The resurrectionist, p.1
The Resurrectionist, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Paul T. Scheuring
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing, 2022
One Light Road, Inc.
Mill Valley, CA
Edited by The Artful Editor, www.artfuleditor.com
Cover design by James T. Egan
Interior design by Phillip Gessert
For Ann Scheuring
Table of Contents
Author’s Note
One: Thundridge, England, 1820
Two: Job
Three: Cager
Four: Job
Five: Quinn
Six: Ivy
Seven: Job
Eight: Job
Nine: Beauchamp and Gray
Ten: Beddoe
Eleven: Job
Twelve: Ivy
Thirteen: Job
Fourteen: Cager
Fifteen: Beauchamp and Gray
Sixteen: Beddoe
Seventeen: Quinn
Eighteen: Beddoe
Nineteen: Job
Twenty: Cager
Twenty-One: Beauchamp and Gray
Twenty-Two: Job
Twenty-Three: Beauchamp
Twenty-Four: Gray
Twenty-Five: Job
Twenty-Six: Beauchamp
Twenty-Seven: Beddoe
Twenty-Eight: Beauchamp
Twenty-Nine: Job
Thirty: Job
Thirty-One: Cager
Thirty-Two: Fife
Thirty-Three: Beddoe
Thirty-Four: St. Mary’s Churchyard
Thirty-Five: Job
Thirty-Six: Beddoe
Thirty-Seven: Job
Thirty-Eight: Job
Thirty-Nine: Quinn
Forty: Job
Author’s Note
Can you punish a man after he’s dead?
In this world and not the next?
Allowing that whatever afterlife there may or may not be and its workings are the province of God, mysterious and unobservable, what can we ask about the limits of punishment in this world, once you have already executed a man and his body now sways, lifeless, from the gallows?
There’s not much more that can be done, one would assume, right?
Our species, however, has shown an endless capacity over the centuries to see otherwise, usually with impressive wickedness and creativity.
Take England in 1752. After a rash of particularly grisly homicides had rocked London, the notoriously breathless London press became even more so, threatening to hyperventilate: England is descending into moral chaos! Will the Crown do nothing about the layabout war veterans, the gin epidemic that renders so much of the country insolent, licentious, violent? The Crown, sensing this was no ordinary panic but one that threatened to have legs, quickly had their barristers up at Whitehall pass the Act for Better Preventing the Horrid Crime of Murder, more commonly known as the Murder Act of 1752 (though I prefer the extra flourish in the official title—meant, I assume, to clear up any confusion about whether homicide was indeed, qualitatively, abhorrent). Buried within the act was a proviso that those convicted of the crime of murder experience “some further terror and peculiar mark of infamy to be added to the punishment of death.” Forever hushing the offending cull was no longer enough; now, upon execution, the criminal would be either dissected or gibbeted, a practice wherein their corpse was hung in chains some thirty feet above the city and often left there to slowly decay for decades.
In the end, of course, I suspect no one up at Whitehall believed the dead man in any way experienced being dissected by anatomists (part of our story to come) or picked apart by carrion birds high over the street. That man’s sentient mind had long since shut down. His soul, if he had one, had already migrated to new realms within which all sorts of greater untold punishments potentially awaited. No, the horror to be experienced by the prescribed further terror and mark of infamy was not meant for the dead man but the man in the street (or the woman, if I may foretell our story a bit) who might have the misguided urge to commit a similar crime. It was meant as deterrence, in the most ghastly and public fashion imaginable.
Did it work? History does not show an appreciable change in the murder rate in England subsequent to the act. More important, in the intervening sixty-odd years leading up to our story, most capital punishment ended at the gallows; juries seemed hesitant to mete out “further terror” to any but the most extreme cases. Many outlying communities, such as Thundridge in Chapter One, simply ignored the new law, finding it the overwrought busywork of the bewigged swells up in London courthouses, with whom they had little to nothing in common. Better to trust the moral authority of their own clergymen, keep the punishment simple as God intended, put the man in the ground as quickly as possible, and be done with it. It was there that real justice would be effected, anyhow.
