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Tenement buildings soar on both sides of the narrow road. Some reach ten stories, and the higher you go, the worse the living conditions. I’ve seen enough on lower floors not to be sure I can stomach going higher. What I’ve witnessed so far makes even me want to duck my head and pretend I don’t see it.
I glance over to see Gray gazing out as well.Hesees it. Even when he’d rather not, he sees it, and he feels it.
He points out the window. “Over there is where the first victim and his suspected killer—his wife—lived,” Gray says. “On his death, she received a payment from the burial society.”
I don’t ask what a burial society is. I’ve learned a lot about the business of death, Victorian style. For Gray’s father, undertaking was only the public face of his business. The real money came by investing in the auxiliary trades. As kirkyards filled, the need for private cemeteries rose, so he’d invested in those. As the cost of funerals increased—largelybecauseof undertakers—grassroots organizations known as burial societies sprang up offering burial insurance, and Gray’s father invested in those.
There’s a good reason the poor are so eager to bury their loved ones: the Anatomy Act of 1832. Intended to stop the trade in cadavers, the act arose partly in response to the case of Hare and Burke, here in Edinburgh, where the two men not only sold corpses, but created them.
Until that point, British doctors could only study the cadavers of executed criminals. The act allowed the medical colleges to obtain cadavers in other ways. Most significantly, they could take unclaimed bodies.
Makes sense, right? Except that unclaimed bodies don’t always belong to people without family. Mostly, they belong to people whose families can’t afford burial fees, people who used to rely on the church to bury their loved ones. Now those corpses go to the colleges. Worse, it’s commonly believed that if the body isn’t intact, the soul won’t be accepted into heaven. So by not being able to pay for burial, they doom their loved ones to purgatory.
Like so many regulations, the Anatomy Act was created to solve one problem and caused another, and as usual, it’s the poor who get screwed.
The partial solution was burial societies, which allow people to pay into an insurance policy that will let them bury their loved ones.
“So the first victim’s wife got a burial-society payout,” I say. “What difference does that make?”
“She didn’t use it.”
“Didn’t use—? Oh. You mean she allowed her husband’s body to be taken to the medical college as a cadaver.”
“Yes, and that might never have been discovered, if not for Hugh.While he isn’t in charge of the case—that would be Detective Crichton again—Hugh followed up on an informant’s tip.”
Detective Crichton is the senior officer who’d been in charge of our last case as well. I open my mouth to ask more, but the coach pulls to the side and Simon calls down. “Here, sir?”
Gray peers out to the darkening street beyond. “Unfortunately, yes. We must walk from here. I would have preferred to walk the entirety of the way, if someone had not delayed our departure with her ethical quandary.”
“Ethical? You cannot mean our Catriona, sir.” Simon’s eyes twinkle as I peek out the window. Then his smile twists into a rueful one as he says, “I mean Mallory.”
“Either is fine,” I say, returning his smile.
I would have been okay with sticking with Catriona, for simplicity’s sake. But Isla had understood that I was already uncomfortable in this world and using my own name would help.
As “Catriona,” I had suffered a head injury that supposedly explains my personality change. It was only a short leap, then, to telling the staff that I wished to be called by another name, as I no longerwasCatriona.
“Mallory is what you wish to be called, and so Mallory is what I will call you,” Simon says. “And if you were delayed by an ethical concern, then you truly are not the Catriona I knew.”
While he tries to smile, there’s a sadness there. Catriona never met a person she couldn’t bully or blackmail or betray, but if there was an exception, it was Simon. Or I hope it was. He was her friend, and she better have deserved it.
We alight from the coach. Yes, “alight” is a word I never had cause to use in the twenty-first century, but as the daughter of an English prof, I am in my element here, throwing out all the archaic words I learned in a lifetime of reading. Admittedly, sometimes my enthusiasm gets the better of me. When I first arrived, I decided that to sound like I came from this time period, I should use all my five-dollar words. That would have worked much better if I weren’t in the body of a housemaid who at leastclaimedto be illiterate.
Gray sends Simon home with the coach. We’ll walk back afterward. I must say that’s another thing I love about this time period. Walking. Oh, sure, the roads aren’t exactly clean, and the air is definitely not clean. Butmost every place we could want to go is within a mile or two, and that walk is through an elaborate Victorian-world theme park, filled with wonder.
This entire world is filled with wonder for me. That doesn’t mean I want to stay. My parents are at home. My friends and career are there. And when I left, I’d been visiting my grandmother on her deathbed, with only days left before cancer stole her from me.
Is Nan gone now? Do my parents think I disappeared—kidnapped and murdered thousands of miles from home, mere hours before my grandmother died? Or is Catriona in my body? And is thatworsethan thinking I’m gone, because their only child has twisted into a stranger who’ll lie and take whatever they’ll give her?
Yes, these are the things I try very hard not to dwell on, and that’s a whole lot easier on a night like this, when I can drown myself in a Victorian adventure.
When Gray said I’d be playing the role ofMcCreadie’sgirl, I presumed that was because Gray isn’t the detective half of the duo. As we walk, though, I am reminded of the real problem.
This is the sort of neighborhood where people mind their own business. They pay attention to us, though. I’m a pretty blond nineteen-year-old who probably looks like a high-priced sex worker, out of place in this neighborhood. Gray looks even more out of place as an obvious man of means, and maybe that could be ignored—just another highbrow man with lowbrow tastes—if not for his skin color.
People here might not be able to afford curiosity, but they’ll make an exception for Gray. In undercover work, one cannot afford to be memorable.
We head downhill on one street and then turn in to a close. In Edinburgh, closes can be narrow lanes into courtyards or they can be equally narrow shortcuts between buildings. This is the latter—an established and official shortcut—but it’s shadowed enough that I’d hesitate to enter even in daylight. I worry that going this way is another sign of Gray’s obliviousness, but when a footfall squeaks behind us, my boss turns even before I do.
