oh, Jock, had he lived!"

John could never bear to see William struggle with tears. "Wullie, pray do not———-"

"… have been the best of us …" William sobbed, hand across his eyes. "And we two—Dr. James Hunter and Dr. William Hunter -—and so," he looked up suddenly, "I have of late been finding myself thinking: Dr. William Hunter and Dr. John Hunter. Jock, have I ever asked anything of you?" His gaze was liquid pain.

"Wullie! Gods, ‘Wullie, it was always I who asked, and you who-————" John was overcome. After a time he managed faintly, "‘when do you Wish me to start my studies?"

"Now," William said.

x

William, anticipating his long separation from John, must now have every minute of his time before departure. They went on William’s rounds together, and supped together, and sat up half the night at William’s clubs. And if William’s friends wearied of the twin subjects of Oxford and the placental circulation, they wet their tired smiles in hot punch and stretched them anew. John basked and grinned; there were times when he would nearly have answered to the name of Jamie--so close were he and William.

Too close indeed for Polly’s comfort; she wept and stormed until she was as flushed as with the hectic. 

But then, none of them divined that he would flee from Oxford in exactly Five weeks.

II Mid-Morn

He stumbled out of the stage still half-drunk and made his way to the Garden. William was at the house in the Great Piazza poring over his precious incunabula. At his side, on the dumb-waiter stood a glass of Fielding’s vinium pomonae. He looked. up from his book at John swaying in the doorway.

"Jock, are you ill?"

"Wullie, I could not bear it. ‘Wullie, take me back… ."

He tried to tell William how it had been for him. Himself parading about in the velvet cap and silk gown which distinguished him as a gentleman commoner from a plebeian student. He had not realised that his registration at William’s behest ("Jock, you must remember to place ‘Charminger’ after your name") would entail such trumpery. Himself lost among the brats in dominoes wandering under the Gothic arches to wander out again. The intellectual pretensions, the social pretensions, the tassel hunters, the assumption that medicine was less a science than a branch of an art once removed from literature, the notion that dissection was somewhat like the playhouse, where many watched while a few performed. And in the town, there were the three hanged men who were cut down after a time and thrown into holes by the roadside. Fresh, young, and healthy the criminals had been at their letting of; and they swung gently in the summer breezes, attracting birds, while the flesh swelled and burst, and the juices steamed out to dry in the midday heat.

"They tried to stuff me with Latin and Greek," John said bitterly, "whilst three great texts on anatomy, free for all to read, hung unnoticed, let go to waste."

"You are quite eloquent on the subject of Oxford," William observed.

"Latin and Greek," John repeated. He put his hand on William’s rosewood desk and dug the stained thumbnail into the wood. "But their schemes to teach me Latin and Greek, I squelched under my nail like—so—many—vermin… ."

"Were you drunk the whole time you were there?" William asked. "Were you as you are now, drunk and loquacious? Is that how the brother of William Hunter appeared to the men who were learning to respect his name, to respect his––—"

"I had only ale with my meals until the day I left, Wullie."

Sadly William rose to take a turn around his cosy library. He examined John from all angles as if John were a statue he was considering. John sat motionless in his chair, waiting for William to come to a decision.

"I was applying to the University of Glasgow for an assistant," William said, then was silent.

John waited.

After a time, William re-seated himself. He sat searching John’s face for long moments. At last he sighed. "P’raps I won’t be needing the young man. Not"—he added with deliberation—-"as yet."

"It is only," John said, "that I cannot seem to live without …" Strangely the two simplest of words seemed too grandiloquent, too glorious for him to mouth, but he could think of no others, none humbler and therefore more appropriate. "… without-—our work together, Wullie. I could bear St. George’s because I had the School to come home to at night. The preparation room—our—plans." In his state of drink and agitation he had very nearly said, "Our war."

"Our work together," William echoed. "Our plans. Good God, d’ye take me for a fool? Get out of my sight; I cannot tell you how you disgust me! To throw away what I would have sold my soul to have! Aye, Jamie and I would have taken to the highways together had we thought one of us could have profited enough from it to go to Oxford! And yet you—drunk and insolent—stand there and tell me it was not good enough for you. You needs must come back to your filthy little slut, whining to me about our work, and our plans, when the only plan you have is to throw away the Hunter name on a common little whore! Damn you, how did you come by the name of Hunter? How could that be your name if it was Jamie’s too? Get out of my sight, damn you!"

Then, quite slowly, savouring the moment, William added almost as if it was an aside, "And no need to peek over your shoulder for her, Brother. She’s been gone a fortnight or more. Oh yes, at least a fortnight." William smiled. "I will say this, Jock, you remained in Oxford a week longer than I thought you would. You see, I have lost a little bet with myself. Tut."

John feared he might vomit. He clung to the arms of his chair, salivating so that it was difficult for him to speak. "Wullie, what have you done with her?"

"Done? I?" William laughed quite merrily. "Why, she was off to America almost before London had seen the last of you. With some rogue or other who had been lubricating her the entire time behind your back."

William’s unheard of lapse into vulgarity went unnoticed by John. He sat struggling with his gorge, making soft noises of pain.

"Oh, she was for marriage, she said," William was continuing on gaily, "and could not wait for you. So she took her other lover and went of with him. To America, or did I say that?" Now he grew severe. "Her leave-taking left much to be desired, Jock. Polly called our sister many cruel things, lewd things, the kindest of which was ‘screeching old hag’. Strange, Brother, that you could have been so blinded by the wench. I would have told you, had I but dared, that she was the plaything of any—well, blood will out. You are rid of her."

"I must leave," John said thickly. "I am ill."

William surveyed him with detachment. "Yes, I can see that you are." He opened a drawer in the table at his side. "Here are the keys to the School, Brother. Pray, contain yourself and do not vomit until you are inside. I will not have the Garden gossiping about my drunken brother vomiting under the Piazzas."

John got to his feet, swaying. The keys were cold in his sweating hands. At the door he heard tinkling sounds that jelled his blood. Holding to the frame for support he swung his head on his short neck to look back. William had thrown a few coins at his feet. "Your friends——if you have any—will be wanting to drink your health," William said, "to welcome you back."

Gazes locked, the brothers fought. A second, long as the eternal seconds known to patients under surgery, endured, and was, at last, over. Then John, vanquished, rightly loathsome in William’s eyes, began his penance. Stooping unsteadily, like a beggar he gathered up the money.

Someone had been in the School during his absence. A dissection table was stained. Had William been at work there? He staggered into the preparation room, all was as it had been. No new preparations to indicate what William had been about. He went back to study the stained table.

Then it was that he discovered and recognised a riband Polly had worn.

ii

He sought out Dorothea, but for once the good Woman had nothing to say. She bent over her sewing, lips pressed together, orange brows almost meeting in her frown. "I know only that the girl was an ingrate, and that she has gone to America. I do not know with whom, nor do I care. She called me many dreadful things, and she called our brother a ‘pious son-of-a–-‘ " That was all Dorothea would say.

He lowered himself enough to question Duncan.

"Indeed, Mr. John," Duncan said, "if yew wish tew know anything about that dreadful girl, pray ask Dr. William. Do not ask me tew tattle."

"Tattle?" John said. "Tattle about what?"

"Dear me, sir," Duncan said, enjoying himself, "I’m sure I don’t know. Indeed I don’t."

No more could be got out of him, and he left John in the corridor, mincing along as impudently as he dared.

It was the faithful Howison who told him, told him reluctantly and gently, told him with one hand placed on Johns trembling arm. Between them on the table lay an infant subject Howison had brought over from Alsatia. Howison, it was, who had known the why of the stain on the table.

Dr. Hunter, he said, had been at work there. But the subject had putrefied, and Dr. Hunter had sought out Howison. There had been much summer complaint in the alleys and garrets of Alsatia, and Howison knew of three corpses at least, one of which had been a pregnant woman. "Buy her and bring her to the School. I shall be there every evening," William had said.

He was attempting to repeat my preparation of the placental circulation, John thought. Had he succeeded, would that have made it any more Wullie’s discovery than … He pushed the thought away, bending to hear Howison the better, for the words were coming slowly and softly now from the pocked face.

"I was creeping across the garden from the stable with my sack. A window was open and I saw-—and heard-—Miss Polly in there with him."

"With Wullie-—Dr. William"

"Aye. She was screaming and crying and throwing money at him. She was hitting at him too, Mr. Jock."

Polly was bawling that she was for marriage. Bawling and throwing William’s money at him and striking across the mouth. William was not going to be able to kick her from his bed like some common whore and give her passage money to some God-forsaken land full of red savages, she had cried.

It would do him no good to send John away and then hide himself in the School every night, she would shout it all over the Garden how the Hunters had treated her. She would go to every surgeon in town, and physician as well, and tell them——

She would tell them nothing, William informed her coolly. She would be on the first boat to America, or he would have her arrested and hanged for stealing. Duncan would not mind-—would be delighted, in fact, to bear witness against her.

Polly had torn at her hair, throwing herself to the floor to crawl about and cling to William’s legs. He had pulled himself away from her in distaste.

Then, in his turn, he had struck her, neatly, calmly. In the ensuing silence he said, "Pick up your money, slut; for it is the only thing that stands between you and the Bridge."

"I’m for marriage!" she had cried once more, but only as if reciting something meaningless by rote.

"Then marry in America," William said.

"And then," Howison concluded, "I took my sack back to the stable. I fell asleep in there. At any rate, when I woke she was gone. Dr. William was reading a book, Waiting for me. He paid me a pound for the subject."

And ruined and then destroyed the preparation, John thought stuporously. He rose.

"Mr. Jock, you are not going out like that!" Howison cried. "You will meet trouble in your mood––"

"I am for trouble."

But William was out, Duncan informed him with a sneer. Hours later, Howison came on John, drunk and sobbing, in a night-house in Alsatia. His clothes were torn, his mouth bloody, and there was a bruise on his cheek. He had been in some row or other, he could not remember.

Howison supported him through the dark, quiet streets. He wanted to go to the Great Piazza to confront William. But Howison was too strong for him, unsteady on his feet as he was, and so Howison succeeded in getting him to the School and helping him up to bed.

He lay, head swinging, trying to focus on the farthing dip. "Wullie," he said, "did you not know what I thought of you? Once? All my life I was jealous of Jamie… . Had Jamie lived he would have been the best of us. Had Jamie lived he would have been the–—Wullie, had Jamie lived? Gods, he would have gotten his belly full of you!"

"Shush, Mr. Jock," Howison said. He stuck a dirty finger down John’s throat. "Pray to puke, Mr. Jock," Howison said.

He was heartsick. For weeks he could not bear to look on William, much less mention Polly to him. The hurt of William filled him so that the loss of Polly was but a vague intermittent ache.

He had loved William. Polly he had only enjoyed in bed.

He went on an orgy of sluts, appeasing and satiating where there was no appetite. He wandered the alleys of London night after night, hoping to be accosted by a footpad, anyone, so that he might hurl his strong squat frame at them, fighting and smashing as he came.

And then, because he was John Hunter, he settled down to work. He went out to haggle with the menagerie keepers for weird animals, and came home with a full sack. He was not happy, no, but he was an anatomist.

The days had a tarnish on them, the summer was past. William came into the School, humming Handel. Students by the score were coming! Attracted, no doubt, by the talk everywhere about the Hunter discoveries.

William was sounding the call to Wullie’s War.

John responded. "Aye, Wullie, aye. The lymphatics next."

"We must not neglect the hernia congenital I have it that Percival Pott is resuming his interest in the problem, Jock. We cannot let him best us!"

"No, Wullie, no indeed, Wullie."

"Work, Brother… ."

John would work. He would work as he never had before. And in the process he would make himself indispensable to the School and the dissection room, which he loved. Aye, he would work, but now William would pay for it. When the time came, he would demand a partnership.

And during the course of that conversation mayhap, he would then first bring up Polly’s name.

iii

The neat young Scot was in search of Dr. Hunter, he said. He stood at the door of the School exhibiting his fine square teeth to John in a winning smile. Because there was an angry eruption just to one side of the point of his chin, his face looked slightly longer on that side than the other, but this only made him seem the more vulnerable, the more receptive to the world and all its wonders. He was obviously seeking to enroll for the autumn course, John decided, and like many a student he carried under one arm a book, as if to indicate that he was of a serious turn of mind in spite of his foppish appearance. This young man’s book was new and unblemished, by its cover, and therefore, John told himself dourly (he had been interrupted in his work), probably unread also. He told the visitor that William would be returning to his house in the Great Piazza later in the day, one encrusted finger pointing out the house.

"… at the very end of the Piazza," he was saying, when he noticed that the young Scot had begun to study him.

"Are you Dr. Hunter’s—ah—ah-—-"

John was amused. If the prospective student concluded that he was William’s brother, and it turned out that he was a servant, or if he decided from the details of John’s clothing and unpowdered hair that he was a servant of sorts, and? A nice dilemma For a cocky young Scot, just down from Edinburgh by his accent. John began to grin, "Aye?"

The young man took the plunge. "… Dr. Hunter’s brother?"

"Someone must have told you," John said, and the young man blushed.

Recovering, the youth bowed to just the exact degree, straightened, and extended his hand. "I’m Alex Monro."

John nearly laughed in his face.

Had William been a falcon he would have bated from the perch of his poise, all afeather. Here was young Alex Monro, Secundus, soon to be Dr. Monro, applying to enter the Hunter School. Applying to study under William, even though he had already received the appointment of Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the University of Edinburgh as coadjutor to his eminent father! And bearing under his arm a gift for his future teacher, a book entitled De Testibus et Semine in Variis Animalibus, being his inaugural dissertation for his degree. And containing an expository description of the injection of the semniferi tubuli, and giving no credit whatsoever to Dr. William Hunter for his prior success in the same anatomical endeavour, and further, implying that the young author had more to announce to the world on the subject of the lymphatic system, or absorbents, this to come later.

Being, indeed, all too much for William, and almost too much for John who had to compel himself to gravity during William’s recital of the afternoon’s interview.

"And can you not stop quaffing my Madeira as if it were water!" William concluded in ringing tones.

As this was, in all probability, a statement of fact, or at best an academic question, John had no reply other than to refill his glass.

"Am I to have supper with you and Dorothea?"

"Dorothea is dining out tonight."

"And you?"

"I am attending the Medical Society."

John shrugged. A thought came to him. "Wullie, when you are at your club tonight—— While you are at your ease talking to your friends, it would be wise if you did not say too much—-—"

"D’ye take me for a fool?"

"Your tongue runs away with you at times," John said mildly.

"In this instance, Brother, I need no cautioning. Although—you may do well to heed your own advice. Mark me, Jock, when that young man attends my school, he shall never be treated with such courtesy and circumspection. And he shall be informed daily, hourly, if need be, by me in my lectures, and by you during dissection, what work the Hunters have done, and what work they are contemplating!" Of necessity William paused to draw breath.

"I think we have no cause for fear," John put in, taking advantage of William’s pause. "A cock fights best on his own dunghill."

"Indeed I do!" William took up, obviously too upset to know what he was saying. "Fancy presenting me with a copy of his dissertation! What pertness! Ah well, we shall do a bit of publishing also. There will be"—here William paused to do a bit of figuring in his head "at least seventy or eighty students about to assimilate these facts along with our ambitious young Doctor Alexander Monro, Secundus. Why, we shall publish our findings in the most effective way of all. Publish: meaning to disseminate, to spread abroad——"

William was safely back on his perch again. "The damned young thief" he squawked, and then was, at last, silent.

iv

Then William made a misstep. Using one of John’s incomplete preparations of the lymphatics, he announced during a lecture that, though the preparation hardly indicated so, he felt that the thoracic duct climbed as high as the upper cava, instead of terminating immediately into the lower. "Briefly, that the chyle is carried a long way before it is poured into the blood. This being because the chyle is first mixed with all the lymph of the body."

Seated at his table, John slammed down a jar of spirits. Those students nearest the door turned around to stare at him.

Scarcely had William crossed the threshold at the conclusion of his lecture before John pounced. "Brother, I want a word with you."

William’s eyes collected data, noting John’s flushed face, the out thrust jaw, the belligerent stance on the short, thick legs; William digested the information and chose his course of action. "Very well." Turning back into the lecture room, he waited until John had entered, then closed the door after them.

John said grimly, "Damn you, why will you do that? Can’t you wait until my work is done before you announce it to the world couldn’t you see that my preparation no more supported what you were saying—-"

"I was only saying what we both know to be true, Jock. We have discussed together that you feel that the thoracic duct——"

"Aye, I do feel so. But I do not know so, nor do you. Pray, in the future Wait until I have made a discovery before you announce it." With that John was done, and would have left the room had not William restrained him with his soft obstetric hand.

In that moment the brothers, the slim and graceful, the stocky and strong, strangely resembled one another. Each wore on his features the implacable, the Hunterian wrath. Hand on John’s arm, William said:

"Very well. Rather than tell me how I shall lecture, I propose you do it for me. I have projects at the hospitals which claim more of my attention than I can now devote to them. But as you are so kind as to take for me the burden of lecturing—-"

"As you like," John snapped.

They said no more. The students looked up from their work when the brothers emerged. They saw only that the Hunters were silent. John re-seated himself at his work, and William strolled among the other tables to be detained by a student with a question. That was all.

The next misstep was John’s. He did attempt to lecture to the students the following evening. He was appalled at his failure. Feared disciplinarian that he was in the dissection room, he was a stumble- tongued knothead before the students in the lecture room. The simplest rudiments of surgery became matters of such complexity that he could find no words to describe them. His throat seemed clogged with a cupful of phlegm, and his eyes refused to focus on William’s neat notes. The students shuffled their feet, glances darting among them. Soon they were grinning openly. Only young Alex Monro listened intently, looked down to scribble furiously, and again listened intently. In the midst of his shame, John was grateful to young Monro.

Then, looking up from the notes, John saw that William had come in to seat himself quietly in the back of the room, and John’s demoralization was complete. William, arms folded across his chest, was smiling broadly. He could not have appeared more pleased had John dazzled the students with his oratory.

His second lecture was little better.

His third was far worse.

Finally he effected a compromise with the spasm of inarticulation which seized him whenever he stood before the class. Rigid as a single stalk in a wintry field, he refused to raise his eyes from the notes. And like that single stalk he rattled dryly for several hours a night.

John made an attempt to jest about his awkward debut. William’s mouth but moved in the direction of a smile. "It is quite apparent that I must resume the lecturing. Either that, or you will find yourself stuttering and mumbling to an empty room one fine night." Abruptly he veered, as if it were not important who did the lecturing. "Have you heard that Percy Pott broke his leg?"

"Did he! I am sorry to hear that!"

"Contain yourself," William said dryly, "the world is not yet come to an end. The important thing is this: Percy now intends to occupy himself with a bit of writing. On—I have it—several matters surgical and anatomical."

"Indeed? I wonder what they could be?" John mused innocently.

"The hernia congenita," William snapped, "Would make for enthralling reading."

"Ah. But then, we do not know that he has made the discovery."

"No, we do not. We know only that we have not made it, eh, Jock? As we are aware that some little attention is yet wanting on the lymphatics. Mere peccadilloes on our part, my dear brother. Hardly matters worthy of your attention. No more worthy, let us say, than the fact that young Monro is here to spy and steal from me."

"Poppycock, Wullie! Because the work of another happens to coincide with mine—-with ours-does not mean-—-"

"Naturally it is of little importance to you. But then, your School is not at stake, your reputation not——"

"Damn you, my School is at stake! For what else do you think I live? Is there anything in my life but the School and our discoveries ?"

Quite as if he considered himself completely responsive, William said, "Baron Haller has just recently written on the subject, and some new thoughts have entered my mind."

"On the subject of young Monro’s attendance at the School?" William cared in no Way for John’s tone. He went on as if he had not been interrupted at all, "… concerning the hernia congenita. Now, the occurrence of the intestine in the same bag and in contact with the testis, has led me to wonder if the testis does not travel downwards at some time in the foetus."

"Well, of course it does!"

"Haller," William went on, "believes that the testes descend from inside the abdominal cavity; If so, could not this explain how on occasion the intestine might also be in the same bag, having dropped at the same time?"

"It follows."

"And you are certain that they do come from inside the abdominal cavity?"

"Gods, yes. I have noted time and again——"

William was pleased. "Then the entire problem lends itself to a simple solution. We have several preparations of the hernial condition. Now I need only a preparation or two illustrating the normal descent of the testes, and I have proved my point."

William began to hum.

"I have a peacock I wish to prepare, Brother, but after that I can have Howison search out––—"

William was humming so loudly that John wondered if he was being heard at all. He raised his voice, "I shall need the money for Howison."

That ended William’s music. He grumbled and searched his person for sovereigns. Suddenly he discovered his pulse-watch he had thought to have lost and held it up happily. Playfully he wound the watch, then took his pulse for the one minute required for the watch to run down. Satisfied that he lived, he continued his search for the money. John looked on with hard eyes; he considered the pulse-watch nothing so much as an impressive toy. And William had so many expensive toys. After that, William took to carrying his pulse-watch constantly. Soon he developed a mannerism with it, taking it out and winding it when someone was saying words displeasing to William. It was almost as if he were timing his patience with it, granting the speaker one minutes grace exactly. After the first time William so clocked John, John paid the watch no notice at all. This was not so with others; more than one student found himself rattling along, panicked lest he not he finished and the watch run down. William grew most fond of that watch.

v

John looked up to gaze out of the dissection-room window. The snow was gone, the sun was out, and it was spring. There was but a handful of students remaining for the midwifery lectures, and no one, it seemed, not even young Alex Monro, had stolen anything from William at all. John gathered up his wine and his work and moved to the parlour, where the noise of the arcades might cheer as he worked.

Here it was, one morning, where the limping Percival Pott found out for a stroll to strengthen his leg, Mr. Pott had found himself, quite by chance, in the vicinity of the Garden. He wished to know, among other things, how John was faring. And, too ("Pray, I am not discommoding you?"), he wondered how John was managing to fill his days. It took some little time for John to answer this, what with the hernia congenita and one thing and another. Mr. Pott vowed he had had a most satisfying visit, bowed, and took his leave.

William also found John at his post in the parlour, choosing a Sunday morning when the students would be out, or still tending their headaches in their rooms. There was no crispness in William’s demeanour, on the contrary he was grave, even a touch melancholy. He came straight to the heart of his concern.

"Jock, I have made arrangements for you to return to St. George’s." The noise of the arcades died in John’s ears, he sat listening to a deep silence within himself. At last he stirred. "Now we have come to it, eh, William?" William, catching at once John’s formal tone, settled himself to equal it. Very well, then, it mattered little how it came about so long as he won his point. "Now we must come to it, John. The School—is in need of an assistant lecturer."

"Hire one. I am certain you can find some university fop or other to your taste. When you do, pray keep him out of my dissection room."

"I see," William said.

"Will that be all, Brother?"

William laughed, not in the least amused. "I think we may dispense with the heroics now, Jock."

"Aye, as you dispensed with Polly," John said passionately. "And me. Ah, no, my pawky brother, not this time."

William delicately patted his chin with the knob of his gold-headed cane. The gesture brought to mind one in the act of tapping a bored yawn back into the mouth. William intended it to. "May I review the winter and spring terms for you, Brother? A certain little holocaust took place yon in my lecture room. You made an ass of yourself, to put it bluntly. Your lack of formal education, your crudities, were all too glaringly revealed."

"In the dissection room I found them most graciously overlooked, then."

"I did not overlook them."

"Others may." Then John knew that he had lost. Even as William was smiling, preparing for the kill, he knew what William was going to say.

"What others, Jock? You can no longer threaten me with hints of running to other anatomy teachers. For I have—driven—them—out! Have I not?" William enquired softly. "Come, Jock, you must admit to being aware of it."

"Aye, you have done well, William." But his irony was flaccid.

"Even so, my triumphs have come dear."

"To whom? You?"

"To me," William said, still soft—voiced. "Everything I have done has been all of a piece. I know well that all these months you have carried with you the thought that I betrayed you. And so I may have, but only because your happiness was precious to me."

"How well you have guarded it, Wullie!"

"The girl was a slut, conscienceless and calculating. She sought me out before she had been in my house a fortnight. I am but human-———" .

"You must not belittle yourself so."

"–and have my moments of feeling the libertine, as any man Will. But I would not marry her, I told her so before I accepted what she offered me. And I told her again and again. Then it was, I suppose, that she fastened herself on you. What would you have done in my place, Brother?"

John mumbled something, he knew not what.

"It is my fault that we did not speak of this much sooner," William went on, his voice taking on colour and sparkle somewhat in the manner of one gathering a handful of multi-coloured posies. "And there might even have been better ways of righting a bad situation. But there, it is done, and you are free of the entanglement. And, if I may say so, no one the worse for it."

"Polly may not agree."

William shrugged. "She had sufficient money in her pocket money I gave her—to attract any number of husbands. I understand that a pretty girl with money with which to buy land may marry quite nicely in America. They are much given to farming over there, you know," he added carelessly.

"Having arranged matters so neatly for all, you have now only to rid yourself of me, eh?"

"Rid? Rid! Jock, my brother, I am asking of you only what those lads upstairs of fifteen and sixteen are doing——learn to make your own way in the world. Do you not see that if you had your own practise during the day, and I had an assistant who could cater for the dissection room and lecture properly, then we could both have more time for our work together?"

John struggled wretchedly against the old sense of worship of William. William had acted according to his lights in the Polly matter. And he himself was an abominable lecturer… .

In fact, William was touching on that point again. "I shall have to procure someone to help me with the lectures, even though you were to continue on here. I should then have a double expense; I cannot afford that expense."

"Not," John conceded, "if you are to afford gold pulse-watches, and Roman coins, and mildewed books in Latin——-"

"It is my money, I earn it." And thus reminded of the pulse-watch, William took it out and wound it.

The brothers sat in full silence for the minute, as if waiting for the watch to come to some momentous decision for them. The ticking ceased.

"I think I can secure the house-surgeoncy for you," William said on the stroke of silence. "I have had Middleton’s ear on the matter. There is only this Gunning person to stand in your way. And though he undoubtedly feels himself entitled to the position, as must his master, Caesar Hawkins—still, Middleton is senior surgeon. It will cost me but ten pounds for your keep for the full year of your residence. And at the end of that time you would surely receive a position on the staff I’ll take my oath on it, in fact."

"And the lymphatics? The hernia congenita?"

"Did I not say that we would work together in our evenings? Surely if you were willing to practise surgery for a mere slut then!—you might do the same for me. Moreover, I have given some thought to furnishing a preparation room for us next to my library. You shall have a good north light—-"

It could not be denied. The right was on William’s side. He could not afford John in more ways than one. I have always been somewhat of a disgrace to him, John thought painfully.

Moreover, he had no choice. William, through influence, had secured a safe berth for him; there were many in London willing to fight with all their might for a house-surgeoncy at a hospital. "My thanks, Wullie," he found his stiff mouth forming.

"There!" William said. "Oh, I do believe, Jock, that being your own man will do you a world of good." Without any break he continued, "And then, you see, I’m moving. And that will be an added expense to me also."

John had wheedled, begged, and then demanded in the seasons past that William move the School into the larger house in the Great Piazza; William had not seen the wisdom of the undertaking. But, as he explained to John, times were changing, his classes were growing unwieldy, and his practise was not exactly lagging. Thus, in the fall he expected almost a hundred students (aye, and your new assistant, John thought bitterly) and it was hardly politic to pen them like animals in the close quarters of the Little Piazza house. For himself; William had taken a lease on a house in Jermyn Street not far from that of his friend, Dr. Macaulay. "An address in the Court end of town," had become a necessity rather than a luxury, as William had it.

John went with William and Dorothea to view the new house. He was awed by the magnificence of it. There was a drawing-room large enough to be a lecture hall for a hundred and fifty. The library was spacious, and the museum-—or the room designated as such, for it was still bare, awaiting the choicest of the Hunterian preparations—-could have been that of an earl. There was even a powder-room off the drawing-room for gentlemen to renew the snowiness of their coiffures. Upstairs were bedroom apartments, and in the back the roomy servants’ quarters.

In the face of John’s wonder, Dorothea and William alike were calm, matter off fact. They seemed a pair of rich cousins out to quell a country relative. "Now, this room," William was saying, pausing on a threshold, "I thought to furnish in japanned pieces and hang it with blue velvet …"

It came out during the visit to the new house that John could have William’s bedroom in the Great Piazza house while he attended St. George’s. "Until you take up your residency there," William said. And that will surely be before the students arrive."

vi

He told himself that never again Would he say farewell upon quiting a place he loathed, for it would only assure his return. His lightheartedness of a summer ago when he had looked back on St. George’s standing foursquare amidst the fields came back to taunt him. And as if waiting for him, willing him to return so that he could hate him the more actively, John Gunning was the first person John saw upon entering the hall flagged with stone.

"Back, eh?" Gunning said in greeting, and turned away before he could reply.

His days were endless, his life stagnant; he knew April had come only because the cutting-ward windows were nailed shut to close it out. Each time he came up the road to the hospital he thought again that the building reminded him of a great clumsy animal taking its ease in a meadow. Of the Cottage, a small rustic house just west of the building proper, he thought of nothing so similar as a heap of dung. Inside the hospital he viewed with renewed distaste the stained sailcloth floor of the surgical theatre and smelled with fresh revolt the odour of charred flesh which lingered there, so that his eyes went always to the cautery heating for the patient’s stump. Damn them, had the eminent surgeons of St. George’s never heard of a ligature?

But if during the day at the hospital he paid the fiddler, at night he danced to the tune.

Back he hastened in his eagerness to the house in the Great Piazza. There he found surcease, there his treasures: the foetus of six months, the current work on the lymphatics, the glass of wine, and on occasion—William. At one such visit William imparted the joyous news that John was to receive the appointment of House-Surgeon to St. George’s at the end of May. John’s board would cost William only a scant ten pounds per annum.

Now John was to he exiled from the Garden completely, he was to have a room in the back of the hated little Cottage, living there as an upper servant. His duties were outlined to him. He was without authority or even any responsibility other than that of slavishly following orders. He was to cup and bleed and apply dressings and fomentations; he was to finish up the rudimentary stitching after surgical operations; he was to administer clysters and pukes; he was to act according to his own judgement only in the clearest of emergencies, and then, unless absolutely necessary, merely to prevent hemorrhage and the like, until the arrival of a surgeon.

He was never to use his mind, never to think.

He dined with William and Dorothea on his final night in the Garden. Later, William accompanied him back to the house in the Great Piazza, chatting cheerfully as John gathered up his few belongings. It came out that William had a little gift for him. With rather a nervous smile William began his presentation speech, then gaining momentum, made quite a ceremony of it.

He had for John an exquisitely fashioned ivory-handled lancet.

"You cannot be a surgeon without a lancet," William said.

He continued his preparations in the close little room in the Cottage. Mr. Middleton took dreamy notice of the fact, Mr. Hawkins made loud comment on it by making no comment on such activities at all, and John Gunning remarked in clerkly indignation to a blank wall, but in John’s hearing, that in his opinion the cutting up of animals was "fantastical foolish".

His room with the curtains closed against prying eyes, with the hot still air, with the single taper, with the odorous carcass putrefying even as he sought fiercely to preserve it, was his retreat from the wards. His room——and his decanter of wine.

He began to suffer from nausea in the small hours of his sleep, he would awaken in a sweat. He would have said he was afraid, filled with nameless, random fears.

Late in August, when the heat of the wards was an actual torture to him, he began to wonder not if, but when he might collapse. And so, one evening, when he emerged from the hospital to see Duncan awaiting him in William’s chariot, he broke into a cooling sweat, as if he had just passed through a crise. Before Duncan’s absurd dignity John could barely restrain his sudden rise in spirits, for Duncan was announcing that he had come to take Mr. John to Jermyn Street at Dr. William’s behest.

Had William failed to find an assistant? Or had he suddenly realised that proficiency in the dissection room was of greater importance than glibness in the lecture hall? Had he decided to offer John a partnership after all? Had he——

God sustain him, had William relented?

In his haste he barely washed the top crust of the cutting ward from his hands before joining Duncan in the chariot. And during the ride back to Jeremy Street he amused himself by watching Duncan’s nostrils, sensitive as weather-vanes, quiver with shock whenever the scent of John’s person reached them.

But William, pacing his library, was only in a fret again. He had made a preparation of a male infant with a malformation he could in no wise interpret. John listened gravely: The communication between the sac of the testes and the cavity of the abdomen was open rather than closed off, whereas William had assumed that the neck of the sac naturally began to contract as soon as the testes had passed through the muscles in the foetal descent.

John reserved his opinion until after they had eaten and repaired to the house in the Great Piazza. There he examined the incomplete preparation carefully. William had been confounded by a lusus natura—a freak of nature—-he decided; thus William would not have to discard his original hypothesis of the descent of the testes.

"In the quadruped," John said, "the communication is always like this. In the human, as you have come to believe, the communication is usually closed off. This is only an instance, Wullie, of what I have been trying to prove with my animal preparations. This infant was imperfect in the manner of the structure of animals."

William grew crafty in spite of himself. "Might you not make me a preparation of a dog, or some such, to show this? At your leisure, or course."

"I have such a preparation at the Cottage," John said measuredly.

"Let us have a glass of wine," William decided. "We should not make this little visit all anatomy and no pleasure, eh, Jock?"

"Indeed no, Wullie."

Together they proceeded to the parlour. William chose to officiate, taking the wine and glasses from the sideboard, pouring, serving John first, then himself.

John drank deeply, careless of William’s calculating gaze. They discussed the weather and Toby Smollett and William’s newest rise in society and Dorothea’s present suitor. St. George’s was not mentioned.

John grew tipsy.

"Shall I send Duncan over for the preparation tomorrow evening?" William asked suddenly.

"Preparation?"

"Aye, the preparation of the dog’s testes."

"Oh … most certainly you may," John said graciously. "Pray, fill my glass, Wullie."

"I fear you may be ill in the morning, Jock."

"Not at all… . Do not concern yourself," John said, extending his glass.

William poured, then rose deliberately. "Well, I, for one, must have my rest. Would you care to spend the night with me?"

"Delighted," John murmured. He downed the wine, belched with satisfaction, and stumbled to his feet.

William looked as if he had just said something withering, though he had not spoken at all.

In the morning John rose in time to bid William farewell, waving to him as William set out in the chariot. Then, head aching, stomach heaving, he set out for St. George’s. Despite his discomfort he was strangely happy, reckless, even light headed. As he left the city behind him, the countryside spread itself out with an unreal clarity. His vision seemed without limit, curving, as the world did, at the horizon. He strolled, he stopped to examine trees, plants, and to observe a bright bird.

He arrived quite late, so late in fact that Gunning had had to perform several of his duties for him. John was bland with his thanks. Gunning looked at him warily.

Late in the afternoon he requested Gunning to speak privately with him. They left the ward together and stood on the gallery looking down on to the hall below.

"You have always felt that you deserved the position of house-surgeon, have you not?" John asked.

"I have," Gunning snapped.

"Then," John said, making a mock bow, "I bequeath it to you, sir. May you take joy in it."

Gunning was agape.

"I must go in search of Mr. Middleton," John said. "Pray excuse me… . And thank you for graciously granting me audience, Mr. Gunning." In spite of himself, he sniggered, but instantly recovered.

On his way to Mr. Middleton he passed Mr. Caesar Hawkins. "Mr. Hawkins!"

"Yes, Hunter?

"Permit me," John said respectfully, "to point out to you that you are a butcher, sir. The good Lord devised the circulatory system as an economical means of using the same blood over and over. I maintain, therefore, that when blooding a patient, this must be kept in mind. He has, after all, only so much blood to spare. Do you not agree, sir?"

"Outrageous!"

"Exactly," John said. "Pray, can you tell me where I may find Mr. Middleton?"

"Are you intoxicated?" Mr. Hawkins demanded in a loud gust.

"Not yet," John said pleasantly. "But I deem it a kindness of you to suggest it."

To Mr. Middleton he said, "I appreciate your every courtesy to me, sir. I regret sincerely to have to leave off in your service."

"Ah?" Mr. Middleton asked. "Are you going somewhere, Hunter?"

"Aye, I am going home, Mr. Middleton."

"Are you?" Mr. Middleton said vaguely.

He was ready when Duncan arrived in the chariot. Duncan then found himself trotting from Cottage to chariot, slopping spirits all over his elegant livery, as he carried out preparation after preparation. "Indeed, Mr. John," Duncan protested once, "Dr. William did not mention in any way that I would be required tew remove an entire——"

"As to that, I am certain he did not," John assured him. "well, Duncan, let us be off: You may take me to the Garden. We’ll take the preparations to the School."

He confronted William steadfastly.

"Are you mad?" William shouted, oblivious to the fact that his voice carried through the opened window and into the garden.

"I do not think so, Brother," John said, after some thought.

"Then why–"

"You invited me."

"Invited!"

"Aye."

"I asked you the loan of one preparation——"

"I do not lend my preparations, Wullie."

Dizzily William whirled off on a tangent. "What are your plans?"

"To proctor the dissection room again. You must do the lecturing yourself, I cannot. But then, I shall have the more time for our discoveries."

William fell helplessly into a chair. At last he asked in an incredulous voice, "Are you, perchance, in a tantrum?"

"Aye, Wullie," John said steadily, "I am."

"What if I were to refuse to accept you back?"

"Then I would destroy each and every preparation I have ever made for you."

"I believe," William decided, "you would."

As one belatedly remembering his manners, John said politely, "I hope it will not discommode you to put off your new assistant a second time. Or is it a third? La, I cannot keep up with them."

William mused.

John poured himself a glass of wine. "I am going to finish that preparation of yours, Wullie. Do you care to keep me company?"

"No …" William muttered dimly, "… no … weary… ." He went slowly out into the night.

John sat before the preparation, hand arrested, deep in thought. It came to him that the suicide must feel that reckless joy when his feet leave the cliff and he begins his glorious flight through the empyrean.

William invited Mr. Middleton and Mr. Hawkins to dine with him one evening. Among other things, he mentioned that John had been unwell.

vii

So newly returned from exile that he still dreamed of it, John barricaded himself in the School with the advent of the students. Again he placed his table in a spot that would be his coign of vantage, giving him a full sweep of the dissection room and the connecting lecture room. When not proctoring he worked with his decanter openly at his side.

The preparations of the hernia congenita and the explicatory notes is made in his scrabbled hand began to clutter his table and spill over on to chairs and neighbouring tables. The picture of the descent of the testes in the eight-month foetus was emerging. William took to demonstrating the preparations in his lectures as they left John’s hand.

The students whispered; it was an exciting piece of work. It was a discovery. But John, unable to take comfort from either Williams greed for the preparations or the students’ admiration of them, was slowly beset with the apprehension that, like blood beginning to clot, some pattern was forming.

He wondered if he carried on his face the results of his long nights of labour. When instructing a student he found he could not catch the fellow’s eye. Added to this, when he had visitors-—and he noted somewhat grimly that there was beginning to be quite a number of them to the School—William was out "publishing" again—his guests treated him with a strange diffidence, almost a tenderness, as if he were dangerous, or epileptic, or perhaps not in complete possession of his wits.

Or visibly tipsy.

So involved was he in Wullie’s War, that it was borne in on John’s consciousness but dimly that his King and country were also entering a war. There were those who sat in the Garden coffee-houses and taverns and complained and prophesied, and looked over their shoulders fearfully, as if fully expecting the French or the Russians or the Swedes to come marching in from the very Piazzas.

John was impatient with such talk, being unable to see how the war could have anything whatsoever to do with him.

Percival Pott reappeared one bleak November morning, sword, distinguished limp and all. Gradually having become accustomed to demonstrating his preparations again and again (somewhat like a quack jawing on his nostrums, John thought, amused), he welcomed his former teacher cordially. Mr. Pott, like the others, was particularly interested in the Hunter theory of the occurrence of the hernia congenita. He attended John closely, studying each of the many preparations at length, questioning often, yet disputing John but rarely and with much civility. Still, he would not admit that the Hunters could, as yet, claim a discovery.

Mr. Pott whiled an hour with John, allowing at his departure that he had had a most "rewarding" time. John then duly reported the visit to William, as William was keeping what he said might loosely be called a log, or account, of who came to observe the Hunter collection and which preparations interested them the most.

"And what did Percival think of our opinions on the hernia congenita?" William wanted to know.

"He thinks we are mistaken." Unbending momentarily, John permitted himself to grin at William’s gasp of indignation. "He had thought the testes to stay in the abdomen for protection until birth. And that then, when the lungs first distend, and the muscles of the abdomen act, squeezing the contents of the belly, the testes are pushed out through the rings into the scrotum. Allowing, sometimes, the intestine to fall with them. I believe the preparations may have convinced him to the contrary."

"I should think so" William said. "What a strange conceit of Pott’s it is. I must comment on it when next I lecture… . Ah, Jock, knew there was some other little matter I wished to discuss with you. I am going to get Mr. Middleton to announce to the Board of St. George’s that I wish to subscribe to the hospital. I assume you knew that I had it in mind, even though… . Oh well, why discuss these things again and again? was there anything else you wanted with me?"

"Nothing, thank you, Brother," John said formally.

He refused to dwell on William’s proposed plan to become a subscriber to St. George’s. As such, William would be eligible for election to the Board. The Board made the staff appointments. True, it was fashionable to be a subscriber to one of the London charity hospitals——artists and lawyers and painters and peers all subscribed. But John could not think offhand of any artist, lawyer, painter, or peer, who had a brother he might want placed on the staff. The dusk turned into night as he walked back from Jermyn Street to the Garden, and he quickened his step, not because of the biting wind, But because he might thus save an extra few minutes for his work.

In December, true to his promise-—or threat—William subscribed to St. Georges And in January 1757 he was appointed one of the governors of the hospital. Now William was in a position to garner votes, to politic, to advance whatever purpose he had in mind. Certain it was that William was not interested in placing himself on the staff.

I will not go back, John thought. Christ! William, can you not understand. And he snapped at a student who had asked a question. The student was a lad of sixteen—-his cheeks filled with mortification. Several of the senior students made a great show of having noticed nothing amiss.

One night when John was seated in his dark corner in Tom King’s, Howison appeared out of the noise and press of bodies. "Time to go home, Mr. John," Howison said. In the faint light of the sputtering dips his pockmarks seemed to run again, giving him the appearance of one newly in the throes of the pox. "Time," Howison repeated firmly, and pulling John to his feet, "I take you home to beddy, Jock."

All the way across the cold, barren area of the Garden, John alternately cursed his lieutenant of the graveyards and bawled Scotch ditties for him. Howison shushed him when they reached the arcades.

Awakening in the morning, John discovered that Howison had tactfully deposited him, not in his bed, where the students could have noted him, but across his work—table, as if he had fallen asleep at his preparation.

viii

At last, William, tired of disseminating and spreading, suddenly decided to publish in the more accepted meaning of the term. Overnight he was in a ferment. Dr. Smollett would help him in the petty, but aggravating details of assembling notes and editing them. Possessor of a degree worthy only of an apothecary’s horse, Toby Smollett did have his uses. William was the first to admit this. "Generosity," William said modestly to John, "is one of my few virtues. Petee?"

"Thank you, no," John said. "Wullie, why have you changed your–" He got no further.

The way of William’s publication of the discoveries was a series of articles in the Critical Review, a magazine with which Smollett was associated. Throughout the summer and autumn and winter, articles and letters, attacks and counter—attacks involving Dr. William Hunter and the Monro’s, Primus, Secundus, and young Dr. Donald Munro were printed. William was in high spirits, exhilarated as a general on the eve of a decisive battle. Withal, John remained as detached as if the Hunter brothers, along with the Monro’s (as well as Percival Pott, who was assaulted without warning), were as unreal as the characters with which Toby Smollett peopled his novels. John read his own name in print—with difficulty—as William, ashen with battle-fervour, held the magazine before him.

Shrugging, John raised his brows in question at William. "I have been vindicated at last," William cried, "and awarded the recognition which has been, for these many years, owing to me!"

"If you say so, Wullie."

The article had been written by one William Hunter.

ix

Late at night, working in the parlour, he was plagued by the fancy that he could hear time ticking off, ticking off. Once he had completed the lymphatics-—-or the absorbents, as William preferred to call them—what then? Yet he worked at a more fevered pace than ever, as if compelled to hasten whatever disaster William had in store for him.

The students came and departed, he lost count of them. Lads and gentlemen alike, they were chary of him, for never before was he such a taskmaster. He was grouchily demanding, obsessively meticulous. And his bottle of wine was ever to hand as he worked.

William’s lips were as white as burn-scars; William watched. Certain it was that he waited.

An American student forced himself on to John’s attention. A sharp, if brash lad, he braved John’s carking and denunciations in order to gain special instruction. He dared to assist the befuddled John up the stairs at night, chattering as if he saw nothing amiss. His name was Shippen, John believed. He sought John’s advice concerning other teachers in London, and went straightaway to attend the lectures of Colin Mackenzie when John suggested it.

Colin sent John a brief note of thanks, no more.

For over a year William’s sole conversation with John consisted of: "You are too fond of your wine, Brother," to add almost in the same breath, "I must congratulate you on your progress on the hernia congenita. Shall I be able to claim the absorbents for the School as well?"

"Aye," John promised, resigned. He repaired to his wine and his work.

It gave him a sour satisfaction to note the rust gathering on the point of his fine ivory-handled lancet.

x

And again, out of a new class of a hundred strong, only a handful singled themselves out for his recognition. There were the usual serious, and these days somewhat reserved, senior students, who needed extra attention because they had to wedge their dissections into the hours they could spare from their practises. There was a lad up from Oxford, recommended by Dr. Smith, whose sole distinction was that he could barely see his subject unless he stuck his nose in it, and whose pupils were so large that the iris encircled them like single strands of coloured thread. And there was a young Scotsman, William Hewson by name, who seemed to observe John at his preparations with as much attention as he devoted to his studies. This last student disturbed John, though he could not have said exactly why.

The lad was gifted in matters anatomical, he had displayed a most disquieting knack for asking questions that might lead to discoveries. He took voluminous notes during lectures, and he seemed much in advance of his fellow students. It came to John not all of a piece, but rather as an accretion of events which he finally interpreted, that Hewson was studying him in the manner a ’prentice might his master. It was after midnight when the notion beset him, and he tried to observe how befuddled he might be by measuring the wine remaining in the decanter. Yet wine or no, once he had viewed young Hewson’s demeanour in this light, he knew that he was correct. William had slyly placed him down in the midst of the School to learn its ways and methods. And William, John reflected in sudden panic, had chosen well.

He worked on for moments more, conscious of the insistence of the rain drumming at the window, of the loud ticking of the clock, even of his own heavy breathing, of the measured regularity of time passing, time running out.

Without bothering to clap his hat on his head, he left his work as it was and staggered out into the stormy night.

By the time he gained Jermyn Street he was drenched, his breeches clinging to his legs, for he had had to wade across several lakes formed by the flooded and dammed kennels. He was drenched, and he was almost, for the first time in many months, possessed of a clarity of mind and purpose. With the water running over his cheeks like tears, he pounded and shouted at William’s door.

xi

Once he thought he saw Dorothea peering from the curtains at an upper window, looking down on him in the rain; and once he was certain Duncan, taper in hand, went creeping through the drawing-room, lighting each window eerily for an instant in his passage. He pounded endlessly, and then stood leaning against the door crying aloud in his rage.

He left to go up to the Mall to a tavern there. Steaming in his sodden clothing, he gulped down a pint of hot port and went again into the night.

Now he would not pound at the door; craftily he decided to wait until he caught some glimpse of William and then shout him out if he had to burst his lungs to do it. After a time he slumped to the sleep with weariness; and there, when it was nearly dawn, and the rain had stopped and the crisp stars came out, William, home from a delivery, found him.

xii

No one in the house had seen or heard him because of the storm. But John was not to know of this until some time later, when he lay weak and still febrile in an upstairs bedroom. It was in his own ravings, William admitted, that he had betrayed himself. For it was John who had first suggested to William that he use the quiet, competent, sternly ambitious young Hewson in his place.

"I had not thought of supplanting you with him," William said, pulse-watch in his hand, its minute over. "And surely you know me well enough to realise that I would have informed you of it first. In point of fact, I was preparing to speak with you of my endeavours to have you appointed to St. Georges again. But according to rumour, such appointments will not be in order until after the first of the year. As for Hewson-—-you were mistaken, Brother. My plans were to write to the University to obtain an assistant from among the graduates. As you may have known me," William ended on a strange musing note, "to do before. I am sorry, Jock."

When William had gone off to the hospital, John rose and dressed himself. Against the protests of Dorothea and the genuinely distressed cries of Duncan, he went back to the School. In his wrinkled clothing, with his hair ﬂying in orange greasy strands, with near a week’s growth of beard on his face, and with his bones protruding, he appeared before the students in the dissection room, swaying, beside himself with rage. One by one the students quieted, stared. But he was concerned with but one person in that room. He saw only William Hewson going quietly from table to table, proctoring the dissections.

At last, Hewson, sensing the tension, looked up. He laid down his probe and made his way across the room. Keeping his voice low and calm (the insolent turd, daring to use that superior tone, that soothing but regulating voice!), he placed his hand on John’s arm and turned him out of the doorway. "Sir, you are still too——"

"Are you a physician, sir?" John said furiously. "Are you qualiﬁed to diagnose my condition?" 

"Dr. William told me only this morning that you were much too weak to return yet, Mr. John."

"Did he?" John said. "Dr. Hunter and his new assistant conferring on my health!"

"That was not the way of it, Mr. John," Hewson insisted. "it came about in another manner. I asked him if I should destroy the preparation you were working on when you became ill."

"Destroy it?"

"it was beginning to putrefy rather badly, sir. And I wished Dr. Hunter to tell me whether to get rid of it, or to continue with it."

The ravaged face swung close to Hewson’s; the pendulous underlip sagged, exposing the lower teeth and the bleeding gums, but John was not smiling. "Continue? Continue with my preparation of the lymphatics?"

"Yes, Mr. John," Hewson said steadily. "However it was too putrescent——"

John slapped him brutally across the mouth. "God damn you, God damn you. I ought to kill you, I ought to twist your neck… . God damn you… ."

Hewson stood immobile, though his face grew white, then pink, where John’s hand had smarted it. After a moment or so he quietly turned and went back into the dissection room, leaving John leaning against the wall in the hall, struggling to catch his breath and sobbing weakly.

This time he was found, comatose, in an alley in Alsatia. And oddly enough by Howison, who, having been told that a dead man was lying behind a certain house, had taken his sack with him, to discover with a cry of dismay that it was his employer and long-time friend, John Hunter.

xiii

"I have rented a house out in Earl’s Court," John heard William saying to someone. "I think he will be comfortable there."

Dorothea said, "William, in God’s name, let me go with him and care for him!"

"I cannot, Sister. He is vile and disorderly. He is a hopeless wastrel, a drunkard. Would you like your Mr. Baillie to see him in such a condition? Do you think he would care to marry into such a family? No, he will be better off with Hewson. The lad is strong and levelheaded, he’ll keep our Jockie out of mischief."

"But if Hewson is at the School during the day-—-"

William interrupted with some impatience, "Sister, I know from my own experience with him that he does not become really drunk until evening. During the day, though he is far from sober, he is, at least, rational." William’s voice changed pitch, as if he had turned to someone else in the room. "Ah, there you are Hewson."

Hewson said, "I shall do my best to care for him, Doctor."

"Of course you will. He’ll be ﬁt enough as soon as the weather warms.

He has decided to hide me away, John thought dimly. Hide me away with Howison … with Hewson… . His chest was packed with old rags, William had made a preparation of his burning lungs, jacking them with rags soaked in spirits.

Dorothea cried, "William You speak of him as if he—- William, he is our brother!"

William said, as if he had discovered a gobbet of something foul in his mouth and was spitting it out, "I have no brother, Dorothea. Jamie has been dead for years. I have no brother."

Someone began to cry softly until the door closed quietly on the sound.

xiv

He was treated like a convalescent and petulant brat. All his toys were ranged around his preparation of the injected testes, his series on the congenital hernia, and his present preparations on the lymphatics. Howison dropped in often, complaining cheerfully of his long walk to the country cottage where John was hidden away. and carrying, like a matron, a jar of hot broth, a bottle of wine, and an anatomical titbit in a sack together. He was always bringing an infant, or a small spotted cat from the ‘Change menagerie, or, if he could ﬁnd nothing else, the mangled remains of a bulldog, He hoped in a brusque, cheery voice that Mr. Jock could ﬁnd some use or other for them. Oh, pray, Mr. Jock, put your money away. It is but a little gift!

Each evening young Hewson, pleasant and dependable, came home full of gossip about the School and the folk of the Garden. He coaxed John to eat the supper the neighbour-woman cook had prepared for him, and which John had let stand unnoticed. He handed John this, and held that steady for him; he reached for spirits on the shelf, and moved that over there, and varnished endlessly, making each stroke exactly as John demanded. And he saw to it that there was always a supply of port, so that John would not have to go out into the raw spring wind for it. As the night wore on, he patiently argued John into bed, then saw, before taking his own rest, that the drunken man was covered against the cold of the night. When he rose in the morning, he straightened the bedclothes, pulling them up neatly over John’s burning chest, and then ﬁlled John’s glass with water so that he could wet his parched mouth and throat before rising. Next the glass there were always a few tarts or buns, or fruit as the spring wore on, for John’s breakfast. He thus managed to serve John’s every want without once appearing servile. He was, John was forced to admit excellent company. For a country lad, and for one who was barely twenty, he had a mature strength; he was, if not by birth, by nature, noble. John found himself growing quite fond of him.

William did not come to the little house in Earl’s Court, though he was several times out at St. George’s, not too far away. Hewson said that Dr. Hunter had gone to St. George’s in January on some business of the court of governors. And that the court had elected two new surgical assistants to the staff——a Henry Sandys, and a John Gunning. Hewson was somewhat startled at the savagery with which John laughed at the tidings.

When John was alone he did only those two things of which he seemed capable. He worked, and he drank wine to sustain him as he worked. Still weak, his chest burning each time it rained, he sat hour on hour at his table bent over his preparations. Slowly, slowly, as if he were creating, the lymphatics revealed themselves, the varied, multitudinous and minute tubules unravelling under his shaking hands.

He was not able to recall when a secret which he had been trying to keep even from himself came to prominence in his mind The amount of wine he drank decreased daily—he found himself actually pouring it out of the window to dispose of it. For his body still exhibited the effects of excess; he was often nauseated, his eyes seemed to slide out of focus, he staggered if he rose too suddenly or even threw up his head. As he worked, some part of him withdrew to study and worry. And as the days grew longer, and the sun warmer, and the black shadows of summer lay under the trees outside his window, it seemed as if the bright sun were casting some growing shadow in his mind.

He found himself staring out of the window at the fields and trees one day, his preparation forgotten, as he asked himself? How did it happen? When did it start? For it had not been as he had thought, a slow, imperceptible change, subject to control at every point; no, it had come on abruptly, disruptive and inevitable.

When I acknowledged one night that William was not walking perfection, he thought. No, not even then; it had been but the work of a moment, occurring in the time it took William’s pulse-watch to run down, for his will to ruin to come into possession of him. In the passage of one minute sometime during that dark and drunken night he had lost William, and so had lost himself.

xv

The shadow lengthened somewhat, he was made aware of it when Hewson came to him one evening. "A Dr. Shippen was at the School looking for you today, Jock."

"Who?"

"Dr. Shippen." Hewson was looking at him curiously. "He said he was a student just last year. You must remember him."

"What does he look like?"

Hewson grinned. "Like an American."

"Ha. He died. He died of hospital fever and his tongue is over there on the shelf" Hewson was looking at him strangely indeed, the lad’s eyes were as bright as if teats were standing in them. "Or, mayhap," John added carelessly, "that preparation is still at the School."

"Jock, you are working too hard," Hewson said. "Could you not put it aside for tonight?"

John grew crafty. "What did he want, this Dr. American?"

"He wished to invite you to his wedding."

"Can he not tup her without my help?" John wanted to know wittily, but his tongue slurred the words. Again, he saw the shine of Hewson’s gaze. It was irritating to be stared at in that manner, to be gawked at like a freak. "Damn you, what are you staring at? Go stare at the moon, I have work to do!"

Then, because it was a clear warm Sunday afternoon, and because he was happily tipsy on two mere glasses of wine, he decided to attend Shippen’s wedding after all. He and Hewson would go to- gether and toast the bride. They could stop off at each tavern they passed on their way to the church and toast her youth and her beauty and her—— He was growing rather anatomical on the subject, he realised. And if his priggish keeper, Hewson, wished to stay home at Earl’s Court, that was his privilege. He could stay home and wear his mouth like his ass-hole all day, for all John——

"I’ll go with you!" Hewson cried with no little trepidation. He then had some difficulty getting John out of the house empty-handed; for John had made a diligent search among his jars and bottles to select just the right preparation as a present for the bride The one he chose, Hewson announced in despair, was exactly the one he might have been expected to choose—-—in his condition.

Throughout the ceremony, John swayed against Hewson’s steady arm and ogled the pretty maidens in front of him. All blue-eyed, all dainty, all scented like a bed of vari—coloured posies, and all a-quiver with vicarious fears for the bride and what was soon to befall her, they attracted John so that he felt young and bullish as he had not since his attack of lung fever. When he leaned too far forward, Hewson, downy Scotch cheeks stern, pulled him back. John chuckled.

In a row, pair upon pair of blue eyes in white faces poised on waving slim stalks–-like necks, John thought, exactly like necks—— turned round to glower on him. He smiled back eagerly, unaware that his teeth were bloody.

Mayhap because the afternoon walk to town had been so warm, or because he had insisted on stopping time and again to down a glass of ale-whatever the reason-—when he was completely off guard, still smiling oaﬁshly at the glaring maidens, a deep, satisfying, and lengthy roiling of his stomach rolled like thunder from him. Beside him, Hewson sighed.

The posies bent their heads together, a thin giggle escaping from their midst. They were laughing at him; one putting a dainty thumb and foreﬁnger to her nose, pinching her nostrils, and indicating John with a nod. His manly pride was flayed by the gesture. He had been thinking he was making a conquest… .

He grew drunkenly wrathful. Young bitches … ought to pinch their saucy asses for them … ought to put that one in pink to bed . . ought to do it, bygar, rip her pretty pink dress from her pretty pink ass—-

"Jock!" Hewson whispered, panicky.

Gods! Had he been muttering?

Somehow Hewson got him away from the wedding party before he had started on his bawdy ballads. John thought it a pity that Dr. Shippen and his pretty bride, Alice, be deprived of music, but he gave of it freely to the countryside all the way home.

Staggering into the cottage, red-faced and breathless, John approached his preparation.

Hewson began persuasively, "Jock, would you not like to rest?"

. . work," John said. "work."

xvi

On occasion he wondered how long Hewson would continue to wet-nurse him, then, as summer drew to a close, Hewson himself brought up the matter. "I am thinking of going to Edinburgh, Jock. If … if you feel sufficiently-——"

"If I can consider myself weaned?" John asked. "Is that what you want to know? Am I weaned from your puerile chaperonage—-"

"Pray do not put your words into my mouth," Hewson said with a touch of asperity. "I meant no such thing. It is only that I wish to continue my education."

Feeling the oaf, John muttered, "Aye, and so you should. ’Tis not fair that you should be wasting your time with the likes of me." And too, he thought selﬁshly, he had little need of Hewson any longer. The work on the lymphatics was nearly completed, his health was fair, and he and his wine had come to an understanding. A glass would but temper the daze in which he seemed always to move, and ease his chest, though several would fell him-but the nausea always came ﬁrst to warn him. "I hope," he said to Hewson, feeling his way carefully, "that my brother has paid you what you deserve for your—ahh—kindness to me."