This was not good news for the aforementioned anatomists. The study of anatomy was booming in England at this time, and with it, the need for cadavers so that professors and students might better explore and understand the human body, ushering in much-needed medical advances in the process. Schools were popping up everywhere, the appetite for bodies insatiable. Predictably, with so much demand and so little official supply, other, blacker markets developed.
If one could not harvest corpses from the gallows, there were other places they could be found with ease and in abundance: cemeteries. It took very little to go out into the night and steal something no one in their wildest flights of imagination would imagine being stolen. Until that point, people protected their dead as much as they did their rubbish—that is, not at all. A small but very lucrative trade developed, involving those that were willing to dig and those that were willing to pay.
This is where my interest was piqued. What did that overlap look like, between the ostensible world of light that is medicine, with its noble aspirations to cure the world, and the dark, shadowy world that traded in, of all things, dead bodies? A more antithetical set of bedfellows I cannot imagine, especially in England, with its rigid class structures: the university-educated doctor of high station conspiring with the brutish, illiterate criminal of such compromised moral standing that he would breach hallowed convention, steal from the Lord’s own soil, and traffic in the sludge and decay of rotting corpses.
Who were such men? What sequence of events, justifications, and mistakes had led them to engage in what seemed to me the darkest vocation imaginable? Were they monsters? Or, like the rest of us, occasionally cornered by fate and forced by circumstance to make ends meet by whatever means possible, carving whatever small dignity they could from their broken life in the process?
I researched and wrote this book to find the answer.
Resurrectionist
noun
a person who brings something to life or view again.
a believer in resurrection.
also called resurrection man. A person who exhumes and steals dead bodies, especially for dissection; body snatcher.
one
Thundridge, England, 1820
There is a seven-foot-tall man buried in Thundridge churchyard.
The locals say he was foul in the head. That as a blacksmith’s son, he’d spent his youth, even before his frame took on its terrifying dimension, proving an inner monstrosity. By four he was catching field mice, and while his father was engaged elsewhere, the dear boy would furtively plop the poor, squirming creatures in the old man’s forge to watch them incinerate. All to see, with glee and fascination, how quickly the living could become the dead.
By his teens he had long since left school and home and developed a reputation on the wharves of Falmouth as a drunk of epic renown, a world-class loafer by day, an inveterate porch-climber at night. Few were the women in Falmouth who did not encounter him in their residences at one time or another, drunken, sweaty, gargantuan, looking either to pilfer valuables and liquor or, as was more often the case, to fulfill his dark yearnings.
He was, in short, a terrible man who spent many a moon in Falmouth Gaol cursing both his captors and the universe at large for his plight. Some years into his reign of terror, the good people of Falmouth, spearheaded by a vigilante group of seamen, managed to convince him to leave their fine city and never come back. They broke his jaw and six of his fingers before he finally consented.
His return to Thundridge, unsurprisingly, did little to change his ways. Now it was the womenfolk of Thundridge that had to suffer; it is said that he raped no less than a dozen across the county in the two years he was back. Add to that the number of men he beat senseless to get to said women, in a couple of cases to the point of killing them, and it’s little surprise that sometime shortly thereafter, he found himself standing atop the gallows, a noose around his neck, his head sheathed in a black burlap sack.
When the trapdoor was finally released beneath him, it’s said the weight of his hulking form nearly brought the whole structure down with him. The scaffold groaned, flexed, but ultimately held, and soon the people of Thundridge were looking upon the lifeless, swinging form of their homegrown monster with a mixture of incredulity and relief. Then, apparently, applause broke out, followed by singing, and after that, drinking, which lasted for the better part of two days.
