Graham frowned. Strange. Had Peckwood returned while he’d been busy de-beaning young Charlie? “Very well. I shall go look for him. Whom may I say is calling?”
“Mr. Emmanuel Waldman.” The fellow’s thick shoulders squared to attention. “Warden of St. Peter’s.”
Graham gave him a sharp nod and turned on his heel, hopefully hiding the unstoppable lift of his brows.Thatwas the warden of the asylum? He’d expected someone older. Someone more academic in appearance. Maybe with a quizzing glass pinned to his waistcoat and sporting neatly trimmed grey side-whiskers. Not a tippler with a penchant for punctuality.
Bypassing the surgery, Graham strode down to the study. Upon finding it empty, he continued searching the remaining rooms on the ground floor. Mr. Peckwood inhabited none of them. On the off chance, he peeked from the back door into the small yard and even quick-stepped to the stable for a cursory glance. Nothing but the horse greeted him. Apparently Peckwood had not nicked off on a medical call with the gig.
Graham went back inside, then paused at the back staircase. With one hand on the railing and a foot on the bottom step, he called upwards, “Mr. Peckwood? Are you about?”
Only the tick of the clock in the hall answered…or did it? He cocked his head. Above him, floorboards creaked, but only once.
“Doctor?” Though the man had forbidden him to tread foot in his private quarters, he ascended the stairs anyway. A quick call at the top of the stairwell wasn’t exactly trespassing. The door on the right of the landing gaped open an inch. Perhaps the older fellow had closed his eyes for a few moments and dozed off.
“Mr. Peckwood? Are you in here?” Graham tapped the wood with his knuckle.
The door swung wide, the hinges clearly greased with an inordinate amount of lubrication, and though he shouldn’t, Graham couldn’t help but gape. This was no bedchamber.
Shelves lined one wall, loaded with all manner of glass jars that were filled with varying colours of liquids and body parts. In the corner sat a cage of white rats, red-eyed and gnawing at the bars. A big desk stood in front of an even bigger window, bearing a vast amount of papers stacked in neat piles, though some were wadded up and littering the floor near the chair.
None of that interested Graham so much as the slab in the middle of the room where a sheet outlined the figure of a body. An incongruous sight, one that raised more questions than for which there could possibly be answers. These were Mr. Peckwood’s private quarters, not a school of anatomy or a deadhouse!
Unbidden, he strode inside and stopped at the raised table. Despite the covering, the stench of death hung heavy in the air. Not a particularly fresh body, but neither had putrefaction fully set in. Grasping the corner of the stained sheet, Graham slowly peeled away the fabric, revealing a naked grey corpse. Male. Middling of years. Malnourished and with a morbidly cleft palate. Abrasions marred the skin at wrists and ankles, but nothing that would have factored into the man’s demise. Nothing else appeared out of the ordinary. So how had the man died? Who was he? Why was he here? And how had Peckwood gotten the body up the stairs on his own?
“What the devil are you doing in my private quarters?” As if the very thought of the man had conjured him, Peckwood’s voice nailed Graham between the shoulder blades. “I told you never to pry into my affairs, Lambert!”
Dropping the sheet, Graham wheeled about, annoyed with the censure in the man’s tone. It wasn’t as if he’d been purposely on the prowl to snuffle about in the doctor’s business. “There was no prying involved. The door was open and I assumed you were in here.”
A murderous flush spread up the man’s neck and spread over his face like an angry rash. “I always lock the door.”
No wonder, what with an illicit cadaver lying about.Graham bit the inside of his cheek to keep the retort from slipping out. Silently, he counted to ten before answering. “I do not care to be labeled a liar, sir. You must have forgotten to secure the latch.”
Peckwood’s blue eyes iced over. “Get out.”
Two words. Just two. But the rage in them filled the room with a palpable threat.
Graham stalked towards the door, debating all the while what to do. Finding a corpse in a senior partner’s office wasn’t something he could just ignore. It was illegal. Unethical. Wrong on too many levels. But if he went to the authorities, he might very well get tangled in Peckwood’s web by implication alone, simply by virtue of being the man’s partner. Becoming embroiled in yet another scandal would seal the fate of his already ponderous career.
Heaving a disgusted sigh, he paused on the threshold. Ought he let the fellow keep his secrets? They were none of his business, after all. A man’s privacy ought to be just that—private.
Still troubled, he spoke without looking back. “There is a Mr. Waldman downstairs, waiting for you, which is why I searched you out.”
Steps clipped. Fingers dug into his arm, yanking him around with an inhuman strength.
“If you breathe a word of what you have seen to Mr. Waldman,” Peckwood seethed, “I will not only end our partnership, I will have you arrested for trespassing. Is that clear?”
He gave a sharp nod. “Quite clear.”
Graham spun away, the lie rancid on his tongue, for nothing was clear about the situation. Not the dead body that belonged in a grave nor the body parts that had been severed and saved. Not the violent reaction from a man who’d been trained to heal bodies instead of acquiring them illegally for dissection in the privacy of his own quarters.
And especially not Peckwood’s desperate wish to keep all of this a secret from the warden of the local insane asylum.
Lunacy! Of all the bizarre and peculiar sights Amelia had experienced on her travels abroad, nothing compared to Mrs. Ophidian’s sitting room.
She barely disguised a scowl as she perched on the end of the settee. Birdcages hung from hooks on the wall, chain swags attached to the ceiling, and even from a homemade ladder-type contraption with branches sticking out of it. How the woman maneuvered about in her wheeled chair took a miracle of navigation. Other pens crowded the floor, housing heavier fowl that didn’t fly. Which, all in all, wouldn’t be so bad if Mrs. O didn’t leave the cage doors open. All of them. All of the time.
Ducking the swoop of an orange-beaked finch, Amelia set down her nearly full cup of chamomile on the newspaper-strewn tea table. There’d be no drinking it. After one sip, a downy feather had floated through the air and landed in her cup. She never should have come here tonight. She should have sent her apologies and stayed home with Colin, though likely he was faring better than she. Since his strange attack the previous evening, he’d been perfectly fine, save for complaining of a slight headache.
Which was nothing compared to the throbbing pulse inside her head at the moment. Oh, that she might be allowed to arm Betsey and herself with brooms and dustpans and tackle the cleaning of this menagerie.