"It was not a matter of payment, Jock," Hewson said faintly.

"Then you have let William take advantage of you."

"Indeed no! I have learned much from Dr. And he has offered me … a permanent …"

"You are now his assistant," John said ﬂatly. "There is no longer any possibility that I might return to the School."

"Aye," Hewson said as if he were apologizing for some misdeed "However, Dr. William has made it a condition of my employment that I take a year at Edinburgh. He thinks to lecture this year, but there will be no dissections."

"I congratulate you," John said. "I had not known your love for anatomy was so great. I did not know of your willingness to work endlessly without credit, without praise, without even being able to claim your preparations as your own. I had not known that about you."

"It will not be that way with me, Jock."

"Indeed?"John sneered. He waved his hand about the room. "And where do you think all these will go when they are completed? Or did you not, all spring, take my work out of my very hands to carry it over to William for his lectures?"

There was a silence, and then, as one changing the subject, Hewson remarked stubbornly, "It will not be the same with me."

"And, pray, why not?"

In a small, embarrassed voice, Hewson said, "Because I have not the worth or genius of a John Hunter. Dr. William will not be inclined to claim my work."

John laughed, shoving his sodden flesh about in his chair in his mirth, pushing his face into Hewson’s, showering him with spittle. His chest ﬁred with the effort but he could not cease. This country surgeon’s by—blow, this young lord of the lancet and cup, sitting there gazing at so poor a thing as a sickly failure of a stinking anatomist and fatuously offering it praise. Almost losing his balance, he grasped Hewson’s shoulder to steady himself. "Lad, where is my wine? God damn you, I need my glass of wine. .…"

The ﬁre in his lungs was burning steadily now.

xvii

Hewson was gone. He missed him. He sat for long moments, hand extended, waiting for Hewson to place what he wanted in it. He shouted his demands, and then looked about him, startled, at the empty room. Bare branches scratched against the windows and the hearth created a small puddle of warmth in the room. The Garden would be quickening now, the theatres opening for the season. Students would be tumbling up and down the stairs at the School, and Howison would be clumping his muddy feet across the disection room at dawn, dragging a sack behind him. Or no—Hewson said it would not be that way this time.

Then that would explain Duncan’s absence. He had been waiting daily, wryly expecting Duncan to appear with a request for the newest preparations. But then, knowing that the work was nearing completion, even William himself might come for it. What a collection it would make for William’s preparation room; it would almost require an entire room to itself.

What was to become of him? William had indicated that he did not deem the series of animal preparations worthy of the expense John cost him. On the other hand, he could not, for all his walking after Pott and Cheselden, hope to practise surgery, for the Examiners would never grant him a licence. William had rather let his inﬂuence at Surgeons’ Hall deteriorate after he had paid his forty guineas to become disenfranchised from the Surgeons’ Company. Nor had William’s indefatigable politicking at St. George’s been productive; he would not be able to rid himself of John that way.

Why indeed was he William’s responsibility? John could not fathom his own illogicalness. Once William had interfered in his attempt to strike out for himself; he then, frustrated in that, had re-turned to fasten himself on William. Since the Oxford matter, and Polly’s enforced departure (in truth, was I not relieved, glad to be free of her pelvic charms, for she was estranging me from Wullie?), he had indulged in a prolonged tantrum. He recalled the grandiose conceits of his ﬁrst anger, his ﬁne declarations to himself that he would force William to make him a partner in the School. Secretly, unknown even to himself, it appeared, he had had another purpose. He had reverted to an earlier dream; only the old love for William had changed, turned, like the last of dead Henry Fielding’s vinum pomonae, to vinegar.

He repeated to himself : No, Wullie, you shall not be rid of me in that way.

xviii

His work was done. He piled his notes together and weighted them down with a candelabrum; William would take those notes, bits and scraps of paper, erratic notations that they were, and mould them into the precise prose of which he was a master.

Fortiﬁed by a glass of wine against the cold, he went out into the wind, in search of William for the ﬁrst time in almost a year. He was not at the School, and not at the house in Jermyn Street. Dorothea too was out with her intended, the Parson Baillie.

Duncan stood staring at the puffy, reeking, blear—eyed wreck before him, startled out of his customary sauciness. "Mr. John! Sir, for an instant I did not recog—- Dr. William said he would go directly from the hospital to the School this afternoon. Mr. John, could I not give you a bit of refreshment? A glass of—er—a cup of chocolate?"

But John had already turned away.

The School was deserted; there were none living in this year, and those taking William’s foreshortened course were almost entirely surgeons or physicians, with a sprinkling of artists and the merely curious—and affluent. His steps resounding, he walked across the empty dissection room, running his hands in passage over the satiny scoured surfaces of the tables. Then he went into the cold parlour where William was wont to house those preparations he used most frequently in his teaching. He found many of his lymphatics missing; William must have ﬁnished with them and taken them over to his own museum in Jermyn Street.

Contentment ﬁlled him in that cold room, time for him had stopped. All the projects William had desired of him, he had done. The injection of the testis, the series on the hernia congenita, and, awaiting William in the cottage at Earl’s Court, the—indeed, it could he so called—the atlas of the absorbents. A gruelling task it had been, to determine the anatomy of those lymphatic vessels and glands. William discovered him musing thus, and John smiled on him with a sudden surge of the old affection.

"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought," William said, returning the smile, but somewhat guardedly, "I summon up remembrance of things past-—Shakespeare. How long have you been here without a ﬁre?"

"I have no idea," John said. "Wullie, I have completed the lymphatics."

"Let us get on to Jermyn Street," William said. "I want my supper before I lecture. I had thought to bring a few preparations with me." He lifted a jar and jerked his head towards the one next to it. "Take that one, will you?"; Moving to obey, John said, "Wullie, did you not—-— where are my lymphatic preparations? Have you taken the ones Hewson brought you to your own museum?"

"Pray be more careful," William said; "you very nearly pushed that one off."

"Wullie, how did the students take to the discoveries on the lymphatics?"

"Why as to that," William said, "as to that …" For some reason he set down the jar he had in his arms. "Why—-I merely touched on the matter, Brother."

"You mean you have decided to publish instead?"

"Oh—I should think not. Until the work is ﬁnished. Although I must admit that it amply demonstrated the system to my satisfaction." William took a deep breath and ﬁngered his lace. "For an artist to draw the preparations, Brother, is another-——— Jock, they had to be destroyed. The preparations were not worthy of you, I could not demonstrate them to my class; they were collapsing, some were even putrefying; you were very ill, Jock; and they had not that nicety of attention———"

John swung his head about on his thick neck as if William had hidden the preparations and he was searching for them. "You didn’t destroy them, Wullie. You put them away somewhere for me to decide on." Surely that was the way of it.

William would not meet his eyes. John waited, watching William as he might a quarry. At last William lifted his head and his eyes were strikingly blue in contrast to his chalky sculptured wig. "I told you I destroyed them, Jock!" He made an aimless motion with his hands. "I would advise you to do the same with those at Earl’s Court. Jock, surely you must have known, unless you were constantly febrile, that they were unworthy of me—-of you-——" His voice seemed to hang in the air questing for another word or two, even after his classic mouth lay in repose.

John brushed past him on his way to the door. He looked back once to see William immobile, reserved, elegant, only the slightest lift to his brows betraying his curiosity, his speculation, much as if he were examining some monstrosity rather than his own brother.

"I’m sorry, Jock," he seemed to be saying, though his lips did not move.

"You son of a whore," John said thickly, then, realising the enormity of his curse, shouted it again at the top of his voice.

It was not possible that William, now calmly turning to gaze out at the busy arcades, could not have heard.

He looked at his work in Earl’s Court with William’s eyes. The preparations were sloppy, inept, hacked where the ﬁnest dissection was wanting, rotting, turning to mush, to ﬂuid, where spirits had evaporated from jars imperfectly sealed. He had to peer through the dusk in the room to see them. But Hewson would have told him if——— The sound of water dripping as from an eave drew him to a corner. An inﬂated preparation, improperly, incompletely varnished, hung from its thread leaking a foul juice, slow drop by drop gathering and falling to the floor. Hewson had seen only a delirious drunk and playing with scalpel and probe and blowpipe, feverish with his industry as he desecrated and washed and destroyed flesh.

With a sweep of his arm he sent a row of jars to the ﬂoor. The putrefying preparations lay amid the broken glass and the odour of spirits ﬁlled the room. He ripped from threads and rent with his hands, he shattered jar after jar, until at last he stood in the bleak dusk surrounded by the wreckage of that which he had loved more dearly than his own life.

He felt as if the blood in his heart had turned black from anguish, and bled in black tears down his face.

Late in the night Dr. William Hunter was still restless, still plagued with an ominous dread. Impulsively he ordered his chariot brought around to his door.

"Earl’s Court, Doctor?" Duncan said. "At this hour of the night, you are planning to drive out to-——"

"Earl’s Court, I said!" Dr. Hunter cried impatiently.

In the light of his candle Dr. Hunter bent over to sort among the shards of glass on the floor. He had not realised there had been so many preparations. An incredible number, an incredible amount of work… .

The anatomist who had, at thirty-two, deﬁned if not preserved a work on the lymphatics that was equalled in stature only by that of Harvey on the circulation, lay on the ﬂoor, unconscious in a pool of his own blood and vomit. Dr. Hunter thought: I know not whose fault this is, but I pray God it is not mine!

Like a pulse-watch, John Hunter had at last run out of time. His London season was over.

xix

He would not drink William’s wine; he sat aflame with the pain in his chest, looking helplessly at his brother. "Wullie, I came to visit you twelve years ago before joining the army. Wullie, would you not say my visit has lasted long enough?"

"I will speak to Robin Adair," William said. "As you may have heard me say, he is Inspector—General of Hospitals for His Majesty’s forces. I have some little acquaintance with him."

"My thanks, Brother," John said humbly.

"You do not look well, Jock."

"Aye… . I have the consumption, I think. Or better, I should say that I will have it soon if I do not seek a warmer climate. The War is to the south, is it not?"

"To the south," ‘William agreed.

John rose to leave, then paused. "A gentleman at Earl’s Court consulted me for a swelling in his groin. I believe a lymphatic vessel is inﬂamed. I took the liberty of referring him to you."

"I shall be most happy to help him," William said formally.

Of a sudden John said, "Wullie, do you remember when once we spoke on each man’s containing his own morbiﬁc seeds at birth?"

"Aye, Jock."

"You contained the seeds of greatness, we decided. What would you say are mine?"

"I would not venture to—-—-" William began and could not finish.

John smiled. The interview had come to an end.

On October 30, 1760, he received his commission as a surgeon to the army. He was to await his orders.

xx

Throughout the winter he saw William infrequently. Dorothea had married, he had not even attended her wedding. Now, free of his grinding compulsion to work, he walked the white fields of winter. All his days stood at the endless hour of dusk.

His orders came. He was gazetted with a regiment of Milord Loudon’s. He was to proceed to Portsmouth at once to join his regiment there.

After twelve years in London to whom would he bid farewell? There were Howison and his entourage of sometime highwaymen and cut-throats to wish him Godspeed. And someone else, surely? Ah yes, it would be but common courtesy to take his leave of the eminent Dr. William Hunter.

His day of departure arrived. He took the flyer to Portsmouth, his baggage a change of linen and his ivory-handled lancet. He wore, as always, a discarded suit of William’s-—-a shabby outﬁt of chiveret cloth. His head was newly shorn of his bright hair and adorned with a regulation military wig.

He leaned out of the window to look back at the dome of St. Paul’s. A dozen years ago he had ﬁrst seen it rising through a mist of rain… .

It was I-—he thought suddenly—I was Wullie’s War.

III Noon

SUFFICE it to say that England was and had been at war for some time. It had something to do with the King of Prussia, and France, and the American territories, and numerous other issues which Mr. Pitt, the War Minister, might give at length. For a certain John Hunter, it was enough that there was a War to which he could escape, and Mr. Pitt was to him that gentleman whose son was delivered a year or so back by none other than Dr. William Hunter, the physician-anatomist teacher-accoucher. (This feat of valour took place in another war entirely, and we should no longer concern ourselves with it here.)

ii

The expedition under the combined command of General Hodgson and Commodore Keppel was designated a military secret. Consequently it was soon known by all in Portsmouth that the expedition would be directed against Belle Isle, a small island in the possession of the French, lying about eight miles off the Brittany coast. The reasons advanced for the taking of Belle Isle were that it would allow the British to command the French coast, and later, would serve as a bargaining point when the War was won.

Portsmouth, that town of red-faced roughs, press gangs, and decrepit lingering sailors, lay some seventy-two miles south of London. To the stranger to matters naval it was another world. Whipped by salty winds the year round, choked by thick cottony fogs. The town brawled and mobbed and slew lustily, seamen’s exhilaration at being released temporarily from the great wooden ships being what it was. During the war the press gangs were never so busy, and no man or lad over twelve was safe were he whole in limb. The sea awaited all just beyond the long sandbank running out from the land which was called the Spit. At the point of the Spit was Spithead, and here were the great roads of Portsmouth wherein the men-of-war could anchor. It was said that a thousand sail could lie in the roads of Portsmouth, though none had ever seen such a sight.

Among the sail anchored there towards the end of March 1761, were ten sail of men-of-war with a convoy of troop transport ships, frigates, bomb ketches, fire—ships, and sloops, under the command of Keppel, assembled for the ascent of Hodgson’s land forces. On a raw grey morning the troops, almost ten thousand strong, formed at the dockyard, their bright coats and colours in startling contrast to the hueless world about them. The flatboats, each manned by Twenty to twenty-four oarsmen lay, row on row, against the shore to receive them. The drums rolled, the officers straightened their swords, the men shouldered their muskets, and the columns began to move forward. The Whitmores, the Beauclerks, the Panmures, the Loudons, the Erskines, the Crawfords, the Morgans, the Stewarts-—regiment after regiment marched towards the flatboats. Within two minutes sixty men could board a boat and leave the azore. In orderly rows the boats moved across the water carrying downy-cheeked novices clutching their muskets, staring straight ahead; and carrying too the veterans, who looked back wistfully, long since grown tired of this war which had been dragging on for five years now, and which, as far as they knew, was originally the concern of Frederick II and a trio of wrangling women, composed of two queens and a French bawd, and should have remained that way.

Now almost ten thousand men were in passage between two worlds, the one that lay ahead seeming to rise and descend with every motion of the flatboats, and striking no particular joy to their hearts. The sea moved about a bit too much to suit any except, perhaps, the marines, who cared about nothing in the world or they would not be marines. In the great roads the waiting ships rocked gently, every yard covered with sailors and seamen standing erect to greet the land forces. Men-of-War, frigates, sloops, even the transports and bomb ketches looked to the approaching troops as if they were swarming with bees. Strange men, these, the land forces thought, who could stand at their ease rocking back and forth in great sweeps half way up to heaven. They could not take their eyes from the sight, their stomachs glumly disagreeing with their quickening pulses. The veterans groaned at the thought of the foul, crammed bellies of the transports, of the casks of putrefying salt meat they would consume, of the hammocks awaiting their sparse-covered bones, which would, after a few days time, give them racking back-aches and cause their water to come reluctantly with much burning, dribbling from them in clouded amber trickles. Those who had not yet completely recovered from their last bout of scurvy looked at the ladders they were to ascend and then down at the water, as if debating which course to take.

The sailors taunted the land forces cruelly as they came aboard, missing not one frightened grin nor jellied gaze of nausea.

The expedition ready to sail, the wind died and the fog moved in.

Packed in the transports, the Exchange, the Rachael, the Britannia, the Hopewell, the Amity, and the Mary Ann, the land forces grew contentious. Beneath the gun-deck, and just at the water’s line, lay the berth-deck wherein the petty quarrelling and bickering among the officers began. And beneath the berth-deck, far below the water, in a dank smelly hole known as the cockpit, the regimental surgeons settled down to pick at one another with tongues sharp as lancets. Ever a gossipy bunch, they found much worthy of comment in the person of a newcomer in their midst, a laconic creature with rare and distinguished connections. As the days passed, and the expedition still lay in the roads at anchor, the gossip grew as thick as the fog that drifted down the hatchways. So much was known about the strange surgeon: he was a staff surgeon temporarily attached to the Loudons, he was the younger brother of Dr. William Hunter, the widely discussed London midwife and teacher, and he had gathered unto himself, deservedly or no, the surgeons would not venture to say, a reputation for being a fair anatomist; Rumour had it that he had left London under a cloud.

Many hours passed pleasantly enough while the exact nature of this disgrace was discussed both conjecturally and jestingly. The object of the gossip spent most of his waking hours on the quarter-deck fighting nausea and staring alternately at the gulls or down through the fog at the greasy-garbage-filled water. At mess he was silent, uncommunicative, ill. Oft-times he lay in his hammock, eyes closed, apparently miserable. All noticed that his hands trembled and that he had a cough which was almost a mannerism—-a dry "huff- huff" which burst from him as naturally as breathing and to which he paid no notice. Several of the kindlier gentlemen suggested that he had left London for his health.

"And when," another gentleman wanted to know, "was scurvy and a musket ball in the gut discovered to be a specific for the hectic bouts of a drunken anatomist?"

"Have you seen him aught but sober?"

"No … but he has the look."

Had they but asked the surgeon in question he would have told them freely all they wished to know. He had obtained his commission as an expedient, for he was not able to practise in London. In short, though he was considered competent enough to attend men who fought for their King, he was inadequately equipped to tamper with civilian subjects. He would have answered them freely because he had not a care in the world. This is not always an ideal state.

Still there was no wind. The men in the Britannia broke into the rum stores and then brawled. For diversion several of the brawlers were flogged—one of them had almost the entire length of his spinal column laid bare——and thrown into the bilge. They would not be granted surgical care for at least a day; and so, still idle, the surgeons gossiped on. There was a great deal of visiting going on among the transports and each day fresh titbits were carried down to the cockpit.

Then suddenly the fog lifted, and a slight breeze sprang up.

On the morning of March 29 the Men-of-War began a restless wallowing, and the captain of the flagship, the Valiant, proclaimed that a wind had risen that was just abaft the beam. The signals were hoisted, the seamen sprang to the rigging, and the cry went up that there was a fair wind abroad. Near noon the virgin sails snapped in the wind, billowing out, and the sailors cursed at the chaffing they had received from the iron stiff canvas. On the deck of the Britannia, the seasick surgeon lifted his head from his contemplation of the water and looked about as if emerging from a coma. Though the fog was gone, the day was dull, sea and sky without depth, shaded as a gull’s wing. He watched the Valiant, in full sail, majestic, powerful, deadly with her seventy-four guns, thrust her bowsprit towards the horizon. After her followed the formidable Sandwich, her ninety guns riding her deep in the water.

Above him a sail took the wind with a crack like a cannon-burst. Of a sudden the sun broke through the overcast, as if in that moment the restless world of the sea and the great sails had just been created. The Men-of-War—the Valiant, whip pennant snapping, the Sandwich, the Dragon, the Temeraire herding the six clumsy transports down the channel-—moved in sparkling splendour, their masts fragile against the urgings of the canvas; moved belly-deep out on to the curving emerald world.

Behind lay all that was England, ahead there were only sail and mast, the ponderous and the gracile; and the bowsprits sharp as couching needles, and aft the plump poops riding high. Alongside gambolled the Frigates, seeming almost to skim the whitecaps.

Face into the wind the surgeon took his farewell of England. The movement, the sensation of light, and the foamed wake pointing backwards to land, gave to him a sudden release. He was saying farewell not only to England, he was at last saying it to himself. He was freed. For thirty-three years he had been imprisoned in John Hunter. Now he was no one.

The sun blazed on that point of the arc of heaven which men call noon.

iii

If his nausea grew severely active, he was not alone in his suffering. In the noisome cockpit he rocked hourly in his hammock. Too weak to do more than stagger to mess, he watched the veteran surgeons cheerfully bang their biscuits on the board to dislodge the weevils, then looked down on the oozings from the salt pork on his plate, recalling vividly certain jelly—like collections that had gathered in pools on the dissection tables, and rose to hasten again to his hammock. There he lay retching weakly, his brain seeming to lurch in his head from ear to ear.

No light drifted down the cockpit hatch, the darkness being shattered into grotesque moving patterns by the swaying lanterns hung infrequently from the sweating beams. The deck was covered with a slime that collected as it rolled down the bulkheads, and the men slid along through it uncertainly, hunched over to avoid rapping their heads above. The area was not big enough to swing a cat in, someone complained a dozen times a day. Even those lob-lolly boys and ’prentices who had been flogged managed a hollow laugh at this, for it was an old jest which, like the taste of the cat, never lost its flavour through repetition.

He urged himself to take to the quarter-deck and the salt air. He began to notice the ship more, and then wondered when he had become so used to the monotonous creaking, hour on hour, that he no longer heard it. At night, under the April sky, he sat on a coil of line, half dozing, and watching the masts swing about among the stars. Bone-thin from his nausea, a weary man on his way to war, he was strangely at peace.

In the middle hours of the night of April 7 the rugged outline of an island of rock appeared ahead. Far to the larboard the frigate Escort hovered, her topsails reefed. They had reached their rendez-vous, then. Faintly, then clearly ringing over the water, came the cries of identification as more sails, insubstantial as mist, gathered against the night:

What ship’s that? And the answer, coming downwind, The Kings.

The one who hailed first greeted the newcomer, Unanimity!

Came the reply, His Glory!

With a shudder the Britannia submitted to the anchor. There now glowed high on her foremast and main four steady lights. In the distance more lights appeared, nodding. Belle Isle lay directly to the south, the expedition arriving to menace her dropping anchor in her Great Roads. Hulking afar in the dark, the island looked impregnable; it seemed to rise like a walled castle straight from the floor of the sea.

On the quarter-deck a presentiment curdled the scanty contents of John’s stomach. This was going to he a very small, very unimportant, and very bloody little engagement. Gazing at the black jagged rise that was Belle Isle, his armpits began to exude in the chill, clear night. 

Not until midday of the 8th did the entire convoy arrive at the rendezvous, and by that time several matters had come to pass.

Six frigates had been dispatched to patrol the French coast to the east, and the assault had been set for the following morning. On the transports the flatboats were hoisted up, ready to receive the regiments and marines at a moment’s warning. Those regiments assigned to the first and second assault waves would take their surgeons with them. In the cockpits of the Men-of-War and the frigates the naval surgeons readied their operating theatres by shoving sea chests together to form tables.

The regiments crowded to the rails to gaze on the escarpments of Belle Isle. Who, except legions of the Devil, could be expected to scale them under fire? Then the word passed among them that Point Locmaria, the southernmost tip of the island, was fortified with four guns. The young soldiers who had not seen action before fiddled about with their cartouche boxes, and when they opened their stiff mouths to speak, saliva collected at the corners.

The orders came: the assault would be made on Port Andre, a spot just north of Point Locmaria, but the marines were to make a feint north of Andre to draw the French fire. The fleet would assist the land forces to the fullest, covering them with an umbrella of fire whilst they were in the flatboats. The Achilles was assigned to silence the battery atop Point Locmaria.

By nightfall on the morrow the land forces and the marines would be snug on land with an extra ration of rum for their troubles.

That night, in the hammocks, foot to head, foot to head, lads of fifteen and sixteen lay awake, rocking gently, staring into the dark in the wavering light of the cockpit lanterns John checked his surgeon’s chest, testing the edges of his scalpels, the bite of his amputating saw. His ivory-handled lancet lay to one side.

A fellow regimental surgeon indicated it. "A handsome lancer, Mr. Hunter."

John extended it to him instantly. "Would you care to examine it, sir?" he asked in a tone of colourless decorum. Not by word or glance would he ever take issue with any of them. Nor with anyone else, for that matter. He was but a simple surgeon, no more.

The drums rolled them out of their hammocks and on deck before the stars in the west had gone out. Cursing, sweating in the chill, the men stumbled up the hatchways to receive the order to wait.

They waited.

The morning was grey, the water rough. Belle Isle, rising to the starboard, appeared deserted. it was full morning before they were ordered into the flatboats. The wind had at last shifted so that the Man-of-War might repair to their stations. The convoy began to move, the flatboats herded among the ships like chicks. Then, taking the wind in full sail, the Dragon and the Achilles broke formation to take the lead towards the bay.

Abruptly the Achilles fired on the French battery, shattering the bleak morning into—birds. The land forces, tossing on the restless water, gazed in astonishment at the skies. Birds, thousands of them, crying and shrieking, swarmed from the cliffs to darken the shy. Again the Achilles fired and the birds swooped and circled, protesting the violation of their rookery. The month was April and the nests were laden with eggs. The boom of the French reply was almost lost in the screaming of the birds, and the land forces looked doubtfully at the cliffs awaiting them. Now the Sandwich moved into line to make her attempt on the French. Heeling greatly, she fired and the French replied, sending an enfilade past the ears of the land forces. One of the men in a flatboat gazed out bitterly on the Sandwich and remarked, "God she can’t even put her thirty-four pounders into action! Look at her!" It was true, the Sandwich was nearly impotent, her heeling carrying her so deeply into the water at each sway that the ports for her most powerful guns were inundated. Hampered, she fired her eighteen and twelve-pounders; and the Valiant, which had been stationed to observe, moved down the wind to join the action.

Of a sudden the French were silent. At once the signal was hoisted on the Valiant’s main topgallant for the regiments to land. The land forces were uneasy; it might be a ruse on the part of the French. Sill, the Erskine grenadiers and the marines rode with fortitude towards the escarpments. Those in the flatboats following strained to see how they would fare in their disembarkment.

Then the French fired again. The Valiant was hit.

Helpless in the flatboats, the land forces looked back to the embattled Men-of-War, and ahead to the marines and Erskines, small as insects as they struggled to scale the escarpments. Man after man drifted from the cliffs to the narrow sandbar at their base. Distant, minute, unreal, the land forces watched them, watched their decimation as they might the destruction of a hill of ants.

Belatedly the Temeraire opened fire, and the French reply this time hit the Valiant again and also the Aetna

Then the first drops of rain fell. Looking up, the men in the flatboats saw that the birds had disappeared but for a few lost ones wheeling and crying out their panic. A handful of grenadiers had gained the top of the escarpment and, tiny silhouettes against the grey sky, took a brief stand, before they too tumbled leisurely down-wards to fall just at the edge of the sandbar. Those land forces close to shore saw the water lap and recede over the stilled bodies of the fallen. The rain began to come down steadily.

The French pounded at the Men-of-War resolutely, batteries all along the cliffs opening fire. The Valiant, mainmast splintered, careened dangerously as she attempted to retreat out of range. The Vesuvius was pelted and the Sandwich, still wallowing in the heavy seas, was suddenly taken aback. The signal went up from the Temeraire for the flatboats to desist, and making the turn, the land forces realized how strongly the winds had risen. A wave washed over a flatboat, overturning it, and the rest of the land forces clung wildly to their seats, awash. Behind them a few marines and grenadiers still crawled on the face of the escarpment, still fell one after the other. Ahead of them, the Men-of-War, the frigates, the fire-ships, and bomb ketches were battling not the French but the sea.

Another flatboat overturned, all in it disappearing. The French trained their fire on the land forces and then grew silent. Against the cliff a solitary figure plummeted through the driving rain to the sandbar. Then there was no more activity at all on the island. The next waves blocked ships, island, and everything but the sky from view.

The flatboats sought succour from the ships nearest them. One, containing fewer than twenty of its original sixty Loudons, managed to reach the Valiant. Those still clinging to the boat were half-drowned by the waves which had washed over them. Taken from the sea they were left in heaps among the rigging, sail, and shards of mast and yards on the deck. A pooping wave swept over the Valiant, battering her and taking with it sailors, rescued, debris, and all. A squat man with streams of water pouring from his nose crawled towards a hatch. He was a surgeon and he would be wanted below.

In the cockpit the wounded and dying were stacked like cords of wood, awaiting the attention of the surgeons. The surgeons themselves clung to the sea chests with one hand and attempted to minister to the wounded with the other. Lob-lolly boys swayed at their sides with lanterns which flickered now on the bulkheads, now on the beams, while the surgeons sawed and hacked and cauterized in the flitting shadows. The screams of the wounded were lost in the roaring and pounding of the great thirty-four-pound guns overhead as their trucks strained and crashed against the ropes holding them. Clinging to the hatch ladder other lob-lolly boys passed the wounded down into the cockpit, and the dying upwards to be cast overboard. The squat surgeon descending looked briefly at a man with his chest ripped open and nodded as the dying man was passed up to his death in the sea.

The deck offered no purchase for his feet as he struggled across the mixture of slime and blood. A man with a dangling arm was slammed on to a chest before the surgeon, and he bellowed for an amputating saw. Without thinking, automatically, of necessity, he seared the stump with the cautery, then smeared on the tar. The next man was slammed on the chest, and ripping the soaked breeches from him, the surgeon probed deep with bullet forceps and fingers into the groin, searching for the ball or splinter embedded there. To a third whose intestines bubbled from him, he cried only, "Overboard!" and did not even look after him as the wretch, conscious and screaming for mercy, was handed on to those at the ladder. From a fourth he removed the entire jaw, his knowledgeable hands seeking and finding the spurting vessels his straining eyes could not see.

Overhead a gun broke loose from its ropes to thunder across the deck crashing into the bulkheads. The lob-lolly boys shrilled in terror while the surgeons paled and cursed and went on with their butchery. Before the gun was secured there would be even more work for them, if indeed, it did not come down on them first. The feet, the hands, the arms, and the legs began to pile up around the sea chests; all were too busy to remove them. The seamen felled by the charging gun were being handed down now.

The gale spent itself, the sea calmed. The loose gun was captured, but the surgeons were still at work on those who had been injured in its terrible journey athwartships. There was little that could be done for them, they were crushed, mashed. John Hunter turned away from his patient to vomit up sea-water, and then shook his head to clear it.

A cry floated down the hatchway and the lob-lolly boys took it up. "The Dutchman’s breeches, lads! The Dutchman’s breeches!" The first patch of blue sky breaking through the overcast had been sighted.

And the Valiant was still afloat.

A flatboat came to take him hack to the Britannia. In the cockpit he discovered his colleagues hard at a game of cards. They greeted him casually, as one of them. "Understand you had quite a time of it on the Valiant."

"Aye."

"One cannot understand how the navy gentlemen can hear it. Will you play a hand, Hunter?"

He joined them diffidently. He had forgotten how to he polite.

A surgeon attached to the Beauclerks said contritely, smiting himself on the forehead, "Hunter, forgive me, but to this moment I had forgot! I neglected to return it to you when you were arranging your chest… ."

The lancet William had given him, and which he had thought at the bottom of the sea, was laid in his hand.

iv

The expedition lay in the Great Roads awaiting reinforcements and making repairs. Atop their natural citadel the French cavalry appeared to taunt the English, riding hack and forth along the ridge, their coats bright dots against the April skies. just out of range of the French guns, the English alternately sulked and laid fresh plans. There were several factors, previously unknown, which they now had to consider. The escarpments were, for one thing, more treacherous than they had realized. The guano of the birds, accumulated on the rocks, had made them slippery as ice in places. For another, a force trying to scale the cliffs had to be too occupied with its footing to he able to return fire. If a successful ascent were to he made, the French would have to he completely diverted. The leaders of the expedition took to boats to scour every nook and bay and jutting point, searching for the weaknesses of the natural redoubt.

From the Great Roads the English could look directly on their objective, which was the Citadel of Palais fronting the sea. Once the Citadel fell, the tiny island was lost. Still, a direct assault upon it would be catastrophic. Separated from the small town of Palais by an inlet of the sea, the Citadel lay within hornworks and ditches, and was connected to the town by one narrow bridge. To the English looking over at the Citadel, the sight had a formidable beauty. And St. Croix, who commanded it, was known to the veterans as a general who did not surrender easily; it was said of him that if he or a single man under him still drew breath, he would not consider the tide of battle to have turned against him.

The morale of the English was low as they rocked uneasily day after day, squinting over at the Citadel, remembering the havoc of their rout. And cramped as they were on the stinking transports, no sight so irked the land forces as that of St. Croix’s cavalry briskly taking the April air.

Then news spread through the ranks which somewhat cheered the land forces. Reinforcements had arrived, among them the 16th Light Dragoons, commanded by Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne. The older, more established regiments, proud as they were of their colours and history, grew wistful at the thought of the 16th Light Horse, now in its third year of existence. Gentleman Johnny was a man to whom legend naturally attached itself. It was said that his own men had fondly named him Gentleman Johnny, because Burgoyne preferred the French "point-of-honour" system of discipline to the English puninishment system, variously imposed in the form of clubbing, drubbing, riding the wooden horse, tying a man’s heels and neck together, or running the gauntlet or gantlope.

The land forces crowded to the rails to watch the reinforcements, under the convoy of the Windsor, sail into the Great Roads. Then, the cheering and the hailing dying, they once more returned to their contemplation of the Citadel.

By the 21st of April the English had completed their plans for a second attempt on Belle Isle.

v

The serene little bay of Locmaria, curving at the base of great rock formations, was thought to be unfortified. Unfortified, because the rocks seemed to the French to be impassable. Here it was that the English determined to disembark the first grenadiers. As before, there would be concurrent attempts to draw the French fire to other landing-points, while the Men-of-War would engage as many batteries as possible.

The flatboats set out early the next morning, close under the stern of the Achilles for protection. At the first volley the birds of Belle Isle again darkened the sky like a storm-cloud passing overhead. But after their passing, the sea sparkled and the rising sun penetrated the water to clear green depths, in his flatboat John Hunter noted that no fish were to be seen at all, and wondered if the concussion of the guns had driven them to the bottom. He found himself being rowed into battle, towards his possible death, debating a question of utmost philosophical import: Can fish hear?

The spanking wind died somewhat as they approached the shoreline, but the water grew choppier, so that John, seated aft, had much the sensation of riding a fractious horse. Beside him, the instruments in his chest bumped noisily. And so the redcoats skimmed across the water towards battle as jauntily as if they were on a pleasure excursion on the Thames. The rocks of Belle Isle took on a pink glow as the sun climbed higher.

A cannon-ball whistled by and the Loudons turned their heads at the singing of its passage. Another came past, and then several splashed into the water just ahead of them. The Loudons clutched their muskets and watched the glinting spray thrown up by the balls hesitate for an instant in the air, then, turning over like a wave, fall in a shower of fluid emeralds back to the sea. The French on the cliffs corrected their aim and fired again. A London in the bow of the flatboat sat upright, his musket still in place between his knees, and his head gone from his shoulders. Those nearest him scrambled to toss the spurting body into the sea. His bright coat contrasted delightfully with the intense green of the water, his blood staining the surface with veins of gold. Everywhere the Loudons looked, this tangy morning, their eyes feasted on beauty. However, after they had been on the water for almost an hour, some of the men began to complain of their eyes, the reflections of the water were so brilliant that squinting helped but little. To the south, the glistening sails of the Sandwich, the Dragon, and the Prince of Orange were almost blinding.

They were close to their landing-point when they espied the in the distance, skimming along under the overhang of the rocks of Locmaria. The Loudons watched as much in curiosity as anxiety as the Beauclerks beached and began to land. The French had not discovered them, and with admirable precision the grenadiers marched in ranks over the narrow beach to the rocks. Only as they began their ascent did they disperse, searching for crags and hand-holds. Miraculously, a handful appeared at the summit, running north. A puff of cannon-smoke obscured their fate as the French took notice of them; and as each red dot topped the rocks it disappeared in the gathering cloud.

Just beyond the breakers the marines were hastening to reinforce the Beauclerks, with the Burgoynes pushing behind them. Now the remainder of the forces were diverted from their appointed rendez-vous to join the fray. The flatboats tumbled on one another, so rapidly were they beaching and emptying. The cliff itself seemed flowing with blood as the English stormed it with more than mere resolution–-with abandon. The entire land force now converged on the spot, while above a breach appeared in the smoke. The French had given ground, retreating from their guns into the interior of the island.

This time the English had refused to be pushed back into the sea.

Before dusk all the land forces were ashore, while the advance waves had pushed almost three miles into the interior in pursuit of the French. The rest were preparing to follow before night came on.

The surgeons wandered about looking for work to occupy their hands, for only thirty men had been lost, and the wounded had not been more than treble that number. Long since, the severely injured had been dispatched back to the sick-berths of the ships, and the walking wounded were now bandaged and wanting nothing so much as their suppers. Many had suffered lacerated hands from the rocks, but the surgeons themselves were among that number.

At the top of the cliff John Hunter stood looking north-east towards the coast of France. Below him the birds were coming back to roost, loudly protesting, and he grimaced at the memory of the difficulties their guano had presented while clinging to the rocks. Beyond the beach the sea at sunset was molten gold, and so smooth that the Men-of-War anchored far out seemed fastened on it rather than afloat. Their masts were stark back against the crucible of the Great Roads. Turning, he looked on the island lying within its escarpments as a series of moors interrupted by streams and verdant valleys. Far in the distance stood the Citadel wherein the French would have retrenched. And like the Men-of-War lying in the Roads in prey of it, the Citadel rose from a sea of gold, too beautiful for the tongue to tell or almost for the eyes to bear.

The marching lines formed, and John Hunter fell in at the rear of his column. The night wind was balmy, moving without sound over the fresh new grasses of the moors.

The English rested on their arms that night, making their march to Palais on the morning of April 23. They forded streams embraced by ruined bridges, they passed batteries which had been blown up, but they saw no sign of the French, only the record of their passing. Occasionally they saw a farm or a tiny community clustered on the bank of a stream, but they saw no living thing that was not wild; cattle, swine, fowl, and horses, all gone, and only manure and wallows to show where they had been. By midday the faces of the men were almost as red as their coats from sunburn and the heat of their exertions. Belle Isle was the way one imagined the tropics to be, and indeed some of the veterans declared it so. After being at sea for almost a month, the land forces were enraptured with the island, and when the columns stopped to rest, many of the men actually pulled up handfuls of grass and sucked and chewed on them. They laughed at themselves, but for all that, they had the strangest desire to graze on the tender greenery, like cows.

Just without the town of Palais and the range of the cannon of the Citadel, the columns came to a halt. Here they would await their reinforcements and provisions. The French did not disturb them in any way. But those sent forward to spy reported that St. Croix was busily availing himself of the English silence to raise more redoubts to fortify the town and Citadel.

The English, tethered by the delay of the reinforcements, moved about camp restlessly, trampling everything green into the earth, so that after several days they had raised a dust to hover in the warm sunshine and coat their throats with every breath.

Details were sent out to collect straw for bedding and for strewing around the tents to keep out rain. Others were set to digging a series of great privy trenches, into which straw would be thrown once a week for sanitary purposes. In only a day or so these trenches grew exceedingly foul, and the men had to fight their way through an enfilade of flies to reach the edges. Near this spot the hospital staff was ordered to set up a series of tents known as the "flying hospital".

Among the hospital surgeons was John Hunter, newly reassigned from the Loudons.

Now the difference between the regimental and the hospital surgeons became apparent. The regimentals were answerable to a superior officer who was not a colleague but a fighting man. The hospital surgeons were answerable to a Mr. Young—-this much was known. What was unknown was the ranking order of a Mr. Lorrimer, a Mr. Farquhar, a Mr. Hunter, and the ‘pothecarial gentlemen. With true surgical spirit the gentlemen set out to wrangle with one another-—with the exception of the stolid, silent Mr. Hunter.

It so happened, during that lull in which the English waited for their reinforcements, that a Panmure eased himself outside his tent rather than repair to the privy trenches. He was ordered to run the gantlope, and was then cast down, unconscious, next the privy trenches which he had avoided. The hospital surgeons were mortified to discover that Mr. Hunter had gravely caused the Panmure to he carried into one of the hospital tents.

Mr. Lorrimer, intent on imposing his superiority on at least one member of the staff, went in search of Mr. Hunter. He found him cleaning the excreta from the Panmure’s lacerated back. Mr. Lorrimer gasped. "Tut, Mr. Hunter," he began, "surely a ’prentice should be doing that for you!" Then, remembering his original purpose, he added, "In truth, it should not he done at all! That man does not belong in the hospital."

"He is injured," John said mildly.

"You are interfering with discipline," Mr. Lorrimer explained. John paused in his ministrations to the Panmure. "I must own that I am unacquainted with the right in these matters," he said. "So newly am I attached to the hospital staff. Mayhap I should have consulted you."

In the shadowy tent Mr. Lorrimer bent forward hastily to peer intently at John. Convinced of John’s sincerity, Mr. Lorrimer was touched. "My dear Hunter," he cried, "do so at any time! I am your servant, sir!"

Mr. Hunter rose and executed a clumsy bow. Mr. Lorrimer unbent in a graceful reply. Mr. Lorrimer then turning to leave the tent, John resumed his tending of the Panmure.

Mr. Lorrimer was most kind to John thereafter; it was obvious that that gentleman considered John to be simple.

Concurrent with the arrival of the reinforcements and the first assault on Palais, Mr. Young, nominal head of the hospital staff, found himself similarly besieged. With the inflow of the wounded into the tents, the gentlemen attempted to give orders to one another; and in a moment of blind abandon, Mr. Farquhar actually requested of Mr. Young, "Pray, sir, would you tend this man? I have another who is haemorrhaging and requires my attention at once." Yet so deep was Mr. Young’s incertitude in his own powers, that he could only mutter some testy retort before turning away.

In the new surgeon, Mr. Hunter, Mr. Young thought he might find his only ally. John Hunter went about his duties quietly, digging out balls, making diligent use of the cautery, further mutilating torn flesh with the bullet forceps, and industriously enlarging with his scalpel every wound which came under his care to permit the "mortified material passage to the surface". So exactly was he following those precepts of military surgery which Mr. Young had laid down for him, that Mr. Young was constrained to say:

"Ah, Mr. Hunter, were only the rest of the gentlemen like yourself!"

"Most kind," John replied expressionlessly, at the same time starting a copious bleeding of an unconscious man.

Mr. Young nodded his approval. The perfect surgeon, his smile was saying. The perfect subordinate.

The buzzing of the flies in the tent nearly drowned out the rumble of the French mortars.

As the English moved forward, the regimental surgeons went also to treat the wounded on the field. In the main, they moved about in the trenches and redoubts stopping haemorrhages and lopping off dangling members. More delicate and demanding work, such as probing for balls and repairing torn tissue and severed vessels, was done in the flying hospital.

Mr. Young insisted (and all the gentlemen agreed with him on this) that all balls be removed and the wounds enlarged. Wounds caused by the complete passage of a ball should be enlarged at both ends of the tunnel so as to facilitate the formation of pus. Only in the matter of copious bleeding did the gentlemen differ. And while the wounded lay in the tents screaming, and the mortars shook the earth, the gentlemen jarled loudly over the dying, unable to reach an agreement on whether fourteen or sixteen ounces should be taken off at the first blooding of a man with a ball in his skull.

Daily the English moved forward, driving the French from redoubt to redoubt, surrounding the town of Palais. From the Great Roads the Men-of-War pounded at the Citadel. The English closing in on the town went forward apace, leaving their dead in the fields behind them where the birds of Belle Isle discovered them. When the details sent out from the flying hospitals came upon them, often the birds had already taken the eyes and genitals, and carried away shreds of the torn uniforms to weave into new nests. At one of the flying hospitals, Mr. Young looked on these dead and remarked, "Oh dear, they look as if anatomists have been at them," and John Hunter, within earshot, did not so much as blink.

During their press towards the Citadel the English captured a French whore in a French cavalry uniform. She was friendly, thirsty, and bilingual. The message was carried back to the flying hospitals: Prepare to move forward into Palais.

St. Croix’s little secret was out. Those cavalry officers who had so plagued the English in the transports, had been but whores and peasants dressed in red coats and mounted on the farm-horses and cows of Belle Isle.

The English took the town that night.

vi

Mr. Young’s gentlemen sallied forth through the ruins of Palais to seek housing for their hospital. The little stone chapel, though it had a great hole in the ceiling near the altar, was chosen. Straw was strewn on the floor, and the wounded, now febrile with their in-inflammations, gazed up at the Stations of the Cross painted and peeling on the walls, and a blue-and-gilt Virgin miraculously intact upon her pedestal.

In the search for a suitable place for the hospital, John Hunter, separated from his colleagues, came upon four wounded French soldiers hiding in a deserted house. They had been there for four days. All had received wounds from balls.

One had taken two balls in the thigh, one of which had gone through, the other being still lodged. The second man had been shot through the joint of the knee, the ball having passed through. The third had received a ball in the arm at a moment when the arm had been extended horizontally, so that the ball had entered at the inside of the insertion of the deltoid muscle, and finally come to lodge between the basis of the scapula and the spinal process. The fourth had a ball in his chest, and was spitting blood occasionally, though far less than he had been, by the indications of the dried blood on his clothing and beard.

John saw at once that the French soldiers had given each other succour only to the extent of binding their wounds to stop the flow of blood. They watched John silently as he went from one to the next examining the wounds. Not even the man with the chest wound was febrile; on the contrary, he made motions with his hands placed to his mouth to indicate that he was hungry. His wound was healing by the first intention, the suppuration was slight. None of the wounds, most certainly, had been enlarged to permit the exit of necrotic tissue and pus.

Of the two men still carrying balls, only the one with the ball lodged near the spinal process showed any great mortification. The man with the ball in his thigh was cheerful; under the rag tied about his hip his two wounds were healing by the first intention, and he seemed not to have undergone any inflammation whatsoever.

Apprehensive as they may have been while John examined them, the wounded French soldiers gradually became more at ease. Some aspect of the little English surgeon with the fiery brows and the direct gaze, other than the strange figure he cut, gave them thought. He stood among them, his colourless eyes fastening for long moments on each man. Slowly the great jaw slid forward; John had come to a decision. As at a signal the Frenchmen began to jabber at him excitedly, but John merely turned on his heel and left them.

He went back to the chapel and ordered that the wounded French he brought to him there, should the chapel be the site chosen for the hospital.

It was then that the French thirty-two-pounders resumed their play on the advancing English.

vii

Under the eyes of the Virgin, John removed the ball from the mortifying shoulder of the wounded prisoner. The man lay quietly under his hands. His gaze, black with pain and the effort to still his outcries, met John’s. The ball removed, the wound must now be dilated with great deep strokes of the scalpel."

Seeming to know this, the Frenchman’s eyes went from John’s face to the handle of his scalpel protruding from his pocket. A sound escaped from his white sliver of a mouth—a thin, suppressed whimper. Then he closed his eyes, waiting.

In that moment, there in a chapel filled with sun and agony and the thunder of siege and the groans of a soldier dying on the altar, John Hunter knew that he was damned. He had sought refuge, a hiding-place, in conformity and a red uniform. But that passion to seek and discover for himself, with little interest and no concern for what the rest of the entire world might think, had at last found him out.

He was no longer the dim Mr. Hunter hovering in the shade of the testy Mr. Young, he was John Hunter again. God help me, he thought… .

He began to bandage the mortified shoulder gently. The Frenchman sighed deeply and opened his eyes on the Virgin. "Ave Maria …" he murmured gratefully, then his lips, though not his voice, continued on with the prayer.

He dressed the wounds of the other three French prisoners, and sent them to the prisoners’ tents.

Mr. Young indeed had his troubles. With the permanent establishment of the hospital in the chapel, a Dr. Blythe had arrived on the scene to take charge. Being as uncertain as Mr. Young in his ability to maintain authority, Dr. Blythe was equally opinionated, and as given to lapsing into a pet when opposed. After his first humiliating passage at arms with Dr. Blythe, Mr. Young sought out the humble Mr. Hunter to salve his wounds. He found him in one of the prisoners’ tents, bending over a wounded man.

"Well, Mr. Hunter," Mr. Young said, making a commendable effort to sound composed and genial both, "When do you intend to remove the ball from that man’s chest? Not that," he added hastily, "I’m pressing you. Merely curious, you understand."

"Never," John said, ignoring all Mr. Young’s remarks but his opening question.

"Oh, dear me," Mr. Young said, sounding pleased in spite of himself. Here was his chance to assert some authority. "I must inform you, sir, that we treat our prisoners with the same compassion allotted to our own men."

"No quarter, eh?" John said.

Mr. Young stared, struggling to surmount his amazement. "Sir, I am afraid you mis––"

"Not at all," John said levelly. "I understand you perfectly, Mr Young."

"Then see that you do!" Mr. Young said, off on a tangent and into a pet in the same instant. He bit his lips fiercely, but before he turned to stalk away, John had seen the tears of chagrin start to his eyes.

As if he had understood every word of the exchange, the French prisoner began to laugh.

"Silence, you turd," John snapped.

But the prisoner continued laughing, confident that John had won the day.

The French, now entirely decamped into the Citadel, kept at their mortars night and day. The wounded English poured into the several hospitals, while a steady stream of those no longer fit for fighting, the amputees, the skull fractures, and the rest, were sent to the ships to languish in the dark, humid cockpits.

The constant mortar fire seemed to those in the chapel to pound and shatter the bright June days into fragments and scatter them out of all relation to each other. To John it was noon at one moment and dusk the next, with tapers and lanterns throwing shadows among the arches and giving movement to the Stations of the Cross. Yet he found the strength to forgo a few of his brief moments of sleep in order to slip out to the prisoners’ tents to the four men under his care.

The lives of these men had become more precious to him than his own. They were that which he had never conceived of before—- living preparations. And each of them, by virtue of the site and condition of his wound, demonstrated in a different manner the first principle of surgery which John had ever formulated: Assist Nature. He knew now that inflammation was an indication of an additional hurt to the body, and that the formation of pus was not to be applauded, but dreaded.

So far he had gone. And at that, he thought wryly, it is more than enough to brand me as a complete heretic.

He bled each of them lightly and freshly dressed their wounds. His four preparations were as grave as he, sensing that in some way this grotesque little Englishman had fought for their lives, for strange reasons of his own. From the chapel nearby, they listened to the screams of dying Englishmen, as the English surgeons finished off what the French had only begun.

Still the siege of the Citadel continued, but breaches were made and great damage done before they were closed. Now the wounded came in haemorrhaging copiously from bayonet wounds, as well as balls and fragments. John applied his new principle, developing it by trial and error as he proceeded. He rarely took up the bullet forceps; if he must dig out a ball he preferred the use of his fingertips to the snapping, tearing chops of the forceps. Wherever he thought it feasible he allowed a ball to remain. Occasionally, after an inflammation had gone off, and a lodged ball threatened future discomfort, he went after it from another direction, making a single incision which would heal more easily than a torn and enlarged wound.

He began to tabulate wounds in columns in his mind. The velocity of the ball as opposed to the damage it inflicted. The differences in wounds caused by the penetration of the ball and its exit. The conclusions to be drawn from the appearance of blood in the urine occupied him. He was in constant search for the cause of that mysterious cold sweat and coma that came on insidiously and killed those who had not been injured in a vital part, who had not haemorhaged excessively, and who should not have died. One such had died within a few hours of Mr. Young’s having ripped a great scab from his buttock, for the reason that Mr. Young feared the pus would begin to dissolve the hip bone were the crater not swabbed out. Then the body, like the Citadel, could withstand only so much punishment, even though a vital part were not involved? He pondered.

One by one the hospital surgeons recognized that there was some thing passing strange about John Hunter. He knew they were whispering, and once he grinned to himself: Gods, how they would shout were they to discover what he had done to a certain patient, hidden behind a pillar of the chapel.

He had had the sliver of bone, taken from an amputated hand, clean and dry in his pocket. He had surreptitiously weighed the sliver on the ’pothecary’s scales. The wound of the patient (also in the buttock, and enormously enlarged by the industrious scalpel of Mr. Young) was in full suppuration. John had waved a ’prentice away from the man saying, "There, lad, I’ll dress this man myself." Before applying the fresh dressings he had inserted the sliver of bone into the pus of the wound.

At the end of a week he was to weigh the sliver and know that pus no more dissolved bone than did the blood itself.

But before then, several other matters had come to pass.

viii

On the 8th of June, St.Croix surrendered, and Belle Isle was at last in the hands of the English.

In the fervour of the final assault, a marine, Lieutenant-Colonel Mackenzie, received a shattered arm. Brought to the chapel, he fell to John, who carefully removed the arm, scorning the cautery, and ligaturing laboriously as he went. To Dr. Blythe’s disgust, and Mr. Young’s horror, John then dissected out the muscles to form the flaps for the stump as carefully and with as calm a precision as if he were back in William’s dissection room. Fortunately Lieutenant-Colonel Mackenzie had long since fainted.

The inflammation came on almost at once, bringing with it fever and agony. John refused to purge him, ordering a ‘prentice to cool him with wet cloths. He applied to Dr. Blythe for laudanum.

That night one would almost have thought Dr. Blythe and Mr. Young to begrudge the young Lieutenant-Colonel his, laudanum-induced sleep. Those wounded who had received the cautery lay awake groaning and crying out in the voices of hurt children, for not even laudanum could douse the fire of the charred flesh.

The entire staff, with the exception of John, immediately predicted that the Lieutenant-Colonel would die.

After the news of the fall of the Citadel had become tiresome, the surgeons returned to their own war. John supposed the regimental surgeons would next be treated to a recital of his misdeeds.

When Mackenzie’s suppuration came on, its scantiness was a disgrace. The poisons he had taken from the wound were still distributed through his body, Mr. Young said. Yet the glance exchanged between Mr. Farquhar and Mr. Lorrimer told John that these two gentlemen were aware that Mackenzie was cool, his fever gone off. Moreover, the young Lieutenant-Colonel was restless; he wanted solid food and he wanted to rise from his bed. John was anxious for him to do so.

"You fear he will take an infection from the stench of the others wounds?" Mr. Lorrimer enquired.

"I do not believe in that, sir," John said. "Still, I would have him out of the chapel."

In a friendly voice Mr. Lorrimer said, "I have been a military surgeon for many years, Mr. Hunter, and I believe it. Why, pray, are you then so anxious to remove him from the chapel?"

"I do not know, sir."

Mr. Lorrimer smiled. "I honour you for saying that, sir," he said, though whether in sarcasm or sincerity John could not say.

"I take it I have been insufferable these last weeks?" John challenged.

He regretted his lapse into his former brusqueness at once; for he discerned as soon as the words were out, belatedly, that Mr. Lorrimer had tentatively extended his friendship, and was even now with-drawing it and packing himself and his dignity off to a safe distance. The moment was beyond repair.

"… seek out the answer to that question," Mr. Lorrimer was murmuring coldly, "elsewhere, sir."

So it was that Mackenzie left the chapel to rejoin his regiment, his praises of Mr. Hunter, the surgeon, loud on his lips.

The cautery cases were still out of their heads with the fevers of their blistered, seared wounds. Most of them died.

ix

After an exchange of prisoners and the signing of the preliminary articles of capitulation, St. Croix was ready to march from his Citadel.

Yet he must make a parade of it, with flying colours and saluting cannon. Out from the Citadel came the garrison, the women marching beside the men, on their way to the French ships waiting to remove them to France.

Standing in the door of the chapel with his fellow surgeons, John watched the gaunt French march along smartly. The dashing St. Croix seemed not to know that his men were in tatters, and himself vanquished.

One of the marching French, catching sight of John, waved and called out something unintelligible, laughing and rolling his eyes. John grinned and waved back.

"Was he not the bone of contention between us, Mr. Hunter?" Mr. Young asked playfully, all willingness to overlook and forgive and conduct himself like a benevolent god in general.

"Aye, Mr. Young." John said, conscious of the intensified gaze of his fellows.

"Most certainly," Mr. Young said generously, "one would not think him ever to have had a ball in his chest."

"And most certainly," John was borrowing Mr. Young’s tune, "one would not think he carried it yet."

Mr. Young saw no reason why he should not laugh at this, no reason at all. He forced a titter. "Ah, we are all witty and lightheaded this day, Mr. Hunter! But you dour Scotch can outdo us all."

"My thanks,"John said, meaning several things, which Mr. Young frowning, began to sort out.

x

With the French evacuated, and the peasantry creeping back into their ruined houses, Palais grew humdrum. Those garrisoned on Belle Isle sought for diversion and found little. There were a few French harlots remaining; of the townspeople the English saw only the men going about their tasks. In the strange subtropical summer of Belle Isle the men grew listless, the English never being too inclined towards rapine at any time.

Conversely, matters were at a fever pitch in the hospital. The gentlemen stood about among the arches of the chapel staring down at John’s patients. Mr. Lorrimer and Mr. Parquhar, who seemed to John to share but one personality between them, each day revised their count of those of John’s patients who might still be carrying balls. Mr. Young announced aloud that a search should be made, much as if stolen articles were in question. To this Dr. Blythe, seizing an opportunity to appear lofty, remarked, _"Oh come, Mr. Young… . Pray, how do you propose to conduct such a search?"

John surmised that Dr. Blythe welcomed discord among the surgeons; it but emphasized his own Olympian status.

John kept his own counsel, doing as he pleased. Having watched for a number of years a certain Dr. William Hunter in action, this present fray was something less than a minor irritation to him.

xi

A Burgoyne had received a stab wound behind the left breast, dealt by a small sword. When he had been brought into the chapel he was bleeding profusely from the mouth. It appeared that the lungs were considerably injured, for the situation of the external wound excluded the possibility of the stomach’s having been involved. The Burgoyne had fallen into John’s hands just at the end of the siege of the Citadel. Thinking the man to be dying, John had merely bled him to slow the pulse and to offset the violence of the inflammation. Yet the man was still alive.

Mr. Young, on the prowl, examined him minutely, as he had taken to examining all John’s patients. John stood aside, unconsciously taking that stance he had once assumed while bending over a particularly backward student in the dissection room. When Mr. Young straightened, John raised his straggling brows in question.

Mr. Young parried with a question of his own. "What do you propose, Mr. Hunter?"

Not inclined to fence when a man’s life was at point, John turned away slightly so that the patient might not hear. "I suspect he is in extremity, and yet I confess—I do not know what to do for him."

Mr. Young said, so quickly that John knew he considered himself to have been deferred to, "Then, we cannot do everything, can we? Just continue on with him as you have, there’s a good fellow, and he may survive yet."

"Aye, and he may die."

"As to that, well all may. Eh, Hunter?"

John gazed at his superior steadily. The man was not fighting over principles, surgical or otherwise, he was merely defending a somewhat hazy concept of his own exalted position. On that point, John cared little if Mr. Young considered himself God, the King, and Jupiter Pluvius, rolled all into one. I see, John was saying to him- self, that I have but to defer to this turd, to do anything I wish on this island. "Yes, we may all die, at that, Mr. Young."

"Hee," Mr. Young said. "You Scotch… . Hee… ."

Still, the patient lay on his back unable to breathe properly, lay behind them dying.

John studied the Burgoyne attentively. He recalled that since his entrance into the hospital the patient had sweated excessively. His legs were beginning to swell. John stood gazing at him, listening to the laboured breathing. Yet he had not haemorhaged from the mouth since his inflammation had? Good God, was he haemorrhaging internally? There was the explanation. The chest was full of extravasated blood, and as the internal bleeding continued, the accumulating pool of blood began to compress the lung. He will drown in his own juice, John thought. No, that is not correct, he will suffocate when he can no longer expand his lungs.

He went in search of Mr. Young.

"Oh no, my dear Hunter," Mr. Young remonstrated, "I could not consider it. You have no proof. It is an interesting supposition, granted. But I––"

"I should not like to proceed contrary to your wishes," John said evenly.

Mr. Young, who had compensated for his many years in uniform by garnering a complete wardrobe of fancy facial expressions, now assumed a smile intended to be engaging. "Of course you wouldn’t, sir But—-ah——since the man is a Burgoyne, why do we not consult Mr. Home on the matter? Now that the regimental surgeons are no longer busy in the field, it would be a courtesy on our part to-——"

"And this Mr. Home is the Burgoyne regimental?"