Then came the question of where to bury such an unholy cre tin. For burying a man of this sort in the local churchyard would only, at least in some ways, memorialize him. It was suggested that he be tossed in the sea, gibbeted, dissected, or left in the wilderness to the animals so that the whole of him would be dispersed and the land would never again know his stain. In the end, however, the local minister prevailed, saying that all men, no matter how great their transgression, deserved a chance at redemption, even in death. To bury him, or anyone, anywhere beyond sacred church ground was to consign them to eternal hellfire. Which was a destination most of the townsfolk thought the man deserved. Nevertheless, the minister, with God in his corner, won out.
So it was that the seven-footer was buried among the noble, God-fearing souls interred in Thundridge churchyard. More than a few of the townsfolk say the soil there turned black in the days that followed. That beneath the lush grass that carpets the graveyard, the earth itself has steadily been decaying, the worms and other subterranean life dying off en masse. That the trees are dropping leaves, though it is nowhere near autumn yet, that birds steer clear of the place, where before they found a pleasing respite and silence.
Cager has heard all of this. He has spent an undue amount of time learning everything he can about Thundridge churchyard, about this seven-foot man.
Cager, you see, is going to dig him up.
❖
He rows across the river to get to the churchyard. The sun is long gone, and the world is asleep. The ten-foot walls that surround the churchyard are imposing in the moonlight; from this vantage, it seems almost a fortress. Such are the times that graveyards are built like this. All across England, bodies are disappearing, and townsfolk are taking greater precautions to protect the decaying remains of their loved ones.
They fear corrupt souls wander the land, demons intent on despoiling all that is holy, the bodies they disinter perhaps used in dark ritual or worship of the devil. What else would you think, were you to come out one morning and see that the grave of your wife or father had been unceremoniously torn open and their decayed body nowhere to be seen? Who takes bodies?
Cager does, for one. Or intends to.
He is an entering apprentice at St. Bartholomew’s College of Anatomy in London, an institution he’s chosen because it is one of the few in England to have adopted the Paris manner of anatomy instruction. No more leaning over a professor’s shoulders or watching from high in the rafters as a lecturer slices into a pickled, rubbery subject. In the Paris manner, each student would put his scalpel to flesh—fresh flesh—with no limit as to how many subjects one could dissect, with one large caveat. The explosion of interest in anatomy in the last few years—and especially given the growing popularity of the Paris manner as a teaching method—meant that corpses were now in high demand. And supply—official supply—was at the moment proving decidedly low in England. A student with a very strong stomach and a willingness to bypass the middleman could set himself up to dissect all day, every day, as long as he was willing to “get his hands dirty.”
The school turned the requisite blind eye, and the phenomenon of grave robbing was still so nascent that the authorities had yet to put together a universal legal response to the issue. Some regions would impulsively jail you if you were found in possession of a corpse. Authorities in others, finding no statutes in their law books concerning the possession of dead bodies—for such a thing, until now, had largely been inconceivable—simply threw their arms up in exasperation. It was a mixed bag—one never knew what to expect if discovered. What was certain, however—legal concerns aside—was how such an incident would affect one’s reputation. Most professors and people that had a name of any renown, a name they traded on and employed as a seal of their business and integrity, knew better than to be caught with the deceased in their possession.
Cager, thankfully, is not saddled with the problem of a name. For the most part, no one outside of his hometown even knows of his existence. Here, far from that hometown, he is just an anonymous shadow in the night, if one filled with the ambition to become the greatest surgeon England has ever known. He is eighteen, charged with the promise of becoming, of discovery. The feathery prospect of the unknown has brought him to this godforsaken churchyard some fifty miles from London. What’s on the other side of what I don’t know, on the other side of what I haven’t yet experienced? What does that world look like? What does it feel like?
His reach has always exceeded his grasp—that’s why he is the first in his family to leave the coal shafts in Lancashire and attend university. Everything is possible. The unknown can become known if you but persist. Say yes to the world, and she will say yes to you, unveil her secrets.
