“What? Both of them?”
“As doornails. They’re saying it’s the bricklayer’s back again. That it took Carafree before he even felt a fever and John Nickels quicker than that.”
“No,” Jack said quickly. “No, the boys at King’s Arms like to talk and scare each other, is all. I bet Carafree and John Nickels are both on a carriage to Glasgow, laughing their heads off about the gambling debts they’re leaving behind, and I bet they didn’t think a lick about leaving me with all of their extra work.”
Mr. Anthony shrugged. “That’s not what I heard, mate. I heard it’s the fever back again. Took a whole family living at Canongate last month.”
“It’s not the Roman fever,” Jack said confidently. “It couldn’t be. They’d close the theaters. We’d be out of a job.”
Mr. Anthony gave a hearty, miserable laugh that turned into a hacking cough. “Sonny boy, if the fever is back, you and I will have to worry about a lot more than a job.” The dance mistress rang the bell for the start of the show. Jack gave one hopeful glance back at Isabella, in case she was still looking at him, but she was distracted, pulling up her stockings. And so Jack just nodded at Thomas Potter, the lead actor, and climbed the ladder along the back wall to get to the galley above the stage.
The rafters above Le Grand Leon felt to Jack like a great ship—there were the ropes and wooden beams, the thick sails of canvas for painted backdrops, and among them all, dipping and swinging and pulling and releasing, there was Jack. He didn’t know where he had been born—somewhere off Canongate, he imagined—but this place was the closest to home he had known.
A few miserable years were hazy in his memory, years after he ran away from his overworked, overdrinking mother; years of begging on High Street and performing card tricks for the ladies in the Princes Street Gardens and wrestling the other sharp-elbowed boys for the bones thrown away behind the butcher’s shop. He had lived for some time near there with a group of thieves in Fleshmarket Close, where the smell of the curdling blood that ran from the butcher’s down onto the street clung in Jack’s nose during all waking and sleeping hours. Munro had been there, too—a boy a few years older than Jack, who wore fisherman’s pants even to sleep and had a nose broken so many times that what was left on his face was crooked in half a dozen directions. It was Munro who’d first taught Jack to become a resurrection man.
“You see there?” Munro said to Jack one afternoon when they were watching a hanging at Grassmarket. The sorry murderer’s hands were tied behind his back, and he had to ask the hangman to take off his cap for him, revealing his hair slicked wet with sweat. The man was being hanged for beating his wife with such viciousness that she died, as had the baby she was carrying in her belly. For weeks, boys in the streets had been selling broadsheets with drawings of the man and details about the crime.
Jack and Munro stood and waited for the body to drop through the wooden floor, for the gruesome bounce, and for the twitching to stop and the cheers of the crowd to go quiet. When the body at last lay still, a horde of men fought their way forward to grab the corpse. “There, all them men coming to get the body?” Munro said. “You see them?”
Jack bit into a mealy apple. “Who wants the bones of a dead murderer?”
“Don’t be daft,” Munro said, snatching the apple out of Jack’s hand and biting into it himself. He made a face but took another bite. “They’re trying to get the body to sell it to the doctors. The students up at the uni. They needs bodies to study on and stuff. A body goes for two guineas and a crown. If it’s pregnant, it goes for three guineas, but that’s harder, seeing as they rarely hang a woman with child.” Munro tilted his head toward the gallows, where four or five men were working furiously with penknives to cut pieces of the noose. “They’ll be selling those pieces of rope as keepsakes. Meant to ward off evil spirits, I guess. Or ward off murderers. Or maybe meant to ward off your own bad luck in being hanged yourself.
“But the real money’s in the body,” Munro said, sucking on the apple core. “Problem is, everyone knows when a hanging is, everyone’s fighting over the body. But a body is a body whether it was hanged or not, and doctors don’t care so much about the law as you might think.”
And so Jack Currer became a resurrection man. He kept a spade and slipped into kirkyards after dark to dig up fresh bodies—sometimes alone, usually with Munro, sometimes with Munro and whatever poor boy showed up at Fleshmarket in need of a good meal.