"Oh, yes. And a most accommodating gentle-—-—"

The conversation was growing tedious, if not irksome. "Then let us send for him!" John said impatiently.

Mr. Robert Home, a Scotsman somewhere in his early forties, had developed that trick (but whether consciously or no, John could not decide) of speaking in so soft a voice that one strained to hear his every word lest one miss something of importance. In manner he stood exactly between gravity and irony. Yet John, mistaking him at first for a malleable person, set out at once to have his way. Mr. Home heard him out without interruption.

"Thus," John said in conclusion, "I wish to open the chest. In short, to perform the operation for the ernpyéma."

Mr. Home asked in his quiet voice, "You are certain, sir, that the collection in his chest is blood, rather than pus?"

"Aye."

"Your pardon, Mr. Hunter, but I cannot quite understand the necessity for removing the extravasated blood, even should it be collecting in the thorax. In the lungs—that would be a different matter… ."

"Still——at each breath the dilation of the thorax sucks more blood from the wound."

"But it appears that only one lung is affected, sir! Men have survived with the use of only one-——"

John grew a trifle exasperated. "The extravasated blood will soon put pressure on both lungs! Furthermore, the blood may irritate and produce more inflammation. Gods, can you not-— Sir, I should like to perform the operation at once, and—"

"Pray, not so precipitate!" Mr. Home begged in his soft voice, but he smiled to show he meant no offence. His mouth remained closed when he smiled, giving him a gentle demeanour. "Let us first see what a spermaceti mixture and a little opium might accomplish for him. I am loath, to be perfectly frank, to expose him to the rigours of such an operation as you suggest at this time." Again he smiled with lips as close as those of a wound; and John thought: He has poor teeth he wishes to hide.

John said, more heatedly than he intended, "And when will you consider the possibility of the operation—when he is moribund?"

"When it becomes apparent to me, sir, that his thorax is filling with blood. You will pardon me, but I must now tell you that I no longer consider this man your patient. I will come to tend him myself. Certain it is that I can do for him only what I feel is right. I pray that I shall not make too serious a mistake." Mr. Home bowed. "Yet, let me assure you, sir, that your opinion on the matter is most persuasive, and I shall think on it at length. I have heard somewhat of your progress and am most impressed. Before leaving with his regiment, Colonel Mackenzie had many fine-—-"

"Lawful," John said coarsely. "Let us hew to the point."

Home looked on John with unconcealed pity. "There is no point, Mr. Hunter." He did not raise his voice. "You must believe me when I say I am most distressed by this clash———"

John, balked, overridden, more positive than ever that a chance to advance surgery had been forfeited, could only turn away in his anger.

In the day or so to follow he returned again and again to the Burgoyne. Slowly the man’s lips began to turn blue. Home gravely decreased the dosage of laudanum.

"You could, at least," John muttered, "put him out of his pain."

Home, choosing to take the remark as an honest suggestion, shook his head. "I fear it would bind his chest too much; I have noticed that opium has that effect in asthma" He seemed unoffended at having to explain his actions to John.

Always in the background was the hovering Mr. Young, waiting to see. He wore the same old soiled expression—incertitude—for three full days in a row. Mr. Farquhar and Mr. Lorrimer somehow managed to be within earshot frequently.

The Burgoyne died shortly after Home had appeared one afternoon to dose him with the bark. Mr. Young made the discovery.

"Where may I find Home at this hour?"John said.

"Mr. Home? Why, I suppose with his regi—-— Surely, you’re not going to search him out! I feel myself quite competent to pronounce a man dead-——"

"Aye, you’ve done it enough, I’ll wager," John said. But his anger was for Home; he did not intend to dally, expending it on Mr. Young.

He found Home sitting outside a tent treating a Burgoyne for the itch. Without preamble, John said, "Mr. Home, I wish to perform a morbid dissection on the Burgoyne who died this afternoon of a plethora of extravasated blood in his chest. May I have your permission?" He was already turning away when Home said:

"One moment, Mr. Hunter! I would speak with you."

Taller than John, and less clumsy, Home nevertheless had some difficulty in matching the pace of John’s short legs. "Mr. Hunter …!"

John stopped so abruptly that Home almost stumbled against him. "Mr. Hunter, I must protest that your conduct to me before a private was personally embarrassing."

"Oh, speak up," John said rudely; "these damned birds make such a row I cannot hear a word you’re saying."

Home refused to raise his voice and stepped backwards out of the sun to the shade of a tree. His beard, growing rapidly in the heat, suddenly stood out on his face as a grey stubble. In the strange black shade that the trees of Belle Isle cast, Home’s gaze was peculiarly penetrating, commanding. "It is not our custom to anatomize the dead, Mr. Hunter. They gave their lives for their country, you know."

"Also, morbid dissection would bring to light too many mistakes, eh, Home?"

"Perhaps. However, I would not care to place my refusal on that head."

"And I believe it to rest on no other! Damn you, you dare not let me prove you wrong, is that it?"

"At least," Home remarked, "you do not insult my intelligence by mere insinuations. You accuse openly."

"That dead Burgoyne accuses you, not I. I challenge you to watch me dissect him. I challenge you to the sight of the extravasation you said did not exist. I challenge you to spare me a few moments of your most valuable time-—"

"Such passion," Home observed, "on such a hot day. Collect yourself, Mr. Hunter, you leave me no choice but to permit you your dissection. Shall we go?" He had not once raised his voice during the entire exchange.

Inside the shattered house that John had selected for his private morgue, the corpse lay on a table swelling rapidly in the heat. Home exhaled a low whistling breath and removed his coat. "It is more like the West Indies than the coast of France," he observed in a friendly tone. "Now, Hunter, let us see what we have here." He stood waiting politely for John to proceed.

Angrily, John plunged in, making a deep incision from throat to navel. Exposing the sternum and ribs, he raised the sternum and cut into the cavity of the thorax. Blood poured out. John looked directly at Home. "Does that take you by surprise?"

"Yes," Home admitted slowly, "I must own that I had not thought it to be so."

John grunted, far from appeased, and began sponging and mopping out the cavity. When he turned to his pile of rags for a fresh handful, Home began where he had left off.

The cavity no longer obscured, they paused to observe the site. "Then the lungs," Home said in his soft voice, "were not punctured after all… . I let him die of suffocation."

"He would have died during the operation," John heard himself saying.

"Yet it should have been performed, Hunter!"

"Aye," John said steadily.

They Walked through the quiet street of Belle Isle together, enjoying the coolness of the approaching dusk. "I had heard that you were an anatomist with your brother in London before joining the army," Home was saying.

"Hmm," John admitted with reserve.

"In all truth, Mr. Hunter, it is only today that I have recognized the value of anatomy to the surgeon. Anatomy had always seemed to me an end in itself. And now, after all my years of practice, I suddenly see it as the foundation upon which all surgery must rest." He looked away from John, his colour rising under the grey stubble on his cheeks. "I suppose that must sound very strange to you… ."

"No," John said, "not too strange. It is more than a matter of a moment’s thought to see that the two are the same thing. Or that the one exists only for the other."

Gaze still averted, Home said, "Until today I would say I have been but half a surgeon."

"For years," John said, "I was but half an anatomist, my dear Home."

For the first time, Home exhibited his decaying teeth in a broad smile. "We are well met, my dear Hunter… . Tell me, are you a married man?"

"What? I thought you asked me if I—-"

"So I did. You are not married, are you, Hunter?"

"No."

xii

When the inhabitants of Belle Isle had crept back into their homes, the animals of the island miraculously reappeared also. Of a sudden stray dogs lay in the street asleep, while cats stalked the birds in branches overhead. Pigs broke out of sties to run squealing among the tents; and when the sun’s rays lay directly across the land and the ocean was mutable green and gold, cowbells drifted faintly from the moors. Those remaining in the chapel lay in torpor, staring at the lizards darting over the Stations of the Cross and around the hole in the ceiling.

One by one the regiments were departing for further action in the war. The garrison stood half-empty, and the French girls began to appear outside the houses at their tasks. The French did not merely tolerate the English; they pretended they were not there at all.

Up and down the coast, the peasantry grew accustomed to a pair of Englishmen who climbed about the cliffs, or sat for hours on an escarpment gazing out to sea.

"I’ll be leaving soon, I suspect," Robert Home said on one such afternoon, and John looked away to hide his dismay. "But then, Jock, so will you. I do not believe they will leave many of the hospital staff for the few troops remaining."

"In that case I hope to go home."

"Ah… . who does not?"

They sat in pensive silence, looking down on the sandbar which had been covered, not so long ago, with English dead. Between them a fly noisily cruised the lip of their wine bottle. "Look," Home said, "how the sea changes colour …"

"I am weary of this place," John said suddenly. "I long for a cold, disagreeable London drizzle."

"God help us both, then. There has been talk of an expedition to Martinico."

Martinico? Where in the middle of nowhere is that?"

"I believe," Home said in his quiet way, "you have located it correctly."

"Why there, I wonder? Robbie, did you ever happen to hear what was the concern of this War?"

But Home laughed; he had a question of his own. "Jock, why did you join the army?"

"I was tired of war," John said promptly.

Home was hurt. "Pray forgive me. I was prying."

"I was at war with my brother."

"I see," Home said carefully.

"And, too, I may have had a touch of the consumption."

"Ah, yes …"

"And then there was the matter of myself and a great many bottles of wine. My brother Wullie—Dr. William Hunter—and I had some little differences over those bottles of wine——"

"Jock, forgive me for——"

"Don’t concern yourself. It doesn’t concern me … overmuch… . My brother and I are very unlike, Robbie. He is most elegant and fashionable and clever and ambitious. I was not able to keep pace with him."

"Dr. William Hunter sounds like a colossus among men," Home commented dryly.

"Ah, he is! Mark me, he will be the richest and most important physician in London one day." John could not resist adding, "I think him to have Court influence even, Robbie. "

"Then perhaps he might use it to have you sent back to England."

John felt his mouth harden. "I do not believe he would. I should not like to burden him with——— Bygar! Why should I not? I shall write him at once. Robbie, I am an ass …"

"Indeed. Tell me, did you say whether or not he is married?"

"Wullie? Ha! No, he is a single man."

Briefly William replied to John’s letter. He could not Prevail upon Mr. Adair to arrange for John to be sent home. However, there was a good chance he could remain on Belle Isle, if that was John's second choice. Young Hewson would not be coming on to London that fall, as the School was to remain closed. He had an enormous practice to attend to these days. He signed himself, as John had, Your most affectionate brother. As an afterthought he added that their sister was pregnant. If the child was a boy she planned to name it Matthew.

William’s letter served only to strengthen John’s sense of exile, and with it came the old longing for the dissection room and his work table. Grumpy, idle, fretful with the heat, John sought the company of Robert Home. "

He found the regimental surgeon under a tree sewing a button on his coat. Home’s fingers moved awkwardly, because like most of the Burgoynes, he had an exasperating case of the itch.

"Come, give me your coat, Robbie," John said. "I’ll do that."

Home watched him with some amusement as John set himself about the task. "You sew a fine seam, Jock. Reminds me of my——"

"If I’m to be a damned surgeon for the rest of my days, I should at least know how to sew," John said testily. "Robbie, you regimentals disgust me with your lackadaisical ways."

"Pray, don’t be so cappernishious. We regimentals don’t look on every patient as being some kind of preparation, you know. Getting the lips of the wound pressed together is our only concern. We leave the fine embroidery to the women. The finest embroidery I ever saw in my life, in fact, is done———"

"Aye, and your scars look like sacks drawn together with a drawstring."

"They manage to keep the organs in and the cold air out," Home said composedly. "Ah, now I’ll look the proper fop again! Thank you." Home started to fold his coat, and then, with an expression John had never seen on his face before, laid it instead across his knees. "I just happened to put a miniature or two in my pockets when last I changed coats," he said. (was his gaze really somewhat crafty, John wondered, or did he merely imagine it so?) "My daughter Anne," Home said. He handed a miniature to John.

The girl was blue-eyed like her father and the majority of English or Scots girls. She had a mouth in the proper position under a slightly pointed nose. Her hair was the colour hair usually is. She was wearing pink. "Hmm," John said politely.

"She sings very prettily," Home said.

John scratched the back of his neck—damn the heat—and announced, "I can’t abide a screeching woman."

As if he had not heard, Home was taking out a second miniature. "Agnes. She plays the harpsichord."

She had blue eyes, she had features, she had hair. She was in blue. "Tinkly things, aren’t they?" John said. "Why will women bang at them?"

"Now, Mary," Home said—he apparently had an inexhaustible supply of daughters, John thought, irritated at the banal turn the conversation had taken, and the heat and his boredom and idleness- "embroiders. Very beautiful work, Jock."

"At least she doesn’t make any noise while she’s about it," John observed tactlessly. He took a turn for the coarse. "Robbie, weren’t you man enough to seed a boy?"

"Aye! My youngest." Home was again digging into the archives of his progeny. "This was done when he was not quite three; he’s five now. That’s my Everard, Jock. Did ever you see such a fine lad? He’s the sum of all my existence, my Everard."

"Then don’t make a surgeon out of him," John advised; and at last found the graciousness to add, "for he appears too fine a boy for such drudgery."

Home beamed, careless of his black teeth. "Mayhap he’ll be a physician. He’s a sharp lad, Jock. Why, at the age of only nine months he-—-" .

John longed for an opportune moment to change the subject. He was doomed a moment later to hear that Home had seven children. It promised to be a long afternoon.

xiii

With a brisk drumming to quicken their steps, and with standard snapping in the salt breeze, the Burgoynes were marching down to the flatboats. At their head was Gentleman Johnny, and even a French maiden or two were saddened to see him go. At the foot of the column, Robert Home, out of step, slouched along on his long legs, scratching at his itch. Beside him, his ‘prentice carried Home’s old surgical chest, bound with a bloodied old strap.

Home was the last man to enter the last flatboat, and as it pulled away from the quay, his soft voice drifted back to John with extraordinary clarity, "… rendezvous in London, Jock… ."

xiv

When September came on, the hospital surgeons fell into a new argument. Mr. Young and a Mr. Gordon disagreed over medications. A private had applied for a potion to solidify his bowels; he had had to seek out the fly-infested privy trenches a dozen times a day. Mr. Young advised clarified butter. Mr. Gordon, suddenly proclaiming himself an expert on the putrid fever, said bleeding only was necessary. Then Dr. Blythe was appealed to, but not before Mr. Farquhar and Mr. Lorrimer had had their first falling out.

John fled the chapel for the escarpment.

There was nothing in the world he so detested as wrangling surgeons. Yet he had it in him to be one of the worst, when it came to that. There had been nothing admirable in his brushes with Mr. Young. And in his first meeting with Home he had addressed that gentleman in the tone he might have used on a pert ’prentice.

"Oh, damme," he cried aloud to the sea and the bland skies, "will I ever get home to London?"

He found himself thinking: If he were, by some stroke of luck, sent home shortly, and if he showed himself to be sobered and matured by his War experience, would William——

But in his next letter William clearly indicated that he would not. He advised John to save his money against the end of the war. Then, on half-pay and given the freedom to practise surgery by virtue of his service to the King, he might set himself up quite nicely in London.

William was, nevertheless, his most affectionate brother. Dorothea was coming to term, John would be delighted to know.

Be damned to the brat, John thought, in a pet.

Through September the sun burned on, and in the chapel the surgeons clawed at one another with their voices. A second soldier had applied to have his stool solidified. And a third, and a fourth… .

Then overnight all quarrelling ceased. The surgeons were too occupied. The bloody flux had at last taken hold of the garrison. Men lay amidst the buzzing flies and the stench of the privy trenches where they had fallen. Word came in that the brigades quartered around the island were affected also. The surgeons conferred, and, for once, agreed. When the putrid fever settled down on a confined population such as that on Belle Isle, there was the not-unheard-of possibility that none would leave it alive. John read in each face an alarm that not even the worst of the siege had roused. Mr. Young was quite shrill, and there was open fear in his eyes. Someone would have to go across the island to Saucon and attend the sick there, and someone would have to go to La Maria, and someone …

In all, there were fourteen hospitals in operation by mid-October. By that time a chill, steady rain began to fall. The dead were left stacked outside the hospitals in the mud awaiting burial; but no one had the strength or time to dig. Inside, under leaking roofs, the dying lay sodden and at the same time racked with fever and dehydration. They lay in their constant evacuations of water and blood, until someone noticed that they were stiff and had them thrown out to join their fellows in the mud.

The French locked themselves away in their houses, abandoning their wells, and leaving out pans in which to catch the rain. The English saw them no more.

The hospital staff succumbed, the physical gentlemen collapsing over their patients. An apothecary died, and Mr. Lorrimer was near death and out of his head with fever. Mr. Young endeavoured to remain on his feet, though he had become emaciated overnight. Dr. Blythe rode on a stumbling nag in the rain, going from hospital to hospital, sounding the cry of the infallible cure for the flux, Clarified butter, gentlemen, two spoonfuls at a time of clar—-Shortly after, he fell from the horse, not to rise under his own power. John climbed into the saddle in his place, and set out.

He had forgotten when he last slept through a night, or even removed his soggy uniform. Yet the flux did not visit him. His morbific seeds were not so inclined, he decided. His ailments seemed always to be those of the spirit; and always chronic.

When October ended and November drearily rained in, the number of new cases lessened. By the end of the month the epidemic was over. The toll had been greater than the entire loss suffered from the assault and capture of beautiful, tranquil, healthful Belle Isle. After that, winter closed in, and the hospital staff languished, still too battered to do more than snap at one another. To his amazement, John received a slight promotion. He was purveyor of the hospital stores, and was thus accorded a slight raise in pay.

As William had advised him, he began to save his money.

When he was not concerned with the clerkly details of his duties, he was engrossed with the hibernating lizards of the island. He found them out and warmed them and poked chunks of meat down them and prodded them into activity. The lizards preferred to sleep forever, rather than not at all, and died. He made a few careless notes.

But he had propounded another principle of surgery: Artificial stimulation did not necessarily strengthen the constitution. Thus, drugs which brought on the warm hands and the flush of health might only serve to diminish those powers needed in the battle against disease. And wound inflammation was a disease—of that he was certain. He would no longer administer stimulants, then, to future patients battling inflammations.

"Why, Mr. Hunter," Mr. Young wanted to know snippily, accosting John at the door of the chapel, "do you waste your time on those slimy creatures?"

"I have no choice," John said, boldly pretending to misunderstand. "They’re all staff surgeons same as you and me, Mr. Young."

Mr. Young was still sorting through his facial expressions when John left him. Like a woman with a full wardrobe, Mr. Young found that he had absolutely nothing to wear.

Soon after that Mr. Young received his orders to embark. John was hardly sorry to see him go.

xv

The talk was all of Portugal. John decided he would want the directorship of a hospital were he to be sent there. Such a position would eliminate his having to bicker with a superior over his surgical principles. He began to storm William with letters; it was April, and William must move quickly.

His orders came: he and Dr. Blythe were to proceed to Portugal. He was still a staff surgeon.

William’s replies were strangely evasive and yet rife with the most astonishing hints. Great matters were afoot, but William was not at liberty to reveal them as yet. John had to learn from gossip brought to the island along with the hospital supplies, that Dr. William Hunter was due for an appointment to attend the Queen in her capacity as a child-bearing lady.

He grew tense with expectation. As the Royal Accoucheur, William’s influence would be scarcely less than mandatory. And, at last, William wrote to say that the Secretary for War had promised John a hospital directorship.

He embarked for Lisbon, high of heart. And within the hour he was groaning in his hammock, violently ill.

xvi

He arrived in Lisbon in midsummer, seeing it first from the ship as it moved up the Taugus River. From a distance the White city, rising in tiers from the river, seemed dreamlike, serene.

On the quay, the heat nearly struck him to his knees, and he and Dr. Blythe clung to one another, panting. "Oh dear," Dr. Blythe was muttering, "oh dear, oh dear… ."

"Courage, sir," John said. "You’ll soon be fanned by the breezes of a nice new controversy."

"Pray, Hunter——" Dr. Blythe began, and in spite of himself, sniggered.

The hospital they found to be a miracle of spaciousness after the chapel and tents of Belle Isle. Entering the cool shadow of the hall, they dimly discerned a familiar figure approaching.

"Dr. Blythe! And my dear Mr. Hunter!"

"Mr. Young," John said.

They bowed.

They strolled down a hallway towards a ward. "Not like Belle Isle, is it?" Mr. Young asked, adorned in his most pleasant expression.

"Not yet," John admitted.

"Hee… you dour Scotch… . Hee… ."

God, John thought Oh God.

They went through the ward, their feet scuffling softly through the sawdust. In another hallway, two gentlemen were approaching them—-physical men, by the look of them–and hastily Mr. Young murmured, "Hunter, I had meant to discuss… . Say nothing if he surprises you—— Ah, Mr. Madox! Dr. Huck!"

Mr. Madox, a gentleman with nervous, quicksilver eyes, took to looking down on John with great concentration, as if he knew something fascinating and unbelievable about him. Dr. Huck, a man of extreme reserve, by the brevity of his greeting, also watched him, but rather in the manner of one fearing a scene and hoping somehow to escape before it should occur.

Mr. Madox opened fire. "I have heard much of your work, Mr. Hunter. You must tell me of your ideas some time when I am not busy. I’m readying myself for the position of director here, you know." So saying, he withdrew a handkerchief from his sleeve and flicked at the air with it, as if to clear the space between himself and John.

"I must be going-—-—-" Dr. Huck murmured.

"Strange," John said, "that there are to be two directors, Mr. Madox. Myself and you."

"Very," Mr. Madox agreed. He did not agree with John in the slightest. "You must be mistaken in your expectations, sir," he said levelly, but his agitated eyes betrayed him. Having opened fire, he was afraid to stand and fight, and bowing quickly to all assembled, he made his retreat.

"Damme———" John began.

"Oh, do lower your voice, Hunter!" Mr. Young cried happily.

"Gods," John said, "you know what kind of a man I am, Young. I cannot work under such a one as that Madox; I must be put over him ! Otherwise he will oppose and balk me at every step."

"Let me assure you," Mr. Young announced in ringing tone "that I am your staunch friend in this matter!"

"And I," Dr. Blythe chimed.

The two gentlemen exchanged a cosy conspiratorial smirk.

"To me,"John said wearily, "this place is exactly like Belle Isle."

It would have mattered little had he managed to receive the post. There was only the most routine surgery to be performed. The English had come to Portugal somewhat in the manner of a big lad rushing to stand over a littler one threatened by a bully. Spain, the bully, then retreated to consider the matter in a new light.

The most serious wounds John treated were those caused by stilettos, which had been employed to settle differences between the Portuguese and the English soldiers.

John persisted in his efforts to obtain the directorship, plaguing William with letters. Yet he knew he did not really want it, careless of prestige.

In August, the Queen was delivered of a Prince, and, rather belatedly, the English set out to celebrate. For the first time in many months John became rollicksome drunk and kept Mr. Young up to all hours, pounding him on the hack and repeating some mysterious witticism about Dr. William Hunter and a pair of rusty forceps. Mr. Young could not make head or tail of it, except to become possessed of the fact that Dr. Hunter had been in attendance at the Queen’s labour.

In reply to John’s pale importunings, William sent him an advertisement for the reopening of the School. Dr. Hewson would assist. John threw the paper to the floor. He remembered that black day when he had discovered Hewson of the downy beard moving among the dissection tables, usurping John’s place. Yet, long before then surgery had marked him for one of its own. It was as if there were a dearth of Mr. Youngs and John Gunnings and the like, in this world, and surgery had resigned itself to the taking of captives for its ends. William’s letter also drifted to the floor. John went out under the white sun to walk the white city, casting before him his shadow of idle discontent. He came to stand at the edge of the town, looking along the road of a great viaduct with arches over two hundred feet high, spanning an empty heaven over which no cloud had ever seemed to move. From there he wandered to Os Cyprestes, the English cemetery, to walk quietly among the trees, to ponder. He had the feeling of one who, waking from a long illness, must become reacquainted with himself. I am a surgeon, he told himself. What then? The war could not last forever, and he would be forced to rely on his own resources.

I have never done that, he thought, and his vast surprise stayed his feet. From Scotland to William to war, always he had clung to someone or something other than himself. On his ultimate return to London he would have to——

He found himself looking down on the grave of Henry Fielding. Crotchety old Fielding, who had glowered and bawled like a baited bull at Smollett. Old? At his death, Fielding had been something like two or three years older than William now was. John’s skin grew cold under the white sun, all light and no warmth. Time was like water, moving rapidly, carrying on its crest all that he had hoped to do, was impelled to do, and had not pursued with sufficient diligence; still, here he stood in a cemetery in a strange land, his hands idle, compounding the waste of his time with petty rivalry over a petty position.

Would this damned war never end so that he could return to London, and work?

When he entered the hospital late that afternoon, Mr. Young met him in the hall. "Ah, there you are, Hunter. Robbie Home has been in search of you."

xvii

"I have every expectation," Home was saying, "of being with my family for Christmas." He rocked on the points of one of the two chairs in John’s quarters. "And I am not ashamed to own that I have long since grown weary of the war."

"Gods, what I would give to be out of it," John said sourly.

Home looked wise. "There is talk… . Matters will come to an end soon. The soldiers can smell a thing like that, and my Burgoynes talk of nothing these days but of their being mustered out. Pray, fill my glass, will you, Jock? Ah … Pffhah! D’ye think the Portuguese to have a secret hostility towards us? The wine they sell would poison a— Jock, you must promise me, you will come to my house as soon as you are in London?"

"Aye, Robbie, though I will be ancient and wandering by then, and you——-"

"La… . Give me your promise."

"Very well, I promise."

Home rose. "I must be off. Remember now, Suffolk Street, Pall Mall!" At the door he paused to add, "And Jock … bring Dr. Hunter with you!"

xviii

Mr. Young and John stood together outside a ward. "It has been a most—-ah—instructive experience knowing you, Mr. Hunter."

John gravely returned the sentiment. On an impulse he asked, "Mr, Young, if a man were brought to you this moment with a ball in the ham—what would you do?"

"Do? Why, I’d remove the ball and enlarge the wound," Mr. Young said promptly.

"Semper idem," John said, quoting William, and taking himself by surprise even more than Mr. Young. "Always the same… ."

Mr. Young was most honoured, he bowed deeply. "God willing, we shall meet again, my dear Mr. Hunter. "

John murmured, bowing also, "Aye, one never knows what God will do next… ."

xix

It was May 1763. In Portugal the skies would be the colour of clear cold water. On Belle isle the wind would be moving across the grasses of the moors, passing over these unlit valleys, and sweeping birds before it as it rushed from the escarpments out to sea.

In London a fog was giving way to a disagreeable rain. A dead dog floated down the flooded kennel in Great Windmill Street; and the garbage heap at the end of Grey’s Lane began to run over the tops of the foot-passengers’ shoes. A child was run down by a carriage in the Haymarket, and at St. George’s Hospital, Caesar Hawkins wiped his scalpel on his sleeve and proceeded to relieve a woman of a cancerous breast. In Golden Square a red-headed child named Willie Blake stared in terror at the Great Head of God which had suddenly appeared in his window, the rain streaming down the Holy Cheeks. Several streets away, a surgeon’s ‘prentice and a quack dentist sat conversing, their topic being the eccentric American, Mr. Franklin, and his philosophy of electricity. In Covent Garden a young Dr. Hewson sat at a work-table laboriously dissecting out a preparation of the lymphatics, or absorbents, as he preferred to call them. In Alsatia a grave-robber awakened in an alley to screw up his pox scar of a face as he might have a sponge, to press from his eyes two tears of anger and pain; he had been stunned and robbed. In the Tower menagerie a dying lion lay on the damp straw of his cage, while his keeper wondered for the thousandth time what had ever happened to the maniac who once would have paid him a handsome sum for the animal. In Pall Mall, a barrister, abed with the sniffles, pulled his nightcap over his ears in a futile effort to drown out the noise from the house next door: "Will she never stop torturing that plinking harpsichord?" he shrieked. In St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, Mr. Percival Pott received yet another insult from a physician, and his hand closed over his sword, as Mr. Pott seriously considered running the physician through. In Jermyn Street, Dr. William Hunter sat in his library, hard at work on a piece of writing in which the leading characters were variously named Monro, Pott, Smith, and Hunter, and drumming his fingers in advance of excitement on the arm of his chair.

And in the portico of the church in Covent Garden, an army surgeon in a soaked, shabby uniform, with a battered surgeon’s chest at his feet, stood smiling beatifically across at the Piazzas and their soot-blackened, mud-bespattered beauty.

The Seven Years War was over.

2

To do William justice, John thought, it must be admitted that he received John for dinner with all the ceremony he might have accorded his Most Favoured Patient. The last of Fielding’s vinam pomonae: came up from the cellar, and Duncan made of himself a parade of one as he bore in the pheasant on a silver plate. William was as full of petees and as playful as a popinjay, and he had much difficulty keeping his lace free of butter, for he had had Duncan spread it on almost every dish—fresh sweet butter, pale as moonlight —and most rare. John had owned that he had emerged from the Seven Years War near famished for butter.

"Come, Brother," William said, at the meal’s conclusion, "you must tell me of your plans."

John toyed with the notion of teasing him for the moment. "Why, as to that," he began, "I fully expected that we"—but he had not the heart to so afright William, and so he relented-—"fully expected," he took up after a pause, "to practise surgery in the Garden. I have taken rooms in Tavistock Row, you know. By and by I suppose someone will apply for my renowned services."

William breathed as if demonstrating the function for a classful lot students. In his visible relief he managed, "Your half—pay will be most welcome also, I wager." He leaned forward now, careless of his stock and the butter, to peer across the table at John. "You are changed," he said slowly. "I cannot quite discern in what direction … You look the same."

William had suffered the loss of several teeth during John’s absence, and as he examined John’s sturdiness his expression grew rather peevish. This but emphasized the fact that his nose had started on its slow journey downwards to his chin. William was not, John observed with pity, preparing to greet the loss of his male beauty with equanimity. To have been born ugly could, of itself, grow to be one of life’s greatest compensations, John decided a trifle smugly. For the first time in his life he was on the verge of preening as William was saying:

"In truth, I have never seen you look better. The war has been good for you."

"Aye!" John agreed. "Wullie, I have found myself. I am become a surgeon!"

"Ah?"

"I shall continue on with anatomy, certainly," John went on.

"Gods, Brother, I am buzzing with plans!"

"You’re planning to teach?"

John grinned. "Would it cause you concern if I did?"

"Of course not," William said with a studied carelessness. "Hewson and I have all the students we could possibly accommodate as it–-" John changed the subject. "How is our sister?"

"Well."

"And Mr. Baillie?"

"He is well, so her letters say."

"And the children?"

"They too are-—-— Are you planning to teach?"

"Why, no, Wullie," John said calmly. "I am going to secure a position on the staff at St. George’s. Would you refill my glass… . My thanks."

"You confound me," William said, though his face had already revealed the fact.

"I suppose you will be able to give me no little help in the matter?"

William belatedly wrapped himself in his old hauteur. "If I may be allowed to say so, I could place an apothecary’s donkey on the staff at St. George’s, if I so chose."

"Then extend yourself," John said easily, "and place me. I need the opportunities of practice the position would afford, and the Lord knows I need the money."

"You are most changed," William decided. "And yet … I cannot say in exactly what way."

"Think on it a while, Wullie," John said. "It may come to you yet."

William let that pass. The old fires of intrigue were lighting up his features, and further, he seemed to welcome the opportunity to display for John his now enormous influence. "Very well, Jock, St. George’s it is. Shall we attend the next board meeting in tandem? Eh? The Hunter brothers!" He was raising his glass.

"The Hunter brothers," John echoed, then, despite himself, could not resist repeating William’s slip of the tongue, "in tandem!"

Over the rim of his glass William’s gaze was momentarily doubtful. But he had so much to tell John, now that his mind was at rest as to the number of demands John might have planned to make on him, that he drank off his wine, rearranged his lace, elevated his brows elegantly, and opened his mouth, "I …" William began importantly.

He had quite an aria to sing. William was busily defending his discoveries—(Publication, Jock, publication. As I have always said, it is the only way!)—-Smollett had gone off to Italy, but William no longer had any particular need of his talents----more important, or less important, really, when you considered the matter for more than the space of a moment, Percival Pott was preparing a second edition of his silly Treatise on Ruptures——oh, pardon, petee—-

"Come, Wullie," John said, "you are teasing yourself more than you are me. What is it you cannot bring yourself to tell me before you have brought me to a fever pitch of curiosity?"

William tried to evade him. But William could never control his eyes; though his voice remained soft, his gaze was almost strident, jarring as a shriek at midnight. John could tell that he was closing in on his subject.

William had a Plan. He had the ear of Lord Bute on it, and if all went well—-

"… a Physical School!" William cried triumphantly.

"You mean to say——you mean, you have it in mind to establish a school which could grant degrees in medicine? Right here in London?"

"I do! Physic and surgery, Jock. Anatomy, materia medica, practical surgery, midwifery—all to be taught in English, no Latin in my school. In short, to train the students to become both physicians and surgeons, at one and the same time! I like to think of it in my mind as being a medical school. My plan is to present the school to the glory of the Crown, and Lord Bute assures me that I will receive a Royal grant for the land. I will have to build out of my own pocket, of course, but the money does not concern me. Jock; I will empty the halls of Oxford! Edinburgh will be peopled by shadows, and a few Monros wandering about through the empty——"

But at the mention of the Monros an old ache possessed John, like the phantom pain of a limb which has been long since amputated, and he said hastily, "I think your idea of a medical school the finest thing I have ever heard of in my life. Had there been such a school when I——— Why, at Oxford I saw … saw" he resumed bravely-—"saw men teaching surgery who had never so much as pared a fingernail or nicked a vein. All theory and no——-"

"Both are wanting," William interrupted, impatient to take over the conversation again.

"And the experimental, Wullie."

William frowned, though he was saying casually enough, "Ah, indeed, the experimental. However … that will come later. I would not care to stress that part of it right at the first."

"Certainly not… . Wullie, believe me when I tell you that I wish you luck on this matter. I shall be famous yet, by virtue alone of being your brother."

"Oh, now—-—-" William murmured with becoming modesty, unable to resist spoiling his effect by adding—-"but then, I have maintained for years that I would one day become a great—ahh—- shall we go to the library, Brother? I believe we will be more comfortable there."

"Wullie, one question more: Must you have the endorsement of the Crown for your project?"

"Yes," William said flatly, "I must."

"Yet such would not affect the school. Only your fame."

"Only my fame," William agreed.

ii

John had anticipated no difficulty in resuming his old life in the Garden, and was surprised to find that he could not adjust, could not feel that he belonged. William, busy with his Plan, said it was only a matter of time. Dr. Hewson, with a fledgling dignity, avowed that the School looked as it should only when John was roaming the parlour, the wine-glass of the guest in his hand, looking over his old preparations to see how they had fared. But he tired of Hewson’s eager company readily, and was impatient with himself when he grew impatient with Hewson’s willingness to defer to him.

Once he thought he espied Colin Mackenzie coming out of a shop in the Hay Market, but it was someone else.

William’s friends, old and new, were a tight gossipy clique, their talk so cluttered with names and events strange to John, that it took William half the night to footnote them, so that John’s interest in them wandered, and soon he too wandered away also.

Yet he was strangely reluctant to seek out Robbie Home or his other Army colleagues. The fact was, he missed his uniform, and he dreaded showing himself as he was, shabby and out at the elbow. Moreover, he was permitting his hair to grow for comfort’s sake, and his red curls would not, as yet, submit to bear-grease.

He avoided the coffee-houses of the Garden, and went but once into Tom Kings He saw no one he knew. He searched through the dismal alleys of Alsatia asking for Howison, but the rogues and trulls he accosted merely shrugged, asking: "Who?"

More by accident than any other means, he acquired a patient or two. A gentleman broke his leg almost at John’s front door. A lady in a house near him wished to be blooded. Several blades applied to him, in secrecy, to have him confirm their suspicions that they were suffering with the venereal distemper.

That was all. He sat in his cold rooms, jaw thrust out in thought, counting up the days until he and William could present his petition at a board meeting of St. George’s. Even before he had returned to London, it had come to him what it was he wanted to do. He wanted to practise surgery on the many, not the affluent few. And only a hospital could afford him the variety of cases he would need. In his desire to see himself secure on the staff of a hospital, he chose to ignore the manner of his departure from St. George’s some seven years ago. Instead he reminded himself of the hospital’s pleasant situation in the open countryside. He thought fondly of the morgue, and of Mr. Middleton’s dreamy lack of opposition to anything the members of the staff might care to do.

He very nearly succeeded in forgetting the existence of a certain John Gunning, until, finally attending the board meeting with William, and dressed in a fine suit of his brother’s, he found himself face to face with his old rival.

John Hunter bowed, glaring.

John Gunning bowed, mouth pursed in a smile of malevolent, clerkly distaste.

Yet even as Caesar Hawkins was bearing down on Dr. Hunter, windily cordial, and William was honouring Mr. Hawkins with his daintiest leg, William’s eyes were saying to John: Pray, do not waste your time on the likes of that Gunning person; I, myself, will demolish him later by the merest flick of a finger. Court yon old fool staring at you, he has power!

Awkward, grinning, and had he but known it, almost overpoweringly intent on his objective, John did as he was bid. Excellent, William’s eyes said, now cozen the imbecile I have on my hook… .

Unfortunately, the Hunter brothers learned, there was no vacancy available. "And if there were," John said mumpishly, riding towards the Garden in William’s chariot, "Gunning would be entitled to it."

"Of course he would," William said. "But that is neither here not there. The point is, you want it."

"D’ye think I’ll be able to take it from him, when one does arise?"

"No," William said. "But I might-—on your behalf."

"I do not deserve your kindness, Brother."

"Tut," William said. "Are you finding it difficult living on your half-pay?"

"Not at all!" John lied valiantly.

"Still," ‘William said, "I believe it would be more convenient for both of us if you simply keep the suit you are wearing. I have no particular need of it at the present. In fact, it never really became me. Have you made any interesting preparations lately?"

"In fact, I have. I bought an eel from the fish monger and–"

"Oh, eels …" William said.

Only after William had dropped him off in Tavistock Row did he admit to himself that he had been hoping for an invitation to dinner. But it turned out that William was going dancing that evening, and he bade John a hasty farewell. Restless, lonely, and still dressed in borrowed finery, John set out to wander under the summer stars. Music spilled from windows opened to the warm night, the open doors of the taverns cast squares of welcome on to the dark streets; still, he but glanced in and then went on his way. At last, what he sought found him, though it was only a matter of time before he would have come upon it anyway.

It was in Golden Square that he was nearly thrown to the ground by a Burgoyne officer making his merry, if somewhat erratic, way down the footpath. The Burgoyne clutched John contritely, attempting to right him on his feet. Then, holding John closer to the light from a window, he cried, "Are you not Mr. Hunter, the surgeon?"

"Aye."

The Burgoyne beamed, and promptly began to undress himself on the street. Or so it seemed to John. "Gods, man," John began, edging away. "what are you——"

"I want you to see my leg. Oh, damme, I can’t seem to-—— Ah well, all in good time, I can show it to you later. No one would ever guess I carried two balls in it. Why, Mr. Hunter, you’d be amazed at the interest the ladies have shown in my——"

"Not at all," John said hastily. "we are attracting attention, pray let me?"

"Indeed no!" the Burgoyne roared. "Permit me! Why, you that saved my leg, and possibly my life, as Mr. Home himself told me just the other day— Indeed no!" He put an arm about John’s shoulder. "In fact, we’ll let Robbie Home pay for our entertainment! No need for us to argue the matter, Hunter, when money-bags Home awaits us around the–"

"I would not think of it," John heard himself crying largely. "The pleasure must be mine, or I will not join you."

"Then rather than displease you," the Burgoyne said promptly, "I’m sure Robbie will agree with you, and let you have your way. Come, Hunter, if you are unsteady, you may lean on me." John supported the merry Burgoyne as they proceeded on their way.

In the busy tavern John saw but one face clearly, and that face one which looked on his, startled, and then broke into a black- snagged grin of welcome. "Jock! You son-of-a-whore, where have you been all these weeks?" As John approached, Home digested his borrowed finery and grew waggish. "Ah, engaged with the ladies, you rogue. Well, that I should live to see Jock Hunter swaggering about in velvet, with lace under his chin. That is lace, is it not? Pray, put your jaw to one side so that I may–—"

"You’re drunk as a lord," John said comfortably, drawing up a chair. "And this is my brother’s suit, as well you might know." After a time he discovered that the tavern was one preferred by former army men. In the heat and the noise, amidst coarse laughter and foul talk, he found himself perfectly at home.

Now he belonged. William was right—he had changed, more even, than he had guessed.

Sometime during the evening he fuzzily promised on his word of honour to come to Robbie’s the next day for tea.

Vanity made him wear his own shabby clothes; though later he was to think it a stroke of fate. For had he worn the suit William had let him have with the sure understanding that John was to use it only for board meetings, and then what had happened had occurred to William’s suit and not his own shabby—— In short, that day at tea, John made the acquaintance of the core of all Robbie Home’s existence, none other than young Everard Home, aged seven.

iii

They sat around the tea-table, John, Robbie, and Mrs. Home, an uncomfortable assembly of three trying to create the merriment of many. The tea-table bounced and tried to walk away from them constantly; young Everard Home was underneath it, playing horsie. Robbie wanted to talk war, his soft voice but an undercurrent in Mrs. Home’s murmurings to her youngest, still hidden from sight. John politely bent his head to Mrs. Home and then Robbie. He could not hear the latter, and the former was the most distracted woman he had ever met. Mrs. Home lived the pyramidal life, each small task, even to the filling of John’s cup or the locking away of the tea in its chest, was piled on those which had occupied her the moment before, so that she seemed but waiting from minute to minute for the final collapse. Her gaze, during conversation, was unwavering, so that one knew she was listening inwardly, her mouth murmuring out of habit. "Ah, yes… . Indeed …? Everard, dear, pray stop….." Defeated, John almost welcomed the emergence of Everard from under the table.

He proved to be a pretty child, even if most forward. He roamed from John to his parents, trebling challenges to fisticuffs, examining minutely John’s coat and the contents of its pockets, wheedling for coins, wheedling for sweets, bawling for coins and sweets, and pommelling parents and Uncle John, showing no favouritism in the matter.

"Are your other children out?" John enquired in a near shout.

"Eh?" Robbie said. "Oh yes, they are. The girls are shopping for-——-"

Young Everard knocked John’s cup from his hand, scalding John’s knee and staining his breeches. Robbie fetched the lad a clout an instant later. Mrs. Home led him screaming from the room.

"He’s the bane of my existence," Home said.

"Strange," John remarked, mopping at his knee, "I had understood you to say he was the core of your existence."

"Aye, but then he was hundreds of miles away."

"I must be off, Robbie. Give my thanks to Mrs. Home for me, would—"

"You must come again," Home said quickly. "Soon. My wife was quite taken with you, I assure you."

"Was she?" John said. Up to that moment he was not sure Mrs. Home had been aware of his existence at all.

And as he descended the steps to the street, Mrs. Home suddenly put her faded blonde head out of the window and inelegantly called down an invitation in Home’s exact words for John to return.

Somehow, he was too busy to come again to Robbie’s house, what with board meetings at the hospital, and his few new preparations, and his fewer patients. Instead he met Home at the tavern in Golden Square.

By autumn he had to admit to Home that he was troubled. He would grow old waiting for a vacancy to come up on the hospital staff. He must find some patients elsewhere.

Home too was dour. "Jock, you know the old saying, ‘You can’t earn enough for bread from surgery until you’re too toothless to eat it. But with Pott and Hawkins and Adair and Bromfield all practising, we smaller beer stand no chance. We’ll have to outlive them, Jock."

"Damn," John said. "Damn… . Robbie, I must have work!"

"If you mean you want patients to experiment on, I can see that there might be some dearth of material," Home said dryly. "Ah, don’t fling up your head at me in that manner, I have seen you at work before."

"Aye, and I remember teaching you a bit of surgery, Robert Home!"

"Let us say you posed a nice theory to me, and apparently happened to be right. But, Jock, you must confess to being precipitate when it comes to rushing your theories into practice. And were I ever to send you a patient or two, the good Lord Himself only knows what you——-"

John was still a sentence or so behind, nagging the point. "Aye, but I test a theory, I shall never know whether it lies in truth or error."

"These are patients we are discussing. human beings."

"And it is human beings who will profit when I am right."

Home flushed in anger. "Look you"-—-he began in soft indignation–-"d’ye realize what you’ve just said? Who are you to dare——"

John blinked. "Eh? What did I——"

"You innovators! God knows whether you are the more careless of others, or the more confident. Well, without your sort we would all still be swine-gelders, I suppose… . I see that I must send you a patient or two if I am able. My appointment book is at home. Have you had your supper?"

"Oh, I hardly think Mrs. Home would-—-"

"She’ll be delighted !"

Ah well, little Everard again.

But the younger children of Home’s brood were not in evidence. As if posing for an artist, Mrs. Home and her third eldest daughters were in the parlour, all in attitudes. Coming upon the scene of the maiden at the harpsichord, her sister singing away at her side, and the third demurely seated at her embroidery frame, John was never more conscious of his frayed linen and dilapidated shoes. It escaped his notice completely, as it had before, that the Home parlour was as shabby as he. He saw only the graceful young ladies, heard their high sweet voices, and dreaded lest they start giggling, and he be the cause of it.

Mrs. Home said, as if this were all too much for her, "My daughters: Mary, Agnes, and my eldest—Anne."

"Miss Home!" He made a leg. "Miss Home"-—a leg. "and Miss-—-"

Anne, she was called. He made the most elegant leg of his life. A little taller than he, she inclined her head to him, and for a moment a pale curl nestled in the shadowy depression created by that portion of the clavicle between the areas of attachment of the deltoideus and trapezius muscles.

John was enchanted, his fingers half rose to dip into that dark pool. He met her gaze. He watched her struggle to conceal her revulsion; she was not unkind. How pretty she is, John thought in the midst of his hurt, and then, as she turned away, he saw that her nose was pinched, the nostrils tense with some inner fear or misery. He thought her too vulnerable even for a girl of only twenty.

"… and writes exquisite poetry!" Home was saying in the tone of one ticking off a list on his fingers. Ah, so that was it.

"And," Home added in a low aside, as the girl moved away, "she fancies herself in love."

"Oh no," Mrs. Home said positively; "that was last week, Robbie." After supper, Home took John to his study. "Well, will you have her, Jock?"

"Which one?"

"Annie, my oldest. Must marry her off first, you know."

"With the greatest of pleasure," John said politely.

Home sighed. "They are a man’s worst problem, Jock. I have to find good husbands for my girls—established men. And yet, even while I am combing the town and half the army for young surgeons and physicians, they are out meeting fops and wastrels and setting their caps for them. Annie, now… . For a month she sighed about the house for a blade who—-you may believe this or no—wore a patch on his face just to the left of his dainty little mouth. He was killed in a duel not long ago, thank——— Well, I should not say that, eh?"

"I am sure so pretty a girl can have her pick of——" John began, when a nasal singing drifted back from the parlour. "Gods, do they do that often?"

"Music and such are supposed to be accomplishments," Home said severely.

"How old is the one who embroiders?"

"You’ll have to wait for her for several years." Home settled himself in his chair more comfortably. "But in the meantime you can build your practice. You’ve made a fine choice, Jock; she’s the least extravagant of the lot. Her name is Mary. It might be easier for you in your suit if you remember that."

"I will try," John said gravely. "She is the plump one, is she not?"

True to his word, Home sent him a few patients. They were not of the best, querulous, poor, and often hopelessly ill. They all lived at the edges of town. Several times he walked over to Jermyn Street to have the use of William’s chariot to get to his calls. And when he finally managed to take in a few fees, he bought himself not a horse, but a hyena from a menagerie keeper in Piccadilly.

He knew himself to be drifting; he was dispirited.

Whereas William was never more assured, pomposities crowding one another from his seamed mouth. "Patience, Jock! There is certain to be a vacancy at the hospital in a year or so–-"

"Wullie, I need some patients! And I can hardly let Robbie Home continue sharing his practice with me!"

"Oh, certainly not, Jock. In point of fact, I have been wishing to discuss the Home family with you."

"They are most anxious to meet you."

"I’m sure they are. Nobodies are usually anxious to meet anyone they can. However,"—William raised an imperial hand as John opened his mouth—"I am equally certain that they are good, honest people, for all that. It is merely that you can undo all my work with the hospital board if you are seen too constantly in the company of——"

"Wullie, I will not let you-—"

"Please yourself!" With a great show of unconcern, William began to speak of other matters—-his proposed Memorial School, to be exact. Lord Bute had said it was only a matter of time until the Crown decided which parcel of land William would be granted. "And had you given me leave to speak further," William said, drawing to a dignified conclusion, "I would have told you that I am endeavouring to send you a patient or so myself."

Hopeful then, John went home to await the arrival of his new practice in droves. In trickles, then… . It came not at all. Robert Home broached a solution of sorts, one evening in the Golden Square tavern. "Jock, there is a dentist right near here who might put you in the way of——"

"Gods, am I now to associate with a quack!"

"I think you might like him," Home said cautiously. "He is a good man. Scotch, like ourselves. Why do I not take you to meet him?" 

"Robbie, tell me the truth. He approached you to share patients with him, and you refused him. Is that it?"

Home met his gaze straight on. "Aye, Jock."

"But beggars cannot be choosers."

"I do not consider you a beggar. It is my sincere hope that you will marry one of my daughters. I want to see you have your chance, that is all." When he saw John’s jaw still out-thrust, Home altered his attack. "Moreover, this dentist, this Andrew Spence, tells me he has a spare room in the back of his house with a good north light. He would have no objections to your using it as a dissection room. And as he buys teeth from a grave-robber, he could put you in the way of some inexpensive subjects. Now, do you want to meet him?"

"Has he many patients?"

"Quite a few. And many have expressed the wish that Spence had a surgeon on the premises to attend to their other wants."

"The venereal distempers, I suppose."

"Aye. Jock, do you want to meet him?"

"Damme, of course I do; my pride is as flat as my purse." With a creditable effort John managed a smile and a jest. "When I marry our pretty Mary, I want to be rich enough to keep her plump!"

What William would say, he could readily imagine.

He came to the swift conclusion that he had no imagination whatsoever. No sooner had he sipped at his wine for courage, and told William of Spence’s offer, than William himself had a counter-offer. William wanted to give him money.

"You don’t understand, Wullie. I need money to buy what I need, only if I have the patients to give rise to the need——— Do you see what I am trying to say?"

"I do not."

John tried again. "I need patients, because each patient will pose a question to me. And to answer those questions I must make preparations—thousands of them——"

"Are you" telling me," William said slowly, "that you intend to practise surgery as if it were some sort of a philosophy, or—science?"

"I am saying that I must practise surgery in my own way."

"You will be fancying yourself as a Fellow of the Royal Society next," William said in a cruel voice, as if John and not he had been longing for years to be invited to join.

"I know nothing of the Royal Society, Wullie." To bring the conversation to a close he added formally, "And I thank you again for your generous offer, Brother. But I know that you have most pressing needs for your money now."

"Damn you!" William cried. "Jock, damn you and your prigish——"

Bygar, that he had lived to see the day William would call him priggish !

iv

(Suppose, in the spring of ’64, on a wet afternoon, you had applied to Percival Pott to treat you of a gumboil. That gentleman would have examined you carefully, asked you a certain question so gravely, and with such a quiet concern for your welfare, that you would have answered it in the negative without any heat at all, and thus assured that you did not suffer the Great Pox of the mouth, he would most likely have written down on a slip of paper that a tooth wanted extracting, and sent you off to a Mr. Spence of Soho Square to have the offending snag removed. With ever so kind a smile, but firmly, Mr. Pott would have you understand that he would not under any circumstances treat you of matters concerning your teeth, and then sent you packing. But you would not have been too distressed, for he would have assured you that, of his kind, Mr. Spence was of the best to be found.

The address itself of Mr. Spence is assuring, for round and about Soho Square are many fine houses wherein dwell the rich and genteel, and even a friend of yours.

As you alight from your carriage and hasten towards Spence’s door, you have just time to notice the hand painted on his front window-—a hand rising from a froth of delicately executed lace ruffles and holding a great tooth aloft twixt forefinger and thumb. Inside, you discover that Spence is a kindly, diffident man in the winter of his days, but in him the season is as mild as those of the Italian chine are reputed to be. There are candles to dispel the gloom of the day, and the barber-blocks about the room are as white as soapsuds can make them, while the blood-basins could shine no brighter had they come directly from the scourers. Even in your pain, your eyes take a sudden delight in the teeth exhibited as specimens about the shop, and you choose a strong pearly one as the very tooth to replace the blackened snag you are about to forfeit. You ask, curiously, where Mr. Spence obtains such lovely wares, and he tells you blandly that a "Mr. Howison" supplies them.

Mr. Spence then reads Mr. Pott’s note, sent by your hand, and shows you to a comfortable chair. Two sturdy youths with pleasant open faces appear at his bidding, to bow most correctly when Spence introduces them as his sons. One of the lads then drapes your person in a linen bib, while Spence removes his coat and slips over his cuffs a pair of linen keep-cleans. A nerve jangles somewhere deep within you as you guess the reason for these precautions. But you obediently open your mouth at Mr. Spence’s courteous request. Somewhat in the manner of one preparing to go down into a well, he peers into your portal. Then, with a motion of so longstanding a habit that he does not need to look behind him, he lifts a shining instrument from the table. At once the two fine lads pinion you to the chair, and you discover with a thrill of horror that they are not fine lads at all, but terrifying fiends with muscles of steel. Your eyes slide out of focus for an instant, and Spence, the arch-fiend, takes advantage of your faintness to wedge your mouth open with two pieces of cloth- covered wood. Now he thrusts with the instrument, and there is a sound in your skull of bone resisting metal—-a sound as of the nuts and bolts of your structure being wrenched awry in a mighty earthquake, joists and pillars screeching and grating, and the great arch of the skull itself being torn asunder. Fleetingly you know that the sound is actually pain, that they are one and the same, and then, before your eyes, black holes appear in the world of reality about you, spreading, and you know that nevermore will there be light again, for God in His majestic disdain has turned His back on you, and the world was only the reflection of His eyes.

You are entering the foyer of Hell.

Mercifully you faint, and when you open your eyes again, Mr. Spence is wiping your face and urging you over the basin. Your snag now lies on the table, still caught within the vice of the instrument.

"… Hunter to come out for a moment," Mr. Spence is murmuring to one of his fine young sons, as he tilts your chin to peer again into the gap in your being he has created. You are numb; you fancy that the interior of your mouth resembles London Bridge at the time the houses were being removed from it, debris and broken timber everywhere. Quickly now, Mr. Spence takes up the tooth you had indicated as your preference, and rams it up the socket clear past your eyes and into the softness of the brain above. You shriek, and your wide straining gaze catches sight of a monster emerging from the hallway. He is squat and orange-haired, his shoulders so broad and upthrusting that they seem to touch the lobes of his ears, filled with orange filaments. His eyes in particular terrorize you, for they are the exact colour of rags which have been rinsed out in the Fleet Ditch and hung in the sooty London air to dry. He comes to put his prognathous jaw close to your battered prow, and the hand lifting to force its way into your mouth is covered with a slime whose origin you suspect, your soul reeling at the very thought. His forefinger presses on the tooth Spence has placed in the socket. You faint, briefly dreaming you are pounding this devil into a stain on the granite floor of Hell. When again you recover, you can only push him away as you grope for the basin. You are relieved of your breakfast, your dinner of the night before, and what appears to be any number of repasts since forgotten. When you fall back, exhausted, your tongue discovers that your mouth is a web of silk.

The new tooth has been tied in place. Now for the first time the horrendous monster addresses you. "If you can bear the pain, sir, a mouthful of brandy swished about would give the parts strength."

He is patently mad. You would not dream of letting brandy enter your wrecked cavern. Yet you do, crying unashamedly at the fire of it. He then gives you another glass to drink from, telling you it contains laudanum and will give you an hour’s rest before you journey home. But just before you drain the glass, Mr. Spence holds a mirror before you, and slowly, painfully, you smile. You are handsome again! You had forgotten what a winning smile yours really is… .

When you awaken from your nap, Mr. Spence advises you to return in a day or so to be blooded by the monster, Hunter. You nod, resolving never to set eyes on the creature again, and make your escape.

Still, you find yourself returning to the tooth-shop. The Hunter person nicks your vein, and pokes about in your mouth. He seems most satisfied with your progress and you let out your breath, though you were not aware of holding it. He callously suggests that you rinse your mouth with brandy again, and produces some.

While you are performing the painful task, you idly note that now and again a young man will come in out of the damp day and disappear into the back of the house. Questioning this Hunter creature, you learn that Mr. Spence has an "electrical" machine in the back. Would you care to see it?

You would, and Mr. Hunter leads you back. You are fascinated with the spitting crackling contraption, though you instinctively hate the shock of its bite. Then, just as you are taking your leave, you spy something on a table in the north room. Again you question this Hunter, and he invites you in.

Now you find yourself on a strange adventure indeed, and for some minutes cannot notice aught but the half-dissected animal on the table, and what you can only call the lights and livers and gobbets of others stored in jars about the room. More objects of internal origin hang from the ceiling, shining with varnish. Mr. Hunter is introducing the other two gentlemen in the room and you bow absently, noting that one is named Jesse Foot, and the other is a Dr. Fordyce, of whom you have heard vaguely. You would question Mr. Hunter about the animal on the table but for the strange actions of Mr. Foot. He does not seat himself after bowing to you; instead, he attempts to place his person between you and the short Mr. Hunter, and himself addresses a question to that gentleman with a bluntness that verges on the rude.

"Sir, do you still deny having read Fallopius’ work on the teeth, even after you have paraphrased his ideas to me?"

You find the question of interest, not for the content which is gibberish to you, but for the manner in which it is uttered. For it seems obvious that Mr. Foot wishes to have all Hunter’s attention for himself, excluding all others. You examine Mr. Foot more closely. You see a long face shaped somewhat like an apothecary’s jar, from which the eyes protrude under nearly lashless lids. It comes to you that Mr. Foot rarely blinks; it is an uncomfortable thing to behold. Also, he has the unspeakable habit of standing too close to one, so that, as in this instance, Mr. Hunter finds it necessary to lean backwards away from Mr. Foot. During this while Mr. Hunter is answering Mr. Foot mildly, "Mr. Foot, you know I am no scholard. I rarely read any book but this———" as he waves his hand towards the animal on the table.

You glance at Dr. Fordyce, Mr. Hunter’s other companion. But he seems as puzzled as you, both by Mr. Foot’s pressing need to gain and secure Hunter’s attention, and Hunter’s gentle tolerance of such impertinence. Pity, you tell yourself, is at large here. Piqued now, you resolve to satisfy your curiosity over this Mr. Hunter. You put a direct question to him about the contents of the jars ranging the walls.

You are somewhat surprised at the length of his answer, some-what amused too, and somewhat taken by the earnest, gross man. In a rough voice he talks on and on, interrupting himself with oaths, scratching his head, telling you of "preparations" and you know not what else, and searching your face to make certain you understand.

He wants very much for you to understand; he is a sharer.

You must depart, and yet are reluctant to take your leave. Then it is, watching a certain fire emanate from the unusually colourless eyes, that you suffer that hiccup of the spirit-—déja vu-—as if you have swallowed this experience before. A second later, you know that you are looking at the wastrel brother of the charming Dr. William Hunter. You have heard of him, yes, but always you had imagined him to be slim like Dr. Hunter, and a touch arrogant, perhaps.

But you are drifting from him, and he pulls you back with a quick tug at your curiosity. You peer into the jar he is holding before you.