And what greater secret is there than death? What does death, beheld face-to-face, actually look like?
❖
He pulls the rowboat up into the shallows, beaches it on the muddy bank. The river is black as oil behind him, the night ahead split through with silence. His footsteps on the muddy shoreline are like impositions, as if this side of the river is somehow aware of his intentions and unwelcoming.
Up toward the churchyard he moves, mattock and shovel in hand.
The ground squeams beneath his boots with every step, the soil sodden from the unseasonably wet summer. The earth yields all its pungencies, the smells of life and death and decay, surface things wed to it—such as moss and tree stumps and scrub—the aromas of things beneath, unseen, in the soggy tangle of loam that stretches interminably downward.
He pauses. Up ahead there is movement, barely discernible. Shadows rearranging themselves.
Cager instinctively grips the mattock tighter as his eyes adjust and the shadows incorporate into a form crouched at the base of the churchyard wall.
A man. Rising at the sight of him. Gnarled, knotty, a study in decrepitude.
He steps into the moonlight. He is older in silhouette than in practice—from afar he is a seventy-year-old, not too short of the grave himself. Up close there is still vitality in him. Cager guesses he is perhaps only fifty years old, in the accelerated way that peasants are fifty years old. He wears a dirty singlet, burlap trousers, and mismatched boots. Though his back is stooped, his arms and shoulders are spiderwebbed with thick veins forced to the surface by decades of manual labor. A body both tempered and broken by incessant toil.
He nods to Cager with impassive eyes.
Cager nods back.
The man before him is the first resurrectionist he has ever laid eyes upon. It is a silly word, resurrectionist, for no life ever comes of their dark work, only money. Or perhaps, in Cager’s case, knowledge.
Little is said as they prepare to scale the wall. They must stay far from the front gate and watchhouse, where the faint warmth of a candle within suggests the unseen presence of a sexton.
The resurrectionist’s name is Job. The o in it is flat; so, rather than evoking the Old Testament stalwart, it instead suggests, as every inch of the man’s sinewy body does, that this is a person that has been brought onto this Earth for toil, and toil only.
He is a workhorse for the medical schools, a man who has apparently dug up dozens, if not hundreds, of bodies. Cager found him through the whisper mill of students and staff at St. Bartholomew’s. Job. The name came up again and again. His prices were reasonable, his work sterling, his discretion top-notch. All said he would be the perfect guide in Cager’s first attempt at lifting a body.
In this case, the body is not for Cager’s studies. School’s yet to begin, the inaugural lectures not for two weeks yet. Cager’s after the purse the corpse will fetch. St. Bartholomew’s, at a guinea a week, does not come cheap. Not for a boy from Lancashire. So Cager has decided to kill two birds with one stone: he will get a head start in the ways of the anatomy student and, at the same time, make money for a tuition that he could not otherwise afford.
There is the added incentive of being the first new apprentice to get his hands dirty, the one that has already done the daunting deed before the others even show up to the first lecture. The old hand. The bold one.
It’s no coincidence they’re after the seven-foot man. One of the first things Cager has gleaned from St. Bartholomew’s is the value of rare subjects. Children with birth defects. Siamese twins. The monstrously corpulent. Poor souls warped with elephantiasis. Those who were shunned by society in life, hidden away in shame behind closed doors, became something different when buried beneath six feet of dirt. In a matter of hours, they went from loathsome things worth less than a boot nail to highly coveted commodities, the procurement of which could net a resurrection man the equivalent of a year’s salary. But the window to cash in was small—a body was considered viable for dissection only in the first two weeks after death. Thereafter, decay rendered the corpse medically useless and, to the resurrection men, worthless. So, upon learning of the giant’s death in the papers and realizing the windfall it represented, Cager immediately took it upon himself to find a resurrection man and hurry to Thundridge as quickly as possible before anyone else got there and unearthed his glorious, malformed diamond before him.