At last you leave, but not before Mr. Hunter has cordially invited you to return any time you wish. Outside, in the dusk of Soho Square, a strange dejection falls on you like the soot from the chimneys. Never before have you known what it is to warm your cold boredom at the fire of another’s obsessive preoccupation with life and its workings. Like the poor hysteric, Mr. Foot, you had been unable to tear yourself away from Hunter’s glow. Climbing into your carriage, you tell yourself that you must regale Lady Di with your experience at the tooth-shop. On your ride to your Gothic house you are already moving your lips, silently fashioning the structure of your story. But at the climax of the tale you find yourself sorting among words you have not used for years, dusting them off to see if any of them might possibly describe this John Hunter, when, of a sudden, reaching for the next word, you discover you are substituting instead the mental picture of Mr. Spence’s "electrical" machine.)

v

Like a home-bound ship slipping into its moorings, John had eased into familiarity with the new life he was making for himself. His associate, Spence, proved to be quiet and industrious, devoting the same solemn attention to polishing teeth as to polishing his electrical machine. He made no comment concerning the odours drifting from John’s "dissection shop" (as he would have it, forgetfully), as John made none about the crackling and spitting that came from Spence’s hobby room. In a very short space of time John was able to dissect steadily while Spence’s machine rang bells and detonated gunpowder placed in the yard.

If Spence was doubtful as to the logical basis underlying John’s admitted intention of comparing the anatomies of animals and man, he was wholeheartedly enthusiastic over John’s newest passion: the structure and formation and physiology of the teeth.

"I should like to make a few preparations of the teeth," John said. "Perhaps if I could succeed in injecting them, I might prove whether or no the bony part of a tooth is vascular." He sighed and hinted strongly, "However, unless I go out for the subjects myself? I do not see how I can afford–––-"

"Why," Mr. Spence interrupted promptly, "I will have my Mr. Howison supply you with whatever you desire when he next comes here."

"Howison?"

"Aye, Mr. Hunter, that is his name."

"A pocked man?"

"Pocked? Hmmm … I do believe he is!"

"If he is the Howison I have in mind, he is all pock, Mr. Spence."

He was the Howison John had in mind.

It came to John as the winter wore on that he was content as he had been but once before in his life, and that only during the first few months he had been with William. Now he could let his mind roam at will; he had patients, he had friends, both old and new, and he had prospects. He was only thirty-six, full of the sense of his own powers and his ability to work unendingly, and prepared to live for years. The Hunters were long—lived unless they were carried away by the consumption or the putrid fever or the hundred other diseases that reaped a harvest from the city daily.

Whereas Jesse Foot firmly expected John to die on the morrow, Foot was never so delighted with himself as when he came to the tooth-shop to tell John of another case of cadaveric poisoning.

"I know for a surety, Hunter, that a surgeon in Essex died within four days of cutting his finger at a morbid dissection. What do you say to that?"

"I say," John said calmly, stepping over Foot’s extended legs on his way to a shelf, "that the poison was carried by the absorbents into his constitution where it killed him."

Jesse Foot looked like a horse driven in two directions at once. "Poppycock," he faltered.

"Aye. Mr. Foot, have you no home? Or do you consider my dissection room your abode?"

"I am a very good friend of Spence’s, I believe," Foot replied. "I was acquainted with him for several years before you entered into association with him."

"Could it be, Mr. Foot, that you once desired to associate yourself with Spence?"

"It could not! I happen, sir, to be a surgeon!"

John grinned. "That still does not tell. me why you are always in any dissection room."

"I am but idling away a moment or so, waiting for my friend, Mr. Spence." But Foot was a bit behindhand in the saying of this. "Then stir yourself, Mr. Foot, and be good enough to reach that jar of spirits for me. At least I find it useful that you are so much taller than I."

Jesse Foot rose immediately to take down the spirits. Then, seizing the opportunity to approach nearer John, he pushed his face close and demanded, "Admit it! There are none here but we two—are you not secretly taking your ideas from others?"

"Pray, Jesse, sit down," John said; "you are in my way. And I have no need of secret reading with you to keep me abreast of everything that comes out."

Foot sneered, but he reseated himself all the same. Then he sat, watching John, his greenish eyes forgetting to blink.

I wonder, John thought, looking sidewise at the thin, elongated face, if he has enough to eat? The young fool must have even fewer patients than I… .

For himself he had few worries on that score. He was invited to dine with the Homes with the frequency of a boarder. Each time, he appeared with little presents, a fan for Mrs. Home, or a sweet for Everard to share with the younger members of the family (which he never did, running off with a sly merriment to devour it himself). On occasion too, and because it seemed to please Mrs. Home so, he bandied quips with little Everard, permitting the lad to sauce him outrageously, and struggling the while with the wish to box the brat’s ears until they rang.

He expanded in Robbie’s home, much as his feet swelled before the parlour fire. In the wet, spring evenings he sat sipping Robbie’s wine, thinking that William would not even have left it out as an insult to Duncan, and enjoying himself as he argued surgery with Robbie and shouted above Anne at the harpsichord to make himself heard. Once he and Anne had a duet in which Anne insisted that her love was far, far away, and John, soaring above her, announced that pus and mucus were the same thing.

Robert Home gave way to his laughter. Anne broke off to glare. And Mary took advantage of the silence to observe placidly, "This thread will knot so. I wonder that I do not throw it away," and went on with her work.

He watched the girl at supper, allowing his eyes to rove over her plump breast and curved arms. He very much approved of the way the girls had changed their dress after the war. He could remember watching Mr. Pott remove a breast from a woman who was more modestly covered than Mary. Her lips were a trifle thin, though not so compressed as Anne’s, but to compensate, she had a way of widening her eyes and raising her brows when she looked at one, as if in the next moment she was going to say, "Oh?" on a rising note of pleased interest. Though she never did.

I wonder, John asked himself, when they expect me to marry her. He considered the matter, munching stolidly with his heavy jaw; he decided he could grow quite fond of the girl. She rarely opened her mouth, and when she did, more often than not, it was to put food in it. He approved of that too; a plump and silent wife would afford him comfort and peace to think, both.

He became aware that the Homes were watching him, Anne in particular. Had she asked him a question? He swallowed and boomed famously at Robbie, "And when is Annie going to favour me with a reading of her poetry?"

"Indeed, never!" Anne cried.

"Why, lass …" Robbie began reprovingly, but was drowned out by one of Mrs. Home’s most distracted murmurings.

Anne burst into tears and abruptly left the table.

Mary turned to John. Gods, he was thinking, Percival Pott would have blushed to have so exposed her even to surgical students—and remarked calmly, "Never mind Anne, Mr. Hunter; she asked for what she got. She was just telling you that true poets never read their poems to anyone."

"So that’s why the word came into my mind."

"She fancies herself in love again." Mary took another slice of beef. "Her poems are always about love. Some man is always leaving her, she says. Pray have some more of the beef, Mr. Hunter."

"John," John said fatuously.

"Pray have some more of the beef, John."

He discovered that Mrs. Home was not always distracted. They had her full beaming attention.

"God knows, Robbie," John said, "when I’ll be able to support her. I would ask for her this moment if it weren’t for that."

Home was thoughtful, his closest approach to calculation. "There is still the matter of your obtaining a situation at St. George’s. Does it seem likely that there will be a vacancy soon?"

"Only if William creates it by some fell deed. We are attending board meetings constantly, and William campaigns for me everywhere he goes." John smiled. "William is irked by my association with Spence. He thinks it to reflect on him."

"I have not yet met your brother," Home burst out, and looked immediately as if he wished he had not. He went on without waiting for John to reply, "Are the staff of the hospital well paid?"

"Oh-—adequately. But the surgeons also share in the fees of the students, which makes a quite decent sum at the end of the year."

"You would almost he rich!" ‘

"Ha, Robbie! But I would have enough to maintain a wife and a house, and some to spare for my prep-—" A thought came to him. "will Mary have me, d’ye think?"

Home said with satisfaction, "She will have the first good man who asks her. She’s the sharp lass of the brood. Now Anne… ."

John always grew uncomfortable when Home spoke of Anne. Were she his girl, he would grab her by the shoulders and shake some of that poetry-singing-harpsichord fancifulness out of her. She was not a princess, she was Anne Home, still unmarried at twenty-two, and a burden and a worry to her father.

"Does Mary have any other strings to her bow?" John interrupted.

"No … no, I think not."

"Then there is no particular hurry."

"None in the least."

vi

One morning when John had opened the windows of his dissection room to admit the sun and the golden sound of the bells of London, the scent of cologne drifted down the hallway, followed by A square of sunlight lay on the floor and William stepped into it precisely and stood smiling about him, while the ancient coin he was twisting in his fingers glinted streaks of light now on a jar, now on John’s nose, and now struck sparks from William’s own blue gaze. He looked on, and did not seem to see, Jesse Foot vibrating quietly to himself in a comer; he devoted but one measured glance to another young surgeon who had chanced in to see John’s new preparation of a cancerous jaw; and then he said crisply, harbouring his excitement, "A word with you, Brother. Will you excuse me, gentlemen?"

Mr. Middleton was talking seriously of resigning his position at St. George’s before the year was out. William had it from Middleton’s lips himself.

"Gods!" John said. "Now the trick is to snatch the vacancy from Gunning. What about Caesar Hawkins?"

"He is adamant in Gunning’s behalf," William said, making an effort to contain his joy at the prospect of the battle ahead. "Well, we shall see!" He eyed John as a general might his troop. "And there is now another point in your favour."

"Aye?"

"Yes, Jock. You are being damned in high places."

John stared.

"Your work is being talked of! Surely you know by now that it matters little what the influential say of you, as long as they devote breath to you at all. Why, there are even some who praise you! I have heard that Horry is telling the most delightful tale about——-"

"Who?"

"Board members are not averse to a pretty story about a candidate. I must own that, as the Queen’s Physician-Extraordinary, I was troubled at first by your being in this–—this——-"

"Tooth-shop," John supplied.

"Ah—thank you. In fact, I feared it might do harm to my plans for the Memorial-—but on the contrary, Jock, on the contrary. Are those young men in there your students?"

Again John stared. William could take a turn in the road so quickly that John often stumbled past.

"Those two men in your dissection room!" William said impatiently.

"Bygar," John said, "not yet!"

William was amused. "The merest rudiments in the earning of money have always been beyond you, Brother. Well, I must be away… . Ah-—Jock—I happened to see a preparation or two I might be able to use in my fall course—"

"Send Duncan over for anything that takes your fancy," John said. William tossed his coin in the air and caught it. "Why, my thanks, Brother!" 

He returned to his dissection room. He stood in the square of sunlight vacated by William and evaluated the unblinking Jesse Foot. No, he had no money. He turned with a wolfish grin to his other visitor, the young surgeon who had come to see the jaw. "Have you ever performed a human dissection, pray?"

"Why, no, Mr. Hunter, I have not."

"Would you care to?" Step lightly now, don’t empty his pockets before his very eyes.

"You’ll pay for the privilege!" Jesse Foot cried out in warning. Damn him! "Five pounds," John said hastily. "And the sum would include the cost of the subject." Howison had been known to sell one for two.

"Allow me, sir," the young surgeon said, "to pay you now." Jesse Foot gave way to his derision. For the first time John bent on him the gelid gaze of the aroused Hunter. Jesse left in a sulk.

"Is Mr. Foot a trifle—-er—mad?" the young surgeon wanted to know.

"Aye, I think so. Or at least a trifle, as you put it."

"Your pardon, Mr. Hunter, but how did you come to know him?"

"Oh, as to that," John said, "he was already here when l arrived."

The young surgeon seemed confused. But John (was happily occupied with counting his money.)

A student or so would put money in his pocket until it came time for him to assume his position at St. Georges. Now he could buy more animals, and perhaps even a riband for Mary’s tallow-coloured hair.

vii

Little Everard had the summer chills. John hardly considered the lad in any great danger. "Give him the bark and keep him quiet, Robbie. Gods, you are yourself a surgeon, and have already consulted six more, why call on me? Most especially when you do not agree with me even on the most basic principles."

"I Cannot give you a reasonable answer to that, Jock. Except that one hopes against hope someone like you might perform a miracle."

"Tut, Robbie, the lad has only what they are beginning to call the malaria. The bark will do him nicely."

"You do not consider it to be putrid, then?"

"Gods, no. It is nothing like that. Besides it is all over town. It’s not serious."

"When it’s my lad, it’s serious!" Home cried. "I tell you, Jock, that boy’s the core of my—-"

"So I’ve heard, Robbie."

Little Everard wanted a glass of water. John wandered, down to the parlour in search of Mary. Instead, he found Anne at a desk, staring out of the window at the garden, quill in hand. Mary was out with the other children so that the house would be quiet for Everard.

Always ill at ease in the presence of Anne’s tight voice and fluttering hands, John asked awkwardly, "Another poem, Anne?"

"I am Writing," Anne said coldly, "to a very dear friend of mine. Alice Shippen who lives in Virginia in America."

"Shippen? Is he a physician?"

"I believe Dr. Shippen is a physician, yes."

"Bygar—Oh, excuse me, Anne—-he was a student of ours once! Why, I went to his wedding."

"As did I." She ventured a laugh, and in doing so revealed that underneath the ice of her manner moved restless incertitude. "It was some time before I remembered where it was I had seen you before, Mr. Hunter."

"Ah, yes."

An uncomfortable silence fell on them.

"You do not approve of me for Mary," he blurted.

She returned to staring out at the garden. "A man has his work," she said faintly, "but a woman has only her marriage. The turning point in her life is her wedding day. From then on she is doomed."

"Doomed! There being no other possibility, I suppose."

"Only if she loves the man very much. And he has position and money."

"That is romantical, Anne. Life is not a poem, you know."

She turned to him angrily. It came to him that when she was older, her nose would dominate her mouth and war with her eyes. "You think me a fool because I love the beautiful things---music and poetry and—-—"

"Money," he supplied.

"Aye, money! I am the oldest of seven, Mr. Hunter, and I am sick of having to share with six others when there was never enough for me alone! You say I am romantical; well, I say I am practical. I loathe poverty and scrabbling for pennies and having to share my dresses with my sisters. I want a better life, and I can get it only by marrying it. Indeed I think Mary a fool, I think any girl a fool who does not see the facts as I do. How could——" At last Anne faltered and sat silent with shock at her outburst.

"How could she even consider my suit, you mean," John said. Anne had no reply.

Mortified, desiring to erase, or at least soften, what had passed between them and then escape, John said,. "In time you will change your mind, I’m sure, Anne." And could have kicked himself savagely in the backside for his stupidity.

"I will never change my mind!" She was shrill, he would have said even frightened. "I will marry well, Mr. Hunter. I will marry very well, you will see!"

"Of that I am certain," he said politely, only to ruin his effect by adding, without volition, "Your Highness."

For reasons he could not fathom, he was as furious as she when he stumped from the room.

He did not repeat their passage at arms to anyone, and neither, he discovered some weeks later, and to his amazement, did Anne.

Yet he grew angry all over again whenever he thought of it, and resolved to make the formal request for Mary’s hand as soon as he had two more students to his credit.

Shamelessly he invited every surgeon and ‘prentice he encountered to come dissect under him. At last several applied, and pocketing their money, he went straight to Robbie’s house in Pall Mall.

He arrived in the parlour to find Mary cosily drinking tea with a pudgy and unbelievably smug young man named Mylne. The very Mr. Mylne, in fact, who had built the Westminster Bridge.

When John at last wearied of the subject of the Westminster Bridge and Mr. Mylne’s great talents, architectural, artistic, and otherwise, he left. The next visit, it was Mr. John Hunter who outstayed Mr. Robert Mylne.

Mary’s needle went steadily in and out of the fabric, her plump arms showing to best advantage in the candlelight, pink and "Mary," he said, "have you ever considered marrying?" Then he thrust out his jaw, appalled at such an opening, and unable to think of any way to repair it.

But Mary was saying calmly, "Why, yes, Mr. Hunter. I’m planning to marry Robert Mylne."

Thank God!

He went on a splurge, buying every animal that suited his fancy, Again he began to meet Home in the tavern in Golden Square, he was too busy to find time to make his way to Suffolk Street.

"You are bearing up under your disappointment exceedingly well," Home said dryly.

"Robbie, forgive me. I am in no position to marry anyway."

"That is exactly what my Annie said."

"Aye, that does sound like Anne."

viii

Late in August William’s carriage rolled up grandly before the tooth-shop. John came out in the full splendour of William’s loaned finery, with his hair dressed into a solid mat, like a rug, with bear-grease. William himself was exquisite in pale blue, and his expression as he surveyed John, clearly stated his conclusion: well, God knows, it is the best he can do with a face and figure like that.

The day just missed being overcast, the sun able to cast only insubstantial fog-coloured shadows that disappeared even as one looked at them. Inside the carriage, as they rattled along towards St. George’s, the brothers looked at one another frankly in the grey revealing light. "You are looking well, Wullie." He was not, he looked as a thin wire felt to the fingers, fragile, attenuated, ready to twang at a breath. "How are the plans for the Memorial coming?" John went on, and regretted it at once.

"Apace," William said, "apace!"

"I am glad for you."

They swung around a corner, and William was flung up against John. In that moment, looking down on William’s cheek just beneath his eyes, John saw that what he had thought to be a flush of excitement was actually a sprinkling of fine red powder, carefully blended in. Then William was righting himself, crying out to his coachman, and straightening his pale blue suit. "Your calmness," he said, giving over his attention to John again, "I find most irritating at times. Had I your lack of ambition I would still be in Covent Garden."

"I am still in Covent Garden."

"Exactly. Ah, do not think I cannot read your thoughts when I speak of my Memorial! I know what you think of my courting persons in high places. Something you could never bring yourself to do, eh?"

"Why, this very afternoon at the meeting I intend to?"

"Aye! With me behind you to push you into it. You may think you have learned what it is to struggle, Jock. But you have no conception of it. You are willing to be unconventional, yes; but I have never thought it a hardship that you felt yourself forced to associate with Spence. Oh, on occasion," he waved a hand to silence John, "I have seen you lose your temper and brawl for what you wanted. They say you did that sort of thing continually during your war service. But struggle?"

"Wullie," John said unhappily, "why are you taking me to task in this man———-"

"I suppose… . Gods, Jock, I must vent my spleen on someone, I suppose. Now that I am the Queen’s accoucheur, and my Memorial is so near fruition, I find myself wondering if I can make that final effort. Do you understand? That final effort to place you securely, and bring my own dreams to reality."

"I did not know that you——"

"That I find it distasteful to toady to rich fools? You think that no effort? You think it requires no effort to kiss the ass of every titled–- Ha, you are shocked?"

John felt the blood leave his face. His mouth opened, though no sound came out. He could not take his eyes from William’s cool smile. He sat staring at his brother framed against the carriage windows, while the panorama of London behind his back changed from crowded city streets to the thinner traffic of the outskirts.

Still smiling, William took out his silver tabatiere, and with a gesture that was a travesty of Dr. William Hunter, the elegant, he swept a pinch of snuff to his nostrils. "Petee?" he enquired, extending the box to John.

"Wullie, don’t!"

"Oh no, Wullie," William said, "oh, pray, Wullie, don’t …"

He looked out of the window at St. George’s looming ahead. "Or is it-—— Oh, pray, Wullie, do!"

At the meeting, the possibility of Middleton’s resigning was an open secret. Watching William, John felt his eyes burn.

"I think," he said when the meeting was ended, "I shall walk back to town, Wullie… . Blow the dissection room from my lungs… ."

"I am certain that that will be best," William said politely. "Good day, Brother."

"Good day to you, William."’

He watched William’s carriage rattle smartly down the road inside William sat, apparently staring straight ahead.

He found himself strolling, deep in thought, not towards London, but south to Earl’s Court. A turn in the lane showed him the house where he had spent those months feverish with wine and lung fever and the precognition of his impending failure. How tediously he had pushed on to it, diligently ruining preparation after preparation, using his notes, often as not, as spills to light his candles, pressing ever onwards as winter closed in to that stage beyond despair—dull indifference.

Watching the house, he saw the woman who had cooked for him come out and empty the contents of a pot on the ground. Specks of chickens, black against the setting sun, converged on her, and she stood there looking down on them. She went in, closing the door, and the house was suddenly a face with its windows square eyes reflecting the sun.

The scene was pleasant, still, the fire dying on the trees and houses, leaving them charred, black. There was the faintest rustle of leaves overhead. He was at peace.

When he was able to afford it, he would buy or build a cottage out here. On evenings such as this he could go straight from St. George’s to this still calm world. He would not even need a chariot, a horse would fill his needs.

At last he turned towards London. He would have to maintain apartments in town, of course; perhaps he could even afford to move from the Garden. Golden Square would be pleasant, then he could find companionship whenever he wanted it. But in good weather he would spend his nights in Earl’s Court, riding into town for his practice when he was not due at the hospital.

His real work he would do here. He could work late into the night with no one to pry or disturb him. And when at last he wearied, he would go into his summer-scented bedroom where Anne with lifted arms and parted mouth lay awaiting him.

He was stunned, immobile. The world died away around him as he gazed on that vision his mind, minute, clear and fragile as the heart of a tear, of Anne arching her body in the dark to welcome him.

ix

Through the days that followed he waited for his strange desire for Anne Home, half-vision, half-pang, to dissipate. Yet, when he was least prepared for it, when he was not thinking of her at all, he would feel that warm sensation of melting within and know that in a moment his mind would show him Anne’s, arms lifting to him in the darkness.

He stood in his rooms in the Garden, gazing at himself in the mirror of his basin-stand. He saw with a shock how hardened his features had become. Above his stained coat his great-jawed head was impaled, pushed down, on his thick stump of neck. When he smiled he bared to the world a strong-toothed yellow grin.

He was ugly and nearly penniless. But he had prospects… . William had said he would not humble himself for them.

Now would see.

x

He went to court Anne. He arrived at the house in Suffolk Street in a new coat of ruby velvet with a ruby chapeau bras with gold lacings perched awkwardly on a snowy new wig. Fawn silk hose were stretched over his thick calves, and a pair of gleaming new shoes pinched his feet cruelly. When Robbie Home came into the parlour and caught sight of him, waiting, he raised his soft voice into a subdued scream:

"My God, it’s Jock!"

John said, looking at him earnestly, knowing his face was pleading for help in this matter, "Is——Annie in?"

Home gazed at John in deep pity. "God help you. Some pretty fop she had her heart set on has just announced his engagement to an heiress. Are you prepared to take his punishment for him?"

"I find that I love her," John said painfully.

"So be it," Home said, and left the room.

He was afraid to look at Anne for fear she would read in his eyes that he loved her. She came in, her mouth thin with hurt, her manner remote. "Good evening, Mr. Hunter, what an unexpected pleasure I assure you-—" Then she saw in a glance why he had come and her smile became cruel. "My mother will be down presently, Mr. Hunter. Would you care for tea, or a glass of wine?"

She played the harpsichord for most of the evening.

At the door, Robbie demanded, "well, Jock?"

"I have already asked her," John said, "to let me wait on her tomorrow evening."

And again Home made no attempt to conceal his pity.

In October David Middleton formally announced his pending resignation from the staff of St. George’s. The entire staff of physicians and surgeons was solidly behind John Gunning. Dr. William Hunter had sorted among his friends and acquaintances and found four who were willing to subscribe as contributors to the hospital fund, and thus be entered as new subscribers in John Hunter’s name. There were six candidates for the vacancy in all, but the contest was admittedly one between only John Gunning and John Hunter, surgeon or Covent Garden.

Throughout November William canvassed votes assiduously. He gave little supper parties at which John appeared in his new finery. William noted his dress and clapped John manfully on the back as he introduced him proudly to this haughty physician and that bored, zorpid nobleman. John bravely produced a frivolous and exorbitantly expensive snuff box and peteed with a restrained elegance that had his eyes streaming and his nose clogged with mucus. William looked on and approved. He restricted himself to no more than three oaths of an evening, and made himself most helpful when it came to helping gentlemen to their feet and steadying them as they stood, garrulous and swaying, over the chambers Duncan had brought out from the credenza. He listened avidly to the most boring and petty gossip, he paid wild compliments, and he swallowed slights and outright insults with a smile. He humbled himself in all ways; and when December came he went, trembling with anticipation, to the Court of Elections of the Hospital of St. George.

John Gunning unanimously won the vacancy. John Gunning would take his position as a full surgeon on the staff in January I765.

God damn them, God damn them," John said furiously, crushing his chapeau bras between his hands.

"Jock, we fought the brave fight," William said. Brightening, he added. "The next vacancy is surely yours."

"The next! Oh, God damn them, Wullie, you do not know what this could have meant to me!"

William was watching him narrowly. "There may be some truth in what you say," he admitted finally.

xi

Now his problem of money was acute. His preparations were never more expensive, and he could not slight them, even for Anne. Nor could he cease bringing Anne little presents; and there was too, the enlargement of his wardrobe. Anne would not be courted, as the phlegmatic Mary had allowed herself to he, by the mere act of his dining freely at her father’s house, as if it were an ordinary open to any who passed by. There were theatre parties for the Home family, at which he sat entranced, not by the events on the stage, but by the sight of Anne’s hands lying in her lap twisting her handkerchief. There were concerts at which he sat sluggish and irritated both, like a hibernating lizard prodded into activity, unable to ignore the intense agitation with which Anne manipulated her fan when some titled coxcomb or rich fop chanced to glance her way more than once. He bought her gloves and then found at the end of an evening that she had lost one somewhere, and he had to retrace their steps for the evening after he had deposited her Suffolk Street, searching for it. Yet he never complained, even to himself; he was imparadised by a vision he had had months ago, walking along a dusty road on the outskirts of the city. Even as his funds dwindled and he counted his money with a helpless anger, he was scheming how to buy land at Earl’s Court, how to afford the bit of Brussels lace that had caught Anne’s eye, how to set aside enough for a really lavish evening at one of the pleasure-gardens, the moment the season opened.

He set out to give himself the reputation of being a surgeon who would travel any distance at any hour of the day or night to attend a patient. He was shameless in his search for "students". Because of his growing reputation for eccentricity, he attracted several wealthy young men who were bored with gambling at White’s and creating riots at the theatres. It was the fad for a certain group of these rich idlers to have hobbies, be they collecting incunabula, or bones, or the richly exotic head-dresses of aborigines. Some of them, as was natural, happened on the field of science as their hobby, and indefatigably scurried around London, now peering down a contraption made up of a series of lenses guaranteed to magnify a louse’s leg to the size of a tree—trunk, now blowing themselves up in the stable by applying a flame to a mysterious gas they had produced by mixing this with that, and at other times running to some anatomist or other to perform that most daring of all larks—a human dissection.

Had the Devil himself applied to the tooth-shop in Soho to learn anatomy, he would have been warmly received. And of all the idlers who came to gawp, or faint, or even dissect with a genuine fervour, John turned away but one. That one he fell upon with a series of oaths, hastening him down the hallway unceremoniously with threats of violence, pushing him forward so that Jesse Foot, on his way back, was driven to the wall, and throwing him out the door, careless or deaf to the young man’s wailings and howls of certain revenge. When John had returned to his dissection room, he had found even Jesse Foot silent, and for once blinking, sickened by the sight of the subject with its genitals excised and crammed into its mouth. In the stillness of the room the gigglings and panting of the departed "student" still echoed in their ears.

"No more," Jesse Foot said at last, "than you might expect, John Hunter. Asking in from the very street any and all you accost to come in and-—-—"

"Shut your boneshop, Foot, or you go next."

"I am waiting for my friend, Mr. Spence," Foot said, and repaired at once to his corner to seat himself on that chair which, had he but known it, had some time since become known to John and his young men, and even Spence, as the "Foot-stool".

And then John had to withdraw from his hoard the four pounds the ex-student had paid him and send it to his home by messenger.

Robbie Home softly declared John a fool to have returned the money.

"No, Robbie, you are wrong. I could not have spent it even for a choice preparation. Much less spent it on Annie." As Anne had a cold and had refused to see him, having shut herself up in her room, John stood up to leave. "Could I not," he said on a sudden inspiration, "bleed her? Perhaps it might ease her discomfort."

Home laughed. "How Anne would love that pretext to see her! In truth, Jock, she is in hiding because she looks a rag. Her nose is red." John took a step or two, then came to a halt. "Robbie… . D’ye think she’ll have me. Now—or ever?"

"I know less about that girl than I do the Queen of Sweden. However, for what it is worth to you, I can say, at least, that she is vapouring over no one else at the moment."

"Gods, I can understand well enough why she might not have me. Why, Anne—Anne could have her choice of any man in the whole of?"

"Aye," Home said dryly, "that is her greatest trouble. She thinks so too."

John began stoutly, "She has every right——"

"She has no such right. She is no handsomer than Mary or Agnes, and like her sisters, she is merely the daughter of a very ordinary surgeon. But Anne has it in her head, I fancy, to be Lady Someone or Other. She wants to—better herself." He reflected briefly before concluding, "Jock, I think I’ll go upstairs and beat her."

"Give her my love while you are at it," John said morosely.

Anne’s shabby treatment of John was but emphasized the more when John observed that the smug architect, Robert Mylne, was furthering his own suit with Mary by permitting the young lady to court him. While John sat in the parlour, sourly awaiting by the hour the appearance of the capricious Anne, Mylne was seated by the fire in Home’s study graciously allowing Mary to refill his glass before resuming her place at his feet to listen to his exploits. Resenting the success of his fellow suitor, and yet desiring to please Anne in any way he might, John offered to consult on the subject of Mylne’s building the Memorial. He was rewarded by a wan smile from Anne, and the lofty admission of Mylne that he might be able to fit the assignment in somewhere.

So it was that he found himself coming to visit William at his house in Jermyn Street. William, toasting his feet before his library fire, seemed amused at John’s sudden interest in architecture. "I had not known you thought of the matter at all."

"I don’t. I hadn’t, that is. But Mylne struck me as being exceedingly clever. He did build the Westminster Bridge, you know." John squirmed.

"Indeed!" William said. He smiled the more.

"So I thought that if you …" Which seemed to be all John could think of to say on the matter.

William flicked a speck of soot from his lace. "It is only that your interest in this Mylne is not exactly clear to me, Jock."

"He is a friend of the Home family," John said humbly. "He plans to marry Mary, Robbie’s third daughter."

"Ah? Permit me to observe that the girl will be bettering herself if she catches him."

"Home happens to he a surgeon, not a chimney-sweep," John snapped. "I cannot see that one of his daughters will be bettering herself by accepting a fat son-of-a-bitch who-——"

"Ha! Your true opinion of the man comes out." William forestalled any interruptions by making a brushing away motion with hand. "Jock, I am not unaware of your infatuation with one of Home’s daughters. I have had the girl pointed out to me. She is a pretty little thing—yes. But pushing. The ladies are most conversant in that sort of thing, Brother, and they say the girl is most pushing. However–-----for a dalliance-——" He looked up innocently as John jumped to his feet.

"Look you, Wullie, I love that girl! I will marry her any time she will have me. Have I made myself——-"

"I should hope she would have you," William said airily. "It is not as if she were entirely ignorant of my position in town. To be the wife of the brother of the Queen’s physician would advance her in society considerably. Since it is obvious, even to the most casual observer, that your passion for this young woman is rapidly approaching that stage which may only be called pulsatory, and as"— William stopped, gazed hack along the path he had come, saw that there was no help for it but to plunge ahead, and proceeded— "ah, inasmuch as I had already been considering your Robert Mylne for the assignment, there could be no harm in letting you take the credit for his appointment, should that come to pass, and thus, I suppose, or rather, I should say, you suppose, pleasing the little Home on that-——-"

"Wullie, you are a dab! I cannot thank you——"

"Mercy on us," William said loftily. "When did you say you were planning to marry her?"

"When she will have me. I should say, when I have the money."

William was curious. "You are really so set on her?"

"I am."

"Fancy," William said. It was all beyond him.

John took himself to Suffolk Street in a glow. Anne would be sure to be pleased. In fact, that evening he rather swaggered before her, showing her that he too had that which she so admired in others-----influence.

She smiled on him, and he returned to his grubby rooms in the Garden to take his hoard from out of his old surgeon’s chest, and scheme on the making of more money.

xii

Mr. Spence appeared in the doorway of John’s "dissection shop" with the request that John come to the front. A lady customer wished to be bled. There was a quaver in Spence’s voice, and with a quick glance at him, John perceived that the gentleman was disturbed by some matter. The way of it was that the lady had, not too long ago, purchased a tooth from Spence. She was not pleased with the transaction. She sat glowering in the most comfortable chair of the shop. John attempted to gentle her, asking in a holy tone to see her mouth. She complied with such a vicious manner that for an instant it crossed John’s mind that she intended to bite him. Cautiously he examined her. The gum was angry, and only by virtue of its swollen state was the tooth retained in the socket at all. Using his fingers alone, John lifted out the tooth. He suggested the gum be allowed to heal a bit, handed the lady a rinse of brandy, and then proposed that she select another, larger, tooth for the socket.

"At no expense to yourself, dear lady," Mr. Spence put in hastily. The lady filled, her cheeks bulging with the brandy. She spat, narrowly missing John’s cheek, to declare, "I want no more dead corpse teeth in my mouth !" She swept out.

Mr. Spence was close to tears. "Oh dear, Mr. Hunter, I do feel that she will do me much harm by talking against me. If only I could have made matters right–—"

"You are disturbing my thoughts!" John shouted. "Be quiet!" He sat down in the comfortable chair. He looked at the tooth in his hand. He smelled it. His thoughts dwelt on the foul odour.

"Mr. Spence," he said finally, slowly, "I believe I know how to make us rich. We are due for a fortune, you and I. Pray have one of your sons go in search of Howison, and bring him here. I myself will explain to him what I want."

Mr. Spence said timidly, "And what, sir, do you want?"

"I want to buy teeth, live teeth, Mr. Spence."

When next Jesse Foot made his appearance, he was astonished to the point of being taken aback to find John looking up at him with an eager yellow grin. "Ah, Jesse, pray take your seat on the Foot-st—— That is, pray be seated. Perhaps I can find a decanter of wine hidden somewhere about… . Ah, here it is, I had hidden it behind——" Pouring almost as much wine over Foot as he did into the glass, John sat himself opposite his guest, beaming. "Tell me, Jesse, have you ever read of anyone having transplanted a live tooth into a socket?"

Jesse Foot stared at him unblinkingly. "Most certain I have. Fouchard has given a case of a tooth transplanted from the mouth of a soldier to that of a captain. He was in the second battalion of Bourbon’s, I believe. Second? No… . Yes, the second battalion."

"Remarkable," John breathed.

"Are you planning to steal from Fouchard too?"

"You are not drinking your wine," John pointed out. "I shall be hurt if you refuse it, sir." Glee bubbled at the corners of his mouth, he could hardly contain himself.

Now he would be rich, and Anne would have him.

xiii

It was a wet afternoon in February that Duncan appeared unexpectedly in the tooth-shop asking for John. He wished to take John to the Jermyn Street house

"What preparations does Doctor William wish?" John said, frowning about him.

"Doctor William did not––– I have come for you myself, Mr. John."

"Is my brother ill?" John asked, but Duncan would not say aye or nay, and with only a glance to John’s current students, escorted John out into the rain where the chariot awaited them.

William was not ill. He was seated in the early dusk of his library, his back to the dying fire, his eyes on the rain running down the window-panes. William was not ill, but the sight of his pale shrunken face, the ruined mouth moving soundlessly with the shapings of unspoken words, showed John that he had begun the process of dying. Someone or something had broken the ambitious Dr. William Hunter at the peak of his career. At John’s heavy step, William turned his gaze from the window momentarily. His eyes were filled with the cloudy tears of the defeated and senile. Then he returned to his observation of the rain. "I asked nothing for myself" he said. "On the contrary, I declared that I would have nothing. Is that not so?" Without waiting for an answer, like one pleading aloud in delirium, he went on in a rasping voice, "I asked only a piece of ground to build upon, that and the Royal approval. I pledged myself to lay out seven thousand pounds for the building, and promised to dedicate it to the public the day it was built. And I told them, I told them over and over that I meant to give my library and preparations. Do you know the worth of my library? Do you? I have laid out somewhere between three and four thousand pounds for-——"

"Wullie!"

-—"and my preparations! No man could put the proper value on them, for they have been paid for with time and work as well as mere money. I put years of my young life in on them. And so did my brother. Aye, I supported him, and bore with him, and very nearly let him kill himself over those preparations. All of this I offered to my country as a gift. My youth, and my brother’s health, and my reputation——"

John left, the rasp of William’s complaint thinning away as he went down the hallway in search of Duncan. He found him standing in a doorway, waiting. "We must get him to bed," John said. "I will bleed him, and then sit with him. He is hysterical, Duncan."

"Damn them!" Duncan said softly. "He was a great man… ."

"Aye, he was… ."

Late at night he left the sleeping William to Duncan’s care. He chose to walk to the Gardens against Duncan’s protests. The rain had stopped but the night was raw, the clouds, broken up now, floating in pale gleaming ribbons across the dark. His chest ached as it had not since he had left England for the war. It was as if there were an extravasation of tears collecting there.

xiv

"In truth," Robert Mylne said, running a fat tongue over his lips to collect the last of the gravy collected in the corners, "I have always said that a commission third—hand is really little better than no commission at all."

"Oh did you, Robert?" Mary asked. "Did you always say that?"

"My brother fully intended——" John began, but Anne cut across him crisply.

"Though I have never had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Hunter, by reports I know him to be a man of his word. If you wish to call someone a liar and dishonourable, then look to those who would not keep their promises to Dr. Hunter. For my part, I want to hear no more on the matter, Robert Mylne. Pray take some more meat, John, and then give the plate to my father. Would you not care for more meat, Father?"

"Good lass," Robbie Home said to no one in particular.

If you will have me, John knew his face was saying to her, I will worship you till the day I die.

But, like one sitting too near the fire, Anne turned her flushed face away.

In the weeks to follow, John spoke freely of William to Home, while Anne listened quietly. John was disturbed lest William’s mind be somewhat affected by his disappointment, but Home snorted at the idea. "Though I have never met Dr. Hunter," he said, unconsciously borrowing Anne’s words as well as her slightly accusing tone, "I am not inclined to believe that he is one to give way. Most certainly if he is anything like you, he will not."

"Ah, but I relieve myself with tantrums."

"I am somewhat acquainted with that fact, my dear Jock. But to resume the topic of your brother—he will revive, never fear."

"He talks now of leaving London. Of starting all over again in Scotland."

"We Scots all talk of returning to Scotland. And wild horses could not drag us fifty feet from London."

"Hmmm… . Robbie, I would not give my brother’s state of mind a second thought, but for his confusion of the present with the past. Only a day or so ago he was telling me that the Monros were going to steal his Atlas of the Gravid Uterus from him before he could complete? Oh, pray pardon me, Anne!"

Anne said serenely, "As the daughter of a surgeon I am not unaccustomed to such talk. And as to the future—— Ma foi, my tongue is running away with me!"

Home sighed. "I was going to ask you how old your brother is, Jock, but I see your thoughts are elsewhere."

"Fifty … I believe …" John said, his thoughts elsewhere.

As Home had predicted, William decided in late May that he would stay on in London. Relieved, John then had to admit to himself that part of his concern over William had been selfish. Without William’s influence, how would he ever manage to obtain a situation at St. George’s?

xv

Of John Hunter, the surgeon brother of Dr. Hunter, he who had unsuccessfully tried to exalt his position through favours from the Crown, there was suddenly much talk that spring. A certain young man, a Mr. Jesse Foot, could talk of no other topic Wherever he chanced to be. In taverns, at the peruke-makers, even at the Surgeons Hall, Mr. Foot made his little comments and told his anecdotes. It was Mr. Foot’s contention that "John Hunter was adept at hanging heavy weights on slender wires", whatever he meant by that. With his protuberant stone-steady gaze fastened on his audience Mr. Foot went on to say that Hunter propounded the wildest of theories from the merest of observations. For example, Hunter’s "scion" teeth. What were they? Why, nothing more nor less than teeth taken from the mouth of one person and tied with silk into the gaping bleeding socket of another! Mr. Foot himself had been present when Hunter made just such an exchange between a lady and her maid. And then the heartless monster had gone swaggering back to his "dissection room", deaf to the cries of the agonized maid, deaf to all but the jingle of the money the lady had paid him for his crime. And on what evidence did Hunter place his theory of the efficacy of "scion" teeth-—-why, only on that which Mr. Foot had spoken on himself. And Pouchard had written that though he had transplanted a tooth, the operation was not successful. And yet, Hunter had not even waited to hear him, Mr. Foot, out but had turned away—- 

As were Mr. Foot’s audience, one by one. Heavy weights on slen—— Mr. Foot was insisting, and found that only one gentleman remained, bland in the face of Mr. Foot’s insistent stare.

"I am somewhat acquainted with Mr. Hunter, myself," that gentleman said.

"Ah, yes, I have seen you in the tooth-shop. You are—-"

"I am Dr. George Fordyce, and I honour myself that I consider Hunter my friend. I shall not neglect to speak to him of your comments." Then Dr. Fordyce also left Mr. Foot.

John was in no wise perturbed at the gossip. Engaged, as always now, on work on the teeth, he did not stop his hands as he chatted with Fordyce. "In truth, he is but advertising me. Gods, he may be responsible for half our patients! Who knows but what I owe my fine new chariot to none other than my faithful. Mr. Foot?"

"He is mad," Fordyce said, "and well you know it."

"Ah well… . He is harmless."

Dr. Fordyce did not think so.

Now George Fordyce was not himself the most conventional man in town. He too had his little idiosyncrasies. For one, he slept briefly and infrequently. Nor was his wakefulness, as John’s was, due to either the press of work or the pressure of love. Fordyce had both an established practice and family. He even had a few students to whom he taught materia medica and chemistry in the mornings. It was merely that he verged on the freakish, a few hours of sleep a week sufficed him. So it was that he, charming, educated, far from impoverished, wandered dark and dangerous London night after night in search of companionship. In the bleak hours before dawn he had wrestled for his life with footpads, he had shivered in draughty, dimly lit night-houses, he had had to he rudely ejected from the houses of his friends so that they might go to bed—-all because he could not listen to the even breathing of his wife at his side while he lay awake and alert longing for the sound of a human voice.

One meal a day usually was sufficient to keep George Fordyce in good health also.

That spring, thanks to Mr. Foot, he had chanced again to come to John Hunter. And in John, himself coming to his dissection room to roll up his sleeves and work, long after midnight and after leaving Anne, Fordyce found that which he sought.

Like everyone else who came into his purview, John wondered how he might make use of Fordyce. Then he hit on it. "Would you care to do me a great service, George?"

"lndeed I would!"

"Then look at my notes on the teeth and see what you can make of them. I have it in mind to publish one day, and yet cannot express the simplest thought in writing."

"I would be delighted to arrange "them," Fordyce said eagerly, straining his eyes to decipher John’s scrawls in the light of two wavering farthing dips.

"My thanks," John said, and dimly recognized that he had become quite ruthless in his exploiting of the talents of others.

For Anne he would do almost anything. Only his work, his animal preparations, and his preparations on the teeth, did he refuse to taint or stint for the love of her.

Where had all his fine notions of the practice of surgery gone? Then, he let his thoughts dwell on his new chariot and the parcel of land he had purchased at Earl’s Court; he let his eyes move about the many preparations that adorned his shelves; he considered again his plans to move away from the Garden into some rather costly apartments—and he told himself: All in good time. When William is able to secure me my position at St. George’s, time enough for me to think seriously about surgery.

xvi

She had begun to permit him to touch her. Wig askew, nervous lest she detect his pit-a-patation and smile, he held her and sought for her mouth. At such times her eyes were cool, luminous, exactly on a level with his, as they examined the effect of the pressure of her breast against his. She noted his breathing, his colouring, the focus of his eyes, and the trembling of his limbs. And once, when she was pulling away, he offered her his wrist on an angry impulse, "You’ve not taken my pulse yet, Annie, my love."

Anne laughed, fully in possession of herself.

Robbie Home wanted to know, in all sincerity, why John didn’t find himself some kind, healthy, sensible young woman and marry her.

John countered by saying, "I am going to take Anne out to Earl’s Court to show her our land."

"You look an ass in that wig," Home said. "Take it off."

Anne’s dress was of palest green, a fluttery thing that whipped against her when John urged the horse into a fast trot. Atop her head she was wearing a bonnet that billowed out over her mass of tallow-coloured curls, and looked somewhat like a mushroom, and then again did not. From a certain angle it had a tumorous appearance also, but Anne was vastly pleased with it. Once on the highway, when the wind was free to have at her bonnet, Anne screamed and clutched the monstrous thing to her head and directed her laughing gaze to John. He was enchanted, noting that when they passed under the branches of trees her hair and skin and even her eyes became the same pale green of her dress.

Soon they had the highway to themselves, and Anne extirpated the bonnet from her hair and leaned back, eyes closed, to turn up her face to the sun. In time the tiny vessels that lay just under her cheeks expanded in the warmth and pinked her complexion. On occasion he lifted his hand from the reins to caress her, but she remained motionless and composed.

At last he said, "Yon’s Earl’s Court, Anne."

She lowered her face to look about her at the grotto of great trees ahead, rising almost like a vision beyond the dust of the road. He offered her the sight with the same solemnity he might have employed were he making her the gift of his life instead. He urged, "D’ye think it a pretty place? Does it please you?"

She smiled and said in a tone that, to his regret, he suspected of being deliberately kind, "I find it most pleasing, John. And where are you to build your mansion?"

They crossed over to a lane no wider than the wheel-span of the little chariot and came to a grotto of bees under which lay grasses short and thick as fur. A neighbour had grazed his sheep here, and patches of white were tangled in low shrubs. Beyond the trees a stone wall wandered, stopping abruptly at a low rise as if having gracefully decided that there could be no purpose in going on. From the chariot John pointed to the grotto, "I propose to build there. The wall can establish my lawn."

He wanted to continue, to build in her mind’s eye each room of the cottage, ending with that room in which, in his recurring vision, she would spend her dark hours with him; but Anne had suddenly become animated. She wanted to run among the trees, she wanted to sit on the wall in the sun. And she wanted to be left alone.

When he had alighted to walk also, he found himself carrying, for no reason, her bonnet in his hands. He let his curiosity engage his thoughts, examining the underside of a leaf, or disputing with an insect the direction in which it truly cared to go. Yet ever he was closing in on Anne as he entered deeper into this green world. Over-head the sky appeared only as shafts of light between the massed leaves, and even as he looked the shafts moved, darted and disappeared. Then he saw Anne step out from behind a trunk.

In the faint light her skin was again the colour of her dress, and the sward on which she stood seemed but a pool of dress and skin flowing from her. In the water-light he saw her with an extraordinary clarity, saw the pale green tendrils of her hair lifting with a movement of air so quiet that it did not cool his cheek. The veins in her hands were like those of the leaves just above his head, dark and rich with life. She was thoughtful, head bent, biting her lips, making some decision.

Then she raised her head and those bitten lips stood out rose-red in her face. Surrounded by her world of green, she was awaiting him. Annie, he cried soundlessly, as the bonnet fell unnoticed from his hands, and he moved eagerly towards her.

She was resigned, quiescent; her gaze never left his face.

Yet, he could not remember later the words she had used in her acceptance of him. She had had little chance to speak at all, he reminded himself wryly, in the face of his impassioned declarations. Their engagement was qualified, that he knew. She would marry only an established surgeon, one who was associated with a hospital or who had a reputable practice. One, indeed, who would support her in a manner to which she was far from accustomed.

It was only a matter of time before he could fulfil all the requirements, of that he was fiercely certain.

xvii

Matters seemed to be running smoothly again for the Hunter brothers. William was better and had reopened his School, with the embattled Dr. Hewson to assist him. And as ever the brothers prowled the board meetings at the hospital seeking titbits of information and assurances of future support. John’s scion tooth transplantations were bringing ever more customers into the shop, though Mr. Spence performed the procedure himself now. John busied himself with his few students, his animal preparations, his Treatise on the Teeth (for so George Fordyce was beginning to call it), his, as yet, slim practice about town—-the venereal distempers were almost fashionable during the warm months----and the building of his cottage at Earl’s Court.

He took to going out to the country before his day started, making the journey on foot. There he gazed fondly on the skeleton of his house, noting each time how much closer its growth was bringing him to the fruition of his dream of Anne. But in time, it was no longer the house alone which attracted him to Earl’s Court. He made a few little experiments on the growth of trees; and later began to stock his land with animals. He had it in mind to make Howison his caretaker.

On a misty morning, following a night of rain, he rose to make his way again to Earl’s Court. The streets were still dark, the kennels running with the sound of small rivers. He passed only a weary link-boy on his way home, and, near St. James’s Church, a morose footpad who eyed him sourly in the grim dawn. On Jermyn Street he saw a chariot drawn up before number forty-two, and as he drew abreast of it, William alighted and stood for a moment drawing in the moist morning air, tottering with weariness. In one hand he held his bag containing the forceps he never used, and in the other his gold-headed cane upon which he leaned. He turned his head to observe John’s approach, the harsh eastern light full on his face. His eye-sockets were filled with puffy fresh the colour of porridge, and his shrunken mouth clung dispiritedly to his face under the impending shadow of his nose.

John stopped, and the Hunter brothers looked at one another for an endless moment in the sodden dawn. Then, with a tired smile, William said, "Good morning, Jock."

"Good night, Wullie."

They parted, William to his bed and a fitful sleep, and John to his grotto and work.

He was late in returning to the tooth-shop, and Mr. Spence greeted him in the way of one who has been waiting impatiently. "Mr. Hunter, before you go to your room … a word, sir."

"Aye, Mr. Spence? Has a customer—-"

"Mr. Foot is back there."

"I am not completely stunned by that piece of intelligence, sir." John was in a fine mood, he felt very witty.

"Sir, I must tell you that he has been going about impugning our work—the scion teeth. One of my lads heard it but last evening in a coffee-shop. Mr. Foot—most distressing!"

"Out with it, Mr. Spence."

"He has been saying that we are implanting venereal poisons along with teeth. He has been going about giving it out in the nature of a warning—that one can take the venereal distemper of the mouth in this way. Sir, I am in such a state of dismay I know not what to say to Mr. -——-"

"I know what to say to him."

In his own ears his feet sounded like those of a giant stomping down the hallway. He burst into his dissection room, gaze rushing past his two students to fasten on the steady stare of Jesse Foot. "You son-of-a-whore," John said levelly, "if ever I see you again I will open up every vein in your body." From his pocket he withdrew his lancet, opening it without taking his eyes from Foot.

Still Foot said nothing, though the crumpling had begun. His elongated face broke into horizontal planes, his narrow temples seeming to sink within his worn wig. A strange sound as of an animal feeling the inexorable bite of the trap rose in the room, coming from nowhere.

"Mr. Hunter," a student murmured, "I fear he is going to-—"

But by then Foot had fallen at John’s feet, his body writhing and arching, his teeth clattering and snapping at his tongue, his eyes turned up in his head. His wig came off and he bumped and knocked his shorn head mercilessly on the floor. John seized him by an ear, thrusting the handle of his lancet into the mouth, holding down the tongue.

Again Foot wailed and opened his eyes. He lay still.

"Give him some wine," John said, "and then throw him out into the street." He left the room to seek solitude in Mr. Spence’s room with the electrical machine.

In time he heard steps coming towards the door. He waited for them to pass. They did not. Jesse Foot stood in the doorway looking at him, tears slowly coursing down his face. "When you need me," he said sorrowfully, "I will come. Remember, Hunter… ."

John turned his hack. "I do not want to do an injury to one such as you, Jesse Foot. Do not force me-—-—"

"When you need me," Jesse Foot repeated, "I will come." After a moment, he added as if in warning, "Never fear, John Hunter… ."

He was gone.

The students were dissecting quietly when John re-entered his room. One of them had a question to ask.

"I should have done it long ago," John said to himself, ignoring his student.

"It would have been better, sir," the student ventured. "I, for one, am afraid of the mad."

xviii

John did not see nor hear of Mr. Foot again. Fortunately he had silenced him before Foot could do harm to Spence’s business. When winter, the season of fractures and lung fevers, came on, John’s practice picked up a bit. He had enough now to enable him to move from the Garden to the more fashionable Golden Square. His rooms had the further advantage of opening off a back stair, up which the faithful Howison might creep of a night stealthily dragging his sack behind him.

And it was to his new quarters that Dr. Fordyce came late one afternoon with a strange young man in tow. With much arching of his dark brows and half-realized gestures pregnant with some meaning John could not grasp, George Fordyce introduced the youth as Mr. Joseph Banks. Still John watched the signalling brow, the twitching hands, and wondered. Before him was a lad of twenty-one or so, a mannered and intelligent young man, and by his satin suit and ermine muf, a rich one. He had come, at Dr. Fordyce’s kind suggestion, to see John’s collection of animal preparations. He was to all appearances, John was pleased to note, of a scientific turn of mind. Mr. Joseph Banks was a newly elected member of the Royal Society, he admitted with a nice display of modesty. He hoped to occupy himself as a naturalist.

"Would you be interested in performing a human dissection?" John asked after some moments of struggling to contain himself? Charge him six guineas if you charge him a farthing, his greed was urging.

Well, not at the present, Mr. Banks decided, though he was emboldened to take it as an honour that Mr. Hunter should be so gracious as to offer his great knowledge and et cetera.

Damme, what does he want, John asked himself.

It was only that Mr. Banks was helplessly drawn by all manner of scientific oddments, that was all. And never had he been so impressed as he was this day. He was proposing to go on a trip to Newfoundland that summer to collect some botanical specimens, and it had just come to him that he might bring Mr. Hunter a few animals also. Would, there be anything in particular Mr. Hunter desired? Having seen and admired to his depths Mr. Hunter’s museum-—-—

(Bygar, Museum! Shall I bow, or merely continue on as I am grinning like an ass.)

… he, Joseph Banks, would find it a privilege to contribute to it in some small way by bringing Mr. Hunter a few dozen animals or so from––

"My God," John cried, "you are proposing them as gifts?" Young Mr. Banks grew slightly bewildered. "Why, certainly Dr. Hun——"

"Mr."

"-—ter. Since we shall not fill the hold of the ship in any way with only our botanical specimens, I thought we might take up the slack with animals."

"Ah, but the one who is financing this expedition might not care to carry free cargo. Pray, who is to finance the trip, sir?"

Still bewildered, Mr. Banks looked briefly to the snickering Dr. Fordyce before answering patiently, "Why——I am, Hunter."

John pulled his chair closer to this charming Joseph Banks. He could barely keep his hands from patting the fresh young cheeks, barely prevent his tongue from enquiring fondly as to the size of the fortune possessed by such a handsome and winning lad. Ah, what a treasure of a young man, John’s eyes declared, and he grinned so broadly, bringing the prognathous jaw into full play, that Mr. Joseph Banks drew back in confusion. John’s beam had a fierce quality to it, somewhat like the toothy approval a tiger bestows on the grazing hart. "You are financing the expedition?" John was saying joyfully. "Ah, sir, I cannot express my approval of your wisdom." Leaning forward (he was rather in pursuit of the retreating Mr. Banks), he summoned his most reasonable tone of voice, "Now then, sir, how many species of animals do you calculate Newfoundland to have?"

"Why, in truth, Mr. Hunter, I could not hazard-—"

"Could you," John went on, clinging desperately to his tone of assured reasonableness, "bring me a sample of each?"

Mr. Banks, now finding himself backed up against a table, faltered, "I cannot promise—but I will try."

"Ah !"

George Fordyce put his head in his hands and shook.

John spoke with such fulsome praise of Mr. Banks to Anne that evening that she at last remarked snappishly, "John, can you see no virtue in anyone unless they stink of dead animals or rotted vegetables? I should think this Mr. Banks could put his fortune to better use by entering society and enriching culture. He might support a magazine devoted to young poets, for example, or—-"

"Anne, don’t talk like a fool," John said shortly, forgetting himself.

She swept to the harpsichord, where she spent the evening. Little Everard, now no longer so little, engaged John in a game of loo. John cheated so cleverly, and with so bland an expression, that Everard did not find him out, and was sent to bed howling his rage at having lost every game.

For his part, Robert Mylne whiled the hours picking morsels of his supper from his teeth. His free hand lay familiarly on Mary’s arm. "I fear," Robbie Home said thoughtfully, at the evening’s end, "that Everard will be much punished in life for his sensitivity. The cruel world always finds and tortures them the valuable, sensitive ones.

"True," John said solemnly. "Too true, Robbie."

He lingered; but when he left he had Anne’s brief kiss on his mouth to warm him all the way home to Golden Square.

He saw the affluent Mr. Joseph Banks several times that spring. He and Fordyce and Banks went the rounds of the taverns, ending in the Garden. Mr. Banks and Fordyce were drunk and garrulous on punch, John on the prospect of free acquisitions for his "museum". He cracked coarse jokes in a loud voice, clapping the retiring Fordyce on the back many times, and bending on the modest Joseph his ever devouring smile of delight. After a time Joseph grew somewhat used to John’s enthusiasm and managed to relax in the face of such concentrated appreciation. They left the Redford Tavern at dawn, groping their way through a thick fog.

Among the several opinions expressed by Joseph had been his conviction that Mr. Hunter would be a valuable addition to the rolls of the Royal Society. And, as with all his opinions, John concurred heartily, though within he grew angry at the thought of this pup being invited to become a Fellow because of affluence and influence only, while Dr. William Hunter had for years knocked on the barred doors in vain.

"… a paper on any of your many marvellous preparations would effect your immediate entry, sir," Joseph was saying.

"I would aid you in the writing, Jock," Fordyce volunteered.

"Most kind, by all means …" John said.

Then, when Banks left on his expedition, John forgot about the paper.

xix

William clutched the preparation he had come to borrow. Almost on the point of departure he had paused in the doorway to ask casually, "Is it true then, that you are going to marry your Miss Home?"

"Indeed, yes, Brother."

"She has condescended to have you, eh?"

"Oh come, Wullie, let us not fall out about the subject. I want you to take pleasure in my impending happiness."

"I suppose I must," William said with a sigh. "Ah well, with our sister’s children carrying the name of Baillie, it will be good to think that more Hunters were due to arrive one day." He made a noble attempt to wax hearty. "And God knows I am not likely to father any future Hunters. Let us make a bargain, Jock. I’ll make a physician out of your firstborn son, if you’ll name him after me."

"Come back in," John cried, "and we’ll drink to it."

They touched glasses solemnly. "To the second Dr. William Hunter," they intoned, grinning foolishly.

On the first fine day he was free, he drove Anne out to see the completed cottage at Earl’s Court. She was able to bear the impact of its magnificence with complete composure.

"What a charming little nook in case it rained during a picnic."

For a moment, memories of the hours of work, the nights he had gone wearily from his bed at the summons of any who roused him, his scrabbling for students, his fevered preparations on the "teeth for the forthcoming Treatise-:—all to secure money for this cottage and their future, gathered in his throat, thick as passion.

"You are going to spend your summers in this ‘charming little nook’ one day, Anne Home!" he shouted. "I built it for you, and you’re going to live in it. D’ye understand?"

"Ma foi," Anne said airily. "And, pray, where is my drawing-room? That patch of grass over there with the cow sleeping on it? And where do my guests sit, on that broken wall?"

Beside himself, he shoved his ugly face at her and shouted the louder. "Damn you, I’ll build an addition on it. This little house that I put every farthing on for you will he my laboratory then. I’ll build you a barn large enough to hold every fop and titled trull in London. And then you’ll live in it! Is that clear, Annie, my dearest love?"

"La," Anne said uncertainly. "Pray, Mr. Hunter, cease taking that liberty with your hand… ."

They were silent all the way back to town. Damn her, where did she expect a man to get enough money to marry her? Steal it? She forgot herself, she was only the daughter of a poor surgeon. Or did she think some lord was going to fall at her feet one day and—-

"Bitch!" he muttered involuntarily.

"How kind of you to say so," Anne snarled.

Suddenly she laughed. He turned to her eagerly, humbly. "Forgive me! You drive me to—— Gods, you know I would give my life for you!"

"Aye," Anne said, allowing him to kiss her hands, "I know."

xx

He mortgaged his lease on the Earl’s Court property in order to build on to the cottage. Now he was indeed in a financial snarl. If only he were ready to publish on the teeth and realize some money from the sale of the treatise; but he could not establish whether or not the teeth were vascular, and he shrank from rushing into print unprepared. He wished he could murder John Gunning and have himself elected to his place at the hospital. He thought of experimenting with botanicals until he discovered an overnight cure for the venereal distempers.

But he knew that for him there was never the fortunate misstep, never the lightning concept, only the wresting from each stubborn chunk of flesh some little point, some little confirmation of a simple theory, knowledge growing slowly as a stalagmite in his mind.

At times, engaged in the tooth-shop, he suffered a constriction of his heart. I am not practising surgery at all, he thought drearily. I am merely pursuing money. He pushed the thought away.

He was growing rather haggard, George Fordyce observed.

"Have you decided to fill the shoes of the long-departed Mr. Foot?" John asked rudely. "That you criticize my working hours and my appearance?"

"Pray," Fordyce said gently, "do not think I wished to offend you, Jock." And to further assure John of his unwillingness to quarrel, he added humorously, "I shall draw up the Foot-stool and watch you in complete silence."

"It is I who should apologize," John said. "George, I am so beset by——" It was needless to state what Fordyce already knew. He worked in silence for some time.

"Ah, nosiness that nurse of genius!" Fordyce burst out.

John turned away from his preparation to stare.

"I am given to such statements," Fordyce explained contritely. "I took my master’s degree at fourteen."

"Then you cannot help yourself," John said comfortingly.

"Jock, you will join me in a bumper later, won’t you?"

"Come with me to visit the Homes, instead," John countered.

But Fordyce would not intrude. Out of pity John promised to meet him at the end of the evening. He was the only person he knew who could keep pace with the lonely and sleepless Fordyce.

He was quitting the tooth-shop when a figure emerged from the dark. A callused hand seized his, a grin, white in a browned face, glittered in competition with Mr. Spence’s wares. "Mr. Hunter, I was afraid I had missed you! Sir, I have all manner of——"

"Joseph Banks? When did you-——"

"My house is but a few doors from here, sir. Could you not join me in a glass while we examine what I brought back for you?"

Fordyce vanished from John’s mind; dimly Anne called out even as she too was dissolving. "I must not keep a lady waiting," he began, "and yet the thought of—— Come with me to see the lady, and then we will return here. I do not want so much as to lose sight of you !"

"Shall we go in my carriage or yours, Mr. Hunter?"

"Yours," John said. He added, "Come to think of it, I have no carriage. How many species did you find in Newfoundland, my fine young friend?"

They were admitted by one of the quiet middle children of the Home family. The first of the elder members to come into the parlour was Anne. John went towards her, eager and proprietary, some such phrase as "Miss Home, my wife—to—be" on his tongue when her comeliness stilled him. It was as if she had awakened from a long and refreshing sleep, her eyes intensifying, gaining colour, her breath becoming shallow and rapid. She was looking past John to Joseph Banks standing quietly by his chair.

"Mr. Banks …" John said inadequately, and watched as Banks performed an elegant leg.

Anne gave Banks her hand. "Mr. Hunter is my father’s dearest friend, sir," she said cordially. "I am sure he will be delighted to meet another of Mr. Hunter’s acquaintances." She turned her head to John. "Father is in his study, Mr. Hunter. He will be so happy to see you."

Her gaze, which usually met John’s directly, now demurely lowered itself to rest somewhere on the region of his stock. She is making an ass of herself before me, John thought angrily, and was turning to Banks to declare his situation with Anne, when, as with Anne, he was struck by the exceeding beauty of the young man. This night Banks was clad in deep blue velvet, a colour so becoming to him that one did not realize at first that the effect of his bright glance in a browned face was partially due to his clothes and his wig, most faintly tinted also with blue.

Anne’s fan was suddenly in evidence, fluttering against her breast. Within the hour, John knew, that fan would be tapping Banks provocatively on the arm, would be shielding all but her eyes when she, laughing in protest, would be the recipient of some compliment he would be emboldened to make.

I will not have it so, John thought, but in that moment Anne captured his attention. Her pleading gaze said to him plainly: If you love me, do not take this chance away from me. I am but a year or so older than he, and he is handsome—-and rich!

And such was the social art of an Anne Home that while she was throwing herself on John’s mercy, her lips were asking casually, "Are you a married man, Mr. Banks?"

"My heart is yours, Miss Home," Banks replied gallantly.

In the months to follow, John looked on in pain and humiliation while Anne made a fool of herself over Joseph Banks.

I will see it through, he told himself stolidly. For Anne had not turned John away.

xxi

The Homes were very gay that winter season. There were always little parties, soirées, and musicales, and every play that came to the Garden or Drury Lane was one that Anne wistfully declared she could not bear to miss. Each time John saw her, she seemed to be wearing a dress more elaborate than the one before. She moved through the parties as festooned with lace and puffs and flounces as the mistress of a peer. Her voice was high and attenuated; yet she could break off at the peak of a laugh like someone snapping an icicle from an eave. Saddened, John watched her, wanting to catch her to him and hide her face against his coat, to comfort her at those very times when her mood was the gayest, her eyes most bright.

Always Joe Banks was near her. He smiled down at her, he danced attendance on her, he took her everywhere in his ostentatious carriage. Yet he was no less attentive to the frantically concentrating Mrs. Home, or even to some decrepit remnant of eighty whom Mrs. Home entertained infrequently as an act of charity.

When young Joe was alone with John, he spoke as if bewitched on "all things scientific", but Anne’s name never crossed his lips. Any mention of her was couched in the term "the Home family", which perforce included that obnoxious lad Everard, as well as the other six children, and possibly, Robert Mylne.

There! John told himself, Anne is but flirting with Joe, and well he knows it. It means nothing.

And satiated with the abundance of animals Banks had brought him for preparations, he was able to save his money towards enlarging the house at Earl’s Court. So, biding his time, he consulted with his builder as to the exposure of the drawing-room, the dimensions of Anne’s own parlour, of her private closet, of her sun-room— of their room together.

He had another thing to pin his hopes on. The better he knew Joe, the more he realized that here was a young man who stood forever on the edge of an abyss, desiring to jump. What lay beyond, whether it be at the bottom of Hell, or no, Joe wanted to go there. Strange lands, unknown dangers, all were included in Joe’s phrase—all things scientific.

You could not save yourself from loving Joe. He was an incorrigible benefactor, showering anyone who would take them, with gifts. He gave with such an unremitting fervour that George Fordyce remarked once, musing, "One has to remind oneself that he is not penniless and hunchbacked. At times I see him so, all covered over in his tallness and his money."

"Aye," John said. After a moment he added, almost as if asking a question, "He has succeeded in getting me invited to join the Royal Society."

"By all means," George said quickly. "Such an association will bring you a better class of patients.

"It matters little," John said dryly, "where they received the distemper: on Robert Mylne’s bridge, or in milady’s bed."

"You are too holy for me today, Jock. Read a paper on it to the Society".

"That I Will, George Fordyce."

The seat of his uneasiness lay, not in the fact that Banks was instrumental in John’s invitation to the Society, but that he must inform William of it at once. He must do it, explaining the way of it, before William got the news elsewhere.

xxii

The Fellows of the Royal Society, presumably the most learned men in England, and the world for that matter, were not to a man, wise, mellowed, and accomplished. In the Society influence was tantamount, if not superior, to talent; and every brash young heir who came up from Oxford could become a Fellow with little trouble. At the meetings, during the reading of the papers, retired army men were seen to doze in their seats, and dilettante noblemen twitched with impatience because the paper did not cover a current fad of theirs. Yet the Society took itself seriously, it was a scientific society, and therefore it was daring, advanced, and useful to the welfare of England, despite the snoring retired colonels.

Usually a Fellow was selected after he had presented a paper which the Society deemed worthy of a future member. Dr. William Hunter, had, over the years, presented several such papers, all unsuccessfully. Mr. John Hunter, surgeon of Golden Square, being described in his certificate as skilled in natural history and anatomy, had presented none.

"Mercy on us, Jock," Dr. William Hunter said, "what a marvellous jest on the part of your Joe Banks! Introducing you to the Society! I vow that young man must be the soul of wit!"

"Pray, Wullie——" John began helplessly.

"But then–I forget! You attended Oxford! Unfortunately, I was never able to afford such a luxury for myself." William flung himself about in his chair as petulantly as an invalid. "Naturally, such a poor and uneducated thing as the Queen’s Own Physician is hardly to be considered Worthy of——"

"Wullie, will you cease indulging yourself in a paddywhack and attend me? I have the ear of Joe Banks on the matter of your invitation next, and I can all but promise that within the next two months-—-"

"Damme, in that case I must hasten to prepare my paper! Let me think: shall I write on The incidence of the Venereal Distemper in Conjunction with Transplanted Teeth?"

"You might," John snapped, "consider: My Discovery of the Placental Circulation!" He had gone too far.

John was privileged to watch William crumple under the hurt, seeing, with a great pain of his own, the courage and mighty anger of Dr. William Hunter drain out of him in tears of indulgent self pity. "Ah, Wullie," he said urgently, "you know what my temper has always been! Never am I so apt to lie and calumniate as when I have lost——-"

"Leave me be," Dr. William Hunter said, his tears flowing freely now. "I am tired and given to weeping even when I am not sad. My eyes, Brother, are constantly burning… . It is nothing… . Most weary… . Ungrateful Hewson claiming preparations as his own… . Lord Bute promising me, promising me that my Memorial… . Own brother associated with a dentist. A dentist, no less… ."

William Hunter was exactly fifty.

The difficulty lay in John’s closeting himself with Joe Banks alone. He persisted, finally cornering his young friend in the Homes’ parlour, having begged Robbie to keep the family out on any pretext that came into his head.

Then, in the course of the conversation, Robert Mylne wandered in, his fat face indicating that he had overheard what was said, however his fat mouth might deny it.

Young Banks was nothing if not magnanimous. His winning smile announced that there was no earthly reason why Dr. William Hunter and Mr. Robert Mylne both could not adorn the Society. Damme, John thought, glowering squarely into Mylne’s smug smirk, just how did he manage to insinuate himself into the matter?

In April Dr. William Hunter became a Fellow of the Royal Society. In May Robert Mylne was also due to become a Fellow. But some time before that John was destined to see his co-suitor but infrequently, whether at the Home household or anywhere else except the Society meetings.

xxiii

It was still April when John groped his way to the tooth-shop through a swirling yellow fog, to find Spence in the back idly shocking himself with his electrical machine, a lone customer waiting to be blooded, and a dullard of a duke’s son, his only student at the moment, desperately forcing himself to continue with a dissection begun as the result of his losing a wager. Were he to emerge from the experience acquainted with the major differences between the arm and the leg, John could consider himself a nonpareil as a teacher. He bled the customer, absently holding the basin and looking out of the window, past the hand holding the tooth aloft, to watch a sedan lumber by, looking for all the world like a strange four-legged insect; and listen to a carriage that was all sound and no sight, like a ghost in reverse. The streets were nearly empty, most of London having found one excuse or another to stay home for the day. He wiped his lancet on his sleeve and closed the lips of the wound with plaster.

His departing customer let in a cloud of fog as he closed the door behind him.

Still holding his lancet, John pondered. Robbie would he out on his rounds. Joe Banks was undoubtedly over at Dr. Solander’s, a block or so away, talking botany. The younger Home children were in school; Mrs. Home and Mary and Agnes would be in the kitchen; and Anne would be at her desk in the parlour slaving over a poem. He closed his lancet and thrust it into his pocket. In his other pocket sagged the final plans for enlarging the house at Earl’s Court. He would need Anne’s approval of them before he undertook the prohibitive expense of the project.

He found Anne indeed at the desk prettily frowning and tickling her chin with the quill, as she sought her muse. There was a candle burning steadily at her elbow, but it cast no warmth or colour on her face, nor did it reflect in her dulled eyes. When she turned to him, John saw that her nostrils were pinched. She was both taut and weary, as if tired of some struggle within herself and yet compelled to carry it on.

She smiled listlessly when he spread out the plans before her on the desk. "I am certain that the house will be most accommodating for you, John," she murmured politely, drawing the quill back and forth under her chin and showing no more voluptuous response to the sensation than a corpse might have.

"I am not building it for myself alone, Anne," he reminded her gently. "It is exactly as you wanted it, is it not?"

"I?" She turned to look out at the fog, uninterested.

"Annie, you said you would want a drawing-room, and here is one. You said you would want …" He grew silent, for if she was listening she gave no sign. He tried again. "Anne? Anne, that first time I showed you Earl’s Court, that first day on which you allowed me to——"

She jerked around to him. "Sir, I may have allowed you liberties; if so, I do not find it becoming in a gentleman to confront me with my-——"

"Liberties! You witless little—- I declared myself! And you permitted my addresses. Well you know that from that day on I have done nothing but work and slave and drudge with you in mind! Every guinea I took in, I told myself that I could put it to good use for you. I have mortgaged my property"—he slammed his hand down on the plans—"to obtain the money to build this. What need have I for a drawing-room? What earthly need———"

"My head does ache so, of a sudden," Anne said, and with shoulders drooping, attempted to rise.

He held her down in her chair. Her cold arm twisted under his fingers, he held her the more securely; but he said, gently enough, "What is it, Anne? How have I displeased you?"

She avoided his gaze, again turning to the window. "You have done nothing to displease me, John, my dear. Unless it be that you come here with the plans of a house I know nothing about and yell at me that I——"

"Blawfum, Anne!" He had blundered; far from being jollied, she straightened up with insult. "Anne, I spoke too hastily. Do not draw away from me, we must have this matter out. If we are to be happy together we must learn to understand one another."

"You take too much to yourself," she said coldly. "I have never considered myself bound or betrothed to you, sir."

"At least, not since you began mooning over Joe Banks! Is that it, my fine lady?"

She sat for a moment in judgement on herself Then she said quietly, "I love him with all my heart, John."

She was pathetic. She and her brave declaration alike both saddened and galled him. He was a man with work to do, and money he had earned for her to spend. It was time, past time, she put away her poetry and her fancies and squarely faced her duties to both of them. Well now, he would simply dismiss what she had said as being a giddy remark intended to tease him. He said deliberately, evenly, "Anne, Joe Banks does not know you exist. He is friendly to your family because of me. Do you think your house the only one in London he visits to have pretty young women in it? Why, I have heard his name linked with every girl in town—and with a handsome young widow too… . Pray, let’s have no more of this. What do you think of our house?"

"It scarcely matters since I shall never live in it."

Damn her! But he pulled her hand to him to fondle it and soften what next he said. "Annie, my love, let me advise you. Joe is a fine lad. Aye, and a rich one. But he’ll not have you. Hear me, my fine lady; he’ll not waste himself and his fortune on the daughter of a poor surgeon, however charming she may be. He’ll take to wife a girl with as much money as he has, and she’ll be as pretty as you. Do you hear me, Anne?"

When she turned her pinched nostrils to him, her eyes were flat with hatred. "You ugly little man with your thick features and your vile person!" Her voice was quite calm. "You smell of death, John Hunter. You smell of death and blood. You are crude and virtually unlettered, you dance as a sow might staggering in her wallow, and when you touch me I see the collection of rotted fresh and filth under your nails. You are an abomination of a man, John Hunter, and had not my father-—-" Though her voice faltered, her glance did not. Then at last she relented and dropped her eyes. "Forgive me, Mr. Hunter."

He had but one question. "You mentioned your father, Anne. That day at Earl’s Court, that first day-——"

"He had asked me to consider you, no more."

"Then that day—why did you permit me?"

She shook her head.

"Anne!"

She said in a small voice, "I do not know-unless it was that I was curious. I could not bear your hands, and yet I wanted to know——to know how so-—unprepossessing-—a man might go about-—"

"Aye?"

"There is no more. At times, when I was a child, I liked to take up a stick and poke at a snake."

She had nothing further to say.

"I will take my plans with me," John said. Her elbow rested on them, lifeless; she did not seem aware of his pulling the plans away. "It is too late to change them, now," John said in a conversational voice. "Good day, Miss Home."

She was already staring out of the window again. Not until he had reached the door did she say in her customary high tones, "When I am Mrs. Joseph Banks, Mr. Hunter, will you come to tea one day?"

"Aye. That day I will come."

Robbie was coming up the steps as he left the house. He brushed past and Robbie’s voice drifted out of the fog, "Jock! Good God, Jock, what––" Wandering about in the fog, careless of the carriages that rushed down on him out of nowhere, to clatter by within inches of his coat, he was tormented by the vision, never before so real, so clear, of Anne in his house in Earl’s Court, awaiting him in their bed with uplifted arms.

In a town where men wept freely at plays, where they spilled copious tears on their lace-stocks and the printed pages of novels, where men of venerable years sobbed aloud at musicales or at the sight of a painting; in such a town there was no closet, no room where sound would not carry, no refuge where a man, broken not by the fancies of others, but his own folly, might go private—to weep.

Patients would be waiting on him in his parlour in Golden Square, his dullard would be desecrating flesh still at the tooth-shop—in all the world he would find no solitude.

At last he stumbled into a tavern. In a dark corner he sat over his bumper, shovel jaw sagging, staring down at his stained hands. He did not bother to raise his eyes when a voice said:

"Why, it is Jock Hunter, is it not?"

"Join me, Colin," John said.

"I recollect that when first we met it was in a tavern also," Colin Mackenzie said, seating himself. "You are looking fit, Jock. Tell me, how have you been?"

John began to laugh.

xxiv

Past midnight he sat at his desk putting down his thoughts as Fordyce had encouraged him to do:

A man has an appetite to enjoy a woman; but if the mind has formed itself to any particular woman, the appetite or enjoyment can be suspended till that object is presented; and the more the mind interferes, the greater stress will be laid upon this relation: the more sexual enjoyment will be almost forgot, and the whole pursuit will be after the particular quality of the appetite.

He read what he had written, and then added:

If a man has not fallen in love by his fortieth year, he would do well to refrain from it thereafter.

He was thirty-nine. He blew out his candle and sat motionless in the dark, he knew not for how long a time, thinking of nothing whatsoever.

xxv

Howison was the first to know of it, for it was he who had purchased the hanged man in John’s behalf. He had waited till long after dark that wet May night to drag his sack up the convenient back stair leading to John’s quarters in Golden Square. Panting from his exertions, Howison had lingered to rest, while John examined the body.

Though the night was wet, it was distressingly warm, and the curtains lifted silently from the open windows at each moist breath of the air. When the flames of the farthing dips guttered and bent to one side, the hanged man seemed to blink and the broken veins on his cheeks and neck to writhe. The trunk and limbs of the hanged man were handsome, like Greek marble covered with a fine patina of filth, and there was only an angry swelling in the left groin to mar the classic structure which had been his. As Howison watched idly, John touched this swelling or bubo with his scalpel, not incising the skin but merely outlining the area. "Like as not," John murmured, "he had a gonorrhoea."

"It would not surprise me." Howison said. "Will you be wanting the teeth, Jock?" he hinted. "If not, I might realize a shilling or so on them from old Spence." He was taken by surprise by the vehemence of John’s reply.

"The teeth are yours. God knows, it is past time I have done with the damned things and become a surgeon again!" So saying, he made his first incision just above the pubis.

Not wishing to press the matter further with John in such an explosive mood, Howison wisely changed the subject. "Jock," he asked carelessly, "how does one get the venereal distemper?"

"Ha."

Howison grew earnest. "Ah, aside from that, you wag! And was trying to say: when is it a man gets one and not the other? Or both, you might say?" He scratched his head, as if the effort of trying to regiment his thoughts had made him itch.

"Oh, I have a theory or two on that head." In afterthought John added, "Yet, I have no way to prove it. Animals cannot be infected, and what human being would offer himself?"

Howison delivered himself of a bark. "Not I!" Then, chuckling to himself still, he announced that he was soon due to meet a lady on the Bridge and might yet present Jock with his proof. He departed in high spirits, money jingling in his pockets.

Howison must have gained the street and gone several blocks before he slowed his pace, stopped dead in the mist, uttered a horrified, "Damme, he would not … even Jock would not… ." and hastily retraced his steps.

He found John in his chair by the cadaver, his ivory-handled lance gleaming softly in his hand. The farthing dips had been placed along the edge of the dissection table as if to light up a surgical field, John sat in a trance. His clothes were opened and he was staring, great jaw slack on his breast, at the two punctures he had made in his flesh. Some material remaining on the point of the lancet resembled that which had earlier stained his scalpel as he had cut into the bubo.

Howison began faintly, "I forgot to take my teeth with–—" and could go no further.

Not raising his head, John said, "I am a surgeon again."

xxvi

When William came to visit him one evening in early fall (a cosily commiserative William; the Hunter brothers, unappreciated by women or the world), he found John, shirtless, at his desk scribbling at his notes. Only William’s slight asperity of tone revealed his disappointment at finding John busy, and therefore quite cheerful. William chose a chair and eased himself into it, to rest his chin on his gold-headed cane, surveying John sourly.

"Do you always receive guests in that half-naked condition?" William asked.

"D’ye consider yourself a guest, Wullie? Moreover, I wished to make some notes while the observations were fresh in my mind."

"Was it necessary to remove your clothes to make these observations?"

"Aye."

But William was not in the mood to be toyed with. He had come to John for intelligent, serious discussion. Among other things he wished to complain of Dr. Hewson, and to inquire ever so evasively and vaguely what plans John might be entertaining for the near future. Excluding the always present hope of a situation at St. George’s. Not that he was contemplating asking John to… . It was merely that Hewson was literally stealing preparations belonging to the School, under some fool claim that since he had made the preparations they were his… . It was too saucy of him, too annoying… . Moreover, William was plagued by a toothache.

"Wullie, why do you not let me pull those snags for you? I am little concerned these days with the tooth-shop, but Spence and I are on the friendliest of terms-—-"

"If you are working around to that ‘scion tooth’ duncicity of yours," William said snappishly, "let me inform you that I will have no part of it. I do not hold with quackery, Jock."

Still cheerful, John shrugged. The movement caught William’s strained gaze and he added disdainfully, "Physician, heal thyself. Why do you not put some salve on that rash you’ve all over your back and shoulders? My God, Jock, one would think you to be lousy."

"Not at all," John said, "this happens to he a pox brought on by the gonorrhea poison." He scratched himself casually.

William was scandalized, stricken, stunned. Through a spray of spittle he managed, "But there is no such-—— Jock, I cannot"-— then cried——"who? …" before he tried, with a choking sound, to recall the word, and ended weakly with a soft wail, "Jock… ."

John was openly amused. "Aye, I have been travelling in high circles, Brother. ‘Twas only the other night, I turned in bed and said to Lady——"

William had somewhat recovered. "Pray, do not jest. Are you curing yourself? Which of the poisons do you think yourself to have? Although it would seem clear to me that—"

"Both," John said bluntly. "Being that both poisons are but one I’ve inoculated myself to prove it."

"To prove what?" William shouted.

"Why, as I said, to prove that there is but one venereal poison. I had long suspected that it manifested itself in several ways, and thus we were all led to believe that two diseases were involved in mucous tissue the disease exhibits itself as the distemper, in other tissue as the pox." John indicated his notes with a wave of his hand. "You might read them, Wullie, if you care to."

William licked his lips. "How did you—where did you get your material?"

"From the bubo of a hanged man. I punctured myself with my lancet and rubbed the poison in well." John was cool in the face of William’s perturbation. He pushed his notes at his brother, and resting his chin on his cane, William began to read.

Once William said fretfully, "You have always made such garbled notes, that I cannot make head nor tail of them. What other treatment have you employed than mercuric salve?"

"Why, none, Brother. That is my point. Though I have shown symptoms of what were believed to be two diseases, the simple treatment for the distemper has cured me——or, I should say, will cure me as soon as I resume my use of the salve. I was healing too rapidly, you see, and I wanted to keep the poison active so that I might make further observations."

William raised his chin from his cane. "You fool," he said bitterly. "I could weep for you, Jock. You may as well have excelled yourself over that wretched little-—-— Ah, Jock, I could weep!"

John was superior. "Don’t fret your guts to fiddle-strings for nothing, Brother. I tell you I am in full control of the situation. I can cure myself any time I choose."

"I cannot find it in your notes when you did this."

"In May."

"May! That long ago! I was thinking it was a matter of a few days—-Oh my God, you have let the poison get into your blood!" William threw the notes to the floor. "I beg of you to enter at once on a severe course of salivation. You can come to my house with me and no one shall know of it. Tell your acquaintances that you must leave town for a few months. Duncan will be silent as the grave, we can rely on his discretion. You need never leave the house, and no one will know where you are."

"This is the first time," John said slowly, "that you have ever doubted my work, Wullie."

"Doubted? I have decried everything you have done since you associated with Spence! Your quackeries with your ‘scion teeth’ and your dancing attendance on customers in a tooth-shop like a bootblack ready to hand-— But I told myself my brother is a man and I must presume that he knows his own mind. I should have thought that my obvious eagerness to place you at the hospital would have given you some clue as to my thoughts on your way of life. But this! Doubt is too mild a word. This inoculation of yourself with God knows what, or how many, venereal poisons, from the corpse of a hanged man, from a corpse that died before the symptoms and effects of his disease——whatever it was——could show themselves—-" William could find no more words, though his mouth continued to move after his voice was stilled.

"I tell you," John said flatly, "that he had but one disease. The venereal disease."

William rose and made his way to the door, dragging his cane across the floor. He stopped and turned to make his final appeal. "Come with me now, Jock." Dimly his strained eyes could make out the rash on John’s shoulders. "None of us know what are the ultimate effects of the Great Pox, but, God help us, we are beginning to suspect them. I beg of you to save yourself. It is a duty you owe to me; Jock? Jock, have you not long known what is in my heart? Jamie would not have been the best of us … for you are." Dr. William Hunter, the Queen's Physician, begged humbly, "Let me take care of you, Brother."

"I am quite capable of caring for myself, thank you," John said politely. "For, as I have told you a number of times tonight, there is but one—-—"

"And I tell you," William said, his voice raw with tears, "there are two."

(There exists a third venereal disease known as Chancroid. It is mused by Haemophilus ducreyi, frequently called a streptobacillus. Chancroid is an acute, localized disease, characterized in over half the cases by a bilateral bubo which develops in the groin. The disease presents itself as a vesico-pustule or chancre, after a brief incubation period. This chancre is not to be confused with the Hunterian chancre, which is typical of syphilis. In general, Chancroid is a self-limiting disease; it will run its course, and its victim will enjoy a spontaneous cure. It is not gonorrhea, though the two are often confused.

Yet Chancroid must not be taken lightly, or it often forms a partnership with a killer. Chancroid masks the presenting symptoms of its insidious partner, and is cordial to it. When Chancroid departs from the victim, the partner remains to invade, to inhabit, and ultimately to destroy. It is sly; it disguises itself, taking on the symptoms of other, lesser diseases, moving through the body, taking up residence in organ after organ, bringing its victim ever closer to death.

In John Hunter’s day this disease was often called the Great Pox; we call it Syphilis. Our most classic description of it comes from the pen of John Hunter, who, all unknowingly, meticulously recorded for us the opening events of the great tragedy of his life.)

xxvii

It was to take three years before John Hunter considered himself free of the venereal poison. But at last the copper splotches on his trunk disappeared, and the tiny ulcer that had appeared on a tonsil departed, and the bubo in the groin melted away. After three years he felt himself in perfect health, but for a bout of the gout that last spring.

During those years his star had risen. He was elected to the staff of St. Georges he took over William’s elegant house in Jermyn Street when William moved, and he bought himself a carriage and fine horses, and he purchased every strange animal or monster or subject that took his fancy, whatever the cost.

In this space of time Joseph Banks went a-wandering to far seas with a certain Captain Cook. He left with many promises to John to bring him all manner of strange fish and beasts.

And Anne Home began a dreary waiting for a man who had neglected, in the hustle of his departure, to ask for her hand, or make any promises to her at all. In time she grew convinced that he would never return.

IV Mid-Afternoon

On a fair Sunday morning in July 1771, a quiet ceremony took place in St. James’s Church, Westminster, joining in holy matrimony Anne Home and John Hunter, surgeon, F.R.S. Although the bride was twenty-nine years old, it was her first marriage, she not being a widow. Miss Home was the daughter of Robert Home, surgeon. The groom, Mr. Hunter, was on the staff of St. George’s Hospital, was a Fellow of the Royal Society, was the author of The Natural History of Teeth, a definitive work on a subject much misunderstood, and had served in His Majesty’s forces during the Seven Years War with much honour. The groom resided in Jermyn Street, but also had a fine little country residence in Earl’s Court where he maintained an exceptional anatomical museum, as well as a most diverse menagerie.

Attending the ceremony were Mr. and Mrs. Robert Mylne, Mr. Joseph Banks, F.R.S., newly returned to London after a miraculous four-year voyage with Captain Cook to the Great Southern Continent, and several house students of Mr. Hunter’s. Among other members of the bride’s family was her youngest brother, Mr. Everard Home, a king’s scholar of Westminster School. Dr. William Hunter, F.R.S., Physician-Extraordinary to the Queen, did not make his appearance, remaining that Sunday morning in his magnificent house and School in Great Windmill Street.

Though the ceremony attracted little attention, those who did take notice of it observed that Miss Home was quite bettering herself. The newly wedded Hunters planned to spend a few days at Earl’s Court before returning to London and Jermyn Street. Both bride and groom were quiet and reserved during the wedding festivities. The groom had suffered, for the three springs preceding, strange attacks of the gout, and he was but recently completely recovered from that which had felled him in the spring just past. The bride smiled little, it was noted, but she was a woman of a grave turn of mind, though when younger she had been most flighty and gay for a season or so. There was some mention that she was a poetess, though none could recall reading her works in print.

On the ride to Earl’s Court, Mr. and Mrs. Hunter sat silent for the most part, their bodies touching only when the sway of the carriage tossed them against one another. The bride stared out of the window, her eyes shadowed under the ponderous erection of her hairdress. The groom constantly turned his great coarse head towards her profile. He noted with a tender delight the transparency of her nostrils and the swanlike fragility of her neck holding upright its burden of her hair.

When the carriage stopped before the doorway of the brick house at Earl’s Court, the groom hastened around on his short thick legs to help his bride alight. As he held up his hands to her, his head looking up almost directly from between his broad shoulders, he appeared, for one startling moment, to be a powerful dwarf on his knees, worshipping. Then the bride alighted, landing on her dainty feet with the dry scratching sound of a cat coming to rest lightly on all fours. She looked back at the coachman, he preparing to drive the carriage around to the stables, and made her first domestic remark to her husband. "I cannot see why you persist in having that pockmarked rogue about."

"I will dismiss him on the morrow," the groom said, telling his first domestic lie.

At the door the bride turned to survey her country home. On a fine lawn a pair of peacocks stood motionless near a fish-pond. Over the bride’s head gaped the jaws of a crocodile appended above the front door, while to each side of her stood stone lions. To her right the bride could see the jutting expanse of her drawing-room, from whose opened windows swarms of bees emerged and returned familiarly. To her left the house extended into a plain ell topped by an ominous smokestack, from which would belch the smoke and glow of burning flesh and bones. All around the bride’s country home there extended a sunken, covered cloister emitting a sour ammoniacal odour and an occasional snarling cry. There the groom’s leopards prowled in their captivity. From stables and other small structures here and there about the grounds there came more sounds from savage throats, and from a barred mound at the edge of the lawn there came the bored dry cough of a dozing lion. Above the top of this mound ran a miniature redoubt or buttress boasting a small cannon. As the bride stood at her door, two servants appeared at this cannon, looking over at Mr. and Mrs. Hunter.

The groom raised his arm, there was a puff of smoke from the gun, a boom that seemed to jar the quiet morning into a series of jolting scenes, shifting one from the other before the eye, and then a silence broken only by the bees. An instant later the lion roared in protest, the leopards snarled, a bull bellowed somewhere, and scores of birds took flight from the trees. In the midst of all this the bride sighed. "Each time I see this place, I see it anew. Somehow I cannot seem to familiarize myself with it." She smiled wryly and offered her husband her hand. "Perhaps it is that I do not really believe such a fantastic place exists."

"No more," said the groom gallantly, "than I can convince myself of the wonder of your standing here as my wife." 

"Little wonder about that," the bride said strangely, turning to enter her country house.

In the cool dim interior, husband and wife stood accustoming their eyes. Gradually their gazes met, and the bride’s pale mouth began to tremble. The groom touched her cheek, letting his fingers trail down her breast to her slender waist. His voice was harsh with his attempt to speak softly and reassuringly. It was as if he were gentling some wild, frenzied thing.

"I promise you," he said, "that I will do all in my power to make you happy."

The bride said politely, "I am certain that you will, John," and prepared her trembling mouth for his kiss. "For you are a good man," she added as if in explanation of her permitting him to draw close. The groom now placed his hands on each side of the bride’s face. Against her pale cheeks his nails stood out, ridged, thickened, the stained rims giving the appearance, like the fingers of a butcher, of having been dipped in blood.

John awakened in the deep of the night to find the bed-curtains still parted. Bright moonlight streamed through the opened window to pour across the floor and the bed and himself, at last to lie like a glow rising from the crest of Anne’s bare hip. She was sleeping profoundly, the tumbled structure of her hair massed about her.

Outside the window a tree stirred and at its motion a black lace pattern on the floor danced. He could see, as he rose carefully on his elbow, that the night without was faintly luminous so that the wall at the edge of the lawn stood out whitely against the blue-black sky behind it. The aura seemed to come from the very earth itself; there was a shimmering quality about the lawn and the wall and the tree, and his fish-pond gleamed like a lidless eye. He had then the feeling of earth-shine, the sensation of the steady glow of the earth as it hung, motionless, in the endless night of the sky. A silence spread through him, a withholding and a waiting, as he turned to look down on Anne. He bent over her, brimming, to find her awake, his shadow spreading over her pale face and skin like a black stain.

There was a faint cry in the night; his leopards were mating.

ii

Midweek, Mr. and Mrs. Hunter drove up to the door of their town house in Jermyn Street, just off the quietly fashionable St. James’s Square. On the steps awaiting them stood Mr. Hunter’s house students, a handful of shavelings who had come to the city to study for a year or so at one of the great hospitals and to dissect under Mr. Hunter when they were not walking the wards after him at St. George’s or attending the numerous other lectures being given about town. There were the usual pair of bumpkins, sons of country surgeons, a ’prentice or so in search of a theoretical veneer, and occasionally a lad with an M.D. fresh from Glasgow or even Oxford, who, for all his degrees, did not know the sterno-mastoid from the Achilles tendon.

On this morning, the students grouped on the steps wearing doubtful smiles; one could not be sure, even on such an auspicious occasion as this, in what mood the "dear man" (as his students had come to call him) might chance to be.

Mr. Hunter, all smiles, dropped from the carriage and turned to give his hand to his bride. As the pair mounted the steps the students parted, much as assembled footmen might have, thus rather encouraging Mrs. Hunter to hold up her chin and sweep grandly into the house. Behind her, Mr. Hunter exhibited his formidable smile to his lads and said brightly, "Well, gentlemen? What’s this? Not at the hospital?"

The youngest of the group, a youth given uncontrollably to thoughts which shocked and staggered him with their baseness, and which seized his mind at the most inopportune times imaginable, suddenly found himself noting that Mr. Hunter was so closely shaved this day as to seem skinned. In horror, the youth felt a titter rise in his throat, and he began to cough in noisy desperation, while through his unutterably vile mind flashed thoughts of Mr. Hunter whistling before his shaving-stand earlier that morning, whilst Mrs. Hunter lay awaiting him in bed. Choking, the young man saw through his tears the great head swinging in his direction, felt the impact of the pale eyes, watched with terror as the jaw, square as a grave-digger’s spade, scooped the air in his direction, and the pendulous lower lip drooped further in preparation for speech. "Well, sir?" Mr. Hunter demanded. "Is this some holiday of which I have not been apprised?"

As if sensing some impending catastrophe, another student, named Edward Jenner, pushed himself to the fore. Determined to preserve Mr. Hunter’s jocularity at any cost, Jenner piped boldly, "Wully, sir, we but wished to present our respects to Mrs. Hunter." Then his skin, creamy as a dairy-maid’s, flushed as he added with a bumptious gallantry, "We are all her devoted slaves, sir!"

"Ah!" Mr. Hunter said. But he smiled on Edward Jenner, for this was admittedly his favourite student, and so all was well as Mr. Hunter followed after his wife into the house.

Even in the elegance of the front part of the house, where were located the drawing-rooms and parlour, and the fashionable powder room, there was the faint hint of putrescence. As Mr. Hunter stalked towards the dissection room and the museum at the back of the house, he sniffed, again saying, "Ah …" before entering the stark room which served as his museum and which lay bright and without shadow under its skylights. Almost as if he feared that thieves had broken in during his absence and stolen away his most prized preparations, Mr. Hunter surveyed the crowded shelves. At last, satisfied, he said for the third time, "Ah!" and began to remove his coat. With one sleeve dangling, he bethought himself, and said hastily, "I will join you in a moment, gentlemen," and retraced his steps.

John found Anne standing in the middle of her parlour frowning at the furniture. "I cannot imagine," she said in a fretful voice, "why I did not decorate in the Chinese fashion. "

"Turn the room into an igloo, if you choose," he said indulgently. "And wherever did that ugly old dumb-waiter come from."

"Throw it out, my love, if it displeases you."

"But the japanned pieces I want are frightfully dear," Anne pouted.

"Buy them anyway," John advised her.

She grew saucy. "Aye, I might at that. Before you spend the money on some dead animal or other!"

He grinned. And so it was that their battle over money was joined.

iii

The staff at St. George’s considered that a disaster had befallen it in the last month of 1768. What serenity the gentlemen had managed to achieve over the years, and through some sacrifice on the part of each man concerned, was disrupted violently by the election of Mr. Hunter to their midst. When the stormy election was over, when the nobles and notables so firmly herded into a voting bloc by the redoutable Dr. William Hunter had at last departed from the hospital, and Dr. Hunter remained to smile in snag-toothed triumph at the son of his old enemy, Dr. Donald Monro, then the gentlemen of the staff looked at one another and sighed. Their unspoken, mutual dread filled them. The morning on which John Hunter would come to ascend the staircase to the wards, with his tongue already loose at both ends with a thousand wild notions----that morning they awaited with a passionate revulsion. Deliver him, Mr. Caesar Hawkins murmured, from idiosyncratic surgeons at his season of life. His deliverance was not at hand.

Mr. John Gunning, still smarting from the concerted try the Hunter brothers had made three years ago to cheat him of his proper place on the staff, greeted John as he once had a score of years before: "Back, eh?"

"Aye, Mr. Gunning," John said Levelly. "I hope I have not taken you by surprise?"

Gunning studied John for a time before delivering in his most clerkly voice, "Hunter, we are no longer youths, either of us. Our aims are similar-—to combat disease and minister to the injured. For my part, I hope we shall accomplish our purposes in amity and mutual respect. May-—may I have your hand on that?"

"Most certainly," John said promptly, unwilling to be outdone. Hands clasped, they smiled at each other; Gunning superiorly because of his exemplary conduct, and John warily, for he knew Gunning to be capricious as a woman. As their hands parted, their eyes met.

I will give you no quarter, Gunning’s said.

I ask none. Nor should you expect mercy from me, John’s replied.

John bowed and departed from the thoughtful Mr. Gunning. That worthy surgeon stood as he was, watching the squat figure retreat down the hallway to the gallery and the stair, the queue of coarse orange hair tempered with grey and bound with a bit of velvet, bouncing jauntily on Hunter’s back.

The staff waited as one for Mr, Hunter’s first disruptive move. He made it within a se’nnight. He had decided to concern himself at once with the welfare of the hospital students. Now, John Hunter was not a stranger to the system of the students. They paid to the staff a certain sum for the privilege of walking after the surgeon of their choice. This sum, collected from all the students, was then divided equally among the surgeons at the end of the year. It had never mattered in the least that one year every last student would he walking after Mr. Hawkins, and in the next would be following Mr. Bromfield about. Each surgeon taught those students who applied to him for instruction, and each surgeon taught his own techniques and concepts-within reason. Which was only sensible.

John Hunter did not agree. To his mind the students were not receiving adequate attention. They should be lectured to in a group-----as were the students of St. Bart’s, now that Percival Pott had begun his lectures. There were several objections to Mr. Hunter’s proposal: St. Georges was not St. Bart’s; Mr. Hunter was not-—saving his grace–-Mr. Pott as yet; and the subject matter of any such lectures would have to be selected carefully. There were hints as broad as the staircase that the students of St. Georges would not be told in lectures that there was but one venereal poison, that pus was the result of inflammation, that the blood was alive, that suppuration was not the first stage of healing and unnecessary to it, that live teeth could be placed in raw sockets indiscriminately, that the absorbents absorbed foreign poisons and disease, and that bubos could be reduced entirely with mercurial salve, no other treatment being necessary for the venereal distempers—that last would empty the salivating wards and send patients home, half-cured, and a menace to all with whom they had contact—not at St. George’s would these principles be propounded. Not yet.

Mr. Hunter was therefore advised to tend to his own students and let his colleagues tend to theirs. To the surprise of all, Mr. Hunter shrugged and did just that. He opened his home to those students who wished to live with him and learn his theories.

Then, Mr. Hunter was stricken with the gout. When he rose from his sickbed he was curt and touchy. His voice was hoarse, he complained of a painful ulcer on his tonsil. The gentlemen of St. George’s trod softly, not wishing to upset him. A year later he suffered another attack. He returned to his duties cross and inclined to take offence where none was intended.

But after his third attack, the pattern of his behaviour was no longer in doubt. He had become terrible-tempered and his sudden engagement to his lady had no softening effect whatsoever. Nor did his marriage.

Only with Anne was he gentle, otherwise he knew himself to be as unstable as an experiment in chemistry. He could not understand himself any more than could his students and his colleagues and his patients and his friends.

It is the last remains of the gout, he told himself. By Christmas I will be in high spirits again.

When he discovered that Anne was pregnant he was sure the change in him would come about.

iv

Edward Jenner was bellowing for his mother in his sleep, rousing the whole house in the small hours. John, still in the museum, stumped to the back stairs, shouting, "Jenner! Jenner, damn you, stop that racket. Jenner!"

There were groans, sniggerings, and finally, silence. A student called down, "He’s awake now, Mr. Hunter… ."

John grunted and returned to the museum. After a time Jenner, clad in a nightcap and his greatcoat, appeared in the doorway. John held up his candelabrum to see the lad the better. "How old are you, Mr. Jenner?"

Jenner said meekly, "Twenty, sir."

"And we are still calling for Mother to tuck us in?"

"I was dreaming of the barn again, sir."

"Ah!" John relented. "It must have been a terrible experience for you.

"Yes, sir. But others were inoculated with smallpox when they were children, and seem none the worse for the experience." In the candlelight the faint sprinkling of pockmarks next Jenner’s blue eye showed plainly.

"Some are more tender than others in this world," John remarked. Edward Jenner grew pink along the jaw-line. Mr. Hunter had reference, his hurt expression said, to Jenner’s inclination to tootle on the flute and write poetry. "I own," he said carefully, "that I may dwell on the experience."

"And how old were you at the time of your inoculation?"

Edward Jenner had been six. With a group of children his age, he had been inoculated by a country surgeon. The theory being, and it was a valid one, that children who had weathered minor cases of the smallpox were then resistant to it for the rest of their lives. In practice, the matter was not so simple. Even though the inoculated children had mild cases, they were the source of fatal infections. It was necessary to sequester them; in Edward Jenner’s case a barn was chosen for the inoculated children. The sick children were quartered like animals, bedded on straw. Women who had been themselves inoculated in the past cared for them. When their fevers came on, the children were bound down, tethered, to prevent their rising up or attempting to run away from the barn. The sick children convulsed, emptying their bowels of a thin watery liquid over the straw. They screamed constantly for their mothers. No mother was permitted in the vicinity of the barn. The eruptions of the pox came on and the children’s hands were secured by ropes about the waist to prevent their scratching and clawing at the pustules. After almost three weeks in the barn the pustules began to rupture and shrink. The children on the straw were bundles of crusts; and as the crusts sloughed they took with them hair and nails. There was no sleep for them, they writhed hourly against their restraints, seeking to free their hands so that they might tear at their burning flesh.

After almost a month the children emerged from the barn; those who lived were forever after safe from the pox. Their infections had been mild.

"You should put the matter from your mind," John said. "Yet, I suppose we can none of us control our dreams."

"I think on it at other times, sir," Jenner said. "Something a woman once said to me … something those dairymaids are always saying… Superstition, of course-—-"

"Well, out with it, Jenner."

"One of them once remarked to me that she could never get the smallpox because she had once had the cowpox on her hands. She took it from the udder of her cow… . It is merely one of those notions dairymaids have."

"They believe that an infection from the cowpox can hold one forever safe from the smallpox?"

Jenner held his ground, though his voice grew rather lame. "Yes, Mr. Hunter."

John turned in his chair to fix his gaze steadily on his student. "Well, sir?"

"Well—well, sir, I think there is something to it."

"You think! You think!" John shouted. "You maundering conjecturing, thinking– Have you never thought to try? To experiment?"

"Sir, I had merely-—"

"Go merely yourself to bed and whine for your mother, then go tootle on your flute and think! Gods, have you never had an idea in your life before, so that when one comes to you, you know not what to do with it? Go back to bed. Thinker… ."

When the nonplussed young Jenner had left him, John grinned to himself. Stuck a ramrod up that young man’s back, he did… .

He would ask Jenner to stay on with him in London. He could perform his experiments on John’s own cows. Together they would see about this cowpox matter… .

He had not been angry with Jenner, he had merely wished to prod him into experimentation. John’s temper, like the weather, held good. He felt himself to be reasonable in all things. Moreover, no one had crossed him recently.

He had with George Fordyce and Joe Banks and Dr. Solander, the botanist, and a number of assorted physicians and surgeons, formed a club that was in actuality a casual Royal Society. The gentlemen met at one coffee-house or another, and there, half in earnest, half in jest, expounded every tom-fool notion which came to their minds. On those evenings when they met in a tavern, John drank little and talked much. By midnight most of the members departed in jolly drunken clots, leaving the owls such as Fordyce and Hunter, or the restless, such as Banks, to their own devices. One such evening only John and Dr. Fordyce remained, and John himself had grown weary and was debating eating a bite of supper against simply going home to Anne and sleep. Fordyce promptly settled the matter by refilling John’s glass and ordering him the supper.

Of a sudden, John became irritated. (This was certainly the way of it, he told himself later. The irritation, floating, arising from nothing, had come first.) He was tired, he should not be staying on. He drummed his fingers, looking about the nearly empty room. A gentleman had come in about a quarter-hour before and was now quietly supping alone, a book propped against his wine-bottle. Dressed in violet and wearing a lavender-tinted wig composed of two neat rolls over the ears and a chic queue which lay precisely down the centre of the violet back, this gentleman was, all unknowing, a further abrasive to John. For some unknown reason, John itched to snatch that fashionable wig and dash it to the floor, would have gloried in besmearing that frothy jabot plummeting over the soft-piled velvet. "Pop!" he muttered aloud, and was turning away from the sight when Fordyce called his attention back.

"The gentleman reading the book?"

"Aye. Pretty youth, aren’t we?"

"Then you know who he is."

"I? Indeed no. I have not had that pleasure." John laughed shortly and drummed his fingers again.

Fordyce was staring. "Jock-pray, let us keep our voices low… . He is your brother’s new assistant. A William Cruikshank, I believe. Just down from Glasgow."

John scraped his chair around fully to observe Dr. Hunter’s new assistant. An old fear stormed him—how would he have fared if William had kept his promise and sent for a youth like this twenty years ago? Old jealousies came back on him with a rush, old failures plagued him. The violet suit, the tinted wig, the slim legs, and the long aristocratic nose… . William wanted him to look and dress and be just such a coxcomb as this Cruikshank of his. "Well," he cried coarsely, "my brother will get his belly full of that one, I’ll wager! Look, George, at the lily hands. Can you imagine them dipping into an abdomen full of pus and––-"

"My God!" Fordyce whispered urgently, "turn away from him, Jock!"

The gentleman in violet turned a page. He did not look up; but he was colouring slightly.

"Why, George," John said, "What’s the harm in my looking over my brother’s new assistant? I am interested in the progress of Wullie’s School. ’Pon my soul, yon must be the new dancing-master! What will my brother be teaching his students next? Manipulations of the fan? The correct use of the snuff——"

‘I am taking you home," Fordyce said. "Come, Jock, you are not well. I fear your gout is troubling you again."

"Not my gout, but my goat!’ John laughed heartily, slapping the table.

The gentleman in violet closed his book, tucked it under his arm, and rose. Not glancing in John’s direction, he started past him for the door. "

"The height of fashion," John commented approvingly. "A violet suit, a lavender wig–—and a purple face!"

Mr. William Cruikshank had gone out into the night.

John turned to face Fordyce, still grinning.

"Why do you mind so that he is your brother’s new assistant?" Fordyce asked gravely.

"I? Mind? I do not mind in the least—for myself. It is only that I believe Wullie to have treated Hewson shabbily by sending for that pretty little son-of-a-bitch behind his back."

"Dr. Hewson left your brother’s School of his own accord some time ago, and well you know it, Jock."

"Did he now?" John said, and laughed again.

He was trembling. He began to sweat; he was in a daze. He permitted Fordyce to help him to his feet. "I am tired," he muttered, "very tired tonight, George."

He lay in bed the next morning later than was his custom. His muscles were flaccid, he was listless, his thoughts settling on no one thing. Dimly he remembered having been a bit hard on this Cruikshank the night before. Had he caused some sort of a scene? Well, no matter, when he saw the young man again he would offer him an apology. And yet——- Wullie had no right to plague him this way… .

By noon he was in his dissection room, crankily teaching his students. He could not dismiss William from his mind. At this point, as promptly as the devil summoned up, Dr. William Hunter himself appeared. He had come for the loan of a preparation of a foetus strangled by the cord wrapped about its neck. Since he was there, Dr. Hunter would gladly rest himself with a glass and a pinch of snuff.

"How is young Cruikshank working out?" John asked casually, but lowering his voice so that the students could not hear.

"Capital," William said. Then, because he could never bear to compliment unless he evened up matters by biting off something at the other end, he added deliberately, "Though I fear he and his wine will have to come to an agreement one of these days."

"He was sober enough last night."

"Ah!"

"Then he has mentioned to you—–he spoke of me?"

"He said that you seemed to take a dislike to him."

"And that is why you are here."

"Aye, Jock. Perhaps you and your wine need to come to another agreement."

"Yes, I intend to give it some serious thought," John said hastily. "When I am with my friends I refill my glass without knowing it."

"I am sure that was the way of it. Pray, do not think I am attempting to censure you, Brother, or trying to interfere in any way with your-—-"

"Indeed, no, Wullie!"

"It is only that we must all of us be on our guard when we are in public. Eh, Brother? Tell me, how is Anne?"

"Well enough," John said, relieved at the change of topic. "She is at the vomiting stage, though."

"That will pass," William said comfortably.

They drifted to other matters.

v

His marriage to Anne had not interrupted his work. She became but the function of his happiness. He compartmented his life just as he had divided the house. The back, secluded, looking out on the garden was his. She had the drawing-room and the parlour and the front of the house upstairs. For weeks her part of the house had resounded with hammering and the tramp of the feet of tradesmen. When she was done with her decorating, she was ready to entertain. The Homes came to dinner. The Mylnes came to dinner. Then the Homes and the Mylnes came to dinner.

Joe Banks arrived one day with an eel for John. He wondered if John would advise him in the selection of an anatomist to prepare a few specimens for his own modest museum. John promptly recommended Jenner, and in the next breath pressed Banks to remain for dinner.

Banks lingered late into the night. He crossed his legs as he talked; he got up to pace Anne’s parlour; he waved his glass about in his excitement. He acted out, wherever possible, his adventures on his trip with Cook, his comely face alight. He had been fried and frozen and shipwrecked, and several times he had given up hope for his life. He laughed triumphantly, and here he was back safe and sound in London. For a time, at least, here he intended to stay.

"I am courting every lady in town," he said gaily. "In the vain hope of finding a lady as charming and good as Mrs. Hunter."

John beamed, jaw resting at ease on his breast. And Anne’s eyes glittered, hard and dry.

She awakened him in the night with her weeping. He comforted her awkwardly. "Women are often melancholy in their second trimesters." He patted her shoulder while his thoughts went to the coming child. Gods, what a surgeon his son would be! He remembered his promise to William; he would name the lad William John Hunter. In only fifteen short years he would be turning the lad over to William to train in his Windmill Street School.

Naturally William would attend Anne at her delivery. He had said it aloud.

"That he will not!" Anne said. Her voice went from sadness to bitterness. "I am not unaware that the great Dr. William Hunter has never thought me fit to be his brother’s wife."

"Annie, my love! Why, only the other day William was asking after you."

"How kind!" Anne commented. "How very kind of the busy Physician—Extraordinary to the Queen. And has he asked us to dine with him? Has he entertained little Anne Nobody Hunter at his parties and soirees?"

"But Wullie and I were never goodwilly in that way," John protested. "He knows my views on such things."

"He does not know mine." Her voice seemed drawn thin, quavering. He found himself thinking suddenly of an exposed nerve of a tooth.

He said soothingly, "Then who is your preference for your physician?"

"Oh, your Colin Mackenzie will do well enough."

The sun shone faintly over London so that at midday it barely broke through the Pall of smoke and fog. Anne lay in her rooms during the winter months, listlessly reading and gazing at the fire. She vomited yet, overmuch, and Colin Mackenzie blooded her and prescribed port and purges. John ran from the back of the house to her side almost every hour; and when he was at the hospital he could not free himself of the fear that she was miscarrying at that very moment. As Colin had said, she was twenty-nine, she should have been having her first child ten years ago.

"Aye," John said dryly, "I was more than willing to father her one then. Or not many years after that… ."

He came up from the dissection room one morning to find her lying across her dressing-table with a basin enfolded in her arms. She was retching and sobbing through a white-lipped mouth. Her cheeks were streaked with drying tears, and her hair hung in strands like the unravellings of an old rag about her face. As he approached her, she screamed, "I beg of you, don’t come near me! I cannot bear the filth and the smell… . I cannot bear the sight of your hands!" She vomited up a stream of froth.

He withdrew the hand extended to her.

"I wish I could vomit the wretch up! I wish I could tear it out of me—-—" She laid her head on the edge of the basin and sobbed. When she subsided, he asked humbly, "Anne, what can I do to make you happy?"

It must have been the wittiest thing he had said to her in months. She was still threshing about in her bed when he left her in charge of her maid.

The next day he arranged to have her go out to Earl’s Court and stay there with her mother and sister. Colin, too, felt that away from the soot and the miasmas …

He got into the carriage with her to kiss her cheek and smile at her. "Be careful of yourself, Anne. I will come out every moment I can spare." As if she were a child, he added on inspiration, "I will bring you little surprises!"

Anne returned his smile gravely. "You must forgive me," she murmured. "I did not mean what I said last night. It is only that I am weary of puking." Anne placed her cold lips against his skin and then leaned back in the seat.

John got out of the carriage and waved his arm at Howison. He stood, shivering in the raw cold, until they were out of sight. He was due at the hospital to perform an operation that afternoon.

vi

His favourite student had packed his flute and his dissection instruments and was preparing to leave him. In the clear light pouring down from the skylight the tiny pocks beside Jenner’s right eye gave him an elfin look. He did not want to leave Mr. Hunter, he confessed, but his training was done, and his work awaited him. He flushed somewhat as if in fear Mr. Hunter might think him pretentious.

"Why, I highly approve!" Mr. Hunter was saying. "Of course you must start your work on the cowpox. There is plenty of room at Earl’s Court, you may use my laboratory, and I will have Howison buy us all the stock we will—-"

"Mr. Hunter!" Jenner said, and then sought for a lower register. "Mr. Hunter, I feel that I can best do my work where I come from. Your pardon, but the dairy country will offer me——"

"More than I can?"

"Not at all, sir. Indeed no. It is only that I think–I do not think, I___"

"Ha! Stay with your story, Jenner."

"I am convinced-—that—-I—-must go!"

"Then be off with you! Can you not see that I am a busy man? Hurry along, Jenner; you will never be a great man if you stand here dawdling your life away."

"There is no greatness in me, sir," Jenner said humbly. The ugly head turned on its short neck. The thick mouth grinned at him. "Why not? Are there not all manner of deformities in this world?"

"Deformities?"

"Aye. And what is a monster but one who is different from the rest of us—whether he be possessed of genius, or a tail? Get along with you, you Lusus Natures, and milk your cows." At the last instant, Mr. Hunter stopped Jenner at the door. "Write to me," he said brusquely, and without waiting for a reply of any sort bent over his work.

Jenner was to write and Mr. Hunter to answer. In their hearts they became father and son, these two, though they were never to speak of it.

vii

When May came on, Anne returned to Jermyn Street to await the birth of the child. Drained of her vitality, she lay on her bed and chatted with her sister, Agnes. Once, when the windows in the back were opened of an evening, there drifted on the warm night the sound of the harpsichord and the wan stridence of Anne’s voice. She withdrew herself from all male company; John paid her visits that were brief and almost formal. Only her physician could gain her presence any time he chose. John grumbled; who had fathered this child, himself or Colin?

He came home from the hospital to find Colin awaiting him in the parlour. There was no glass of wine at Colin’s elbow, nor fire to cheer him on an overcast day. He was alone and unattended, cooling his heels like a dunning tradesman.

"What’s this?" John cried. "Why did you not———"

"For the reason that I do not wish Mrs. Hunter to know I am waiting on you," Colin said. "I must speak to you about her, Jock."

"Nothing has happened?"

Colin brushed the question from the tip of his chin and leaned away from the agitated John. He shook his head, then added bluntly, "As yet—no. But I refuse to take the responsibility of attending her alone, Jock. I suggest—urge—that you call in Dr. Hunter."

"You wish to consult with Wullie?"

"I do."

John shifted uneasily in his chair. A bewildering somnolence drifted over his mind like a miasma. With an effort he remembered that he must question Colin about Anne, must elicit from him the truth, if so it was, about her impending loss of the child. His thoughts eluded him, he was busily concerning himself with the pattern of the bricks lining the hearth. There were six bricks which marched unevenly up the walls, topped by a thin layer of seven—-"Colin, are you afraid for her? Or her child?"

"Jock, I do not wish to alarm you-—-"

"You are!" John said sharply, trying to rouse himself. "What is Anne’s condition?"

"First, we must take into consideration the many facets of the matter. Anne—Mrs. Hunter-—is past her first youth. And her first two trimesters were not of the easiest. Miasmas were most noxious this year… . Pelvis rather small… . However, her state of health indifferent, and drugs to induce labour at this time …"

"God damn you, what is it?" Five more bricks, two on one side and three on the––- Colin resumed his recital concerning miasmas and the like. In sum, he would not deliver Anne alone. The health of the father, he concluded, as if the thought had just occurred to him, could, under certain rare circumstances, determine the vital energy of the foetus.

"I assure you, I am in perfect health! I had a touch of the gout before my marriage, but by September I was completely well. Completely!"

"Certainly you were," Colin said hastily. "I have your permission, then, to seek the advice of your brother?"

Odd, the pattern of the bricks was uneven. These physician mid-wives were all old women. He had conceived his son in perfect health. Still, it was strange that there were two more bricks on one side than the other!

On an evening in June, Anne began her labour. John sent for Colin and William at once, as well as Robbie Home and Mrs. Home, and Mary Mylne, and then busied himself nagging Anne’s maid to light a roaring fire in Anne’s room and close the curtains against the mild night. He was useless, and in his clumsy concern he had Anne on the verge of tears by the time William arrived.

William looked at the fire, looked at the tearful Anne, looked at the distraught John, and requested, "Jock, would you be so good as to go down to your museum? I’m sure you will find something to occupy you there. And pray, have someone bring up some water."

"Water?"

"If you please. I wish to put this blazing conflagration out." Having dismissed John, he removed his pearl-grey satin coat, hanging it carefully over the back of a chair, and approached his patient. "Now then, sister-in-law," he said gently, "it is time we become better acquainted."

Anne glared her hostility, then succumbed to a pain. William took out his massive watch and seated himself familiarly on the bed. Beyond the curtains sounded dimly the hoofbeats of Colin’s arrival.

William said negligently, just as John had reached the door, "I suppose you have sent for half of London, Jock. Pray, admit only Dr. Mackenzie to this room, and station a servant outside the door. Our Anne is not holding a soiree, you know." He waved John away bending again to Anne.

At dawn William came into the dissection room. He was wearing his satin coat and carrying his cane smartly. "I shall return around nightfall," he said without preamble. He yawned delicately, tapping the gold head of his cane lightly against his mouth. "Dr. Mackenzie will send for me otherwise, if I am needed."

"How-———-"

"Brother, I do not know how—or when. I know only that this is her first, and that the child is alive in her. For that you may be very, very thankful. As to the rest—God knows. You might …"

"Wullie, what is it that you refuse to mention?" John was startled to see anger flood William’s face.

"Sir, ask yourself that! I had never thought there would be a question I would not dare ask my own brother. But when you wrote to me of your coming marriage, I could only pray God that you were not making the most monstrous mistake a man ever made."

"Damn you, you are speaking of my wife!"

William shook his head. "Do not seek refuge in misunderstanding me. I am not speaking of that woman upstairs in her labour. I am speaking of what you may have done to her. Gods, Jock, did you never suspect why I did not attend your wedding? I—could—not—stomach… . I will be back this evening, Jock." William’s mouth softened, "Get some rest. You may need it."

When John went up to Anne, he found her dozing. Colin was lolling in a chair, nodding over a book.

"Colin——"

"Depart," Colin said pleasantly. "Pray, dear Jock, depart."

After thirty hours or so, Anne began to wail. Near midnight her screams carried throughout the house. John sought the garden where the scent of summer was collected heavy as shadows beneath the trees. He walked around to the street and stood looking up at Anne’s window. Now and again William’s shadow loomed against the curtains, and then Anne’s crying rose again and seeped out to the quiet street.

A loneliness came over him. The two people he loved most in the world were up there shut away from him. and Anne, closeted together; and William wondering—- William never trusted me, he thought. He always considered my work to be inferior to his. He cannot bear for me to be right in anything. I must make preparations over and over of the lymphatics to satisfy William. They tell me he has set his violet-faced dandy from Glasgow to taking up where Hewson left off. Ha, Wullie, the absorbents are mine. And the placental circulation—how are you able to meet Colin’s gaze? You and Colin up there—I am fatigued, he thought, I must go to see Anne.

Under other circumstances he might not have known her. In spite of the dead hearth the room was hot and malodorous with the sourness of pain. Anne lay on the bed, swollen of face and body, with a crusted mouth. At her side, his features calm and encouraging in the candlelight, sat William. His wig was lying on the floor, and John saw with a shock that his brother was bald. Drops of sweat glistened in the folds of William’s skull. He was saying meaningless things to Anne, speaking the language of the comforter to the racked. When she cried out again and clawed at his hand, he offered her both, and her strength in her labour was so great that William’s thick neck was corded in his effort to offer the resistance she needed. The pain receded and she sank back, her slitted eyes discovering John in the doorway. "Send him away!" she cried to William. She strained again, eyes bulging against their swelled lids. freed a hand to thrust it under the bed-clothes, saying at the same time, "Doctor Mackenzie-—"

Colin hastened from his chair, but by the time he reached the bed, William was shaking his head. "Breech, I fear … dilation… ."

For a moment, as the pain released Anne, she dropped into a brief doze. She awakened with a cry. Gradually her screaming took on words. She was shrieking at John, naming him bestial and repulsive. Filth and oaths erupted from her crusted lips as she threshed and pulled at William’s arms. Then again she fell into the brief comatose sleep.

In the silence William said, "Ladies are wont to view their husbands in a rather frank light under these circumstances, Jock. Would you be so good as to close the door after you? And send her family away, if you have not done so before."

After eighty-one hours John pushed past Colin to look down on Anne. Delirious, she was now obsidian-eyed, and sobs dribbled from the caked mouth like saliva. She showed no recognition of John, her drained gaze moving slowly in search of William. She was clinging to him, and William’s arms were covered with scratches. In a faint, rasping voice she said, "William? William …" While her blind eyes sought him.

"I am here, Annie. Right at your side. I am holding your hands, Annie, my dear… ."

"William! John cried.

"Aye, Brother?"

"Use your forceps and take the child out of her!

"Get out," William said.

"Use them! God damn you, how many women did you let die, so that you could wave your rusty forceps and tell the World that the great Dr. Hunter let women die——In God’s name, Wullie, Brother, use-—"

Colin Mackenzie was dragging him from the room. Colin pushed him from the door and he fell against the hallway wall. Anne’s screams rose again, and over them Colin shouted, "Are you satisfied, genius? Will you say there is but one venereal poison when your wife dies!"

He left John sagging against the wall, crying. The closing of the door left him in darkness for an instant. Suddenly he saw a wash of light flowing over the window-sill at the end of the hallway. Almost imperceptibly the silver light spread along the floor, the moon was rising. As in a dream John went towards the pool, and as he stepped into it he sighed as his clothing and then his flesh melted from his bones, and he stood skeletal and freed of the soilure of himself in the filling pool of light. Only his mind remained trapped within his skull, but in a moment it would be freed too. Slowly, painfully, his mind dissolved into a silver liquid and drained in tears of mercury from his eyes. Hollowed out, blinded in the moonlight, he was without stain. He did not hear Colin Mackenzie when he neared him and said, "Jock, forgive me …Jock! Oh, God, again?"

He awakened on the couch in Anne’s parlour. A worn William with a face the colour of his satin coat was shaking him. "You are the father of a son, Jock. Frank breech presentation… Ahem, come name the lad for us." On William’s face there was dawning a smile so diffident, so modestly anticipatory, so humbly proud, that John knew instantly what debt William was declaring due.

Anne’s face was cleansed of its grime, and her hair was neatly bound. She was sleeping, the child at her side. From behind the curtains came the morning street noises, and her thick lids moved as a vendor shouted his cry.

William bent over his patient. "Annie, here is Jock."

She looked at John briefly before directing her gaze to her infant.

"Come, name the laddie!" William said heartily.

First, John must take Anne’s hand and lay his lips on it. She did not look at him again. "Annie, my love …" He lifted the coverlet from his son’s head and gazed at the featureless foetal face. Down, like a cobweb spun from copper, rested above the high curve of the forehead. The child’s jaw was well formed, but proportionate to the rest of the face. John smiled. He felt the back, the arms, the legs. Perfectly formed. A darkness, as of a thought unrealized, gathered, dissipated. Last night—he had dreamed in visions. Gravely he replaced the coverlet. "Anne, shall we name our-——"

Anne’s mouth formed the single syllable Jo… . Now she looked at her husband directly, but her courage could not carry her through. "John," she said, and then added clearly, "John Banks Hunter." Her eyes went to William. In them burned all her resentment for the debt she owed him; her rancour against the pity he had shown her, that same pity he might have bestowed on a drab in travail. She would never forgive him for gracing her delivery room when he had refused to enter her drawing-room. He had come to her, not as the Queen’s Physician, but—Wullie.

"An uncommon fine name!" Colin blurted. "John, eh?"

William was quietly gathering up his hat and cane. "I hope you will visit me soon, Jock," he said. He bowed formally to Colin. "Good day, Doctor." The dignity of his going silenced them all. When the door closed on him, John turned to Anne, but she was asleep.

"I must be going too," Colin said wretchedly, knowing he had witnessed some ugly thing which had befallen the Hunter brothers. "We have sent for the nurse, and she will arrive shortly. She will know what to do. Well, Jock …"

"My thanks, Colin," John said. "My thanks."

They stood for a moment as if waiting for someone to tell them what to do or say next, and then Colin went to the door. "A fine son," he said, and on this hastily took his leave.

In the quiet room John sat listening to the street—criers and watching his sleeping wife and son. John Banks Hunter? He would have to brave it through-—would have to pretend that it was he who had originated this fawning gesture. Joe Banks would be bewildered-— mayhap pleased. Whereas William?

He would have to visit William at once. Tell him… . Aye, tell him: She sought to hurt me doubly, she succeeded.

Yet looking at Anne’s swollen face, at the white thin mouth with the crust of chap, he felt stirred by his love for her as are dead leaves scattered by a wintry wind. He loved her bitterly, bleakly; neither of them could take any joy in it.

I wonder, he was asking himself, what it was that Robbie said to her that persuaded her to have me.

He waited exactly twenty-four hours before going to visit William in Windmill Street. Duncan led him to a small elegant parlour, and there John sat cradling in his arm a preparation with which he hoped, in some small measure, to propitiate William. He was ill at ease, undecided whether to be reserved or brusque, when William appeared in the doorway and decided the matter for him.

Rigid civility was to be the way of their meeting, William’s stiff smile, and the arch of his wrist lifting snuff to his nostrils, declared.

Clasping the preparation, John burst out, "Wullie, I came to——"

"A cup of chocolate, Brother?" enquired.

"No. Wullie—-—"

"Tea, perhaps?"

"Not at the moment. I came to—-"

"Coffee, then. I’ll have Duncan"

"Wullie, I don’t want any damned coffee!"

"And how—is our Anne?" William said smoothly. From his deferential, solicitous tone, one would have thought him to be asking after his Most Illustrious Patient in her capacity as a child-bearing lady.

"Colin tells me that her exhaustion will pass off soon."

"Yes, it was quite an ordeal for her. A frank breech in a primipara is a serious cause for concern. It augurs well for her general state of health. that she weathered her labour. We had feared some weakness on the part of Mrs. Hunter—or some malformation of the child—-But I would say she is in perfect health, Jock! Now, then, what have you there for me?"

"The foetus of a sea-cow. Would you care for it?"

"Exquisite!" William said softly. "I remember envying you it the last time I was in your museum. Young Jenner had done it for you; am I correct?"

"Aye," John blurted. "Joe Banks had made me a gift of the specimen."

Not a muscle moved in William’s face, not a shadow shifted or deepened. "Indeed," William murmured.

John said abruptly, "It was not my wish, Brother, you know that. But she was exhausted after her long labour—who could know that better than you?—and probably she remembered his many kindnesses to me—"

"Very many, I am certain?" William put in politely.

"And he is always bringing her little gifts, and gracing her table—it is important to her, this sort of fashionable conduct, you dine with me one night, and next I dine with you, and by all means let us see that the newspapers hear of it——Anne is most impressed by …" He blundered on, still in hot pursuit of this topic. "… and quite taken with the idea of entering fashionable society herself, though I cannot help her in that regard; I should not wish to hinder her either———-"

"Pray, forgive me, Jock, but I have entirely lost the thread of what you are saying." William picked up Jenner’s preparation. "Would you care to see where I am going to display this in my museum?"

Meekly, John followed William out of the room.

viii 

The advent of her son had transfigured Anne. She nursed the infant herself, she was ever near it, rarely she laughed, but almost always there was a smile on her mouth. There was an aura of "milk-softness" about her, her skin had lost its sickly translucence, had taken on a warm substantiality. At night, encircled by the light of her candelabrum, the very air about her seemed to pulse softly. And just without that circle sat John, silent in their shared contentment, welcome to her as he had never been before.

Beyond that circle of light in Anne’s room, as around a sun, his other worlds swung by on their appointed paths. His patients at St. George’s and his truce with the staff, his own students in the back of the house, the Royal Society, his friends, and that strange and erratic comet, William, his field laboratory at Earl’s Court—-all attracted him, pulled away; but for an hour or so each night he returned to Anne.

He had thought his own private universe locked against interference by its own immutable laws. Distortion, if not destruction, was brought on by a casual visit of Robbie Home. Mrs. Home was still upstairs with Anne and the boy, and John, with proud large gestures, was pouring an especially rich and mellow wine for Robbie and Everard. Little Everard, now long and slim as William’s cane, and topped like it with a golden head, was leaning against the mantel. He was finer-featured even than Anne, his hands slimmer; a greater length of leg extended from knee to ankle, and his ears were so close to his golden head that they seemed carved in relief on his very skull. Yet he was a masculine shaveling, for all his beauty; it was almost as if he were racked by an enormous but over-selective lust. Robbie sat, glass at his lips, to stare unashamedly at the avowed core of his life. John smiled, and it was then, careless that John was reading his extravagant thoughts, that Robbie set about to wreck the mathematica hexactitudes of John’s universe.

"Everard has decided to become a surgeon," Robbie said, and could not have been more awed by his own words had he just announced that Everard was planning to usurp the Crown.

"Indeed?" John said warily.

"And I can think of no man in this world more equipped to teach my son than——"

" William!" John clutched the subject as if it were a toy and Robbie attempting to wrest it from him. "I shall make it a point to see William on the morrow and secure Everard a place in the School at once. There is no need for him to wait until autumn to start, if he has set his heart on surgery. Mr. Cruikshank is always to be found at the School, and has little to do but repeat a bit of my work and dust my brother’s books. He could start Everard in on his first dissection no later than the day after tomorrow. You will get on quite readily with Mr. Cruikshank, Everard, a very fine young gentleman, someone for you to emulate in all ways. Why, Robbie, as soon as my son is able to hold a scalpel"—here John lapsed a touch into pomposity——"I intend to send him to his Uncle William and rest assured—"

"Whereas," Robbie put in softly, "I wish to put my son in the care of his brother-in-law!"

Bygar, John thought, did I ever fancy differently? And when Everard turned his haughty face to John, there was in the downward slanting of the upper lids and the uncertainty in the line of the mouth a vestige of that child who had gazed out of a miniature at John years ago on a hot afternoon on Belle Isle. He had not cared for the weakness revealed in that baby face even then.

"… student at St. Georges" Robbie was continuing with uncommon animation, "and live here with your house students. I wanted to surprise you, Jock!"

"Oh, you have, Robbie," John said, manipulating his face into what he hoped would pass for a smile. "Robbie, you wag, indeed you have!"

It was settled then.

"Of course," Robbie added, "I shall not expect any privileges for my son beyond those granted all your students."

"You liar," John said so frankly, with such resignation, that Home grinned.

Young Everard looked at once disgruntled and bored.

Anne was so, delighted with the arrangement that John made a determined effort to withhold judgement until Everard had proved himself one way or the other. From the beginning Everard conducted himself as a member of the family rather than a student. He was as often to be found in the front part of the house as the back, where he belonged, in John’s opinion; he seemed to be affecting, under Anne’s encouragement, a role somewhat reminiscent of that of the Queen’s favourite.

What the hell, John reminded himself, Everard is Anne’s brother. The tartar in him contradicted: He’s a house student, first and foremost!

John frankly eavesdropped on Everard after he had been in the house about a month. Young Mr. Home was edifying his fellow students with the following:

"Of course, I could have devoted an allotted amount of time to Trinity College-—let us say a year—to determine if it had anything to offer me. Yet again, I considered that no advantages which could have been derived from my scholarship in the University would have compensated me for my time. I felt that to proceed apace in my surgical education would profit me more——" Young Everard was, as John had thought, draped across the mantel of the dissection room. Everard reminded one of those tiny, graceful Dresden figurines propped against china pillars representing broken Greek columns. Once John had actually seen Everard absently lean against a support which was not there, only to recover himself after he was on his way to the ground. This morning, Everard was properly propped, one arm lying along the mantel, the other hand on hip, and his head thrown back.

One of the students paused in his dissection to ask of his fellows, "D’ye think the dear man appreciates the honour Mr. Home has bestowed upon him?"

"The dear man John said from the doorway, "appreciates the misfortune of having such a dunderhead as yourself under his roof. Did I not tell you three days ago to feed the leeches? Now I find several of them dead!

The dunderhead paled. Everard crossed his ankles and smirked. You next, John promised him, coming into the room, shaking the floor with his heavy footsteps. He bent over a dissection, noting from the corner of his eye that Everard had hastily departed from the mantel to seat himself at his own table. John straightened to examine a preparation hanging from the ceiling. He swept his gelid gaze over all assembled, he was looking for fault. He almost always found it. Everard had not capped the jar of a preparation tightly enough. John pounced, cursing and carping.

What had started out as a mere disciplinary tongue-lashing, suddenly became a furious attack on the lack of intelligence, negligence, and pertness on the part of every student in the room. Did they think their conduct would pass muster in the Great Windmill Street School, he enquired angrily. Would Percival Pott brook such insolence? Let him who believed it pack up his dissecting instruments and depart from the house at once. "Well?" The students, to a man, sat motionless, deep in contemplation of the floor.

"Well?" A student, thinking an answer was required, ventured, "Sir, none of us has any desire to walk after Mr. Pott. And highly as we regard Dr. Hunter and his Scho–"

"Stop blathering and go to work," John said coldly. "Have I asked you to leave? Any of you?"

As suddenly as it had come on his anger left him. "We will put this behind us," he said generously. "Return to your dissections, gentlemen. I will be in the museum if you want me."

You are too hard on them, he thought. Nonsense-—not one of them made a move to leave, did he?

ix

Duncan arrived with a note early one morning from William. The Queen had just presented William with the carcass of a young elephant from her private menagerie. Would John and his lads care to have the preparation of it?

John rounded up his students, loaded them into the wagon, and rode over to Windmill Street. In the back of the School the Dr. William students, swarming over the elephant, looked up in instant hostility at the entering Mr. John students. Mr. Cruikshank was hastening forward to John saying, "Good morning, Mr. Hunter. Dr. Hunter has asked me to bring you to him in the——-" John brushed past him without a word. (I can find my own brother’s parlour, thank you.)

The Dr. William students, in the meanwhile, were assuming their various interpretations of the pose best known as "fashionable". Their speech was formal and clipped, their gestures precise, their greetings to the Mr. John students so studiedly supercilious that they almost missed being insulting. Their conduct was noted scornfully by the Mr. John students, who scowled, walked heavily around the animal, and cursed. The Mr. John students cracked one coarse joke after another, much to the pain of the Dr. William lads.

In William’s parlour, John and William sat over their chocolate and gossiped. William, John noticed, had parted with all his lower teeth but one remaining molar which rose triumphantly from its socket. It reminded John of something, but he could not think what.

"How is Everard Home progressing?"

"Excellently!" John lied blandly.

"I suppose you will make him your assistant in time?"

"I have seen worse," John said, deliberately turning his head in the direction of William’s dissection room.

William grew bored.

In time they wandered back to the dissection room to see how their students were faring. The carcass, now dismembered and quartered, was ready to be loaded for its journey to Jermyn Street. William came to stand at the door, directing operations in a finical voice. The affection John bore for William began to nag at him like a fugitive ache. Dr. William Hunter, the greatest physician in London, old and cranky before his time. How had those fools and politicians dared to break and discard him? Still, John comforted himself, watching the pincers of William’s nose and chin open and close as William talked, he is the Queen’s favourite. That is something. "Eh?" he said, when he realized William was addressing him.

"I said that I am certain Horry was instrumental in the Queen’s donation of the elephant."

"Who?" But William had already returned his attention to the students.

Absently William took out his linen handkerchief and, lifting his wig slightly, blotted at the sweat on his bald pate with it. "… careful, lads! he was crying with more anxiety than the occasion warranted, "careful… . Mercy on us, do look where you are——-— Oh, dear—"

John found himself wondering if William was ever with a woman any more.

After several days, one of John’s students muttered to another, "Do you know what the most obscene word in the English language is?"

"… quiet!" the other warned in a whisper.

"Elephant," muttered the first. "Elephant!"

John Hunter, with his long ears full of grey hairs (useful, his students said, for straining out all but what he wanted to hear), called out from his museum, "’Twill he your name is the most obscene word in the language if you ruin that liver!"

But when he came home unexpectedly early from a call to find Everard standing in the dissection room, pushing a handkerchief over his thick blond hair, mincing among the tables and shrieking, "Mercy on us! Do … be … careful… . Mercy on–" John made his way past the frightened students, eyes only for Everard, to reach up and strike him on his soft mouth.

He said not one word and left the room as swiftly as he had entered. He went to the front of the house, to Anne’s parlour, to calm himself, and there, the pain, lunging as if it had stalked him down the hallway waiting for its chance to attack, rammed him unerringly in the solar plexus and nearly felled him. He felt his face sag with surprise as he tottered to a chair, remarking in some remote chamber of his mind that the sensation of a facial expression may be fully experienced even in the midst of overwhelming pain. Holding himself with both hands he leaned far forward on the chair, his gasping loud in his ears. He was swinging his head, and a shining tassel lowering slowly like a rope from his gaping mouth to his knees caught his gaze. He began to grunt, great helpless belly-noises. A stroke? He must get to his feet and prove to himself that it was not a stroke.

He rose tortuously, the locked muscles in his midriff trying to double him. Once in motion he had to keep staggering forward or fall. The mantel stopped his progress, and pulling himself erect by it, he gazed at himself in the glass. The thick white mouth still emitted its tassel, and in the wide-staring eyes the pupils were so minute that a couching needle might have created them.

In the still room he was suddenly listening intently. His gasping and grunting alike had ceased. Staring into his own gaze, he listened deep within himself as one placing an ear to a door. He had never experienced such silence before, some booming sound which had muffled the noise of the world all his life had been stilled. A coach went by, blocks distant. There was a footfall above him and rooms away. Water dripped somewhere, and a clock was ticking loudly, though he knew it was not in that room, or even in his house.

Then he knew that he had stopped breathing. He slumped to the floor, hand at wrist, searching for the pulse. There was no pulse, he was dying. The anatomist in him rebelled. The anatomist concentrated fiercely on the familiar apparatus of respiration. He commanded the necessary muscles to act, pitting his will against the locking pressure of the pain. A great wind was sucked into his head, whistling down his throat, until, with the sound of a thunderclap, it rushed into the collapsed bellows of his lungs, filling them to the bursting point. He pressed his chin hard on his chest and compressed the muscles; the wind roared up from his lungs ballooning his skull, pounding for exit at his drums. He raised his head and prepared to press again against the pain, mouth open wide. This rushing and roaring, this tremendous passage of sound and pain, like subterranean waters pounding along the beds of buried rivers, this deafening task–-this was the simple act of breathing.

The tassel depending from his mouth spread into an opaque pool on the floor. Drops of waxy sweat blinded him. Still he laboured at living. At last he exercised a measure of control over the volume and velocity of the wind rushing from his chest and gave voice to a deep animal cry.

The door opened and he heard a servant shouting his name, heard far away Anne’s high voice, heard the clatter of his chariot being brought around from the stable, heard the wailing of his son up above as the infant intelligence grasped the concept of adult panic; and he heard, at last, William’s voice taking control, and felt William’s arms encircle him and drag his body to a sofa, and never ceasing his labour, he mutely held up his wrists to William, and pleaded with his eyes.

Out came William’s gold pulse-watch.

"There is a faint beat," William said after a time. "It is faint, but it is there." With a grave smile, William added, "Your hands are like ice, Jock."

He shuddered through his length. The next instant the great machinery in his chest slowly pomaded into life. "Your tooth, Willie! Reminds … Belle Isle!" He fainted.

He was in his bed. He had been laughing and raging, the Achilles had gone down with all hands, the whores of Belle Isle rode on their cows and jumped from the ramparts, floating lazily through the blue skies of Belle Isle, Robbie Home scratched at his itch. "Are you a married man, Hunter?" "Aye, I have a wife and a son named after my brother."

He was lucid. The room was murmurous with physicians. He recognized George Fordyce bending over him and declaring that the pulse was faint but steady. "A flying gout which is seated in the stomach," Fordyce said over his shoulder to someone.

"Hmmm… . Not the heart, Doctor?"

"Or the liver, Doctor?"

"The spleen, sir! Indubitably the spleen!" They reached accord on the pyloris. "Gout seated in the pyloris." The gentlemen departed.

Anne said, "John? Shall I sit with you, husband?"

"I wish to speak to Everard alone."

Everard stood before him. "I am here, John."

"How dare you speak to me in that familiar tone." John closed his eyes, and as if making an anatomical observation, stated, "What a despicable little turd you are, Everard. If ever I hear of you deriding my brother again, you will never re-enter my door as long as I live. Which may be longer than you are inclined to think at this moment." He did not open his eyes even when he knew that Everard was weeping. "I shall speak of what happened to no one. I can rely on my students to be equally discreet. See to it that you also remain silent."

"Yes, sir," Everard said.

"Now, go tell my wife I want her."

Anne came to sit by him and wait on him and hover over him. He indulged himself in her attention and lay abed all the following day. John did not mention Everard, and though Anne did, it was in connection with their child. She had brought the copper-haired lad in to lie by his father and amuse him.

"He looks exactly as Everard did when he was an infant," Anne said fondly. "I can remember clearly, for my mother allowed me to care for him when I was very good."

John held his tongue, but his hand went out to touch the fiery hair. Everard would scorn such a thatch as this lad would grow, John could take a vow on that. And then, looking at his son lovingly, he could no longer avoid the recognition that the child was limp in spirit. It lay as in a burrow, its eyes wandering aimlessly. He thought of Robert Mylne’s lad, the cousin of his own son. Fat and rosy, Mylne’s son had been a crawling, curious, vigorous little animal at this age. My son is not sharp, John thought wretchedly, and he looked quickly at Anne. But the regard she bent on her child was adoring, recognizing no fault or even the Possibility of one. After a time, she said, her eyes still on the boy, "I am with child again, I believe."

Instantly he was on the fret. It was too soon … her health …

William had suggested… . He was babbling, and silenced himself. As if he had not spoken, Anne took up placidly, "I think to call this one William."

He was reminded——why, he could not have said—of his boyhood in Scotland when William was already in London. He could no longer remember exactly how it had been not to have his life completely entangled with his brother’s. He was two beings—himself, and one of the Hunter brothers.

His thoughts led him to Anne’s affection for Everard. I must learn to tolerate dear Everard somehow, he told himself sternly. Anne was watching him expectantly. He roused. "Whereas I," he said, "have just planned to name our next one Anne."

They smiled, their hands touched. There was a rare communion between them for a moment or so.

x

Mr. Gunning looked down from a ward window to see Mr. Hunter’s chariot draw up before the hospital. He sighed and paused, lancet in hand, to watch Hunter’s strong legs emerge on to the thin snow, carrying their burden of the squat frame with an energy that would have amounted to a swagger in another man. Oh Lord, Mr. Gunning thought, standing in full view of the outside, what has he in mind now?

Pulled by Mr. Gunning’s gaze, John looked up and saw the spare figure in the neat puce coat watching him. What poor Gunning needs, I’ve always said, John thought (he had never thought any such thing until this bright morning, but it gave greater weight to his opinion to tell himself that it was not a sudden haphazard notion), what he needs is a wife and some children.

Jauntily he went inside to accost the first porter he saw. "Will you search out the surgical gentlemen and tell them I wish to speak to them in the Board Room?"

The staff straggled in. "Sir!" Mr. Hawkins began.

John interrupted. As though he had never spoken of the matter before, as though the idea had come to him, winged, inspired, he said, "Gentlemen, I have decided that we should lecture to our students. As Mr. Potts is doing at St. Bart’s," he added ingeniously. The staff to a man looked at him as they might at a new disease. "But—-—" Mr. Gunning ventured.

The gentlemen then sat in silence, looking at the walls of the hoard room, at the portraits, or past the windows of the glistening snow outside. They seemed unable to look at one another. John sat in their midst, smiling, confident, waiting for them to accede. At last Mr. Caesar Hawkins was tempted to ease the tension by cracking a joke. "I should not like, sir, to reveal my ignorance to the students at this late date by lecturing to them!" His face betokened both merriment and modesty.

Still smiling John turned to the next man. "Mr. Gunning?" he asked politely.

"At this time …" Gunning cleared his throat. "Perhaps at a later—-—"

"Mr. Bromfield?" John cut in curtly, his smile was fading.

"Your pardon, Mr. Hunter, but I do not approve of———"

"Dr. Monro?"

Dr. Monro, son of the revered Alex Monro, Primus, merely shrugged. "A patient requires my attention," he said. "You will excuse me, gentlemen."

"Very well," John shouted. "I will teach them myself. St. George’s is turning out a pack of ignorant swine-gelders who know only the merest rudiments of surgery! What of the theory of surgery? What of physiology? Of anatomy? Comparative anat——— Ah, God, why do I waste my time on the likes of you?" John jumped to his feet and left the room.

"He distresses me increasingly," he clearly heard Gunning murmur, "though I cannot say why. His recent attack of gout does not seem to account for …"

There were some fifty students walking the wards of St. George’s. That night John wrote out the announcement that he would teach, without fee, all those students who applied for instruction. He dipped his quill in the ink angrily. He made snorting noises through his nose as he scribbled. He remembered his old agonies while lecturing. Be damned to them——he would take laudanum before his lectures.

His anger and indignation brushed aside such minor objections to the scheme. He was beside himself.

He would start the lectures on Monday. On the Friday before, he arrived home from a call and was confounded by the sight of a purple polka-dotted pony tethered before his door. He strode into his dissection room shouting at Everard, "What in hell is that thing at my front door?"

Everard smiled weakly and wagged his bronze brows. A gentleman with a beard to his waist turned from his examination of a shelf of preparations. The gentleman was only as rich in years as John himself, yet his expression and manner were as punctilious as those of a Court Physician of fifty years ago. Making an extravagant leg to John and sweeping a hand to his heart he proclaimed himself one Martin Van Butchel, inventor, dentist, originator of the gold-pivot tooth—most becoming to the appearances of both ladies and gentlemen—and students. Mr. Hunters newest student, in point of fact. Or so Mr. Van Butchel fervently prayed. Word had gone out from St. George’s that Mr. Hunter was to favour the world with a series of lectures. Mr. Van Butchel, though not a student at the hospital, was compelled to apply, in all humility, yet with deepest desire, for a seat in Mr. Hunter’s munificent lecture-hall. Mr Van Butchel stroked his beard and looked at Mr. Hunter out of eyes like brown fur.

"Is that," John began, stunned, "your pony at my door?"

It was indeed. Mr. Van Butchel sincerely prayed that Mr. Hunter did not object to his having tethered it there for the nonce—-—

"It is purple," John heard himself announcing foolishly.

"I dye it, sir. On the theory that my pony will attract attention. Hypothesis, I should say; for a theory, I believe, though not a fact, is more amenable to proof than a mere—–"

"Are you interested in surgery, sir?" Mr. Van Butchel said simply, "I am interested in everything, Mr. Hunter. That is why I have come to you. May I ask the fee?"

"There will be no fee. I shall be pleased to have you attend. I am interested in everything also."

Van Butchel bowed, straightened, and drew a package from his pocket. "A small token… . I would be honoured by your acceptance.

John took the package. "What is it?"

"A spring-band garter, sir. Most useful to ladies and gentlemen alike. A neatly turned leg, sir, is at last possible for both sexes. Hose-sag is a thing of the past."

John, decked in his new spring-band garters, and confident on a dose of thirty drops of laudanum, faced his class. Every last student at St. George’s had made his appearance in John’s museum, now his lecture room also. "Gentlemen," he began.

He had so much to tell them; experiments he had performed over the years jostled with bits of anatomical information on his tongue. The absorbents, the teeth, the vascularity of the teeth, the generative organs of the eel, the origin of pus-—— Best to start off with the history of surgery.

"Gentlemen," he repeated. "Some years ago, at St. George’s, in fact, I made a few experiments with the blood of a very simple nature. These gave me thought on the action of air on venal blood for the following——"

Bewildered, the students looked up at him like so many rising moons. In his seat in the back, Mr. Van Butchel was dipping and scribbling, dipping and scribbling, lest he miss one precious word.

Some organization of my lectures is wanting, a part of John’s mind noted dryly.

A few of the students did not return for the next lecture, They were not missed. Mr. Van Butchel was happily able to move up a row.

He lectured on alternate nights, and between one lecture and the next Anne gave birth to Mary Anne Hunter. William was all smiles and winks and references to a "Cat’s having kittens-—-" enjoying himself at Anne’s expense. But the child was alive and Anne’s delivery had been easy, and William had been freed of a gnawing worry. He had secured the wet nurse himself, telling Anne, "Your lass is going to suck at a breast that nourished Royalty!"

"But I want——-" Anne began in protest, holding out her arms for her child.

"Ah now, Annie," William said briskly, "with Jockie I gave you your head: He was your first. But it is time you play the lady, my dear." And as he spoke he bound her breasts tightly but deftly. "You will not want to be going about in the warm weather with the front of your dress sopping, like a country woman, will you?"

Anne glared. William grinned at John, going on with the business at hand.

But after a day or so, William frowningly unbound her breasts, and remarked anxiously on the degree of caking. He had, in three days, tried as many nurses for little Mary Anne, but the infant would not suck. In such cases, he explained to John, the mother’s milk was often the only milk that would not curdle in the child’s mouth.

Anne rose from her bed to take complete charge of the child. And little Jockie, dethroned, and left to the care of his nurse, wailed day and night, and if put on the floor to crawl, remained stationary on all fours, his head hanging between his short little arms, screaming until his scalp purpled visibly under his orange down.

For once the odour of putrefaction did not dominate the household; rather, the sourness of infant vomit permeated even the dissection room and the lecture hall. "Wullie, what in hell is the matter with the lass" John demanded. William was not alarmed. "You should smell the stink at the Palace." said the Queen’s Physician.

As soon as the weather grew warmer, Anne and the children and the nurse and assorted servants moved out to Earl’s Court. John came out to join them on those nights when he was not lecturing. Here it was, on the first fine evening of the year, when the thread of smoke from the stack rose unwavering in the twilight, and the old lion roared his nostalgia in his fortress, that Howison appeared in the laboratory to speak to John.

He was covered with blood and other rusty stains, a smear of dejecta across his pocked face, for he had been feeding the oven with the refuse of the laboratory. "Was it tonight Mr. Banks was to come to supper, Jock?"

John looked up from his work. "How dare you call me Jock? My God, is it tonight?"

Howison wiped his face with the back of his hand, then rubbed the hand on his clothing. "If ’twas, the Missus will have your wig for this. There’s a carriage turning in at the gate, and you not dressed, Jock!"

"I have eaten my supper."

"Eat another." Howison shrugged. "Missus told me not to burn when there’s guests. And all I know is that there’s a carriage turning in at the gate, and I’ve a pile yet to burn, and should be done before there’s more." He chose to add familiarly, "And besides, you always eat your supper at five, guests or no. You can’t remember your head these days, Jock."

"Will you shut your boneshop and go see who ’tis?"

Howison strolled to the window. "It’s not a carriage after all," he decided. "It’s only Dr. William’s chariot." He sniggered. "That Duncan… . Foppish in his old age, ain’t he?"

"Better," John snapped, "than be the filthy old reprobate you are in your old age!"

"I’m forty-three and two years younger than you," Howison said. "And Dr. William is fifty-five and the Missus is—"

"What are you doing, keeping a record? Go show my brother back here!"

Howison strolled out.

William entered with a measured step. Never was he more immaculate than on this spring evening. His wig, a new one but of a somewhat conservative fashion, featured rolls over the ears and a trough across the crown. He was in the formal red velvet of the physician, and his gold-headed cane caught the last rays of light coming in the windows. In the twilight his skin had the delicacy of wrinkled satin, and the carmine powder dusted lightly under his eyes made their blue that of periwinkles. He was consciously posing, just within the door, one neat leg in exact juxtaposition to its mate.

John viewed him in open admiration. "Are not those garters of Van Butchers a wonder, Wullie?" he cried. "I vow, never have your legs appeared so–—"

"May I interrupt," William said, a trifle vexed, "to say that I do not consider a pair of garters entirely responsible for the excellence, or lack of it, of my toilette?" Then as if to end the topic right there, and retrieve the effect his appearance had first produced, he shifted his grip on his cane with a practised gesture, and advanced into the room. It was then that John saw he was bearing a large folio under his arm, holding it closely to his side.

William accepted the chair John kicked over to him, and deposited his shrunken flanks thereon. The folio now lay on his lap, while he crossed his hands on the head of his cane and rested his chin on them.

"How is the comparative anatomy progressing?" William was totally uninterested in knowing.

"It is work," John said briefly, watching the folio on William’s lap. "What’ve you got there, Wullie?"

William raised his brows, lifted his chin from his hands, and quested about his person with his eyes, as if in search of some novelty he might have put on and then forgotten. "Eh?"

"On your lap, damn you," John said patiently. Pushing William was always a vain undertaking when he had set his heart on taking his own good time.

"Oh … oh!" Now William smiled; the lone molar rising in magnificent solitude from its pink sea. "Take it, Jock. This is your copy.

It was William’s Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus, an elephant folio, a masterpiece… .John turned the pages, plate after plate, beautiful beyond any work he had ever seen.

"You hold thirty years of my life in your hands," William said. 

"In Latin," John could not resist adding.

"Most naturally."

John continued turning the pages, grunting in his appreciation. "Here is your Memorial, Wullie," he said presently.

"Aye… . When—-when my Great Disappointment came on me, I was fortunate that I had the Gravid Uterus left to me," William said gravely. He turned his head to gaze at the preparations of every animal conceivable crowding the shelves. "The goals we set for ourselves when we are young!" He smiled. "Never realizing that we will not even come within sight of them until we are old. Old and tired. Possunt quia posse uidentur… . They do because they think they can. Virgil."

"Good God, Wullie, you are just approaching your prime!"

"Loosely translated, of course," William went on, as if he had not heard John at all.

After William had gone, John sat with the folio before him. After a time Howison came in to nag him for sitting there in the dark. A phrase that was a favourite of William’s twenty-five years ago, came to John: Exegi monumentum aere perennius. Had William forgotten it, now that at last he could rightly apply it to himself? I have raised a monument more enduring than brass.

"Horace," John said to Howison, who was lighting the candles. "Indeed, Dr. William?" Howison said, his thoughts elsewhere.

He talked of nothing but William’s Gravid Uterus. He bought copies of it as gifts for all his friends. Joe Banks was the recipient of a copy, and Colin Mackenzie, and he sent one to Edward Jenner. His friends praised the work to the skies; they sat patiently, folio before them, while John pointed out this plate or that again and again.

Colin Mackenzie vowed the work would prove invaluable to him in his practice. At John’s instance he scrutinized each plate again and again. Always he marvelled, and never did the mention of the placental circulation slip his tongue. At last, one evening when the gentlemen were meeting at a tavern, Colin interrupted John to say:

"Gentlemen, I heard a piece of sad news today. Hewson is dead!"

"Why," Joe Banks cried, "was he not your brother’s assistant until recently, Jock?"

"Aye."

"He died this morning … of cadaveric poisoning. A pity, is it not?" Colin was continuing.

John leaned back in his chair, silent. Colin was always the pawky one! So this was how he had finally managed to attack William! I should not be surprised to find, John was thinking venomously, that he has been going around disparaging the Gravid Uterus behind my back.

"You were quite well acquainted with Hewson, were you not?" Banks was asking him.

"Aye. Until he deserted my brother, and he had to send for that popinjay Cruikshank in his place?"

"But-—" Then Joe Banks decided that he had no more to say on the matter after all.

For the rest of the evening John sat in a moody silence. The gentlemen parted from one another early. A pall had hung over them. Even George Fordyce was tired for once, and declared himself ready for bed. "

An uneasiness followed after John for weeks thereafter, nagging him like a cur at his heels. The world stood out with an unreal clarity as before a storm. At last he took a purge that left him weak and weary.

But he felt better, and some of his unease departed from him.

xi

He noticed that as his lectures to the hospital students advanced beyond anatomy and the rudiments of surgery to enter into the tangle of physiology, and further into the snarl of comparative anatomy, and beyond that into the origin of disease, that the students no longer attempted to take notes. He stood before them sorting his notes helplessly, unable to find words for what he wanted so desperately to tell them. Frequently he fell into a frustrated silence, only to mumble, "I am not clear in my mind on this yet… . Still, it would seem that if we were capable of following the progress of increase of the number of parts of the perfect animal, that—or rather -—as-—-as they first formed in succession, say, from the very first to its state of full perfection… . I mean … in utero … no, that would not apply here. . , . Let me put it this way: If we were to take a series of animals, from the more imperfect to the perfect, we should probably find an imperfect animal, corresponding with some stage of the most perfect. The foetus seems at its different stages to resemble nothing human at all, but some imperfect… . I am not clear on this, gentlemen… ."

His mouth hung slack, he was helpless. In the silence, the constant wailing of the sickly Mary Anne carried dimly to the lecture-hall. Now cosily ensconced in the second row, Martin Van Butchel petted his beard, his eyes soft and furry with sympathy.

Not one of the gentlemen of St. George’s bothered–-or dared—-to point out John’s failure to him. Very probably they thought the facts spoke for themselves.

The unease resumed. I must take a purge, John reminded himself, to clear my mind.

xii

As if sensing John’s inexplicable displeasure with him, Colin Mackenzie made his appearances in John’s own circle infrequently. He is jealous of William, John told himself, and was grateful that William was again willing to deliver Anne of her third child.

This time, as William was slipping into his coat and replacing his wig, John said, "Wullie, Anne and I would like to give the lad your name."

William paused, looked at Anne, who managed if not a cordial smile, at least a dutiful one, and said, "May I ask an even greater honour! Give me the privilege of naming the boy." And receiving immediate consent, he went on, "Then, I name him James Hunter. The world has been too long without a Jamie Hunter, Jock. Now, before many years have passed we will have another Dr. James in the family. Eh?"

John smiled. "You always did say that Jamie would have been the best of us."

"And he will be! Now we will have to look to our laurels, you and I!"

Anne had drifted off to sleep.

William lowered his voice. "Jock, I do not like the look of you. All this lecturing and fighting with the staff of the hospital, and running out to Earl’s Court, and teaching your own students, and working on those endless animal——-—"

"It is nothing, Wullie Only a touch of my gout, you may be certain. Though it does plague me in the strangest ways… . I cannot say exactly how… . They are all against me, Wullie. Hawkins is the leader… ." To his ears John sounded querulous overtaxed.

"Perhaps," William said, "you need a purge."

In less than four months, little James Hunter, destined to be the best of the Hunters, was dead. He had died, William said, of an incapacity to live. William wept like a defeated old man. "I loved that lad, Jock. Surely you knew that in my heart he was my son… ."

They sat before a dying fire, the Hunter brothers. The parlour was dim, the day outside drizzling. "I must attempt to find out," John said dully.

William stared at him. "Find out why——" John was already rising. William caught at his sleeve. "Jock, I beg of you not to do it! Anne-——"

"I have demanded of my patients that they permit me to perform morbid dissections of their children. There is no other way to learn why my son died of an ‘incapacity to live’. Anne need never know; I will give her laudanum and have Everard sit over her. Will you help me, Wullie?"

"Jock, you must be—-" William began, and as suddenly closed his mouth. "I will help you," he said. He began to weep.

In the wavering light of the candles, William looked across their handiwork to John. "Now do you know why my little Jamie died?" he asked bitterly.

"Yes," John said. "Of an incapacity to live."

William turned away. "Send someone after Duncan for me, Jock. This night’s work has made a poor thing of me. Now I know what—did ever I tell you of the French anatomist who dissected his own child before a class for want of a subject? Yes, I must have… . Now I know what that poor father must have suffered."

"Do you, Wullie?"

"There is little Jockie left for you, Brother. This lad was mine." 

"Aye," John said. "My Jockie."

They buried the child at St. James’s Church, where they had been married. And when they came home with Everard, taking the carriage, even though the church was but a few doors from theirs, George Fordyce was awaiting John.

Colin Mackenzie was dying of a rapid lung fever. He wanted to see John. Everard bent his golden head protectively over Anne, "I will see to my sister, sir," he said to John.

"Good lad …" John murmured, donning his greatcoat again.

He was numb, he had just seen his child put into the earth, and now he was rushing to more dying and death. The anatomist in him cowered, death should not approach him except in the form of subjects… . He sat in the carriage, looking straight ahead. Hewson of the downy Scotch cheeks, then his son, and now Colin. He was afraid.

They were all assembled in Colin’s parlour. Dr. Pitcairn, Dr. Armstrong, Mr. Percival Pott, Mr. Caesar Hawkins. As John entered with Fordyce, they turned to one another quietly remarking his entrance. Ah, Hunter! And they watched him as he climbed the stairs to Colin’s bed.

A wasted Colin Mackenzie plucked at the bed—clothes, febrile, talkative, his wits wandering. When he caught sight of John appearing between the parted curtains, his voice lowered to a whisper; he wanted John to bend down to him. Gravely John put his ear to the moving mouth, feeling the dry breath on his face, hearing the deep crackling of the tales in Colin’s lungs. Colin whispered to him of a secret. Of a great discovery that he wished to entrust to John. "I was always afraid," the dry whisper said in great agitation, "that it would be stolen from me! Now I give it to you to guard …" The swollen lips smiled slyly. "I have discovered the circulation of the-—Promise you speak of it to no one!"

"I promise."

Colin went on whispering, whispering, until John pressed him back against the pillow. "Help me with him," he muttered to Fordyce, "he is growing excited… ."

He left the raving man and went out into the hallway. He paused on the landing of the stairs and looked below him. Since he had gone up a Dr. Lettsom had arrived. The solemnity of the gentlemen, the civility with which the physicians listened to what Mr. Pott had to say, reminded John of a meeting of the Royal Society, or some very dignified club. One which met now at this gentleman’s house, again at another’s. He himself had been host two years ago when the spasm of gout had seized his stomach and respiratory muscles. Now it was Colin’s turn. It was a Death Club, and the gentlemen convened only when a member was threatened by his end. As their numbers dwindled, those gentlemen remaining would creep into a parlour, dragging themselves along with the support of their canes, to greet one another with palsied gestures: Ah there, Dr. Pitcairn—Ah there, Hunter!-— the while noting the rheumy eye, the withered hand and the sagging corner of the mouth, or the dangling bandaged foot, as the servants carried its gouty owner to his seat of honour (would he be the next host?), the laboured breathing, the yellowish stain at the crotch of the fawn satin breeches, the hand caught over the heart—noting each symptom, comparing them with one’s own, and thinking, Ah, poor old Pott, that heart of his will take him off soon! And then, feeling the strange squeezing and tightening in the chest, the deep—seated and unclassifiable anxiety, the fugitive unease—-

Dr. Pitcairn was looking up at him. "Hunter? You are not yourself un-—-" (Hunter, will you be our next host?)

Without answering directly, John descended and said to no one in particular, "I must leave. I attended the-—a—-funeral this morning."

"A pity," William said, "that he went so quickly. Only three days, did Fordyce say?"

"Aye, during that rain we had. He came home early one morning from a delivery. He was wet through just from running from his carriage to the door, and chilled. Wullie, he sent for me before he died."

"What was your opinion?"

"I had no opinion, I was not called in to examine him. He sent for me as a friend. He wanted to entrust me with the secret of the placental circulation."

William looked away. "Delirious, I suppose."

"He was afraid," John said deliberately, "that someone would steal the discovery from him."

Quite slowly William brought his gaze around to John. "Why are you telling this to me?"

"To see if we Hunter brothers have the courage to speak of our theft to each other, now that Colin is dead."

"Do not attempt to ease your conscience by accusing me of your wrongs. You assured me that you had made the preparations at Mackenzie’s request. And as you were my assistant at the time-——"

"Was I? was I your assistant, Wullie? God damn you, I never was that! I was your churlish brother, your burden, your thief, but I was never——— You’ve admitted that fool, that precious coxcorm, that pretty slobber-chops of a Cruikshank to a partnership, haven’t you, Wullie? Hewson was not good enough for you, and I was never worthy even to empty your bed-chamber!"

William was staring. After a moment, he said formally, "How is Anne, Brother? I trust she is not grieving overly?"

xiii

And one thing he would never do again, John informed a silent and mortified staff at St. George’s, would be to take on the entire teaching burden of the hospital, to take upon himself without remuneration their duties, nor yet suggest to his friends and acquaintances that they send their sons to be trained at St. George’s, only to have them neglected, to have them emerge from their courses worse off in their confused understandings of the benighted and stagnant practice of surgery than if they had never entered the portals of St. George’s at all, nor devote almost a hundred evenings struggling to educate the swelling numbers of students, enticed to the field of surgery by the growing threats of war with the damned traitors in America, only to have his colleagues on the staff question his principles and insult him to his face by telling him that his discoveries were "ingenious" as if they were speaking of a new spring-band garter he had just invented, while they opposed each proposal of his to improve the lot of the students by talking behind his back so boldly that even his brother-in-law must know of it and remain silent only because he must have thought himself not to have heard aright-—

Mr. Gunning coughed, and John fell silent. He had lost the thread of what he was saying. Mr. Hawkins at once called the meeting to a close. The gentlemen filed out.

John Hunter was left alone in the Board Room. "This time," he cried to himself, "I will teach only for money! Only for money!"

And only for money he began to accept a patient or two from Martin Van Butchel. It was no worse than his association with Spence had been, and that had done him no harm.

And when Martin suffered a sudden bereavement through the loss of his wife, John would have done the embalming of her, had he not been busy with his new paying students. He sent Martin to William instead.

That, William insisted, was different. He had embalmed Mrs. Van Butchel in his capacity as an anatomist. He was hardly to be considered on the level of one who accepted patients from the little quack. "Nor," William added, "did I permit him to tether that abomination of a purple pony in front of my School."

"No, but he exhibits his wife in a glass case in his parlour, and tells one and all that Dr. William Hunter, Fellow of the Royal Society, and Anatomy Professor at the Royal Academy, and the Physician- Extraordinary to the Queen, embalmed her."

"That," William sought to repeat, "is––"

"Aided and abetted in his task by his illustrious partner; none other than the renowned Mr. William Cumberland Cruik———"

"Aided and abetted?" William said. "What an odd way to put it." He set his half-empty glass carefully on the table. "May I see Anne now?"

"Why do you wish to examine her so soon? The child isn’t due for another two months."

"She is my patient, Jock. May I attend her in my own way, and according to my own practices? Surely, if my methods are accepted without cavil by the Crown, we might consider them of sufficient worth to Mrs. John—-" William broke off. "However, I must confess to another reason for waiting on you today, Brother. I have had the ear of the Queen, as you may have"—-William permitted himself to titter at his wit—-"somewhat suspected. And but yesterday I learned that a project close to my heart is about to ripen into a certainty!" William paused.

John said nothing.

"A certainty!" William repeated. He paused.

John grinned, to bait him. "

"Very well," William snapped, "since you are entirely unconcerned as to your future appointment as Surgeon-Extraordinary to His Majesty, George the——"

"I know who he is," John said.

For an instant longer William held his pose of outrage. Then he reached over to clap John on the back. "Mercy on us, you are your old self again these days, Jock! You know who—- Hoo, ah, heee!"

The next day, Surgeon—Extraordinary or no, John accepted another patient from Martin Van Butchel. Being the King’s Surgeon-Extraordinary, honour though it was, was like being the odd horse in the stable. He did not expect to be called on for his services in the near future, and in the meantime he needed patients and money.

xiv

He took joy in his appointment only because Anne was beside herself with pride. Then they both forgot the matter. Even as Anne was still weak from the birth of Agnes Margarita, little Mary Anne took the putrid sore throat.

Anne staggered from her bed to help in the restraint of the child as John cut a slit in the swollen throat to enable the child to breathe. From the nursery they heard little Jockie’s eternal whining, as they listened to the hoarse gasping of the dying Mary Anne.

Mary Anne died at the age of three years. She had in her entire life learned a vocabulary of two words. One was her lisped name for her mother, the other for her Uncle Everard.

The King’s Surgeon held his wife in his arms while she wept. She began to scream suddenly. "Why are my babies dying? What is wrong with my children?"

Again Anne went out to Earl’s Court. She decided to redecorate their country home completely. She threw herself into extravagance as into a pool of forgetfulness. The waters closed over her head. She spent, as she always had, without consulting John. He wanted her to have whatever caught her fancy, whenever it did.

He began advertising for more students. His parlour was beginning to fill with patients by eight in the morning. The American War was approaching, and surgeons were growing scarce. Added to this, he had his regular duties at the hospital, as well as his own endless work on his animal preparations. He was relying more and more on Everard. Relying on him, and yet disliking him.

He wrote one of his many letters to Edward Jenner, and found himself brooding on Jenner’s ingratitude to him. Edward should have remained with him. Then he knew that his unease had crept back. He took a purge that night before he went to bed. He could not locate the source of his distress. Perhaps it was only that he needed to spend a few days at Earl’s Court.

Anne welcomed him warmly, Agnes on her arm. Red-headed Jackie clinging to her skirts looked up at John sullenly.

Annie?’ John said.

"I am happy," she said. Her arm tightened over Agnes. The infant was six months old, yet Anne would permit no one but herself to care for it.

After his supper John went to his laboratory. But his attention was divided; it was as if he were waiting for someone to speak. But there were only Howison and himself, and Howison was fiddling with the new argand lamps and cursing to himself in a sing-song. "Get out!" John shouted at him suddenly.

Howison looked at him gravely. "Aye, Jock." He left quietly.

Now the silence was irritating. An animal cried out, and he dropped his blowpipe to the floor, shattering it. He would go to bed himself He needed rest, this unease… .

Then, going down the hallway, he saw that Anne’s door lay ajar. William, as in a dream or vision of some other time or person, her arms rising from the bed shone whitely in the light of his candle. In his rising excitement he stumbled to her, the haste of his motion extinguishing his light. Now in the darkness he heard her breathing and the whisper of his name. He saw himself standing in the dust of a road at sundown, sick with desire as his mind envisioned this very moment, and now himself entering that dream which had stayed with him through the years. Her arms stretched forth for him. But he was not the John Hunter of the vision. He was another man and sick, not with desire, but a torturing unease… . The gout… . He revealed his sickness to her. "Anne, I cannot."

"You are weary," she said. "Perhaps—-—"

"I am more than weary, Anne."

As if she had cried aloud: No more children? I must be content with two?

He answered humbly, "Aye, Anne. No more."

xv

"Now that my children need my personal care less," Anne said, "I intend to take my proper place in society. I am the wife of the King’s Surgeon."

She was very brisk. Her voice was high and nervous, and her fan tapped continually at her breast, or the arm of her chair, or her cheek, or on any object within reach. "I feel we are rapidly out-growing the Jermyn Street house, John. We need a place more commensurate with our position. In the meantime, though, I may have the Jermyn Street house brightened up a bit." She looked about her. "Do you really like this panelling, John? Or would you prefer hangings?"

"Please yourself, Annie," he said gently. "But spare me what expenses you are able. There is a giraffe for sale."

"But you don’t need the giraffe," Anne pointed out reasonably. He replied with more spirit than he had intended. "I do not even have one!"

"Then somehow, John, you must earn more money. If we are to have each of us what we want."

It was shortly after this that Everard, little Everard, lost a considerable sum at gaming. That debt had to be paid at once. Everard, Anne reminded John, was not only his assistant but her brother.

"How like Everard," John said, furiously counting the money he had scraped together for the purpose.

"All young gentlemen will gamble on occasion, John. It is quite fashionable."

"Aye. But how like Everard to lose!"

Anne had placed him in the same predicament as once before. Now he would attend any patient, anywhere, making the call at the end of his day or very early in the morning, or at any hour of the night.

A request came one day for him to attend a patient residing some eight miles from town. He put his preparation aside, saw to it that each of his dissecting students was able to proceed without him, gobbled down some cold chicken and ham, and set out with the messenger in a post chaise. He did not return until late in the evening.

At midnight he stopped work on his preparation long enough to take some caraways to settle his stomach, the sixteen-mile jolting trip having somewhat upset him. But he was suddenly too weary to continue work, and in the face of all his promises to himself to complete the preparation before going to bed, he found himself stumbling tiredly up the stairs.

He undressed rapidly in the dark, hurrying himself so that he could get his rest that much the sooner, and rise early in the morning. He laid himself down.

Elation filled him and he felt his body beginning to rise from the bed. Floating in the air, he felt himself banking as a bird might when he started on to the periphery of the circle. He was unafraid. He gave himself to the ecstasy, whirling in the darkness about that vortex of his being. He began to spread out thin as a sheet of light, while the vortex glowed. Then down, down, spinning less, he felt the vortex diminish. At last it disappeared within him and he was lying on his bed again. He vomited and the vortex came pouring out of him. The unease rushed up to fill the hollow. He was crying now, crying for his dead children, for the young Hewson who had been his friend when he had had no other, for Colin whom he had betrayed, for Anne, for William———Why was he crying for William? He could not remember.

When he awakened he was uncertain of his identity or his where-abouts. He must send out for a surgeon. William Hunter, the surgeon—-The thought of William illuminated his memory as a candle might a dark and crowded cupboard.

Long after the street-criers had come to waken the city he lay abed. His servant came to find him lying in his vomitus and made an outcry. He heard Everard then telling Anne that "dear John" was fatigued and needed only a day’s rest.

He stayed in his bed all that day, not eating, drinking, nor speaking. He was stuporous. Anne was in and out, but Everard had assured her that there was no need for her to be alarmed. "If you will remember, Sister, there was a great row made over his last attack of the gout. What with William Hunter calling in every physician in town, and John insisting that if he had not forced himself to breathe he would have died——"

"And so he would have, Everard! A man cannot live without-——-"

"Breathing," Everard said conclusively, "is necessary for the blood only when it is circulating. As his circulation had stopped there was no reason for his forcing air in and out of his lungs. Had he but rested himself I do believe he would have recovered the sooner. And this time, Anne, there is no problem of breathing and such—-let him rest."

On the second morning John rose at dawn as was his custom. He was restless, ravenously hungry, and unable to concentrate. He went out to the stable and himself hitched up his chariot. Whipping his horses fiercely he clattered through the empty streets, recklessly rounding corners. He stopped at a coffee-house and gorged on butter and tea. He had always loved butter; in his youth he would spread it on everything he ate, much to the dainty disgust of William. Yet he remembered how William had loaded the table with it on his return from the war.

William… . He desperately wanted to see William But William was at the hospital when John arrived in Windmill Street, and John paced the parlour waiting for him to return. Duncan came in several times to see if there were anything Mr. John might require. And the last time Duncan came to make his request he found John seated, hands gripped along the arms of his chair, eyes wild.

They put him in William’s carriage, Duncan and Mr. Cruikshank. John did not know either of them. in his own bed again, he began to rise, to float. Each turn of his head shot his skull out endless yards on the pole of his neck, and he had to extend his energies vast distances to move his tingling hands and feet. Ants crawled the length of his body, needling him with acid, and when at last he gathered his voice to speak to William he said: "I am two feet long, Wullie."

Then, of course, William called a meeting of the Death Club.

He could not bear the piercing May sunshine that penetrated the curtains as easily as if they were made of gauze. Anne directed that a blanket be hung over the windows so that he might gain relief. The fire was screened at night, and he rolled his head into his pillow in agony whenever someone approached him bearing a lighted candle.

The Death Club conferred.

He lay with his hands pressed over his eyes, his ears stuffed with cloth, and his mouth salivating constantly with every new odour that came his way. When the bells of London set up their daily clangour he himself grew brittle as cold, cold metal with the pain of it.

In his receptivity, it seemed to him that his sensory nerves had become thick as tendons, rooting through his flesh, gnarling into bulbs at his fingertips. But he knew who he was now, and where he was.

William told him that he had been force-fed for ten days. Cautiously William asked, "Have the-ah-strange sensations passed off, Brother?"

"I am no longer two feet long," John said dryly, "if that is what is troubling you."

"I did not relish hearing you say that, Jock."

"And to what conclusion did the Death Club come?" There was a frightened silence from William.

"I am jesting, William." John smiled from behind the cloth over his eyes. "What was the diagnosis?"

"Why, a severe affliction of the stomach complicated by a spasm of anxiety of the mind. Bleeding and purging has been an excellent measure in your case."

"Yes," John said, "I have been dosing myself with purges William–-ever I was uneasy… . Tell me, Brother, what is your opinion of my ailment?"

After a long silence William said bleakly, "I think there lie in you the morbific seeds of madness."

"Pray don’t play the Tom Fool," John said irritably. "I haven’t heard anyone speak of ‘morbific seeds’ in twenty years."

William did not reply.

xvi

It was midsummer before he first made his way to the back of the house. The bedrooms of the house students were bare, the beds stripped. He remembered dimly their having come to say farewell to him weeks ago. His dissection room was darkened, as was the museum. His preparations were dusty, and a dusty jar held down a carelessly heaped stack of notes. All was as if he had died, and that part of the house where he had had his being closed off. Everard’s handiwork?

He stumbled to a chair and rested the weight of his jaw on his breast. His hands lying on his knees were scrawny, rope-veined, the knees on which they rested a pair of trembling knots. Some alteration had occurred to his entire constitution this time, he was not convalescing but adjusting to changes that were irreversible. It came to him how protean was this disease which had possession of him, how invidious, and yet—a buffoon among diseases mimicking its fellows, pretending always to be more serious than it really was. Gout, John called it.

Well, he thought, I have work to do, and he rose to open the curtains. The sun from the skylight struck the jars of his preparations. There were thousands of them, temporarily arranged in odd ways which had pleased him. The feather and the shaft of hair, the wing and the arm, the foetus and the seventy-two-hour fertilized egg, the scale and the tooth, the foot and the flipper, the lung and the gill—-what did he mean by them? What could he hope to learn that he might use in surgery? His mind was sluggish, costive. He groped for thoughts. Quickening, growth, reproduction, deterioration, death; all structures, forms, and functions subservient to this simple cycle.

And healing. The elusive factor, yet the one he would learn of above all others. And if he could not study it directly, then he must find where it lay in the pattern, and approach it in that manner.

Thank God, he said to himself, that I have years left to me. I am but forty-eight.

He was so weakened from the gout that he had to lean against a table for support.

When he returned to St. George’s, the faces of his colleagues registered their shock at his wasted appearance. Mr. Gunning’s eyes returned again and again to the stringy calves in the sagging hose. Mr. Hawkins was struck by the grizzled hair. All watched and followed him in horror, as he laboured up the stairs to the wards, staggering, swaying, panting. Yet they dared not offer him their assistance.

He had been back at the hospital but a few days when he removed a cancerous breast. The students ranging around him, the handlers restraining the patient, even Mr. Hawkins and Mr. Gunning who came in for a time, felt a gathering awe as the minutes lengthened into quarter-hours and the quarters into halves. The patient, a woman nearing fifty, gnawed on a stick wrapped with rags, the room echoing with her fierce gruntings and slobberings. Again and again she fainted. Still, the wasted surgeon, waxen with his effort, worked on precisely, carefully. When he turned the knife in his hand to dig out the last of the cancer between the ribs with the handle, and then, with a strange sound of impatience threw the knife to the floor and dug with his fingers instead, a student mumbled to himself and tottered from the room.

John said to the students: "I shall have performed this operation for nothing, if I leave any of the material which might seed another cancer. For though cancer is not flesh, it is of the flesh, and has its own life and growth." He added to their astonished gazes, "As a grain of sand may seed a pearl in an oyster."

In just over an hour he was done, motioning to Everard to perform the bandaging, then wiping his hands on his linen. As he had seen another surgeon do, he came to stand by his patient to look into her fainting gaze. After a time she closed her eyes. "You have been more merciful than I." John said strangely and staggered from the room.

Mr. Gunning found him seated in the anteroom staring at the slimy cloth-wrapped stick, bemused. "Hunter——" Mr. Gunning began, and then noticed for the first time that Hunter’s eyes were no longer mates. One pupil had almost devoured the iris, while the other was but a pinpoint in the faded grey. "She is alive," Gunning said. "You have performed a triumph of surgery, sir."

Mr. Hunter moved a thick tongue along his slack lower lip. "I have failed. In my pond at Earl’s Court I have seeded many a pearl… . And I have learned nothing but the fact that it can be done. We are savages, we surgeons. Good God, that in our ignorance we are willing to go on day after day torturing humans beings as I tortured that woman!"

"You are fatigued," Gunning said, disturbed. He held out a glass of wine he had brought for his colleague. "This will refresh you, sir."

John half rose from his chair to strike the glass from Gunning’s hand, and the wine spattered on them both. "Butchers!" John cried "Tell me, Gunning, is there not something else we call ourselves? We have some pretty term for what we are, do we not? Surely, we do not call ourselves butchers?"

"We are surgeons, John," John Gunning said.

"We are butchers, John," John Hunter contradicted.

He staggered from the anteroom on the arm of his enemy. Together the two surgeons made their way to the hall and the entrance to the hospital. Carefully Mr. Gunning handed his enemy into his chariot, and stood watching as it drove away.

John Hunter gazed out of the window, his ugly massive head swivelling, seemingly, on his shoulders, his eyes drawn still to those of John Gunning.

So they looked at one another for as long as they were able.

The hammering and pounding of the decorators at the Jermyn Street house drove him away to Earl’s Court. He needed more assistance, another young man to share the burden with Everard, for Everard became wan and thin under John’s incessant belabouring. A young Mr. Lynn, an ineffectual former student with wide watering eyes accepted the position. He went with John to Earl’s Court and proved to be efficient, self-effacing, respectful to the point of reverence, and utterly maddening.

Once John pounced on Mr. Lynn so suddenly with the command that he not "drop that jar, you fool!" that the startled Mr. Lynn promptly let it slip from his fingers. "You God damned, son-of-a-——" John began. But instead he sank back into his chair, head cocked, listening. His left hand crept to his chest to lie on it, fingers curled, as if preparing to rap on a door. For over a minute John sat listening in the manner of one seeking to catch a stealthy footfall within. Then his hand fell away.

On his return to Jermyn Street he set up a dispensary for himself in the dissection room: James’s powders, camphorated julep, Hoffman’s anodyne liquor, and his purges. His demeanour was that of a man entrenching himself for war.

He had had his first heart spasm. Hereafter rage was to be a luxury he could not afford.

xvii

To John the world seemed wobbling on its axis, dizzying him. Events came too fast. Anne was babbling of her friend Alice Shippen and Alice’s husband who had signed some outrageous document termed a Declaration of Independence, and John said, "Aye, Shippen, I remember him. He was a student of Wullie’s once, and I——" And Caesar Hawkins was garrulous on the subject of the influx of students at St. George’s, and the resultant necessity for the staff to cut to the bone—pardon, I intended no pun, gentlemen, hee-—all outside activities and devote themselves to training the students as quickly as possible, and John said, "Indeed, Mr. Hawkins, for some years now I have demanded that we lecture to our students. Yet-—-" And Everard came to pose against a shelf of preparations while he languidly announced that he felt it to his best interests that he (Careful, you turd! Do you want to pull the whole shelf down on us? Your heart your heart-—that spasmodic squeeze!) begin his practice of surgery, and apply for a commission in the army, and John shouted, "Gods, you are not planning to leave me now! Clumsy-thumbs that you are, I have come to rely on you, you know my methods—-" And William came to John with a letter from their sister Dorothea, and John sat down to listen quietly, scheming.

Dorothea had been suddenly widowed, and she prayed John and William to undertake the education of her son, Matt Baillie. John narrowed the eyes which were no longer mates. "I’ll have a letter off to Dorothea tonight. Let me think, Matt would be about eighteen now, eh? Ah! Trouble yourself no further about the lad, Wullie. I’ll enter him at the hospital and keep him here with me. I can train him to take the place of?–-"

"Not so fast, Jock," William said, somewhat coldly. "My plans for young Matt include Oxford."

"Oxford! Why stuff his mind with Latin and nonsense?"

"Because he wishes it, I believe."

"The little ass doesn’t know what he wishes. Let us have him stay with me a year or so. Is he a sharp lad, Wullie? I have not had the time to write too often——"

"Very sharp, Jock." William veered in another direction. "When the time comes to educate little Jockie, are you planning to deprive him of——"

"Indeed no! I shall send him to you, Wullie!"

"We are arguing at cross-purposes. Oxford for Matt will not necessarily exclude his coming to stay with you later on. We can decide that when the time——"

"Why do you not wish me to have a decent assistant?"

William was stunned. After a moment, ignoring the hot accusation, he countered with a question of his own. "Brother, why is it that for the last thirty years the very word ‘assistant’ has been like a red rag waved in front of you?"

"I suppose," John said irrationally, "it is that I am upset at Everard’s deserting me. I am overtired… we can discuss our nephew again. We should not settle the matter so lightly."

William had no response to this.

When William returned to London with his nephew in his charge, John was as eager as a bride to meet the young man. He sent William a note, worded with no less emphasis than a subpoena duces tecum, demanding that William appear at once with Matt Baillie. With a sweetness of spirit that went all unapplauded by John, William complied. The journey to fetch Matt had left William’s own gout in full possession of his constitution, and he sagged in his chair by the fire and let John monopolize Matt as he would.

John had eyes only for his nephew. A stocky youth with an open countenance under a somewhat haphazardly controlled blaze of hair stood before him. Stood, John noted with deep approval, on his own two feet, needing no mantel nor chair-back, nor yet a broken Grecian pillar to support him. John beamed, shoving his jaw forward and fixing his gaze with the one wide pupil and the one pinpoint unwaveringly on the youth. Matt returned the smile somewhat warily, but he answered John’s questions readily enough. Yes, Uncle John, he was anxious to go to Oxford; oh, indeed, he wished to become a physician as was his Uncle William; most certainly he was interested in anatomy and surgery—but as subjects ancillary to physic. He considered himself most fortunate in gaining Uncle William’s promise that he would attend the Windmill Street School and be under the direct surveillance of Mr. Cruik-—-

"For God’s sake, Wullie," John snorted. "What’ve you filled his head with?" Without waiting for the startled William to answer, he returned his awesome gaze to Matt. "Now, lad, let us have no more such talk. Your Uncle Wullie and I have arranged that you’re to walk after me at St. George’s, and dissect under me here. Under me. There’s a room for you upstairs, and there’ll be a guinea or so for your pocket-—- Oh, you’ll learn fast, by the look of you, and make me a fine assistant!"

William said levelly, "Jock, I have promised to send Matt to Oxford. As for assistants—were you to control that temper of yours occasionally, you might have less difficulty in finding one."

"Or," John sneered, "were my taste as poor as some I might mention."

"Oh come now," William said in a bored tone. "Let us not stray from the subject. Matt has expressed to me his wish to go to——"

John cut in, crying heartily, "Let Matt speak for himself! What d’ye say, lad?" He extended his jaw at Matt, his tone grew mandatory. "Shall I have a room readied for you to move in tomorrow?"

With both uncles giving him their full attention, young Matt could not maintain even a semblance of a smile. But he was a courageous enough lad for all that, for he looked directly into John’s dis- proportionate gaze and said firmly, "No, Uncle, though I thank you. Oxford is my choice."

The little son-of-a-bitch. Well, what could one expect? His name, after all, was not Hunter but Baillie. A parson’s son… .John sat for long moments staring at Matt, saying nothing, revealing nothing but the devastation his illness had worked on his countenance, and the ferocity of his gaze. At last Matt began to quail.

"Jock," William said in reproval, "are you not going to ask me to see your new additions to your museum?"

"Aye …" John said, concluding his perusal of Matt in his own good time. He led brother and nephew to the back of the house, his feet clumping along the hallway in that strange new walk of his, come on him since he had risen from his sickbed.

While he was showing William his preparations of a double human uterus, with one horn pregnant, and a kangaroo from New Holland, not by so much as an eye beam or an explanatory lift of the voice did he acknowledge the eagerness with which Matt attended to all he said…

Aye, he was disappointed in the lad, but there was more to it than that. William had made a slip with his talk of assistants and John’s temper. William was attempting, then and there, to poison Matt against him. God knew what he had said behind Jock’s back to the lad… . well, they would see. He had not done with the matter yet. His voice was going on and on smoothly, unwinding from the spool of habit. Why had he not had a son like Matt, instead of that delicate duplicate of Everard Anne had given him?

"In truth," John said to Anne at the table that evening, "William has never forgiven us for naming little Jockie after me. He has always wanted a son of his own—that is, he conceived the notion of one when it was too late for him to conceive anything else———-" He became coarse and ugly on the subject, his own impotence galling him.

‘John," Anne managed to interrupt, "even from what you’ve told me, I do not think William means to poison Matt against———"

"God damn you, are you telling me I’m a liar?"

"Allow me to put a bit of butter on your pudding," Anne said hastily.

This was virtually on the eve of Everard’s departure. John was hardly aware of his presence. Everard leaned on the table and sulked all unnoticed.

xviii

When it was, John could not remember, but he knew it was a few months after Everard’s departure that he suspected someone was following him, stalking him. On a white night when he descended from his chariot, and left his widespread tracks behind him in the fresh snow, he saw the ghostly traces of feet that had stood in the street before his house. Someone had stood there long enough for the snow to fill the steps which had led him there, had remained, facing the house, almost until John had arrived and then had hastened away. But only, perhaps, to the corner where he now stood, ever watching. In staggering unease John followed after, came to where the fellow had paused, and then looked along the footprints towards Piccadilly, where a carriage was passing with a high thin screeching of axles and a dreamlike rattling of harness. The carriage passed on, and John was alone in the deserted street where the windows looking down on him shone like black ice, and the falling flakes gathered on his shoulders and on steps and sills and even piled crystal spires on each point of an iron rail at his side. There was no one.

He retraced his steps, to pause at his door, as the other had done. Now only his own tracks remained in the snow, and looking back at them, it came to him with how unsteady a gait they had been made. He remained there, chilled, watching the snow eradicate the marks of his staggering passage, until they could no more be clearly discerned, and then he went in.

In the morning he questioned the servants and his house students and Anne ; but there had been no visitors to his door that they knew of. Quickly enough he forgot the incident, for he had not enough time in a day to think of all that sought for his attention as it was. He had had to move his lectures from his own house to a larger hall to accommodate all those who wished to attend them. For a term he lectured in William’s Anatomical Theatre, but had been uncomfortable there, knowing himself open to comparison with William. He rented then a hall in the Haymarket a few blocks from his house. On fine evenings he walked to and from the lectures with his house students, nagging them the while to keep their grips on the preparations they were carrying. Again, those evenings, he thought he caught fleeting glimpses of someone behind him, or someone waiting in a doorway to see him pass. Yet watch his students as he might, never by so much as the tremor of an eyelid did any of them indicate that they saw the shadow retreating into the doorway, or the flick of a coat into an alley at the instant of a backward glance.

His mind was playing him tricks, then; and he wondered at the perversity of the human mind, that, once seized by a fancy, it took every opportunity, however remote, every clue, however meaningless in itself, as further and irrefutable evidence of the validity of the fancy. It was as if the mind rebelled against the constant discipline of the will and tried to live a secret and exciting life of its own.

In the few times on which he dwelt on his suspicional fancies, there slid into his awareness memories that, in retrospect, seemed real, although they had been dreams. At the time of little Jockie’s birth he had been fatigued and had dreamt that he stood in the moonlight and felt his flesh dissolve; and again during his violent attack of a spring or so ago, he had believed himself to be but two feet long. As was his habit, he made rough notes of his conjectures on such matters and left them to accumulate with hundreds of other notes, surgical, anatomical, physiological, physical, and-—as these were–-philosophical: What we think of when awake, we only see in the mind: eye; but what we think of when asleep appears to be an object immediately of the senses… . we are very apt to go back into the same state when there is a slight tendency to delirium; it may indeed be one of its first symptoms: when the brain is slightly disturbed, as by a fit of gout… . Whatever I conceived in my mind became, at such a time, almost a reality.

Still, on a warm evening when he was returning home from one of his final lectures of the course, his ears singled out from all the noise of the London streets, the fall of those feet which followed him from shadow to shadow and doorway to doorway.

Again he wrote: Anxiety is expressive of the union of two passions, "desire" and "fear". What did he desire? No more than the continuation of his life as it was: his family, his students, his work, his patients. Indeed, he would like an assistant… . well, one would come along––-

What was it he feared?

His hand made a brushing motion. They are all against me, he said to himself.

Anne was impatient to take herself and their two sickly children out to Earl’s Court for the summer. She was going to lay her plans carefully for her assault on fashionable society in the autumn.

Summer too brought Matt Baillie back from Oxford to stay in town with William. And John, having stopped in the School to pick up a preparation he wished to borrow from William’s museum, found his brother out, and Matt in the dissection room alone. John clumped in, swaying slightly, and observed the stocky youth at his task of making an anatomy, a text open near the subject’s head.

"So, learning anatomy from a book, eh?" John said in a disgusted tone.

Matt confessed winningly, "I’ll admit to being lost in the division of the brachial artery, sir."

"And I suppose a book will lead you out! Here, let me see what it says." Snatching up the book, John saw that it was in Latin and let it fall to the floor. "I should have thought you to have gotten you’re belly full of dead languages, by now." He was conscious of growing cranky, irked even. "Give me your probe—damme, look at that hacking! Here is your brachial artery, sir, and you will find it covered in front by the integument. And the Brachialis in behind it, separating it from-—-— Matt, you will not be returning to Oxford, will you?"

"Why, yes, sir, Uncle—-" Again Matt met the strange stare, the calculating inspection which Uncle John bent on his face.

"Do they," John asked, his gaze fixed, "still let hanged men rot in gibbets in Oxford?"

"Sir?"

"Do the fine young students of Oxford still learn their anatomy from books while fresh subjects rot in the sun and heat?"

"I have seen no one hanged in Oxford, sir."

"Ah." There was a sly note in John’s voice, a waggish tilt to his head now. "Let me think; you are a Balliol College man, are you not?"

"Yes, Uncle."

"I was a St. Mary’s Hall man myself" John said. ‘He laughed with great appreciation of his witticism, repeating it several times. "… was a St. Mary’s Hall… . Oh indeed, a St. Mary’s——-"

Matt endeavoured to laugh also, but succeeded in producing only an uncertain smile. "Yes, sir."

"Oh, get on with your dissection," John said abruptly. "I am speaking of things that happened before you were born… . Tell Wullie I shall wait on him another day, lad."

Mr. Lynn, the silent and cowed, suffered exceedingly that afternoon. Mr. Hunter was in the worst of tempers and God Himself would have been hard put to please him.

xix

With the regularity of one given to fits, John created his scenes in the Board Meetings of the hospital. By now the gentlemen were so used to Mr. Hunter’s tirades that they had long since grown deaf to them. Caesar Hawkins, newly Sir Caesar Hawkins, merely sat and listened to the sound of his own windy breathing, flanked as he was by recent additions to the staff-—his son and his nephew. Mr. Bromfield wearily closed his eyes, and only Mr. Gunning paid Hunter the respect of pretending to follow the harangue at all. Mr. Hunter had come to the conclusion that the gentlemen should lecture to the students, as was Mr. Percival Pott lecturing----- Mr. Gunning discovered a button on his coat to be loose. With a surgical nicety he plucked at the end of the thread until he had drawn it taut. He began to wrap the thread around the shank of the button.

At the end of the meeting Mr. Gunning attempted to humour the carping Hunter. "Lord, sir, it is enough as it is to cope with the students on the wards. I look forward to the end of the American War as a time of peace at St. George’s also. And perhaps then, with fewer students about——"

"And you think the war has caused the influx of students, sir?" Mr. Hunter demanded loudly, supporting himself against a table.

The question was so obvious that Mr. Gunning blinked, surely he had not heard correctly. "Do I think it is the-—" he repeated after Hunter, stammering.

"Well, it is not the war," Hunter was crying. He was to tremble, his gaze growing wild. "No, this plethora of students of which it pleases you to complain, exists because of me. They come to walk after me, Mr. Gunning!"

Mr. Gunning drew in his breath, said, "Hunter, you must be––" expelled his breath and came to a stop.

Mr. Hunter fell back into his chair, his head pulled into his collar, his forehead dotted with sweat. He glared at the gentlemen impartially. "… against me," he muttered. "Why?"

Sir Caesar Hawkins observed, "I find it oppressively warm and humid for October, gentlemen."

Mr. Gunning, watching Hunter covertly, anxiously, suddenly looked down to find the button in his hand. Damme, when had he torn it off?

George Fordyce, who had wandered into the house on Jermyn Street around two one morning in search of companionship, was treated to John’s version of the scene. Quietly Dr. Fordyce said, "Jock, your temper will kill you one of these days if you are not careful."

"Aye," John said, "I am at the mercy of any rogue who chooses to tease me."

Dr. Fordyce fell silent.

xx

John came raging out of his museum, bawling at the startled Mr. Lynn and causing his scalpel to jump in his hands. "Where in hell is my double-horned uterus?" was the burden of John’s complaint.

"Why, sir, did I not mention———"

"Mention what, Lynn?"

"That Dr. Hunter has the loan of it, sir."

"And by whose authority does Dr. Hunter have the loan of it?"

Mr. Lynn swallowed.

"Well, Lynn?"

"But, sir, Dr. Hunter has always-—— There have been many times in the past when you have not been here and I was happy to serve Dr.—- I should say, I was permitted to extend to Dr. Hunter___"

"Very well," John snapped. "But in future I would take it as a kindness were you to inform me when my brother is here."

"But Dr. Hunter did not come for the preparation himself," Mr. Lynn said, happy at last that he had found an exit to the conversation. "just Mr. Cruikshank."

"Mr. Cruikshank?"

"Dr. Hunter’s assistant," Mr. Lynn heard himself saying with idiotic fervour.

"Are you trying to wave a red rag in front of my face?" John demanded.

Mr. Lynn became frightened. Mr. Hunter had been acting strangely all winter. There was no answer to such a question. Denial would only impure to him a knowledge he did not have, and assent was, most certainly, out of the question. Mr. Lynn sat mutely debating the point while Mr. Hunter threw up the window and began shouting at the stable-boy to bring out his chariot.

When John stepped down from his chariot the chill wind rushing down Windmill Street cooled the heat of his face. Brushing aside Duncan, who had hastened to him as he entered, John stumped through a room full of students busy at their dissections, and into William’s museum. There he found Mr. Cruikshank, glass of claret at his elbow, neat legs extended towards the fire, peacefully at work at his cataloguing of William’s museum. Looking up, Mr. Cruikshank smiled and rose deferentially, hastening forward to greet John. Partner, John’s mind said. Wullie’s partner. He began to throb with the old jealousy and fear of usurpation. "Give me my preparation," he said in a cold blunt voice.

After an instant Mr. Cruikshank recovered, and nodding his neatly powdered head, murmured, "At once, Mr. Hunter. Permit me to draw up a chair to the fire, sir. May I offer you some claret? Dr. Hunter is on a call, but I expect him at any——-"

"Spare me your coxcornbitries," John said in the same iron tone. "And give me my preparation which you stole from me. "

Mr. Cruikshank’s poise was not such that he could control his start of surprise at the accusation. "Stole?" he echoed, but as if reaching some decision even as his mouth remained open to continue, he turned smartly on his heel and went to take the preparation from the shelf. His comely features were devoid of expression as he placed the jar in John’s extended hands. Only his mouth trembled almost imperceptibly, and that was but a single twitch.

"Thank you," John said. He clasped the preparation to his breast and withdrew his great head farther into his shoulders. The gelid eyes with the disproportionate pupils began a careful study of each of Mr. Cruikshank’s features.

Mr. Cruikshank rallied all his forces and submitted to the examination without moving a single muscle not necessary for breathing. At last John smiled, revealing strong yellowed teeth. "Heh," he remarked. He might have been talking to a third person in the room. He laughed in sudden disparagement of what he saw. "Heee … hah!" And when Mr. Cruikshank shifted a foot ever so slightly, John was triumphant. "And he calls himself my brother’s partner!’ he observed to that third person who was not present.

It had been his parting remark, though he could not contain his amusement at the spectacle of Mr. Cruikshank’s rigidity even as he stumbled back through William’s dissection room, clutching the preparation to his chest.

He laughed aloud in his chariot on his return home, braying his hilarity to the world. But when he had drawn up before his door, he sat on hugging his preparation, unable to move, gripped by a strange despondency. A thought rose to the surface: I must take another purge.

William’s note read:

Sir: 

Would you oblige me by choosing a day which will be most convenient for you to receive the return of your preparations? I shall send one of my students in the carriage with them to ensure their safe arrival. I remain your humble servant,

Wm. Hunter

"Tell him," John said to Duncan, "that he may please himself as to the day. My students or Mr. Lynn will accept the preparations if I am not here."

"Yes, Mr. John. Good day, Mr.-——"

"Duncan!"

"Yes, Mr. John?"

"How long have you known me?"

Duncan stared at the ceiling, moving his lips and tapping his ﬁngers the while against his thighs to aid in his calculations. "Why, dear me, sir, above thirty years."

"And have I changed? Other than the normal ravages of time?" Duncan permitted himself to smile, a seamed echo of his old sauce. "Mr. Jock, I would not say yew have changed at all. I would say—- only that yew have become more so."

John grunted his satisfaction. William had overstepped himself sending his pet fop to steal the double—horned uterus. He would see his error; he would come round.

xxi

That William was far from coming round was pleasantly apparent to the gentlemen of the Royal Society. The meeting had been dull; a mathematics gentleman had read a paper that seemed but an arbitrary rearrangement of the alphabet, with heavy emphasis on x, y, and z. Very dull. Moreover it was raining, and the room was damp and chilly. When the meeting was over the gentlemen had risen, yawning, to engage in idle chit-chat. Mr. Joseph Banks voice could be heard warmly congratulating the speaker on his marvellous presentation. Humbug! Joe was over—impressed at all times. His enthusiasm was too boring, too tiresome to be—- Ah?

Two groups of gentlemen had broken apart to reveal the Hunter brothers confronting one another. The atmosphere was tense. Mr. John Hunter swayed, but with an effort drew the heel of one foot to the instep of the other. He made his leg.

Dr. William Hunter, never more elegant, returned with his most genteel leg.

Not a word was exchanged. Each Hunter then went his way. Ah, something delicious was afoot! But what?

Several there were who did not ﬁnd the rift between the brothers amusing. Dr. George Fordyce was distressed, a certain courtly Dr. Maxwell Garthshore (he had openly declared Mr. John Hunter a genius, once) was painfully embarrassed, Robert Mylne was mortiﬁed (disgusting, such conduct), certain members of the Death Club considered the quarrel (whatever it was) unbecoming, and Joe Banks was actually grieved. There was also the danger of schism within the Society itself, and this too fretted Joe Banks, for he loved the Society and all that it represented when at its best.

There were visits to both brothers; there were sessions and pleadings and exhortations and summonses to attend to reason. But William remained embayed in his Windmill Street School, and John busied himself with his own students and with plaguing the staff of St. George’s.

The Hunter brothers continued to bow formally when encountering one another at the meetings.

George Fordyce, urged on by Joe Banks, came to the Jermyn Street house late one night to plead again the cause of reconciliation. He found John in his museum hard at work dictating to Mr. Lynn.

"Might I speak to you in private, Jock?" Fordyce began, but Mr. Lynn was already rushing his pale self from the room.

John was all cordiality. "Pray sit down, George. Here, let me ﬁnd you a glass. I have not had wine at this hour of the night in months—-years! And here you have come to join me! Let me move these notes and you can-—"

"More discoveries?" Fordyce said-—-fatuously—but it was obvious that he thought he had to say something.

"Aye, I’m readying another paper for the Society. I can use your help. My prose does not exactly threaten the stature of the great Sam Johnson, you will admit!" John laughed; he was most pleased with himself this night.

"Well, what have we discovered now, Jock?"

Again John laughed, secretively, savouring the moment. "Why, he said, elaborately casual, "I have decided to present a paper on my discovery of the uterine and placental circulation, George."

Dr. Fordyce raised a hand in the air as if warding off a blow. "You have made a new discovery on the placental circulation?" he said at last.

"You know as well as I, that I made the discovery twenty-ﬁve years ago, John said curtly. His serenity was dissolving somewhat. "Well—I am now to claim it."

"I wish that you would not do this, Jock."

"Not communicate my discoveries to the Society! Then what is the purpose of the Society, pray? I should have thought the Society the exact and proper place, the ideal forum, in which to bring forward————"

"Jock, oratory ill becomes you. Pray to let me speak without interruption, would you?"

John turned his disparate glance on his friend. "You have always thought that I stole the discovery from Colin. Always! I have seen it in your eyes when you and Colin and I would talk near the matter. You were always in fear I would touch on it and-—"

"Colin himself told me years ago that you had done the preparations. Had made the discovery," Fordyce put in earnestly. "He admitted freely that he had only stumbled across it, but would never have made anything of it, had you not come to Smellie’s house with him that day. No, Jock, Colin was never hurt that you had taken the discovery from him."

"Aye, but he was hurt! For what reason, then?"

Pulled by the intensity of John’s strange eyes, Fordyce could not drop his own. "Because you gave it to … your brother, without consulting Colin in any way, you let Dr. Hunter announce the discovery at a soiree—of sorts-the very next night."

"Ah! Old Smelly Smellie did not care for that either, I recollect!" John did not himself applaud his vicious snigger.

Fordyce rose. "Strange. Here it is a few minutes past midnight, and yet I must say that I am weary and ready for my bed. Good night, Jock. No need to see me out, I know my way well. Too well, perhaps."

"Then you will not read over my paper before I present it?"

"You know that I will not, Jock."

"Very well, George. Then you will hear me read it to the Society!"

"I most sincerely hope not," Dr. George Fordyce said.

Suddenly John cried, "A question before you go!"

"Yes, Mr. Hunter?"

John set himself to watch Fordyce’s face closely, to read every expression, however ﬂeeting, thereon. "When you came in tonight… . Did you notice anyone? Near my door, say?"

"Notice? Notice who?"

I must be wary, I like not that sudden innocence. George is very crafty on occasion. John smiled. "Ah, that is a question, eh, George?" He was bent over his notes again even before Fordyce had gained the door.

John read his paper to the Society just before the end of the year. Dr. William Hunter sat in his seat listening calmly. It was as if he had never heard of the placental circulation in all his life; had never claimed it regularly year after year in all his courses; had never published it in several of his works; had never claimed it for himself alone in any way. At the close of the meeting Dr. Hunter rose with a glacial poise. He bowed here, murmured a greeting there. He made mention of a most pressing engagement and departed in a whiff of delicate scent. Oil of roses, one gentleman thought it was.

Early in February Dr. William Hunter addressed a letter to the President of the Society. In it he pointed out that Mr. John Hunter was mistaken if he did not think that Dr. William Hunter had ﬁrst discovered the doctrine of the circulation of the foetus in utero. He had made the discovery, he had claimed it, and his claim had been admitted by all for a number of years. True, Mr. Hunter had been his assistant at the time, and Dr. Hunter had given him his due credit in his published works. But Dr. Hunter was even more tenacious of truth than of anatomical discoveries, and he prayed the Society’s Council to seek out and determine the matter on its merits.

The Society listened to Dr. Hunter’s letter.

The Society then listened to Mr. John Hunters rejoinder. Mr. John Hunter, it appeared, was as tenacious of anatomical discoveries as Dr. Hunter. Mr. Hunter went on to relate the events of that day, so long ago, in which the late Dr. Mackenzie had sought him out on the matter. Mr. Hunter went on to beg the Society to consider that were Dr. Hunter to put forward proof that he had made the discovery prior to that day, that the Society would then excuse Mr. John Hunter for having troubled it with the matter.

The Society decided to drop the issue.

Besides, the mathematics gentleman wished to read another paper. Old X and Y and on occasion Z bumbled to the podium.

Joseph Banks had but one question, and one or two comments, after which, he vowed, he would never mention the subject to John again. "Jock, I am going to break a promise I made to a dying man to speak of this to you. Before he died, and for the first time in our acquaintance, Colin Mackenzie let mention of this matter cross his lips to me. He told me of the discovery and of its consequences his loss of his position with Dr. Smellie, as well as that gentleman’s respect forever. But he did not complain to the physical world of your brother’s theft because he thought it more important that you and William continue on together. He felt—pray, let me proceed— that you had in you the seeds of greatness (as your brother did to a lesser extent) and that he would serve the world ill if he allowed so petty a thing to come between you. That is why, even though Dr. Hunter sought him out time and again to become his assistant—-—"

"You are lying!" John cried.

"–---to become his assistant. Colin refused. He supposed that in his way your brother was seeking to make amends. Yet he could not be certain that that was the way of it. Who can say? But even when you were—ill——just before you entered the army, even then, Colin would not join your brother. He did not want to step into a breach lest he widen it. And remember, Jock, he had not seen you for a number of years by then. Later, of course, your brother acquired the assistance of Dr. Hewson. Very well, Jock, turn your head away, pretend to yourself you cannot hear what I am saying; But it is only the truth I speak now. As it happened, you made your way without your brother. Though not entirely, I should say. I suppose you were destined, or doomed, to cudgel your way through this world in behalf of your work. But Colin could not have known that. He had always feared that because you were without a classical education and—-"

"Ignorant? Say it, Joe, that I was ignorant and unlettered! Have you never heard of the word ‘dolt’, you liar? Can you not mouth a simple word such as that when speaking of me?"

"–and without any desire to obtain one," Banks continued on resolutely, "that any attempt of yours to practise surgery would end in failure. He wished above all to see you remain with your brother, to remain his-—anatomist. Colin never felt it of much importance who claimed the discoveries, but only that they were made." Banks had ﬁnished his say.

John sat smiling at him, head pulled low, jaw thrust out. "And your question, Joe?" he asked softly, gently even. "You made mention of some question you wished to put to me?"

"Why, only this: why did you wait until now to give Colin the recognition you owed him? Why have you besmirched the memory of one of the kindest men who ever lived, and made it a bone of contention between yourself and your brother? Jock, are you mad?"

"Quite a flock of questions," John commented with a sneer.

"I cannot understand you, Jock. Your brother—well, I must admit that he has acted all the way according to his own lights. But you!"

"Then, if I baffle you, why do you not seek company more comprehensible to–—"

"I am not going to let you drive me away, John Hunter. You will not alienate me with your childish tantrums and storms. I do not care a ﬁg for your temper. I will remain your friend for as long as I choose, and for the same reasons Colin did. And because I am your friend I ask you to approach your brother and apologize."

"You’re the one who is mad!"

"I should never have used that word," Banks admitted. "Will you do it, Jock?"

John cursed and struggled to his feet. Bracing himself against the table, he exhausted every oath and insult he knew. Then, panting and pale with the pain about his heart, he slumped again into his chair.

Joseph Banks, pale himself, got to his feet. He gathered up his muff and hat, and looking down on the grizzled hair and the squat body sprawled in the chair, he said, "I shall never understand why God chose to cram a giant into such a pygmy as you, John Hunter."

Nor did Joseph Banks ever mention the rift between the brothers again. Months later, when he became the President of the Society, he was equally gracious to each Hunter. The Society was beginning to forget the matter, until Dr. Hunter missed several meetings in succession.

Now it was no longer a titbit of gossip, this bitter enmity between the Hunters. The subject had become painful to all, for Dr. William Hunter was dying. The Death Club was shortly to convene.

xxii

Their carriages were lined up and down Windmill Street when John arrived in his chariot. There were Dr. Pitcairn, Sir George Baker, Dr. Herberdeen, Dr. Garthshore, Sir Caesar Hawkins, and Dr. George Fordyce. The consensus was that William was dying of gout of the stomach. He had been stricken on Wednesday by a wandering gout. Thursday he had collapsed during his lecture. Since then he had passed no urine, and now, Friday afternoon, Mr. John Hunter, the surgeon, had come to introduce the catheter. Purgative medicines had been administered repeatedly, Dr. Pitcairn said in warning, but had produced no effect. The gout had undoubtedly come to settle in the stomach.

Young Matt Baillie was keeping watch outside the sickroom, and down the corridor sat Mr. Cruikshank, head bent, eyes on the ﬂoor. He might have been weeping.

John stood in the doorway looking at the dying William. The wrinkled bald skull barely pressed into the pillow. The ruined face returned his gaze with bleary eyes. The shrunken mouth cowering under the overhang of the nose was grave. Then John started forward, lumbering with his feet wide apart, his clothing hanging from his great bones in disarray, and his gaze wild with one eye wide with fear or pain and the other a pinpoint of suspicion and some other emotion—hatred or perhaps anger.

When he had gained the bed, John sank into a chair and opened his instrument bag. Silently he performed his task, and as silently, William submitted to his ministrations. Only as John was wiping the catheter on the bed-clothes did William speak for the ﬁrst time. "It is not an unpleasant task, Jock. This dying …"

"Aye. But it is poor work for all of that, Wullie."

William Hunter smiled.

"I see," John went on, "that you’ve parted at last with that molar."

"It parted with me."

As if the exchange had been momentous and therefore tiring, William turned his head away, closing his eyes. John was dismissed. only when John had gained the door did William say, as if remembering not so much his manners as his old loftiness to John, "My thanks … Brother." And he died a bit more, even in the saying of it. He would not open his eyes.

John rode home in his chariot, his thoughts chaotic. Scenes that had taken place between himself and William years before came vividly to mind. His lips moved, he gestured, now in good-humoured raillery, now in a fury.

When he stopped before his door, another chariot hastened past the house. Had it not been standing in Windmill Street when he had left William’s house?

Yet again the Death Club met. When John came in, George Fordyce rushed to his side. "Jock, you must remember your own condition-—-—"

"How is Wullie?"

"He is dead. Only a few minutes before you arrived, Dr. Hunter went peacefully in his—-—"

"Did he say anything? He must have said something!"

"He was not conscious, Jock."

At that moment Mr. Cruikshank came down the stairs. His face was streaked with red where he had been smearing the carmine on his cheeks by wiping away his tears. Behind him was young Matt Baillie.

John turned away from George Fordyce and made his way over to his nephew. The gentlemen in the room grew silent, so that John’s feet sounded loudly on the floor. To one with his eyes closed it would have been like listening to some wounded cumbersome beast dragging itself to its lair.

Into Matt’s solemn and sorrowful face John shouted, "Well, lad, are you ready to come with me now? Eh?" Then because Matt’s expression grew bewildered, John reduced his voice with an effort. "Time you became my assistant, eh, lad?" he wheedled.

"Jock, for God’s——" Fordyce began, taking his arm.

"Oh, he’ll come round soon enough!" John assured Fordyce. "You may rely on that!" And with one last sly glance in Matt’s direction he was ready to quit the Windmill Street School forever.

Outside a pelting rain had begun to fall. John stumbled down the steps, clinging to the rail with one hand and motioning for his chariot with the other. He slowed when he saw that someone was waiting by the door of his chariot, oblivious to the rain, oblivious, by his blinkless gaze, to all the World but the sight of John Hunter staggering, wide-legged towards him.

A face John had not seen for years looked at him from under a dripping hat. The pale skin, the protuberant eyes, the wet corners of the mouth were unchanged. The very face itself seemed to pulse with excitement, as if some great heart were beating inside the head. "Ah, there you are, Jock!" Jesse Foot cried in the intimate tone of one who knows a secret.

"Let me be," John said dully. "My brother has just died… . Let me go home."

"I must go with you," Jesse Foot said earnestly. "You need me, and I am here." He reached out to touch John.

John stumbled back and shouted his driver’s name. He grabbed for the door of the chariot to keep from falling, hanging there, his wild gaze locked in Jesse Foot’s, until the driver came to lift him under the arms. "Here we are, Mr. Hunter, sir… . Let me help you up."

Jesse Foot smiled.

As the chariot started off, Jesse raised his arms and waved. Except for that one gesture, he stood there in the rain, motionless. It seemed to John as they turned the corner that Jesse was still smiling intimately at him under his dripping hat.

xxiii

He had a spasm on the way home. The servants had to carry him into the house. Anne came running to his side as they laid him on the sofa in the parlour.

"Jock, is it bad this time?"

He pulled her hand against his mouth. "You called me ‘Jock’."

Anne looked over him to a servant. "Go and get Dr. Fordyce. You’ll probably ﬁnd him at Dr. Hunters."

"Dr. Hunter is dead," John said.

Anne laid her cheek against his. "You must lie quietly. You are very ill. I’ve sent for George."

"George Fordyce knows no more than I what ails me, Annie."

(The spasm was severe. For a day or so he could not so much as raise a glass to his mouth, for he was not only weak, but uncoordinated. Syphilis is a protean disease. His motor system was awry, he had locomotor ataxia; his heart was damaged, he had coronary disease; and most tragic of all, not his genius, but his mind was affected. The disease had long since altered, now it was about to destroy.)

xxiv

The ﬁrst Saturday in April, 1783, at eight o’clock in the evening, Dr. William Hunter was interred in the vault under St. James’s Church. One of the greatest men of John Hunter’s day was gone.

John Hunter was not there to say his farewells.

V Dusk

Two monsters were abroad in London. One was a true giant, a lad to be exact, who at twenty-one was upwards of eight feet tall. The other was Mr. Hunter, the peculiar surgeon, who, though an inch or so over five feet, gave the distinct impression of being an enormous dwarf. To each of these phenomenons London was paying its affectionate attention. The young giant exhibited himself for money; Mr. Hunter admitted a number of the select to his museum for nothing, and to his surgery for whatever fee he had the audacity to exact at the moment. On occasion, however, Mr. Hunter might be pleased to charge no fee whatsoever for his ministrations, this being considered by many to be only fair, in that his methods of treatment ranged variously from the merely unorthodox to the wildly notional. Entering the sphere of Mr. Hunter’s activities often led to a cure that was as unexpected as it was unaccountable; nearly always the venture proved to be diverting (in retrospect) and something to talk about at a party.

In short, above royalty and war even, London had ever loved a spectacle, and never more than when it was bizarre or naughty, or best, brutal. From the animal baitings to the pillories and hangings the populace had enjoyed itself hugely over the years. When times were dull there had always been a grave-robber or two scheduled to be flogged through the streets or, perhaps, an enterprising gourmet who was willing to bet—and win—against all takers that he could consume a live cat, fur, teeth, meat, and all but the very skeleton.

Still, times were changing: All the Gallants were now gouty and tiresome, while their sons, the Coxcombs, and their grandsons, the Macaronis, had grown as wearily knowing as the century. The Italianate influence had bled the lustiness from London, the town had become a touch cloyed. The most popular spectacles were those which touched off scorn rather than horror. It was a lark to take tea with the wealthy faker, Martin Van Butchel, because he himself was such a silly earnest buffoon, not because the corpse of his wife still sat in its glass cage in the parlour. His eager courtesy, his humility in the presence of the fashionable-----many of whom had far less money than he-----was so ridiculous. Simply, it was that hangings and the like were outmoded by taste as well as custom, for after ’83 the gloriously entertaining mornings at Tyburn were to become a memory—the law had decreed no more hangings under the fine old tree.

Well, an era was ending, one had to accept it. Soon the nineteenth century would be rounding the corner.

The fashionable ones, sighing over their cups at Van Butchel’s mansion in Grosvenor Square, spoke of the failing Sam Johnson and smiled in a bored fashion at the mention of his drunken surgeon, the precious Mr. Cruikshank. Reminded one of Dr. William Hunter—- oh, will you ever forget his manipulations of his snuffbox? The fashionable ones drifted past the withering corpse of Mrs. Van Butchel on their way to the door. Covent Garden next? Yawning, they agreed on it. Covent Garden and Dr. Katterfelto it was.

Dr. Katterfelto lived and roamed the world in a great caravan filled with some thirty or so black cats. At the present he had dropped anchor in the Garden. The cats lolled about in the caravan, undisturbed by the Londoners who trooped in to peer down the Solar Microscope and watch tiny insects swimming about in drops of milk or blood. Those very insects, Dr. Katterfelto claimed seriously, were the single cause of influenza and almost any other disease one might care to name. Kill the insects and one killed the disease.

Where next? From the Garden one could repair to Mr. Hunter’s magnificent new establishment in Leicester Square where he had joined two houses by a great glassed—over amphitheatre, and which housed, among other things, the jaw of a whale. Having stomached as much as one could of Mr. Hunter’s preparations, one wandered in the evening to Adelphi Street where Dr. Graham’s Temple of Health was situated. Here one sat in "electrickal" chairs, backside tingling not unpleasantly, and listened to a titillative lecture. The electricity was declared most stimulating to the—–. Ah well, the fortunate ones, who had booked their reservations well in advance, were now ready for the Celestial Bed. The bed was also "electrickal", so that, as Mr. Graham had it, the moment critique was expanded into the Heure critique, and the "electrickal" current enabled one to endure such ferocious pleasure. The price was fifty pounds per Heure critique,

Whether one supplied one’s own partner, or Mr. Graham made up the deficiency with a member of his staff.

There was some little reluctance among the ladies to place their entire faith in electricity, in or out of the Celestial Bed. One’s husband, galvanized or no, was still he of the faulty or indifferent furnishings. No, the ladies preferred to gaze on the young giant, O’Brien, speculating aloud while he giggled and blushed. He was a very handsome young giant. Very gentle, and, had they but known it, very frightened.

Giants are short-lived, and O’Brien, nearing twenty-two, was ill. Spirits had been forbidden him, and yet he found no ease except in gin. While the ladies crowded outside his tent, the young giant put his eye to the peekhole and then sobbed. At the very edge of the crowd there stood the mad surgeon, Mr. John Hunter, his gaze so fond, so yearning, that it had seemed to the giant that it fingered him longingly as he exhibited himself before the crowd. Mr. O’Brien fell away from the peek-hole and into a chair built for him alone. He put his huge frightened countenance into his shovel-hands and wept. After a time his sobbing brought up flecks of blood from his lungs, and not all the comforting of his manager, not even the promises of the pock-marked gentleman who sneaked him gin, could assuage his terror. He clung to them, nearly crushing their shoulders, and whimpered, "Don’t let him anatomize me. Promise me you won’t let him get me!"

They assured him. They recited again for him how they would place his body in a carriage and take him to the middle of the Westminster Bridge. There they would weigh him down with a ton of stones, if necessary, and cast him into the waters. His bones would lie at rest on the bed of the Thames forever.

"Not even mad John Hunter will be able to dredge you up," the pock-marked gentleman said earnestly. "And he can’t very well anatomize you at the bottom of the Thames."

Young O’Brien opened his great blue eyes and let drop from them his final teaspoonful-size tears. "I’m so afraid of that dreadful little man …I, a giant… . But I am afraid!"

"You’re safe with me!" the pock-marked gentleman said, as he had many a time before. "Ain’t I the one who brings you a drop of something every night? Ain’t I your truest friend?"

"Oh, sir," the giant quavered, "in the few months I’ve known you, why—why, you’ve become like a father to me. Wullie I am dead"—here he paused to gather up the remnants of his courage—"and gone, you are the only one who will remain faithful to my body. It is my one comfort, Mr. Howison, when I think on how soon my lungs will give out and my breath … desert … me. I know that as long as I am in your hands my fears are groundless. As," he added, somewhat lost in the fervour of his declaration, "as will be my body."

"Oh, groundless indeed!" Mr. Howison echoed heartily.

The O’Brien remains cost Mr. Hunter over five hundred pounds in bribes alone, and he had to borrow the money at that. The sensation—seekers called him a fool even as they left his Museum where the skeleton was on view. So many there were who wondered how Mr. Hunter, for all his enormous practice and teaching and hospital situation, could afford to spend as he did on his house and Museum. Most especially since Mrs. Hunter lived as lavishly as an heiress. One lady (the wife of a tradesman) had the answer: "My dear, they simply don’t pay their bills."

"I would imagine that he once had some notion of breaking his brother’s Will, then. A good sum of money to be had there!"

"No … I do not believe so. Though it could easily have been, and I not have known of it. Speaking of Dr. Hunter, have you seen that Mr. Cruikshank lately?"

"Ah yes. Such a pity! He and his wine should come to some agreement."

A titter. "Perhaps, my dear, he is still celebrating!"

ii

After the reading of Dr. William Hunters will, young Matt Baillie had gone to call on his surviving Uncle John. Matt was the sole heir. To him went the property in Scotland where both uncles and his mother had been born, the use of the Windmill Street School for thirty years, and the sum of eight thousand pounds to maintain the museum. Should Matt die before the end of the thirty years, Mr. Cruikshank would enjoy the use for the remainder of the time. At the end of the period, the University of Glasgow was to inherit all except the farm in Scotland in fee.

Matt had repaired with some misgivings to see his Uncle John, for he knew that his uncle was full of grandiose plans concerning a pair of houses in Leicester Square. He was in little doubt as to the mood in which he would find his uncle.

He came upon Uncle John at his work, as always, jaw hanging over his probe, feet planted flat on the floor to maintain his balance. He must be tortured with gout, Matt thought, but removed all traces of pity from his face as the great head swung up and the disturbing gaze sought his. "Well, lad?"

"I’ve come to—— Sir, I have come to the conclusion that Uncle William’s will did not represent his true wishes on the matter."

"Ah?" Uncle John showed his yellow teeth. "Well? Speak up! How much have you decided to share with me ?"

Matt faltered, matters were proceeding too hastily; he sought to collect himself. The making of a generous offer, countered with modest refusals, these overriden with impassioned urgings, and all capped with a reluctant but overwhelmingly grateful acceptance, was one thing. To find oneself bullied, nay, literally lifted from the floor and shaken until the coins flew from one’s very pockets-—. Still, Uncle John had not moved, but was only fixing that terrible regard on him, and smiling. The yellow canines curving backwards in Uncle John’s jaw reminded him of some preparation or other, and when the resemblance came to Matt he had to fight against an almost overpowering desire to turn around and look at it. On a shelf behind him, in Uncle John’s extraordinary exhibition of the weapons and tools allotted to animals, there was the head of an American rattlesnake—Crotalus horridus——with the jaws spread wide and the venom fangs brought forward into the striking position. The Deity preserve me, Matt thought, flustered, I will not permit myself to imagine that Uncle John’s teeth fold back into his head when he closes his mouth. He is a kind man and my mother’s bro––-

"Speak up, Matt!"

"The Scotland property, sir," Matt managed. "I want you to have it. The—er—other is not at my disposal."

"Ah."

Matt cleared his throat. "I am bound by the will–-"

"And what am I to do with a scrap of land in the middle of Scotland?"

Indeed, Matt had no idea.

"You are too generous, lad," Uncle John said suddenly. His accompanying smile was surprisingly sweet, affectionate.

Matt bit his lips, he distrusted that smile. Was his uncle mocking him? They are saying he is peculiar, Matt’s mind muttered in caution. But Uncle John was dropping the subject as casually as if they had been discussing the weather. "I suppose," he was now remarking idly, "you and the elegant Mr. Coxcomb are planning to set yourselves up as teachers in the School?"

A slip of the tongue surely. "Yes, sir. Mr. Cruikshank and I are already in receipt of a number of applications for our autumn course."

"My!" Uncle John breathed. "Under the circumstances, I was indeed the old fool to ask you to come to me as my assistant that day, eh? Here you are, at twenty-two, the owner of the finest anatomy school in the world!"

"I am most fortunate, Uncle."

"Heh! Most fortunate! Your discoveries are yours. Your preparations are yours. Gods, the School is yours? At twenty-two. Two years older than I… Just two years older. And no Wullie to——" Of a sudden Uncle John turned away. "No Wullie."

Matt occupied himself for some moments with a perusal of the museum. After a decent interval he said tentatively, "Uncle?"

But Uncle John was staring at the air in front of him, dry-eyed now, though one last tear dropped unnoticed from his chin.

"I will have the deeds of the Scotland property drawn up at once, Uncle," Matt said loudly.

He doubted if his uncle heard him. After a while Matt silently went away.

And just before Mr. Hunter was preparing to move into his new house in Leicester Square, another young man sought his presence. Everard Home was back from the army, powdered hair, exquisite ears, and all, intact. Everard readily admitted that he had not cared for the army, it had been too stultifying, too—-—-

"Rigorous?" John Hunter supplied for him.

"Not at all," Everard said stiffly. "It was merely that I was completely inable to serve my patients in the manner I felt best."

"And what manner was that?"

Everard wondered when the old fool had developed that exacerbating habit of smiling, or sneering, really, when the occasion in no wise warranted it. Ignoring the question, Everard resumed, "So, I have not quite made up my mind as to what my present course will be. Naturally, Anne suggested-—"

"Naturally!"

(Damn that smile of his! Why—— Why, his eyes are strange also!) "And Robbie is in favour of it too, I assume," John was saying. Everard grew confused. "My father? Would favour what?"

"Your resuming your place here as my assistant."

Everard leaned backwards for a support, felt his spare backside come in contact with the edge of a table, and began to pose gracefully. "Why, as to that—— I suppose I might consider the situation. For a time at least, until I-—-"

"Oh la!" John cried. "Pray——" But he could not continue for his laughter.

Everard waited him out, making no attempt to conceal his disgust. When John had subsided, tears of mirth still wet in his eyes, Everard said, "I had thought to catalogue the museum for you before you move. Otherwise, matters will be in such a snarl——"

"Ah, yes," John said, politeness itself all of a sudden, "that would be most helpful. Thank you, Everard."

"Then I will have my belongings sent over," Everard said. "I have packed among them a few little bagatelles I brought back for the children. They are looking quite well, John."

"Who, the bagatelles?"

Everard rose to the heights of his dignity, still slouching against the table. He said coldly, "Jocksie has grown into quite the fine lad."

"My thanks. Does he not remind you of someone?"

Everard said thoughtfully, "Ummm… ."

"Annie," John said in flat voice, "tells me he is the exact replica of you at that age."

"Does she now!" Everard cried, vastly pleased. He had always been most fond of little Jockie. The lad was delicate, with a nature that bruised easily—-how well acquainted Everard was with the torture of being too sensitive!

"The very image of you," John was saying in the same flat voice. Everard pondered; what was irking the old fool now?

So it was that the battered Mr. Lynn took his not too unhappy leave, and Mr. Hunter found himself again in possession of that which he had sought at the top of his voice, and in the most unseemly places, for some time now. He had an assistant who was a member of his family. Not too long after his return, Everard then hired another young man to ease his burden. A colourless creature, a Mr. André, joined them. He was an anatomist of sorts, but, more important, he was an artist and could make drawings of the preparations. Everard decided that John ought to publish. They could buy a printing press and set it up in the Leicester Square house. There was plenty of room.

iii

Mr. Gunning had himself a clerkly little jest which he had never mentioned to anyone. The board meetings at the hospital had become "Bored Meetings" to Mr. Gunning, and thus immured in his own wit he was able to attend to the harangues of Mr. Hunter with a glazed vacuity which passed for ardent attention. For a time uncounted, Mr; Hunter was on his feet, swaying, coughing, and chewing on the frayed topic of lectures to the students. Mr. Gunning found himself thinking of the sensation he might create were he to rise to his feet and announce that he had decided to aid Hunter in his suggestion. He toyed with the notion.

"… be taught physiology right here in the hospital!" Mr. Hunter was ranting. "And the technique of making preparations. A surgeon can learn in no other way that which he learns from his preparations of——"

"Pigs pettitoes," someone murmured.

Mr. Gunning looked about him sharply.

Mr. Hunter made a strangling noise, his face purpling as he sought for his chair.

Glaring on Mr. Walker and Mr. Hawkins, Secundus, and Mr. Hawkins, Nephew (respectively son and nephew of the great retired Sir Caesar) Mr. Gunning said anxiously, "Hunter, what is it you take for your spasms? I will have the ’pothecary-—-"

"No, no … better now," Mr. Hunter murmured, taking his hand from his heart. "Let us proceed, pray."

Still doubtful, Mr. Gunning reseated himself. There was a pause. Mr. Gunning heard himself saying, "Gentlemen, I, for one, am willing to make the trial. I offer myself as a lecturer———"

"I move we adjourn," Mr. Walker said hastily.

"No such thing!" Mr. Gunning began, but the gentlemen were already departing.

The panting Mr. Hunter and the frowning Mr. Gunning were left alone.

"Well," Mr. Hunter said, "so you are at last to take up your responsibilities!"

"Don’t provoke me," Mr. Gunning said coolly. "I have decided to lecture to the students, yes."

"Hah! And what will you teach them, eh?"

"That," Mr. Gunning snapped, "shall be my concern. Unless," he added with a brilliant stroke, "you would care to supply me with a copy of your lecture notes."

"My God, you are demented! The next thing, you would be publishing them under your–—"

"I withdraw the suggestion then," Mr. Gunning said smugly. Mr. Hunter fell silent.

After a time of thought on the part of each gentleman, Mr. Gunning said in a voice quite warm for him, "Hunter, you must know that you are taxing your strength."

"Aye. What would you have me do about it?"

"Why… . Do not tax yourself."

Mr. Hunter’s smile appeared, the yellow venom teeth almost seeming to come forward. "Perhaps I need an assistant here at the hospital."

"If you wish, I shall present the request to the board for you."

"Excellent! I wonder if that fine young nephew of mine-—"

"It can surely come as no surprise to you," Mr. Gunning put in swiftly, "that the selection of assistants is made by the hoard and not the gentleman who wishes the assistant. Moreover, Mr. Baillie is not a St. George’s man. Now, were you to suggest someone who is, say–—"

"Why do you oppose me at every step!" Hunter thundered. "Gunning, why have you set yourself from the first day we met to impeding me and blocking-—"

"I cannot imagine,". Gunning said dryly. "I was about to mention the name of Everard Home. As he was a student here, I anticipate no particular difficulty in securing his appoint——-" But he saw that he had lost Hunter’s attention. Dropping the matter, he enquired solicitously, "Do you feel able to rise now, Hunter?"

Obediently Mr. Hunter responded to Mr. Gunning’s grasp on his arm. It was not an uncommon sight, that of Mr. Gunning assisting the staggering Mr. Hunter from the board room. In the flagstone hall, Mr. Hunter stopped and began to laugh raucously. "Pigs pettitoes, indeed! Come, Gunning, confess, did you say it?"

"Why in hell would I, John Hunter!" Mr. Gunning burst out crankily.

True to his word, Mr. Gunning began to lecture to the students at the hospital. Somewhat contritely, Mr. Walker joined him. And were Mr. Gunning, by any chance, to leave any old stone upturned, or any old surgical chestnut whatever lying around, Mr. Wallker speedily remedied the mistake in his own lectures. The students soon failed to attend the lectures, preferring the antics of Mr. Hunter in his Leicester Square amphitheatre. So, after years of keeping the issue alive, Mr. Hunter saw it die of decrepitude. Now there would be peace in the board meetings at last. Better yet, Hunter was now on the defensive. Still, on occasion, the gentlemen suffered a twinge when they looked on Hunter’s bitter and dreadfully worn countenance.

Also, Mr. Gunning had said firmly, "Gentlemen, let us not resurrect the matter, if he does not. His spasms, you know… ."

In truth, Mr. Gunning was not alone in his mindfulness of Hunter’s spasms. Joe Banks and George Fordyce trod lightly, and Martin Van Butchel’s manner grew almost as soft and furry as his eyes. "I love that man, for all his faults and tantrums," Joe Banks said, and Martin nodded in agreement, too full of the honour of sitting in a tavern publicly drinking wine with the President of the Royal Society to speak. "Caution," Fordyce said, "here he comes."

John Hunter staggered in, the slap-slap of his gait causing stares.

"Well, Joe," he said noisily, "is that your purple pony tethered outside?" He laughed in a merry bray.

"So waggish tonight, Jock …" Fordyce murmured, while Martin’s face showed red through his beard with hurt.

Hunter’s enemies saw no reason for taking to this sort of conduct kindly. They did not give a tinker’s damn about his spasms one way or another.

iv

John Hunter himself began to wonder if his explosive rages were the triggering mechanisms of his spasms or only the presenting symptoms. When he was at the hospital, when he was tending his private practice, when he was engaged at his preparations, and when he was before his students, whatever the occasion or place, the strange and painful sensations might come on him. His fingers tingled and ached, his face seemed to swell and pull from the skull, his nose complained as if some unseen hand were tweaking it violently, and the contents of his intestines bubbled and boiled and surged through the passages, building up pressures that racked his depths with griping pains that caused him to gasp and double over. At times he experienced a noisy lengthy release from the pressures which he was powerless to prevent, and which caused his colleagues and friends and students alike as much embarrassment as himself. He was a compendium of pain, from the deep-seated pang to the felling lightning stab; yet he could sit with his hands before him on a dissection table, seeing only their usual appearance of broken nails and stained cracks, and wonder that they did not swell and burst with the fire that ran along the nerves. He slept little and with great unrest. He dozed in twisted positions to favour a limb or joint that was torturing him, only to awake in agony and find that he had been crushing a hand or wrist that now throbbed in protest. Often he came out of his sleep to find his grizzled hair matted on his cheeks because he had slept with his mouth ajar and a thick malodorous saliva had escaped and collected in a crust on face and neck. When he staggered from his bed at dawn, advancing spread-legged to his basin-stand, he found himself staring without recognition at the spectre that confronted him. The pendulous jaw sagging with its weight of a scraggly beard (frequently he had to go unshaven because he could not bear the touch of the razor on his face), the hair matted on cheeks and neck, the pupils of a divided man—half hatred, half fear, and the body twitching with the fugitive tics and tremors and paroxysms that came and went, unheralded, uncontrollable——was this he? Eructations shattered his vision, as if the mirror itself had been broken, and he had to seek supports as they racked his frame with the regularity of hiccups, but afforded him no relief from the mounting pressure within.

When he was thus tortured he knew himself to be disgusting, nauseating even, and he pulled his head deeper into his shoulders, looking straight ahead, avoiding the gazes of all.

Very rarely, so rarely that his intimate friends had not as yet interpreted the mannerism, he would turn his head in his shoulders in the way of one cocking an ear, and his eyes would narrow in the puffy face and seek the corners of the room, straining.

He did not mention or permit others to mention his illness unless he were felled by it. He acted as if he were the only person in London who knew he was suffering severely from the gout.

Only Jesse Foot, that surgeon of parts, differed in his diagnosis.

It was Jesse Foot’s contention that he had been invited to Russia for several years to serve as Surgeon—Extraordinary to the Tsar. He was avowedly displeased on his return to London to find his reception flaccid and his frame dimmed by that of the eccentric John Hunter. Time was when Mr. Foot could clearly remember visiting the tooth-shop of a dentist-quack and there finding John Hunter dancing attendance on the customers. Still, being a man of good will, no sooner had he come home from the land of the gaudy-turnip-topped palaces of the Tsar, than he had sought out his old acquaintances. To Mr. Foot’s amazement, Mr. Hunter had avoided him. Mr. Hunter had dodged from doorways and into his chariot, rushing past Jesse’s extended hand, pretending not to see him at all. It was only natural that Jesse began to ponder such strange behaviour. It took him several years to discern the seat of Hunter’s actions, it took him, in point of fact, until the very day that Dr. William Hunter died.

Then he knew.

Jesse was the first to agree that the gossip he had heard concerning Hunter had aided him in reaching his conclusion. The sudden rages, the equally unannounced spurts of gross laughter, the obsessive pursuit of the very likeable young Dr. Matt Baillie, the fantastical splurging while bills snowed the front door——ah, yes, all quite clear to Jesse now. Clear also was the cause. That, Jesse alone knew. He suffered a seizure one afternoon in a coffee-house while attempting to tell someone about it.

In time, Jesse Foot recognized where his duty lay. He must save the ill and injured from the hands of Hunter at all costs. A surgeon in Hunter’s frame of mind constituted a menace. God alone knew what Hunter might take into his mind to do next. Jesse would have to publish his mistakes, his criminal disregard of all that was accepted in surgical practices to the world. The difficulty lay in Jesse’s inability to be present when Hunter was committing his surgical crimes.

It was not until Jesse heard of the death of the Rowley boy that he had his proof. At last he was on firm ground, for young Master Rowley had been one of Jesse’s own patients. The lad had been taking a walk with his nurse, when the two of them were set upon by a mad dog. The boy was chewed in the lip, the nurse about the arms. Though the family had been applying to Jesse for their seasonal bleedings and purges, they had cast him aside in favour of John Hunter when the child was bitten. Hunter had applied caustic to the child’s torn mouth, preferring not to cut out the wound for the reason that he did not wish to mutilate so young a child. In due course of time both the nurse and the boy had died. And when Jesse heard of the matter, Hunter had already received permission to perform a morbid dissection on the bodies. Jesse learned of the last during the course of a conversation in which someone had remarked that Hunter had cut his hand while performing the dissection and was fretting about it.

"Fret he might," Jesse said, "were true justice to overtake him. He carelessly deprived two people of their lives—-why should he not lose his in payment?" For effect he paused before adding, "Had the Rowleys brought their son to me I would have saved him."

Now Jesse had only to bide his time before the next step. His duty was clear again, he must confront Hunter with his perfidies. Savouring the moment, putting it off, teasing himself with anticipation, Jesse waited. London was not so huge that he would not encounter Hunter somewhere, some day.

News of Jesse Foot’s vicious talk reached John Hunter’s ears. "I cannot be troubled by the persecution of one individual," Mr. Hunter said shortly. Almost out of habit he then said, "Not when they are all against me. Pray attend to what you’re doing, Everard. You’ve left that whole portion there unvarnished."

"Nevertheless," Everard went on, undaunted, "the-—uh—others are not vindictive. They are not … mad."

Mr. Hunter snorted, "Are they not?"

Everard said solemnly, "Surely you have heard the truth about Foot’s absence from London?"

"When he was in Russia?"

It was Everard’s turn to snort. "Aye, Russia! More like, his family had him secreted somewhere in the country until his ravings ceased. I have it from one who is in a position to know, that Jesse Foot was completely out of his head for over two years, and thought himself the Tsar’s surgeon one day, and the Tsar himself the next. I am almost prepared to swear that he has been, in his time, a raving-—-"

"Oh, come, Everard, pay attention to what you are doing! Clumsy-thumbs! Can you not shut your mouth and open your eyes for a change? What in hell are you trying to do, ruin that preparation completely? How many times have I told you and told you and told you, you dunce, you turd, that the bladders must be stretched tight over the mouth of the jars or-— Damn you, damn you …" Purpling, then paling, Mr. Hunter had collapsed into a chair. "Must … take …purge… ."

John Hunter had then forgotten about Jesse Foot. Then for one whole night he had been racked by stomach pains, which but increased during his rounds on the morning. He had thought to stop in a coffee-house and warm his stomach with some coffee and perhaps a bite or two of bread and butter. His chair was full in the sunlight coming through the window, and as he waited for his refreshment he found himself examining the wound he had received during his dissection of the Rowley boy. The wound was still angry after a number of weeks, but the burning of the caustic he had applied might account for that. Good God, with his gout torturing him, he needed only the rabid poison to bring a stop to his work completely. He muttered aloud to himself that fate too always contrived to be against him. In his agitation a great eructation rolled from him, thundering about the room. The heads of strangers lifted suddenly from cups to stare at him, before reading some information on his face that he himself could not see and hastily looked away. Gods, that he must vent his pain like a swine; that he must be hagged by his stomach when he needed all his strength this afternoon when he must remove a tumour from the skull of a young girl. "To be so plagued!" he cried out. But at the instant of his outburst his food was placed before him and he pretended he was commenting on it humorously.

"Yes, sir," his server said and rushed away. He fell to gorging the bread, he was not eating but taking medicine; and in his pain he abandoned even his thin pretences of table manners. When the first pangs were allayed, he paused to grunt and saw that his fellow diners were covertly staring at him. He pulled his head into his shoulders and again applied himself to the easing of his stomach. It was as he was finishing his coffee that the shadow fell across his wounded hand lying on the table. "No more," he said. "I have eaten enough."

"What, defeated by a single cup of coffee?"

Looking up, John met the conspiratorial gaze of Jesse Foot.

"Time was, John Hunter," Jesse went on gaily, "when three bottles of wine barely loosened your tongue!"

"I see yours flaps readily on air alone," John commented, attempting to rise. His legs, as ever an uncertain foundation, suddenly gave way beneath him. There was no help for it but to remain seated until the temporary paralysis passed. Looking down at the aspen legs, Jesse Foot smiled.

"Gout?" Jesse wanted to know gently.

"Aye. Gout."

Jesse Foot licked his lips. He hitched a chair close to Hunter’s and seated himself. He let his unblinking gaze meet the disproportioned eyes steadily. He was not to be intimidated; no, not he! In his softest voice he began his attack, the rill of an excited giggle bubbling occasionally to the surface. "Gout?" he enquired again gently.

John sat stolid. "Aye, I said gout." Cruelty flickered in Foot’s face like a candle in a draught. My spasms, John reminded himself. I am helpless until I can walk again. But I must remember my spasms… .

"Gout of the mind, perhaps?" Jesse corrected him.

"That," John shouted, enraged before he knew what he was about, "is your ailment, Jesse Foot, not mine!"

Jesse tittered. Squirming and tittering the more, he put his face into John’s and whispered cosily, "Ah, that little story would take your fancy, Jock! Perhaps you are searching for some quiet little place in which to hide yourself too."

"If you are insinuating that I am mad, do not strain yourself to contain it. I have been called that too many times to be affected by it in the least."

"Ah, but never before by me!" Jesse laid a trembling hand on John’s arm, one finger lightly tapping the wound. He whispered archly, "Foxes know how foxes smell, Jock. There’s your difference." The tapping of the wound had changed to a caressing of John’s sleeve between thumb and fore finger. "I can help you, Jock. I know that you, have never thought of me as a friend, but I am one to you. Perhaps I am not as rich and influential as Joe Banks, and the Fellows of the Royal Society have ever been jealous of me or I would have been one of you long ago—but I am not telling you something you do not know, you are one of them, you know how they revile me, you are a Fellow—but we can remedy that, you and I. You could present some of my papers. My work would surprise even you, Jock, and when it is published in the Proceedings of the Society, then we can both step forward and admit that it was my work———-"

"Jesse, in God’s name, leave me in peace-—-"

"I have invented a boogie," Jessie went on as there had been no interruption, "for the luetic venereal poison. It is a great boon, you may believe me on that head, and I am willing to share it with you. There have been those who say you believe there is only one poison, but I do not give credence to lies–well, we will let it pass, mistakes are the common lot of all of us–-and once you have used my boogie on your patients in the salivating wards, I vow that you will hasten without delay to the Royal Society to inform them of it. We will share the fame, there will be no unpleasantness between us as there was between you and your—— well, again I say, no matter. I invented my boogie in Russia, Jock. There was such a one as you in the Court, a man who walked as if two planks were nailed to his feet. Slap, slap, slap! He came to me—he was very important, so he came to me—and I told him he had the gout."

"A safe diagnosis, I am sure," burst from John unwillingly. 

Again Jesse squirmed like a child who needs to excuse himself and yet cannot tear himself away from the room. "Safe indeed! Why, gout—-we both know this—is but a portmanteau into which all kinds of ailments may be safely packed out of sight. Hidden under the bed, so to speak. I digress, don’t I? But I vow my good fortune in being able to converse with you has quite carried me away. This man—this Russian who slap slap slapped, like a man on snowshoes, I would say you have never seen snowshoes—but you walk on them all the same, John Hunter!—-came to me, rake that he was, his blood crammed with the venereal luetic poison, and desired me to call it something else," Jesse crossed his legs tightly above the knees, pressing his thighs together, much as if he feared his excitement would spew forth from him like urine. In Russia they have your head for telling patients what they fear to hear. But I suspected that the poison had already gone to his legs, and he had a story of a chancre he had suffered after an—-oh, this is too delightful—an Encounter with a Countess——-"

"I care not if every Russian alive has suffered a gonorrhoeal chancre!" John shouted, careless of the others in the room.

"Gonorrhoeal?" Jesse began to blink, sniggering. For a wonder, Jesse Foot was blinking like a man with a tic. "Gonorrhoeal? Oh, Jock! There, I would not have believed the gossip had I not heard it from your own lips! So you have done it… . Then I must go on about my Russian… ." Jesse inclined his head so that his breath was dry on John’s cheek. "He saw things, Jock."

"Jesse, I am fainting. Get me——-"

"You are calling me Jesse, Jock! Did you ever stop to note that our two names start with the same letter? An omen, my dear Jock; after this day there can be no more secrets, eh? I know all there is about you—-and I alone am able to help you—as once I promised I––-"

"You will have a seizure, if you do not-——" John tried to put in wretchedly. The pain in his stomach was spreading like a tree, tendrils and branches creeping along his vessels; he gagged as a shoot crowded his throat.

"–I promised you that I would." Again Jesse squeezed the material of John’s sleeve. "Why did you avoid me, Jock?" he asked plaintively.

John cried out, his coat had become as sensitive as his own skin. He could feel Jesse’s hand twisting it——

"Here is your coachman come to help you, sir," a gentleman said. "Let me take your arm——"

Again John cried out in agony, and the strange gentleman released his arm at once.

"And yet," someone was saying to the coachman, "I do not believe he injured himself when he fainted. At first I thought him merely to have laid his head to rest on the table. Then it was I noticed that his cheek was reposing on his plate-—-"

The coachman was gathering John into his arms. "I can carry him, sir. I have done it several times before. His spasms come quite frequently now."

"Gods," John said, "what o’clock is it?"

"Nearly two in the afternoon, Husband," Anne said.

"I am lucid now, I think. How long has it been this time?"

"Only a day or so." She took a glass from the table. "You must drink this; Dr. Pitcairn ordered it for you. And your James’s powders too, if you wish them."

"Aye, get me my powders." He attempted to rise, but the pain in his arm where the sleeve had been twisted renewed itself so swiftly, like the memory of a recent bereavement upon awakening, that he fell back panting. Anne, on her way to the door, had not seen him.

When she had closed the door behind her, he again rose. His left arm was useless, paralysed by pain. The ulnar nerve? he thought. But the fourth and fifth fingers seemed no more affected than the rest; all were involved. The arm crept to his chest to lie palm up, supinate. It seemed to have done so of its own accord, it nestled there. Using his right arm as a lever he swung his feet to the floor. He essayed a step. He stumbled to the chair Anne had vacated. From the chair to the basin-stand, he pulled himself upright. In the glass he saw a shrunken face sagging beneath a pate sparsely sprouting grey clumps of fuzz here and there. "Wullie?" he said.

A preparation awaited him. Then he must go to the hospital and remove the tumour.

Everard looked up from a dissection and paled when he saw John in the doorway. "Annie!" he began shouting, hurling himself across the room to John. "My God, I thought she was Watching you!"

v

The Death Club was enjoying a quarrel. Electricity for the arm, one gentleman insisted. Indeed no, James’s powder, then camphorated julep. Ah yes, but let us try Hoffman’s anodyne liquor also. Certainly, sir, but combined with the julep, would you not agree? Then, of course, the thebaic tincture… . Yes, yes. And the bark. And powder of Valerian. And tincture of rhubarb in ginger tea … excellent! And asafoetida. And opium. And a cluster, gentlemen, we must not overlook the-— A bladder of hot water to his heart, Doctor? Certainly, Mr.——— And oleum succini. cinnamon water. Mr. Gunning, I think it an inspiration to blister him at the back of the neck. Undoubtedly will serve to draw off the humours collected-— Pray, Jock, open your mouth. just a modicum of baume de vie … there!

Still there were the spasms, the shooting pains, the burning along the limbs, the headache, the confusion, the tempest in the bowels, and the swellings.

He rose from his bed. He staggered towards the wardrobe. He dressed himself, grunting with pain.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I have work to do."

He pushed his way past them and to the door. A hand reached out to restrain him. "God damn you, damn you, you turds, all of you, turds and vultures and quacks and liars and sons-of-whores-—-"

"Let him go, or he will have another spasm right before our eyes. From this day on, any one of them may be the fatal one… ."

His parlour was filled with patients. The students fought for seats in his lecture hall. At the hospital Mr. Gunning glared and snapped at the younger men if they dared to cross him. He said at a board meeting, "Gentlemen, I have been going over the figures of the number of students who have applied to walk after Mr. Hunter over a period of years. To my amazement, sirs, I have discovered that— almost–-a thousand students have come to St. George’s for their training because of Mr. Hunter."

His friends said, "Yes, Jock; … of course, Jock … you must please yourself on the matter… ."

Martin Van Butchel asked timidly, "Might I use your name, Jock, in connection with my garters? It would dignify them. Glorify them!"

"You may use my name in connection with the contents of your chamber-pot for all I care." John laughed coarsely, bending himself over the left arm clinging to his chest.

Martin looked quickly to Everard, but Everard refused to meet his gaze.

George Fordyce reported that, having left John one morning just before dawn, he came upon Jesse Foot standing full in the bleak wind and covered with snow, his unblinking gaze fastened on the door of John’s fine house in Leicester Square. If Jesse heard him speak, he did not reply nor even shift his eyes.

Alone in his museum late at night, his students sound asleep on the floors above him, he wandered from preparation to preparation. I am wandering in time, he told himself. Almost all of them were there now, from the most imperfect to the perfect. He staggered against the O’Brien skeleton, righted himself, patted a bone, and then frowned. The skeleton was brownish. A pity … he should not have been in such haste. He touched a patella. Greasy, he said. Slapping his feet, he began another turn about his museum. All there, from the creatures that swam or floated or writhed or lumbered or flew or trotted to those that walked upright. They are time, he said. In them lie the answers to all my questions. I must hurry.

He heard footsteps behind him. "Are you there?" he called out. "Is that you?" But when he turned he was, as he had known he would be, quite alone.

The flames of the candles burned steadily.

vi

Mrs. Hunter’s parties in the Leicester Square house were brilliant. Until almost dawn the coaches clustered around the house, and music drifted out by the hour. Now in her early forties, Mrs. Hunter had a stunning presence, and appeared either younger than she was, or more accurately, appeared to be no age at all; one day, years hence, the women said, she would go to bed a beauty and wake up a crone. There was a certain intensity about her that many did not care for (though this dislike was hardly enough to keep them away from her entertainments), she could be shrill even with her mouth shut. She rarely laughed, she had, instead, a way of smiling while her eyes flared up fitfully. This last might be accounted for by the fact that she was tremendously poetical.

Everyone came to an Anne Hunter party; everyone but John Hunter. "He lurks in the back with his cadavers," Anne liked to say with a smile, while her eyes blazed up and the hand resting on Everard’s arm tightened with tension.

Mrs. Hunter had been prevailed upon, prayed, and implored for years to read a snatch or so of her poetry. At last, she must have mercy on her admirers; she acceded graciously.

The loo games ceased, the courting couples crept out from under the stairs, ancient rakes hastened to be in the first circle of chairs so that they might admire the better the agitated rise and fall of Mrs. Hunter’s satin-covered breasts, beldames fought with the rakes for the seats, brandishing ear-trumpets for weapons, and an adoring student or two modestly stood in the shadows, debating the while whether to ask Mrs. Hunter outright to run away with them, or merely seize up the "dear man’s" lancer and nick their jugulars.

"Are we all ready?" Mrs. Hunter cried, taking her stand between a pair of candelabra on pillars.

Sir Joshua Reynolds turned to his neighbour, ear trumpet growing from his head like a morning-glory and shouted, "Who’s in beddy?"

"You should be, my dear sir," Joe Banks, newly Sir Joseph Banks muttered.

"Hssst!" several people turned round to warn, "she is commencing!"

"Ah," someone else said, "look there, Horry is just arriving."

"Who?" Sir Joshua Reynolds howled, twisting in his chair.

Stately Mrs. Hunter cleared her throat. Her bosom heaved, soft in the light of the candles. The ancient rakes to a man leaned forward. "The North American Death Song," Mrs. Hunter announced, and again cleared her throat.

The Sun sets in Night, and the Stars shun the Day,

But Glory remains, when their Lights fade away:

Begin ye Tormentors, your Threats are in vain;

’ For the Son of Alknoomach shall never complain.

Remember the arrows he shot from his Bow,

Remember Your Chiefs by his Hatchet laid low;

Why so slow? do you wait till I shrink from my Pain?

No! The Son of Alknoomach shall never complain.

"Never heard of the fellow," Sir Joshua muttered; "who is he anyway?"

Remember the wood where in Ambush we lay,

And the Scalps which we tore from your Nation away,

Now the Flame rises fast, you rejoyce in my Pain,

But the Son of Alknoomach shall never complain.

I go to the hand where my Father is gone,

His Ghost shall rejoyce in the fame of his Son;

Death comes like a Friend, he

Something was lumbering towards the drawing-room, its feet slapping the floors, a mixture of cursing and growling issuing from it.

relieves me from Pain,

And thy Son oh Alknoo—

John Hunter swayed in the doorway, cursing bitterly. The guests stirred nervously. Mrs. Hunter put out a hand towards her husband, then let it fall to her side.

"Get out, all of you!" Mr. Hunter shouted. "Pops! Wastrels! When did I invite you here?" He stumbled a step farther into the room and threw something-—a vase it was, some said later—which crashed against a wall, narrowly missing Sir Joseph Banks, who was on his feet rushing forward. "Turds, the lot of you! Sons-of——"

The ladies were turning over their chairs, shrieking in their haste to get out of Mr. Hunter’s way. Sir Joshua, ear-trumpet swinging this way and that, begged one and all to tell him what Mr. Hunter was saying.

Mrs. Hunter stood between the candelabra, tears coursing down her cheeks. She had not moved except for that first gesture, half realized, towards Mr. Hunter

Of a sudden the drawing-room was emptied, Sir Joshua’s shoutings echoing in the hall. A door closed with a slam. There was silence. Sir Joseph Banks touched Mrs. Hunter on the arm, "Anne, my dear, you——"

She pulled away from him and ran from the room.

"Well, Jock?" Sir Joseph said.

"I must return to my deer’s antler," Mr. Hunter said; "I have been studying it all evening." Then he added, as it there were some connection between the two, "Tomorrow afternoon I operate. Have I shown you my deer’s antler? Come; you will like it, I think."

Sir Joseph said coldly, "Were you to fall at my feet in a spasm this moment, I do not think I would lift a hand to save you. Pray give me your permission to seek out your poor wife."

"You should have done that years ago," Mr. Hunter said strangely. He began to laugh, then broke off to dig at his nose. Bemused, he turned without another word and stumbled out of the room.

Sir Joseph Banks was left alone amidst the scattered fragments of the vase and the tumbled chairs. In her haste a lady had dropped her fan, and now Sir Joseph found himself kicking it across the room in an aimless fury.

vii

Until almost dawn Mr. Hunter remained in his museum studying the antler. The antler had been highly injected and acid-steeped so that the ramifications of the vessels in the substance of the bone were clearly shown. Also demonstrated was one of the external vessels of the periosteum derived from the branches of the external carotid. Mr. Hunter was wont to point out, when speaking of the preparation to his students, that the external carotids in the stag were much larger when the horn was growing than at any other time. It was but one more example of a part of the animal machine varying in size when some particular action was required of it. The uterus, he would add, swelled to many times its size when gravid.

Mr. Hunter had a question to pose to the preparation. Could a part of the body not naturally required to undergo considerable variations in size, do so if mechanical interference warranted it?

"Or should I take off the leg and have done with it?" Mr. Hunter said aloud.

He thought of his patient, sleeping now, he hoped, in his bed at the hospital. In his mind he saw the leg, grossly swollen, for the popliteal vessel had received an injury and had become a great sac, filled with blood, into which each beat of the heart pumped more blood. An aneurism, Mr. Hunter called it.

Mr. Gunning was of the opinion that it was a matter of the patient’s leg or his life. Amputation, Mr. Gunning had announced firmly, was the only hope.

Mr. Hunter continued to study his preparation. What if the popliteal were tied off, ligated, could the collateral vessels in the leg enlarge sufficiently so as to take over the burden of supplying blood to the member? And if so, what of the great sac of blood, the aneurism, now restricted to be sure from further expansion, but still present in all its clumsy and painful impedimental condition? Would the blood in the sac gradually be absorbed into the system?

"I think so," Mr. Hunter said softly. "God guide me, but I think so.

In the operating theatre a bleary-eyed Mr. Hunter stood over his patient. "Then I have your consent to make this trial?"

The patient, a mere coachman by trade, not a soldier or an adventurer, but a man who by his own definition was a person of but ordinary courage, closed his eyes. He lay thus quietly for an instant, already trussed and bound and strapped and surrounded by four brawny men who rested their hands on him, and he said, "What if the operation should fail, Mr. Hunter?"

"Why then I would have to take the leg off after all."

Still the patient did not open his eyes. "What is the use," he seemed to be asking himself, "of seeking a great surgeon if I do not take his advice?" Finally he opened his eyes to meet the weird gaze of Mr. Hunter. "Make the trial," he said on an expiration of breath.

Mr. Hunter dropped the amputating saw to the sawdust. "We’ll not he needing that," he said. He nodded to the handlers. "I am ready."

John Hunter made his incision. The patient shrieked. The science of surgery had been born. Tradition had been supplanted by theory.

A quarter-hour later Mr. Hunter staggered from the operating theatre, his loud slapping gait emphasized by his fatigue. He was met in the corridor by the neat, spare Mr. Gunning and there delayed.

"Do you think you have saved his leg?" Mr. Gunning asked.

"Aye," Mr. Hunter said briefly.

Mr. Gunning pursed his mouth as of old. "Do you not fear that the ligatured vessel will begin to rot by virtue of its being ligated ?"

"Would I not have ligatured that vessel anyway had I amputated?"

"Hmmm …" Mr. Gunning said.

"You think me a fool," Mr. Hunter muttered.

"I think you to be wrong and stubborn and possibly mad," Mr. Gunning countered with a smile, "but I do not think you a fool, John."

"I regret to say that I cannot return your compliment," Mr. Hunter said crankily.

They inclined their heads in a perfunctory bow and parted.

When the coachman left the hospital he was able to do so on his own two legs. His master had sent the carriage for him, and the coachman was to ride in state. It was February, and he had to scrape the ice from the window of the carriage in order to look up at the squat figure standing at one of the ward windows looking down on him. He waved, but the figure did not reply. Then the carriage moved on.

"Well," Mr; Hunter said, "there you have it, Gunning."

"I am nonplussed to admit that the Hunterian operation for the popliteal aneurism is a success," Mr. Gunning said dryly. "What a gambler you are with lives."

Somewhat touchily Mr. Hunter said, "I have gambled with mine as well!"

‘"Ah. And there I fear you may have––—" But Mr. Gunning suddenly remembered that he had a patient awaiting him, and left. 

At dusk Mr. Hunter himself left the hospital. He sat in his carriage, head sunk between his shoulders, his right hand on his knee, his left cradled within his greatcoat. The wintry air was so cold that the moisture in his nostrils began to freeze and he dug at the offending crystals impatiently as he talked. Occasionally he looked out of the windows of his carriage at the snow-patched fields through which he was passing. Behind him a violent red streak of sky lay on the horizon like a line of blood, but ahead the darkness was rushing to meet him. He noticed that but for the last stain of the setting sun on the sky, the entire world had become black, white, or grey. He shivered. "Night is coming on apace," he said, then without waiting for a reply to this he went on with what he had been discussing before. "… told me that the art of surgery could not be improved," he said. He laughed coarsely. "He had the effrontery to tell me that progress had come to an end with Cheselden. And when I told him; ‘You slobber-chops,’ I said, ‘you pig-headed fool, progress in surgery is just begun!’ why, then he called me mad. They all call me mad. They are all against me. Calling me mad, and yawning through my papers at the Society… ."

The surgeon sat in his carriage mumbling and gesturing with his free hand, until his coachman opened the door and said, "We’re home, Mr. Hunter. Shall I help you down?"

viii

His operation was the talk of the physical world. Some praised, some impugned, all wondered what he would do next.

Then John Hunter published his Treatise on the Venereal Disease. It sold well from its first day of publication. It was a curiosity to those who did not agree with Hunterian theories, and a valuable addition to the libraries of those who did. Gradually, the purchasers began to read the Treatise here and there, urged on by those who had, for reasons of boredom or insomnia, read it straight through at once.

In John Hunter’s day, surgeons and physicians, though not notoriously licentious, were not prudes either. But the calm blunt assertions in the Treatise shocked them, stunned them, reawakening all the talk that they had refused to believe as being malicious gossip years ago. They winced as they read the cold statement of fact:

Two punctures were made on the penis with a lancer dipped in enereal matter from a gonorrhoea; one puncture was on the glans, the other on the prepuce …

Three times he had left off treating himself with mercury for fear the experiment would draw to a close too fast for him to learn all that he might from it. He had refused to heal himself until almost three years had passed.

A question rose between the reader and the print. Could it be that his spasms, his tantrums—-Could it be?

The London physical world reacted. Some were foolish, like poor Jesse Foot, who, having built up his hopes for the heavy sale of a boogie he had invented for the venereal diseases, found that by Hunterian standards it was worse than useless, harmful even. Jesse set about to publish a scorching paper about Hunter. He was weary of seeking Hunter’s notice and being ignored. He was weary of skulking about, trying to gain admission to Hunter’s house, trying to slip past the servants who had orders to keep him out. He was weary of trying to intercept Hunter on his way to a patient or in a coffee- house. In print and in conversation Jesse Foot clamoured for Hunter’s notice, only to have reported to him that Hunter had shrugged and remarked wryly, "Oh, we all have lice that live on us." Jesse Foot, hysterical, occasionally demented, could not understand. It was the poor creature’s natural and half-realized desire to be the pathic of some great man. But the only great man he was ever to know seemed unaware of his existence, except to look upon him as a symbol of all that was noisy, pushing, and of no consequence whatsoever. Jesse Foot was racked with hatred.

For Hunter partisans, physicians, and surgeons who had treated many cases of venereal diseases over the years, the Treatise presented the choice of disbelieving the work (and therefore disavowing Hunter, for to the irascible surgeon his work and himself were one), or accepting Hunter’s conclusion that the venereal diseases were an entity. Loyalty was no solution for these gentlemen when logic was wanting. At last, when some one of those who had laughed at the Treatise—-it was never certain who-—came to the conclusion that if the hard chancre were not the syphilitic chancre, then it could only be the Hunterian chancre, then the Hunter partisans, hearing the term, knew with a painful certainty that aptness would carry the phrase through the ages. Sooner than one would have thought possible the term had entered the language, and Covent Garden macaronis went about poking one another in the ribs and giving out the warning that a certain actress had given one of them a Hunterian chancre.

That fall when Hunter began his opening lecture he found two students before him, and his friend Martin Van Butchel. His tones sounded hollow in the large lecture—room filled with row on row of empty seats; the lecture-room which had cost him so much to build, but which he had justified by the throngs who had sought to attend him. "Gentlemen …" he began in his halting lecture voice, and looking up from his notes surprised a look on the faces of his two students that he had never seen before.

In their eyes he read his deterioration, saw his wasted legs spread far apart in the attempt to steady his swaying body, saw his left arm lying supinate along his chest, saw his face gaunt with many more years than he had actually lived, saw the recurrent wanderings and madness of early senility in his pallid, darting, unmatched eyes.

What envy and hatred and derision and scorn, what even his suffering and his spasms and his confusions had not been able to do, a few words of idle speculation and gossip had accomplished almost overnight.

They had crippled John Hunter at last with pity.

ix

He knew himself to be frightened. Lunacy was stalking him. His confusions, his deliria, were the debris of the crumbling edges of his mind. At the core lay his work, still inviolate, still to be trusted—at least by him.

He sent everyone away from him: Everard, Anne, and his friends. He wanted to work. In those long nights when he worked on alone and racked with pain and panic both, he began to hear the rustling and whispering just beyond the reach of the candle’s light. There among the jars, there crouching in the shadows, the voices talked to him, kept him company.

While he worked, the front of the house was full of music and dancing and screams of laughter. Mrs. Hunter’s parties were never so popular. One could not risk missing another of Mr. Hunter’s performances should he care to make it. And there were glimpses to be had of him now and again as he struggled up the stairs just before dawn.

x

Now that the world had reduced, withered his giantism, it heaped him with honours. Academies in foreign lands made him one of their Fellows, the Royal Society awarded him its Copley Medal, he was appointed deputy-surgeon-general to the Army, and young writers on matters anatomical and surgical stole his ideas and printed them as their own.

At St. George’s he was allowed to have Everard as his assistant as a matter of course. He then promptly endeavoured to have Matt Baillie situated on the physical staff. But in spite of Mr. Gunning and Mr. Hunter’s spasms both, the physicians rebelled. Mr. Gunning warned them that if Mr. Hunter were crossed he would have a spasm. Let him, the physicians replied. He did. A Mr. Ford was elected instead of Matt Baillie, and the unfortunate fellow bore Mr. Hunter’s hatred and persecution with surprising fortitude. Dr. Ford, being young and somewhat in awe of Mr. Hunter, was very mindful of the spasms.

In truth, the world rather enjoyed considering John Hunter’s spasms; it was a way of giving him what he deserved, at the same time depriving him of the satisfaction of it.

Mr. Hunter observed them all with his repelling gaze, and then returned silently to his work. He spoke now only to communicate his orders, to teach, or to dictate to his assistants. He was busy arranging his notes for publication. He was plagued by the fear that he would not remove from his mind all that it contained before more large areas crumpled, crashed into ruins.

They did not know he was aware. Sir Joseph and George Fordyce came to plead with him to conserve his strength. He cried out impatiently, "My God, I live in constant fear that I will not finish my work! When I am gone, it will be a long time before the world will have another John Hunter to finish it for me."

He would not hear another word on the matter.

"Then come to dinner with me," Sir Joseph said, hoping in that way to force Mr. Hunter to rest for an hour or so.

"Yes, you must do that, Jock," George Fordyce urged.

"Shall we say Thursday?" Sir Joseph pressed him.

"Very well, very well! Do not plague me on it!"

But when he came to Sir Joseph’s to dine, he said not a word until the wine was being passed. He spoke then only to enquire politely as to who he was and where he was. He knew that he was but two feet long, he was able to inform those assembled of that much about himself.

xi

The board meetings were no longer Bored Meetings to Mr. Gunning. Purse-mouthed and edgy he sat by the side of his old enemy fending off the flank attacks of the Hawkins faction. Now his task would be the harder, for Hunter had decided to present the gentlemen with an ultimatum. Hereafter he would not divide his share of the students fees with the other gentlemen. He would keep the fees paid in by his students himself. The ultimatum was delivered in a letter.

On the close of its reading, a Mr. Walker burst out, "Monstrous!" Mr. Everard Home lounged in his chair and admired his legs. "Let us discuss this calmly," Mr. Gunning begged. "We should hold a special meeting to go over the matter carefully. We must remember that over the years Mr. Hunter has trained over a thousand students here at the hospital."

The gentlemen considered it glumly. Over a thousand students turned loose on the world, mouthing Hunterian theories, collecting museums, and seeking the answers to surgical questions by dissecting the hind leg of an American Water Moccasin. "Criminal," Mr. Walker said, voicing his thoughts aloud.

As if he had heard nothing, Mr. Hunter raised his jaw out of his chest to remark, "Nor do I care for the new policy of receiving as students only those young men who have been ’prentices or sons of surgeons. I consider that unfair."

"Sir, what you consider is—-—-" Mr. Walker began, to be silenced by a glare from Mr. Gunning.

There was a pause during which Everard Home continued to admire his legs.

"Entirely!" Mr. Hunter said suddenly. "Entirely!"

Mr. Gunning was on his feet, bending over Mr. Hunter. A spasm was coming.

For the first time Everard Home spoke. "He has two Scotch lads who wish to walk after him," he said carelessly. "They are neither ‘prentices nor sons of surgeons. That is what this is all about."

"If you know what this is all about," Mr. Walker said over Mr. Hunter’s gaspings, "then you are far wiser than I, Mr. Home."

"I move," Dr. Ford said hastily, "we adjourn." He was due to join a group of physicians at a coffee-house that evening. He would now be able to tell them that John Hunter had had another spasm. Some of the gentlemen in the group considered Hunter the first surgeon of the land; they were always eager for news or bits of gossip about him. It was true, the foremost surgeon in all the English-speaking world was John Hunter. Dr. Ford related his little story and then sat back to listen deferentially to the talk of the older august gentlemen. The physicians sat over their wine and considered the surgeons. Well, give them their due; it had been almost fifty years now since they had separated themselves from the barbers, and in that time they had indeed improved their lot. There had been, in spite of sagest opinions to the contrary, significant improvements in the art: the refinement of the lithotomy, the reducing of Pott’s fracture, the Hunterian operation for the aneurism, the—- But no one could think of anything else. There was always Mr. Foot’s boogie, someone said in jest, and the gentlemen laughed. Close on the heels of the laughter they found themselves sighing. Anatomy, another gentleman murmured, but this brought only a smile, Ah, certainly anatomy was a contribution, but many of the physical young men, Hunter students, or Hunter influenced, led by Dr. Matt Baillie, made overmuch of anatomical preparations, and pathological preparations, and museums full of pigs pettitoes.

"I can clearly remember," one of the gentlemen said suddenly, "William Hunter’s saying that a surgeon was a savage armed with a knife."

They nodded; truer words were never spoken. The gentlemen sipped their wine and looked out at the dusk. Autumn seemed to have arrived in the midst of summer that year. They could not remember a time of so many fogs and rains. By October it seemed that fall had been going on for months on end. The gentlemen were mildly melancholy, there was a miasma abroad that caused the spirit to languish. Perhaps it was that the century itself was growing old. Each century seemed to simulate the ages of man, from energetic youth to worn senility. Their century was growing very old and wise, and they with it. Yet it was a comfort to know that in the brave young century nearing, physic and physicians and all that the old tradition of the gold-headed cane represented would remain unsullied, unchanged. They would he Doctors; the surgeons would remain just Mister.

They sipped their wine. They looked out, at the rain. They sighed. It was drearily certain to rain also on the morrow.

xii

In spite of the weather, Mrs. Hunter’s little gathering was a success. Long after midnight, Mr. John Hunter, first surgeon of the land, struggled up the stairs, unnoticed by the guests, his red-rimmed eyes like open wounds in his head.

Gaining his bedroom, Mr. Hunter sagged down on his bed, fully clothed, to catch his breath. Before he could seek his rest he must face the ordeal of removing his clothing. His manservant had been pressed into service downstairs.

He bent over to remove a shoe and the spasm hurled itself at him. The pain in his left arm was stunning, the ulnar nerve screaming, as if it were exposed. His head reeled and the squeezing about his heart left him grunting through a sagging mouth. His saliva swung from his great jaw. He steeled himself for the herculean task of removing his coat. He would have slept as he was but for the knowledge, gained through experience, that the binding of his clothing would torture him all through the night.

At last he laid his bloated body down on the bed. He closed his eyes for an instant; one more effort. He must raise his arm and pinch out the candle. Idly his gaze followed the path of his hand, and as the hand hovered, highlighted against the flame, he saw that the fingers were blistered with burns. He lowered a finger into the flame, he held it there. He felt nothing. So that was how he had done it to himself… . This night he found he could not bear the weight of the bed-clothes on his left arm. It lay across his chest in the cold dark, burning, burning, burning.

Anne was at her harpsichord downstairs. For a time he followed her song, then his thoughts drifted. Sleep would not come to him, but it was not Anne or her party keeping him awake. Sleep rarely came to him any more under the best of circumstances.

He thought of Earl’s Court; perhaps he might find the time to go out there tomorrow. There were experiments he wanted to try. Again, there was the arranging of his notes—a task that went on and on. Could he spare the time for Earl’s Court? His new, very young artist and amanuensis had blurted out that Mr. Hunter’s notes and journals would fill a carriage. Nay, lad, they would fill two carriages. How had he ever let them go unattended for so long? His notes covered over thirteen thousand dissections and preparations in his museum. There were carelessly jotted fragments on hundreds of experiments with plants and animals alike. There were his observations on the blood and gunshot wounds and inflammations; observations on existing species as varieties of the original; on the order of the study of Nature; on matter, its properties causing sensations and founding the idea of spirit, its different states, its different species; on the principle of classification; on Nature’s care for forms; on species and varieties, on animal matter; on the comparisons between vegetables and animals, in the mode of digestion, in the circumstances of engrafting, in propagation of species, in being affected by impressions, in respect to matter, by means of chemistry, in respect to colour; on the point of connection between vegetables and animals; on the mutual dependence of vegetables and animals; on motion in vegetables; on arbitrary and natural divisions in natural history; on the classification of animals according to their hearts, their breathing organs, their essential and circumstantial correlated characters; on the affinity of fowl and amphibia; on the classification of animals according to their brains, according to their modes of generation, according to their modes of coitus, according to their temperature, according to their size, according to their element; on perfect and imperfect animals; on the origin of species; on the varieties of animals; on the superiority of man according to the mind, according to the frame; on the use of feet in man; on the difference between man and monkey; on comparative observations between the human and brute-kind; on the uses of animals to man; on the sociability of man and animals; on the influence of parents on manners of young animals; on the natural disposition of animals towards one another; on the combative principle in animals; on the rising of animals; on the limbs of animals; on the progressive motion of the newt; on the horse, and the effects of medicines on the horse; on the ass; on the economy of crows, of humble-bees, of hornets, of wasps, of beetles; on the maychafer, and the cockchafer, and the rose-beetle, and the grasshopper, and the dragon-fly, and the aphis, and the white evening-moth, and the white butterfly, and the ant, and the rat-tailed fly, and the gnat, and the bug; and on the external characters of insects, the senses of insects, the nourishment of insects, the storing of fat of insects, the food of insects, the digestion of insects, the teeth in insects, the weapons of insects, the heart and blood of insects, the circulation in insects, the respiratory organs of insects; on the water spider, and the river crawfish, and the earthworm; on the geographical distribution of animals; on the analogy of life to combustion; of the union of the living principle with the body; of the nature and degrees of the living principle; of simple life, and the loss of simple life, and the degrees of simple life, and action adverse to simple life; on degrees of excitements and sedatives; on animal heat, and respiration, and the blood, and the circulation, and the arteries, and the veins, and the absorbents, and the heart; on the uses of arteries, the vitality of arteries, the origins of arteries; on the food, and the teeth, and the formation of the teeth, and the relation of the teeth to food; on eating, drinking; on the oesophagus, and the stomach, and digestion, and the intestines, and air in the bowels, and the excrements, and the natural lubricating fluids, and the organs of secretion, the liver, the gall-bladder, the pancreas, the kidneys; on parts whose uses are not known, the suprarenal bodies and the spleen; on the fat; on the brain and nerves; on sensibility arising from involuntary actions of voluntary parts; on the senses, on seeing and the orbits, and the choroid coat, and the motion of the iris, and the flatness of the bottom of the eyes, and the size of eyes in different animals, and squinting, and the gutta serena; on the organ of hearing, and the effects of sound upon animals; on the organ of smell; on the organ of taste; on the relative durability of impressions in the different organs of sense; on the organ of touch; on the voices of animals; on the distinctive characters of the sexes, and the relative degree of deviation in the two, and the physical causes of pleasure in the act of generation, and the mental influence over the act of generation, and the relative pugnacity of the sexes when in heat, and the season for breeding; and the testes, their shape and their exit from the abdomen in brutes, and their condition of the tunica vaginalis in brutes, and the origin of their vessels; on the prostate and its relative position in man as deducible from disease; on the seminal reservoirs in the fowl and shark; on the semen and its smell and taste; on the mucus of the urethra; on the erection; on the ovaria; on the oviducts; on the double uterus; on the functions of the uterus; on the organs of generation; on the debilitating effects of coitus; on superfoetation in the goat; on the motion of the foetus in utero; on the modes of materno-foetal communication; on the foetus and its membranes in the uterus bicornis; on experimental impregnation of sows, andran ass; on the egg; on principles governing the formation of animals; on methods of examining the progress of the chick in the egg; on the membranes of the chick, and their use, and their formation; on the blood’s motion in the chick, and the peculiar arteries in the chick, and the peculiar veins in the chick, and the brain and spinal marrow, and the formation of the intestine, and the vivification of the embryo; on the generation of the eel, and the lamprey, and the moth, and the rose-beetle; on the longevity of insects according to period of opposition; on the two fold birch of insects; on insect metamorphosis; on the relation of generative parts to grade of species; on the influence of the male on gestation; on the relation of size of offspring to the number produced and the mode of development; on the different proportions of parts in young and old animals; on the breast, and the relation of nipples to the number of offspring, and the suckling of the whale tribe; on the effects of castration and spaying; on the enlargement of the breasts in the male; on monsters, and monsters in crystals, in vegetables, in animals, and monsters before birth, and after birth, and hereditary monsters, and the occasion of particular monsters in species, and the classification of monsters, and double-headed snakes; on consciousness, and the mind, and the states of the mind, and the action of the brain, and on reason, and ideas from sensation, and the command or presence of the mind, and fear, and superstition, and deceit, and mental operations of the different periods of life, and sympathies, and appetites and passions, and instinct, and imitation and custom; on fossils, and the changes on the earth’s surface, and the coevality of fossils with the strata in which they are imbedded, and the relative age of granite and igneous rocks, and the alternations of land and sea in the same place, and the probability of the extinction of species, and the processes of fossilization, and fossil woods, and the inadequacy of the Mosaic Deluge to account for geological phenomena, and special geological observations in the valley of the Thames, in Portugal; on vegetable life, and the suspension of its actions, and the movement of sap, and the bark, and the experiments of barking trees, and the growth of plants, and climbing plants, and motion of vegetables, and experiments on the sensitive plant, and relaxation in vegetables, and sympathy in vegetables, and the action of light on vegetables, and the falling of leaves, and the natural decay of parts of vegetables, and buds, and the generation and germination in vegetables, and monsters in vegetables; on the structure and composition of animal bodies; on the order of the study of anatomy; on the skeleton in general, and the membranous skeleton, and the cartilaginous skeleton, and the horny skeleton, and the bony skeleton, and the spine, and the limbs, and the ligaments; on the arrangement of anatomical preparations, of injected preparations, of syringes, of injections, of corroded preparations, of dry preparations, of wet preparations; and on embalming. And his work in comparative anatomy; dissecting and preparing the chimpanzee, the gibbon, the green monkey, the wanderoo, the brown monkey, the albino variety of a macacus, the pig-faced baboon, the black baboon, the mandrill, the spider-monkey, the capuchjn monkey, the sanguine, the squirrel-monkey, the lemur, the woolly macaco, the slender lemur, the slow-paced lemur, the lion, the leopard, the tiger, the cheetah, the margay, the ocelot, the Sierra Leone cat, the caracul, the lynx, the zibet, the genette, the civet, the suricate, the striped hyena, the dog, the dingo, the fox, the Virginia Fox, the martin-cat, the ferret, the stoat, the zoril, the otter, the grison, the skunk, the javanese shunk, the ratel, the wolverine, the badger, the carcajou, the raccoon, the kinkajou, the poto, the coatimondi, the bear, the large black bear, the white bear, the seal, the sea cow, the porpoise, the whale, the grampus, the bottle-nose whale, the piked whale, the hog, the peccari, the camel, the pygmy musk-deer, the deer, the hog-deer, the spotted deer, the reindeer, the corine, the antelope, the ring-horned antelope, the goat, the sheep, the nylghai, the bison, the zebu, the cow, the horse, the ass, the zebra, the tapir, the elephant, the sloth, the two-toed ant-eater, the short-tailed manis, the armadillo, the bat, the mole, the African mole, the hedge-hog, the black shrew, the common shrew, the hare, the rabbit, the desman, the Sumatran tree-shrew, the guinea-pig, the capybara, the paca, the acouchy, the porcupine, the coendou, the beaver, the water-rat, the mouse, the rat, the mole-rat, the jerboa, the marmot, the Virginia grey squirrel, the flying squirrel, the kangaroo, the potoroo, the hepoona roo, the whatapoa roo, the opossum, the golden eagle, the black eagle, the brown eagle, the bald eagle, the golden vulture, the sparrow hawk, the hen-harrier, the goshawk, the kite, the horn-owl, the swallow, the night-raven, the butcher-bird, the crow, the jackdaw, the magpie, the jay, the nightingale, the sparrow, the large wattle bird, the cuckoo, the wood- pecker, the wryneck, the parrot, the macaw, the pigeon, the dove, the Brazil dove, the white dove, the blue-crowned pigeon, the Guanbird, the guinea fowl, the Argus pheasant, the golden pheasant, the partridge, the ostrich, the bustard, the Numidian crane, the crane, the crown-bird, the heron, the bittern, the East Indian bittern, the Portuguese bittern, the spoonbill, the flamingo, the scarlet ibis, the curlew, the peewit, the plover, the swan, the goose, the Canada goose, the Muscovy duck, the smew, the pelican, the cormorant, the seagull, the diver, the crocodile, the turtle, the tortoise, the lizard, the Australian lizard, the guana, and snakes, and fish—hundreds of fish and toads and insects-—thousands of insects-hives of bees, whole colonies of them, every member coming under his knife and probe, as he sought to prove to himself the sexual rule of the queen——all scattered through his notes and journals, but falling into a pattern in his mind. My museum, he thought, my one single preparation. Here is life, he could say when he was finished. Finished? God damn them all, he was far from done!

Yet tomorrow he must waste more valuable time trying to beat sense into the heads of his colleagues at the hospital. "Oh, I know what you are saying behind my back, John Gunning," he said into the darkness. "I can hear you."

And you, Jesse Foot. Provoking me into a spasm… . It was a delirium, he thought suddenly. That time in the coffee-house when I had stopped to ease my stomach. Jesse was never there. Or was he?

Another chunk of his mind broke off, crumbled, powdered. He must return to the core, dwell there. His work …

He was awakened by Anne’s presence in the dark beside him. "I am awake, my love," he said.

"I was afraid a candle might hurt your eyes, John."

"Was it a successful party?"

She did not answer, but he knew she was nodding happily to herself in the dark. When she did speak, it was to say, "I came in to see if you were covered."

"All but my arm … I am comfortable."

He put out his right hand and the back brushed against her breast. Then she was there. He could not feel, though, the swift light touch of her lips on his burned finger-tips. "Good night, my love," he said.

In the darkness he smiled.

xiii

The morning was grey, and the streets and rooftops were still wet, though it was no longer raining. There was a chance that by mid-day the sun might break through and dry off the sodden town. As always, Mr. Hunter rose just after dawn. The students had come yawning down to their dissections, and young Clift, his new gawky little artist, had stumbled into the museum, blinking with sleep. Mr. Hunter worked quietly for some time. Occasionally he spoke to a student or to Clift, occasionally to someone else. He seemed in a good humour, all noted with visible relief Mr. Hunter smiled to himself, so my brats are in terror of me… .

He thought of his full morning and the board meeting in the afternoon. Irritation rose in him; silly new rule, only ’prentices or sons of surgeons admitted, indeed! Well, as dear Everard had said, he did have two Scotch lads who wished to walk after him, and walk they would! Be they sons of surgeons or sons-of-bitches—— He found himself rather looking forward to the afternoon’s battle.

By the time he was ready to leave on his rounds he had worked himself into a minor rage over the matter. He staggered from the dissection room and out of the house. He was struggling into his carriage when young Clift came rushing out to him with his appointment book. Mr. Hunter was rueful. "Aye, I am forgetful today. Much on my mind… . Perhaps I should forget the Scotch lads this afternoon… . Too upset. No, by God, why should I?" He debated the matter at length as he rode on his rounds.

By noon the sun came out for a time, but its light was thin and pale, with no warmth to it. Then the clouds gathered again, and the city grew bleak and colourless. There were no shadows, buildings far in the distance seemed to the eye to be equally distinct with the near. In the older parts of town the kennels ran swiftly with their collection of garbage, dead rats, and sewage. It was no day to be out.

Still, it did not rain.

Just before the appointed hour for the board meeting, Mr. Hunter’s heavy foot was heard in the hall of St. Georges Oh Lord, Mr. Gunning thought to himself, and hastened out of a ward to see if he might be of assistance to Mr. Hunter.

Mr. Hunter shook off his hands, swayed, nearly fell, recovered, let an oath, dribble carelessly from his pendulous lower lip, and continued on. "Damned old fool …" Mr. Hunter muttered. His expression told Mr. Gunning that he was not aware that he was speaking aloud. At times, words dropped from Mr: Hunter’s mouth, like rain from leaves, long after he had finished what he wanted to say, merely because he was too preoccupied to shut them off.

Present at the meeting were a Dr. Robertson, a sometime friend of Matt Baillie’s, and therefore not an object singled out for abuse by Mr. Hunter, a Dr. Pearson who was impatient with the meeting and its purpose, the hospital Chaplain, who disliked Mr. Hunter, Mr. Walker, who despised him, and Mr. Gunning, who was called out soon after the meeting began. Everard Home was elsewhere in the hospital, leaning on a bed or a patient, no doubt.

The meeting had started with a prayer, and the gentlemen dutifully or reverently, as befitted their religious intensity, bowed their heads. All but Mr. Hunter, that is, who stared fixedly at the wall opposite him during the lengthy prayer. His mouth moved, and once he bent his shoulders forward in a protective movement over his supinate left arm on his chest. Immediately thereafter he fell back rather heavily in his chair, but the gentlemen made an effort to over-look this, as it was known that his ailment often caused him severe pain. When the prayer was over, the gentlemen raised their heads, and the meeting began peacefully enough. The Chaplain, a ruddy gentleman in his sixties, smiled in hearty vacuity on one and all.

They discussed minor business, Mr. Hunter continuing to ignore them, preferring to stare at the wall. At last, the gentlemen were faced with directing their attention once again to Mr. Hunter’s shocking ultimatum, and his demands that the two Scots lads be admitted as students. Dr. Pearson and Mr. Walker set their mouths in lines of resistance, while Dr. Robertson shifted uncomfortably in his chair. It was at this moment that Mr. Gunning was summoned to a patient, and with many an anxious backward glance at Mr. Hunter he left the meeting. The Chaplain smiled on.

Mr. Hunter rose shakily. He spoke somewhat incoherently, but the gentlemen gathered that he was demanding that the two Scotch lads be admitted. Mr. Hunter felt he might reasonably ask such a favour of the board by virtue of his seniority alone. "… and my years of service to St. George’s, during which I have–––-"

"You’re preparations are rotting," William interrupted him coldly. "Go home to your museum, if you do not believe me."

Mr. Hunter stopped in mid-sentence and looked about him wildly, his pupils startlingly disparate. The gentlemen, disturbed by his purpling face and mouth, stared back.

"In place of Jamie," William went on bitterly, "I had only you. A wastrel who destroyed flesh, and let it rot and putrefy—-—"

" Who said that?" Mr. Hunter screamed at the gentlemen. Then he saw William—William as he once had been, young and slim and elegant, with his snuffbox in his hand, looking in at him contemptuously from the anteroom.

Mr. Hunter cried out like an animal and staggered to the door, his feet slapping the floor loudly. At the door Mr. Hunter nearly fell before recovering himself. Dr. Robertson abruptly said something and hastened towards Mr. Hunter.

The Chaplain turned his head in curiosity, his smile gradually fading from his face, lingering for a time in the lines about his bright blue eyes.

Mr. Hunter had gained the anteroom, and Dr. Robertson entered just in time to receive the squat bloated body as it came crashing towards him. William’s voice had penetrated the core, even as John begged: Wullie, my work is not yet …

But only a groan escaped from Mr. Hunter, and then Dr. Robertson was supporting the lifeless body in his arms.

Mr. Gunning came rushing in at the news. Looking down on the corpse of his old enemy he said gravely, "We had best send him home in one of the hospital sedans. I will go with him." He then walked alongside the body as it was borne through the hall, past the silent students, and out to the sedan.

Mr. Gunning spoke once more as the body was being placed in the sedan. "Gently … gently …" he said, as the left arm banged against the door.

Jesse Foot was looking forward to his fire and a glass of wine. Dusk was coming on as he hurried down the street to his last call for the day. When he reached Piccadilly, the damp cold of the dusk had seeped through his clothes, and even through his flesh, it seemed, jelling his blood. He dug his hands deeper into his muff and set out at a trot, only to slow his feet until he had come to a halt. Approaching him came the familiar baystone horses and the carriage he knew so well. He left the footpath to stand almost in the way of the carriage, so that he might accost with his visible hatred that bloated face which would look down on him. Blinkless eyes alight, Jesse waited. The breath of the horses wreathed him in steam, and he threw up his head in the fierce joy of his coming encounter, but saw no bloated face, no squat bulging body. The carriage was empty, there was only the driver out front.

Jesse was stunned, his hands let his muff fall to the cobbles. He was no longer aware of the piercing damp cold. That bleak grief which was gathering slowly, inexorably in him, told him that the carriage was empty only because John Hunter was dead. He stood motionless, almost invisible in the dusk, in mortal danger there in the busy street, looking after the baystone horses and the carriage. into his mind came the thought of the magnificent sorrow of the warhorse, Aethon, weeping and following after the body of Pallas, glorious Pallas:

Post bellator equus, positis insilgnilms Aerhon

It lacrymans—

He did not know himself whether the drops running down his face were tears. For as night closed over London it had begun to rain.

So matters had been in John Hunter’s day.

Egloga

JOHN HUNTER, I728-I793

Let fiction cease with life, and let us be serious over the grave.

Life of John Hunter, by Jesse Foot (London, 1794)

There are no direct Hunter descendants. Both his surviving children died without issue, and both lived drab lives interrupted only by marriage scandals or proclivities to dissipation. On Hunter’s death, Anne was to see their home and its furnishings sold, as well as the Museum. She went into retirement, except for a short interlude spent with the composer Haydn. Together they wrote the Canzonettas, and because of this Anne’s poetry lives on, particularly in the song entitled "My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair".

Everard prospered. He went on to become Sir Everard, noted surgeon and anatomist of parts. There was a lengthy scandal when it was discovered that he had burned hundreds of Hunter papers, at, as he would have it, "Hunter’s request". After this event, Everard’s own work picked up amazingly. Some there are who have pondered this sequence.

Shortly after Hunter’s death, Jesse Foot published his Life. And twenty years later he was still collecting Hunter items, still slandering a memory, still brooding, unable to admit or forget that he had been acquainted with greatness.

Edward Jenner, Hunter’s spiritual son, developed, after some twenty years of experimentation, the first smallpox vaccine. Hunter did not live to see the triumph he had seeded.

In the then young United States, Hunter-trained students laid the foundation for modern American medicine. In England, the echelon of Hunter students, led by Matt Ballie, razed the worn traditions and prejudices and raised scientific surgery in their place.

Hunter’s Museum exists today, housed in the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Work from the great hands, that work still unequalled, endures. The remains of John Hunter rest in Westminster Abbey.

Exegi mormmentum aere perermius, William Hunter liked to say. And so he had, for it was he who placed a lancet in John Hunter’s hand.